BOOK GROUP

The Book Group meets on the fourth TUESDAY of the month with time and place as shown in the Directory and on this website.  Please watch for emails and the “Upcoming Events” section of this website’s Home page for the most current information..

September 24, 2024 – 4 pm  – The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters via zoom only

In 1962, Mi’kmaq family from Nova Scotia arrives in Maine to pick blueberries for the summer. Weeks later, four year old Ruthie, the family’s youngest child, vanishes. She is last seen by her six-year-old brother, Joe, sitting on a favorite rock at the edge of a berry field. Joe will remain distraught by his sister‘s disappearance for years to come. In Maine, a young girl named Norma grows up as the only child of an affluent family. Her father is emotionally distant, her mother is frustratingly overprotective. Norma is often troubled by recurring dreams and visions that seem more like memories than imagination. As she grows older, Norma slowly comes to realize that something her parents are not telling her.  Unwilling to abandon her intuition, she will spend decades, trying to uncover this families secrets.  
This novel gives witness and voice to those who suffer the attempts to erase native culture in the name of a simulation. 

October 22, 20 24–4 p.m. – PCCF and via Zoom – The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict

This is a historical novel about Belle da Costa Greene, who was hired by JP Morgan to curate his collection of manuscripts, books, and artwork for his newly built Pierpont Morgan Library. Not only is she a woman, she is also a Black woman whose color is light enough that she passes for White, explaining her tiny complexion as being from her alleged Portuguese heritage.   She is the daughter of Richard Greener, the first Black graduate of Harvard and a well-known advocate for equality. Belle  is a real person who became famous for her intellect and style as she navigates being a woman in a profession dominated by men, and protects her carefully crafted identity in the racist world in which she lives. 

November 14, 2024– 5:30 p.m. – PCCF – (Sister to Sister discussion with high school students) –The Girls We Sent Away by Meagan Church

it’s the 1960s and Lorraine Delford has it all – an upstanding family, a perfect boyfriend, and a white picket fence home in North Carolina. Yet every time she looks through her father‘s telescope, she dreams of the stars and becoming an astronaut. It’s ambitious, but Lorraine has always been exceptional. But when the girl next-door gets pregnant, she’s forced to learn firsthand the realities that keep women grounded. To hide their daughters, secret shame, the Delord send Lorraine to a maternity home for wayward girls. But this is no safe Haven – it’s a house with darksecrets and suffocating rules. As Lorraine begins to piece together a new vision for her life, she must decide if she can fight against the powers that aim to take her child or submit to the rules of a society that she once admired.
Powerful and away is a timely novel that explores autonomy, belonging, and quest for agency when the illusions of life as you know it fall away. 

January 28, 2025 – 6:30 pm via Zoom only – Unwell Women:  Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World by Elinor Cleghorn,

As our state and local public policy selection on women’s health, Cleghorn’s book is an introduction to the relationship between women and the practice of medicine. Other books address, how governments serve women’s health, but this is an eye-opening account of how women have to battle to be treated. The book traces the most unbelievable history of how medicine has failed women, packed with character studies, and case histories of those who have suffered, challenged and rewritten medical orthodoxy – and the men who controlled their fate. From the “wandering womb” of Ancient Greece to the rise of the witch trials through Europe, and from the dawn of hysteria as a catchall for difficult- to -diagnosed disorders to to first forays into autoimmunity and the shifting understanding of hormones, menstruation, menopause, and conditions like endometriosis, Unwell Women  examines the relationship of women to illness and medicine. 

February 25, 2025 – 4 pm via zoom only – Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy, born to a teenage single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks, and copper-colored hair, caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture, where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities. Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara, Kingsolver enlists Dickens’, anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story.  Demon Copperfield speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born in the beautiful, cursed places they can’t imagine leaving behind. 

March 25, 2025–4 pm via zoom only – The Women by Kristen Hannah

Women can be heroes. When 20-year-old nursing student Francis “Frankie” McGrath hears those words, it’s a revelation. Raised in the sundrenched , idyllic world of Southern California, and sheltered by her conservative parents, she has always prided herself on doing the right thing. But in 1965, the world is changing and she suddenly dares to imagine a future for herself. When her brother ships out to Vietnam, she joins the Army Nurse Corp and follows her path. As green and inexperienced as the men sent to Vietnam to fight, Frankie is overwhelmed by the chaos and destruction of war. Each day is a gamble of life and death, hope and betrayal, friendships run deep and can be shattered  in an instant. In war, she meets – and becomes one of – the lucky, the brave, the broken, and the lost. But war is just beginning for Frankie and her veteran friends. The real battle lies in coming home to a changed and divided America, to angry protesters, and to a country that wants to forget Vietnam. 

April 22, 2025–4 pm- PCCF and via zoom – Caste: the Origins of our Disconnect  by Isabel Wilkerson

The Pulitzer prize-winning best selling author of The Warmth of Other Suns, examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how our lives today are still defined by a hierarchy of human divisions as we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings of morality. It is about power – which groups have it and which do not.  
In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply research narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history, has been shaped by a hidden caste system, rigid hierarchy of human rankings.

Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences peoples lives and behavior and the nations fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including a divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more   Using riveting stories about people – including Martin Luther King Jr, baseball’s Satchel Page, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others – she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan out their out-cast of the Jews, she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against, she writes about the surprising health cost of caste in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points towards the way America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity.
NOTE: There is a new movie based on the book- Origin was written and directed by Ava DuVernay   

May 27, 20 25–4 p.m. – PCCF and via zoom Empress of  Nile:  the Daredevil Archeologist  who Saved Egypt’s Temples from Destruction by Lynne Olsen

This is the riveting story of a true life action, hero Christian’s Desrouche-Noviecourt, one of the seemingly unafraid to turn down a fight for a noble cause; it is a story of an archaeologist who joined the resistance, survived the Nazis and then saved Egypt’s ancient temples from the floodwaters of the gigantic new Aswan High Dam.
in the 1960s, the world’s attention was focused on a nailbiting race against  time:  the international campaign to save a dozen ancient Egyptian temples from drowning in the floodwaters of the gigantic new Aswan High Dam. But the coverage of this unprecedented rescue effort completely overlooked the daring French archaeologist who made it all happen. Without the intervention of Christine Desrouche-Noviecourt, the temples – including the temple of Dendur, now at New York’s  Metropolitan Museum of Art – would currently be at the bottom of a vast reservoir. It was an on imaginably complex project that required the fragile sandstone temple to be dismantled and rebuilt on higher ground.
Willful and determined, Desrouche-Noviecourt refused to be cowed by anyone or anything. As a member of the French resistance in World War II, she survived imprisonment by the Nazis, in her fight to save the temple she defied two of the most daunting leaders of the postwar world, each Egypt’s president, Abdul, Nasser, and French’s president, Charles de Gaulle. As she told one reporter, “you can’t get anywhere without a fight, you know “

Desrouche-Noviecourt,also received help from surprising source. Jacqueline Kennedy, Americas new First Lady, persuaded her husband to help fund the rescue effort. After a century and a half of western plunder of Egypt’s ancient monuments, Desrouche-Noviecourt, helped instead to preserve a crucial part of that cultural heritage. 

June 24, 2025– 4 PM – PCCF and via zoom – James by Perceval Everett

Everett wrote Erasure, which was the basis for the movie American Fiction. James is a brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and ferociously funny, told from the enslaved Jim’s point of view. When Jim overhears he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter, forever, he decides to hide a nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all members of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi river toward the elusive, and too often unreliable, promise of the Free States and beyond. While many narrative, set pieces of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unprecedented death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the rivers banks, and countering the scam artist posing as the Duke and Dauphin… ), Jim’s agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light, 

July 22, 20 25–4 p.m. – PCCF and via zoom –Wifedom:  Mrs Orwell’s Life by Annie Funder

At the end of the summer 2017, Annie Funder found herself at a moment of peak overload. Family obligations and household responsibilities were crushing her soul and taking her away from her writing deadlines. She needed help, and George Orwell came to her rescue. “I’ve always loved Orwell,” Funder writes,  “his self -deprecating humor, his laser vision about how power works, and who it works on.”  So after rereading and savoring books  Orwell had written, she devoured six major biographies, tracing his life and work. But then she read about his forgotten wife, and it was a revelation . Eileen Shaughnessy married Orwell in 1936. O’Shaughnessy was a writer herself, and her literary brilliance was not only shaped, but practical common sense saved his life. But how and why, wondered, was she written out of the story? Using newly discovered letters from Eileen to her best friend, under re-created the Orwell’s marriage, through the Spanish Civil War and the second world war in London. As she peaks  behind the curtain of Orwell’s private life, she is led to question what it takes to be a writer – and what it takes to be a wife. A breathtakingly intimate view of one of the most important literary marriages of the 20th century, Wifedom speaks to our present moment as much as it illuminates the past. Genre, vending, and utterly original, it is an ode to the unsung work of women everywhere. 

August 26, 2025 – 4 p.m. – PCCF and via Zoom – Two Old Women by Velma Wallis  

Simply stated, it is an Alaskan, legend of betrayal, courage, and survival. It is a short read. Velma Wallis’ award-winning, bestselling tail about two elderly Native American women who must fend for themselves during a harsh Alaskan winter. Based on a Athabascan Indian legend passed along for many generations from mother to daughter of the upper Yukon River Valley in Alaska, this is a suspenseful, shocking, ultimately inspirational tail of two old woman, abandoned by their tribe during a brutal winter famine. Though these women have been known  to complain more than contribute, they now must survive on their own or die trying. In simple but vivid detail, Wallis depicts, a landscape and way of life that are at once merciless and sparkly beautiful. In her old woman, she has created two heroines of steely determination, whose story of betrayal, friendship, community, and forgiveness “speaks straight to the heart with clarity, sweetness, and wisdom. “