ALL-SCHOOL/COMMUNITY READS

An exciting, high interest read, with an accessible reading level and lots of educational value, that make it great for an all-school or community read.

CROSS-CURRICULUM TIE-INS

• Social Studies: Supplement your units on the Cold War with this unique window to a critical event and its participants.
• ELA: The story draws inspiration and references works of classic literature including Alice in Wonderland, King Lear, and stories by Franz Kafka.
• Music: The story highlights the power of music — from rock to classical — to fight repression and feed the human spirit.

THEMES

Strawberry Fields covers the following themes:

Secrecy Trust Censorship Family Freedom

PRE-READING

Share this video of the author introducing Strawberry Fields and talking about his life growing up in U.S. embassies inspired the story.

Ask Readers:

• What do you know about the Cold War?
• What do you know about The Beatles?
• What do you think will happen in the book?

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS & ACTIVITIES

This guide contains questions, activities, and lists of terms and names to help structure discussions with your readers. They are grouped by theme.

Characters & Relationships:

1. Growing up, Josie shared a close bond with her grandmother, who taught her the Czech language and passed on a nostalgia for her homeland. Do you share a special bond with an older relative? How have they influenced you? Have they passed along a special appreciation for something? 

2. Josie thinks of her pen and notebook as her “sword and shield.” What does she mean? Is there something you carry with you everywhere that has special significance for you?

3. From a young age, both Josie and Laurent had “wanderlust” — they yearned to leave home and travel the world. How were their reasons for that longing similar? How were they different? Do you ever feel wanderlust?

4. Josie’s parents gave her a traditional Czech name. Laurent’s parents gave him a traditional Amharic name, although he chose to change it after leaving Ethiopia. How do you think their names affected them growing up? Why do you think Laurent changed his? Do you think names are important? Has your name impacted your personality or life?

5. Josie and Laurent face choices between advancing their careers as journalists and helping a cause they have discovered. Do you think they let personal attachments, or professional goals, influence their choices too much? Too little? What choices might they have made differently? 

6. At the end, Josie realizes that “Home could mean more than a place. It could be a feeling.” Laurent expresses a similar sentiment when he recalls, “My father told me stories about his childhood in the hills in Ethiopia. Now those stories seem more real than my memories. Although I don’t think of it as home anymore. The whole place feels distant, like a dream.” What do you think they mean? In what ways can home mean something other than a physical location? 

History & Social Studies: 

1. What did you know about Czechoslovakia and the Prague Spring before reading this book? Did you look things up while reading? Did the story change what you thought about them?

2. The Playwright speculates that Czechoslovak leaders ordered the country’s military to stand down because they feared a repeat of what happened in Budapest in 1956, when troops sided with Soviet invaders and much blood was shed. It must have been a difficult decision, and it shaped the nature of the resistance and underground movement that followed. What do you think might be some of the factors leaders must weigh in deciding how to resist an invasion? How might it differ depending on the circumstances? 

3. The Playwright says that, “The invaders can kill people and destroy monuments. But they cannot shoot ideas.” She fears an even more potent weapon: lies. What do you think she means? 

4. Laurent says, “Sometimes absurdity is the only rational response to the world around us.” What do you think he means? Can you think of examples today? 

5. The Soviet reaction to the Prague Spring in 1968 invites comparisons to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. In what ways have the two invasions been alike, and in what ways have they been different? 

Music & Culture:

1. How much did you know about Beatles songs like “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “I Am the Walrus” before reading this book? Has it changed your impression of these songs, the band, or their music generally?

2. Laurent reflects that a poem can be a mystery, and discovers that a song can be too. What does he mean? In what ways can music and poetry hide secret meanings or reveal truths about the world? 

3. Václav Havel, the Czech playwright and underground activist who was elected president of Czechoslovakia after the fall of the Soviet Union, wrote that, “If the main pillar of the system is living a lie, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living the truth.” A major source of that threat was “young people who wanted no more than to be able to live within the truth, to play the music they enjoyed, to sing songs that were relevant to their lives, and to live freely in dignity and partnership.” What do you think Havel meant? What is the relationship between music and truth? Do young people somehow have greater access to truth? 

4. Janek Mroz expresses the wish that “society could be as beautiful and as orderly as a sonnet.” Members of the Stasi, East Germany’s feared secret police during the Cold War, actually formed a poetry club inspired by a similar desire. We normally think of poetry, art, and music as inherently good things. What do you think is right and what is wrong with Mroz’s wish? How does Laurent later challenge him? 

5. Laurent says his father wrote poetry in his native Ethiopian language of Amharic “that would say one thing but hint at its opposite, and we had to figure out the double meaning. It’s traditional in Ethiopia. Our poets mask insults with praise, a gentle form of rebellion against the powerful.” Can you think of other examples of this in literature, music, or everyday language? 

6. One theme in the story concerns transformation, or “metamorphosis” as referred to in the chapter title or Kafka’s short story. Who or what is transformed over the course of the book? Are the changes real or merely perceived? What are the consequences? 

ACTIVITIES

1. Pick a favorite song and examine its lyrics. Are there any lyrics that you think might be considered dangerous or be banned in a place where an authoritarian government restricts freedom of expression? Can you find any “hidden meanings” in the song? 

2. Read Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky” and listen to “I Am the Walrus” by The Beatles. How are they “absurd”? In your opinion, does their absurdity magnify their impact, or lessen it?  Can you find any “hidden meanings” in them?  

3. We usually think of revolutions as seeking radical change in the realms of economics or politics. But some see it as even more fundamental. Music critic Ian MacDonald called the cultural change ushered in by The Beatles in the 1960s a “revolution in the head.” And the Czech activist (and later president) Vaclav Havel argued that the totalitarianism of Communist states demanded an “existential revolution.” Read excerpts from MacDonald’s introduction to his book and Havel’s essay “The Power of the Powerless.” What did they mean? How are their arguments similar and different? Why is music so important to both perspectives?

4. Near the end of the story, Laurent realizes that both a poem and a song “could be a mystery.” The Shrouded Man concealed a message within a poem inside a song. Think of a poem or a song you could use to hide a secret message. Deliver it to a classmate, along with a hint about its meaning or someone who might understand it (like the Playwright).

KEY TERMS

Fiction can shed light on history in a unique way, differently from textbooks and other works of nonfiction, but also valuable. Think about the Terms, Places, People, and works of Music & Literature on the next few pages. Divide readers into small groups and assign each group a topics from each category. Their task: explain how each topic is important to the story, and how the story sheds light on the topic in a new or special way.

1. Amharic
2. Central Committee
3. Communist Party
4. Eastern Bloc
5. Iron Curtain
6. Kremlin
7. National Assembly
8. Prague Spring
9. Presidium
10. Radio Prague
11. StB
12. VB
13. Velvet Revolution
14. Warsaw Pact
15. Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR, Soviet Union)

Notable Places

1. Addis Ababa
2. Czechoslovakia (Czechoslovak Socialist Republic)
3. Davle
4. Malá Strana
5. Minsk
6. Moscow
7. Old Town Square
8. Prague
9. Prague Castle
10. River Vltava
11. Soviet Union
12. Vitkov Hill
13. Wenceslas Square

Notable People

1. The Beatles (John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr)
2. Leonid Brezhnev
3. Alexander Dubček
4. Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll
5. Franz Kafka
6. Martin Luther King Jr.
7. President Svoboda
8. Arthur Rimbaud
9. Robert F. Kennedy
10. Vaclav Havel

Music & Literature

(Each of these works is referenced in Strawberry Fields or inspired it in some way.)

1. Magical Mystery Tour
2. King Lear
3. The Trial
4. The Metamorphosis
5. Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass

THE BRIDGE

Just before dawn a mist crept across the Charles Bridge. It slid over the cobblestones and climbed up the lampposts. The heavy sky pressed down upon Prague, but the city pushed back with its steeples and monuments. The world seemed not quite real.

