TWN Book Club

Welcome to our Book Club! Each month we’ll review a different book. Discussions are held on both books throughout the month. This month's selection is featured as bulleted items (below)!  Books are selected by the 25th of each month for the following month.

Members are encouraged to suggest titles for selection in the Book Club area of our Forum. If yours is picked, you will be notified by Private Message, mentioned on this page, and given 3 referral points!
 
Please join us in the Book Club in our Women’s Forum to discuss this month’s selection! Not a member yet? It's free and easy to join! Register Here.


UPDATE: Author Lisa See, Peony in Love, will be joining us for a discussion July 29, 8pm EST!

August's Selection is Here!

Buy it HERE! New or Used!

For used prices, click on the book below, then look BELOW the large centered price. 
You will see "New and Used available from $4.50" (ex) click there.

 

 

April: Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, by Lisa See....Click Here to Read Review & Buy The Book!

This month’s book was selected by Thinkhappy!

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, by Lisa See

Historical/Fiction

Summary:

Lily at 80 reflects on her life, beginning with her daughter days in 19th-century rural China. Foot-binding was practiced by all but the poorest families, and the graphic descriptions of it are not for the fainthearted. Yet women had nu shu, their own secret language. At the instigation of a matchmaker, Lily and Snow Flower, a girl from a larger town and supposedly from a well-connected, wealthy family, become laotong, bound together for life. Even after Lily learns that Snow Flower is not from a better family, even when Lily marries above her and Snow Flower beneath her, they remain close, exchanging nu shu written on a fan. When war comes, Lily is separated from her husband and children. She survives the winter helped by Snow Flower's husband, a lowly butcher, until she is reunited with her family. As the years pass, the women's relationship changes; Lily grows more powerful in her community, bitter, and harder, until at last she breaks her bond with Snow Flower. They are not reunited until Lily tries to make the dying Snow Flower's last days comfortable. Their friendship, and this tale, illustrates the most profound of human emotions: love and hate, self-absorption and devotion, pride and humility, to name just a few. Even though the women's culture and upbringing may be vastly different from readers' own, the life lessons are much the same, and they will be remembered long after the details of this fascinating story are forgotten.      -Molly Connally, Chantilly Regional Library, VA

 

Please join us in the Book Club in our Women's Forum for club discussions. General comments about the book may be left below.

August: Three Junes, by Julia Glass.........................................Click here to read a review and buy the book!

 

Three Junes, by Julia Glass

Women's Fiction

Summary:

From Library Journal

This strong and memorable debut novel draws the reader deeply into the lives of several central characters during three separate Junes spanning ten years. At the story's onset, Scotsman Paul McLeod, the father of three grown sons, is newly widowed and on a group tour of the Greek islands as he reminisces about how he met and married his deceased wife and created their family. Next, in the book's longest section, we see the world through the eyes of Paul's eldest son, Fenno, a gay man transplanted to New York City and owner of a small bookstore, who learns lessons about love and loss that allow him to grow in unexpected ways. And finally there is Fern, an artist and book designer whom Paul met on his trip to Greece several years earlier. She is now a young widow, pregnant and also living in New York City, who must make sense of her own past and present to be able to move forward in her life. In this novel, expectations and revelations collide in startling ways. Alternately joyful and sad, this exploration of modern relationships and the families people both inherit or create for themselves is highly recommended for all fiction collections. Maureen Neville, Trenton P.L., NJ

 

July: Peony in Love, by Lisa See......................Click here to read review and buy the book

Peony in Love,  by Lisa See

Women's Fiction

Summary:

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Set in 17th-century China, See's fifth novel is a coming-of-age story, a ghost story, a family saga and a work of musical and social history. As Peony, the 15-year-old daughter of the wealthy Chen family, approaches an arranged marriage, she commits an unthinkable breach of etiquette when she accidentally comes upon a man who has entered the family garden. Unusually for a girl of her time, Peony has been educated and revels in studying The Peony Pavilion, a real opera published in 1598, as the repercussions of the meeting unfold. The novel's plot mirrors that of the opera, and eternal themes abound: an intelligent girl chafing against the restrictions of expected behavior; fiction's educative powers; the rocky path of love between lovers and in families. It figures into the plot that generations of young Chinese women, known as the lovesick maidens, became obsessed with The Peony Pavilion, and, in a Werther-like passion, many starved themselves to death. See (Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, etc.) offers meticulous depiction of women's roles in Qing and Ming dynasty China (including horrifying foot-binding scenes) and vivid descriptions of daily Qing life, festivals and rituals. Peony's vibrant voice, perfectly pitched between the novel's historical and passionate depths, carries her story beautifully—in life and afterlife.

