October Book Choice and Gathering 2021

 

Our October choice was Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia 

Michele hosted the gathering. 

February/March 2021 Book Choice

 The Life She was Given by Ellen Marie Wiseman was our mid-winter read. 

Here is selection of a book review from ForewardReviews 2017:

Ellen Marie Wiseman gathers potent Gothic elements in The Life She was Given to examine the impact of
child abuse across generations. A sumptuous plot balances horror and tenderness to reveal lesser-known facets of history.

In the 1930s, Lilly, a daughter held captive in Blackwood Manor’s attic, is sold to the circus. In the 1950s, Julia, a runaway teen, inherits the family manor and horse farm, where she uncovers lies about her past. Coralline Blackwood is an exacting matriarch who wields the Bible as a weapon.

As each character grows, their histories overlap; the secret that binds them lies at the heart of the book’s tragedy. The Life She was Given is a vibrant maze of desires. The sharp divide between expectations and painful truths, mothers and daughters, past and present, culminate in a sensational finale." 

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.

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!

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: