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!