Meets the 4th Monday of the month at 7:00 PM, except where noted.

September 28, 2009
View from Mt. Joy / Lorna Landvik
By 1972, when he graduated high school, Joe shared one thing with nearly all his male classmates: He had a crush on head cheerleader Kristi Casey. However, unlike the others, lucky Joe had actually briefly dated this nimble heartbreaker. Graduation snapped any romantic connection between them; but now, decades later, still unmarried, Joe nurses wistful memories of Kristi as he tends to his grocery business. Meanwhile Casey, now a winsome born-again radio evangelist, is married to a conservative senator ramping up for his first presidential run.



October 26, 2009
Splender of Silence, by Indu Sundareson
Set in India during four searing pre-monsoon days in May 1942, The Splendor of Silence is internationally bestselling author Indu Sundaresan's most unforgettable accomplishment yet, merging her Indian and American backgrounds into a heartrending tale of love and clashing cultures in a time of war. Sam Hawthorne, a twenty-five-year-old U.S. Army captain, arrives at the princely state of Rudrakot in search of his missing brother, Mike, carrying with him wounds from combat in Burma and several secrets. But Sam's mission is soon threatened by the unlikeliest of sources -- he falls hopelessly in love with Mila, daughter of the local political agent. Mila, unexpectedly attracted to Sam, nurtures a secret of her own and finds herself torn between loyalty to her family and Sam. The Splendor of Silence opens twenty-one years later with Olivia, Sam's daughter, receiving a trunk of treasures from India, along with a letter from an unknown narrator that finally fills all the silences of her childhood -- telling her the story of her parents' passionate and enduring love for each other that throws them in the path of racial prejudice, nationalist intrigue, and the explosive circumstances of a country and a society on the brink of independence from British rule.

November 23, 2009
Reliable Wife / by Robert Goolrick.
1907: Abandoning her worldly life, traveling to a remote Wisconsin town in the dead of winter, trusting her future to a man she had never met--such was Catherine Land's new beginning. But there was an ending in sight as well, an ending that would redeem the treachery ahead, justify the sacrifice, and allow her to start over yet again. That was her plan. For Ralph Tritt, the wealthy business man who had advertised for "a reliable wife," this was also to be a new beginning. Years of solitude, denial, and remorse would be erased, and Catherine Land, whoever she might be, would be the vessel of his desires, the keeper of his secrets, the means to recover what was lost. That was his plan.



December 14, 2009 (2nd Monday)
Dewey the Library Cat / Vicki Myron
Traces the author's discovery of a half-frozen kitten in the drop-box of her small-community Iowa library and the feline's development into an affable library mascot whose intuitive nature prompted hundreds of abiding friendships, in a tale told against a backdrop of the town's struggles with the 1980s farm crisis.

January 25, 2010
Gift of the sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh
In this inimitable, beloved classic--graceful, lucid and lyrical--Anne Morrow Lindbergh shares her meditations on youth and age; love and marriage; peace, solitude and contentment as she set them down during a brief vacation by the sea.

February 22, 2010
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society / Mary Ann Shaffer.
As London is emerging from the shadow of World War II, writer Juliet Ashton discovers her next subject in a book club on Guernsey--a club born as a spur-of-the-moment alibi after its members are discovered breaking curfew by the Germans occupying their island.



March 22, 2010
Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout
*Starred Review* "Hell. We're always alone. Born alone. Die alone," says Olive Kitteridge, redoubtable seventh-grade math teacher in Crosby, Maine. Anyone who gets in Olive's way had better watch out, for she crashes unapologetically through life like an emotional storm trooper. She forces her husband, Henry, the town pharmacist, into tactical retreat; and she drives her beloved son, Christopher, across the country and into therapy. But appalling though Olive can be, Strout manages to make her deeply human and even sympathetic, as are all of the characters in this "novel in stories." Covering a period of 30-odd years, most of the stories (several of which were previously published in the New Yorker and other magazines) feature Olive as their focus, but in some she is bit player or even a footnote while other characters take center stage to sort through their own fears and insecurities. Though loneliness and loss haunt these pages, Strout also supplies gentle humor and a nourishing dose of hope. People are sustained by the rhythms of ordinary life and the natural wonders of coastal Maine, and even Olive is sometimes caught off guard by life's baffling beauty. Strout is also the author of the well-received Amy and Isabelle (1999) and Abide with Me.

April 26, 2010
Sisterhood of Blackberry Corner, by Andrea Smith
Canaan Creek, South Carolina, in the 1950s is a tiny town where the close-knit African-American community is united by long-term friendships and church ties. Bonnie Wilder has lived here, on Blackberry Corner, all her life, and would be content but for her deep desire to have a child. She and her husband Naz cannot conceive, and he refuses to adopt. Even the support of her outrageous best friend Thora--to whom Bonnie tells everything--can't help fill the emptiness inside her. Then Naz finds a blanketed infant on the banks of Canaan Creek, and suddenly Bonnie's life is transformed. She has found her calling. Together with Thora and the rest of the women from her church group, Bonnie creates an underground railroad for unwanted babies. But one of these precious gifts will come back to haunt her--a deception begun in good faith comes full circle, ultimately forcing Bonnie to find the courage to confront a difficult truth at the center of her own life.

May 24, 2010
Coop, by Michael Perry
Last seen sleeping off his wedding night in the back of a 1951 International Harvester pickup, Michael Perry is now living in a rickety Wisconsin farmhouse. Faced with thirty-seven acres of fallen fences and overgrown fields, and informed by his pregnant wife that she intends to deliver their baby at home, Perry plumbs his unorthodox childhood--his city-bred parents took in more than a hundred foster children while running a ramshackle dairy farm--for clues to how to proceed as a farmer, a husband, and a father. Alternately hilarious, tender, and as real as pigs in mud, "Coop" is suffused with a contemporary desire to reconnect with the earth, with neighbors, and with meaning.

Book-em Mystery Book Club 2009-2010