We have a terrific book club in our chapter!
As our reading guide, we’re taking the list of 2014 Great Group Reads titles recommended for book clubs during WNBA’s National Reading Group Month.
Our book for our September 1 meeting is….
EVERYTHING I NEVER TOLD YOU
by Celeste Ng
Penguin Books
A haunting debut novel about a mixed-race family living in 1970s Ohio, and what happens when their favorite daughter is found drowned at the bottom of a lake near their home.
Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet…So begins the story of this exquisite debut novel, about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee; their middle daughter, a girl who inherited her mother’s bright blue eyes and her father’s jet-black hair. Her parents are determined that Lydia will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue—in Marilyn’s case that her daughter become a doctor rather than a homemaker, in James’s case that Lydia be popular at school, a girl with a busy social life and the center of every party.
When Lydia’s body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family together tumbles into chaos, forcing them to confront the long-kept secrets that have been slowly pulling them apart. James, consumed by guilt, sets out on a reckless path that may destroy his marriage. Marilyn, devastated and vengeful, is determined to find a responsible party, no matter what the cost. Lydia’s older brother, Nathan, is certain that the neighborhood bad boy Jack is somehow involved. But it’s the youngest of the family—Hannah—who observes far more than anyone realizes and who may be the only one who knows the truth about what happened.
A profoundly moving story of family, history, and the meaning of home, Everything I Never Told You is both a gripping page-turner and a sensitive family portrait, exploring the divisions between cultures and the rifts within a family, and uncovering the ways in which mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and husbands and wives struggle, all their lives, to understand one another.
Celeste Ng grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio, in a family of scientists. She attended Harvard University and earned an MFA from the University of Michigan (now the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan), where she won the Hopwood Award. Her fiction and essays have appeared in One Story, TriQuarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, the Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere, and she is the recipient of the Pushcart Prize. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and son.
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Our meetings take place on the first Tuesday of each month, 7 PM, at the Panera on Fairview near SouthPark – see dates below. We have chosen books to take us through to next October when there will be a new Great Group Reads list released. If you have questions about our Book Club, please contact Kristen Knox at whitreidsmama
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These are the books we’re reading in 2014-2015:
For more information, please go to our Book Club page.
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