Official Discussion Questions for Bookclubs + Buddy reads

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1. Much of Ree’s life is built upon comforts and freedoms she thinks little of initially. As she progresses and must face down the city’s threats without her mother’s protections, she comes to understand that her life and safety was always built upon a tenuous balance of freedom that her mother’s rule enabled. The cruel irony becomes clear—Ree’s freedom comes at a steep cost, perhaps for everyone enslaved. How does Ree come to question not just her own role in maintaining the city’s status quo, but also Marie’s as well?

2. The city’s magical population known in the book as Les Magiques can be enslaved or freed (mirroring real life politics of the 19th century) and are often exploited for their magical prowess. How does magic complicate the fickle power dynamics of a city like New Orleans? Can a true balance of power ever be achieved and what exactly would it take to establish this?

3. The further Ree channels the past, the more she learns that her mother as a young woman was strikingly similar to her once upon a time (selfish in her own way, rebellious and idealistic). Are there pivotal scenes in Marie’s past that that directly parallel Ree’s current situation or threat?

4. Who is the real villain of The Quarter Queen—Marie, Jon, Silas, Corbin—or perhaps the invisible if not faceless threats of the system itself? Are they simply cogs in “the machine” so to speak or much more?

5. The Brotherhood of the White Hand wields an enormous amount of power within New Orleans, thanks in part to their ability to transfigure and transmute items for magical advancement, thus leading to prosperous commerce for New Orleans. But this is only a polite half-truth. The events of La Lune reveal their real power is much more terrifying and bleaker than this—that they can in fact transmute and bend reality itself. How does this evil hiding in plain sight behind ‘political correctness’ mirror real power structures and organizations throughout history, especially in current times?

6. Jon the Conjurer is presented at first as the very real (and perhaps sole) threat to Marie. But later chapters reveal that Jon is perhaps the lesser of all evils lurking within New Orleans and that his divide with Marie is more personal than political. In a sense Jon and Marie are both right and very much wrong and come to represent differing but similar ideological stances on freedom and rebellion. Who ultimately is right in the end? And is there such a thing within the world of The Quarter Queen?

7. The world of The Quarter Queen is not one of strictly light or dark. It very much lives within the gray twilight of good and evil (not unlike books such as The Witcher or Game of Thrones). What ultimately does the gray represent?