Each of the four main narrators speaks in a different voice. Discuss which narrator you found easiest to understand or which consistently delivered the most interesting tales.

C.J. Marcum's grandfather said he was named after the "two greatest men who ever lived." Who were these men and what about them would have earned to admiration of a rural farmer?

Albion Freeman enters the novel when a traveling salesman leaves his son with strangers for months. Discuss how this is an example of how the rural society depicted in the novel is different from our modern society and why reliance on the hospitality of strangers was necessary for survival.

In Chapter Two Rondal reveals that his family rarely has enough to eat despite his father working six days a week in the coal mines, and he says that the only meat besides bacon that...