June 2011

One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

Jim Fergus

An American western with a most unusual twist, this is an imaginative fictional account of the participation of May Dodd and others in the controversial "Brides for Indians" program.  In the year 1874, the head of the Cheyenne Sweet Medicine tribe, Chief Little Wolf, journeyed to Washington D.C. with a proposal for President Grant.  Dressed in full, colorful Indian regalia, Chief Little Wolf presented his plan to give the government one thousand horses in exchange for one thousand white women.  Hoping to end the fighting between the white man and the Indians on the American plains, Little Wolf felt that if white women could merge with his tribe and bear children of mixed blood, the new children might bond the two races.  Indians and whites would then begin to truly assimilate and learn to live together peacefully. 

May's personal journals, loaded with humor and intelligent reflection, describe the adventures of some very colorful white brides (including one black one), their marriages to Cheyenne warriors, and the natural abundance of life on the prairie before the final press of the white man's civilization.  Fergus is gifted in his ability to portray the perceptions and emotions of women.  He writes with tremendous insight and sensitivity about the individual community and the political and religious issues of the time, many of which are still relevant today.  This book is artistically rendered with meticulous attention to small details that bring to life the daily concerns of a group of hardy souls at a pivotal time in U.S. history.

April & May 2011

Let the Great World Spin: A Novel

Colum McCann

It's August of 1974, a summer "hot and serious and full of death and betrayal," and Watergate and the Vietnam War make the world feel precarious.  A stunned hush pauses the cacophonous universe of New York City as a man on a cable walks (repeatedly) between World Trade Center towers.  This extraordinary, real-life feat by French funambulist Philippe Petit becomes the touchstone for stories that briefly submerge you in ten varied and intense lives--a street priest, heroin-addicted hookers, mothers mourning sons lost in war, young artists, a Park Avenue judge.  All their lives are ordinary and unforgettable, overlapping at the edges, occasionally converging.  And when they coalesce in the final pages, the moment hums with such grace that its memory might tighten your throat weeks later.  You might find yourself paused, considering the universe of lives one city contains in any slice of time, each of us a singular world, sometimes passing close enough to touch or collide, to birth a new generation or kill it, sending out ripples, leaving residue, an imprint, marking each other, our city, the very air--compassionately or callously, unable to see all the damage we do or heal.  And most of us stumbling, just trying not to trip, or step in something awful.

But then someone does something extraordinary, like dancing on a cable strung 110 stories in the air, or imagining a magnificent novel that lifts us up for a sky-scraping, dizzy glimpse of something greater: the sordid grandeur of this whirling world, "bigger than its buildings, bigger than its inhabitants."

March 2011

Room

Emma Donoghue

Room is a 2010 novel by Irish-Canadian author Emma Donoghue.  The story is told from the perspective of a five-year-old boy, Jack, who is being held captive in a small room along with his mother.  In many ways, Jack is a typical five-year-old.  He likes to read books, watch TV, and play games with his mom.  But Jack has lived his entire life in a single room, sharing the tiny space with only his mother and an unnerving nighttime visitor known as Old Nick.  Donoghue conceived the story after hearing about five-year-old Felix in the Fritzl case.  For Jack, Room is the only world he knows, but for Ma, it is a prison in which she has tried to craft a normal life for her son.  When their insular world suddenly expands beyond the confines of their four walls, the consequences are piercing and extraordinary.  Despite its profoundly disturbing premise, Emma Donoghue's Room is rife with moments of hope and beauty, and the dogged determination to live, even in the most desolate circumstances.  A stunning and original novel of survival in captivity, readers who enter Room will leave staggered, as though, like Jack, they are seeing the world for the very first time.

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.

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.

November 2009

The Weight of Silence

Heather Gudenkauf

It happens quietly one August morning. As dawn's shimmering light drenches the humid Iowa air, two families awaken to find their little girls have gone missing in the night.
Seven year old Calli Clark is sweet, gentle, a dreamer who suffers from selective mutism brought on by tragedy that pulled her deep into silence as a toddler.

Calli's mother, Antonia, tried to be the best mother she could within the confined of marriage to a mostly absent, often angry husband. Now, though she denies that her husband could be involved in the possible abductions, she fears her decision to stay in her marriage has cost her more than her daughter's voice.
Petra Gregory is Calli's best friend, her soul mate and her voice. But neither Petra nor Calli has been heard from since their disappearance was discovered. Desperate to find her child, Martin Gregory is forced to confront a side of himself he did not know existed beneath his intellectual, professorial demeanor.
Now these families are tied by the question of what happened to their children. And the answer is trapped in the silence of unspoken family secrets.

June 2009

American Pastoral

Philip Roth

(From the book jacket) As the American century draws to an uneasy close, Philip Roth gives us a novel of unqualified greatness that is an elegy for all our century's promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss. Roth's protagonist is Swede Levov, a legendary athlete at his Newark high school, who grows up in the booming postwar years to marry former Miss New Jersey, inherit his father's glove factory, and move into a stone house in the idyllic hamlet of Old Rimrock. And then one day in 1968, Sewde's beautiful American luck deserts him.

For Sewde's adored daughter, Merry, has grown from a loving quick-witted girl into a sullen, fanatical teenager, a teenager capable of an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism. And overnight Swede is wrenched out of the longed-for American pastoral and into the indigenous American berserk. Compulsively readable, propelled by sorrow, rage, and a deep compassion for its characters, this is Roth's masterpiece.

May 2009

The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood

The Handmaid's Tale takes place in the Republic of Gilead, a country formed within the borders of what was originally the United States of America after nuclear, biological, and chemical pollution rendered a large portion of the population sterile and a staged terrorist attack killed the President and Congress. After the attack, a revolution occurred which deposed of the United States government and abolished the US Constitution. New theoratic governments, including the Republic of Gilead, were formed under the rule of a military dictatorship.

The story is told from the point of view of a woman called Offred, who is kept by the ruling class as a concubine handmaid for reproductive purposes shortly after the beginning of what is called the epilogue the Gilead period. The story's narrative is disjointed and out of order and ends abruptly, which is revealed at the end to be caused by its supposedly having been narrated onto a series of unnumbered audio tapes.

March 2009

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Jonathan Safran Foer

This is one of the first novels to deal with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The book is an example of an emerging school of contemporary postmodernism which challenges technical limitations of the novel to create a more immersive work.

Meet Oskar Schell, an inventor, Francophile, tambourine player, Shakespearean actor, jeweler, and pacifist. He is nine years old. And he is on an urgent, secret search through the five boroughs of New york. His mission is to find the lock that fits a mysterious key belonging to his father, who died in the World Trade Center on 9/11.

An inspired innocent, Oskar is alternately endearing, exasperating, and hilarious as he careens fromCentral Park to Coney Island to Harlem on his search. Along the way he is always dreaming up inventions to keep those he loves safe from harm. What about a birdseed shirt to let you fly away? What if you could actually hear everyone's heartbeat? His goal is hopeful, but the past speaks a loud warning in stories of those who've lost loved ones before. As Oskar roams New York, he encounters a motley assortment of humanity who are all survivors in their own way. He befriends a 103-year-old war reporter, a tour guide who never leaves the Empire State Building, and lovers enraptured or scorned. Ultimately, Oskar ends his journey where it began, at his father's grave. But now he is accompanied by the silent stranger who has been renting the spare room of his grandmother's apartment. They are there to dig up his father's coffin.

February 2008

Sundays at Tiffany's

James Patterson & Gabrielle Charbonnet

Jane Margaux is a lonely little girl. Her mother, a powerful Broadway producer, makes time for her only once a week, for their Sunday trip to admire jewelry at Tiffany's. Jane has only one friend: a handsome, comforting, funny man named Michael. He's perfect. But only she can see him. Michael can't stay forever, though. On Jane's ninth birthday he leaves, promising her that she'll soon forget him.

Years later, in her thirties, Jane is just as alone as she was as a child. And despite her own success as a playwright, she is even more trapped by her overbearing mother. Then she meets someone-a handsome, comforting, funny man. He's perfect. His name is Michael...

