He forgave them their ignorance and hatred and stayed. Frank forgave the town that looked down on him and prosecuted him because they believed him to be German.

Tom’s character paralleled Frank, Hannah’s late husband, in one big way his propensity to forgive. When Tom’s gift is bigger the second time, we suspected his guilt was catching up with him and growing in a similar way and one of our members suggests that he might have turned himself in the next time in an even bigger jump toward absolution. She had finally given up hope and is more or less told to keep looking. At that time, Hannah had just started to move on, finally moving out of her father’s house, and received the crippling news that her baby was still alive. We agreed that if he felt so guilty as to leave a note, he should have given Lucy back at the christening. We couldn’t figure out how he thought he was helping Hannah by doing this.

To him, it was a form of repentance and confession, but he was putting his family in danger and dragging Hannah along for the ride. We all agreed that it was a huge mistake of his to give the rattle away and we thought that his motivations were completely selfish and self-serving. We frequently came back to Tom sending Hannah notes during our discussion. Someone argued that Tom didn’t really know how to be a parent because of how hands-off his parents were and that he kept himself at arm’s length from Lucy because of the guilt he felt toward her so that losing her didn’t hurt him as much as it would hurt Isabel. From the description I’m not sure if his rift with his brother and father stems from him feeling guilty all his life and being submissive because of it, or his father was blaming him for the split and the brother emulating his father. He’s connected telling his father about the car in front of the house with his parents splitting up, but he doesn’t know that the car implies another man and his mother’s infidelity. When he’s young, he felt responsible for his parents split, but he doesn’t understand what he did. Tom was a very difficult character for me to understand. I think the characters are a good place to start the analysis. We found it interesting that the only lawyer in the book, the man who represents Tom, was portrayed very favorably in the book. From the few interviews she’s given, Stedman comes off as a very private person, not wanting to talk about herself in interviews and preferring to stick to the plot of her books. She was born and raised in Western Australia, where the book takes place. The author herself is a very interesting character. I wrote a review of this book a few weeks ago and if you didn’t read it, you can view it here and see how much I absolutely loved it. My book club met to discuss The Light Between Oceans just before Christmas.

Between the oceans book