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.