This is a heartrending story that surpasses all expectations of why these people have been brought together. With the breathtaking momentum and gripping emotional twists that have make James Patterson a bestselling author all over the world, Sundays at Tiffany's takes an altogether fresh look at the timeless and transforming power of love.

January 2009

Icy Sparks

Gwyn Hyman Rubio

Icy Sparks is a young girl living in midwestern America with her grandparents in the 1950s/1960s. She doesn't get along well with her peers and suddenly starts having tics and croaks. Icy goes down into the root cellar to hide there urges from her grandparents and finally tells her friend, Miss Emily Tanner, a local store owner who is also an outcast from society at 300 pounds. Her teacher tries putting her in a solitary classroom but even that doesn't work and her grandparents have Icy admitted to a mental institution for observation. Even in the institution, Icy is an outcast. She sees herself as not as mentally ill as her peers there and is being tormented by one of the hospital workers. She befriends a second worker but really just wants to go home. She is allowed to go home after a while but stays mainly in the house or on the surrounding property, but not in public. After her return home, the atmosphere is tense even there and after her grandfather dies, Icy and her grandmother turn to religion for solace.

December 2008

The Memory Keeper's Daughter

Kim Edwards

This stunning novel begins on a winter night in 1964, when a blizzard forces Dr. David Henry to deliver his own twins. His son, born first, is perfectly healthy, but the doctor immediately recognizes that his daughter has Down syndrome. For motives he tells himself are good, he make a split-second decision that will haunt all their lives forever. He asks his nurse, Caroline, to take the baby away to an institution. Instead, she disappears into another city to raise the child as her own. Compulsively readable and deeply moving, The Memory Keeper's Daughter is a brilliantly crafted story of parallel lives, familial secrets, and the redemptive power of love.

November 2008

The Road

Cormac McCarthy

The Road is a post-apocalyptic tale describing a journey taken by a father and his young son over a period of several months, across a landscape blasted years before by an unnamed cataclysm that destroyed civilization and, apparently, most life on earth. The sun is obscured by deep, dark clouds, and the climate has been altered radically. Plants do not grow. Humanity consists largely of bands of cannibals, their food-source captives, and refugee-travelers who scavenge for food. Ash covers everything; it is in the atmosphere, it obscures the sun and moon, and the two travelers breathe through improvised masks.

October 2008

Fractured

Karin Slaughter

Best-selling novelist Slaughter is most well known for her Grant County series, but here she follows up on the characters introduced in Triptych (2006). Will Trent, of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, needs a GPS system to find his way to the crime scene in Ansley Park, one of Atlanta's oldest and wealthiest suburbs. Once on the scene, however, he is the only one to intuit the true specifics of the case, much to the irritation of the Atlanta PD. Suburban mom Emily Campano, returning home early, finds the severly beaten body of her teenage daughter, Emma, and instinctively attacks the seeming perpetrator, stragling him. Will soon discovers, however, that the dead teen is not Emma but her best friend. He is charged with heading up the investigation into Emma's kidnapping and saddled with a partner from the Atlanta PD, an officer who has her own reasons for hating him. Possible motives and suspects abound as they home in on the girl's posh private high school, a veritable cauldron that mixes cruel social climbing with sexual manipulation, among both the faculty and their pupils. As Will makes headway on the case, he must also struggle to compensate for his severe dyslexia, smooth the tensions with his new partner, and hide the emotional scars of a childhood spent in an orphanage.

September 2008

Those Who Save Us

Jenna Blum

For fifty years, Anna Schlemmer has refused to talk about her life in Germany during World War II. Anna's daughter Trudy was only four when she and Anna were liberated from Nazi Weimar by an American soldier and went with him to Minnesota, so Trudy can't remember much...but she has one piece of evidence from the past; a family portrait showing Trudy, Anna, and a Nazi officer, the Obersturmfuhrer of Buchenwald.

Driven by the guilt of her heritage, Trudy, now a professor of German history, begins investigating the past and finally unearths the dramatic and heartbreaking truth of her mother's life.

Combining a story of passionate but doomed love, a vivid evocation of life during the war, and poignant mother-daughter drama, New York Times bestseller Those Who Save Us is a profound exploration of what we endure to survive and the legacy of shame.