Statues lined the bridge, thirty dead saints. In the daylight they wore varied expressions, but at this hour they all gazed blankly downward, watching and waiting for a passerby who might tip the balance of history in their favor.

On this August morning in 1968, a young woman walked onto the bridge, touching the feet of the saints as she went. The mist curled at her heels, like it was trying to discover who she was and what she was doing, all alone at this early hour.

She peered into the gloom. She was looking for someone.

In spite of all her efforts to get to this moment, she felt a temptation to turn back. She’d arouse suspicion if she waited too long. Her source had named this time and place, and he hadn’t showed up. Maybe he’d run into trouble. Maybe he’d been arrested.

Her doubts gathered and transformed into ugly shapes. They flew back at her and perched on her shoulders like gargoyles.

As if to join them, a cloud separated from the mist ahead and condensed into a figure. A man. Like the air itself had produced him, like the progression of matter through its states. Gas, liquid, solid. Mist, dew, man.

He drew closer and details appeared, but not many. The folds of a woolen scarf hid his face. A brimmed hat hooded his eyes, casting them in shadow.

The young woman kept her attention forward as she reached into her shoulder bag. She pulled out a pen and notepad, her sword and shield. If this meeting went right, they would save her. If it went wrong, would they spell her doom?

Her name was Josie Brouk, and she was a correspondent for the Toronto Post. She was new to Prague. It was her first posting abroad, and the job had not been easy. She had struggled to learn the pitfalls of reporting inside a communist state. She had picked up bits of wisdom here and there, following the lead of other Western journalists. Sometimes they bothered to notice her as they milled outside the National Assembly. Sometimes they did not.

But Josie had a skill most of them lacked. She spoke Czech. She’d learned it from her grandmother. Most of her family had dropped their traditions after they’d arrived in Canada, before Josie was born, but her babička had kept them all, language included. She'd made Josie her collaborator in preserving the old ways. Josie, as she’d grown up, was more than willing.

Most of the world saw little value in the country’s languages and culture. The great powers saw Czechoslovakia as a bargaining chip, a stepping stone, a distraction that allowed them to engage in geopolitical sleights of hand elsewhere. It came to this: It was a pretty nation with a quaint architecture and storied history, but its future was not its own. Generations of Czechs and Slovaks had fought against that notion, but its fate always seemed to lie in the hands of others. Like the Soviets, who had imprisoned it behind an Iron Curtain. 

For Josie, the language of her grandmother opened doors. On the steps of the Assembly, she stood in the path of government officials parading up and down and surprised them with her fluency. It got her the attention she craved, and details other reporters missed. But it didn’t get her the stories she needed. As soon as officials talked, the rest of the foreign correspondents circled in, pens at the ready. They couldn’t speak fluent Czech, but they had connections, drive, and experience. Some had interpreters or fixers. Josie was new to the scene, alone in her paper’s small bureau, and a young woman, forced to prove herself at every turn.

She worried she would lose her job in this place she’d always dreamed about. But she suffered past her mistakes. She struggled through the obstacles. She learned from them.

Josie knew she had to make a splash. She had to deliver a big story to her editors, one nobody else could tell. This meeting with the mysterious source who had summoned her to the bridge felt like that chance. The slip of paper had appeared under her apartment door the night before and told her to come alone. Why? Maybe it wasn’t only her last chance. Maybe it was his, too. Or his country’s.

Was he alone as well? Would there be others, across the bridge, beyond the fog, hiding in alleys on either side? 

If she proceeded to the middle of the bridge, she would be exposed, equidistant from either bank. It was a long bridge. What if it was a trap? Should she go on? Could she find the courage?

She thought of her babička. The stories she’d told Josie were the reason she was here, in this city, on this bridge. Her parents had warned her: Don’t go back there. But she’d never been there before. How could she go back? 

