2022 Monday Night Book Discussion

"It's 1947 and American college girl Charlie St. Clair is pregnant, unmarried, and on the verge of being thrown out of her very proper family. She's also nursing a fervent belief that her beloved French cousin Rose, who disappeared in Nazi-occupied France during the war, might still be alive somewhere. So when Charlie's family banishes her to Europe to have her "little problem" taken care of, Charlie breaks free and heads to London determined to find...

Amanda and Clay head to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a vacation: a quiet reprieve from life in New York City, quality time with their teenage son and daughter, and a taste of the good life in the luxurious home they've rented for the week. The houseowners, Ruth and G. H., arrive in the middle of the night in a panic. They say a sudden blackout has swept the city: the TV and internet are down, and no cell phone service. Is the vacation...

"Before Nick Carraway moved to West Egg and into Gatsby's periphery, he was in the trenches and tunnels of World War I. Floundering in the wake of the destruction he witnessed, Nick delays his return home, hoping to escape the questions he cannot answer about the horrors of war. He embarks on a redemptive transcontinental journey that takes him from a doomed, whirlwind romance in Paris to the debauchery and violence of New Orleans."--Publisher.

"Alice Wright marries handsome American Bennett Van Cleve hoping to escape her stifling life in England. But small-town Kentucky quickly proves equally claustrophobic, especially living alongside her overbearing father-in-law. So when a call goes out for a team of women to deliver books as part of Eleanor Roosevelt's new traveling library, Alice signs on enthusiastically. The leader, and soon Alice's greatest ally, is Margery, a smart-talking, self-sufficient...

The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Ten years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and...

"In her first book, Blonde Indian, Ernestine Hayes powerfully recounted the story of coming back to Juneau and to her Tlingit home after many years of wandering. The Tao of Raven takes up the next and in some ways more interesting question: once the exile returns, then what? Using motifs from the story Raven and the Box of Daylight to deepen her narration and reflection, Hayes expresses an ongoing frustration and anger at the obstacles and prejudices...