Featured Reading Guide
Sophie Cooke
Recently expelled from boarding school, 14-year-old Vanessa watches as her autocratic, glamorous mother unravels. Her friend Alan McAlpine offers an impossible comfort, one that she cannot accept. Over the course of four years in the Southern Highlands of Scotland, she tells a tale of desire and loss, power and devotion. But nothing is what it seems, and the world Vanessa has built for herself is as treacherous as glass: fragile, filled with half-truths and reflections.
Delicious
Digg
StumbleUpon
Reddit
FacebookAbout Sophie Cooke
Sophie Cooke s critically acclaimed first novel The Glass House was nominated for the Orange Prize and shortlisted for the Saltire First Book of the Year Award. Cooke was also awarded a Writer s Bursary by the Scottish Arts Council. Her short stories have been commissioned by the BBC and read on Radio 4. Having grown up in the Scottish countryside in which Under the Mountain is set, Sophie Cooke now lives in Edinburgh.
topAbout the Book
Recently expelled from boarding school, 14-year-old Vanessa watches as her autocratic, glamorous mother unravels. Her friend Alan McAlpine offers an impossible comfort, one that she cannot accept. Over the course of four years in the Southern Highlands of Scotland, she tells a tale of desire and loss, power and devotion. But nothing is what it seems, and the world Vanessa has built for herself is as treacherous as glass: fragile, filled with half-truths and reflections.
topStarting Points for Discussion
- Bryony and Vanessa believe that Lucy was their mother’s favourite child – what evidence is there for this in the novel?
- “Mum was going to die. Mum was going to leave me. And she was the only one I had.” Vanessa feels isolated throughout the novel: why do you think she does not talk to her sisters, her friends or Alan? Who do you think she should have confided in?
- How differently do you think Vanessa’s life would have turned out if she had had brothers rather than sisters? Do you think her mother would have treated her sons in the same way as she treated her daughters?
- Discuss the importance of the Scottish landscape and the natural world in the novel.
- How convincingly do you think the author captures the voice of an abused teenage girl?
- Why do you think that Vanessa chooses to stay with her mother when their father comes to collect them?
- Discuss Alan and Vanessa’s relationship. Do you think, as Lucy did, that their difference in their social backgrounds was responsible for their break up? Why does Alan not integrate Vanessa into his social group at school?
- What do you think that Vanessa’s refusal to acknowledge Bryony’s anorexia tells us about the two siblings and their relationship?
- Do you think that Bryony is telling the truth when she tells Vanessa that her father and Lucy blame her for her mother’s death? Why do you think they would blame her?
Other Books by Sophie Cooke
The Glass House
Recently expelled from boarding school, 14-year-old Vanessa watches as her …
Under the Mountain
It is the blazing summer of 1981 and Catherine is laid low by childhood illness…
Suggested Further Reading
- Crow Lake ~ Mary Lawson
- Isabel and Rocco ~ Anna Stothard
- Special ~ Bella Bathurst
- Cat’s Eye ~ Margaret Atwood
- The Cement Garden ~ Ian McEwan
- The Lake of Dead Languages ~ Carol Goodman