Just in time to celebrate Independent Bookstore Day on April 27, my book club chose our next group of books which are shared below. I found this great quote from www.indiebookstoreday.com which defines the importance of independent bookstores:
“Independent bookstores are not just stores, they’re community centers and local anchors run by passionate readers. They are entire universes of ideas that contain the possibility of real serendipity. They are lively performance spaces and quiet places where aimless perusal is a day well spent.”
If you don’t have an independent bookstore near you, Barnes and Noble makes a better choice than Amazon because as Ann Patchett says:
“Consumers control the marketplace by deciding where to spend their money. If what a bookstore offers matters to you, then shop at a bookstore. If you feel that the experience of reading a book is valuable, then read the book. This is how we change the world: we grab hold of it. We change ourselves.”
Valsroad Book Club Choices
Where the Crawdads Sing by D. Owens (384 pages) Fiction
With prose luminous as a low-country moon, Owens weaves a compelling tale of a forgotten girl in the unforgiving coastal marshes of North Carolina. It is a murder mystery/love story/courtroom drama that readers will love, but the novel delves so much deeper into the bone and sinew of our very nature, asking often unanswerable questions, old and intractable as the marsh itself. A stunning debut!”—Christopher Scotton, author of The Secret Wisdom of the Earth
Hunger: A memoir of my body by Roxane Gay (320 pages) Memoir
From the New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist: a searingly honest memoir of food, weight, self-image, and learning how to feed your hunger while taking care of yourself.
Tumblr blog, Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and body, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. As a woman who describes her own body as “wildly undisciplined,” Roxane understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care. In Hunger, she explores her past—including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life—and brings readers along on her journey to understand and ultimately save herself.
The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker (384 pages) literary fiction
“This novel is the holy grail; it’s the rare novel that explores and examines the deep friendship and professional lives of two women [and] keeps that focus.”—The Baltimore Sun
In the male-dominated field of animation, Mel Vaught and Sharon Kisses are a dynamic duo, the friction of their differences driving them: Sharon, quietly ambitious but self-doubting; Mel, brash and unapologetic, always the life of the party. Best friends and artistic partners since the first week of college, where they bonded over their working-class roots and obvious talent, they spent their twenties ensconced in a gritty Brooklyn studio. Working, drinking, laughing. Drawing Mel, to understand her tumultuous past, and Sharon, to lose herself altogether.
The Good Lord Bird by James McBride (480 pages) Historical Fiction
In the turbulent times just before the Civil War, abolitionist John Brown visits the Kansas Territories to free the slaves. In the midst of a gunfight, a young slave named Henry Shackleford watches his father die. Now freed and under the protection of the wily abolitionist, who mistakes the ten-year-old boy dressed in a potato sack for a girl, Henry maintains this feminine guise as he rides with Brown and his band of volunteers. After becoming separated during a skirmish, Henry finds himself in a Missouri brothel only to rejoin Brown’s ragtag group two years later. Brown takes Henry on a fundraising tour back East, meeting with other abolitionists including Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. Despite John Brown’s reputation for violence, Henry discovers an old man whose intense passion for the abolitionist cause tends to overrule common sense, proving disastrously detrimental as they travel to Harpers Ferry in 1859. Library Journal
Becoming by Michelle Obama (448 Pages) Autobiography
In her memoir, a work of deep reflection and mesmerizing storytelling, Michelle Obama invites readers into her world, chronicling the experiences that have shaped her—from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago to her years as an executive balancing the demands of motherhood and work, to her time spent at the world’s most famous address. With unerring honesty and lively wit, she describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private, telling her full story as she has lived it—in her own words and on her own terms. Warm, wise, and revelatory, Becoming is the deeply personal reckoning of a woman of soul and substance who has steadily defied expectations—and whose story inspires us to do the same.
The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra (384 pages) Short Stories
From the New York Times bestselling author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena—dazzling, poignant, and lyrical interwoven stories about family, sacrifice, the legacy of war, and the redemptive power of art.
