Book Club Discussion Questions and Guide for Hera by Jennifer Saint

Book Club Discussion Questions

Print PDF

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

1. What was your sense of Hera before reading this novel? Has your understanding of her life and character changed? If so, how? Did you come away with a very different understanding of any of the other characters here? Discuss.
2. As a goddess, Hera experiences time differently from mortals. How does Jennifer Saint capture that in these pages? How else does Hera uniquely perceive the world, compared to mortals?
3. Zeus names Hera the goddess of marriage and motherhood. How does Hera's understanding of her role evolve over the course of the novel? What about her personal views of marriage and motherhood?
4. Hera has very complex relationships with her children. What kind of mother is she? Why does she feel so differently about Typhon than her other children? How does her relationship with Hephaestus change?
5. Discuss Hera and Zeus's marriage. Why does Hera agree to it, in the end? What does marriage mean to each of them, and how do they wield power over each other? Do you think there is any love between them?
6. Hera recognizes that her treatment of the women Zeus has affairs with is "petty. It's beneath her. And yet it consumes her." Why is she so obsessed with punishing them, instead of focusing her anger on Zeus? Do you sympathize with her actions?
7. Hera reveres Gaia and feels very close to her. How do you understand their bond? Why is Gaia so important to Hera?
8. The other Olympian goddesses, especially Demeter, Hestia, and Athena, have very different approaches to the power struggles on Mount Olympus than Hera. How do they wield their power and influence in unique ways? How are they shaped by their gender and the social constructs around it?
9. What do you make of the relationship between Ekhidna and Hera? What draws Hera to "monsters" like Ekhidna, Typhon, and their children, especially when she also craves order, especially when it comes to life on Mount Olympus?
10. Hera goes from revering Olympus to wanting to destroy it to feeling loyal to it once more: "After so long existing at the heart of the Olympians yet still feeling like an outsider, she finds that she's more like them than she ever knew." How do you explain the evolution of her feelings? Do you see her as an outsider at all?
11. After observing how obsessed the Olympians are with the Trojan War, Hestia argues that the gods have come to need mortals to survive, while Hera believes it's the other way around. What do you think? Why does Hestia ultimately decide to leave Olympus, and why does her departure have such a seismic impact?
12. What happens to Zeus over the course of the novel? Why do you think he becomes so powerless by the end? What is the significance of Hera destroying his thunderbolt?
13. When Hera meets Athena in Athens, she observes: "The way Athena is talking, she seems to celebrate all that the mortals have learned, even if it means an unheard-of questioning of the gods, as though she'd let them consume her in pursuit of progress." What do you think Hera means? How do Hera and Athena relate differently to mortals?
14. In watching the play in Athens, Hera compares it to gods watching mortals: "The entertainment they sought on Mount Olympus when they gathered together, how deeply they yearned for pain and suffering, how they used to savour it." Do you agree with the comparison? How is it similar and different? Why do you think Hera is so drawn to the mortal playwright?
15. Near the end of the novel, Hera reflects: "That version of Hera still exists: a shell built around her of prayers and myth, a construction that's been made for her, made of her. But she can walk free of it now and leave it standing behind her." What do those words mean to you? What do you think the future holds for Hera and for the other Olympians? How does this novel itself exist as part of that construction Hera is describing?

Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of Flatiron Books. Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions.