November - The Snow Child

Most of us probably don't remember the old days, when two of three members at a meeting had gotten to be the norm. Well, three was our turnout this month and only two of us had finished the book. While we both liked the book and enjoyed discussing it, it was hard to have a sustained discussion. 

If you were a person who picked up this book and found it entirely too depressing in the first 50 pages to continue, I beg of you to power on. Once the titular Snow Child has been created, once Jack and Mabel find friends, the book begins to be about something entirely different. It becomes a book about hope and renewed love, and family, in whatever form you find it. 

In the end, Alaska seems a little less imposing and hard and a little more about the hope of spring and the beauty of winter. And that snow child? Well, you'll just have to read the book to find out what happens to her. 

September and October

The 2021 Omaha Reads selection was Amber Ruffin's and Lacey Lamar's You'll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey, which made it our selection for September. And the title is right - we couldn't believe what happened to Lacey. It was a tough read, especially since we live in the town where all of these things are happening. We're an educated group of ladies and don't live with our heads in the sand, but I think that all of us were shocked to find out just how racist so many of those who live in our city are. 

This is a book that really got us talking - about what happened to Lacey and to Amber and to their parents. It really made us think about the things we've done and said in the past that might have made it into a book like this. We actually went around the table and each of us made a confession. I was proud of our group for being able to do that and proud that we are a close enough group that we felt safe enough to be able to say those things. 

We all learned a lot from this book but one of the main things we may all of taken away from this book is to speak up when we see someone being racist. The number of times that others stood by while Lacey's job was in jeopardy, for example, were shocking. 

For October, the task was to find a book by a Canadian author which was set in Canada. After turning down a lot of books because they seemed to be too dark, our choice was Miriam Toews' A Complicated Kindness. It was too dark. And depressing. All of us found ourselves skimming at some point in the book as it seemed that the main character, teenager Nomi, was doing the same thing over and over again. But in writing the book that way, Toews does manage to convey the bleakness of life in a small, religious town in the middle of nowhere. Along the way, she alway sneaks in the details that move the book along. While we understood the reason Toews ended the book the way she did, none of us was a fan. We did discuss the book but as it was not a popular choice, it was tough to keep things on track. It was just too hard to read about the terrible things that happened to this young girl. 

August - A Long Petal of the Sea

It was hot, the boss (ha!) was gone, but I'm told that the questions I sent were discussed (although that might have been an agreed upon strategy to make me happy!) and Becky's backyard won high praise. This one was not a hit, although many agreed it was an eye opener about some historical events, particularly the Spanish Civil War. 

It was a disappointment for me, too; I'm finding it hard to believe that so many found this to be a "best of" book for 2020. Sadly, we can't recommend this for other book clubs, although there is a lot to be learned here, including that Allende's father was once the president of Chile. 

July - The Summer Before The War

The Summer Before The War was our selection for a book about a teacher, with the lead character, Beatrice Nash, moving to a small town in East Sussex, England to accept a post as the Latin teacher just before World War II breaks out. 

It soon becomes obvious that Beatrice won't actually do that much teaching, at least not of students in a classroom, in this book but it was still a book that gave us a fair amount to discuss. It is a book that really helps the reader see both the time and place setting. Many of us are big fans of historical fiction and many of us enjoyed the slow pace of this book as it developed its characters. We by and large found the final chapters a bit jarring, though, as they are really different from the rest of the book. When asked which was each of our favorite characters from the book, most liked either Beatrice or Agatha (the woman responsible for bringing Beatrice to the village) for their wit, self-awareness, and longing to change the way of women. 

While we all agreed the book could have been 100 pages shorter, we weren't sure we were willing to give up the lovely descriptions or the meat of the story. Because Simonson does load the book up with heavier topics - immigration, war, sexual assault, class. The major theme, though, is the way women were forced to live their lives in that time and place. We talked about how so many of the women had learned out to use the men to get what they wanted without them actually having any power. We talked about the plight of a young immigrant who was pregnant because of rape and how it didn't matter to people why she was pregnant, only that she was. We talked about how Beatrice would not have been given the position without intervention, despite the fact that she was clearly the best candidate. 

It's a book that strolls alone as peacefully as the village in which it's set and it's long, which makes it a more difficult choice for some readers. But book clubs will find plenty to talk about here. 

June - The Little Paris Bookshop

My but we had a tough time staying on topic with our discussion in June! Luckily, more than one of us would get us back on track. You'd think we only saw each other once a year, not once a month! But there always seems to be so much to catch up with. 

This book was not just our book about books but also our translated work; it was originally written in German, although Nina George now lives in France. We could definitely see both German and French influences in the book; a husband that's ok with his wife having a lover is definitely a French thing. 

One of the publisher's questions that we discussed was how a book can heal or help you through things. Mostly we agreed that they can be an escape or a way to lift your mood but we did have a couple of examples where people felt that books had really impacted their lives. Another question had to do with a quote from a book that essentially asks if this is the kind of book that you enjoy but then forget about. For the most part, people felt like this is a book they would remember, although Linda had previously read it and could only remember that the bookshop was a barge. 

There's a scene in the book that we all agreed really seemed out of place in the book, despite the way George used it to move the characters along (here we felt like it was the Germanic coming through). 

We talked about how deceptive the title of the book is - the bookshop is only in Paris a short part of the book and while books play a big part in the book, the shop itself is more important for being the home to Jean and Max than for being a store. But we also acknowledged that we'd probably not have picked up this book had it been the titled "The Lavender Room," which is the translation of the title George gave it. Still, we were glad that we'd read it because it had a lot of interesting characters and made for good discussion...when we could stay on track!

May - Behold The Dreamers

We are all vaccinated! We are all vaccinated! It was so nice to get together at someone's home again, made even better by knowing that we had all taken the precaution to keep others safe. It is a little embarrassing that Ann's garage is cleaner than my house but it did make for a nice place to meet, enjoy the sun coming in the open door, and all fit comfortably. 

We had a lot to say about Behold The Dreamers. A basket of questions was passed around, some of which were team questions. Every question that got asked elicited not just a response but a longer discussion of other aspects of the book. There were 17 slips with questions on them but we only got to 6 of them before an hour was up! We talked about the similarities and disparities between the couples in their marriages and their parenting styles and between the two main women. It's the mark of a good writer that Mbue Imbolo could make us understand and even sympathize with the wealthy couple. We talked about what Jende and Neni both went through and were willing to do to stay in the United States. That led to Linda being able to enlighten us on her own experiences working with immigrants.  

Quite a few people didn't care for the ending, feeling that there was surely something more that Jende could have done to stay in the U. S. and that he left Neni with no choice despite her willingness to do whatever it took to stay. But it was also noted that in going back, they had changed their lives in Cameroon so much that life there might now be better. Some of us didn't feel it was in character for Neni to do what she did to Cathy, but, again, she was desperate to stay as we saw again and again. 

Despite any concerns about flaws of the book, it's safe to say that this is a great book club choice which so much to discuss. And even though it's an Oprah book club selection, there is only the slightest hint of the kind of thing that has steered our book club away from Oprah's choices for years. 

April - Sunburn by Laura Lippman

We have so many members fully vaccinated (and more part way there) that we were finally comfortable to meet INSIDE for the first time in more 13 months! In fact, it was the first time we've physically been together in six months and it was so much fun! 

It would have been really easy for us to spend those two hours we were together just chatting, but we do like to call ourselves a book club so we really should spend some time every meeting talking about the book. To that end, we played a board game (albeit, one that had entirely too many spaces on it - gotta work on that) and divided into teams to answer questions. Some had multiple answers with the chance to move multiple spaces and many had the chance for one team to make some moves on the other team's turn. 

We learned that some of us can really retain details, especially when it comes to food being discussed in a book. We found that we can justify a character's behavior even as we also find the character to be reprehensible on so many levels and that we can be very creative when comparing a character to an animal. And we found that even when we like a book, if you ask about the ways a book failed, we can pick that book apart like nobody's business. 

Because of the way we chose books this year, it's been a year of unusual choices and this one definitely isn't the kind of book we would normally read or recommend for book clubs. But we did find a lot to talk about with this one and worked our way through all of the questions, even if we never reached the end of the game board.

January, February, And March!

Oh, my! How the year has gotten away from me! Let's try to catch up, shall we?

In January we read Ariel Lawhon's I Was Anastasia. We had mixed feelings about this book. As with so many books where there are two story lines, we all felt like Anastasia's story was stronger than Anna's. The bigger issue, even though we understood why Lawhon did it, was the way that Lawhon wrote Anna's story in reverse. It made it difficult to keep track of that part of the story. But it did mean that Lawhon could have the two stories converge and reveal the truth behind Anna. We all knew, or looked up, the story of the Romanovs, so we also weren't entirely surprised by how the book ended; still, we held out hope for Anna. While this wasn't a perfect book, it was interesting, found us doing some research, and made for a good discussion. 

In February, we missed our meeting so we tried to discuss both our February and March books at our March "meeting." Our February book was Alice Walker's The Color Purple, which served as both our classic book for the year and fit the month's theme, which was banned books. The Color Purple has been banned in many places because of the amount of violence, particularly to women, in it. That was also the reason that many of our club couldn't keep reading the book. That made it hard to discuss the book so we spent very little time with it, other than to talk about how much of behavior, particularly violent behavior, is inherent versus learned. 

For March, we read Rachel Joyce's The Music Shop which we all enjoyed. Except...some of us really didn't like the ending and felt it was too staged and too cutesy. We liked Joyce's characters and we had many different favorites. We really enjoyed the music aspects of this book. With all of the music pieces Joyce referenced, Lisa S decided to make a Spotify playlist from the book, only to discover that there were already several options on Spotify. Because we hadn't talked in two months and were trying to talk about two books in one meeting, we didn't talk about this one as much as we might have otherwise. 

We were really hoping that with as many of us planning to be fully vaccinated by the April meeting we might be able to get together outside. Sadly, it's going to be too chilly yet. But by May, we may be able to really get together again. So looking forward to it!