Introduction

Against the Wind is an elegantly written story of relationships involving six principal characters, strands of whose lives braid together after a chance reunion among three of them. A successful environmental lawyer is forced to take himself to task when he realizes that everything about his work has betrayed his core beliefs. A high school English teacher asks her former high school love to take up her environmental cause. A transgender adolescent male raised by his grandparents struggles to excel in a world hostile to his kind. A French-Canadian political science professor finds himself left with a choice between his cherished separatist cause and his marriage and family. An accomplished engineer is chronically unable to impress his more accomplished father sufficiently to be named head of the international wind technology company his father founded. The Quebec separatist party’s Minister of Natural Resources, a divorcée, finds herself caught between her French-Canadian lover and an unexpected English-Canadian suitor.

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Excerpt

CHAPTER 2

As her headlights unfurl the highway in front of her car on the way back from Toronto, Lynn continues replaying parts of the evening’s conversation with Ralph at Café Boulud. She congratulates herself that she managed to avoid admitting that she took their college breakup hard. Didn’t want to let him know that she’d often played the ‘what if’ game. But it always came down to Jules—if she’d married Ralph, there wouldn’t be Jules. Not that Jules has been easy. It was hard to adapt to the new reality that he imposed on her and Jean-Pierre. Their Jules started life as Juliette, and now, like their daughter Suzanne, Juliette is gone. Juliette started leaving at a young age, insisting on joining boys’ teams, challenging boys on their turf, proving she was every bit as competent—she’d especially loved trampling them in soccer. At age seven, she refused to wear dresses to school, church, anywhere at all. Well before the court approved her name change, she demanded to be called Jules. As he tells it now, it was only ever the illusion of Juliette; Jules was there from the beginning. ... view entire excerpt...

Discussion Questions

1. Why do you think the author chose to write from six characters’ points of view? Among these six, who are the primary characters? Would the novel have been more effective written in various first-person voices?

2. Various reviewers of Against the Wind have had opposite opinions about the denouement of the novel. Do you think that it ends too abruptly, leaving important matters unresolved? Or that too many loose ends are wrapped up too neatly?

3. Which characters did you find likable and had sympathies for? Which are the unlikable characters in the book? Did most characters come across as multi-dimensional, with various admirable and some not-so-admirable traits and behaviors?

4. As the story is told in the book, life presents the principal characters with second chances to get things right at which they failed or could have done better the first time around. Who succeeds and who continues to fall short?

5. Did the transitions between decades-old backstory and the current time of the novel work for you? Why do you think the author chose to start the story halfway through current time and then immediately shift back to the beginning of current time?

6. The book deals with a variety of issues: transgender parenting (Lynn/Jean-Pierre/ Jules), lost love (Ralph/Lynn and Lynn/Jean-Pierre), male rivalry (Ralph/Dieter), marital infidelity and divorce (Lynn/Jean-Pierre), Alzheimer’s disease (Ralph’s father), environmental issues (wind energy and hydroelectric), French-English politics in Quebec (Jean-Pierre/Monique versus Lynn/Ralph), and the matter of trust (in particular, Ralph’s continuing attempts to manipulate outcomes). Did you find the plot too complicated or did the story flow smoothly despite its complexity?

7. What purpose did it serve to have Ralph trying to divine the future from time to time by interpreting and re-interpreting the Miró prints hanging on his office wall? Was it a sign of something about Ralph as a person?

Weblinks

»	Author's website
»	Publisher's Book info
»	Library Journal Book Review

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