Happy Valentine's Day! Is there a better way to spend the holiday than among friends, having a warm discussion about a good book? What if I said one of our members even brought along a beautiful bouquet of flowers to boot? Tough call!
February's book selection was The Nature of Fragile Things, by Susan Meissner, with The Winter of Our Discontent, by John Steinbeck coming in next for March. We had a great turn out at the meeting, and welcomed one new face!
While you're here, immediately following the book discussion, we announced that it's that time of year again to start getting in any book nominations for next year's reading list! We ask that all nominations be submitted to Amanda, preferably, (in an effort to keep all the nominations in one place), but if it's more convenient for you to submit them to Susan and/or drop them by the library, that will work too! We'd like the nominations to be submitted on or before our March 14th meeting so they can then get organized and ready to distribute to everyone at our April 11th meeting~ we plan to cast our votes at the May 9th meeting, where shortly after we'll get a compiled, finalized reading list put together, and away we go!
For any member who isn't able to attend the April and/or May meetings and would like to participate in the nominations and/or voting~ Amanda will be sure to e-mail a final, compiled list of nominated books to anyone not present at the April meeting. We can also print out a copy for you at the front desk if that's easier. Regarding voting, there will most likely be a way to cast votes online via a link on the Perham Library's website~ we'll get the word out about that as May approaches, but you can also always e-mail your votes to Susan or Amanda, and/or call them into the library if you'd prefer.
Lastly, we plan to stick with the same five dedicated categories that we had last year. Those 5 dedicated categories are: Minnesota Author, Memoir, Mystery, Classic, and Young Adult. The remaining 7 slots will being left open for nominations of any genre. You do not have to nominate books into these 5 designated categories (although some of the nominations may naturally be put into these categories based on their subject material), but you will need to plan to vote for at least 1 title out of the 5 dedicated categories when we vote. If there aren't enough books nominated into the designated categories to offer some good variety, we'll add them in!
Onward!
Sophie Whalen is a young Irish immigrant so
desperate to get out of a New York tenement that she answers a
mail-order bride ad and agrees to marry a man she knows nothing about.
San Francisco widower Martin Hocking proves to be as aloof as he is
mesmerizingly handsome. Sophie quickly develops deep affection for Kat,
Martin's silent five-year-old daughter, but Martin's odd behavior leaves
her with the uneasy feeling that something about her newfound situation
isn't right.
Then one early-spring evening, a stranger at the
door sets in motion a transforming chain of events. Sophie discovers
hidden ties to two other women. The first, pretty and pregnant, is
standing on her doorstep. The second is hundreds of miles away in the
American Southwest, grieving the loss of everything she once loved. The
fates of these three women intertwine on the eve of the devastating
earthquake, thrusting them onto a perilous journey that will test their
resiliency and resolve and, ultimately, their belief that love can
overcome fear.
We opened the meeting with questions and opinions about where the title for this book came from and what it might mean. We sort of mashed all of our suggestions together to come up with a final analysis: We believe the title refers to women, especially in the era the book is written, being largely considered "fragile things". However, the reference to "the nature" of fragile things is believed to refer to mostly the opposite. This group of lead female characters banded together with support, encouragement and whatever resources they had amongst themselves to get to the other side. So in a way, the title is a kind of scoff at women being thought of as wholly fragile beings. We liked this conclusion very much.
In fact, come to think of it, you could just as easily say we all liked this book very much. We very much like Meissner's writing, we thought the characters and plot lines were well developed, thought-out, and believable. It's not an entirely moving or deep tale, not likely something you'll be thinking about a week after you've read it~ but a good story well told, with no regrets in the time it took to read it.
We continue to find that we like real world history presented in this way... wound into stories with plausible, relatable characters that make you "feel" right along with them~ you can't help but appreciate the time, places, and circumstances depicted... and in turn, you can't help but have some sort of lasting, beneficial take away at the books end.
If there was any criticism to be found, it would be that while we all liked, and believed the female protagonists, there was a speculation mentioned about if this same group could come together and walk through all they did and not have any sort of conflict amongst themselves. Would it be possible for any group, male or female, to weather together what these women faced, without any falling out of any kind?
Do you have any critiques we might have missed? Any questions about next year's reading list? Leave us a comment below!
Did you love The Nature of Fragile Things? Fans of the book also enjoyed: The Forest of Vanishing Stars, by Kristin Harmel, Surviving Savannah, by Patti Callahan, and Eternal, by Lisa Scottoline. All of these titles are available within the Viking system~ reserve your copy today!
At the conclusion of every book club
discussion we ask three questions and track the average answers:
Would we
recommend this to another book club for discussion?
"YES"
Would we
recommend this to a friend to read?
"YES"
Rate the
book 1-5 stars, with 1 being the lowest rating:
4 stars
