November December 2018 Book Choice and Cookie Exchange

We wrapped up the Beehive year with the fiction based on fact book:
Before we were yours by Lisa Wingate
Here is part of the Huffington Post 2017 book review:

The book is written from two viewpoints, The first takes place in the present and centers on Avery Stafford. She is the daughter of a politician and has been raised to be obedient to the family’s needs and wishes. Her father is embroiled in a re-election campaign and so she has headed home to South Carolina to work with him. She is also there to be groomed as his successor. 


While there she meets a woman named May Crandall, an elderly lady who somehow has a link to Avery’s grandmother Judy. Her curiosity is piqued so she asks her grandmother about the relationship. Judy however is suffering from Alzheimer’s and can’t respond clearly to the questions. Therefore Avery decides to look into her grandmother’s past and when she does secrets become unlocked. They lead to a murky situation concerning orphans and their adoptive parents. 


The other viewpoint belongs to a twelve year old girl named Rill. The time is 1939 and the place is Memphis, Tennessee. Rill lives in a boat on the river and helps take care of her four younger siblings. Her parents do the best they can for their children but life is hard. When Rill’s mother and father are at the hospital awaiting the birth of a new baby, Rill and her sisters and brother are gathered up by the “authorities” and taken to an orphanage of sorts. 

It is a rarity for an author to create a book with two central stories told side by side and not have one overshadow the other. Lisa Wingate has the talent to present this brutal tale tenderly. She is able to get readers into the heads of both Avery and Rill and make their goals crystal clear. Lisa Wingate has the talent to present this brutal tale tenderly. She is able to get readers into the heads of both Avery and Rill and make their goals crystal clear. 

Betsy hosted the dinner and sweet treat exchange at her lovely vila. 

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! 

Summer 2018 Born a Crime

Summer Read: Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

Here is a brief part of the NYTimes review 2016:

By turns alarming, sad and funny, his book provides a harrowing look, through the prism of Mr. Noah’s family, at life in South Africa under apartheid and the country’s lurching entry into a post-apartheid era in the 1990s. Some stories will be familiar to fans who have followed the author’s stand-up act. But his accounts here are less the polished anecdotes of a comedian underscoring the absurdities of life under apartheid, than raw, deeply personal reminiscences about being “half-white, half-black” in a country where his birth “violated any number of laws, statutes and regulations.”
“Born a Crime” is not just an unnerving account of growing up in South Africa under apartheid, but a love letter to the author’s remarkable mother, who grew up in a hut with 14 cousins, and determined that her son would not grow up paying what she called “the black tax” — black families having to “spend all of their time trying to fix the problems of the past,” using their skills and education to bring their relatives “back up to zero,” because “the generations who came before you have been pillaged.”

June 2018 Book Club Choice

The Rules of Magic was the June book choice, here is brief review from the NY Times

   Hoffman’s latest offering, “The Rules of Magic,” is likely to attract particular attention because it’s a prequel to her 1995 novel, “Practical Magic,” perhaps the best-known work of her career and the basis for the 1998 film starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman as the sisters Sally and Gillian Owens, born into a Massachusetts family whose founding matriarch escaped Salem’s gallows by magicking herself out of her noose. 
  Hoffman has now returned to fill out their portraits, providing a back story that thoroughly upends what we thought we knew about them. The Owens sisters had a baby brother! The only male Owens in centuries was the third child of Susanna, an Owens who skedaddled out of Massachusetts as soon as she could, desperate to remove herself from the stigma clinging to her family name.

   It’s tough to top a dead body in a car, the event that drove the plot in “Practical Magic,” and Hoffman doesn’t try. Instead she goes for historical sweep, setting the Owens siblings’ saga against the backdrop of real events like the Vietnam War, San Francisco’s Summer of Love and the Stonewall riots. But this is a novel that begins with the words, “Once upon a time,” and its strength is a Hoffman hallmark: the commingling of fairy-tale promise with real-life struggle. The Owens children can’t escape who they are. Like the rest of us, they have to figure out the best way to put their powers to use.


Lovely dinner where we did discuss both Rules of Magic and Little Fires: