About ML

BCIB ...

Welcome to the Merrick Library's Book Club in A Bag Program. Each bag contains 10 copies of a title, discussion information, discussion leader tips, and a book sign up sheet to help the leader keep track of the books. The Reference Department has been very busy gathering multiple copies of several titles for your discussion groups. You will be able to check them out as one complete kit. Also included will be everything you need to lead your group; author biographies, discussion questions, critical material and more! All of the work has already been done for you. All you need are some interested readers, some snacks, great conversation, and you are good to go! Please call the Reference Desk for more information. (516) 377-6112 x112 or x113.

	"Garden Spells" By Sarah Addison Allen In a garden surrounded by a tall fence, tucked away behind a small, quiet house in an even smaller town, is an apple tree that is rumored to bear a very special sort of fruit. In this luminous debut novel, Sarah Addison Allen tells the story of that enchanted tree, and the extraordinary people who tend it.
	"Sarah's Key" By Tatiana De Rosnay Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is brutally arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel' d'Hiv' roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family's apartment, thinking that she will be back within a few hours. Paris, May 2002: On Vel' d'Hiv's 60th anniversary, journalist Julia Jarmond is asked to write an article about this black day in France's past. Through her contemporary investigation, she stumbles onto a trail of long-hidden family secrets that connect her to Sarah. Julia finds herself compelled to retrace the girl's ordeal, from that terrible term in the Vel d'Hiv', to the camps, and beyond. As she probes into Sarah's past, she begins to question her own place in France, and to reevaluate her marriage and her life. Tatiana de Rosnay offers us a brilliantly subtle, compelling portrait of France under occupation and reveals the taboos and silence that surround this painful episode.
	"If Today Be Sweet" By Thrity Umrigar Umrigar's protagonist is Tehmina, a recent widow, whose only son lives in a fictional suburb of Cleveland with his American wife and young son. Tehmina, who is visiting her son over Christmas, has to make a choice about where she will live the rest of her life. If she were to stay in Bombay, she would be independent and surrounded by the familiar including her memories of a beautiful life with her husband. But, she would be away from her son and his family. If she were to move to the United States, it would have an impact on her son and his family and she would have to acculturate herself to life in the United States
	"Aloft" By Chant Rae Lee At 59, Jerry Battle is coasting through life. His favorite pastime is flying his small plane high above Long Island. Aloft, he can escape from the troubles that plague his family, neighbors, and loved ones on the ground. But he can't stay in the air forever. Only months before his 60th birthday, a culmination of family crises finally pull Jerry down from his emotionally distant course.
	"The Art of Mending" By Elizabeth Berg It begins with the sudden revelation of astonishing secrets secrets that have shaped the personalities and fates of three siblings, and now threaten to tear them apart. In renowned author Elizabeth Berg's moving novel, unearthed truths force one seemingly ordinary family to reexamine their disparate lives and to ask themselves: Is it too late to mend the hurts of the past?
	"The Double Bind" By Chris Bohjalian When Laurel Estabrook is attacked while riding her bicycle through Vermont's back roads, her life is forever changed. Formerly outgoing, Laurel withdraws into her photography, spending all her free time at a homeless shelter. There she meets Bobbie Crocker, a man with a history of mental illness and a box of photographs that he won't let anyone see. When Bobbie dies, Laurel discovers a deeply hidden secret-a story that leads her far from her old life, and into a catand-mouse game with pursuers who claim they want to save her
	"Mona in the Promised Land" By Jen Gish Mona Chang is a Chinese-American teenager growing up in the late 1960s and early 70s when matters of race and ethnicity are beginning to be contested. She is one of two daughters of Chinese immigrants who have just moved their pancake house to upscale Scarshill, New York. The neighborhood is "moneyed" and has many delis. Mona soon has numerous friends. many of whom are Jewish. The plot centers around Mona, a nice Chinese girl, turning Jewish over the objections of her parents.
	"The Bridge of Sighs" By Richard Russo Louis Charles "Lucy" Lynch has spent his whole life in Thomaston, a small town in upstate New York. He's married to Sarah, the girl he fell in love with in high school, owns and operates three convenience stores, including the corner grocery he inherited from his parents, and is perfectly content with his well-established routines and the familiar rhythms of Thomaston. At the age of sixty, as he and Sarah plan their first-ever trip away from home, he looks back on his life, weaving memories into a history of his family and his town. He writes about his outgoing father, who believed fully in the American Dream and loved him unconditionally, and about his critical but caring mother, whose realistic view of life provided the necessary balance to his father's naivete and idealism.
