Lori's suggestions for March Book Selection

Book club choices for March 2010
Submitted by Lori Maxfield

The Women by TC Boyle

Synopsis by the author from the official TC Boyle web site:

The Women is my twelfth novel and twentieth book of fiction overall. It hearkens back to The Inner Circle (2004) and The Road to Wellville (1993), in that it centers around the life of a historical figure, Frank Lloyd Wright, who, like Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey and John Harvey Kellogg, protagonists of the aformentioned books, was one of the great twentieth century forgers of our culture. The book is narrated by Tadashi Sato, an invented character who was a member of the Taliesin Apprenticeship in the 1930s. He provides three long introductions to each of the major sections of the book, and these move his own story forward even as the three sections take us backward in time. Each section is devoted to one of Frank Lloyd Wright's inamorata: Olgivanna, Miriam and Mamah. The text, purportedly written by Tadashi in collaboration with his Irish-American grandson-in-law, goes deeply into the points of view of these women (as well as that of Frank Lloyd Wright's first wife, Kitty, whom he abandoned when he ran off to Europe in 1909 with Mamah Borthwick Cheney, wife of one of his clients), and provides footnotes as a running commentary on the action and on the architect's ouevre. It is my hope that the reader will not only enjoy the ride--there is humor.

The Amazon.com Link:
http://www.amazon.com/Women-Novel-T-C -Boyle/dp/0143116479/ref=tmm_pap_title_0

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A Mercy by Toni Morrison

Synopsis from Wikipedia:

A Mercy is Toni Morrison's 9th novel. It was first published in 2008. A Mercy reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery in early America. It is both the story of mothers and daughters and the story of a primitive America. It made the New York Times Book Review list of "10 Best Books of 2008" as chosen by the paper's editors.

Florens, a slave, lives and works on Jacob Vaark's rural New York farm. Lina, a Native American and fellow laborer on the Vaark farm, relates in a parallel narrative how she became one of a handful of survivors of a smallpox plague that destroyed her tribe. Vaark's wife Rebekkah describes leaving England on a ship for the new world to be married to a man she has never seen. The deaths of their subsequent children are devastating, and Vaark accepts a young Florens from a debtor in the hopes that this new addition to the farm will help alleviate Rebekkah's loneliness. Vaark, himself an orphan and poorhouse survivor, describes his journeys from New York to Maryland and Virginia, commenting on the role of religion in the culture of the different colonies, along with their attitudes toward slavery.

All these characters are bereft of their roots, struggling to survive in a new and alien environment filled with danger and disease. When smallpox threatens Rebekkah's life in 1692, Florens, now sixteen, is sent to find a black freedman who has some knowledge of herbal medicines. Her journey is dangerous, ultimately proving to be the turning point in her life.

Morrison examines the roots of racism going back to slavery's earliest days, providing glimpses of the various religious practices of the time, and showing the relationship between men and women in early America that often ended in female victimization. They are "of and for men," people who "never shape the world, The world shapes us." As the women journey toward self-enlightenment, Morrison often describes their progress in Biblical cadences, and by the end of this novel, the reader understands the significance of the title, "a mercy."

Amazon.com Link:
http://www.amazon.com/Mercy-Vintage-International-Toni-Morrison/dp/0307276767/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1264343522&sr=1-1

You Tube link of Toni Morrison discussing the book:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IZvMhQ2LIU

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The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

Synopsis from Wikipedia:

The Elegance of the Hedgehog (French: L'élégance du hérisson) is a novel by the French novelist and professor of philosophy Muriel Barbery. The book follows events in the life of a concierge, Renée Michel, whose deliberately concealed intelligence is uncovered by an unstable but intellectually precocious girl named Paloma Josse. Paloma is the daughter of an upper-class family living in the upscale Parisian apartment building where Renée works.

Featuring a number of erudite characters, The Elegance of the Hedgehog is full of allusions to literary works, music, films, and paintings. It incorporates themes relating to philosophy, class consciousness, and personal conflict. The events and ideas of the novel are presented through the thoughts and reactions, interleaved throughout the novel, of two narrators, Renée and Paloma. The changes of narrator are marked by switches of typeface. In the case of Paloma, the narration takes the form of her written journal entries and other philosophical reflections; Renée's story is also told in the first person but more novelistically and in the present tense.

First released in August 2006 by Gallimard, the novel became a publishing success in France the following year, selling over a million copies. It has been translated into several languages, and published in a number of countries outside France, including the United Kingdom and the United States, attracting critical praise for both the work and its author.

Amazon.com link:
http://www.amazon.com/Elegance-Hedgehog-Muriel-Barbery/dp/1933372605

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The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

Summary from browsebooks.com:
Winner of the 2007 BookBrowse Ruby Award.

Set during World War II in Germany, Markus Zusak’s groundbreaking new novel is the story of Liesel Meminger, a foster girl living outside of Munich. Liesel scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist – books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement before he is marched to Dachau. This is an unforgettable story about the ability of books to feed the soul.

Amazon.com link:
http://www.amazon.com/Book-Thief-Markus-Zusak/dp/0375842209/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1264344072&sr=1-1

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The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

Summary from enotes.com:
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was Carson McCullers’ first novel, published in 1940, when the author was just twenty-three years old. The book introduced themes that stayed with McCullers throughout her lifetime and appeared in all of her works, such as “spiritual isolation” and her notion of “the grotesque,” which she used to define characters who found themselves excluded from society because of one outstanding feature, physical or mental. The story takes place in a small town in the South in the late 1930s. The five central characters cross paths continually throughout the course of about a year, but due to the imbalances in their personalities they are not able to connect with one another, and are doomed to carry on the loneliness indicated in the title. An indication of their lack of coping mechanisms is that the one character that the other four confide their hopes and aspirations and theories to is a deaf mute, who cannot fully understand them nor communicate back to them anything more than his nodding acceptance of what they tell him. Throughout her short career, McCullers’ novels continued to present characters who were cut off from mankind, although, many critics believe, never as successfully as in this first, brilliant stroke.

Amazon.com link:

http://www.amazon.com/Heart-Lonely-Hunter-Oprahs-Book/dp/0618526412/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1264344949&sr=1-1