The Inquisitor’s Tale

Find one or two other books or movies that use a frame narrative (hint: The Canterbury Tales is a big influence on this book) and compare them to The Inquisitor’s Tale. What other purposes could stories about stories serve?

Each of the children in The Inquisitor’s Tale has a quality that shuts them out of the usual channels of power in their world. But each, too, has a special power of their own. How do the children’s different miraculous powers relate to the ways in which they’re oppressed? 

What does the Inquisitor have in common with the children he’s pursuing? Why might their story be of particular interest to him?

The difficulty of changing your mind is a strong theme in The Inquisitor’s Tale. How does the development of the story play with this idea—and perhaps change the reader’s mind?

The Inquisitor’s Tale juxtaposes real medieval history and big moral questions with legends, miracles, and downright goofy inventions (like farting dragons with cheese allergies). What effect does this mixture of fact, magic, silliness, and seriousness have on how you read the story?

Like a medieval manuscript, The Inquisitor’s Tale is illuminated: the illustrator, Hatem Aly, decorates the margins with his own interpretations of the story. Choose a few of the book’s marginal pictures, and compare them with the text on the page. How do the pictures interact (or make mischief) with the story that’s being told? How do they add to or change your reading? Why might this book be illustrated the way it is?

Michelangelo is believed to be doing evil while he’s really doing good; Hubert is believed to be doing good while he’s really doing evil; Fabian has done evil but is not irredeemable; Blanche de Castile seems awful through and through, but is still rescued and given another chance. What is Gidwitz saying about humanity through his use of these complicated characters?

The Inquisitor’s Tale has two epigraphs, from the poems “Pied Beauty” by Gerard Manley Hopkins and “As I Walked Out One Evening” by W.H. Auden. Read these poems. How do they seem to be connected to the big ideas of the book? Why might Gidwitz have chosen these particular lines?