When their dad left for a yearlong military deployment, a community stepped in to fill his seat at the dinner table...one week at a time.
On its surface, DINNER WITH THE SMILEYS is an uplifting true story about a wife and mother's yearlong experience inviting one new guest (from senators to school teachers, artists to professional athletes) to dinner for each week that her husband was deployed overseas.
But DINNER WITH THE SMILEYS isn't really about dinner. And it's not about the military either.
It's about 250 strangers who came together to help raise three boys (one of the cusp of adolescence) in the absence of their father. It's a love story about marriage, motherhood, and the importance of community in all of our lives.
Inside this personal story are the universal issues of loss, grief, loneliness, regrets, sacrifice, and, ultimately, unexpected joy and finding one's own strength.
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Some book club discussion topics for this book:
How would you keep your family engaged with one another during deployment?
Which of the family dinners was your favorite and why?
I expected to find a book with 52 stories of family dinners and meeting new people, but I found the book reflecting a different theme. What central idea did you see in the book?
What was most different in Sarah’s life experiences than your own? What did you find most surprising, intriguing or difficult to understand?
What specific passages the book struck you as significant—or interesting, profound, amusing, illuminating, disturbing, sad...? What was memorable?
What have you learned after reading Dinner with the Smileys?
Describe your experience reading the book – were you immediately engaged, or did you get into it quickly? How did you feel as you were reading it?
Which character in Dinner with the Smileys could you most relate to? Or, do you see correlations with their family dynamics in your own family? Do the characters in Dinner with the Smileys remind you of any people you know?
Describe how one (or all) of the Smileys change by the end of the book. What have they learned about themselves?
Were you surprised by the structure of the book based on what you were expecting when you read a brief description? How does the structure of the book change how you might read or understand it?
If you could ask Sarah a question, what would you ask?
In the book, we only get a glimpse of the Smileys' family dynamics as told by Sarah. How do you think the story might be different from Dustin's point-of-view?
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