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Jesus
Land by Julia Scheeves
Michele's book of the month
is Jesus Land by Julia Scheeves. Julia has written a love
story that is as romantic and as sad as any recent memoir
you'll read. It's about Julia and David, it's the mid-1980s,
and the family has just moved to rural Indiana, a landscape
of cottonwood trees and trailer parks - and a racism neither
of them is prepared for. While Julia is white, her close
relationship with David, who is black, makes them both outcasts.
At home, a distant mother, more involved with her church's
missionaries than with her own children, and a violent father
only compound their problems. When the day comes that high-school
hormones, bullying, and a deep-seated restlessness prove
too much to bear, the parents send Julia and David to the
Dominican Republic - to a reform school there. The Escuela
Caribe is governed by a disciplinary regime that demands
its teens repent for their sins under boot-camp conditions.
Julia and David's determination to make it through with heart
and soul intact is told here with immediacy, candor, sparkling
humor, and not a note of malice. This is one of the most
compelling, page-turning memoirs to come along in years.
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The God
of Animals by Aryn Kyle
Ms. Carol's book of the
month is The God of Animals by Aryn Kyle. This is one of
the most exciting fiction debuts in years, a breathtaking
and beautiful novel set on a horse ranch in small-town Colorado.
Kyle develops a great story: a young girl approaching womanhood
in a man's world. The business of raising horses acts as
a novel-length metaphor, and Kyle's illuminating details
make it fresh. This is a wise and astonishing novel about
the different guises of love and the hard-to-learn lessons
on the road to adulthood.
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The Judges
by Elie Wiesel
Keith's book of the month
is The Judges by Elie Wiesel, a gripping novel of guilt,
innocence, and the perilousness of judging both. A plane
en route from New York to Tel Aviv is forced down by bad
weather. A nearby house provides refuge for five of its passengers.
Their host, an enigmatic and disquieting man who calls himself
simply the Judge, begins to interrogate them, forcing them
to face the truth and meaning of their lives. Soon he announces
that one of them--the least worthy--will die. The Judges
is a powerful novel that reflects the philosophical, religious,
and moral questions that are at the heart of Wiesel's work.
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The Last
Chinese Chef by Nicole Monesis
Keith's book of the month
is The Judges by Elie Wiesel, a gripping novel of guilt,
innocence, and the perilousness of judging both. A plane
en route from New York to Tel Aviv is forced down by bad
weather. A nearby house provides refuge for five of its passengers.
Their host, an enigmatic and disquieting man who calls himself
simply the Judge, begins to interrogate them, forcing them
to face the truth and meaning of their lives. Soon he announces
that one of them--the least worthy--will die. The Judges
is a powerful novel that reflects the philosophical, religious,
and moral questions that are at the heart of Wiesel's work.
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Stolen Lives,
Twenty Years in Desert Prison, by Malika Oufkir and Michele
Fitoussi
Amy's book of the month
is Stolen Lives, Twenty Years in Desert Prison, by Malika
Oufkir and Michele Fitoussi. Oufkir was the eldest daughter
of General Oufkir, the King of Morocco's closest aide. She
spent most of her childhood and adolescence in the court
harem, surrounded by luxury and privilege. In 1972, her father
was executed after an attempt to assassinate the king. Oufkir,
her five brothers and sisters, and her mother were immediately
imprisoned in a desert penal colony. After 20 years, the
Oufkir children managed to dig a tunnel with their bare hands
and make an audacious escape. Oufkir was finally able to
leave Morocco and begin a new life in exile in 1996. Stolen
Lives is an unforgettable story of one woman's journey to
freedom.
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The Bookseller
of Kabul by Asne Seierstad
Sue's book of the month is
The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad. In Afghanistan,
just after the fall of the Taliban, a bookseller named Sultan
Khan allowed a Western journalist to move into his home and
experience firsthand his family's life in the newly liberated
capital city of Kabul. In this remarkable portrait, Norwegian
journalist Seierstad recounts with brutal honesty the day-to-day
lives of one Afghani family persevering through life in a
country beset by chaos. Sultan, a man whose love of books
has exposed him to great risks over his 30 years in the trade
has seen his volumes censored, ripped apart, even burned
in the street by the Communists and the Taliban. Each time
he rebuilds his business, hiding the most controversial texts,
surviving prison, traveling treacherous back roads to Pakistan
to order much-needed schoolbooks. He takes joy in selling
books of history, science, art, religion, and poetry, and
defends his business against competitors and theft with a
primal ferocity. With the assent of the Khan family with
whom she lives, Seierstad gives us intimate access to a world
were women have few privileges, and where an attitude of
hope seems uncommonly rare.
