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Tuesday Afternoon Book Discussion - Adults

In-Person

09/24 The Women; 10/22 Crying in H Mart; 11/26 The Berry Pickers

September 23rd, 2 PM: The Women, by Kristen Hannah

"Frankie McGrath is just 20 when she enlists in the army to go to Vietnam as a nurse in 1965, planning to follow in the footsteps of her older brother, Finley. Frankie's parents are dismayed by her decision, even more so once they get the horrible news that Finley has been killed in action. Frankie deploys to Vietnam and is quickly overwhelmed by the horrors of war, but with the help of two new friends, Barb and Ethel, and a handsome doctor, Jamie, she adjusts to the rigors of nursing in a war zone. Her attraction to Jamie is stymied by complications, then she finds love with her brother's best friend, a charming pilot named Rye. When Frankie's service comes to an end, she is distressed when she returns to the States to find that Vietnam vets are not lauded as heroes and that many vets don't acknowledge the service of military women. As she grapples with PTSD and finds her place in antiwar protests, Frankie is dealt a terrible blow. Hannah (The Four Winds, 2021) continues her winning streak of compelling historical novels, capturing the tumultuous atmosphere of the 1960s and '70s in a moving, gripping tale that pays tribute to the under-appreciated skill and courage of combat nurses."

October 22nd, 2 PM:  Crying in H Mart

After losing her mom to rapidly advancing cancer when Zauner was in her midtwenties, the author finds herself in an Asian supermarket chain, devastated that she can’t call her mom for shopping advice or eat with her in the bustling food court. Zauner restores her mother in her vibrancy here, as a collector of knickknacks and face creams, an amazing cook who eschewed recipes, a loyal protector of her family. Zauner recalls trips to visit family in Korea, where she and her mother were both born, and moments during her adolescence that felt cruel at the time, but seem obviously born out of love in retrospect. As Zauner lives through her shocking grief, food binds her to her mother, as it always did, and in meditative paragraphs she shares her therapeutic experiences making jatjuk and kimchi. This is a beautiful, forthright memoir about the bewildering loss of a parent, and the complicated process of finding one’s art.

November 26th, 2 PM:  The Berry Pickers, by Amanda Peters 

In 1962, an Indigenous Mi'kmaq family is in Maine to pick summer blueberries when their youngest child, four-year-old Ruthie, disappears. Her six-year-old brother, Joe, saw her last. Told in alternating, first-person chapters from Joe and a narrator called Norma, the novel follows the painful reverberations of Ruthie's disappearance across five decades. Peters wisely never makes the reader wonder if Norma is Ruthie; we know that she is, which allows more compelling questions to come into focus. How much do Joe's subsequent life events and choices trace back to this first major trauma? Is his lifelong guilt justified? How does Norma/Ruthie reconcile love for the white mother who stole her from her birth mother and for the white aunt who saved her from a lonely childhood but knew the secret all along? The story is told in braided strands, and it is a testament to Peters' ability that both strands fascinate. Indigenous stories like this matter, and while little is easy for Peters' characters, in the end, for all of them—even for those who stole a small child—there is hope.