	"The Girls" By Lori Lansen Rarely has the experience of being a sister been so poignantly and memorably captured as in Lori Lansens's triumphant novel. The Girls celebrates life's fundamental joys and trials as it presents Rose and Ruby, sisters destined to live inseparably but blessed with distinct sensibilities that enrich and complicate their shared experiences-of growing up, of finding their way in the world, of saying good-bye.
	"The Invisible Wall" By Harry Bernstein The writer is 95. This memoir is his first book. This is a groundbreaking story of family secrets and forbidden love told through the eyes of a young Jewish boy, Harry, growing up in an English working-class neighborhood on the eve of World War I.
	"The No.1 Ladies Detective Agency By Alexander McCall Smith When Precious Ramotswe decides to use the money her beloved father left her to open the first ever Ladies' Detective Agency in Botswana, everyone is skeptical. "Can women be detectives?" asks the bank's lawyer. Mma Ramotswe herself feels unsure of her success. After all, her only assets are a tiny white van, two desks, two chairs, a telephone, an old typewriter, a teapot, and three teacups. But she does possess the intangible assets of intuition and intelligence. These she has in great supply, along with perseverance, a keen knowledge of the human mind and heart, a steadfast sense of right and wrong, and a personality that inspires trust and loquaciousness in nearly all who meet her. What she also has is a deep love for Africa generally and for Botswana and its people especially.
	"Three Junes" By Julia Glass In the novel's first part, we meet Paul McLeod, the patriarch, who is touring Greece after the death of his vivacious wife. The story of his infatuation with a young American artist he meets there, and his gesture toward a new freedom so late in life, segues into the tour de force of part two, where we re-experience the privileged but provincial world of the McLeods-and the cosmopolitan world of the West Village--from the perspective of Fenno, the eldest son. A lovable, slightly repressed but self-aware gay man, he leads the life of an aloof expatriate, trying to protect himself from emotional entanglement--until a worldly neighbor presents him with an extraordinary gift and a seductive photographer makes him an unwitting subject. And in the final part, Fenno crosses paths with Fern, the woman who captivated his father in Greece ten years before and who is pregnant with a son she may decide to raise on her own. All the loves and losses of this rich, emotionally complex book come together in the fateful meeting of these two characters one exquisite night in June over a Long Island dinner table.
	"Three Cups of Tea" By Greg Mortenson In 1993 Greg Mortenson was the exhausted survivor of a failed attempt to ascend K2, an American climbing bum wandering emaciated and lost through Pakistan's Karakoram Himalaya. After he was taken in and nursed back to health by the people of an impoverished Pakistani village, Mortenson promised to return one day and build them a school. From that rash, earnest promise grew one of the most incredible humanitarian campaigns of our time---Greg Mortenson's one-man mission to counteract extremism by building schools, especially for girls, throughout the breeding ground of the Taliban.
	"Those Who Save Us" By Jenna Blum An emotionally estranged mother and daughter are reconciled when the daughter learns the truth about her German mother's actions in WWII.Blum, who is half-Jewish and of German descent, worked for Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation as an interviewer of Holocaust survivors-and her first fiction is suffused with details about life in wartime Germany, where her protagonists Anna Schlemmer and her daughter Trudy were both born.
	Wait till Next Year By Doris Kearns Goodwin This is the story of a young girl growing up in the suburbs of New York in the 1950s, when owning a single-family home on a tree-lined street meant the realization of dreams, when everyone knew everyone else on the block, and the children gathered in the streets to play from sunup to sundown. The neighborhood was equally divided among Dodger, Giant, and Yankee fans, and the corner stores were the scenes of fierce and affectionate rivalries. This is also the story of a girlhood in which the religious festivals of the Catholic church and the seasonal imperatives of baseball combined to produce a passionate love of history, ceremony, and ritual. It’s the story of growing up in what seemed a more innocent era until one recalls the terror of polio, the paranoia of McCarthyism reflected even in the children's games, the obsession with A-bomb drils in school, and the ugly face of racial prejudice.
	Away by Amy Bloom Panoramic in scope, Away is the epic and intimate story of young Lillian Leyb, a dangerous innocent, an accidental heroine. When her family is destroyed in a Russian pogrom, Lillian comes to America alone, determined to make her way in a new land. When word comes that her daughter, Sophie, might still be alive, Lillian embarks on an odyssey that takes her from the world of the Yiddish theater on New York’s Lower East Side, to Seattle’s Jazz District, and up to Alaska, along the fabled Telegraph Trail toward Siberia.
	Moloka’i by Alan Brennert Rachel Kalama, a spirited seven-year-old Hawaiian girl, dreams of visiting far-off lands like her father, a merchant seaman. Then one day a rose-colored mark appears on her skin, and those dreams are stolen from her. Taken from her home and family, Rachel is sent to Kalaupapa, the quarantined leprosy settlement on the island of Moloka'i. Here her life is supposed to end—but instead she discovers it is only just beginning.
	The Camel Bookmobile by Masha Hamilton Fiona "Fi" Sweeney is a librarian from New York. Driven by a desire for adventure and her professional devotion to literacy and reading, she relocates to Kenya to help with a traveling library program for isolated rural villages. She inadvertently renews a decades-old tribal feud involving a camel-powered bookmobile and prior efforts to promote local education.
	Blue Diary by Alice Hoffman When Ethan Ford fails to show up for work on a brilliant summer morning, none of his neighbors would guess that for more than thirteen years, he has been running from his past. His true nature has been locked away, as hidden as his real identity. But sometimes locks spring open, and the devastating truths of Ethan Ford's history shatter the small-town peace of Monroe, affecting family and friends alike.
	The Photograph by Penelope Lively When Glyn, a landscape historian, stumbles upon a photograph of his deceased wife, Kath, holding hands with another man, his understanding of the past is "savagely undermined." Reading the past, uncovering and deciphering its strata, is his stock in trade, but now it is his own personal landscape, and the history of his marriage, that he must reinterpret. He veers from emotional vertigo to an obsessive need to know what kind of woman his wife really was.
	Hidden by Victoria Lustbader The battlefield traumas of The Great War cement an improbable friendship between Jed Gates, scion of the wealthy Gates family, and David Warshinsky, first-generation American from New York's poverty-ridden lower East Side. David sacrifices his family and his Jewish heritage in pursuit of his untamable ambition, while Jed sacrifices his private desires to assume the burdens of familial expectations.
	The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger Passionately in love, Clare and Henry vow to hold onto each other and their marriage as they struggle with the effects of Chrono-Displacement Disorder, a condition that casts Henry involuntarily into the world of time travel.
	Change of Heart by Jodi Picoult One moment June Nealon was happily looking forward to years full of laughter and adventure with her family, and the next, she was staring into a future that was as empty as her heart. Now her life is a waiting game. Waiting for time to heal her wounds, waiting for justice. In short, waiting for a miracle to happen. For Shay Bourne, life holds no more surprises. The world has given him nothing, and he has nothing to offer the world. In a heartbeat, though, something happens that changes everything for him. Now, he has one last chance for salvation, and it lies with June's eleven-year-old daughter, Claire. But between Shay and Claire stretches an ocean of bitter regrets, past crimes, and the rage of a mother who has lost her child.
	The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer London, 1946, is emerging from the shadow of the Second World War, and writer Juliet Ashton is looking for her next book subject. Who could imagine that she would find it in a letter from a man she’s never met, a native of the island of Guernsey, who has come across her name written inside a book by Charles Lamb. As Juliet and her new correspondent exchange letters, Juliet is drawn into the world of this man and his friends. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society—born as a spur-of-the-moment alibi when its members were discovered breaking curfew by the Germans occupying their island—boasts a charming, deeply human cast of characters. Juliet begins a remarkable correspondence with the society’s members, learning about their island, their taste in books, and the impact the recent German occupation has had on their lives. Captivated by their stories, she sets sail for Guernsey, and what she finds will change her forever.
	Black and White by Dani Shapiro For 14 years, Clara Brodeur has cloaked herself in a cocoon of white lies and evasions in an effort to wipe out her own history. The simple life she has built with her husband and daughter in small-town Maine retains no hint of her notorious childhood in New York City, her mother’s meteoric rise to international fame as a photographer or the controversial series of nude photos of herself that she believes destroyed her life and permanently unraveled her family. But when her sister telephones with news that their mother lies near death, ravaged by lung cancer, Clara’s careful façade crumbles. Suddenly, she is drawn back into her mother’s force field, grappling for ways to explain the truth of her past to her young daughter while simultaneously learning how to say goodbye to the mother she wants to hate.
	Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout At times stern, at other times patient, at times perceptive, at other times in sad denial, Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher, deplores the changes in her little town of Crosby, Maine, and in the world at large, but she doesn’t always recognize the changes in those around her: a lounge musician haunted by a past romance; a former student who has lost the will to live; Olive’s own adult child, who feels tyrannized by her irrational sensitivities; and her husband, Henry, who finds his loyalty to his marriage both a blessing and a curse.
	The Shack by William P. Young Mackenzie Allen Phillips' youngest daughter, Missy, has been abducted during a family vacation and evidence that she may have been brutally murdered is found in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Four years later in the midst of his Great Sadness, Mack receives a suspicious note, apparently from God, inviting him back to that shack for a weekend. Against his better judgment he arrives at the shack on a wintry afternoon and walks back into his darkest nightmare. What he finds there will change Mack's world forever.
