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!

August 2020 Book Choice

And here we are still in lockdown, slowly opening up with masks and social distancing. Our August selection is " The Little Old Lady who Broke all the Rules" by Catharina Igelman-Sundberg 


Here is part of the San Francisco book review:

Martha Andersson and her friends aren’t happy about the recent cost-cutting that’s been going on in Diamond House, their retirement home. Determined to continue living life to the fullest, the group hatches a plan to commit a crime and go to prison, where the living conditions are surely better. But being criminals is more complicated than they thought, and the situation quickly grows beyond anything they’d imagined.

Readers are sure to love Martha, Brains, Christina, Rake, and Anna-Greta, the delightful group of retirees that star in The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules. Author Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg has written a truly fun and enjoyable novel here, with spunky main characters, a cunning plot, great supporting characters, and even a little bit of romance. The story is funny and easy to read; readers will want to make it all the way to the end to see if the oldies manage to pull off their perfect crime in the end and get the ultimate retirement they dream of.

July 2020 Book Choice

Happy Anniversary 11 years of Beehive book reading and over 100 book too!.Moving into summer with a delightful novel, the Downstairs Girl by Stacey Lee. This young readers novel was a perfect choice for this very odd summer. We continue to meet on Zoom and share our thoughts, updates and discoveries. Here is part of the NPR Review from August 2019:


As a Chinese girl living in late 19th century Atlanta, Ga., Jo Kuan constantly struggles to remain invisible. She was born in America but can't be a citizen or even rent a proper apartment, so she lives in a former abolitionist's hidden tunnels, secreted away underneath a newspaper office. Her job is in the back room of a hat shop where everyone wants her beautiful decorative knotwork — but not the comments of the opinionated girl who makes it. And when she loses that job, she must go work for the Payne family as a maid for their snotty daughter, who does everything she can to make Jo miserable.

But one night, Jo overhears her upstairs neighbors bemoaning low subscription numbers and wondering if the newspaper will make it. Afraid of what new neighbors might mean for her living situation, Jo begins writing an advice column, "Dear Miss Sweetie," and submits it anonymously to the paper. Suddenly, all the opinions that she's struggled to keep under wraps come pouring out, and her column burns with radical thoughts on everything from gender equality to segregation. It's just what the newspaper needed, and soon, her writing is the talk of Atlanta. But not all the talk is good, and even as she yearns for acknowledgement, invisibility becomes more important than ever.

I honestly didn't know it was possible for a work of historical fiction to seriously take on the racism and sexism of the 19th century South while still being such a joyful read. I almost want to dare readers to not be delighted by its newspaper office shenanigans, clandestine assignations in cemeteries, and bicycle-riding adventures, but there's honestly no point. The Downstairs Girl, for all its serious and timely content, is a jolly good time.

June 2020 Book Choice

And still in lockdown masks and social distancing to flatten the curve. The school year is coming to an end and book group is continuing with Zoom meetings. Nice to see everyone's face and connect.  Our May book choice was "Love and Other Consolation Prizes" by Jamie Ford. This was our 3rd book by Jamie Ford that we have selected-the Corner of Bitter and Sweet and The Songs of Willow Frost. 

Here is part of the review posted by Kirkus review Oct 2017:

Ernest has already lived a lifetime of surprises and indignities. After his starving Chinese mother secured her only son a spot on a freighter to America, Ernest, only 5 years old, had to learn swiftly how to navigate a world that denigrated him not only for being an orphan, but also, and perhaps worse, for being of mixed blood. Ernest never knew his white father, but his youth and mixed heritage enabled him to make friends with both the Chinese girls on the ship and the lone Japanese girl, Fahn. Once Ernest survived a month captive in the hold of the ship, not to mention a near drowning, he became a ward of the state in Seattle and eventually attracted a wealthy sponsor, who sent him to an exclusive boarding school, where he endured racism and discrimination, and then, when he has the temerity to tell her he would rather go to another school, she has him raffled off at the World's Fair. Surprisingly, life in the bordello is exciting, not least because there Ernest meets Madame Flora’s tomboyishly charming daughter, Maisie, and reunites with Fahn. Falling in love with both, however, can only lead to heartache, since life in a brothel exacts certain prices.

