Reading Group Questions for
A Most Uncommon
Degree of Popularity
by Kathleen Gilles Seidel

1. Jane Austen, speaking of perfect novels and heroines, said, “pictures of perfection make me sick and wicked.” How might she view A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity? Does it avoid “pictures of perfection”?
   
   
2. What do the four friends—Lydia, Mimi, Blair, and Annelise—have in common? Is it a good basis for a friendship?
   
   
3. Lydia had always thought of popular girls as “manipulative little blond bitch-goddesses” only to discover that her daughter is one. What issues confront the mothers of popular girls? To what extent do you sympathize?
   
   
4. Lydia stops practicing law to stay at home. “I was afraid I would disappear if I quit work,” she tells us. Does she disappear? What other challenges face professional women who decide to become stay-at-home moms? Would more women stay at home if they could afford to?
   
   
5. Lydia travels to Houston to visit Jamie. Does the novel’s depiction of marriage seem too pessimistic? Too optimistic?
   
   
6. The novel is set in a “theme-park version of a small town.” Does this setting reflect a trend in American culture that transcends this affluent section of Washington, D.C? What is appealing about life in a small town?
   
   
7. How valid are the meritocrat/aristocrat class distinctions that Lydia makes?
   
   
8. We see the events of the novel through Lydia’s eyes. How would Mary Paige tell this story? How would Chris Goddard?
   
   
9. The novel ends at the untidy resolution of a crisis in Alden School. What will happen to Mary Paige, her daughter Faith, and Chris Goddard? What will happen to Lydia’s family?