Buy the Book Here USED for as little as $6!

June's Selection: Love and Biology at the Center of the Universe.......Click here to read review & buy the book

This month’s book was selected by Thinkhappy!

Love and Biology at the Center of the Universe,  Jenny Shortridge

Women's Fiction

Summary:

 “An accomplished and superior novelist” (Statesman Journal) delivers a bittersweet book about a woman’s midlife crisis that asks: How does a good girl know when to finally let herself be bad?

When she learns that her college sweetheart husband has been seeing another woman, Mira Serafino’s perfect world is shattered and she wants no one, least of all her big Italian family, to know. She heads north—with no destination and little money— stopping only when her car breaks down in Seattle. She takes a job at the offbeat Coffee Shop at the Center of the Universe, where she’ll experience a terrifying but invigorating freedom, and meet someone she’ll come to love: the new Mira.

Buy it here USED for under $6!

 

March: Here She Lies - by Kate Pepper.....................Click Here to Read Review & Buy The Book!

This month's book was selected by member TK4Life!  Thank you, TK!

Here She Lies, by Kate Pepper

Mystery/Thriller

Summary:

When she discovers evidence of her husband's infidelity, Annie Goodman's life is thrown asunder and she flees with her young daughter to the one person she has always trusted-her twin sister, Julie. In this safe harbor, the sisters quickly become as close as they were as children. But when Annie tries to get a job, her safe harbor turns rocky-she's arrested, her credit cards are stolen, and her very identity is in question. Seeking solace with Julie, she finds her twin sister gone-along with her daughter.

It soon becomes clear that nothing Annie previously believed is certain-and that she is the only one who can find her child, and reclaim the life that someone has stolen from her...

Please join us in the Book Club in our Women's Forum for club discussions. General comments about the book may be left below.

May: The Knitting Circle - Ann Hood.........................Click here to read Review & Buy Book

This month’s book was selected by Thinkhappy!

The Knitting Circle,  by Ann Hood

Fiction

Summary:

While mourning the death of her daughter, Hood (An Ornithologist's Guide to Life) learned to knit. In her comeback novel, Mary Baxter, living in Hood's own Providence, R.I., loses her five-year-old daughter to meningitis. Mary and her husband, Dylan, struggle to preserve their marriage, but the memories are too painful, and the healing too difficult. Mary can't focus on her job as a writer for a local newspaper, and she bitterly resents her emotionally and geographically distant mother, who relocated to Mexico years earlier. Still, it's at her mother's urging that Mary joins a knitting circle and discovers that knitting soothes without distracting. The structure of the story quickly becomes obvious: each knitter has a tragedy that she'll reveal to Mary, and if there's pleasure to be had in reading a novel about grief, it's in guessing what each woman's misfortune is and in what order it will be exposed. The strength of the writing is in the painfully realistic portrayal of the stages of mourning, and though there's a lot of knitting, both actual and metaphorical, the terminology's simple enough for nonknitters to follow and doesn't distract from the quick pace of the narrative. 

Ann Hood lost her own young daughter to a rare form of strep. This is a semi-autobiographical novel.

 

 

May: The Red Tent...............................................Click Here to Read Review & Buy The Book!

This month’s book was selected by Thinkhappy!

The Red Tent, by Anita Diamant

Historical/Fiction

Summary:

The red tent is the place where women gathered during their cycles of birthing, menses, and even illness. Like the conversations and mysteries held within this feminine tent, this sweeping piece of fiction offers an insider's look at the daily life of a biblical sorority of mothers and wives and their one and only daughter, Dinah. Told in the voice of Jacob's daughter Dinah (who only received a glimpse of recognition in the Book of Genesis), we are privy to the fascinating feminine characters who bled within the red tent. In a confiding and poetic voice, Dinah whispers stories of her four mothers, Rachel, Leah, Zilpah, and Bilhah--all wives to Jacob, and each one embodying unique feminine traits. As she reveals these sensual and emotionally charged stories we learn of birthing miracles, slaves, artisans, household gods, and sisterhood secrets. Eventually Dinah delves into her own saga of betrayals, grief, and a call to midwifery.

"Like any sisters who live together and share a husband, my mother and aunties spun a sticky web of loyalties and grudges," Anita Diamant writes in the voice of Dinah. "They traded secrets like bracelets, and these were handed down to me the only surviving girl. They told me things I was too young to hear. They held my face between their hands and made me swear to remember." Remembering women's earthy stories and passionate history is indeed the theme of this magnificent book. In fact, it's been said that The Red Tent is what the Bible might have been had it been written by God's daughters, instead of her sons. --Gail Hudson --This text refers to the Paperback edition.