Winter 2010

Freedom

Jonathan Franzen

Freedom captures the temptations and burdens of liberty: the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, the responsibility of privilege. Charting the characters' mistakes and joys as they struggle to learn how to live in an ever-changing and confusing world, Freedom is an indelible and deeply moving portrait of our time.Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul, Minnesota—the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Baby Boomers. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbor who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to actually do their job. She was an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter's dreams. Together with Walter—environmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, total family man—she was doing her small part to build a better world.

But now, in the new millennium, the Berglunds have become a mystery. Why is Walter working away from home so much? What has happened to their teenage son? Why has Patty, the bright star of Barrier Street, become "a very different kind of neighbor," coming unhinged before the street's attentive eyes? And what exactly is eccentric rocker Richard Katz—Walter's college best friend and rival—still doing in the picture?

As the story explores the nature of love, it also tackles our tenuous relationship with nature. When Walter fights to preserve a habitat for an endangered bird, the troubled history between Patty, Richard and himself threatens to topple the deal, along with everything he believes about truth and illusion.

*This is a longer book therefore with our busy schedules, we have decided to discuss this book club choice in January.  Happy reading!*

October 2010

Ford County

John Grisham

John Grisham returns to Ford County, Mississippi, the setting of his immensely popular first novel, A Time to Kill.  This wholly surprising collection of stories reminds us once again why Grisham is America's favorite storyteller.

In the years since his first novel, John Grisham said he has often returned to the people and places of that book: "I've had dozens of ideas for Ford County novels, almost all of which peter out for one reason or another...The good stories stick, but they're not always long enough to become novels."  His first collection of short fiction, Ford County, collects seven of those tales set in the titular Mississippi region where his characters are "always in the vicinity of the trouble."  While none of the stories are out-and-out courtroom dramas, most of them are populated with felons, ex-felons, and the kind of lawyers of who are one bad decision away from a jail sentence.  In one story, three good ol' boys start driving to Memphis to donate blood for an injured friend, but they're distracted by beer joints and strip clubs along the way.  In another, a down-and-out divorce lawyer gets a second chance to make some big money on an old class-action lawsuit.  Grisham knows how southerners tick.  The characters in Ford County are rendered with great humor and tenderness; even the worst rapscallion and the slimiest scallywag can be loved here in these pages.  Ford County may just be Grisham's best book to date. 

September 2010

A Soft Place to Land

Susan Rebecca White

For more than ten years, Naomi and Phil Harrison enjoyed a marriage of heady romance, tempered only by the needs of their children.  Bun on a vacation alone, the couple perishes in a flight over the Grand Canyon.  After the funeral, their daughters, Ruthie and Julia, are shocked by the provisions in their will.

Spanning nearly two decades, the sisters' journeys take them from their familiar home in Atlanta to sophisticated bohemian San Francisco, a mountain town in Virginia, the campus of Berkeley, and lofts in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.  As they heal from loss, search for love, and begin careers, their sisterhood, once an oasis, becomes complicated by resentment, andger, and jealousy.  It seems as though the echoes of their parent's deaths will never stop reverberating--until another shocking accident changes everything once again.

Summer 2010

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Stieg Larsson



Once you start The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, there's no turning back.  this debut thriller--the first in a trilogy from the late Stieg Larsson--is a serious page turner.  Mikael Blomkvist, a once respected financial journalist, watches his professional life rapidly crumble around him.  Prospects appear bleak until an unexpected (and unsettling) offer to resurrect his name is extended by an old-school titan of Swedish industry.  The catch--and there's always a catch--is that Blomvkist must first spend a year researching a mysterious disappearance that has remained unsolved for nearly four decades.  With few other options, he accepts and enlists the help of investigator Lisbeth Salander, a misunderstood genius with a cache of authority issues.  Little is as it seems in Larsson's novel, but there is at least one constant: you really don't want to mess with the girl with the dragon tattoo. --Dave Callanan

May 2010

Boneman's Daughters

Ted Dekker

The BoneMan, a serial killer, who murders his victims by breaking their bones, but not their skin, re-emerges after a two-year hiatus and abducts 16-year-old Bethany Evans, the estranged daughter of military intelligence officer Ryan Evans.  Having recently returned from Iraq, where he was captured and psychologically tortured by insurgents, Ryan is an emotional wreck.  His mental state not only impedes his efforts to find Bethany, but also gives the authorities reason to suspect him of being the BoneMan himself.

April 2010

Look Again

Lisa Scottoline

When reporter Ellen Gleeson gets a Have You Seen This Child? flyer in the mail, she almost throws it away. But something about it makes her look again, and her heart stops. The child in the photo is identical to her adopted son, Will. Her every instinct tells her to deny the similarity between the boys, because she knows her adoption was lawful. But she's a journalist and won't be able to stop thinking about the photo until she figures out the truth. And she can't shake the question: if Will rightfully belongs to someone else, should she keep him or give him up? She investigates, uncovering clues no one was meant to discover, and when she digs too deep, she risks losing her own life and that of the son she loves. Lisa Scottoline breaks new ground in Look Again, a thriller that's both heart-stopping and heart-breaking, and sure to have new fans and book clubs buzzing.

March 2010

Gang Leader for a Day

by Sudhir Venkatesh

Gang Leader for a Day written by Sudhir Venkatesh, a graduate student at the University of Chicago opens with Sudhir doing a survey on poverty in the infamous Robert Taylor Homes in South-side Chicago, on poverty in the projects in 1989. Honest and entertaining, Venkatesh, a Columbia University professor, vividly recounts his seven years following and befriending a Chicago crack-dealing gang in a fascinating look into the complex world of the Windy City's urban poor. He became involved with the Black Kings and their gang leader JT. Sent to the projects with a multiple choice test on poverty he was invited to see hot the drug dealers functioned in real life, from their corporate structure to the corporal punishment meted out to traitors and snitches. Venkatesh breaks down common misperceptions (such as all gang members are uneducated and cash rich, when the opposite is often true), the native of India also addresses his shame and subsequent emotional conflicts over collecting research on illegal activities and serving as the Black Kings' primary decision-maker for a day-hardly the actions of a detached sociological observer. But over involved or not, this graduate student turned gang-running rogue sociologist has an intimate and compelling tale to tell.

January & February 2010

A Reliable Wife

by Robert Goolrick

Rural Wisconsin, 1909. In the bitter cold, Ralph Truitt, a successful businessman, stands alone on a train platform waiting for the woman who answered his newspaper advertisement for "a reliable wife". But when Catherine Land steps off the train from Chicago, she's not the "simple, honest woman" that Ralph is expecting. She is both complex and devious, haunted by a terrible past and motivated by greed. Her plan is simple: she will win this man's devotion, and then, ever so slowly, she will poison him and leave Wisconsin a wealthy widow. What she has not counted on, though, is that Truitt-a passionate man with is own dark secrets-has plans of his own for his new wife. Isolated on a remote estate and imprisoned by relentless snow, the story of Ralph and Catherine unfolds in unimaginable ways.