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We have two active
book clubs here at The Well Red Coyote. All book club selections
-- ours and others about town and the Verde Valley -- receive a
20% discount on their book club choices.
The Well Red Coyote Book Club, which has been active for more than
five years, reads mostly general fiction, along with occasional
memoirs and history titles. It meets on the second Monday of every
month, from 6 - 7:30 pm. Pizza and wine are served.
To partially offset the cost of the refreshments, attendees who
consume the refreshments are asked to make a $5 donation. To read
more about this club, its meeting dates and current selections,
scroll down.
We recently formed a second book club for
women only, the Women who Dare to Dream Personal Growth Book Club,
which meets on the second Thursday of each month, and which is facilitated
by Karen Ely, founder of A Woman’s Way, one of the country’s
premier retreat organizations for women. Click
here to read more about its meeting dates and reading choices.
July Meeting:
Monday, July 12, 6 pm
July Choice: THE PIANO TEACHER by Janice
Y.K. Lee
SUMMARY: Starred Review. Former Elle
editor Lee delivers a standout debut dealing with the rigors of
love and survival during a time of war, and the consequences of
choices made under duress. Claire Pendleton, newly married and arrived
in Hong Kong in 1952, finds work giving piano lessons to the daughter
of Melody and Victor Chen, a wealthy Chinese couple. While the girl
is less than interested in music, the Chens' flinty British expat
driver, Will Truesdale, is certainly interested in Claire, and vice
versa. Their fast-blossoming affair is juxtaposed against a plot
line beginning in 1941 when Will gets swept up by the beautiful
and tempestuous Trudy Liang, and then follows through his life during
the Japanese occupation. As Claire and Will's affair becomes common
knowledge, so do the specifics of Will's murky past, Trudy's motivations
and Victor's role in past events. The rippling of past actions through
to the present lends the narrative layers of intrigue and more than
a few unexpected twists. Lee covers a little-known time in Chinese
history without melodrama, and deconstructs without judgment the
choices people make in order to live one more day under torturous
circumstances. — Publishers Weekly
August Meeting:
Monday, August 9, 6 pm
August Choice: INTO THE BEAUTIFUL NORTH
by Luis Alberto Urrea
SUMMARY: Nayeli, the Taqueria worker
of Urrea's fine new novel (after The Hummingbird's Daughter), is
a young woman in the poor but tight-knit coastal Mexican town of
Tres Camarones who spends her days serving tacos and helping her
feisty aunt Irma get elected as the town's first female mayor. Abandoned
by her father who headed north for work years before, Nayeli is
hit with the realization that her hometown is all but abandoned
by men, leaving it at the mercy of drug gangsters. So Nayeli hatches
an elaborate scheme inspired by The Magnificent Seven: with three
friends, she heads north to find seven Mexican men and smuggle them
back into Mexico to protect the town. What she discovers along the
way, of course, surprises her. Urrea's poetic sensibility and journalistic
eye for detail in painting the Mexican landscape and sociological
complexities create vivid, memorable scenes. Though the Spanglish
can be tough for the uninitiated to detangle, the colorful characters,
strong narrative and humor carry this surprisingly uplifting and
very human story.
September Meeting:
September 13, 6 pm
September Choice: SARAH’S KEY
by Tatiana de Rosnay
SUMMARY: Starred Review. De Rosnay's
U.S. debut fictionalizes the 1942 Paris roundups and deportations,
in which thousands of Jewish families were arrested, held at the
Vélodrome d'Hiver outside the city, then transported to Auschwitz.
Forty-five-year-old Julia Jarmond, American by birth, moved to Paris
when she was 20 and is married to the arrogant, unfaithful Bertrand
Tézac, with whom she has an 11-year-old daughter. Julia writes
for an American magazine and her editor assigns her to cover the
60th anniversary of the Vél' d'Hiv' roundups. Julia soon
learns that the apartment she and Bertrand plan to move into was
acquired by Bertrand's family when its Jewish occupants were dispossessed
and deported 60 years before. She resolves to find out what happened
to the former occupants: Wladyslaw and Rywka Starzynski, parents
of 10-year-old Sarah and four-year-old Michel. The more Julia discovers—especially
about Sarah, the only member of the Starzynski family to survive—the
more she uncovers about Bertrand's family, about France and, finally,
herself. Already translated into 15 languages, the novel is De Rosnay's
10th (but her first written in English, her first language). It
beautifully conveys Julia's conflicting loyalties, and makes Sarah's
trials so riveting, her innocence so absorbing, that the book is
hard to put down. |
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