Join us each month for lively discussion on books that are currently popular, or maybe some old classics! All are welcome to join.
September 20, 2024
West with Giraffes by Lynda Rutludge
It's 1938; the Great Depression still lingers. Hitler is threatening Europe, and world-weary Americans long for wonder. They find it in two giraffes who miraculously survive a hurricane while crossing the Atlantic. What follows is a twelve-day road trip in a custom truck to deliver Southern California's first gifaffes to the San Diego Zoo. Part adventure, part historical saga, and part coming-of-age love story, West with Giraffes explores what it means to be changed by the grace of animals, the kindness of strangers, the passing of time, and a story told before it’s too late.
October 18, 2024
Murder on the Red River by Marcie Rendon
1970s, Red River Valley between North Dabota and Minnesota: Renee "Cash" Blackbear is 19 year old and tough as nails. One Saturday her guardian, Sheriff Wheaton, is called to investigate a pile of rags in a field and finds the body of an Indian nam. When Cash derams about the dead man's weathered house on the Red Lake Reservation, she knows that's the place to start looking for answers. This is the first book in the Cash Blackbear series. Marcie R. Rendon is an enrolled member of the White Earth Anishinabe Nation.
November 15, 2024
All Adults Here by Emman Straub
When Astrid Strick witnesses a school bus accident in the center of town, it jostles loose a repressed memory from her young parenting days decades earlier. Suddenly, Astrid realizes she was not quite the parent she thought she'd been to her three, now-grown children. But to what consequence? Astrid's youngest son is drifting and unfocused, making parenting mistakes of his own. Her daughter is pregnant yet struggling to give up her own adolescence. And her eldest seems to measure his adult life according to standards no one else shares. But who gets to decide, so many years later, which long-ago lapses were the ones that mattered? Who decides which apologies really count? It might be that only Astrid's thirteen-year-old granddaughter and her new friend really understand the courage it takes to tell the truth to the people you love the most. In All Adults Here, Emma Straub's unique alchemy of wisdom, humor, and insight come together in a deeply satisfying story about adult siblings, aging parents, high school boyfriends, middle school mean girls, the lifelong effects of birth order, and all the other things that follow us into adulthood, whether we like them to or not.
For more information contact:
Sara Bonk (sarabonk9844@gmail.com) or Diane Chapa (dianechapa@gmail.com)
A member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America.