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The Historian
by Elizabeth Kostova
Michele's book of the month
is The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. When a motherless
American girl living in Europe finds a medieval book and
a package of letters, all addressed ominously to "My dear
and unfortunate successor." she unwittingly assumes a quest
she will discover is her birthright--a hunt that nearly brought
her father to ruin and may have claimed the life of history
professor Bartholomew Rossi. What does the legend of Vlad
the Impaler, the historical Dracula, have to do with the
20th Century?
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Until I Find
You by John Irving
Sue's book of the month is
Until I Find You by John Irving. Irving's eleventh novel
contains multitudes, building and building on the questionable
memories of perhaps his most autobiographical character to
date. Until I Find You, the story of the actor Jack Burns.
His mother, Alice, is a Toronto tattoo artist. When Jack
is four, he travels with Alice to several North Sea ports;
they are trying to find Jack's missing father, William, a
church organist who is addicted to being tattooed. But Alice
is a mystery, and William can't be found. The author's tone,
indeed, the narrative voice of this novel, is melancholic.
Until I Find You is suffused with overwhelming sadness and
deception; it is also a robust and comic novel, certain to
be compared to Irving's most ambitious and moving works.
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The Brief History
of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier
Keith's book of the month
is The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier. This
book is original, thought provoking, gorgeously written and,
ultimately, very moving. The novel alternates between the
adventures of Laura Byrd, a Coca Cola researcher stranded
in the Antarctic, and the City of the Dead. There was been
a war on earth in which the combatants are virus's. Brockmeier's
notion of an afterlife is a way station where people must
stay until people whom they have known on earth have also
died. Over half of them have known Laura Byrd. The people
who live in the City of the Dead are not ghosts. They will
remind you of your next-door neighbors. They get up, have
breakfast, and go to work, just like normal people. They
appear to have corporal bodies. One of the characters, the
Blind Man, wonders about this. He has a theory about the
difference between the spirit and the soul. He believes the
spirit connects the body and the soul, and that when the
spirit dies, we move on to the next life. It's a treat to
find a truly original young writer and I recommend it highly.
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Julie and Julia
by Julie Powell
Sue's book of the month is
Julie and Julia by Julie Powell. This story is at once a
comic tale of struggling to find one's balance in the adult
world, and a witty exploration of why - and how - we cook.
Gastronomes, as well as those more inclined to order take-out,
will enjoy Powell's down-and-dirty journey into French cuisine,
but her depiction of America is the secret ingredient that
holds the whole recipe together. Julie is 30 years old, living
in a rundown apartment in Queens and working at a soul-sucking
secretarial job that's going nowhere. She needs something
to break the monotony of her life, and she invents a deranged
assignment. She will take her mother's dog-eared copy of
Julia Child's 1961 classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking,
and she will cook all 524 recipes. In the span of one year.
At first she thinks it will be easy. But as she moves from
the simple Potage Parmentier (potato soup) into the more
complicated realm of aspics and crepes, she realizes there's
more to Mastering the Art of French Cooking than meets the
eye. With Julia's stern warble always in her ear, Julie haunts
the local butcher, buying kidneys and sweetbreads. She sends
her husband on late-night runs for yet more butter and rarely
serves dinner before midnight. She discovers how to mold
the perfect Orange Bavarian, the trick to extracting marrow
from bone, and the intense pleasure of eating liver. And
somewhere along the line she realizes she has turned her
kitchen into a miracle of creation and cuisine. She has eclipsed
her life's ordinariness through spectacular humor, hysteria,
and perseverance. A nourishing read if you love to cook or
would rather stay out of the kitchen altogether.
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The Traveler
by John Twelve Hawks
Keith's Book of the month
is The Traveler by John Twelve Hawks, the first in a projected
trilogy called The Fourth Realm. This novel is powerful,
mainstream fiction built on a foundation of cutting-edge
technology laced with fantasy and the chilling specter of
an all-too-possible social and political reality. The time
is roughly the present, and the U.S. is part of the Vast
Machine, a society overseen by the Tabula, a secret organization
bent on establishing a perfectly controlled populace. Allied
against the Tabula are the Travelers and their sword-carrying
protectors, the Harlequins. The Travelers, now almost extinct,
can project their spirit into other worlds where they receive
wisdom to bring back to Earth, wisdom that threatens the
Tabula's power.
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