We had a great time discussing The Swifts: A Dictionary of Scoundrels by Beth Lincoln at Seeds Children’s Bookstore for our October meeting! With Halloween approaching and the weather cooling, we appreciated reading this exciting, funny, and thought-provoking murder mystery!

While looking for the treasure and trying to solve the mystery, Shenanigan and Phenomena conducted an experiment to decide whether Shenanigan’s name really did suit her, since the family believed that the definition represented the person. This was a really interesting concept, and we discussed how the book showed a variety of outcomes: some characters who did embrace their names such as Phenomena the scientist, Inheritance the archivist, and even Atrocious and Pique who never hid how unpleasant they were! But we also noticed that some characters didn’t act like their names at all, such as Gumshoe who was a terrible detective, Candour who was hiding a big secret, and Felicity who was certainly not treated luckily or positively by other members.

In the end, we agreed that perhaps putting too much emphasis on upholding a definition that we don’t even choose would be difficult. This was shown through characters like Erf, whose dictionary name we never learn since they chose their own name, and the twins Flora and Fauna who spent most of the book trying to look exactly the same. One Book Clubber admitted fear when Flora got injured, because he thought Fauna might try to shoot herself to match – but realising that they didn’t have to be exactly alike freed them from that… phew!

This meeting would not be complete without a dictionary of our own, so we made sure to have one on hand which made our writing activity extremely fun: we flipped through the dictionary at random and created our own Swift family member based on what we landed on! That was how we came up with Rectangle Swift the up-and-down architect, Forthright Swift who was so direct and blunt about solving the mystery, and Zeitgeist Swift the clockmaker! Even these characters had variety in how they either embraced or rebelled against their names – joining Shenanigan, who realised at the end of the book that she as a person, not as a name, was the one behind her actions.