We miss a lot of you this month but what can we say...you're adults, it's your own fault :) (my empathy meter is dead at this stage in my life--sorry)---hope to see you all for next month!!

Here is the list of books that were talked about at our open forum with their star ratings.

Janae (my sister) brought:

•  The Chaperone by Laura Moriarty ***+
• Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen ****
•  The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister *****

 Angela brought:

• How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewllyn ****
• Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's by John Elder Robison ***

Christy brought:

•  Wildwood series by Juliet Marillier ***+
• What's on the Other Side by Brent L. Top *****
• A Confusion of Princes by Garth Nix **
• The False Prince by Jennifer Nielson ***+
• Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas ***+

Margaret brought:

• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy ****
• All The Pretty Horses by Cormack McCarthy **
• The Aloha Quilt by Jennifer Chiaverini ***
• Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver ****

Annette brought:

• The Light Between Oceans by M. L. Stedman ***+
• Days of Blood and Starlight by Laini Taylor ****
• Next Thing on My List by Jill Smolinski ***+
• Excuses Begone: How to Change Lifelong Self-Defeating Thinking Habits by Wayne W. Dyer****
• Sweep series by Cate Tiernan **+
• Man in the Moon by William Joyce *****

 We did talk about next month but with so few of us together we didn't make any definite plans.  I had a few ideas but one of them I want to run by Sheri Lee before I make the group suggestion.

Happy Reading, Friends!

Submissions

We had a great discussion about Shell Seekers by Rosamunde Pilcher. Thank you Margaret for hosting and preparing such delicious pizza and muffins. Thanks to everyone who brought treats and participated in the discussion. We had a lot of fun.

Feb 8th will be our next meeting at Annette's house where we will be doing an open forum. Please bring a book you liked and/or a book you didn't like and share with us why you did or didn't like it.

Mindy was way prepared and already had her submissions ready for our discussion book in April. Here is a list of her submissions

Mudbound by Hillary Jordan
The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh
March by Geraldine Brooks
State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's by John Elder Robinson
We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

We chose Mudbound by Hillary Jordan

Here is the description as posted on Goodreads:

In Jordan's prize-winning debut, prejudice takes many forms, both subtle and brutal. It is 1946, and city-bred Laura McAllan is trying to raise her children on her husband's Mississippi Delta farm--a place she finds foreign and frightening. In the midst of the family's struggles, two young men return from the war to work the land. Jamie McAllan, Laura's brother-in-law, is everything her husband is not--charming, handsome, and haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eldest son of the black sharecroppers who live on the McAllan farm, has come home with the shine of a war hero. But no matter his bravery in defense of his country, he is still considered less than a man in the Jim Crow South. It is the unlikely friendship of these brothers-in-arms that drives this powerful novel to its inexorable conclusion.
The men and women of each family relate their versions of events and we are drawn into their lives as they become players in a tragedy on the grandest scale. As Kingsolver says of Hillary Jordan, "Her characters walked straight out of 1940s Mississippi and into the part of my brain where sympathy and anger and love reside, leaving my heart racing. They are with me still."