Host An Unforgettable Book Club Party

With her father’s maid, motherless fourteen year old Lily Owens sets out on a quest in 1964 South Carolina to learn more about her mother and the mysterious circumstances of her death. The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd is a story about motherhood, sisterhood, prejudices, love, and coming of age.

A Room With a View is a surprisingly entertaining novel set in Italy and England in the early 20th century. This social comedy is about a high society girl trying to choose between the life that is expected of her and following her heart.

Little Bee comes from a village in Nigeria sheltered from the world’s advancements, but not sheltered from the world’s evils. Little Bee’s journey to freedom begins when she flees her village with her sister and friend. She touches the lives of Andrew (a writer), Sarah (editor of a fashion magazine), Charlie (a batman freak), and Lawrence (Sarah’s confidant). Little Bee touched my life as well. “Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means this story teller is alive” – Little Bee

In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot tells the story of the woman whose cells have contributed to numerous medical breakthroughs without the knowledge or consent of her or her family. This book is also about the family Henrietta left behind and how they have dealt with knowing that part of their mother continues to thrive despite her death.

A mesmerizing young Irish seanchaí (storyteller) on a red 1950 Vincent Comet motorcycle pulls into town and into the lives of young school teacher, Fiona Walsh, her twin sisters, Aiofe and Róisín, and Aunt Moira. With riveting tales of long ago kingdoms, mighty battles, princes, princesses and wolves, Jim charms and seduces his listeners. But let the games begin when a jealousy-driven Fiona follows Jim and discovers a very dark secret.

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind is about the resourceful William Kamkwamba, who, at fourteen years old, built a series of windmills from junkyard finds that brought electricity to his impoverished town in Malawi.

“Some people called it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed fell, it made a tree which struggled to reach the sky. It grew in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps and it was the only tree that grew out of cement. It grew lushly, but only in tenements districts.”

Like the Tree of Heaven, Francie Nolan is a young girl growing up poor in Brooklyn in the early 1900s determined to thrive and make a better life for herself.

A terrifying encounter with an escaped convict in a graveyard on the wild Kent marshes; a summons to meet the bitter, decaying Miss Havisham and her beautiful, cold-hearted ward Estella; the sudden generosity of a mysterious benefactor—these form a series of events that changes the orphaned Pip’s life forever, and he eagerly abandons his humble origins to begin a new life as a gentleman. Dickens’s haunting late novel depicts Pip’s education and development through adversity as he discovers the true nature of his ‘great expectations’.

Pour yourself some Glogg as you read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a story about a misfit girl with a photographic memory and a promiscuous journalist who eventually team up to solve the mystery of a murder that occurred almost 40 years ago. In this first installment of the Millenium series, you get an introduction to Lisbeth Salander, one of the most intriguing characters I have ever read about.

How would it feel if the sun and the moon where the only things you could count on in your life?

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier is Ishmael Beah’s story of what it took to survive the civil war in Sierra Leone. Under unimaginable conditions he was without his family, traveling the land with a pack of boys. He was then captured by the government army, given drugs and turned into a soldier at the age of 13.