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What Book Clubs are reading in August! |
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Discussion August 19th Eighty-five-year-old Veronica McCreedy is estranged from her family and wants to find a worthwhile cause to leave her fortune to. When she sees a documentary about penguins being studied in Antarctica, she tells the scientists she's coming to visit-and won't take no for an answer. Shortly after arriving, she convinces the reluctant team to rescue an orphaned baby penguin. He becomes part of life at the base, and Veronica's closed heart starts to open. Her grandson, Patrick, follows Veronica to Antarctica to make one last attempt to get to know his grandmother. Together, Veronica, Patrick, and even the scientists learn what family, love, and connection are all about. |
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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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The Library Book
by Susan Orlean
Orlean re-opens the unsolved mystery of the most catastrophic library fire in American history and delivers a love letter to the institution of libraries themselves.
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Science Under Siege: How to Fight the Five Most Powerful Forces That Threaten Our World
by Michael E. Mann
From pandemics to the climate crisis, humanity faces tougher challenges than ever. But our efforts to effectively tackle these existential crises are now hampered by a common threat: politically and ideologically motivated opposition to science. Michael E. Mann and Peter J. Hotez have spent the last twenty years on the front lines of the battle to convey accurate, reliable, and trustworthy information about science in the face of determined and nihilistic opposition. They reveal the five main forces threatening science: plutocrats, pros, petrostates, phonies, and the press. Armed with the information in this book, we can be empowered to promote scientific truths, shine light on channels of dark money, dismantle the corporations poisoning the planet, and ultimately avert disaster--
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The Briar Club
by Kate Quinn
A powerful story of female friendships and secrets in a Washington, DC, boardinghouse during the McCarthy era--
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The Correspondent
by Virginia Evans
Sybil is seventy-three years old, in the winter of her life. Sybil has always made sense of the world through writing letters and through this epistolary novel we see how she comes to terms with her past and present and learns forgiveness--
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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 lion women of Tehran : a novel
by Marjan Kamali
When Homa, a girl from her childhood, reappears in her privileged world, Ellie, amidst Iran's political turmoil, joins her in pursuing their goals for meaningful futures until one earth-shattering betrayal has far-reaching consequences, altering the course of both their lives,
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The Murmur of Bees
by Sofía Segovia
From a beguiling voice in Mexican fiction comes an astonishing novel--her first to be translated into English--about a mysterious child with the power to change a family's history in a country on the verge of revolution.From the day that old Nana Reja found a baby abandoned under a bridge, the life of a small Mexican town forever changed. Disfigured and covered in a blanket of bees, little Simonopio is for some locals the stuff of superstition, a child kissed by the devil. But he is welcomed by landowners Francisco and Beatriz Morales, who adopt him and care for him as if he were their own. As he grows up, Simonopio becomes a cause for wonder to the Morales family, because when the uncannily gifted child closes his eyes, he can see what no one else can--visions of all that's yet to come, both beautiful and dangerous. Followed by his protective swarm of bees and living to deliver his adoptive family from threats--both human and those of nature--Simonopio's purpose in Linares will, in time, be divined.Set against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution and the devastating influenza of 1918, The Murmur of Bees captures both the fate of a country in flux and the destiny of one family that has put their love, faith, and future in the unbelievable.
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Pride and Prejudice (a Read with Jenna Book Club Pick)
by Jane Austen
Read with Jenna
When Elizabeth Bennet first encounters the aristocratic Fitzwilliam Darcy at a ball, the two young people are mutually appalled--she by his arrogance and aloof manners and he by her embarrassingly crass relatives. Though Elizabeth's future security depends on finding a prosperous husband, she is determined to follow her heart instead. Darcy, meanwhile, finds himself thoroughly unsettled by such an uncommonly lively and headstrong woman. Further misunderstandings widen the gulf between them, before a devastating scandal forces the pair to confront the errors of pride and prejudice that have kept them from recognizing each other's true worth. Jane Austen's skill in uniting sparklingly humorous dialogue with profound depths of feeling never found more dazzling expression than in this much-loved novel.
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The Secret Book Society
by Madeline Martin
London, 1885. Trapped by oppressive marriages and societal expectations, three women receive a mysterious invitation to an afternoon tea at the home of the reclusive Lady Duxbury. Beneath the genteel facade of the gathering lies a secret book club--a sanctuary where they can discover freedom, sisterhood and the courage to rewrite their stories. Eleanor Clarke, a devoted mother suffocating under the tyranny of her husband. Rose Wharton, a transplanted American dollar princess struggling to fit the mold of an aristocratic wife. Lavinia Cavendish, an artistic young woman haunted by a dangerous family secret. All are drawn to the enigmatic Lady Duxbury, a thrice-widowed countess whose husbands' untimely deaths have sparked whispers of murder. As the women form deep, heartwarming friendships, they uncover secrets about their marriages, their pasts, and the risks they face. Their courage is their only weapon in the oppressive world that has kept them silent, but when secrets are deadly, one misstep could cost them everything--
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The Stolen Life of Colette Marceau
by Kristin Harmel
Colette Marceau has been stealing jewels for nearly as long as she can remember, following the centuries-old code of honor instilled in her by her mother Annabel: take only from the cruel and unkind, and give to those in need. Never was their family tradition more important than seven decades earlier, during the Second World War, when Annabel and Colette worked side by side in Paris to fund the French Resistance. But one night in 1942, it all went wrong. Annabel was arrested by the Germans, and Colette's four-year-old sister Liliane disappeared in the chaos of the raid, along with an exquisite diamond bracelet sewn into the hem of her nightgown for safekeeping. Soon after, Annabel was executed, and Liliane's body was found floating in the Seine--but the bracelet was nowhere to be found. Seventy years later, Colette--who has 'redistributed' $30 million in jewels over the decades to fund many worthy organizations--has done her best to put her tragic past behind her, but her life begins to unravel when the long-missing bracelet suddenly turns up in a museum exhibit in Boston--
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Swan Song
by Elin Hilderbrand
When rich strangers move to the island, social mayhem and a possible murder follow. Can Nantucket's best locals save the day, and their way of life?
