The Night Sky
by Mary Morris
List Price: $13.00
Pages: 288
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 031215609X
Publisher: Picador USA
In The Night Sky, Mary Morris tells the story of Ivy Slovak, a single mother struggling to provide for her infant son while coping with childhood memories of abandonment by her own mother. While Ivy's story invokes memories from the past and struggles of the present, the night sky holds within it dreams yet to be realized. With quiet eloquence and deep compassion, The Night Sky establishes Mary Morris as one of the foremost chroniclers of the secrets and strengths of the human spirit.
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1. In manuscript, this book was originally called The Night Sky, but Morris's publisher felt she should change the title, so it was published first as A Mother's Love. At some risk Morris wanted Picador to republish this book with the original title. Why do you think Morris felt so strongly about this? Why is The Night Sky the real title of this book?
2. Why do we need the story in the past to inform the present?
3. How is Ivy's art reflected in the structure of the novel as a whole?
4. Ivy is named Ivy because her mother says she likes to cling. How and to what does she cling? Is her name a self-fulfilling prophecy?
5. In some ways this novel is a book about gambling. What is the role of gambling in the novel?
6. Sense of place is always important for Morris who is also a travel writer. What part does the desert play in this book?
7. Is Ivy a good mother? How is it in the end that we know what kind of mother she is or will be?
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"Morris's novel joins a rich literary tradition of women who, in the absence of mothers, flounder in their search for womanhood, who are fused to phantoms they fear they will never shake off."—Barbara Lazear Ascher, The Washington Post Book World
"A haunting tale . . . Ivy Slovak's life is not one a reader will soon forget."—Roxana Robinson, The New York Times Book Review
"Mary Morris inhabits Ivy with an intensity and clarity of vision that makes this a story at once tough, sad, and honest, yet at the same time hauntingly beautiful."—Stuart Dybek