This stunning, exquisitely written collection introduces a cast of remarkable characters whose lives intersect in ways both life-affirming and heartbreaking. A 1930s Soviet censor painstakingly corrects offending photographs, deep underneath Leningrad, bewitched by the image of a disgraced prima ballerina. A chorus of women recount their stories and those of their grandmothers, former gulag prisoners who settled their Siberian mining town. Two pairs of brothers share a fierce, protective love. Young men across the former USSR face violence at home and in the military. And great sacrifices are made in the name of an oil landscape unremarkable except for the almost incomprehensibly peaceful past it depicts.
The Friend By Sigrid Nunez (226 pages) Fiction
The narrator of Nunez’s wry novel inherits a Great Dane after her friend and mentor, an aging author, commits suicide. The novel suggests that something larger than writerly passion has been lost in our culture, but itself serves as a tribute to the values it holds dear.
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, Atul Gawande (282 pages) Non-Fiction
This is a must read! In Being Mortal, bestselling author Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending. Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But in the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicine seem too frequently to run counter to the interest of the human spirit. Nursing homes, preoccupied with safety, pin patients into railed beds and wheelchairs. Hospitals isolate the dying, checking for vital signs long after the goals of cure have become moot. Doctors, committed to extending life, continue to carry out devastating procedures that in the end extends suffering.
Gawande offers examples of freer, more socially fulfilling models for assisting the infirm and dependent elderly, and he explores the varieties of hospice care to demonstrate that a person’s last weeks or months may be rich and dignified.
Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison (320 pages) literary fiction
Jonathan Evison’s voice is pure magic. In Lawn Boy, at once a vibrant coming-of-age novel and a sharp social commentary on class, Evison offers a painfully honest portrait of one young man’s struggle to overcome the hand he’s been dealt in life and reach for his dreams. It’s a journey you won’t want to miss, with an ending you won’t forget.”—Kristin Hannah, author of The Nightingale
Mike Munoz is a young Chicano landscaper working in a gated, all-white community near Bremerton, Washington. His future, at first glance, is not expansive. Munoz seems destined to a life on the margins, hemmed in by forces both external and internal: class and race, bad judgment and resentment. Dialogue is often the strength of Evison’s stories, and there’s a lot of it here—driving the story forward as Mike drives toward a future of his own design, regardless of its uncertainty and imperfections. After all, the best gardens are wild, and a little bit dark.
Circe by Madeline Miller (385 pages) Fiction
“Brilliantly reimagines the life of Circe, formidable sorceress of The Odyssey.”
Miller has determined, in her characterization of this most powerful witch, to bring her as close as possible to the human—from the timbre of her voice to her intense maternal instincts. The brutal insouciance of her fellow immortals…proves increasingly alien to this thoughtful and compassionate woman who learns to love unselfishly. It is an unexpected and jolly, if bittersweet, development, and one rather closer to Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid than to traditional Greek myth…Circeis very pleasurable to read, combining lively versions of familiar tales…and snippets of other, related standards…with a highly psychologized, redemptive and ultimately exculpatory account of the protagonist herself…Circe will surely delight readers new to the witch’s stories as it will many who remember her role in the Greek myths of their childhood: Like a good children’s book, it engrosses and races along at a clip, eliciting excitement and emotion along the way. The novel’s feminist slant also appeals, offering…a reclamation of one of myth’s reviled women. New York Times Book Review
Saints for All Occasions, by J. Courtney Sullivan (352 pages) Fiction
A novel about the hope, sacrifice, and love between two sisters and the secret that drives them apart. Nora and Theresa Flynn are twenty-one and seventeen when they leave their small village in Ireland and journey to America. Nora is the responsible sister; she’s shy and serious and engaged to a man she isn’t sure that she loves. Theresa is gregarious; she is thrilled by their new life in Boston and besotted with the fashionable dresses and dance halls on Dudley Street. But when Theresa ends up pregnant, Nora is forced to come up with a plan—a decision with repercussions they are both far too young to understand.
Fifty years later, Nora is the matriarch of a big Catholic family with four grown children. Estranged from her sister, Theresa is a cloistered nun, living in an abbey in rural Vermont. Until, after decades of silence, a sudden death forces Nora and Theresa to confront the choices they made so long ago. A graceful, supremely moving novel from one of our most beloved writers, Saints for All Occasions explores the fascinating, funny, and sometimes achingly sad ways a secret at the heart of one family both breaks them and binds them together.
