READERS GUIDE

Questions and Topics for Discussion

1. The Sunshine Man is a revenge story, but it also traces the deeper, enduring struggles of living with trauma and grief. Do you think that Birdie Keller’s plan to kill Jimmy Maguire is driven strictly by vengeance—or is she searching for something else? Does she end up getting what she’s looking for?

2. The Sunshine Man is told through alternate points of view, switching between Birdie and Jimmy. Why do you think the author chose to construct the book this way, with Birdie’s sections told in the first person and Jimmy’s chapters told through transcripts and in the third person? How did this approach affect your perception of both characters? What details are concealed or missing?

3. Birdie comments that she began to track Jimmy in prison when she realized that her “agony wasn’t going anywhere.” Did you empathize with Birdie and her way of managing the pain of her sister’s death?

4. The Maguires are spoken of as a “rotten” family, and Jimmy as a “bad seed.” How do you think these labels influenced the Maguire family’s outcomes in life? Do you think that their lives could have turned out differently had their community offered them more support?

5. Compare the parents and guardian figures in The Sunshine Man—Gamma, Mary, and Mother Maeve. How did Birdie’s and Jimmy’s relationships with their guardians shape the trajectory of their lives? How do they inform their own approaches to parenthood?

6. Why do you think Gamma and Providence readily welcomed Jimmy into their home, while Birdie disliked him from the start? Where do you think Birdie’s resentment stemmed from and was it justified?

7. How does class play into the dynamics between characters? What do the Maguires and the wealthy Fairfax family both reveal about the community in which Birdie grew up?

8. Where do you place the blame for Providence’s death? Was it Jimmy’s fault alone, or do you believe there were other factors at play?

9. Throughout the book, Birdie has several encounters with a mysterious man wearing yellow socks. What purpose do you think he served in the narrative?

10. Toward the end of their journey, Donna tells Jimmy: “I’ve only got one dad. There’s only one whether I like him or not and I didn’t know if I did like him because all I had was that shadow, and what people said, I didn’t have anything else.” Do you agree with Donna’s decision to give Jimmy a chance? Would you have done the same?

11. How did your understanding of Floyd change throughout the novel? When did you begin to suspect the real nature of his relationship to Jimmy?

12. Reflecting on his time in prison, Jimmy realizes that, for his whole life, he had been missing the feeling of someone “giving him an identity that wasn’t a number or a statistic or a reason why he’d failed, of reminding him he was human.” How does this idea tie into the book’s central themes?

13. Did the ending surprise you? If you were in Birdie’s position, what would you have done? Do you think that Birdie and Jimmy each got the resolutions they deserved?

14. Jimmy takes part in a therapy program at Grendon that mirrors the facility’s real-life rehabilitative program. What did you think of the author’s choice to highlight this as part of Jimmy’s story?