Alternating between Ernest’s past and present, Ford captures the thrill of first kisses and the shock of revealing long-hidden affairs.

A lively history of romance in the dens of iniquity, love despite vice.

May 2020 Book Choice

No April choice this year. As we continue in Lockdown and keeping safe distances the Beehive is continuing with Zoom book group discussions. What has been fun is that now out of town and out of state members can join. This will be a feature we will continue with into the New post COVID world...The April book choice was the very popular "Where the Crawdads Sing" by Delia Owens.

Here is part of the book review from Krikus August 2018

“The Marsh Girl,” “swamp trash”—Catherine “Kya” Clark is a figure of mystery and prejudice in the remote North Carolina coastal community of Barkley Cove in the 1950s and '60s. Abandoned by a mother no longer able to endure her drunken husband’s beatings and then by her four siblings, Kya grows up in the careless, sometimes-savage company of her father, who eventually disappears, too. Alone, virtually or actually, from age 6, Kya learns both to be self-sufficient and to find solace and company in her fertile natural surroundings. Owens (Secrets of the Savanna, 2006, etc.), the accomplished co-author of several nonfiction books on wildlife, is at her best reflecting Kya’s fascination with the birds, insects, dappled light, and shifting tides of the marshes. The girl’s collections of shells and feathers, her communion with the gulls, her exploration of the wetlands are evoked in lyrical phrasing which only occasionally tips into excess. But as the child turns teenager and is befriended by local boy Tate Walker, who teaches her to read, the novel settles into a less magical, more predictable pattern. Interspersed with Kya’s coming-of-age is the 1969 murder investigation arising from the discovery of a man’s body in the marsh. The victim is Chase Andrews, “star quarterback and town hot shot,” who was once Kya’s lover. In the eyes of a pair of semicomic local police officers, Kya will eventually become the chief suspect and must stand trial.

March 2020 Book Choice

March was a month of change and tension. As COVID-19 became more widespread and a national shutdown unfolded we all try to figure out how to adjust our lives. This was our first Zoom Book Club meeting. Our March book of Choice was There, There by Tommy Orange.

Here is part of the book review by NPR June 2018

Here's the thing about There There, the debut novel by Native American author Tommy Orange
Even if the rest of its story were just so-so — and it's much more than that — the novel's prologue would make this book worth reading.


In that 10-page prologue, Orange wittily and witheringly riffs on some 500 years of native people's history, a history of genocide and dislocation presented mostly through the image of heads. He begins with a description of the "Indian Head test pattern," a graphic that closed out America's television programming every night during the age of black-and-white TV. He then catapults backwards to 1621 and the first Thanksgiving, then bebops through a litany of Indian massacres in American history.

There There is distinguished not only by Orange's crackling style, but by its unusual subject. This is a novel about urban Indians, about native peoples who know, as he says, "the sound of the freeway better than [they] do rivers ... the smell of gas and freshly wet concrete and burned rubber better than [they] do the smell of cedar or sage..."

Orange's story takes place in Oakland, Calif., and his title comes from the famous pronouncement about rootlessness that Gertrude Stein made when, as an adult, she revisited Oakland, her childhood home. "There is no there there," Stein said.


Orange knows the feeling and the terrain: He also grew up in Oakland and is enrolled in the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma. But in There There, Orange wanted to do something more than fictionalize his own experience. Instead, his novel is composed of the stories of a bunch of Native and mixed-race characters, all of them eventually converging in a climactic scene at a big powwow in the Oakland Coliseum.

In a satiric aside, Orange says that one thing that unites the diverse powwow participants is the type of bumper stickers they've slapped on their cars: They all sport Indian pride messages like "My Other Vehicle Is a War Pony" and "Fighting Terrorism Since 1492."


Like those bumper stickers, There There is pithy and pointed. With a literary authority rare in a debut novel, it places Native American voices front and center before readers'

February 2020 Book Choice

Moving into the year with a dynamic and moving selection by the one and and only Toni Morrison: Song of Solomon.

