Reading it with a class, a group, or one child

A book that withholds its conclusion is unusually good to read together, because the conversation afterwards is the part where the meaning gets made. Here is what is worth asking. None of it requires a leader's guide.

Questions that work

When did you first notice the narrator was wrong about something? That one is the whole book in a single question, and children answer it with real precision.

Did you like him? Almost everybody says yes and then looks uncomfortable. That discomfort is the thing worth sitting with.

What does he think success looks like? And then: was he right?

Was there anything he could not explain? Children spot this faster than adults do, because they are not trying to be sophisticated about it.

What not to do with it

Do not close by telling them what it meant. The entire mechanism of the book is that it does not do that, and undoing it in the last five minutes of a session converts a story back into a lesson, which is what the reader's guard was up against in the first place.

If a child reaches a conclusion you did not expect, that is the approach working rather than failing.

Reading it aloud

It reads aloud better than most books at this level, for a reason specific to the form: a narrator with a voice and an attitude is a gift to whoever is doing the reading. Damon is pompous and put upon, and that is playable.

Eighty three pages is roughly three or four sittings at a chapter or two each. Short enough that a group does not lose the thread between sessions, which is the usual reason a read aloud dies in week three.

If somebody objects

In a church or school setting somebody may object to a demon narrator on principle, and it is better to have thought about it beforehand than to improvise.

The straight answer is that this is the Screwtape structure, that Lewis is on most of the same shelves, and that the demon is the one who turns out to be wrong. If that does not settle it, it will not settle, and the objection is a real one held sincerely rather than a misunderstanding to be corrected.

For a group buying several

For a class, a youth group or a church library, copies can be signed to each person individually rather than generically, which for a leavers' gift or a confirmation class is worth doing properly. That is arranged directly with Bryant rather than ordered one at a time.