Reading Group Guide

This reading group guide for The Color of Light includes an introduction and discussion questions for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

Introduction

The Color of Light tells two intertwining stories of forbidden love, beginning with the powerful attraction between Raphael Sinclair, the mysterious British founder of the American Academy of Classical Art, and Tessa Moss, a gifted art student.

Rafe has everything; looks, money, beautiful women, a townhouse on Gramercy Park filled with priceless art, regular appearances in the society pages of major newspapers; but his real passion is the struggling Classical art school that he founded with his own fortune. On the wall of Tessa’s studio, he finds a sketch of a young woman covering the eyes of a small child, flames reflected in her eyes. The suitcase at her feet has the name Wizotsky printed on it. Sofia Wizotsky, the love of his life, was lost in the flames that engulfed European Jewry during the Holocaust.

Or was she? Tessa may be the key to discovering what really happened to Sofia that terrible night in 1943. And Rafe’s shadowy past may hold the answers to Tessa’s questions about her family’s catastrophic losses in World War II.

At the heart of the story are secrets and lies with their roots in a doomed love affair between two art students in Paris on the eve of World War II. One night, with his art school under siege, and her future as an artist in the balance, Rafe tells Tessa a tale of undying passion that consumes the talented daughter of a wealthy Jewish family and the playboy son of a knighted British aristocrat.

Topics and Questions for Discussion

1. Is Tessa’s relationship with Lucian consistent with her character’s values? What does their affair offer her? Why do you think she stays with him, even though he cheats on her?

2. What is the significance of the painting of the Madonna and Child over Rafe’s fireplace?

3. Tessa’s grandfather refuses to talk about what happened during the war. Why do you think that is? Do you think it’s healthy or unhealthy for Holocaust survivors to talk about their war experiences?

4. Rafe has been involved with thousands of women, whether he sleeps with them or drinks their blood. What is the source and significance of his promiscuity?

5. “The terrible things that happen to us,” Tessa said slowly. “What we do with them...I think that’s what makes us artists.” Do you think this statement is true for most artists, writers, dancers, actors?

6. Tessa’s family is still affected by secrets and horrors that took place fifty years earlier. Do you think the events of the Holocaust still shape family dynamics, and affect the children and grandchildren of survivors, seventy years after the end of World War II?

7. How does the tale of Sofia and Rafe and the circle of artists living in Paris intersect with the plot of the larger novel? In what ways does this magical tale of vampires connect with the brutality of the Holocaust and the ongoing life of the children of Holocaust survivors today?

8. Her small white hand glided over mine, alighting as gently as a butterfly. “We are just the same,” she said softly. How do Rafe’s recollections of his childhood compare to Sofia's childhood? What do you think they shared in common?

9. Do you think Rafe loves Tessa for herself? Or does he love her because she reminds him of Sofia?

10. How did Rafe and Yechezkel’s witnessing so much death up close impact them, respectively, as witness and survivor of the Holocaust? Why did both of them choose to keep details of this period of their life a secret from those closest to them for so long?

11. Do you think that keeping a terrible secret has any effect on the secret-keeper? Could you forgive someone who hides a terrible secret? Why do you think Rafe doesn’t tell Tessa what really happened in Auschwitz until he’s dying?

12. There are several icons that appear in the past and the present of the story—Sofia’s wedding ring, the drawing of the mother and child over Rafe’s fireplace, the paintings hanging in Rafe’s mansion, his sketchbook. What is their significance in the past, and what is their significance in the present-day part of the story?

13. How did you feel upon discovering that Rafe misled Tessa about what he really did in Auschwitz? Do his actions as a vampire make him irredeemable?To what extent is it possible to forgive someone who honestly repents of having committed evil acts?

14. “This is my Paris,” Tessa said, spreading her arms wide. “This is where I belong.” She smiled. “In New York, you can be anyone you want to be.” Tessa chooses to remain in New York rather than to go to Paris. How do you feel about her decision?

15. “What about children, Tessa?” Portia was almost shouting. Wiry blond hairs were springing free of her tightly wrapped bun. “A family? A normal life?”

“David was normal,” said Tessa.

Tessa and her art friends all come from backgrounds that could be described as difficult or unusual. David is “normal,” and yet, he’s the one who snaps under pressure the night before the Graduation Exhibition. How do you define normal?