Check Out Six All-New Book Club Choices! |
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All Adults Here by Emma Straub
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When Astrid Strick witnesses a school bus accident in the center of town, it jostles loose a memory from her young parenting days, decades earlier. Suddenly, Astrid realizes she was not the parent she thought she’d been to her three now-grown children. Now, Astrid’s youngest son is drifting, making his own parenting mistakes. Her daughter is pregnant yet struggling to give up her adolescence. And her eldest seems to measure his life by standards no one else shares. It might be that only Astrid’s 13-year-old granddaughter and her new friend understand the courage it takes to tell the truth to the people you love most.
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The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd
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“I am Ana. I was the wife of Jesus.” So begins this story of a young woman raised in a wealthy family with ties to the ruler of Galilee. She is rebellious and ambitious, a relentless seeker with a brilliant, curious mind and a daring spirit. She yearns for a pursuit worthy of her life, but finds no outlet for her considerable talents. Defying the expectations placed on women, she engages in furtive scholarly pursuits and writes secret narratives about neglected and silenced women. When she meets the 18-year-old Jesus, each is drawn to and enriched by the other’s spiritual and philosophical ideas. He becomes a floodgate for her intellect, but also the awakener of her heart. Their marriage unfolds with love and conflict, humor and pathos in Nazareth, where her impetuous streak occasionally invites danger.
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The Book of Lost Friends by Lisa Wingate
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Louisiana, 1875. In the tumultuous aftermath of Reconstruction, three young women set off as unwilling companions on a perilous quest toward Texas. There’s Lavinia, the pampered heir to a now-destitute plantation; Juneau Jane, her illegitimate free-born Creole half-sister; and Hannie, Lavinia’s former slave. For Lavinia and Juneau Jane the journey is one of financial desperation, but for Hannie, it reignites an agonizing question: could her long-lost family still be out there? In 1987 Louisiana, first-year teacher Benedetta Silva a subsidized job at a poor rural school seems like the ticket to canceling her hefty student debt...until she lands in a tiny, out-of-step town that seems suspicious of new ideas and new people. But it’s here that Benny discovers the century-old history of three young women, a long-ago journey, and a hidden book that could change everything.
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A Burning by Megha Majumdar
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Jivan is a Muslim girl from the slums, determined to move up in life, who is accused of executing a terrorist attack on a train because of a careless comment on Facebook. PT Sir is an opportunistic gym teacher who hitches his aspirations to a right-wing political party, and finds that his own ascent becomes linked to Jivan's fall. Lovely, an irresistible outcast whose exuberant voice and dreams of glory fill the novel with warmth and hope and humor--has the alibi that can set Jivan free, but it will cost her everything she holds dear.
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The Girl with the Louding Voice by Abi Dare
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Adunni is a 14-year-old Nigerian girl who knows what she wants: an education. This, her mother has told her, is the only way to get a "louding voice"--the ability to speak for herself and decide her own future. But instead, Adunni's father sells her to be the third wife of a local man who is eager for her to bear him a son and heir. When Adunni runs away to the city, hoping to make a better life, she finds that the only option before her is servitude to a wealthy family. As a yielding daughter, a subservient wife, and a powerless slave, Adunni is told, by words and deeds, that she is nothing. But while misfortunes might muffle her voice for a time, they cannot mute it.
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My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell
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2000. Bright, ambitious, and yearning for adulthood, 15-year-old Vanessa Wye becomes entangled in an affair with Jacob Strane, her magnetic and guileful 42-year-old English teacher. 2017. Amid the rising wave of allegations against powerful men, a reckoning is coming due. Strane has been accused of sexual abuse by a former student, who reaches out to Vanessa, and now Vanessa suddenly finds herself facing an impossible choice: remain silent, firm in the belief that her teenage self willingly engaged in this relationship, or redefine herself and the events of her past. But how can Vanessa reject her first love, the man who fundamentally transformed her and has been a persistent presence in her life? Is it possible that the man she loved as a teenager--and who professed to worship only her--may be far different from what she has always believed?
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