2024: Book Group Titles

After journalist Spencer-Wendel learns of her diagnosis of ALS, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease, she embarks on several adventures. This includes taking her fourteen-year-old daughter, Marina, to New York City's Kleinfeld's Bridal to shop for Marina's future wedding dress-- an occasion Spencer-Wendell knows she will never see. This is her account of living a full life with humor, courage, and love, accepting death with grace and dignity,...

"Spanning decades, generations, and America in the 1940s and today, The All-Girl Filling Station's Last Reunion is a fun-loving mystery about an Alabama woman today, and five women who in 1943 worked in a Phillips 66 gas station, during the WWII years. Like Fannie Flagg's classic Fried Green Tomatoes, this is a riveting, fun story of two families, set in present day America and during World War II, filled to the brim with Flagg's trademark funny voice...

Each summer the wealthy, seemingly perfect Sinclair family meets on their private island. Cadence, Johnny, Mirren, and Gat are a unit, especially during "summer 15," marking their fifteenth year on Beechwood-- the summer that Cady and Gat fall in love. Cady became involved in a mysterious accident, in which she sustained a blow to the head, and now suffers from debilitating migraines and memory loss. When she returns to Beechwood during summer 17,...

Lordor Nordstrom created, in his wisdom, not only a lively town and a prosperous legacy for himself but also a beautiful final resting place for his family, friends, and neighbors yet to come. "Resting place" turns out to be a bit of a misnomer, however. Odd things begin to happen, and it starts the whole town talking.

A boy grows to manhood while attempting to subdue the evil he unleashed on the world as an apprentice to the Master Wizard.

Presents an oral history of the dust storms that devastated the Great Plains during the Depression, following several families and their communities in their struggle to persevere despite the devastation.

"When Madeleine L'Engle was very small, she marvelled at the stars. They guided her throughout her life, making her feel part of a big and exciting world, even when she felt alone. They made her want to ask big questions-Why are we here? What is my place in the universe?-and let her imagination take flight. Books, too, were like stars-asking questions and proposing answers. Books kept Madeleine company, and soon, she began to write and share her own....

The book begins with newlywed Fernea's journey with her husband to the village where they will be living. It speaks of her misgivings about being such an outsider, entering such an unfamiliar environment, and shows her resentment at beginning her marriage living in a two-room mud hut with no plumbing. The story is one of a U.S. woman learning how to live in an environment which is entirely alien to her. [...] Her description of village life is very...

The Handmaid's Tale is not only a radical and brilliant departure for Margaret Atwood, it is a novel of such power that the reader will be unable to forget its images and its forecast. Set in the near future, it describes life in what was once the United States, now called the Republic of Gilead, a monotheocracy that has reacted to social unrest and a sharply declining birthrate by reverting to, and going beyond, the repressive intolerance of the...

"Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. Aibileen is a wise, regal black maid raising her seventeenth white child. Minny, Aibileen's best friend, can cook like nobody's business but can't mind her tongue. It is 1962, and these three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step that forever changes a town and the way women --mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends -- view one another"--Page 4 of...