November/December title

The library's next book discussion will be held on 

Wednesday December 14th at 1pm. 

The meeting will be held in the Local History Room

and via zoom.

Copies of the book (regular print and large print) and audiobook are available at the desk at the library.

In addition the audiobook is available to download via Overdrive/Libby. 

 

"An extraordinary story set in the first century about a woman who finds her voice and her destiny, from the celebrated number one New York Times bestselling author of The Secret Life of Bees and The Invention of Wings

In her mesmerizing fourth work of fiction, Sue Monk Kidd takes an audacious approach to history and brings her acclaimed narrative gifts to imagine the story of a young woman named Ana. Raised in a wealthy family with ties to the ruler of Galilee, she is rebellious and ambitious, with a brilliant mind and a daring spirit. She engages in furtive scholarly pursuits and writes narratives about neglected and silenced women. Ana is expected to marry an older widower, a prospect that horrifies her. An encounter with eighteen-year-old Jesus changes everything.

Their marriage evolves with love and conflict, humor and pathos in Nazareth, where Ana makes a home with Jesus, his brothers, and their mother, Mary. Ana’s pent-up longings intensify amid the turbulent resistance to Rome’s occupation of Israel, partially led by her brother, Judas. She is sustained by her fearless aunt Yaltha, who harbors a compelling secret. When Ana commits a brazen act that puts her in peril, she flees to Alexandria, where startling revelations and greater dangers unfold, and she finds refuge in unexpected surroundings. Ana determines her fate during a stunning convergence of events considered among the most impactful in human history.

Grounded in meticulous research and written with a reverential approach to Jesus’s life that focuses on his humanity, The Book of Longings is an inspiring, unforgettable account of one woman’s bold struggle to realize the passion and potential inside her, while living in a time, place and culture devised to silence her. It is a triumph of storytelling both timely and timeless, from a masterful writer at the height of her powers".     --from the author's website

 

October title

 

 Book Group Meeting

Wednesday October 26 

at 1pm

 Print copies will be available at the library starting October 5th.

Overdrive/Libby ebook

Overdrive/Libby audiobook 

 

 

 

About The Thursday Murder Club

A New York Times bestseller | Soon to be a major motion picture from Steven Spielberg at Amblin Entertainment

“Witty, endearing and greatly entertaining.” —Wall Street Journal
 
“Don’t trust anyone, including the four septuagenarian sleuths in Osman’s own laugh-out-loud whodunit.” —Parade

Four septuagenarians with a few tricks up their sleeves
A female cop with her first big case
A brutal murder
Welcome to…
THE THURSDAY MURDER CLUB

In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet weekly in the Jigsaw Room to discuss unsolved crimes; together they call themselves the Thursday Murder Club.

When a local developer is found dead with a mysterious photograph left next to the body, the Thursday Murder Club suddenly find themselves in the middle of their first live case.

As the bodies begin to pile up, can our unorthodox but brilliant gang catch the killer, before it’s too late?          --PenguinRandomHouse

September book

  

Book group meeting

Wednesday September 28th at 1pm

Finding Chika by Mitch Albom

Print and audio cd copies available at the library

Digital editions:

Hoopla ebook

Hoopla audiobook

Overdrive/Libby audiobook 

 

 

Check out our latest Gallery exhibit A Celebration of Haitian Art (through the end of October). Also on Thursday September 29th at 7pm Judith Kumin will present 
A Panorama of Haitian Art in the Library Community Room. Join us!

 

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Tuesdays With Morrie comes Mitch Albom’s most personal story to date: an intimate and heartwarming memoir about what it means to be a family and the young Haitian orphan whose short life would forever change his heart. 

Chika Jeune was born three days before the devastating earthquake that decimated Haiti in 2010. She spent her infancy in a landscape of extreme poverty, and when her mother died giving birth to a baby brother, Chika was brought to The Have Faith Haiti Orphanage that Albom operates in Port Au Prince.

With no children of their own, the forty-plus children who live, play, and go to school at the orphanage have become family to Mitch and his wife, Janine. Chika’s arrival makes a quick impression. Brave and self-assured, even as a three-year-old, she delights the other kids and teachers. But at age five, Chika is suddenly diagnosed with something a doctor there says, “No one in Haiti can help you with.”

Mitch and Janine bring Chika to Detroit, hopeful that American medical care can soon return her to her homeland. Instead, Chika becomes a permanent part of their household, and their lives, as they embark on a two-year, around-the-world journey to find a cure. As Chika’s boundless optimism and humor teach Mitch the joys of caring for a child, he learns that a relationship built on love, no matter what blows it takes, can never be lost.

Told in hindsight, and through illuminating conversations with Chika herself, this is Albom at his most poignant and vulnerable. Finding Chika is a celebration of a girl, her adoptive guardians, and the incredible bond they formed—a devastatingly beautiful portrait of what it means to be a family, regardless of how it is made.

                                                    https://www.mitchalbom.com/books/chika/

August title

 August Book Group Meeting

In person and via zoom

August 31st at 1pm 

(Please email the library at
info@hopkintontownlibrary.org
if you would like the zoom link)

 Still Life

by Sarah Winman

Print books are available for check out
at the library and the book is also available on 
Overdrive/Libby (ebook and audiobook).

 

Tuscany, 1944: As Allied troops advance and bombs fall around deserted villages, a young English soldier, Ulysses Temper, finds himself in the wine cellar of a deserted villa. There, he has a chance encounter with Evelyn Skinner, a middle-aged art historian who has come to Italy to salvage paintings from the ruins and recall long-forgotten memories of her own youth. In each other, Ulysses and Evelyn find a kindred spirit amongst the rubble of war-torn Italy, and set off on a course of events that will shape Ulysses's life for the next four decades.

As Ulysses returns home to London, reimmersing himself in his crew at The Stoat and Parrot -- a motley mix of pub crawlers and eccentrics -- he carries his time in Italy with him. And when an unexpected inheritance brings him back to where it all began, Ulysses knows better than to tempt fate, and returns to the Tuscan hills.

With beautiful prose, extraordinary tenderness, and bursts of humor and light, Still Life is a sweeping portrait of unforgettable individuals who come together to make a family, and a richly drawn celebration of beauty and love in all its forms.

--Goodreads.com

July title

 July Book Group Meeting

In person and via zoom

July 27th at 1pm 

 

The Secret Keeper of Jaipur

by Alka Joshi 

Books are available for check out
at the library and on hoopla and Overdrive/Libby.

 

This follow-up to The Henna Artist picks up the story 12 years later, and is told alternatingly in the voices of henna artist Lakshmi; her protégé Malik; and Nimmi, Malik's beloved. It's 1969, and Malik is studying the building trade under the tutelage of the Singh family and apprenticing at the Facilities Office of the Jaipur Royal Palace. When a section of their largest project, the Royal Jewel Cinema, collapses on opening night, blame is quickly assigned. Meanwhile, Lakshmi is running the Lady Reading Healing Garden, while her husband, Dr. Jay Kumar, heads up the Community Clinic. They invite Nimmi to coordinate the healing garden, creating opportunities for the facets of Malik's life—personal/professional and traditional/modern—to intersect. As Malik tries to clear the person blamed for the cinema collapse, he uncovers nefarious connections between his mentors and his life back in Shimla, which may put Nimmi in danger. It's only after Malik employs the help of Lakshmi, and her connections at the Royal Palace, that justice may be served. With lush details, a return to favorite characters, and emotional complexity, this story satisfies on every level.   --Library Journal

June title

 

Our next book is A Thousand Ships: A Novel by Natalie Haynes; the Trojan War from the point of view of the silenced women! Lots of options for accessing this title: we will have print copies (here by Wednesday 6/1), an audio CD edition, hoopla audiobook, Overdrive/Libby audiobook and ebook.  We'll meet in person and via zoom on Wednesday June 29th at 1pm. 

 

 

Broadcaster and classicist Natalie Haynes amplifies the muted voices of women in her all-female retelling of the Trojan War. From slaves to queens to muses to deities, she takes the scraps of women Homer offers us in THE ILIAD and THE ODYSSEY and patches them into full characters with powerful stories.

In A THOUSAND SHIPS, Homer is writing yet another epic. Desperate for inspiration, he beseeches Calliope, the muse of epic poetry and the novel’s sporadic narrator, to lend him her song once more. She obliges, albeit reluctantly, intent on two objectives: teaching Homer the true meaning of war and memorializing the women left unsung.

"[T]he novel draws cohesion from the fragmented voices of women. In presenting her audience with so many voices, Haynes could have written a cacophony. Instead, she has conducted a choir."

What follows is a series of primarily self-contained chapters tackling not only the Trojan War but also its long and drawn-out aftermath. For the most part, each chapter is its own entity and does not follow a linear timeline. Creusa runs through a smoke-choked city in search of her husband. Briseis is enslaved by her family’s murderer. Laodamia laments the death of her king. A rejected Oenone raises her son as a single mother atop Mount Ida.

While these stories give A THOUSAND SHIPS the feel of a series of thematically connected vignettes, the book is lent narrative scaffolding by the Trojan women and Penelope's letters to her husband, Odysseus, transforming it into something between a collection and a novel.

Nestled between stories of goddesses arguing over golden apples and wives offering prophetic warnings to their husbands, the Trojan women are living in the direct aftermath of the war. Their stories converge in these chapters as they huddle together on a beach at the outskirts of the Greek encampment. Their fates hang in a precarious balance. They are held captive by the Greeks and are waiting to be divided as spoils of war among the men who have slaughtered their loved ones and laid waste to their homes. Still, they continue to hope --- for those who made it out of Troy and for one another --- and, in doing so, exhibit bravery even in the depths of loss and despair.

Penelope’s letters, on the other hand, offer a witty respite from the traumatic stories of other women as she awaits her husband’s return in a quiet rage. She listens as the bard sings songs of his exploits across the seas and grows more cross by the year as she imagines Odysseus getting sidetracked from his destination (her) by an endless parade of monsters, cannibals and enchantresses.

Even as the tone of the chapters sways from daunted to desperate to downright ruthless, the novel draws cohesion from the fragmented voices of women. In presenting her audience with so many voices, Haynes could have written a cacophony. Instead, she has conducted a choir.

If THE ILIAD is an ode to the actors, then A THOUSAND SHIPS commemorates those acted upon: “victims of men, slaves of men, survivors of men.” With the wisdom of Athena and a pinch of humor, Haynes considers the many ways in which women exhibit strength, even in situations of relative powerlessness.

Reviewed by Kayla Provencher on January 29, 2021

From BookReporter.com

 

May title

 Our May title is The Seed Keeper by Diane Wilson. The group will meet on Wednesday May 25th at 1pm at the library in the Local History Room and on zoom. There are copies of the book to check out here at the library as well as a hoopla ebook edition and audiobook edition (if you have any questions about using hoopla just let us know!). We'll also have a CD audiobook available if you would like that format.

Rosalie Iron Wing has grown up in the woods with her father, Ray, a former science teacher who tells her stories of plants, of the stars, of the origins of the Dakota people. Until, one morning, Ray doesn’t return from checking his traps. Told she has no family, Rosalie is sent to live with a foster family in nearby Mankato—where the reserved, bookish teenager meets rebellious Gaby Makespeace, in a friendship that transcends the damaged legacies they’ve inherited.

On a winter’s day many years later, Rosalie returns to her childhood home. A widow and mother, she has spent the previous two decades on her white husband’s farm, finding solace in her garden even as the farm is threatened first by drought and then by a predatory chemical company. Now, grieving, Rosalie begins to confront the past, on a search for family, identity, and a community where she can finally belong. In the process, she learns what it means to be descended from women with souls of iron—women who have protected their families, their traditions, and a precious cache of seeds through generations of hardship and loss, through war and the insidious trauma of boarding schools.

Weaving together the voices of four indelible women, The Seed Keeper is a beautifully told story of reawakening, of remembering our original relationship to the seeds and, through them, to our ancestors.                             ---https://milkweed.org/book/the-seed-keeper

April title

Our title for April is The Woman They Could Not Silence; One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear by Kate Moore. Pick up a print copy (starting on March 30th) or access online via hoopla (ebook) or Overdrive/Libby (audiobook) (ebook). We will also have this title available in Large Print and audio CD format. The book group will meet in the Local History Room at the library on Wednesday April 27th at 1pm. There will also be a zoom option.

