Notorious Virtues

by Alwyn Hamilton

Nora Holtzfall expects to inherit her powerful family’s fortune, but her mother’s murder and a magical competition among the family’s heirs upend her future. As Nora and her convent-raised cousin Lotte navigate trials meant to test their virtues, the contest exposes dangerous tensions among wealth, moral goodness, and the right to rule.

Big Idea

A reputation for virtue is not the same as ethical action, especially when powerful people control how goodness is defined and rewarded. Readers can examine how competition, privilege, and institutional rules influence both individual choices and public judgments.

Discussion Questions

1.How do Nora’s privileged upbringing and Lotte’s convent education shape their different understandings of goodness? Where do their experiences complicate an easy judgment of either character?
2.What does the Holtzfall competition assume about the relationship between virtue and leadership? Which of those assumptions does the story invite readers to question?
3.How does the prospect of inheriting wealth and power affect the meaning of a supposedly virtuous act? Can an action be both self-interested and genuinely good?
4.How does the mystery surrounding Nora’s mother’s murder affect whom readers trust? Discuss a moment when new information changes your interpretation of a character.
5.How does Hamilton balance the excitement of magical trials with criticism of the system that creates them? When might a reader feel both attracted to and troubled by the competition?

Lesson Plan

⏱ 55 minutes📦 Copies of the novel or teacher-selected excerpts, paper or shared documents, pencils, highlighters, index cards, and a timer.

Learning Goals

Support interpretations of Nora, Lotte, and the inheritance competition with relevant textual evidence.
Analyze how a competitive institution can shape characters’ choices and complicate a theme about virtue.
Use scene, summary, dialogue, and sentence variation to control narrative pacing.
Revise an original scene to make its moral conflict and turning point clearer.

Activity Steps

1.Establish the evidence base: Read a teacher-selected passage involving a trial, its rules, or an heir’s response to the competition. Identify what is rewarded, what is at stake, and whose perspective guides the reader.
2.Map contrasting perspectives: In pairs, use passages from the novel to record what Nora and Lotte appear to value. Separate supported observations from predictions about how they might behave.
3.Design a hypothetical trial: In small groups, choose a virtue and create a challenge with a public success condition and a less visible ethical cost. Label all invented rules and events as student-created extensions rather than events from the book.
4.Draft under pressure: Write a 200–300-word scene centered on an imagined heir confronting the challenge. Include a brief setup, an immediate obstacle, and a choice that reveals a conflict between winning and acting ethically.
5.Revise the pace: Highlight summary, underline dialogue, and box the decisive action. Compress background information and expand the moment of choice through selective detail, sentence variation, or a deliberate pause.
6.Read and reflect: Share the original and revised turning points. Peers explain how the revision changes tension, then connect the invented dilemma to a specific moment or pattern in Hamilton’s novel.

Standards Connections

ELA: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.1 / RL.11-12.1 — Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support literary analysis.
ELA: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.3 / RL.11-12.3 — Analyze character development or the impact of an author’s choices in developing story elements.
ELA: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.9-10.3 / W.11-12.3 — Write narratives using effective technique, well-chosen details, and structured event sequences.
ELA: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.9-10.5 / W.11-12.5 — Strengthen writing through planning, revising, editing, and rewriting.
ELA: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.9-10.1 / SL.11-12.1 — Participate effectively in collaborative discussions, building on others’ ideas and expressing interpretations clearly.

Pace-Write-Read Study with Pace-Write It!

In Notorious Virtues, Alwyn Hamilton combines an inheritance competition with a murder mystery, giving readers two linked reasons to keep reading: they want to know who will prevail and what lies beneath the family’s public claims to virtue. The magical trials provide immediate goals and obstacles, while Nora’s mother’s murder creates a longer arc of uncertainty. A pacing study can explore how these different kinds of narrative pressure work together rather than treating pace as simply the speed of action. Nora and Lotte also offer a useful way to study how characterization affects a reader’s experience of time. Their contrasting backgrounds make the meaning of a rule, reward, or moral choice worth examining, not merely the outcome of a challenge. In the Pace-Write-Read workshop, students first notice a specific craft move in a selected passage, then try it in an original scene, and finally read their work aloud to test its effect. The central question is how to keep an audience eager for the next event while giving an ethical decision enough space to matter.

