The Invention of Wings

1. General Impressions

Gather initial thoughts and broad opinions about the book.

• Though Sue Monk Kidd’s writing differs greatly in subject matter and plot, she often writes realistic fiction that follows people who are transformed as they experience tragic and dramatic situations. How does this novel compare and contrast with Kidd’s other works that contain this core theme, like The Secret Life of Bees and The Mermaid Chair?
• Some novels written by white authors about enslavement or Jim Crow-era segregation are criticized for sanitizing, misrepresenting, or romanticizing harsh historical realities. For instance, Kathryn Stockett’s The Help is often criticized for this. What is your overall impression of the representations in this book? Does it help that they are based on real figures?

2. Personal Reflection and Connection

Encourage readers to connect the book’s themes and characters with their personal experiences.

• Did Handful or Sarah’s first-person point-of-view sections produce a stronger emotional response in you as a reader?
• Handful and Sarah each help the other’s character to evolve. Has there been someone in your life who has drastically changed your outlook on the world or helped you evolve as a person?
• Both Sarah and Handful—for very different reasons—have struggles with their voice being heard, literally and metaphorically. Have you ever felt as if your voice wasn’t being heard? What was the situation and contributing factors? Was it related to larger systemic inequities, like in the novel?
• Kidd’s Author Note states one of her goals for the novel: to make a historical story that was not just facts and dates but that made people feel empathy and emotions. Did she succeed? What emotions did you experience through the novel?

3. Societal and Cultural Context

Examine the book’s relevance to societal issues, historical events, or cultural themes.

• Sarah and Handful have a complex relationship: Though unwilling, Sarah enslaves Handful and engages in various Southern traditions. How does this novel examine topics such as white innocence and privilege through Sarah’s complicity in the systems of enslavement, and then her eventual outspoken rejection of them?
• How is the novel’s plot impacted and complicated by the fact that the main characters, Sarah, Angelina, and Handful, are all women? What unique social mores affected women in the novel’s temporal setting? How do these mores differ between Sarah and Angelina, the affluent enslaving class, and Handful, an enslaved girl?

4. Literary Analysis

Dive into the book’s structure, characters, themes, and symbolism.

• Consider the title: What do you think “wings” means, given the context of the entire narrative? What does it mean to invent wings, and how do different characters invent wings?
• Sarah and Handful learn to grow and understand one another through their interactions. What scene and set of dialogue do you think is most important for the growth of each character and why?
• Consider how the motif of quilting and sewing interacts with the topic of racial and gendered expectations. How does this motif both conform to stereotypes and allow the characters to form resistance? How does this differ between characters?
• Though much of Kidd’s novel is fictionalized, the Grimké sisters and Handful were real historical figures. Consider bringing in biographical details for one of these real women and using it to do a character analysis and comparison between their historical and fictional personas.
• What is the role of mother characters in the themes, plot, and character arcs in this novel? How do Mauma and Mary each influence the characters of their children? How do Mauma and Mary contrast with one another, and why does the author depict such contrasting mother figures?

5. Creative Engagement

Encourage imaginative and creative connections to the book.

• This novel alternates between Handful and Sarah’s points of view. Consider a scene that is only told by one of them. Then, rewrite that scene from the other character’s perspective. How would the other character describe that moment in their own first-person narration?
• The novel begins with Handful’s mother telling her a story of their ancestral people in Africa. The story retells an ancestral narrative about flying, and it has a moral that informs the plot and character arcs in the novel. Imagine you are talking to a young person, telling them the story revealed in this book and giving them the moral to be learned. How would you frame the story and moral for them?

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