Book Discussion Group

     Ever read a book and really want to discuss it with someone?   Formed in December 2000, this group has discussed fiction, non-fiction, love stories, mysteries, sad stories, happy stories, horror stories and everything in between!   With twelve active members, a rousing discussion is always at hand.

     The Vermontville Township Library Book Discussion Group meets on the second Thursday of each month. Everyone is welcome.  Please contact the library for a copy of the selection of the month. 

 

Reading Schedule 2009

 

January--The Sisterhood of the Queen Mamas, by Annie Jones

An unlikely gaggle of women are drawn together by the Five Acres of Fabulous Finds Flea Market and become friends. Narrator Odessa and her friend Maxine are both pastors' wives of a certain age, and both love to meddle in other ladies' love lives. They set up the voluptuous Bernadette with a single pastor who's just moved to town, and they intervene when they suspect that another woman's boyfriend may be abusing her. In their spare time, they also try to figure out what's gone wrong between 40-something Jan, who still has the figure of a co-ed, and her taciturn husband. Along the way, Odessa realizes that her own marriage isn't perfect.

 

February--How to be Lost, by Amanda Eyre Ward

Fifteen years ago, on the day the three Winters sisters packed their most precious belongings in their mother's Oldsmobile and planned to run away from home just as soon as school was out, 5-year-old Ellie disappeared. The family never recovered: their abusive father drank himself to death; their unstable mother retreated deeper into her depression; and once-close sisters Caroline and Madeline grew far apart. Now, armed with a grainy People magazine photo of a young woman who might be a 20-year-old version of her beloved youngest sister, Caroline heads out for Montana on a quest to bring her back home.

 

March--Waltzing at the Piggly Wiggly, by Robert Dalby

The Piggly Wiggly has been the hub of the community of Second Creek, Mississippi, but now it may be forced to shut down. Determined to keep her favorite market open, Laurie Lepanto enlists the help of her fellow "Nitwitts." They are influential widows who love to socialize-and remain true to their beloved store. With the help of handsome widower and former ballroom dancer Powell Hampton, they have the ladies of Second Creek foxtrotting back into the market. It's become the town's most festive event: waltzing at the Piggly Wiggly (while someone else takes care of the shopping). But it's Laurie who's thrown for a whirl when the dancing sparks an unpredictable romance. It may be the best deal she's ever gotten at the Piggly Wiggly.

 

April--Home to Harmony, by Phillip Gulley

Welcome to the fictional town of Harmony, Ind. The town's characters include the wise Quaker pastor who narrates the book; a childless couple who spend their life savings (and then some) to wrest their niece from the grip of her alcoholic parents; and the narrow-minded church elder who "knew just enough Scripture to be annoying, but not enough to be transformed."

 

May--The Good Good Pig, by Sy Montgomery

A naturalist who spent months at a time living on her own among wild creatures in remote jungles, Sy Montgomery had always felt more comfortable with animals than with people. So she gladly opened her heart to a sick piglet who had been crowded away from nourishing meals by his stronger siblings. Yet Sy had no inkling that this piglet, later named Christopher Hogwood, would not only survive but flourish–and she soon found herself engaged with her small-town community in ways she had never dreamed possible. Unexpectedly, Christopher provided this peripatetic traveler with something she had sought all her life: an anchor (eventually weighing 750 pounds) to family and home

 

June--Like Dandelion dust, by Karen Kingsbury

It's the emotional story of an adoptive couple that tragically learns that the birth mother who gave up her son four years earlier has changed her mind. A forged signature on the paperwork makes it seem possible that they will lose their son, Joey, maybe forever. Like Dandelion Dust is the story of a mother's passion, and the lengths a couple is willing to go to, all for the love of a child.

 

July/August--Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain

In this enduring and internationally popular novel, Mark Twain combines social satire and dime-novel sensation with a rhapsody on boyhood and on America's pre-industrial past. Tom Sawyer is resilient, enterprising, and vainglorious, and in a series of adventures along the banks of the Mississippi he usually manages to come out on top. From petty triumphs over his friends and over his long-suffering Aunt Polly, to his intervention in a murder trial, Tom engages readers of all ages. He has long been a defining figure in the American cultural imagination.

September--Becky: The life and loves of Becky Thatcher by, Lenore Hart

Becky Thatcher wants to set the record straight. She was never the weeping ninny Mark Twain made her out to be in his famous novel. She knew Samuel Clemens before he was “Mark Twain,” when he was a wide-eyed dreamer who never could get his facts straight. Yes, she was Tom’s childhood sweetheart, but the true story of their love, and the dark secret that tore it apart, never made it into Twain’s novel.

 

October--Sarah’s Key, by Tatiana De Rosnay

De Rosnay's U.S. debut fictionalizes the 1942 Paris roundups and deportations, in which thousands of Jewish families were arrested, held at the Vélodrome d'Hiver outside the city, then transported to Auschwitz. Forty-five-year-old Julia Jarmond, American by birth, moved to Paris when she was 20 and is married to the arrogant, unfaithful Bertrand Tézac, with whom she has an 11-year-old daughter. Julia writes for an American magazine and her editor assigns her to cover the 60th anniversary of the Vél' d'Hiv' roundups. Julia soon learns that the apartment she and Bertrand plan to move into was acquired by Bertrand's family when its Jewish occupants were dispossessed and deported 60 years before. She resolves to find out what happened to the former occupants: Wladyslaw and Rywka Starzynski, parents of 10-year-old Sarah and four-year-old Michel. The more Julia discovers—especially about Sarah, the only member of the Starzynski family to survive—the more she uncovers about Bertrand's family, about France and, finally, herself.

 

November--Dream When You’re Feeling Blue, by Elizabeth Berg

Kitty and Louise Heaney say good-bye to their boyfriends Julian and Michael, who are going to fight overseas. On the domestic front, meat is rationed, children participate in metal drives, and Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller play songs that offer hope and lift spirits. And now the Heaney sisters sit at their kitchen table every evening to write letters–Louise to her fiancé, Kitty to the man she wishes fervently would propose, and Tish to an ever-changing group of men she meets at USO dances. In the letters the sisters send and receive are intimate glimpses of life both on the battlefront and at home. For Kitty, a confident, headstrong young woman, the departure of her boyfriend and the lessons she learns about love, resilience, and war will bring a surprise and a secret, and will lead her to a radical action for those she loves. The lifelong consequences of the choices the Heaney sisters make are at the heart of this superb novel about the power of love and the enduring strength of family.

 

December--Giovanni’s Light, by Phyllis Theroux

As the twenty-fifth of December approaches, no one can seem to muster up the usual Christmas spirit. Christmas merchandise languishes on store shelves and carols remain unsung. Taking the village by surprise, a harsh blizzard strands natives and visitors with nothing but the promise of a miracle to keep them warm. On a dark Christmas night, lives are permanently altered as an emotionally neglected little boy, an aloof father, a bored adolescent, a spiritually undernourished artist, and a retired schoolteacher are drawn by the light of a bonfire kindled by a lonely mountain man.