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What Book Clubs are reading this month! |
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Discussion June 17th Kiela has always had trouble dealing with people. Thankfully, as a librarian at the Great Library of Alyssium, she and her assistant, Caz--a magically sentient spider plant--have spent the last decade sequestered among the empire's most precious spellbooks, preserving their magic for the city's elite. When a revolution begins and the library goes up in flames, she and Caz flee with all the spellbooks they can carry and head to a remote island Kiela never thought she'd see again: her childhood home. Taking refuge there, Kiela discovers, much to her dismay, a nosy--and very handsome--neighbor who can't take a hint and keeps showing up day after day to make sure she's fed and to help fix up her new home. |
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Have you ever wanted to read The Lord of the Rings? Maybe it's time for a re-read-or simply a love for epic fantasy adventure. Join us either in person or online this year as we travel through Tolkien's legendary world together! |
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Culpability
by Bruce W. Holsinger
Oprah's Book Club
"When the Cassidy-Shaws' autonomous minivan collides with an oncoming car, seventeen-year-old Charlie is in the driver's seat, with his father, Noah, riding shotgun. In the back seat, tweens Alice and Izzy are on their phones, while their mother, Lorelei, a world leader in the field of artificial intelligence, is absorbed in her work. Yet each family member harbors a secret, implicating them all in the tragic accident. During a weeklong recuperation on the Chesapeake Bay, the family confronts the excruciating moral dilemmas triggered by the crash. Noah tries to hold the family together as a seemingly routine police investigation jeopardizes Charlie's future. Alice and Izzy turn strangely furtive. And Lorelei's odd behavior tugs at Noah's suspicions that there is a darker truth behind the incident"
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Treekeepers: The Race for a Forested Future
by Lauren E. Oakes
In recent years, planting a tree has become a catchall to represent doing something good for the planet. Many companies commit to planting a tree with every purchase. But who plants those trees and where? Will they flourish and offer the benefits that people expect? Can all the individual efforts around the world help remedy the ever-looming climate crisis? In Treekeepers, Lauren E. Oakes takes us on a poetic and practical journey from the Scottish Highlands to the Panamanian jungle to meet the scientists, innovators, and local citizens who each offer part of the answer. Their work isn't just about planting lots of trees, but also about understanding what it takes to grow or regrow a forest and to protect what remains. Throughout, Oakes shows the complex roles of forests in the fight against climate change, and of the people who are giving trees a chance with hope for our mutual survival. Timely, meticulously reported, and ultimately optimistic, Treekeepers teaches us how to live with a sense of urgency in our warming world, to find beauty in the present for ourselves and our children, and to take action big or small--
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The Astral Library (Standard Edition)
by Kate Quinn
From New York Times bestselling author Kate Quinn comes a gorgeously written fantastical adventure which poses the question: Have you ever wished you could live inside a book? Welcome to the Astral Library, where books are not just objects, but doors to new worlds, new lives, and new futures. Alexandria Alix Watson has learned one lesson from her barren childhood in the foster-care system: unlike people, books will never let you down. Working three dead-end jobs to make ends meet and knowing college is a pipe dream, Alix takes nightly refuge in the high-vaulted reading room at the Boston Public Library, escaping into her favorite fantasy novels and dreaming of far-off lands. Until the day she stumbles through a hidden door and meets the Librarian: the ageless, acerbic guardian of a hidden library where the desperate and the lost escape to new lives...inside their favorite books. The Librarian takes a dazzled Alix under her wing, but before she can escape into the pages of her new life, a shadowy enemy emerges to threaten everyone the Astral Library has ever helped protect. Aided by a dashing costume-shop owner, Alix and the Librarian flee through the Regency drawing rooms of Jane Austen to the back alleys of Sherlock Holmes and the champagne-soaked parties of The Great Gatsby as danger draws inexorably closer. But who does their enemy really wish to destroy--Alix, the Librarian, or the Library itself?
