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Overview
On the Ides of March, our hero, Raleigh Whittier Hayes (forgetful husband, baffled father, prosperous insurance agent, and leading citizen of Thermopylae, North Carolina), learns that his father has discharged himself from the hospital, taken all his money out of the bank and, with a young black female mental patient, vanished in a yellow Cadillac convertible. Left behind is a mysterious list of seven outrageous tasks that Raleigh must perform in order to rescue his father and his inheritance.
And so Raleigh and fat Mingo Sheffield (his irrepressibly loyal friend) set off on an uproarious contemporary treasure hunt through a landscape of unforgettable characters, falling into adventures worthy of Tom Jones and Huck Finn. A moving parable of human love and redemption, Handling Sin is Michael Malone's comic masterpiece.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781402253980 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Sourcebooks |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 720 |
| Sales rank: | 355,260 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Michael Malone is the author of ten novels, a collection of short stories, and two works of nonfiction. Educated at Carolina and at Harvard, he is now a professor in Theater Studies at Duke University. Among his prizes are the Edgar, the O. Henry, the Writers Guild Award, and the Emmy. He lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina, with his wife.
Michael Malone is the author of ten novels, a collection of short stories and two works of nonfiction. Educated at Carolina and at Harvard, he is now a professor in Theater Studies at Duke University. Among his prizes are the Edgar, the O. Henry, the Writers Guild Award, and the Emmy. He lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina, with his wife.
Hometown:
Hillsborough, North CarolinaPlace of Birth:
Durham, North CarolinaEducation:
B.A., Syracuse University; Ph.D. in English, Harvard UniversityRead an Excerpt
Handling Sin
By Michael Malone
Sourcebooks, Inc.
Copyright © 2010 Michael MaloneAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4022-5398-0
CHAPTER 1
In Which the Hero Is Introduced and Receives a Blow
On the ides of March, in his forty-fifth year, the neutral if not cooperative world turned on Mr. Raleigh W. Hayes as sharply as if it had stabbed him with a knife. Like Caesar, Mr. Hayes was surprised by the blow, and responded sarcastically. Within a week his eyes were saying narrowly to everything they saw, Et tu, Brute? The world looked right back at the life insurance salesman; either blinked or winked, and spun backward on an antipodean whim, flinging him off with a shrug. This outrage happened first in his little hometown, which was Thermopylae, North Carolina, and, soon thereafter, all over the South, where Mr. Hayes was forced to wander to save his inheritance from a father who'd, again, run ostentatiously berserk.
Of course, there were warnings. Like Caesar, Hayes ignored them. A lunatic had gotten into the fortune cookies at the Lotus House, the only Chinese restaurant in town. Suddenly, along with their checks, patrons began receiving, coiled like paper snakes, harsh predictions or dreadful instructions: "You will die of cancer." "Someone close will betray you." "Sell all your stocks at once!" Either the manufacturer had unwittingly hired a sadistic sloganeer, or here in the Lotus House kitchen the Shionos themselves (ingrates despite decades of Thermopylae's hospitality) were tweezering out the old bland fortunes and slipping inside the cookies these warped prognostications. The restaurateurs (who were not Chinese anyhow, but Japanese) were already suspected of holding a grudge about the war, of catching stray cats and serving them to unknowledgeable palates as Cantonese chicken, of meaning by "C. Chow Mein" on their menus, "Cat."
The Thermopylae Civitans met at the Lotus House anyhow, because it served liquor without resembling a bar, and the Civitans didn't think of themselves as the sort of people who would eat lunch in a bar. As Raleigh Hayes did not drink, and as he found disturbing the mingling of foods customary in Asian cuisine — so many vegetables, meats, and noodles heaped communally together violated his sense of privacy — he never would have eaten a meal in the Lotus House had he not been a member of the Civitans Fund Drive Committee. Had he not reached for a fortune cookie to give his hand something to do other than twitch to choke to death the committee chairman for wasting his time, Hayes never would have pulled from the shell of stale pastry the strip of fortune that read, "You will go completely to pieces by the end of the month." Obviously, nothing could be more preposterous. Mr. Hayes knew himself to be an irrevocably sane man; nor was this conclusion reached in a vacuum: he had a great many blood relations who were not in one piece, and he could see the difference. Folding the nonsensical strip, he put it absentmindedly in his pocket.
Next to Hayes, less imperturbable, fat Mingo Sheffield curled up his paper fortune and set it on fire with his cigarette without telling the other Civitans what it said. It said, "Your spouse is having an affair with your best friend. Solly."
"Who's suh ... Solly?" asked Sheffield as nonchalantly as he could.
Nemours Kettell, the chairman and a veteran, took it on himself to explain. "It's Jap for sorry." He picked at a sharp fragment of cookie stuck in his receding gums, a public display of his mouth that irritated Hayes, who also disliked Kettell for abbreviating words, although he'd never been able to decide why this verbal habit so incensed him. Kettell shook his own fortune. "Somebody's pulling our you-knows here. You may think it's funny, Wayne." Wayne Sparks was Kettell's son-in-law across the table, now giggling because he'd just read his slip, "See a doctor. You have the clap," and he was thinking about making a joke in mimicry of his wife's father, by saying "clap" was Oriental for "crap." On the other hand, it was quite possible he did have a venereal disease, so he rolled the paper into a spitball and stuck it under his plate like gum. Kettell was still nodding. "But I don't happen to think there's a lot to ha-ha about when I see this kind of anti-American blasphemy." He passed his fortune around the table. It said, "Jesus is a bag lady. He saves trash." Nobody thought it was funny but Wayne.
Nemours Kettell now banged his fork on the cymbal-shaped cover over the last of the pepper steak. "I want some info on this cookie business. This could be like pins in the Snickers bars, remember that? I hate to believe the way the world's turning to dirt, poisoning aspirins and shooting at the President over some girl you never even met."
"What the hell did we drop the bomb for, really, you know, if we have to put up with this kind of Jap backtalk?" threw in Wayne facetiously. A neo-hippie who'd had the bad luck not to be born until the sixties were over, he was in line to inherit Kettell Concrete Company, and liked to take these risks with his future.
Raleigh Hayes kept calm by polishing his unused knife with his napkin while Kettell rapped on the dish cover until finally the tiny Shiono grandmother looked up from her Japanese newspaper. Like a pigeon through snow, she shuffled across the empty room of white tablecloths toward them. When the Civitans waved their fortunes at her, she bowed with a smile; when they pointed at the messages, she smiled and pointed at her newspaper.
"Doesn't speak the lingo," suggested Kettell's son-in-law.
Mrs. Shiono smiled. "Check? Quit it, Claude."
"Credit card," Kettell translated. "Look here, Miz Showno, you want our business, you won't ask us to come in here and read this kind of garbage." He snapped a cookie in two; nothing was in it.
"Oh, for God's sake," said Hayes who had two prospective clients to see on the way back to his office. But not until Nemours Kettell was satisfied personally by the Shiono grandson, Butch, that they would complain to their fortune-cookie supplier in Newport News, would he let the Civitans adjourn. They had already voted to host a fish fry in June and donate the proceeds to diabetes research. That's what they'd voted to do for the last ten years. Kettell's wife had diabetes. So did most of Raleigh Hayes's relatives; if it weren't for his sensible diet, no doubt he'd have it himself.
Outside their restaurant, the Shionos had grown a dogwood tree in a box on the sidewalk. Raleigh Hayes, preoccupied, started to snap off a blossom. He was stopped by a sweat coming all the way back from Sunday school, where he'd been taught it was against the law to mutilate a dogwood because Christ had died on a dogwood cross and the rust on the petal tips was His blood. The flower dangled bent, and Hayes propped it up on a neighboring branch. "Back to work, Mingo," he told his next-door neighbor.
"What for?" Mingo Sheffield sighed at Thermopylae, the rolls of his neck billowing out above his yellow short-sleeved button-down shirt. "I tell you what. Downtown is starting to look like that old movie, On the Beach. Did you see it on TV last night? The whole world was dead from fallout, not a soul on the streets. They thought somebody survived, but it was just a Coca-Cola bottle."
"Gas has dropped," said Hayes. "That's why."
"Just a Coca-Cola bottle clinking on a telegraph key."
"Everybody's back on the beltway headed for the mall again."
Sheffield looked forlornly across Bath Street at the stone facade of Knox-Bury's Clothing Store, whose menswear manager he was. "They're sure not here," he said.
"How's Vera doing?" asked Hayes by way of initiating his departure.
Pouches of flesh slid up over Mingo's eyes as he recalled the fortune cookie's warning about his wife Vera's being an adulteress. It occurred to him that Raleigh Hayes was his best friend. At least — except for Vera — he didn't have any other close friends, and hadn't had since high school, and hadn't had very many then, being fat, timid, and furtive. "What do you mean?" he asked with a hard look. He certainly didn't want to find out that his cookie had told the truth and that he had lost his wife, and his only friend, the only neighbor who had accepted his fortieth-birthday dinner invitation, the next-door neighbor who could be relied upon to recharge a battery, explain a 1040 form, call the police if robbers started packing up his house.
"How's she doing?" Hayes repeated.
"What do you mu ... mu ... mean, doing?" Sheffield stalled, hanging on to innocence.
Hayes grew impatient. "What do you mean, what do I mean?"
"You mean her diet?"
"She's dieting?" Hayes didn't even much like Vera Sheffield. She had too many things going on at once; she was a religious maniac and a lewd joker at the same time. She was altogether gluttonous. She was almost as fat as Mingo, as fat as Hayes's dead relatives, and not-yet-dead relatives, most of whom had ballooned off the top of his Mutual Life healthy-weight charts. She was a fat, born-again loudmouth.
"She's lost forty-two pounds," Sheffield was saying.
"She has?"
"She had her teeth wired together. You know how they do."
"She did?"
Mingo Sheffield relaxed with a heave at the sight of his neighbor's unmistakable amazement. Surely, if Raleigh and Vera were having an affair, it wouldn't have escaped his notice that her mouth was wired shut and forty pounds of her were missing. Now, Mingo said proudly, "It was a last resort and my hat's off to her, that's for sure. She's been through all getout." Sheffield never dieted himself, but slenderized vicariously through his wife's suffering. She'd been losing weight for a quarter of a century, but always with a backlash. Two years ago she'd had Mingo put a lock and chain on the refrigerator door, but then had gone crazy and sawed it off while he was out at Chip 'n Putt. She'd even eaten the bread that had turned blue. Last year, after not missing a single Gloria Stevens exercise class for eight months, she'd tried for first prize in the Civitans' Christmas fruitcake fund-raiser by buying the ones she couldn't sell and eating them herself. "She's doing it for Jesus," explained her husband. "Forty-two pounds!"
"Well, I hope He appreciates it," Hayes offered in parting.
"She's not in such a hot mood," Sheffield called after him, and then walked across the silent street to look at the family of picnicking mannequins he had himself arranged in Knox-Bury's display window. Sharp-creased summer clothes stuck out stiffly from their arms and legs, and new shoes hung off their toeless feet. The mannequin mother was taking a rubber pie from an ice chest and the mannequin father was looking fixedly at his tennis racket as if he were wondering why he'd brought it along on a picnic when there were no courts in sight and nobody to play with. Lonesomeness fell on Mingo Sheffield; there wouldn't be a soul to talk to in the empty store, and at home his wife's teeth were wired together. He felt like climbing in the display window and sitting with the mannequins on the plastic grass and staring with them into the aluminum-foil lake on whose surface the boy mannequin's fishing line lay tangled, as if he'd tossed it onto an ice lake without bothering to drill a hole. Mingo looked back down the sidewalk but Raleigh Hayes had disappeared. His friend was a fast walker, thought the pensive floor manager; a man with somewhere to go.
Raleigh Hayes always walked fast, even if he was only walking to the bathroom, even if he was only walking along the beach. He hurried because forty-five years had already gotten away from him, because life was always two uncatchable steps in front of him, running away like a burglar with satchels full of all the things that should have belonged to Raleigh Hayes — like money, position, a home in which nothing was unrepaired, and, in general, a future, and, mostly, his just desserts. What our hero didn't know as he hurried back to business was that the burglar was just now getting ready to wheel around and scare him to death by flinging the satchels at his head. That, at any rate, was his father's plan, if a man like his father could be said to have formulated anything that could reasonably call itself a plan, which Raleigh would have denied.
On the surface, Raleigh Whittier Hayes looked like his father, (ex) Reverend Earley Hayes, but the resemblance hadn't soaked in. For that, the son was grateful. Indeed, he resented even the physical likeness. The blueness of Raleigh's eyes, the high color of his cheek, the corkiness of his sand-colored hair and soft loose fullness of his mouth had, all his life, led people (even those who hadn't known the father) to expect of the son a Rabelaisian insouciance he neither possessed nor approved. He was continually a disappointment to those who assumed he would live up to his looks, and they were a disappointment to him. He'd done what he could to bring his surface into conformity with what was inside: he'd put his eyes behind glasses, fretted away a little bit of his hair, and tightened his mouth. Raleigh'd grown tall and lean and pale, so that he'd come to look like Earley Hayes stretched on the rack and, consequently, bitter in the face.
What was on the inside of the son belonged to the mother, second of Earley's three (so far) wives, and the only one with any money. A great deal of money (well, not a great deal, but enough for a reasonable man), money that Raleigh Hayes was to inherit as soon as his father died, which should have happened a long time ago. Not that Raleigh wanted it to happen at all. In fact, he and his single sane aunt had spent the past six months persuading the seventy-year-old gadabout to enter the local hospital for the tests he was now having for his blackout spells. It was just that Hayeses rarely lived into their seventies. Most of the foolhardy gene pool had died laughing of one carelessly aggravated congenital malady or another, years and years younger than Earley Hayes was now. Somehow, Earley kept bouncing up and down on the tip of the diving board without ever slipping in. His son, Raleigh, considered himself fortunate that he'd been bequeathed only the father's looks, for the majority of those with any Hayes blood shared a dangerously blithe character as well, and they'd horsed around as if life were child's play until they'd toppled (uninsured) into early graves.
As a life insurance agent, Raleigh was appalled by the fact that he'd never been able to sell his relatives a single policy. They were too cavalier to insure themselves and too sentimentally superstitious to insure anyone else. But they were glad to let him take out his own small policies on them, although it seemed to them a terribly dull use of money. Because of their calamitous genealogy, the premiums were exorbitant. He sank the returns into land; it lasted longer than the creatures who lay under it. He now owned two beach houses near Wilmington, and he rented them out to vacationers, and lent them to his relatives. They loved the beach.
* * *
On the twelfth floor of the Forbes Building at the Crossways (as the center of downtown Thermopylae was called), Raleigh Hayes overlooked his reflection in the glass door that bore his name and title. INSURANCE AGENT, MUTUAL LIFE. The phone was ringing while he was opening the door. He couldn't imagine why Bonnie Ellen didn't answer it. She was his new secretary, and the reason she didn't answer the phone was she was at home arguing with her husband about whether or not they should move to California. But Hayes wasn't to find out why Bonnie Ellen had let the phone keep ringing until much later, because when Chief Hood came to his house to ask him if he'd killed her, he'd already left town.
Raleigh snatched up his own receiver and announced himself.
"It's me," said his wife, out of breath. Her name was Aura, and as a result, her sensible, if somewhat cryptic, remarks struck others as having a mystical elusiveness.
"What's the matter?"
"Your daddy's gone!"
"He's dead. Dear God."
But Aura blew a puff of air into the phone. "Oh, Raleigh, no. He ran off from the hospital before they could finish his heart tests. When they brought in his lunch tray, there was nothing on his bed but his suitcase! Honey, I hate to say I told you so." She didn't explain what she had told him, but it certainly hadn't been that his father was going to skip out of the hospital, undetected, and vanish.
Hayes sat down without even looking for his chair. His tailbone hit the corner of the armrest and shot pain up his spine like a dart. "Why wasn't I informed?" he asked, as if he were already talking to the hospital officials, which, in his mind, he was. "Why has all this time been lost?"
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Handling Sin by Michael Malone. Copyright © 2010 Michael Malone. Excerpted by permission of Sourcebooks, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
PrologueTHE CALL
Chapter 1 In Which the Hero Is Introduced and Receives a Blow
Chapter 2 Which Treats of the Strange Message the Hero's Father Sent Him
Chapter 3 Of a Misunderstanding between Our Hero and His Neighbors
Chapter 4 How Raleigh Received His Name
Chapter 5 In Which Raleigh Blackmails an Enemy and Frightens the Kaiser
Chapter 6 Of the Advice Given Raleigh by His Only Sane Aunt
Chapter 7 In Which the Hero Commits a Crime
Chapter 8 And Is Nearly Arrested
Chapter 9 The First Sally Takes a Strange Turn
Chapter 10 How Raleigh Was Confirmed in His View of the World
THE QUEST
Chapter 11 In Which Our Hero Attends a Surprise Party
Chapter 12 Raleigh Escapes
Chapter 13 Wherein Is Continued the Account of the Innumerable Troubles Endured by Our Hero
Chapter 14 Sudden Impulses Overwhelm Our Hero
Chapter 15 In Which Is Continued a Conversation Begun Thirty Years Ago
Chapter 16 In Which Raleigh and Mingo Fall into a Swamp
Chapter 17 Raleigh's Confession
Chapter 18 How Mingo Fared Alone at Myrtle Beach
Chapter 19 In Which the Hero Finds Himself at Sea
Chapter 20 The Great Adventure of the Bass Fiddle Case -
Chapter 21 In Which Is Described the Famous Barbecue at "Wild Oaks"
Chapter 22 Our Hero Succumbs to a Faded Beauty
Chapter 23 The Very Extraordinary Adventures Which Ensued at the Inn
Chapter 24 In Which Are Continued the Misfortunes That
Reading Group Guide
Our Book Club Recommendation
Michael Malone’s Handling Sin is a comic novel whose depths are almost deceptively hidden by a happy-go-lucky exterior. Beneath the improbable story -- which concerns a respectable man who must pursue his elderly father on a humiliating wild-goose chase across the American South -- is a tale that encompasses complex issues such as racism, the claims of family, and the extent to which "respectability" is a virtue. Readers will laugh at the goings-on in Malone’s whimsical universe, but they may also see in them a reflection of the world they experience every day.
The theme of family in Handling Sin is sure to start many conversations. On the one hand, Malone is a master at portraying the uncomfortable comedy that results when a family contains more than a few eccentrics, and his hero, North Carolina insurance salesman Raleigh Hayes, must put up with an almost endless assortment of relatives who are decidedly not, by his middle-of-the-road standards, normal.
But as Hayes digs deeper into his family's history, he finds that what he’s been quick to judge is far from simple, and his attitudes about family raise issues of real significance, such as identity and race in the modern South, and the conflicts between compassion for others and the need to care for oneself. Raleigh's journey into his family history becomes multilayered and in turn will provoke many to think about the funny and serious sides of every family.
Book clubs may particularly enjoy sharing their ideas about the literary influences behind this almost epic-sized tall tale. The strange quest on which Raleigh finds himself borrows liberally from such masterpieces as Don Quixote and Tom Jones. Readers of John Kennedy Toole’s modern classic, A Confederacy of Dunces, will also spot many of the citizens of that nation among Malone’s southern eccentrics and hopeless cases. It’s almost impossible to exhaust the hunt for these literary connections in Malone's highly sophisticated novel; and while Handling Sin is too much fun to feel like work, reading group members will discover just how "heavy" the themes in this lighthearted book can become. (Bill Tipper)
Discussion Questions from the Publisher
1. At the beginning of the novel, on the Ides of March, Raleigh Hayes receives the following fortune in a Chinese cookie: "You will go completely to pieces by the end of the month." In what ways does the fortune come true, and in what ways does it not?
2. Aristotle has famously said, "Character is action." Characters will act in certain believable ways because of their established natures. How does the character of Raleigh Hayes lead to his response to the situations in which he finds himself? What qualities in his personality make Raleigh's father feel he needs to be sent on the journey he takes?
3. The first section of the novel is called "The Quest." Earley Hayes is sending his son on a quest for certain objects, but the quest is really to teach Raleigh what lessons about life and faith?
3. The objects Raleigh must "find" and bring to New Orleans (the gun, the bust, the Bible, Jubal himself, etc.) are all connected to the Hayes family past: How?
4. Why do you think that Earley set up such an elaborate journey for Raleigh instead of just coming out and telling him what he wanted him to do and why?
5. Raleigh's journey takes place during Lent and climaxes on Maundy Thursday (the gathering in New Orleans), Good Friday (when Earley dies), and Easter (when Earley is "buried"). How is this significant?
