Discuss The Hours Count by Jillian Cantor. Funded by the Fountain Hills Friends of the Library.

 On June 19, 1953, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed for conspiring to commit espionage. The day Ethel was first arrested in 1950, she left her two young sons with a neighbor, and she never came home to them again. Brilliantly melding fact and fiction, Jillian Cantor reimagines the life of that neighbor, and the life of Ethel and Julius, an ordinary-seeming Jewish couple who became the only Americans put to death for spying during the Cold War.

A few years earlier, in 1947, Millie Stein moves with her husband, Ed, and their toddler son, David, into an apartment on the eleventh floor in Knickerbocker Village on New York’s Lower East Side. Her new neighbors are the Rosenbergs. Struggling to care for David, who doesn’t speak, and isolated from other “normal” families, Millie meets Jake, a psychologist who says he can help David, and befriends Ethel, also a young mother. Millie and Ethel’s lives as friends, wives, mothers, and neighbors entwine, even as chaos begins to swirl around the Rosenbergs and the FBI closes in. Millie begins to question her own husband’s political loyalty and her marriage, and whether she can trust Jake and the deep connection they have forged as they secretly work with David. Caught between these two men, both of whom have their own agendas, and desperate to help her friends, Millie will find herself drawn into the dramatic course of history.

As Millie—trusting and naive—is thrown into a world of lies, intrigue, spies and counterspies, she realizes she must fight for what she believes, who she loves, and what is right.

Discussion Questions
1.After Millie first meets Ethel, she idealizes her life and marriage. How are Millie and Ethel different? Similar? How does their friendship play out in each other's lives?

2.Does Millie's view of Ethel and this story change what you have thought or known about Ethel Rosenberg historically? What were your previous perceptions?

3.Millie and Ethel both make their children their top priority. Compare their roles as mothers in the 1940s and 1950s to what motherhood is like today. Do you think Ethel and Millie are good mothers?

4.Millie and Ethel are both women of their time. How do changing ideas of family, motherhood, birth control, autism, and psychology play roles in the novel?

5.What do you think of Millie's relationship with her husband, Ed? Why does Millie stay with him even after their issues become clear?

6.Near the end of the novel Millie must choose between Ed and Jake. Do you think Millie should have listened to Ed or trusted Jake? How would the novel have ended if Millie had chosen differently?

7.How does the time period and the era of McCarthyism play a role in the novel? What about the setting of New York City in the 1950s and the difficulties that the Rosenbergs as well as Millie's family both faced?

8.Who in the novel could be considered guilty and of what? Who is innocent? Does anyone get what he or she deserves in the end?

9.The title, The Hours Count, comes from a Picasso quote about the Rosenbergs. How does it fit the story in this novel as well as the fictional character of Millie?

10.Millie and Ethel are both Jewish. What role does religion play in the novel? Do you think it played a role historically in the Rosenbergs' execution? Why or why not?