Welcome & Kingdom of the Blind by Louise Penny

Welcome! We're excited to start on a new journey with a blog for our library book club! A few months ago we had a request from a patron that we create a way of sharing the discussion and general opinions of our Library Book Club with others. And the concept of the Perham Library's Book Club blog was conceived. We're hoping that we can make this page useful and interesting  to those wanting to follow our monthly book club and its ongoing selection of titles for discussion. We intend to make a post every month following our book club gathering to summarize the book and the general discussion. We'll also make periodic posts to share information on special book club activities or to collect reading suggestions, or to vote for items to be included on the upcoming reading list.  We're looking forward to hearing people's comments and suggestions, too.

As the inaugural post for this blog, I'm including some thoughts on the book that our group discussed last week:

Kingdom of the Blind is the 14^th novel by Louise Penny in the Three Pines/Armand Gamache mystery series.  It was a slight departure for our book club because we don’t often choose to discuss mystery or crime fiction. The book follows Chief Superintendent Armand  Gamache of the Surete du Quebec as he is coping with being suspended from his job for allowing a supply of opioid drugs to enter the country. The  dual story line starting with an odd bequest naming Gamache as an executor for the will of a complete stranger while at the same time, Gamache races to track down and retrieve the shipment of opioid drugs before they are introduced onto the streets.  

Our book club members’ primary comment regarding this book is that they found the book confusing (“like walking into someone else’s conversation”). While many of our book club members said that they enjoyed the vivid friendships, the underlying sense of integrity and the ingenuity of the story, they felt that the author assumed that all readers were already familiar with the series story lines and characters and therefore assumed that everyone would understand the backstory without explanation. It was agreed that many of our club members would probably have enjoyed the book more if they had read some of the earlier books in the series and a couple of the members said that they were planning to go back and read the series. On the other end of the spectrum, several people said that they weren’t interested because they thought the book had too many characters and too many twists and turns at the end of the novel. 

At the end of every book club discussion we ask three questions and track the average answers:

Would we recommend this to another book club for discussion?  
“NO” (unless you start at the beginning of the series)

Would we recommend this to a friend to read?
“YES” (but it is recommended to read the entire series and not start in the middle)

Rate the book 1-4 stars with 1 being the lowest rating:
2.75 stars (the ratings varied from 1 star to 4 stars)