6. The author has said that characters often insist on following their own destinies. For example, he did not originally plan for Mingo to accompany Raleigh on his journey. How do you think Raleigh's trip would have been different if Mingo had not joined him?
7. It has been said there are really only two stories. In one, a stranger comes to town (as Mr. Darcy does in Pride and Prejudice); in the other, somebody leaves home, as Dorothy does in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Which is true of Handling Sin? Does the novel contain both elements?
8. Images and characters of a religious nature show up often in Handling Sin. One of the most important of these has to do with Earley's position as a former minister. Would you consider the Hayes family to be religious? In what other ways do the doctrines and rituals of Christianity play a central role in the novel?
9. The name of the novel is Handling Sin. Why? What does Earley want his son to learn by going into the world and handling sin there (becoming engaged in the clutter of life, accepting his own imperfections, and forgiving those of others)? What are some examples of how Raleigh's journey leads him to participate in the seven "sins" (lust, anger, etc.)?
10. There are seven chapters in the book that are meditations, taking Raleigh back to memories of his childhood. These chapters are named for the seven sacraments: Baptism ("How Raleigh Received His Name"), Confirmation ("How Raleigh Was Confirmed in His View of the World"), and so on. Talk about the purpose of these chapters.
11. In the memory chapters, there are two central figures (both women, both intellectual and moral "guides" to the young Raleigh). One is Flonnie Rogers, the family maid; one is Raleigh's aunt Victoria. Early in the novel, Raleigh turns to Victoria Hayes to be a kindred soul, a reliable ally amidst a madcap family. In what ways is Raleigh wrong about his picture of Victoria? What do they both learn?
12. Flonnie and Victoria have long kept a deep and dark family secret (that Victoria and Jubal Rogers had a child). Raleigh's journey is to unravel that secret. What does the discovery of "Billie" do to the characters in the novel?
13. Discuss the similarities and differences caused by race between Victoria Hayes and Flonnie Rogers. From where did they draw their strengths, and how did these strengths affect the courses of their lives, for better or for worse? How have Flonnie and Victoria's attitudes about life informed Raleigh's own?
14. Handling Sin has been compared to the great picaresque novels like Don Quixote and Tom Jones. It shares many qualities (and even narrative scenes) with the cherished comic epics on which it is modeled, yet it is set in the modern American South. In what ways does the novel mix elements of old and new narrative styles to make the story realistic and contemporary, yet fantastical and classic?
15. Race and religion are two of the major themes of Handling Sin. How do these issues interact? What do you think the novel is trying to say about the complicated histories of Southern communities?
16. Gates Hayes, Raleigh's free-spirited brother, is one of the novel's most engaging characters. Do you know anyone like Gates? Why are these people so engaging despite their irresponsibility?
17. The cover description refers to Mingo (the novel's Sancho Panza to Raleigh's Quixote) as Raleigh's "irrepressibly loyal friend." Would Raleigh agree with this description at the beginning of the novel? At the end? Is it possible for two people so different to truly be friends? How does Raleigh learn to appreciate Mingo's human gifts?
18. Through the course of Handling Sin, Raleigh begins to better understand his own family-in the beginning of the novel, he seems to be contemptuous of his Hayes relatives and to know little about what's going on with his wife, Aura (who's running for mayor), or his twin daughters, Caroline and Holly. How many different types of families does Raleigh come to have in Handling Sin? How do Raleigh's changing attitudes toward the Hayes family reflect real-life family relations?
19. How would you describe Raleigh and Aura's relationship? Does Aura's activist work disturb Raleigh as much as you would expect? Why do you think this is so?
20. Willa Cather said, "Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet." Michael Malone is a Southerner and his novels are almost always set in the Piedmont region of North Carolina, where he grew up. How is this Southernness manifested in Handling Sin?
21. The novel travels southward through very specific Southern cities (Charleston, Atlanta, Montgomery) on its way to New Orleans. What are some of the reasons for these choices?
22. Handling Sin is filled with hilarious and quirky characters. Besides the main characters, who was your favorite person in the novel? How did this supporting character affect the outcome of the story?
23. What do you think of the contents of the Civil War treasure chest? What treasure did Raleigh receive at the end of his journey?
24. How would you summarize the spiritual "message" of Handling Sin?
