Thank you for choosing Valley High, Mountain Low for your book club.

This is a story about starting over, family fractures, grief, technology, truth, forgiveness, and finding home in a world that sometimes seems determined to pull us apart. I hope these questions spark thoughtful conversation—and maybe a few laughs, a few tears, and a reminder that even when families lose their way, love often finds a path home.

Discussion Questions

1. Success—and Starting Over
Mariella walks away from a life many people would envy. What finally convinces her that conventional success isn’t enough? How does her definition of a successful life change?

2. Reinvention
Mariella keeps reinventing herself as the life she expected falls away. Have you ever had to begin again after believing one chapter of your life was over?

3. A Microcosm of America
BookLife called Valley High, Mountain Low a “microcosm of contemporary America.” Which character’s response to the cultural and political divisions of the time did you find most relatable—or most unsettling? Did anyone challenge your assumptions?

4. The Silicon Divide
The novel connects the exhaustion and ethical compromises of the corporate tech world with fractures occurring inside families. How do the algorithms we live with every day mirror—or accelerate—the divisions between the characters?

5. Two Kinds of Digital Harm
Mariella’s mother is pulled toward conspiracy theories online, while a younger generation experiences a very different kind of damage through social media. What do these storylines have in common? Why can digital spaces become so powerful at shaping our sense of reality, identity, and belonging?

6. More Than Labels
The novel suggests that people are more complicated than the labels we give them. Where did you see this most clearly? Was there a character you judged early in the novel and understood differently by the end?

7. Generational Fractures
How do the generations in the book misunderstand one another’s fears, losses, and experiences? How much of that divide is caused by technology—and how much is simply part of being human?

8. Grief in Many Forms
Nearly every member of Mariella’s family is grieving something, though not always something that can be easily named. Which loss or form of grief resonated with you most?

9. Forgiveness and Healing
What role does forgiveness play in the novel? Is forgiveness always necessary for healing? Can we forgive someone without excusing what they’ve done?

10. Family Across a Divide
One of the central questions of the novel is whether families can survive profound differences in beliefs, values, and versions of reality. What answer do you think the book ultimately gives?

11. The Search for Truth
Beneath the contemporary technology and political themes is a deeper search for meaning and truth. Where did you see glimpses of hope, grace, or a desire for something higher amid the chaos?

12. Colorado as a Character
How does Colorado function as more than a setting? What do the mountains, plains, storms, skies, and changing seasons contribute to Mariella’s journey?

13. A Cinematic Journey
Ann Crawford is also an award-winning filmmaker. Which scenes felt most visually striking or cinematic to you? How did the landscape and atmosphere reflect the characters’ internal lives?

14. Valley High, Mountain Low
What did the title mean to you when you first encountered it? Did its meaning change by the end of the novel? Where do you see the story’s metaphorical valleys and mountains?

15. The Scene That Stayed
Which scene stayed with you longest after you finished the book? Why that one?

16. What Is Home?
Mariella spends much of the novel leaving, returning, searching, and rebuilding. What does “home” mean to her by the final pages? Is home a place, a family, a state of mind, or something else?

17. The Ending and Beyond
The ending offers hope without tying every thread into a neat bow. Did that feel satisfying? Where do you imagine Mariella and the other characters five years later?

And One Just for Fun

18. Cast the Movie
If Valley High, Mountain Low became a movie, who would you cast as Mariella, Jake, Julianne, and Frank?

One Last Question

If you could sit down over coffee with any character in Valley High, Mountain Low, who would you choose and what would you ask them?

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About Valley High, Mountain Low

Valley High, Mountain Low explores one family caught in the fault lines of contemporary America—Silicon Valley ambition and its consequences, political polarization, social media and its effects on young people, grief, motherhood, forgiveness, and the complicated work of finding our way back to one another.

BookLife called the novel an “astute” examination of a “microcosm of contemporary America.”

Above all, it is a story about what can rise when we crash the life we thought we wanted.