Posts Tagged ‘Book Clubs’
March Book Pick is here for the Jane Green Book Club
Announcing our March book! Our next pick is Cruel Beautiful World by Caroline Leavitt . As with all of our choices, this was one of my ABSOLUTE favorites of last year.
It’s 1969, and sixteen-year-old Lucy is about to run away to live off the grid in rural Pennsylvania, a rash act that will have vicious repercussions for both her and 
her older sister, Charlotte. As Lucy’s default caretaker for most of their lives, Charlotte’s youth has been marked by the burden of responsibility, but never more so than when Lucy’s dream of a rural paradise turns into a nightmare.
Cruel Beautiful World examines the intricate, infinitesimal distance between seduction and love, loyalty and duty, and explores what happens when you’re responsible for things you cannot fix.
Caroline will be joining me live at my home – hooray – on March 15th at 8pm, where we will be chatting about the book, the writing life, and answering your questions.
She says about the book: When I was 17, a friend of mine was murdered by her much older, more controlling boyfriend–someone she had been with for five years. I never forgot it, but until I was in a controlling relationship of my own years later (Google my story “The Grief Diet,”) I couldn’t understand how someone could stay. I set the novel in 1969 and 1970, the time when the peace and love movement began to turn ugly, when Woodstock turned into Altamont and the Manson murders. The novel is so much about how we yearn to fix things and fix people, but sometimes we cannot, no matter how hard we try. Sometimes all you can do is step back and let life wash over you.
February Book is Here for the Jane Green Book Club
And now, we are announcing our February pick. We will be reading The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin, and Chloe will be joining us live on www.facebook.com/janegreenbookclub on February 15th at 8pm.
It’s 1969 in New York City’s Lower East Side, and word has spread of the arrival of a mystical woman, a traveling psychic who claims to be able to tell anyone the day they will die. The Gold children—four adolescents on the cusp of self-awareness—sneak out to hear their fortunes.
The prophecies inform their next five decades. Golden-boy Simon escapes to the West Coast, searching for love in ’80s San Francisco; dreamy Klara becomes a Las Vegas magician, obsessed with blurring reality and fantasy; eldest son Daniel seeks security as an army doctor post-9/11; and bookish Varya throws herself into longevity research, where she tests the boundary between science and immortality.
A sweeping novel of remarkable ambition and depth, The Immortalists probes the line between destiny and choice, reality and illusion, this world and the next. It is a deeply moving testament to the power of story, the nature of belief, and the unrelenting pull of familial bonds.
