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'