Summit Avenue
Reading Group Guide

PLOT SUMMARY:

Set in Minneapolis and Saint Paul during the First World War, Mary Sharratt’s debut novel is the story of a young German immigrant experiencing her spiritual and sexual awakening.

When Kathrin’s mother dies, she immigrates to America, where she is reunited with her cousin Lotte and begins work at a mill. Soon Kathrin meets the Jeliniks, the owners of a small bookstore. While Jan, a compassionate, elderly man, loves his bookstore, his nephew John would rather see it reopened as something more profitable. Jan introduces Kathrin to Violet Waverly, who offers her a job typing and translating a book of fairy tales that her husband was compiling before he died. Violet invites Kathrin to live with her in her mansion on Summit Avenue, the richest neighborhood in St. Paul. Both women, left wounded and alone, find increasing solace and warmth in each other.

Although Violet can offer Kathrin love, compassion, and a glimpse of the heights of wealthy grandeur, she cannot fully disguise the painful secrets hiding behind the glitter. As Kathrin comes closer to the heart of Violet’s mysterious past, she discovers that life, like a fairy tale, is often based on illusion.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

1. Why does Kathrin immigrate to the United States? What is driving her? If Kathrin’s journey is a quest, what is the object of that quest?

2. What role does the loss of her parents play in Kathrin’s life? How absent or present is the parent/child role throughout the novel?

3. As Kathrin moves from mill worker, to translator, to housewife, to bookkeeper, her work is very connected with her self-esteem. What do jobs say about her in the different stages of her journey? Contrast Kathrin’s successes and failures in relationship to work with Lotte’s. How does work liberate and oppress them?

4. Contrast Kathrin and Lotte, as working-class women, with Violet and her sister, as upper-class women. Which class of women has the greater degree of autonomy and self-expression? Who is most trapped in her role?

5. Violet and Kathrin form a compassionate relationship that seems to offer both of them the love and companionship they desire. What draws them to each other? What roles do age, wealth, class, and education play here? Does Violet abuse her power over Kathrin?

6. Compare and contrast the relationships between men and men, women and women, and men and women in the novel.

7. Compare and contrast the different sexual encounters in the book. What unites them and what sets them apart? How does sex function as an initiation and an awakening for Kathrin?

8. Jan and John Jelinik have different ideas about the role of the bookstore and how it should be managed. John is in search of prosperity and will do anything to achieve it. How valid and attainable is this dream? What is the hidden root of John’s hunger and longing?

9. What is Kathrin’s defining moment of progressing from an "immigrant" to a "true American"? What is John’s? How does John’s American dream contrast with Kathrin’s? What particular personality traits and life events cause Kathrin and John to go in such different directions?

10. How are fairy tales used in the book? How do they connect to womanhood?

11. What do the fairy tales mean to Kathrin? How do they empower her and illuminate her? How do they lead her astray? What truths do the tales represent? What illusions?

12. Throughout the narrative, there are many references to witches and sorceresses. How do these archetypes evolve in Kathrin’s psyche as her story progresses? By the end of the novel, how have the tales transformed her?

PRAISE FOR Summit Avenue:

"A book about Woman . . . and the tremendous, multiplied hurdles and barriers which women had to overcome as immigrants. This turbulent tale, while apparently telling of a lesbian relationship, is talking even more about the flight back into the mythic depths of womanhood—the old, pre-Christian, woman-centered community."

—Mandy Sivers

"Summit Avenue is a beautiful, moving, entirely unconventional romance. . . . Kathrin casts a wonderful spell; her 1919 world seems more real, more true than the one outside today. Virginia Woolf noted that good fiction contains more truth than fact; Summit Avenue contains a lot of truth."

—Maureen Reddy, Hurricane Alice: A Feminist Quarterly

BIO:

Mary Sharratt’s fiction has appeared in Hurricane Alice, International Quarterly, The Long Story, American Writing, Lynx Eye, Evergreen Chronicles, and Emrys Journal. She is the editor and publisher of the literary journal Another Country. Originally from Minneapolis, Sharratt lives in Grafing, Germany, where she teaches creative writing and coordinates the Munich Writers Workshop. This is her first novel.