Element	How to notice or teach it in the novel
Pacing	Compare a passage driven by a trial’s immediate demands with one focused on its consequences. Identify where Hamilton compresses time and where she gives a choice or reaction more narrative space.
Plot	Track the inheritance contest and the mystery of Nora’s mother’s murder as connected plot lines. Ask how developments in one alter the stakes or interpretation of the other.
Prosody	Read a tense exchange and a reflective passage aloud, noticing stress, breath, and phrasing. Discuss how oral delivery can make the same number of words feel hurried, controlled, or hesitant.
Word	Collect words associated with virtue, inheritance, and power in a selected passage. Examine how their connotations encourage readers to admire or distrust the Holtzfall family’s authority.
Concept	Use the premise of a virtue-based inheritance competition to distinguish a story concept from its theme. Ask how the concept generates action while the characters’ choices complicate what virtue means.
Voice & Worldview	Compare passages centered on Nora and Lotte for differences in judgments, assumptions, and attention. Connect those differences to privilege and convent education without reducing either character to her background.
Point of View	Identify whose perceptions organize a selected scene and what information remains unavailable. Discuss how that access affects readers’ judgments of other heirs and their suspicions about the murder.
Setting & Place	Examine how spaces associated with Holtzfall wealth communicate status, access, or exclusion. Ask how entering a place as an insider rather than an outsider changes the tension of a scene.
Original Characters	Study how Nora and Lotte complicate the familiar roles of privileged heiress and convent-raised newcomer. Identify a choice or reaction that resists the reader’s first expectations.
Dialogue	Find an exchange in which characters discuss a rule, obligation, or claim to authority. Mark what each speaker wants and how interruptions, evasions, or short replies affect the scene’s movement.
Details	Select a small detail that influences your judgment of an heir or the competition. Explain whether it functions mainly as characterization, world-building, or information readers may need later.
Descriptions	Examine a description connected to the family’s wealth or a trial’s environment. Ask how it does more than establish appearance—for example, by suggesting danger, inequality, or a character’s priorities.
Firsts	Study the reader’s first substantial introduction to Nora, Lotte, or the competition. Identify what Hamilton establishes immediately and what she leaves uncertain.
Immediacy & Engagement	Locate a passage where an heir must respond to a present obstacle rather than explain background. Identify the concrete goal and consequence that make the moment feel urgent.
Story Scenes, Summaries & Structures	Distinguish dramatized moments from passages that summarize background or elapsed time. Discuss why a trial’s decisive choice might deserve a full scene while less consequential transitions can be compressed.
Tension / Suspense / Surprise	Separate tension about competing desires, suspense about an unresolved outcome, and surprise caused by new information. Find examples connected to the inheritance contest or murder investigation and explain their different effects.
Flashback, Flash-Forward, Cliffhanger	Check selected chapters for memories, anticipatory statements, or endings that withhold resolution; do not assume all three techniques occur. Explain how any example you find changes your understanding of Nora’s loss or the contest’s dangers.
Page Turns and Chapter Breaks	Read the final paragraph of a chapter and the opening of the next. Identify whether the break carries forward a threat, a question, a decision, or a change in perspective.
Pace & Creativity	Use the novel’s combination of moral testing and competitive action as a model for generating scenes. Invent two ways to stage the same ethical dilemma, then compare which version creates more meaningful pressure.
Play	Explore the gap between the competition’s stated moral purpose and strategies for succeeding within it. Let students test hypothetical loopholes, then consider what those loopholes reveal about the rules.
Performance	Distinguish performing goodness for an audience from acting ethically when recognition is uncertain. Stage a brief exchange from the novel and discuss how posture, emphasis, and pauses influence perceived sincerity.
Personality	Track how Nora’s and Lotte’s personalities emerge through responses to pressure rather than through labels alone. Identify whether a reaction speeds a scene into conflict or slows it into deliberation.
Humor	Look for wit, irony, or discrepancies between the family’s moral image and its conduct. Where humor appears, discuss whether it offers relief, sharpens criticism, or makes a character more appealing.
Pause	Find a moment when action gives way to observation or thought before a consequential choice. Explain what readers understand during that pause that a faster version might obscure.
Poetry / Poetic Devices	Look for figurative language or sound patterns in passages about power, magic, or moral judgment. Analyze a device actually present in the passage rather than assuming that vivid prose must contain a particular technique.
Repetition	Track recurring references to virtue, worthiness, inheritance, or family obligation. Ask how repetition changes meaning as readers see more of the competition’s costs.
Rhythm	Compare sentence-length patterns in a trial sequence and a reflective passage. Have students imitate one pattern in an original moral-choice scene and describe its effect on reading speed.
Punctuation	Annotate punctuation in a tense exchange involving the heirs. Test how changing a period, comma, or dash would alter emphasis, hesitation, or the impression of control.
Questions	Maintain a reader-question chart for the murder mystery and the inheritance competition. Distinguish questions the text answers from questions it deepens or replaces.
Compare-Contrast	Compare Nora’s and Lotte’s responses to expectations of goodness using evidence from both characters. Explain how juxtaposition makes their differences visible without requiring lengthy explanation.
Objects	Choose a concrete object from a selected scene and examine its practical and social significance. Ask whether its meaning depends on ownership, access, wealth, memory, or its role in a challenge.
Threes	Search a short passage for three-part phrasing or a sequence of three actions, noting if no clear example appears. As a writing experiment, build a three-beat sequence of rule, complication, and choice within an invented Holtzfall trial.
Lists	Examine any enumeration of expectations, possessions, obligations, or rules in the chosen excerpt. If none appears, have students create a planning list of what an heir stands to gain and lose, then decide which item belongs in the scene itself.
White Space & Negative Space	Notice how paragraph and scene breaks separate actions, reactions, or revelations in the edition being used. Also discuss informational gaps: what the narrative leaves readers to infer about motives or concealed knowledge.
Art & Graphics	Analyze the cover and any decorative features present in your edition for expectations about wealth, danger, and fantasy. Keep this paratextual analysis distinct from claims about events or meanings established by the prose.
Interactives & Gamification	Map the inheritance competition’s goals, constraints, rewards, and consequences as though analyzing a game system. Discuss how making virtue competitive may encourage strategic behavior rather than ethical growth.
Placement	Choose a revelation about an heir, a rule, or the murder and consider why it appears at that point. Predict how moving it earlier or later would change suspicion, sympathy, or suspense.
Form	Examine how the novel combines fantasy, competition narrative, and murder mystery. Identify where each form creates a different reader expectation, such as discovering rules, anticipating outcomes, or interpreting clues.
Dummy	Adapt the publishing practice of making a dummy into a six-card scene mock-up. Arrange setup, rule, obstacle, complication, choice, and consequence for a hypothetical trial, then vary the space allotted to each beat.
Passion	Ask which conflict—belonging, justice, family loyalty, grief, or unequal power—most strongly engages each student. Use that investment to choose a scene focus while grounding interpretations of Hamilton’s characters in evidence.

