Books for 2013

Just a quick glimps into the books for 2013.

January 17th - Heidi Maxfield - Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs

February 21st - Lisa Pyron - The Time Keeper by Mitch Albom

March 21st - Jennifer Alley - The Midwife of Venice by Roberta Rich

April 18th - Margie Harton - Killing Kennedy by Bill O'Reilly

May 16th - Shannon Garofalo - Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing

June 20th - off due to summer and girls camp craziness

July 18th - Donna Gaddis - How to Forgive When You Don't Feel Like It by June Hunt

August 15th - Lisa Mullins - Miss Lizzie's War: The Double Life of Southern Belle Spy Elizabeth Van Lew by Rosemary Agonito

September 19th - Marisa Garofalo - The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels - a Love Story by Ree Drummond

October 17th - Mallory Duncan - Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

November 21st - Richelle Fawcett - The Bedford Boys: One American Town's Ultimate D-Day Sacrifice by Alex Kershaw

December 19th - Shannon Garofalo - end of the year book exchange and 2014 book pick night

Christmas Exchange - December 20

At Shannon Garofalo's home on Thursday December 20 at 6:30.

One Thousand White Women - November 20

For November's Book Club we will be reading One Thousand White Women by Jim Fergus.  We will be meeting at Heidi Maxfield's home at 7:00 pm.



Book Discription -

One Thousand White Women is the story of May Dodd and a colorful assembly of pioneer women who, under the auspices of the U.S. government, travel to the western prairies in 1875 to intermarry among the Cheyenne Indians. The covert and controversial "Brides for Indians" program, launched by the administration of Ulysses S. Grant, is intended to help assimilate the Indians into the white man's world. Toward that end May and her friends embark upon the adventure of their lifetime. Jim Fergus has so vividly depicted the American West that it is as if these diaries are a capsule in time.

To get a copy for your electronic device try clicking here.   Or here to check the public library.

Sarah's Key - October 18

For October book club will be reading Sarah's Key and meeting on the 18th at Karen Rich's house at 7.


Book summary - 

Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is brutally arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family’s apartment, thinking that she will be back within a few hours.

Paris, May 2002: On Vel’ d’Hiv’s 60th anniversary, journalist Julia Jarmond is asked to write an article about this black day in France’s past. Through her contemporary investigation, she stumbles onto a trail of long-hidden family secrets that connect her to Sarah. Julia finds herself compelled to retrace the girl’s ordeal, from that terrible term in the Vel d’Hiv’, to the camps, and beyond. As she probes into Sarah’s past, she begins to question her own place in France, and to reevaluate her marriage and her life.
Tatiana de Rosnay offers us a brilliantly subtle, compelling portrait of France under occupation and reveals the taboos and silence that surround this painful episode.

To get a copy try the public library or Amazon.

September 20 - Wish You Well

This month book club will meet on September 20th at Shannon Garofalo's house at 7pm and we will be reading Wish You Well. 

Book Summary

Whether it is the story of a young woman on the run in The Winner or a violent intrigue convulsing Washington, D.C., in Saving Faith, David Baldacci has delivered great stories, authentic characters, and thought-provoking ideas since he burst on the literary scene with Absolute Power. Now this versatile writer sets his sights on a new field of fiction.

Wish You Well
...is the story of Louisa Mae Cardinal, a precocious twelve-year-old girl living in the hectic New York City of 1940 with her acclaimed but sadly underpaid writer father, her compassionate mother, and her timid younger brother, Oz. For Lou, her family's financial struggles are invisible to her. Instead, she is a daughter who idolizes her father and is in love with the art of storytelling.

Then, in a single, terrifying moment, Lou's life is changed forever, and she and Oz are on a train rolling away from New York and down into the mountains of Virginia. There, Lou's mother will begin a long, slow struggle between life and death. And there, Lou and Oz will be raised by their remarkable great-grandmother, Louisa, Lou's namesake.

Suddenly a girl finds herself coming of age in a landscape that could not be more foreign to her. On her great-grandmother's farm, on the land her father loved and wrote about, Lou finds her first true friend; learns lessons in loyalty, tragedy, and redemption; and experiences adventures tragic, comic, and audacious. When a dark, destructive force encroaches on their new home, Lou and her brother are caught up in another struggle-a struggle for justice and survival that will be played out in a crowded Virginia courtroom.

In Wish You Well David Baldacci has written a tale laced with touching passages evoking the charms of rural Virginia, imbued with graceful humor, and enriched by with unforgettable characters. The novel is a heart-wrenching yet triumphant story about family and adversity from times past that resounds forcefully today. Wish You Well is a breathtakingly beautiful achievement from an author who has the power to make us feel, to make us care, and to make us believe in the great and little miracles that can change lives-or save them. 

To get an electronic copy either from Amazon or from the public library click the links & enjoy!

The Great Gatsby - Aug 23 - UPDATED

This month book club will be reading The Great Gatsby.  We will meet on August 23 at Richelle Fawcett's home.

Amazon's Book Review - 

In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald announced his decision to write "something new--something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned." That extraordinary, beautiful, intricately patterned, and above all, simple novel became The Great Gatsby, arguably Fitzgerald's finest work and certainly the book for which he is best known. A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, Gatsby captured the spirit of the author's generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology. Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald's--and his country's--most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings. "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning--" Gatsby's rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream.
It's also a love story, of sorts, the narrative of Gatsby's quixotic passion for Daisy Buchanan. The pair meet five years before the novel begins, when Daisy is a legendary young Louisville beauty and Gatsby an impoverished officer. They fall in love, but while Gatsby serves overseas, Daisy marries the brutal, bullying, but extremely rich Tom Buchanan. After the war, Gatsby devotes himself blindly to the pursuit of wealth by whatever means--and to the pursuit of Daisy, which amounts to the same thing. "Her voice is full of money," Gatsby says admiringly, in one of the novel's more famous descriptions. His millions made, Gatsby buys a mansion across Long Island Sound from Daisy's patrician East Egg address, throws lavish parties, and waits for her to appear. When she does, events unfold with all the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama, with detached, cynical neighbor Nick Carraway acting as chorus throughout. Spare, elegantly plotted, and written in crystalline prose, The Great Gatsby is as perfectly satisfying as the best kind of poem.

To get a copy try here or check your local library for an e-copy.

July - Heaven is for Real

Book Club for July will be reading Heaven is for Real and will meet at Jennifer Alley's house at 7:00pm on July 19.

Book Overview -

Heaven Is for Real is the true story of the four-year old son of a small town Nebraska pastor who during emergency surgery slips from consciousness and enters heaven. He survives and begins talking about being able to look down and see the doctor operating and his dad praying in the waiting room. The family didn't know what to believe but soon the evidence was clear.
Colton said he met his miscarried sister, whom no one had told him about, and his great grandfather who died 30 years before Colton was born, then shared impossible-to-know details about each. He describes the horse that only Jesus could ride, about how "reaaally big" God and his chair are, and how the Holy Spirit "shoots down power" from heaven to help us.

Told by the father, but often in Colton's own words, the disarmingly simple message is heaven is a real place, Jesus really loves children, and be ready, there is a coming last battle.

Check out the local library or here to find a copy of this book.