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."
