49 pages • 1-hour read
Wild Side
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Book Club Questions
General Impressions
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes references to the death of a loved one and child welfare.
Gather initial thoughts and broad opinions about the book.
1. What were your favorite and least favorite aspects of Wild Side? Which characters, conflicts, and scenes did you find most and least believable, and why?
2. How did your experience reading Wild Side compare and contrast to your experience reading Silver’s other titles? For example, discuss the similarities and differences between Wild Side and Silver’s books Wild Eyes, Wild Love, Flawless, and A Photo Finish.
3. What other works of contemporary romance is Wild Side in conversation with? Consider narrative, thematic, and stylistic connections between Silver’s title and titles like Colleen Hoover’s Maybe Now, Lucy Score’s By a Thread, Sally Thorne’s The Hating Game, and Love on the Brain by Ali Hazelwood.
Personal Reflection and Connection
Encourage readers to connect the book’s themes and characters with their personal experiences.
1. How did you respond to the revelations offered in Erika Garrison’s journals? Discuss how the journals changed your impressions of Erika’s character and her relationships with Tabitha Garrison and Rhys Dupris.
2. The novel explores Navigating Grief and Loss. How do Tabitha and Rhys’s grieving processes compare to your own? Which aspects of their emotional experiences did you find most and least relatable?
3. Did you identify with Tabitha or Rhys’s character more closely? Consider how they respond to one another, to Erika’s death, and to Milo Garrison. Would you behave in the same ways? Why or why not?
4. Tabitha and Rhys gradually form a community in Rose Hill. How does their social life compare and contrast with your own? How do they view friendship and social connections similarly and differently from you?
5. How did you respond to Rhys’s injury and hospitalization? Would you have pushed Tabitha away? Would you have come back to help him if you were Tabitha? Discuss the significance of this plot point to the characters’ evolving dynamic.
Societal and Cultural Context
Examine the book’s relevance to societal issues, historical events, or cultural themes.
1. Wild Side explores child welfare and the possibilities surrounding found family. Examine how Silver’s representations of Milo and Rhys’s childhood relate to contemporary child welfare issues. Are Silver’s representations accurate? What do you think she’s advocating for in terms of the nuclear family and parenting?
2. Tabitha and Rhys get married in order to resolve their logistical and citizenship issues. How do these plot points resonate with contemporary immigration and citizenship conflicts? Which aspects of their marriage are accurate and/or inaccurate? Does Silver’s handling of this issue disrupt the novel’s “fictive dream?”
Literary Analysis
Dive into the book’s structure, characters, themes, and symbolism.
1. Tabitha is a professional chef. What role doe food, cooking, and eating play in Tabitha’s character development and her intimate relationships?
2. Discuss Milo’s significance to Rhys and Tabitha’s storylines and to their relationship. Is Milo a narrative device? What does he accomplish and represent? How would the narrative change if his character were more developed?
3. The first chapter of the novel is set two years prior to the narrative present. Discuss the significance of this temporal structure. How would the novel change if Silver had offered more chapters set in the past?
4. Tabitha and Milo’s cat is a fixture throughout Wild Side. Explore its symbolic significance. What does the cat represent and/or accomplish? How would the characters’ family life differ without her?
Creative Engagement
Encourage imaginative and creative connections to the book.
1. The novel is written from Tabitha and Rhys’s alternating first-person points of view. Imagine that Erika’s point of view was interspersed throughout the novel, too. Write a sample of Erika’s first-person account. Additionally, discuss how more access to her interiority throughout Wild Side would change and/or develop Tabitha and Rhys’s stories.
2. Imagine that you are adapting Wild Side into a film. Who would you cast in the leading roles, and why? Which plot points would you omit, alter, or add to make the adaptation your own?
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