It's so far out of my range of genre experience, I don't feel comfortable rating the book with some level of stars, although I do wonder what happened to the radio and why it never was used again. 
 Here are the questions discussed at the Reading the Western Landscape Book Club at the Arboretum Library of the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden on September 27, 2017: 
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 **	Did you perceive that towards the end there was less violence or did you feel that you had become desensitized to it? What does the violence teach the reader? 
 *	What did you gain from the chapter beginning poems? 
 *	Did the author convince you that the narrator was a teenager? How or why not? 
 *	How did it feel to read this book in our current political climate? 
 *	Were there any plot points that were confusing to you? 
 *	What happened to the radio? Why didn't it help in other situations instead of only in the instance of avoiding San Francisco? 
 *	What was the point of making Olamina's love interest 40 years older than she was and her father's age? Did you trust him? 
 *	What was the overarching message of this book? Was there one? 
 *	What did you like best about this book? Least? 
 *	The book was about evenly divided between the time in the neighborhood and the journey. What do you think the reasoning for that was? 
 *	What is one thing you might have changed about this book to make it better? 
 *	This book was published in 1993. Do you think she was reacting to the crack cocaine epidemic? Why? Why not? 
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