Pace-Write It!

20-minute Pace-Write-Read task: “Win the Trial—or Do the Right Thing?” Minutes 0–4, PACE: Read a short, teacher-selected passage involving the Holtzfall competition. Mark a compressed section and a moment Hamilton slows down; name the unresolved question that drives the passage. Minutes 4–6, PLAN: Invent a hypothetical trial of generosity in which an heir can gain public credit through a conspicuous gift, but responding to a less visible need would cost the heir time or recognition. This is a student-created extension, not a reported event from the novel. Minutes 6–12, WRITE: Draft 120–180 words from one heir’s limited perspective, using Nora’s or Lotte’s established priorities as an evidence-based starting point. Summarize the setup in one sentence, then dramatize the choice through action, selective detail, and a brief pause. Minutes 12–16, READ: Partners read their scenes aloud and identify where they felt urgency and where they understood the ethical cost. Minutes 16–20, REVISE: Compress one explanatory passage and expand one decisive beat; finish with a two-sentence note explaining how the revision changes pacing and connects to the novel’s distinction between rewarded virtue and ethical action.

Classroom Activities

Virtue Under Pressure

Students become designers and critics of a fictional Holtzfall inheritance trial. After examining how the novel places moral choices inside a high-stakes competition, groups create a new, clearly labeled hypothetical trial, write a scene in which its apparent definition of virtue becomes ethically complicated, and revise the scene’s pacing to emphasize the difference between looking good and doing good.

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