Are you part of a book club or looking to start one? Time Squared by Lesley Krueger makes a great book club pick!
A clever young woman meets a handsome soldier. Their love story unfolds through romance and misunderstandings, but with a twist: Eleanor and Robin they keep jumping through time, and only Eleanor knows that it’s happening.
Book Club Questions
1. Eleanor Crosby travels through time, landing in many different time periods. It is possible for someone’s personality to remain stable when her circumstances change so abruptly?
2. Of all the time periods in the novel, which one would you most like to visit?
3. Why has the author made Eleanor’s love, Robin, a soldier?
4. How have men’s expectations of women changed over time?
5. What about women’s expectations of men? And of themselves?
6. Who do you prefer: Robin or his brother Edward?
7. Eleanor’s Aunt Clara is her guardian. How is it different being brought up by an aunt rather than a mother?
8. When a novel is set in the past, do you like to think about the differences with our own time or prefer to explore similarities?
9. Eleanor’s best friend Catherine is an artist. What changes for a woman artist over the two hundred years between the Regency period and the present day?
10. What role does fashion play in the novel? Not just as a subject, but as a theme?
11. Aunt Clara speaks of the economic cycles in society, when people lose their fortunes in periodic crashes. What role does the economy play in Eleanor’s life?
12. How does Eleanor grow as a woman as she jumps through time? Why?
13. How does the status of a military man like Robin change over the centuries?
14. At the climax of the novel, we meet the “chess masters” who move Eleanor through time. Who do you think they really are?
15. How do you think Eleanor’s life in the final chapter compares with the earlier and more glamourous lives she lived in the past? Is it better to be as rich as she often was, or a working woman, as she becomes?