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!