October/November Book Choice 2020

 This lush novel took two months to complete but was well worth the journey. Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield provided us with a lengthy discussion and lots of wonderful moments. Here is a part of the Washington Post 2018 book review...

 " Diane Setterfield haunts familiar ground in “Once Upon a River,” an eerily mystic tale of a mute child who captivates the local townspeople after she’s seemingly brought back from the dead.

The author of “The Thirteenth Tale” and “Bellman & Black” begins this account on a winter solstice more than a hundred years ago. A near-drowned stranger arrives at a rural inn, grievously injured and carrying a young girl who, to all appearances, has already died. Despite the child’s corpse-like state,
however, the local nurse, Rita, discovers a pulse.

At different points the narrative emphasizes the powers of oral tradition, photography and performance, using stories that straddle fiction and fact to reveal essential truths to the speaker and the audience.

The river acts as both setting and character, a force in the everyday lives of its neighbors. Though Setterfield writes emotions with marvelous truth and subtlety, her most stunning prose is reserved for evocative descriptions of the natural world, creating an immersive experience made of light, texture, scent and sensation."

A perfect Tale to carry you into Winter!

October Book Choice 2019

The History of Bees by Maja Lude was our October read.
This complex tale woven through time gave us lots to discuss. Alayna hosted at her lovely cottage and she raises bees so it was an extra sweet meeting!

here is a expert from the Publisher Weekly 2017 review


In her first adult novel, Norwegian children’s author Lunde posits an apocalyptic future, weaving together stories on three continents in three different time periods that revolve around honeybees.

As the author adroitly switches back and forth among the intense stories, she explores the link between parents and children, and the delicate balance of expressing parental expectations versus allowing grown children to follow their own passions.

There is also the strong theme about the potentially bleak outcome for a world that ignores the warning signs of environmental catastrophe and allows honeybees to disappear. Lunde’s novel provides both a multifaceted story and a convincing and timely wake-up call.

October 2018 Book Group Selection

October's Book Choice was the Haunting: Radium Girls by Kate Moore

Here is a brief bit of the NPR Book Review April 2017:

The book, infuriating for necessary reasons, traces the women at two dial-making factories — the USRC in New Jersey, and Radiant Dial in Illinois. And Radium Girls spares us nothing of their suffering; though at times the foreshadowing reads more like a true-crime story, Moore is intent on making the reader viscerally understand the pain in which these young women were living, and through which they had to fight in order to get their problems recognized.

The history of business is a history of violence. The worst descriptions of disease (and I'll be surprised if you don't run your tongue across your teeth at least once) can't match the fatal callousness of the companies that knew the dangers of radium long before they ever admitted them. There's a reason Moore repeatedly notes the girls' phosphorescence as ghostly; the companies knew they were doomed. (Radiant Dial tested its girls and never gave them their results, even as internal correspondence was sorting them by radiation levels to see who'd be first to die.)

Radium Girls is frighteningly easily to set in a wider context. The story of real women at the mercy of businesses who see them only as a potential risk to the bottom line is haunting precisely because of how little has changed; the glowing ghosts of the radium girls haunt us still.

Kitty hosted our get together at her sweet cottage, powerful discussion and glowing treats! 

October 2015 Book Choice

The Magician's Lie by Greer Macallister was the October 2015 Beehive book choice here are a few reviews:

At the pinnacle of her career, an early 20th-century magician known as the Amazing Arden astonishes the world by sawing a man in half onstage — or at least appearing to do so. “Who is this Amazing Arden?” the headlines ask.

Greer Macallister’s atmospheric novel tells the story of this fictional magician, whose talents make her one of the world’s most famous female masters of illusion. It’s a tale as spellbinding as any of Arden’s performances, with plenty of smoke and mirrors to confound and misdirect the reader.

“The Magician’s Lie” opens in 1905. Arden is preparing to dazzle an audience in Waterloo, Iowa, with her “Halved Man” trick. She will saw a man in half, blood will spurt from the wooden box in which he lies, and she will put him back together again. But this time she switches out the saw for an ax. “Tonight, I will escape my torturer, once and for all time. Tonight, I will kill him,” she confesses to the reader. (Her tormentor isn’t named, but who he is and what he has done to her are horrifying when finally revealed.)

Later that night, a man’s body, an ax buried in his chest, is found under the stage. The police’s prime suspect in the death is, not surprisingly, the Amazing Arden. The victim is said to be her husband. Arden flees Waterloo but is soon captured by a police officer.

‘The Magician’s Lie’ by Greer Macallister is a spellbinding tale...Washington Post 2015 

"Macallister is as much of a magician as her subject, misdirecting and enchanting while ultimately leaving her audience satisfied with a grand finale." -- Columbus Dispatch

"Greer Macallister's haunting first novel is a compelling mystery.... [her] painstaking descriptions of the costumes, technique and trickery involved in Ada’s work as an illusionist are unparalleled." -- BookPage review


"And for its next trick, the novel 'The Magician’s Lie' by Greer Macallister just might become a hit." -- The Christian Science Monitor

October/November 2014 Book Choice

Our October/November book choice is I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban  by Malala Yousafzai, Christina Lamb

I come from a country that was created at midnight. When I almost died it was just after midday.

When the Taliban took control of the Swat Valley in Pakistan, one girl spoke out. Malala Yousafzai refused to be silenced and fought for her right to an education.
On Tuesday, October 9, 2012, when she was fifteen, she almost paid the ultimate price. She was shot in the head at point-blank range while riding the bus home from school, and few expected her to survive. 
Instead, Malala's miraculous recovery has taken her on an extraordinary journey from a remote valley in northern Pakistan to the halls of the United Nations in New York. At sixteen, she has become a global symbol of peaceful protest and the youngest-ever Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
I Am Malala is the remarkable tale of a family uprooted by global terrorism, of the fight for girls' education, of a father who, himself a school owner, championed and encouraged his daughter to write and attend school, and of brave parents who have a fierce love for their daughter in a society that prizes sons.

October's Book...Boo!

And now for something completely different...