She needed to prove she’d been right. For her babička. For herself.

She walked forward.

A foghorn cut through the haze. It echoed the note of a familiar song, one that Josie could not place. The moment felt like a turning point, and the music of the city magnified the effect. She remembered the simple poetry her babička had often scratched for her, in notes she’d hidden in lunches packed for school. They had inspired Josie to write herself, and later to become a writer. In school, she had learned that words could change the course of history. At some level, she knew hers could too, and someday they would.

The Shrouded Man had said so himself in his note. Its message made her think of her babička.

She held the memory close. She let the foghorn’s music pulse in her ears. The energy propelled her forward.

When she was close enough, the Shrouded Man whispered through his scarf.

“You are Canadian, yes?”

He spoke in Czech and was out of breath. He’d been running recently.

“I am,” she said.

“You are young.”

She coughed. She was nineteen. She’d quit college to take a job at the Star. She’d started with trivial stories, dreaming of bigger ones. She filled in for someone on the crime beat, and they let her stay. To the cops, she had seemed meek at first, and they had treated her with indifference, but she was dogged in her work and they quickly lost their illusions. Her persistence became well-known. 

Then a public uprising halfway around the world sent its echoes back to Canada, and her editors discovered she spoke Czech. So they sent her.

“That is good,” the Shrouded Man said. “Freedom hangs in the balance, for all of us, young and old alike.”

His words were clipped. He struggled with them. He opened his mouth to say more, but a noise pierced the sky, more urgent than the foghorn. It was a high-pitched whine, two notes alternating and repeating.

It was a sound meant to reassure, to alert people help was on the way. Often, it did. But here, now, it signaled danger. 

It was a siren.

The mist disappeared. The first rays of the rising sun shot over the bridge. The sound of running feet slapped at the stone.

Until that point, the Shrouded Man had moved like the mist around him, slow and deliberate. Now he spun in place. His eyes, visible suddenly in the trench between his hat and his scarf, filled with fear. They frightened Josie.

Men in pale green uniforms appeared at the towers on both sides. They wielded heavy batons. Beyond them, blue lights spun and flashed on the tops of little cars.

They were the VB — the regular public security force of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.

A barrage of shouts burst across the bridge, followed by a shrill whistle. From a distance, a cacophony of violent noises broke out. The ground itself seemed to rumble and transmit vibrations through the stone, like a great trouble broadcast from afar.

The Shrouded Man pulled his scarf tight. Josie knew he was about to run. She knew she should run too, even if there was little chance of escape.

It was the rational thing to do.

But sometimes, the irrational thing made more sense.

Josie grabbed his wrist.

“Wait,” she said. “Tell me what you came for.”

His eyes darted back and forth. He made a quick calculation.

In English, he rasped, “I am the walrus.”

Josie stared, uncomprehending.

“Sorry, you’re … what?”

“Go to the Café Skrýš. Listen. The Playwright will understand. Trust no one else!”

The words came so fast, between labored puffs, that Josie thought she must have heard him wrong. Another whistle shook the air. The Shrouded Man pulled away. Quicker than seemed possible, he pounced toward the low stone wall and crouched under a saint. For a moment, its shadow concealed him.

Police closed in from both sides of the bridge, seconds away from colliding at the spot where Josie stood. The unfolding events took her by surprise, but they didn’t paralyze her. She tucked her pen and notepad into her bag. They’d be no use now, not yet.

She raised her hands, palms forward to show they were empty, but stood her ground.

The Shrouded Man made a different choice. He leaped onto the wall. He took a saint’s arm.

Josie gasped.

The VB shouted.

Another whistle blew.

The Shrouded Man jumped.

The impact made a great sucking whoosh. Josie rushed to the edge and looked down. He was gone. His scarf and hat floated on the surface of the water, arranged like symbols in a secret code.

The VB halted at the wall, stumbling into each other. One jumped in after the Shrouded Man. One pointed at the opposite bank. Another rushed there, aiming to intercept him.