Kirkus Review
1977

And the scribbled no-name "Macon Dead," given to a newly freed black man by a drunken Union Army officer, has stained out a family's real name for three generations, and then we meet the third "Macon Dead," called "Milkman." Raised among the sour hatreds of the richest black family in a Michigan town, Milkman learns not to love or make commitments, learns to turn away from his father's hard, tight greed, his mother's unloved passivity, his sisters' sterile virginity. He stands apart from his outcast aunt Pilate (a figure reminiscent of Sula, living beyond all reason), a "raggedy bootlegger" who keeps her name in a box threaded to one ear. And he stands above the wild untidy adoration of his cousin Hagar, above the atrocities against blacks in the 1950s, even while his friend organizes a black execution squad. However, when Milkman's father opens the door to a family past of murder and flight, Milkman—in order to steal what he believes is gold—begins the cleansing Odyssean journey. His wanderings will take him through a wilderness of rich and wonderful landscapes murmuring with old tales, those real names becoming closer and more familiar. He beholds eerie appearances (an ancient Circe ringed with fight-eyed dogs)—and hears the electric singing of children, which holds within it the pulse of truth. Like other black Americans, Milkman's retrieval of identity from obliteration helps him to shake off the "Dead" no-name state of his forebears. And, like all people, his examination of the past gives him a perspective that liberates the capacity for love. Morrison's narration, accomplished with such patient delicacy, is both darkly tense and exuberant; fantastic events and symbolic embellishments simply extend and deepen the validity and grace of speech and character.

When you know your name, you should hang on to it, for unless it is noted down and remembered, it will die when you die."

Molly hosted the dinner at her lovely home filled with friendship and deep conversation. 

January Book Choice 2020

Dear Mrs. Bird by AJ Pearce started our new season of ready.
Here is the Kirkus Review July 2018:

Innocence and perky optimism are tempered by less sunny feelings over the course of British novelist Pearce’s debut, which opens with a relatively upbeat evocation of World War II London as experienced by 22-year-old legal secretary Emmy. Fond of larky contemporary expressions and capital letters—“I gave what I hoped was a plucky Everything Is Absolutely Tip Top smile”—Emmy yearns to be a Lady War Correspondent and finds a new job at Woman’s Friend magazine. But her duties turn out to include destroying problem-page letters on unacceptable topics (“Premarital relations, Extramarital relations, Physical relations,” etc.) on behalf of her boss, battle-axe agony aunt Mrs. Henrietta Bird. Warmhearted Emmy can't bear to leave these needy women's letters unanswered and begins replying to them in secret, forging Mrs. Bird’s signature. Matters turn more serious after Emmy has an argument with her best friend Bunty’s fiance, William, over his risky work as a fireman.  Vividly evocative of wartime life, with its descriptions of bombed streets, frantic fire stations, and the desperate gaiety and fortitude of ordinary souls enduring nightly terror, Pearce’s novel lays a light, charming surface over a graver underbelly. With its focus on the challenges and expectations placed on those left behind, it also asks: Who is supporting the women in a world turned upside down by war?

 “a jaunty, heartbreaking winner” (People)—for fans of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and Lilac Girls.

Jane hosted the dinner at her bungalow the conversation was lively and the food yummy.

December Cookie exchange 2019

And another Beehive year wraps up with our annual Holiday Cookie exchange, this year hosted by Suzi. Our book choice was perfect for the season of giving...One Amazing Thing by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. 

Here is what NPR book review had to say: 

Poet, short-story writer and novelist Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni cut her teeth listening to her grandfather tell tales from the ancient Indian epics — the Ramayana and Mahabharata — by lantern light in his Bengali village. This storytelling legacy shines brightly in her entrancing new novel, One Amazing Thing, in which nine people in the passport office in the basement of the Indian Consulate in San Francisco are yoked together by fate when an earthquakes hits.

Trapped strangers are transformed into a chorus of Scheherazades, offering up tales of loss and love, and betrayal and redemption, to illuminate the gathering darkness.

