An autocracy is a system where ONE person has absolute power. In a way The Adult’s Only Book Club is such a system. I pick the time, I choose the date, I select the place, AND Me, Myself and I decide upon the books that we’ll read. I also determine whether we’ll have snacks or not and what those snacks will be. I CAN’T however force anyone to attend the meetings. I CAN hope you’ll check out the book selections and that you’ll WANT to come and join us. Hope to see you on the second Monday of each month . . . YES, I mean YOU!
Monday, February 20, 7pm: The Blood of Flowers by Anita Amirrezvani
Monday, March 12, 7pm: Heretic's Daughter by Kathleen Kent
Monday, April 9, 7pm: In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez
Monday, May 14, 7pm: Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum
Monday, June 11, 7pm: Pope Joan by Donna Woolfolk Cross
$13.99
ISBN-13: 9780316065771
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Back Bay Books, 5/2008
Both a sweeping love story and a luminous portrait of a city, THE BLOOD OF FLOWERS is the mesmerizing historical novel of an ill-fated young woman whose gift as a rug designer transforms her life. Illuminated with glorious detail of persian rug-making, and brilliantly bringing to life the sights sounds and life of 17th-century Isfahan, THE BLOOD OF FLOWERS has captured readers' imaginations everywhere as a timeless tale of one woman's struggle to live a life of her choosing.
$13.99
ISBN-13: 9780316024495
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Back Bay Books, 10/2009
Martha Carrier was one of the first women to be accused, tried and hanged as a witch in Salem, Massachusetts. Like her mother, young Sarah Carrier is bright and willful, openly challenging the small, brutal world in which they live. Often at odds with one another, mother and daughter are forced to stand together against the escalating hysteria of the trials and the superstitious tyranny that led to the torture and imprisonment of more than 200 people accused of witchcraft. This is the story of Martha's courageous defiance and ultimate death, as told by the daughter who survived.
Kathleen Kent is a tenth generation descendent of Martha Carrier. She paints a haunting portrait, not just of Puritan New England, but also of one family's deep and abiding love in the face of fear and persecution.
$13.95
ISBN-13: 9781565129764
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1/2010
It is November 25, 1960, and three beautiful sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The official state newspaper reports their deaths as accidental. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of Gen. Rafael Leonidas Trujillo’s dictatorship. It doesn’t have to. Everybody knows of Las Mariposas—“The Butterflies.”
In this extraordinary novel, the voices of all four sisters—Minerva, Patria, María Teresa, and the survivor, Dedé—speak across the decades to tell their own stories, from hair ribbons and secret crushes to gunrunning and prison torture, and to describe the everyday horrors of life under Trujillo’s rule. Through the art and magic of Julia Alvarez’s imagination, the martyred Butterflies live again in this novel of courage and love, and the human cost of political oppression.
$14.95
ISBN-13: 9780156031660
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Mariner Books, 5/2005
For fifty years, Anna Schlemmer has refused to talk about her life in Germany during World War II. Her daughter, Trudy, was only three when she and her mother were liberated by an American soldier and went to live with him in Minnesota. Trudy's sole evidence of the past is an old photograph: a family portrait showing Anna, Trudy, and a Nazi officer, the Obersturmfuhrer of Buchenwald.
Driven by the guilt of her heritage, Trudy, now a professor of German history, begins investigating the past and finally unearths the dramatic and heartbreaking truth of her mother's life.
Combining a passionate, doomed love story, a vivid evocation of life during the war, and a poignant mother/daughter drama, Those Who Save Us is a profound exploration of what we endure to survive and the legacy of shame.
$15.00
ISBN-13: 9780307452368
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Broadway, 6/2009
"Pope Joan has all the elements one wants in a historical drama–love, sex, violence, duplicity, and long-buried secrets. Cross has written an engaging book."–Los Angeles Times Book Review
$15.00
ISBN-13: 9780143119135
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Penguin (Non-Classics), 3/2011
Mary Sutter is a brilliant young midwife who dreams
of becoming a surgeon. Determined to overcome the prejudices against
women in medicine--and eager to run away from recent heartbreak--Mary
travels to Washington, D.C., to help tend the legions of Civil War
wounded.
