A Pair of Aces
Cut along the dashed lines and pass the cards around the table.
Where did you do most of your reading of this one, and did you have a go-to blanket, chair, or mug while you read?
Benedict and Murray trade off voices chapter by chapter. Which narrator's chapters did you settle into most easily, like slipping into a familiar room?
This is a book about two women who become a pair. Who is your pair, the person you would want narrating the other half of your life story?
The women here are told, in a hundred small ways, how much space they are allowed to take up. Was there a moment of quiet defiance that made you want to cheer out loud?
Benedict and Murray write across their own difference as co-authors, Black and white, two voices at one table. What did it feel like to read a story built that way, and did you notice places where the two voices were listening to each other?
Which scene felt most like being let into someone's kitchen or dressing room, the private, unguarded moments rather than the public triumphs?
Friendship in this book costs something: honesty, pride, sometimes safety. Thinking back over the whole story, what did these women give each other that nobody else could, and have you ever been given that?
Without giving anything away, how did you feel in the last few pages, settled, aching, grateful, restless? Sit with that feeling for a second and tell us where in your own life it comes from.