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A Calamity of Souls
by David Baldacci
Set in the tumultuous year of 1968 in southern Virginia, a racially charged murder case sets a duo of white and Black lawyers against a deeply unfair system as they work to defend their wrongfully accused Black defendants in this courtroom drama from #1New York Timesbestselling author David Baldacci. A tour de force. S. A. Cosby, bestselling author of All the Sinners Bleed Jack Lee is a white lawyer from Freeman County, Virginia, who has never done anything to push back against racism--until he decides to represent Jerome Washington, a Black man charged with brutally killing an elderly wealthy white couple. Doubting his decision, Lee fears that his legal skills may not be enough to prevail in a case where the odds are already stacked against both him and his client. He quickly finds himself out of his depth when he realizes that what's at stake is far greater than the outcome of a murder trial. Desiree DuBose is a Black lawyer from Chicago who has devoted her life to furthering the causes of justice and equality for all. She enters a fractious and unwieldy partnership with Lee in a legal battle against the best prosecutor in the Commonwealth. Yet DuBose is also aware that powerful outside forces are at work to blunt the victories achieved by the Civil Rights era. Lee and DuBose could not be more dissimilar. On their own, neither one can stop the prosecution's deliberate march towards a guilty verdict and the electric chair. But together, the pair fight for what once seemed impossible: a chance for a fair trial and true justice. Over a decade in the making, A Calamity of Souls breathes richly imagined and detailed life into a bygone era, taking the reader through a world that will seem both foreign and familiar. This is David Baldacci at his best. Using the law and the courtroom as the stage for a searing parable on race and the cost and courage to do the right thing. Michael Connelly, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Lincoln Lawyer
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The Five Wishes of Mr. Murray McBride
by Joe Siple
Murray McBride--a lonely 100-year-old who's outlived just about everyone he's ever loved--is looking for a reason to live. He finds it in Jason Cashman, a spirited 10-year-old boy with a terminal heart defect and a list of five things he wants to do before he dies. Murray is determined to help Jason fulfill his dreams. Together, they race against the limited time each has left, ticking off Jason's wishes one by one as Murray remembers what it's like to be young, and Jason fights for the chance to grow old. But when tragedy strikes, their worlds are turned upside-down, and an unexpected gift is the only thing that can make Jason's final wish come true.
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The frozen river : a novel
by Ariel Lawhon
In 1789 Maine, midwife and healer Martha Ballard, who is good at keeping secrets, investigates a shocking murder linked to an alleged rape that has shaken her small town, especially when her diary lands at the center of the scandal, threatening to tear both her family and her community apart.
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The god of the woods
by Liz Moore
In 1975, when a camp counselor discovers the 13-year-old daughter of the summer camp's owners has disappeared just like her brother 14 years earlier, a panicked search begins as the secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow are revealed.
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Hamnet : a novel of the plaque
by Maggie O'Farrell
The award-winning author of I Am, I Am, I Am presents the evocative story of a young Shakespeare’s marriage to a talented herbalist before the ravaging death of their 11-year-old son shapes the production of his greatest play.
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The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
by James McBride
When a skeleton is unearthed in the small, close-knit community of Chicken Hill, Pennsylvania, in 1972, an unforgettable cast of characters—living on the margins of white, Christian America—closely guard a secret, especially when the truth is revealed about what happened and the part the town's white establishment played in it.
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James
by Percival Everett
Describes the events of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn through the eyes of the enslaved Jim, who decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island after learning he is to be sold to a man in New Orleans.
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Lonesome Dove
by Larry McMurtry
A love story and an epic of the frontier, Lonesome Dove is the grandest novel ever written about the last, defiant wilderness of America. Richly authentic, beautifully written, Lonesome Dove is a book to make readers laugh, weep, dream and remember.
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My Friends
by Fredrik Backman
The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Anxious People returns with an unforgettably funny, deeply moving tale of four teenagers whose friendship creates a bond so powerful that it changes a complete stranger's life twenty-five years later.
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The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World
by Laura Imai Messina
Laura Imai Messina's international bestselling novel is a story about grief, mourning, and the joy of survival, inspired by a real phone booth in Japan with its disconnected wind phone, a place of pilgrimage and solace since the 2011 tsunami.
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Table for two
by Towles, Amor
The New York Times best-selling author shares six stories based in New York City, which consider the fateful consequences that can spring from brief encounters, and a novella set in Golden Age Hollywood, told from seven different viewpoints, which stars the indomitable Evelyn Ross.
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Theo of Golden
by Allen Levi
One spring morning, a stranger named Theo arrives in the small Southern city of Golden. He doesn't explain much about where he came from or why he's there--but when he visits the local coffeehouse, where pencil portraits of the people of Golden hang on the walls, he begins purchasing them, one at a time, and giving each portrait to the person depicted. In exchange, he asks only for the person's story. And so portrait by portrait, person by person, secrets are revealed, regrets are shared, and ordinary lives are profoundly altered. A story of giving and receiving, of seeing and being seen, Theo of Golden is an unforgettable novel about the power of generosity, the importance of connection, and the quiet miracles that happen when we choose kindness and wonder.
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Twice : a novel
by Mitch Albom
GMA Book Club
Young Alfie Logan can rewind any moment for a do-over -- but must accept the results of his second try -- and having navigated through adolescence and finding seemingly lasting love with Gianna, he must confront an impossible choice when his power unravels during a casino arrest.