From the New York Times, USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of The Radium Girls comes another dark and dramatic but ultimately uplifting tale of a forgotten woman whose inspirational journey sparked lasting change for women’s rights and exposed injustices that still resonate today.

​

1860: As the clash between the states rolls slowly to a boil, Elizabeth Packard, housewife and mother of six, is facing her own battle. The enemy sits across the table and sleeps in the next room. Her husband of twenty-one years is plotting against her because he feels increasingly threatened – by Elizabeth’s intellect, independence, and unwillingness to stifle her own thoughts. So Theophilus makes a plan to put his wife back in her place. One summer morning, he has her committed to an insane asylum.

​

The horrific conditions inside the Illinois State Hospital in Jacksonville, Illinois, are overseen by Dr. Andrew McFarland, a man who will prove to be even more dangerous to Elizabeth than her traitorous husband. But most disturbing is that Elizabeth is not the only sane woman confined to the institution. There are many rational women on her ward who tell the same story: they've been committed not because they need medical treatment, but to keep them in line – conveniently labeled “crazy” so their voices are ignored.

​

No one is willing to fight for their freedom and, disenfranchised both by gender and the stigma of their supposed madness, they cannot possibly fight for themselves. But Elizabeth is about to discover that the merit of losing everything is that you then have nothing to lose...

​

Bestselling author Kate Moore brings her sparkling narrative voice to The Woman They Could Not Silence, an unputdownable story of the forgotten woman who courageously fought for her own freedom – and in so doing freed millions more.

 

Elizabeth’s refusal to be silenced and her ceaseless quest for justice not only challenged the medical science of the day, and led to a giant leap forward in human rights, it also showcased the most salutary lesson: sometimes, the greatest heroes we have are those inside ourselves.              --from the author's website

 

March title

     You probably read this one in high school so it's time to revisit it!  Our title for March (which happens to be Women's History Month) is The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. Pick up a copy at the library or access online (see below).  We will meet at the the library and via zoom on Wednesday March 23rd at 1pm.   

 There are several editions of both the ebook and the audiobook in hoopla.  It's also available in Overdrive/Libby. The print copy we are reading is called the "definitive" edition.

Hope to see you there!

Meeting options for February meeting

The library book group will meet this Wednesday February 23^rd at 1pm in the Local History Room at the library.  If you can’t make it in person but would like to join via zoom the link is below.

Enjoy your week!

 

Topic: February Book Group

Time: Feb 23, 2022 01:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

 

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83121721518?pwd=ZFVpTmVxVkRPNlFBL3Mzb1ozZmxpZz09

 

Meeting ID: 831 2172 1518

Passcode: 394958

 

February title

 

Our February book title is The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett.  We'll meet in person and on zoom on Wednesday February 23rd at 1pm.

Copies of the book are available at the library.  Regular print, large print, cd audiobook and Overdrive/Libby ebook and audiobook editions are available for this title.

 

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. Many 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 her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters’ storylines intersect?

Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person’s decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.

As with her New York Times-bestselling debut The Mothers, Brit Bennett offers an engrossing page-turner about family and relationships that is immersive and provocative, compassionate and wise.       ---www.penguinrandomhouse.com

 

 

 

American Dirt

 We’ll be meeting to discuss American Dirt on Wednesday January 26^th at 1pm here at the library (in the Local History Room).  We are also offering the option of participating via zoom.  The link to the zoom meeting is below.  Just click on the first link in the invitation and it should get you into the zoom ‘waiting room’ and I will let you into the meeting.  (The information below the first link is how to connect via telephone, so you can ignore that part unless that’s the only way you have of joining in). Let me know if you have any questions about how to join.

 

Topic: January Book Group

Time: Jan 26, 2022 01:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

 

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83730297155?pwd=bTVVMGJhOFJCK214azhZcmZ5cGp0UT09

 

Meeting ID: 837 3029 7155

Passcode: 024130

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