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WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON
BOOK GROUP |
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Book discussions are held on the third Wednesday of each month (excluding summer), from
1:00-2:00pm. Meetings are held in the Trustees' Room.
The following is a list of titles that will be discussed during the 2008 season. All books announced are tentative, based on availability of multiple copies. To confirm dates, book selections, or for more information, call 978-686-4080, ext. 16.
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Family Tree, by Barbara Delinsky - December 19, 2007
"Dana Clarke has always longed for the stability of home and family - her own childhood was not an easy one. Now she has married a man she adores who is from a prominent New England family, and she is about to give birth to their first child. But what should be the happiest day of her life becomes the day her world falls apart. Her daughter is born beautiful and healthy, but no one can help noticing the African American traits in her appearance. Dana's husband, to her great shock and dismay, begins to worry that people will think Dana has had an affair." "The only way to repair the damage done is for Dana to track down the father she never knew and to explore the possibility of African American lineage in his family history. Dana's determination to discover the truth becomes a poignant journey back through her past and her husband's heritage that unearths secrets rooted in prejudice and fear."
This title is also available on Audiocassette and CD.
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When Madeline Was Young, by Jane Hamilton - January 16, 2008
"When Aaron Maciver's beautiful young wife, Madeline, suffers brain damage in a bike accident, she is left with the intellectual powers of a six-year-old. In the years that follow, Aaron and his second wife care for Madeline with deep tenderness and devotion as they raise two children of their own." "Narrated by Aaron's son, Mac, When Madeline Was Young chronicles the Maciver family through the decades, from Mac's childhood growing up with Madeline and his cousin Buddy in Wisconsin through the Vietnam War, through Mac's years as a husband with children of his own, and through Buddy's involvement with the subsequent Gulf Wars. Jane Hamilton, with her usual humor and keen observations of human relationships, explores the Maciver's unusual situation and examines notions of childhood (through Mac and Buddy's actual youth as well as Madeline's infantilization) and a rivalry between Buddy's and Mac's families that spans decades and various wars. She captures the pleasures and frustrations of marriage and family, and she exposes the role that past relationships, rivalries, and regrets inevitably play in the lives of adults." "Inspired in part by Elizabeth Spencer's Light in the Piazza, Hamilton offers an honest portrait of how a family tragedy forever shapes and alters the boundaries of love."
This title is also available on CD and in Large Print. |
Shadow Catcher, by Marianne Wiggins - February 20, 2008
"The Shadow Catcher inhabits the space where past and present intersect, interweaving narratives from two different eras: the first fraught passion between turn-of-the-century icon Edward Curtis (1868-1952) and his muse-wife, Clara; and a twenty-first-century journey of redemption." "Narrated in the first person by a reimagined writer named Marianne Wiggins, the novel begins in Hollywood, where top producers are eager to sentimentalize the complicated life of Edward Curtis as a sunny biopic: "It's got the outdoors. It's got adventure. It's got the do-good element." Yet, contrary to Curtis's esteemed public reputation as servant to his nation, the artist was an absent husband and disappearing father. Jump to the next generation, when Marianne's own father, John Wiggins (1920-1970), would live and die in equal thrall to the impulse of wanderlust." "Were the two men running from or running to? Dodging the false beacons of memory and legend, Marianne amasses disparate clues - photographs and hospital records, newspaper clippings and a rare white turquoise bracelet - to recover those moments that went unrecorded, "to hear the words only the silent ones can speak." |
Charity Girl by Michael Lowenthal - March 19, 2008
"Charity Girl examines a dark period in our history when fear and patriotic fervor led to devastating consequences. During World War I, the U.S. government waged a moral and medical campaign, incarcerating and quarantining fifteen thousand young women who were found to have venereal disease." "Frieda Mintz is a seventeen-year-old Jewish bundle wrapper at Jordan Marsh in Boston. She's struck out on her own in the wake of her mother's determination to marry her off to a wealthy man twice her age. Then she spends one impulsive night with "a mensch, a U.S. Army private, ready to brave the trenches Over There." Unfortunately, Felix Morse leaves Frieda not just with vivid memories but with an unspeakable disease. Soon after, she is tracked down and sent to a makeshift detention center, where she suffers invasive physical exams, the discipline of an overbearing matron, and a painful erosion of self-worth. She's buoyed, though, by the strong women around her - her fellow patients and a sympathetic social worker - who, in depending on one another, seek to forge a new independence." "Charity Girl lays bare an ugly part of our past when the government exercised a questionable level of authority at the expense of some of its most vulnerable citizens; it also casts long shadows, exploring questions of desire, identity, and the balance between the public good and individual freedom."
This title is also available in Large Print.
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Abide with Me, by Elizabeth Strout - April 16, 2008
"Author Elizabeth Strout welcomes readers back to the archetypal, lovely landscape of northern New England, where the events of her first novel, Amy and Isabelle, unfolded. In the late 1950s, in the small town of West Annett, Maine, a minister struggles to regain his calling, his family, and his happiness in the wake of profound loss. At the same time, the community he has served so charismatically must come to terms with its own strengths and failings - faith and hypocrisy, loyalty and abandonment - when a dark secret is revealed." "Tyler Caskey has come to love West Annett, "just up the road" from where he was born. The short, brilliant summers and the sharp, piercing winters fill him with awe - as does his congregation, full of good people who seek his guidance and listen earnestly as he preaches. But after suffering a terrible loss, Tyler finds it hard to return to himself as he once was. He hasn't had The Feeling - that God is all around him, in the beauty of the world - for quite some time. He struggles to find the right words in his sermons and in his conversations with those facing crises of their own, and to bring his five-year-old daughter, Katherine, out of the silence she has observed in the wake of the family's tragedy." "A congregation that had once been patient and kind during Tyler's grief now questions his leadership and propriety. In the kitchens, classrooms, offices, and stores of the village, anger and gossip have started to swirl. And in Tyler's darkest hour, a startling discovery will test his congregation's humanity - and his own will to endure the kinds of trials that sooner or later test us all."
This title is also available in Large Print.
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