Suggestions for April books to be voted on at February 28 meeting.
The Storyteller – J. Picoult 480 pages
2013
Picoult takes on a heavy subject: the
Holocaust. At 25, Sage Singer is scarred, physically and mentally, by the car
accident that took her mother’s life. A baker who works in a New Hampshire shop
run by a former nun, Sage shuns almost all human contact, save for her
coworkers and her funeral-director boyfriend, who is married to another woman.
Sage ventures out of her comfort zone to befriend Josef Weber, an elderly
retired teacher, who throws her world into chaos when he tells her he’s a
former SS officer and asks her to help him end his life. Sage, whose
grandmother Minka survived the Holocaust, reaches out to the Department of
Justice and is connected with Leo Stein, an attorney and Nazi hunter. Leo
travels to NH to investigate Sage’s claims, which leads them to Minka, who
shares a connection to Josef. Based on extensive research, this is a powerful
and riveting, sometimes gut-wrenching read, in which Picoult brings a fresh
perspective to an oft-explored topic.
Destiny of The Republic – A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and The Murder of a President - 260
Pages
Author: Candice Millard (The River of Doubt) 2011 Amazon summary:
James A. Garfield was one of the most
extraordinary men ever elected president. Born into abject poverty, he rose to
become a wunderkind scholar, a Civil War hero, and admired reformist
congressman. Nominated for president against his will, he engaged in a fierce
battle with the corrupt political establishment. But four months after his
inauguration he was shot.
The drama of what happened subsequently is a
powerful story of a nation in turmoil. The unhinged assassin’s half-delivered
strike shattered the fragile national mood of a country so recently fractured
by civil war, and left the wounded president as the object of a bitter
behind-the-scenes struggle for power—over his administration, the nation’s
future, and over his medical care. As
his condition worsened, Alexander Graham Bell worked around the clock to
invent a new device capable of finding the bullet.
Meticulously researched, epic
in scope, and pulsating with an intimate human focus and high-velocity
narrative drive, it will stand alongside The Devil in the White City
and The Professor and the Madman as a classic of narrative history.
Mrs. Dalloway Author: Virginia Woolf, 216 Pages
2005 (I know Marilyn, another whole book about one
day)
Listed as #22 of the greatest
100 novels of all times. Currently 99
cents on Kindle
As Clarissa Dalloway walks through
London on a fine June morning, a sky-writing plane captures her attention. Like
the airplane's swooping path, Mrs. Dalloway follows Clarissa and those
whose lives brush hers--from Peter Walsh, whom she spurned, to her daughter
Elizabeth, the girl's angry teacher, and Septimus Warren Smith, who is sinking
into madness.
As Mrs. Dalloway prepares for the
party she is giving that evening, a series of events intrudes on her composure.
Her husband is invited to lunch with Lady Bruton. Peter Walsh appears, recently from India. His
sudden arrival evokes memories of a distant past, the choices she made, and her
wistful friendship with Sally Seton.
Woolf explores relationships between
women and men, and between women, as Clarissa muses, "It was something
central which permeated; something warm which broke up surfaces and rippled the
cold contact of man and woman, or of women together.... Her relation in the old
days with Sally Seton. Had not that, after all, been love?" While Clarissa
is transported to past afternoons with Sally, and as she sits mending her green
dress, Warren Smith catapults desperately into his delusions. The strands
connecting all these characters draws tighter as evening deepens. As she
immerses us in each inner life, Virginia Woolf offers exquisite, painful images
of the past bleeding into the present, of desire overwhelmed by society's
demands
Assistant DA Andy Barber is called to a
gruesome crime scene after Ben Rifkin, a 14-year-old boy, has been brutally
stabbed in a city park. One suspect seems likely, a pedophile who lives nearby
and is known to frequent the park, but suspicion turns quickly to another, much
more unlikely, suspect—Andy’s son Jacob, one of Ben’s classmates. It seems Ben
was not the paragon of virtue he was made out to be, for he had a mean streak
and had been harassing Jacob...but is this a sufficient motive for a
14-year-old to commit murder? Some fellow students post messages on Facebook
suggesting he’s guilty of the crime, and Jacob also admits to having shown a
“cool” knife to his friends. When Andy finds the knife, he disposes of it, but
he’s not sure he does this because he suspects his son is innocent or because
he suspects guilt. Complicating the family dynamic is Laurie, Jacob’s mother,
who’s at least half convinced that her son might indeed be capable of such a
heinous act. Andy has concealed his own past and he fears he may have both
inherited and passed down to Jacob a gene associated with aggressive behavior
in males.
The Lace
Reader Author: Brunonia Barry, 416 Pages 2009 From Publishers Weekly:
In Barry's captivating debut, Towner
Whitney, a dazed young woman descended from a long line of mind readers and
fortune tellers, has survived numerous traumas and returned to her hometown of
Salem, Mass., to recover. Any tranquility in her life is short-lived when her
beloved great-aunt Eva drowns under circumstances suggesting foul play.
Towner's suspicions are taken with a grain of salt given her history of
hallucinatory visions and self-harm. The mystery enmeshes local cop John
Rafferty, who had left the pressures of big city police work for a quieter life
in Salem and now finds himself falling for the enigmatic Towner as he mourns
Eva and delves into the history of the eccentric Whitney clan. Barry excels at
capturing the feel of smalltown life, and balances action with close looks at
the characters' inner worlds. Her pacing and use of different perspectives show
tremendous skill and will keep readers captivated all the way through.
