What Was Mine (32 page)
Authors: Helen Klein Ross
11. Marilyn and Tom both managed to eventually move on and make new lives for themselves after the kidnapping. Cheryl wonders how Lucy could ever
“restore what she took from those parents? She took their baby. She took their marriage. She took the lives they were meant to have.”
How do you think Marilyn and Tom would reconcile the regret of losing the lives they were meant to have with embracing the seemingly happy lives they ended up with?
12. Does the fact that Lucy raised Mia with love excuse her actions? What does “restorative justice” mean in this case? How do you think she deserves to be punished for her crime?
ENHANCE YOUR BOOK CLUB
Does Wendy's cooking have you craving Chinese? Try your hand at some homemade dumplings to serve during your book club meeting (
chinesefood.about.com/od/dimsumdumplings/r/jiaozi.htm
)âor order takeout!
In California, Marilyn gets really into things like yoga, meditation, palm reading, and astrological charts. You can find lots of free astrological charts online. For an in-depth reading of your birth chart, try this one:
http://www.chaosastrology.net/freeastrologyreports.cfm
. How accurate do you think your chart is? Highlight some fun parts to share with your book club.
You can read about real kidnapping stories similar to Mia's by searching online for the kidnappings of Carlina White and Zephany Nurse, who were both raised in other families and found their birth parents years later. How do they compare to Mia's story?
Fascinated by Wendy's story of giving up her daughter? Read more about the history of China's one child policy by visiting
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1710568/one-child-policy
.
© JOHN GRUEN
HELEN KLEIN ROSS
is a poet and novelist whose work has appeared in
The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times,
and in
The Iowa Review,
where it won the 2014 Iowa Review Award in poetry. She graduated from Cornell University and received an MFA from The New School. Helen lives with her husband in New York City and Salisbury, Connecticut.
FOR MORE ON THIS AUTHOR:
authors.simonandschuster.com/Helen-Klein-Ross
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Gallery Books
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2016 by Helen Klein Ross
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Gallery Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
First Gallery Books trade paperback edition January 2016
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Interior design by Jaime Putorti
Cover design by Janet Perr
Cover photograph © Navid Baraty/Getty Images
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ross, Helen Klein.
âWhat was mine : a novel / Helen Klein Ross.
ââpages cm
âISBN 978-1-4767-3235-0 (paperback) -- ISBN 978-1-4767-3236-7 (ebook) 1. Mothers and daughters--Fiction. 2. Kidnapping--Fiction. 3. Deception--Fiction. 4. Family secrets--Fiction. 5. Life change events--Fiction. 6. Domestic fiction. 7. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
âPS3618.O845263W53 2016
â813'.6--dc23
2015022044
ISBN 978-1-4767-3235-0
ISBN 978-1-4767-3236-7 (ebook)