Educated: A Memoir, by Tara Westover (352 pages) Memoir
Educated is an account of the struggle for self-invention. A young girl growing up in rural Idaho in an ultra conservative Mormon family. It is a tale of fierce family loyalty and of the grief that comes with severing the closest of ties. With the acute insight that distinguishes all great writers, Westover has crafted a universal coming-of-age story that gets to the heart of what an education is and what it offers: the perspective to see one’s life through new eyes and the will to change it.
All We Ever Wanted by Emily Giffin (342 pages) Domestic Fiction
Follows the entangled lives of three troubled people — a wealthy Nashville housewife, a struggling single dad, and his teenage daughter — and explores how one fateful night changes the course of their worlds forever. Giffin’s plot touches on social class and misogyny while delivering an excellent page-turning story. This satisfying novel will appeal to readers looking for a nuanced, thoughtful take on family and social dynamics.
Palisades Park by Alan Brennert (384 pages) Fiction
Bestseller Alan Brennert’s spellbinding story about a family of dreamers and their lives within the legendary Palisades Amusement Park. Growing up in the 1930s, there is no more magical place than Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey―especially for seven-year-old Antoinette, who horrifies her mother by insisting on the unladylike nickname Toni, and her brother, Jack. Toni helps her parents, Eddie and Adele Stopka, at the stand where they sell homemade French fries amid the roar of the Cyclone roller coaster. There is also the lure of the world’s biggest salt-water pool, complete with divers whose astonishing stunts inspire Toni, despite her mother’s insistence that girls can’t be high divers.
But a family of dreamers doesn’t always share the same dreams, and then the world intrudes: There’s the Great Depression, and Pearl Harbor, which hits home in ways that will split the family apart; and perils like fire and race riots in the park. Both Eddie and Jack face the dangers of war, while Adele has ambitions of her own―and Toni is determined to take on a very different kind of danger in impossible feats as a high diver. Yet they are all drawn back to each other―and to Palisades Park―until the park closes forever in 1971.
Before We Were Yours, Lisa Wingate (352 pages) Fiction
Based on a notorious true-life scandal in Memphis, 1939. Twelve-year-old Rill Foss and her four younger siblings live a magical life aboard their family’s Mississippi River shanty boat. But when their father rushes their mother to the hospital one stormy night, Rill is left in charge—until strangers arrive in force. Wrenched from all that is familiar and thrown into a Tennessee Children’s Home Society orphanage, the Foss children are assured that they will soon be returned to their parents—but they quickly realize the dark truth. At the mercy of the facility’s cruel director, Rill fights to keep her sisters and brother together in a world of danger and uncertainty.
Disturbed in Their Nests: A Journey from Sudan’s to San Diego by Alephonsion Deng and Judy Bernstein
Nineteen-year-old refugee Alephonsion Deng, from war-ravaged Sudan, had great expectations when he arrived in America three weeks before two airlines crashed into the World Trade Towers. Money, he’d been told, was given to you in pillows. Machines did all the work. Education was free.
Suburban mom Judy Bernstein had her own assumptions. The teenaged ”Lost Boys of Sudan” — who’d traveled barefoot and starving for a thousand miles-needed a little mothering and a change of scenery: a trip to the zoo, perhaps, or maybe the beach.
Partnered through a mentoring program in San Diego, these two individuals from opposite sides of the world began an eye-opening journey that radically altered each other’s vision and life. Disturbed in Their Nests recounts the first year of this heartwarming partnership; the initial misunderstandings, the growing trust, and, ultimately, their lasting friendship. Their contrasting points of view provide of-the-moment insight into what refugees face when torn from their own cultures and thrust into entirely foreign ones.
Britt Marie was Here, by Fredrik Backman, 336 pages, Fiction
The New York Times bestselling author of A Man Called Ove and My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry “returns with this heartwarming story about a woman rediscovering herself after a personal crisis…fans of Backman will find another winner in these pages” (Publishers Weekly).
Britt-Marie can’t stand mess. A disorganized cutlery drawer ranks high on her list of unforgivable sins. She is not one to judge others—no matter how ill-mannered, unkempt, or morally suspect they might be. It’s just that sometimes people interpret her helpful suggestions as criticisms, which is certainly not her intention. But hidden inside the socially awkward, fussy busybody is a woman who has more imagination, bigger dreams, and a warmer heart that anyone around her realizes.