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The Children
by Melissa Albert
Read with Jenna
The haunting new novel from New York Times bestselling author Melissa Albert, in which the estranged adult children of a legendary author, written into their dead mother's beloved fantasy series, must contend with the vine-like creep of legacy, memory, and magic. Guinevere Sharpe has two childhoods. In one, she and her brother, Ennis, live in the wooded shadow of their family's isolated Vermont farmhouse; in the other, the pages of their mother's world-famous Ninth City books, where their magical adventures have made them household names. In reality, Guinevere's childhood isn't the enchanted idyll her mother's readers imagine: she and Ennis are growing up near-feral, unwashed and underfed, escaping each day to the wild woods they've made their playland. As Edith Sharpe's books explode into epic popularity, the threats of a rural childhood give way to the escalating perils of fame--until the night it all goes up in flames, leaving Edith's series unfinished and her children the sole survivors. Now an adult coasting on her mother's name, Guinevere is mid-promotion for a ghostwritten memoir when her estranged brother, an artist who has until now spurned his family's legacy, announces an upcoming installation titled, simply, Mother. As rumors swirl around a death connected to his last show, unsettling recollections from Guinevere's childhood begin to surface. Her public facade starts to crack, forcing her to confront the questions she's spent the last twenty years running from: What really happened the night of the fire? And what dark history lies behind their mother's fantasy world? The Children is wise to the mythic weight childhood memories gather over time, and the way our most beloved stories grow up with us. It's for anyone who's ever revisited an old favorite and found its pages cast in a darker light, the line separating magic from reality blurring as we discover the books that once comforted us carry shadows of their own.
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Dolly All the Time
by Annabel Monaghan
GMA Book Club
A hardworking single mom returns to her seaside hometown and stumbles into a fake dating situationship with a wealthy, workaholic scion, from the New York Times bestselling author of Nora Goes Off Script. This book is like a spicy margarita...sweet and a little salty, tart and hot...I have fallen in love with Dolly and with funny, fizzing Annabel Monaghan --Catherine Newman, New York Times bestselling author of Sandwich If they start by pretending, can they end with something real? Dolly Brick has never met a problem she couldn't solve. Not when her mom left when she was twelve, and not at thirty-nine when she moves with her son back to Whitfield, Rhode Island, for the summer to keep her dad and brother from losing the family home. So when she comes across Stewart Whitfield--annoyingly handsome scion of the Whitfield family--with a flat tire and at the wrong end of a very public, very humiliating breakup, it's in her nature to help. But Stewart's proposed arrangement ends up being more than either of them bargained for, because as public dinners and high-society benefits turn into sunset boat rides and kisses that hit her bloodstream like a ghost pepper, Dolly starts to feel something more than helpful. She's never relied on anyone besides herself--can she really start now?
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A Pair of Aces
by Marie Benedict
Reese's Book Club
A gripping novel about two trailblazing women on opposite sides of the law--a prosecutor and a madam--who team up to bring down notorious Mob boss Lucky Luciano in 1930s New York, from the New York Times bestselling authors of the million-copy bestseller The Personal Librarian. Eunice Carter, assistant district attorney for the City of New York and Manhattan's first Black female prosecutor, has her sights set on the one and only Lucky Luciano, head of New York City's five largest organized crime families. Other prosecutors have tried to bring down Lucky, but they've all focused on the crime syndicate's traditional businesses--bootlegging, gambling, loan sharking, and drug dealing--or tax evasion. No one has thought to approach the mob through its role in prostitution. Until Eunice. But she can't get Luciano alone. Polly Adler has worked long and hard to build up her high-class brothel business. Her client list is filled with well-known names, both the famous and the infamous, who all know her booze is top-notch, her music first-rate, her food exquisite, and her girls the best. But Lucky has gone too far, putting her girls in danger, and Polly finally sees the chance to end his reign once and for all. Together, Eunice and Polly fashion a case utilizing a network of women. Bridging the enormous divide between them and risking their own lives, they assemble evidence bit by bit, under the nose of the man they're trying to convict. It is this very alliance--of two women from vastly different worlds--that launches the most sensational trial New York City has ever seen.
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Caller Unknown
by Gillian McAllister
Read with Jenna
An unputdownable adventure that was both heartwarming and thrilling! Everything I've come to expect from Gillian McAllister! --Freida McFadden, #1 New York Times Bestselling Author Only a Gillian McAllister thriller can make your heart race and then your heart melt from one page to the next! I'm a devoted fan! --Liane Moriarty, #1 New York Times bestselling authorHow far would you go to rescue your child? A mother races against the clock--and finds herself on the wrong side of the law--in a desperate fight to save her teenage daughter in this pulse-pounding thriller from the author of Reese's Book Club Pick and New York Times bestseller Wrong Place Wrong Time.There is nothing that Simone won't do for her daughter, Lucy. The two have always been close, and with Lucy about to leave home for university, they depart the UK for a vacation to Texas to spend some quality time together. But when Simone awakens on their first morning in the desert, Lucy is gone, missing from their rental cabin. In her place is a cell phone, and a voice on the other line issues a shocking ransom demand. Don't tell the police. Come to this location. And be prepared to do a deal...Though Simone's husband urges her to bring in the authorities for help, she knows she can't take any chances. The kidnappers might kill Lucy if she tells anyone. No mother would take that risk. Instead, that night, she drives to the isolated meet-up.What she finds there changes everything. The mysterious kidnapper doesn't want money. They want Simone to do something. The unthinkable.A catastrophic chain of events is set in motion, with chilling consequences that extend beyond Simone and her family. What follows is a heart-pounding journey through the small towns and punishing deserts of remote Texas, in which Simone's courage--and morality--is pushed to the brink as she discovers what it truly means to be a mother.Unbearably tense, compassionately told, and full of well-crafted moral dilemmas, Caller Unknown proves once again why Gillian McAllister's thrillers are the best of the best (Lisa Jewell).
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Change of Plans
by Sarah Dessen
GMA YA Book Club
From acclaimed and #1 New York Times bestselling author Sarah Dessen comes a sweet, nuanced, and reflective coming-of-age love story (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) about an unassuming girl who learns to stand on her own while falling in love during a life-changing summer.
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The Fine Art of Lying
by Alexandra Andrews
Reese's Book Club
In the beginning, there was art. It was Clare Bast's love of art that saved her from a bleak, predictable life in upstate New York, and drew her to the cultured world of Manhattan's Upper East Side where she met Jed, her doting, affluent husband. Despite her best efforts--including a half-finished PhD, abandoned when her daughter Sadie was born--Clare secretly can't help but feel like an imposter in Jed's one-percent, Park-Avenue life. When the well-connected wife of Jed's new boss introduces her to influential friends--a curator here, a gallerist there, an aficionado abroad--Clare feels an essential part of herself coming alive again. And when she discovers that an important work painted by the subject of her unfinished dissertation is hanging in the brownstone of a seductively attractive dealer, she believes fate is leading her where she belongs . . . until she finds herself at the scene of a gruesome murder and a stolen masterpiece. Caught in the perfectly wrong place at the perfectly wrong time, every clue the investigation uncovers points back to her. Suddenly, Clare is trapped inside a dark and treacherous art world filled with unscrupulous dealers and international criminals. What, exactly, has she gotten herself into . . . and how is she going to get herself, and her family, out?
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Homebound
by Portia Elan
GMA Book Club
Five lives are entangled across time by one story of survival and hope, uploaded to a floppy disk in the 1980s and destined to ripple across the centuries... A joy--at once a gripping mystery that confidently spans centuries, and a hauntingly beautiful exploration of what makes us human...It kept me up all night --Madeline Miller, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Circe and Song of Achilles It's 1983 and Becks can't wait to get the hell out of Cincinnati. She's nineteen, blasting her Walkman, and hiding from the fact that her beloved uncle, the only person who understood her, is dead. But she has work to do: he left her a half-finished game to complete--one last collaboration to find her way out of loneliness. Little does she know, what Becks is making will echo far into the future and shape the lives of a scientist, a sentient automaton, and a flinty sea captain in ways she cannot imagine. All are bound together by their search for connection--and by a futuristic traveler on a mysterious mission through space. A novel about our deep interconnectedness, Homebound is a clear-eyed, hopeful adventure into humanity's future and capacity for love.
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John of John
by Douglas Stuart
Oprah's Book Club
Out of money and with little to show for his art school education, John-Calum Macleod takes the ferry back home to the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides to find that little has changed except for him. He returns to the windswept croft and the two pillars of his childhood: his father John, a sheep farmer, tweed weaver, and lay preacher in the local Presbyterian church, and his maternal grandmother Ella, a profanity-loving Glaswegian whose steady warmth helped Cal weather the sudden departure of his mother. Cal privately wonders if any lonely men might be found on the barren hillsides of home, while John is dismayed by his son's long hair, strange clothes, and seeming unwillingness to be Saved. But Cal isn't the only one in the croft house who is keeping secrets. As lambing season turns to shearing season, the threads holding together the community together become increasingly frayed, and nothing will remain as it was before. John of John is a singular novel about duty, passion, and the transformative power of the truth. It is a magnificent literary work that cements Douglas Stuart's reputation as one of our greatest novelists working today.
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Yesteryear
by Caro Claire Burke
GMA Book Club
A traditional American woman, a beautiful wife and mother who sells her pioneer lifestyle of raw milk and farm-fresh eggs to her millions of social media followers, suddenly awakens cold, filthy, and terrified in the brutal reality of 1855--where she must unravel whether this living nightmare is an elaborate hoax, a twisted reality show, or something far more sinister in this sensational debut novel.
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