November 2019 Book Choice

As we neared the end of another year, we selected  My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh. 

Here is what the NPR review 2018 had to say about this novel and the desire for sleep:

Imagine taking a sabbatical, not just from your job, but from your life. How about going even further and taking a yearlong break from yourself and the world, courtesy of an extended nap? That's the desperate plan of the unnamed 24-year-old narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh's bizarrely fascinating second novel. This miserable young woman hopes she can hibernate for a year and literally lose herself — her haunting memories, obsessive thoughts, and acidic negativity — and emerge from her sleep-cure as "a whole new person." My Year of Rest and Relaxation is her hyper-articulate account of this disturbing, ultimately moving "self-preservational" project. You might call it a rest-oration drama.


Moshfegh knows how to spin perversity and provocation into fascination, and bleakness into surprising tenderness, but her dark humor and ghoulish sensibility are not for everyone. She's drawn to the transgressive and the disgusting, finding plenty of both in the offensive art at a downtown gallery where her narrator briefly works. (She has a field day mocking the ridiculous reviews these shows receive.) Reading her, you gawk and balk but can't turn away.


Suzi hosted at her charming bungalow and everyone had lots of comfort food and plenty of treats for the munchies!

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.

September Book Choice 2019

We chose a very curious novel for our September read- the novel Little by Edward Carey. Here is just a bit about this historically based "fairytale" from the NPR book review 2018:

"Madame Tussaud is a familiar name — you may have visited one of her wax museums. But chances are, you don't know a thing about the life of the real Marie Tussaud. For example, she was tiny, which is why writer and artist Edward Carey has called his new novel about her Little.
She seemed like a character from a fairy tale, he says. A small woman, she fled the French Revolution, arrived in England with the wax heads of many of the famous people who had lost theirs under the guillotine, and set up a museum that became wildly successful. "It's a strange fairy tale but I feel it is the most extraordinary fairy tale. And it is a fairy tale about this little person and history."
Fiction, it turns out, was a good way to capture her — because Madame Tussaud is an enigma. No one is sure how much of what she said about her life is true. And, Carey says, "Nobody ever took a photograph of her, which seems to me perfect. Not her medium. She was wax."

We all agreed to meet at Obo's and enjoy a book group gathering out and about!

July 2019 Book Choice

Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue was our July book choice. Here is a sample of what the NPR 2016 book review had say about this novel:

"Those who lived through the turbulent final years of the George W. Bush administration remember that it brought out the worst in a lot of people — not just in the bankers and politicians who let the crisis occur in the first place, but in ordinary citizens brought to the edge by the threat of financial ruin.

Behold the Dreamers is, at times, hard to read — not because of her writing, which is excellent, but because the characters keep getting hit, over and over again, by horrible circumstances beyond their control. Jende is reminded that "bad news has a way of slithering into good days and making a mockery of complacent joys;" Neni feels "crushed" by her own feelings of helplessness, "the fact that she had traveled to America only to be reminded of how powerless she was, how unfair life could be."

Behold the Dreamers is a remarkable debut. Mbue is a wonderful writer with an uncanny ear for dialogue — there are no false notes here, no narrative shortcuts, and certainly no manufactured happy endings. It's a novel that depicts a country both blessed and doomed, on top of the world, but always at risk of losing its balance. It is, in other words, quintessentially American."

Sally hosted our dinner at lovely poolside home there was conversation, cake and merriment !

June book choice 2019

For our early summer read we selected "Becoming" by Michelle Obama
Here is a small sample of the NYTimes book review 2018

The book is divided into three sections — “Becoming Me,” “Becoming Us” and “Becoming More” — that sound like the bland stuff of inspirational self-help. Which isn’t to discount how useful empowerment can be; Obama emphasizes how important role models are, especially for young women of color in a culture that isn’t changing fast enough. But this book isn’t all unicorns and rainbows. By the end of it, she ultimately champions endurance and incremental change; she will probably be lauded and lambasted accordingly." 

Kim hosted the Beehive Ladies at her lovely home. Wonderful food, and a great discussion ! 

Look at this spread