The Ed Calkins "Bryony" Discussion Group

By Ed Calkins, the Steward of Tara

The discussion kept drifting onto what it means to be the parent of a teenager. Strange, since everyone in the group were once teenagers, but not all were parents.

The conversation started with Melissa and how isolated she seems from her peers and being far closer to her mother and brother. She is definitively not the kind of girl/woman to get in trouble.

Yet, trouble seems a pit that all of us (in the discussion group) fell into as teens whether or not we were like Melissa . What we feared, as parents, was that some secret boy/man/woman/girl would approach our teen and blindside her in some clandestine pact that would lead to danger. John seems a perfect metaphor for this. (Did we stumble on something your former editor feared? (Fear or not, Masters is a pillar of the novel and its truthful metaphors), so says Ed Calkins anyway, and you've got to be a little impressed with my own personal grammar and spelling).

We talked about the guilt of a parent. Each parent had an insight on some problem that our teens or tweens was experiencing. It seems fitting that Darlene, who is quite close to Melissa, might later reflect that she took her eye off the ball and got distracted by her own love interest when a vampire was feeding on her willing daughter in her own bedroom.

Did we get something right or are Irish parents just guilt ridden and weird?

I hardly summarized the whole discussion but I though I'd share that much with you. I should also tell you that eight of the twelve people did not finish the book as assigned, but we had the discussion anyway, since everyone had read to the part of Ed Calkins. I took no one to task, since I was just sitting down to dinner, but I did warm them Bryony had some turns ahead.