The Inquisitor’s Tale

The Inquisitor’s Tale is the telling of the story of the telling of a story. How does the novel’s frame narrative support its bigger ideas?

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?