May 2022 Book Choice

 For May we chose the novel The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue written by V.E. Schwab 

Here is how Publishers Weekly summarized the story: 

Schwab crafts the tale of one woman’s desperate drive to be remembered into a triumphant exploration of love and loss. The story hops across time as it follows the life of Adeline “Addie” LaRue from the French country side in the early 1700s to New York City in 2014. As a young woman, Addie makes a deal with the devil to save herself from the tedium of an arranged marriage, asking for “a chance to live and be free.” The devil grants her immortality but curses her to a life of horrible isolation: no one she meets will be able to remember her. The first half of the book––as Addie learns the limits and loneliness of her curse––is as devastating as it is prescient in these self-isolating times. Which makes Addie’s eventual meeting with Henry, the first person to remember her in some 300 years, all the more joyous. This sweeping fantasy is as much a love story as it is a tribute to storytelling, art, and inspiration. Schwab’s diverse cast is beautifully rendered, and the view of human connection on offer is biting and bitter, yet introspective and sweet. This ambitious and hopeful work is a knockout.

Molly hosted the dinner at her lovely home and we had so many delicious food choices it made for an exceptionally delightful gathering.

What does the coffee tell you about your future?

May Book Choice and Zoom 2021

 

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.

May 2019 Book Choice

Sourdough by Robin Sloan was our May book choice.
Here is an excerpt from the NPR book review 2017:

Okay... Robin Sloan's new novel, Sourdough, is exactly like his first book, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, except that it's not about books (exactly), but is absolutely about San Francisco, geeks, nerds, coders, secret societies, bizarrely low-impact conspiracies that solely concern single-noun obsessives (food, in this case, rather than books), and also robots. And books, too, actually, now that I think about it.

It is a beautiful, small, sweet, quiet book. It knows as much about the strange extremes of food as Mr. Penumbra did about the dark latitudes of the book community. It concerns one Lois Clary, a young proprioception engineer for a gleaming robotics company in San Francisco called General Dexterity. She ended up there kind of by accident: She was good with computers, good with machines, had a perfectly reasonable job in Michigan, close to her family, when she was suddenly recruited out of the blue by the robot people. And she took the job because, in Lois's words (via Sloan), "Here's a thing I believe about people my age: We are the children of Hogwarts, and more than anything, we just want to be sorted."

We had our dinner meeting at Magpie Cafe 

We shared Sweet Treats!