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Too Old for This
by Samantha Downing
A retired serial killer receives a knock on the door. The uninvited guest threatens to blow up her quiet life if she doesn't start killing again. What's a gal to do? From bestselling author Samantha Downing. Lottie Jones thought her crimes were behind her. Decades earlier, she changed her identity and tucked herself away in a small town. Her most exciting nights are the weekly bingo games at the local church and gossiping with her friends. When investigative journalist Plum Dixon shows up on her doorstep asking questions about Lottie's past and specifically her involvement with numerous unsolved cases, well, Lottie just can't have that. But getting away with murder is hard enough when you're young. And when Lottie receives another annoying knock on the door, she realizes this crime might just be the death of her...--
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Under the Tulip Tree
by Michelle Shocklee
Sixteen-year-old Lorena Leland's dreams of a rich and fulfilling life as a writer are dashed when the stock market crashes in 1929. Seven years into the Great Depression, Rena's banker father has retreated into the bottle, her sister is married to a lazy charlatan and gambler, and Rena is an unemployed newspaper reporter. Eager for any writing job, Rena accepts a position interviewing former slaves for the Federal Writers' Project. There, she meets Frankie Washington, a 101-year-old woman whose honest yet tragic past captivates Rena. As Frankie recounts her life as a slave, Rena is horrified to learn of all the older woman has endured-especially because Rena's ancestors owned slaves. While Frankie's story challenges Rena's preconceptions about slavery, it also connects the two women whose lives are otherwise separated by age, race, and circumstances. But will this bond of respect, admiration, and friendship be broken by a revelation neither woman sees coming?--
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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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Sunlight Finds You
by Laura Moriarty
Read with Jenna
A forbidden love blows open the world of a teenage girl, altering the trajectory of her life-from the author of the New York Times bestseller The Chaperone It's 1949, early in the Cold War, but St. Petersburg, Florida is warm, lush, and booming with newcomers seeking sunshine and opportunity. For seventeen-year-old Nora, St. Pete feels like paradise, especially after she meets and wins over Leonard, the shy, brilliant son of transplanted New Yorkers. Nora and Leonard are soon spending balmy days and evenings together, and in her adoring, encouraging company, he grows more confident, even as he remains tender and caring. Leonard's sophisticated mother welcomes Nora into their lives, but his father distrusts her motives. When his suspicions are seemingly confirmed, Nora is forced to cut contact. In her longing and fear, she takes a chance that changes her life, exiling her from the family she loves and setting off a chain of secrets and betrayals that will follow her into adulthood. It is a mature Nora who tells the story of her turbulent past. Wiser and more worldly, she commits to an honest but compassionate account, and to a future based on trusting, first and foremost, herself.
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Take What You Can
by Naima Coster
GMA Book Club
A rich, panoramic exploration of female friendship, class, new motherhood, and independence-- Provided by publisher.
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The Wild Beneath
by Kelly Anderson
Reese's Book Club
For readers of Wild Dark Shore and The Time Traveler's Wife, a fierce, haunting story of one woman caught between her first love and a mysterious stranger who upends everything--and the two worlds that won't let her go.
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Country People
by Daniel Mason
GMA Book Club
A year in the life of a family as they strike out into the unknown (aka Vermont), leaving all the comforts of home behind--a rollicking, lyrical novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Mason, the bestselling author of North Woods
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A Founding Mother: A Novel of Abigail Adams
by Stephanie Dray
Reese's Book Club
In time for the 250th Anniversary of the birth of the United States comes a sweeping, intimate portrayal of Abigail Adams--wife of one president and mother to another--whose wit, willpower, and wisdom helped shape the fledgling republic. A stunning historical novel with modern-day implications from the New York Times bestselling authors of America's First Daughter and My Dear Hamilton.
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Little Wonder
by Sophie Chen Keller
Oprah's Book Club
A musical prodigy and his mother spend years searching for each other in this beautiful novel of hope, perseverance, and love.
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The Shampoo Effect
by Jenny Jackson
Read with Jenna
An ambitious young woman insinuates herself into a tight-knit social set, shaking up friendships and marriages in a small seaside town. A frothy novel of love, money, sex, and friendship, from the New York Times bestselling author of Pineapple Street
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