	“American Pastoral” by Philip Roth Philip Roth's 22nd book takes a life-long view of the American experience in this thoughtful investigation of the century's most divisive and explosive of decades, the '60s. Returning again to the voice of his literary alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, Roth is at the top of his form. His prose is carefully controlled yet always fresh and intellectually subtle as he reconstructs the halcyon days, circa World War II, of Seymour "the Swede" Levov, a high school sports hero and all-around Great Guy who wants nothing more than to live in tranquillity. But as the Swede grows older and America crazier, history sweeps his family inexorably into its grip: His own daughter, Merry, commits an unpardonable act of "protest" against the Vietnam war that ultimately severs the Swede from any hope of happiness, family, or spiritual coherence
	The Senator’s Wife by Sue Miller Meri is 37, newly married and newly pregnant, standing on the cusp of her life as a wife and mother, and recognizing with some terror the gap between reality and expectation. Delia, her neighbor in the adjoining New England town house, is twice Meri's age, the wife of Tom Naughton, a venerated former U.S. senator --- a man whose habitual infidelities are an open secret in Washington. As dissimilar as they may appear, these two women find themselves leading strangely parallel lives, reckoning with the contours and mysteries of marriage, one refined and abraded by years of complicated intimacy, the other barely begun.
	“American Wife” by Curtis Sittenfield When Alice meets boisterous, charismatic Charlie Blackwell, she hardly gave him a second look: She was serious and thoughtful, and he would rather crack a joke than offer a real insight; he was the wealthy son of a bastion family of the Republican party, and she was a school librarian and registered Democrat. Comfortable in her quiet and unassuming life, she felt inured to his charms. And then, much to her surprise, Alice fell for Charlie. When Charlie eventually becomes President, Alice is thrust into a position she did not seek --- one of power and influence, privilege and responsibility. As Charlie’s tumultuous and controversial second term in the White House wears on, Alice must face contradictions years in the making: How can she both love and fundamentally disagree with her husband?
	The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery This dark but redemptive novel, an international bestseller, marks the debut in English of Normandy philosophy professor Barbery. Rene Michel, 54 and widowed, is the stolid concierge in an elegant Paris hotel particulier . Though "short, ugly, and plump," Rene has, as she says, "always been poor," but she has a secret: she's a ferocious autodidact who's better versed in literature and the arts than any of the building's snobby residents. Meanwhile, "supersmart" 12-year-old Paloma Josse, who switches off narration with Rene, lives in the building with her wealthy, liberal family. Having grasped life's futility early on, Paloma plans to commit suicide on her 13th birthday. The arrival of a new tenant, Kakuro Ozu, who befriends both the young pessimist and the concierge alike, sets up their possible transformations.
	Little Bee by Chris Cleave Little Bee, smart and stoic, knows two people in England, Andrew and Sarah, journalists she chanced upon on a Nigerian beach after fleeing a massacre in her village, one grisly outbreak in an off-the-radar oil war. After sneaking into England and escaping a rural "immigration removal" center, she arrives at Andrew and Sarah s London suburb home only to find that the violence that haunts her has also poisoned them. In an unnerving blend of dread, wit, and beauty, Cleave slowly and arrestingly excavates the full extent of the horror that binds Little Bee and Sarah together.
	Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford Fifth-grade scholarship students and best friends Henry and Keiko are the only Asians in their Seattle elementary school in 1942. Henry is Chinese, Keiko is Japanese, and Pearl Harbor has made all Asians—even those who are American born—targets for abuse. Because Henry's nationalistic father has a deep-seated hatred for Japan, Henry keeps his friendship with and eventual love for Keiko a secret. When Keiko's family is sent to an internment camp in Idaho, Henry vows to wait for her. Forty years later, Henry comes upon an old hotel where the belongings of dozens of displaced Japanese families have turned up in the basement, and his love for Keiko is reborn. In his first novel, award-winning short-story writer Ford expertly nails the sweet innocence of first love, the cruelty of racism, the blindness of patriotism, the astonishing unknowns between parents and their children, and the sadness and satisfaction at the end of a life well lived.
	Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See Lily at 80 reflects on her life, beginning with her "daughter days" in 19th-century rural China. Foot-binding was practiced by all but the poorest families, and the graphic descriptions of it are not for the fainthearted. Yet women had nu shu, their own secret language. At the instigation of a matchmaker, Lily and Snow Flower, a girl from a larger town and supposedly from a well-connected, wealthy family, become laotong, bound together for life. Even after Lily learns that Snow Flower is not from a better family, even when Lily marries above her and Snow Flower beneath her, they remain close, exchanging nu shu written on a fan. When war comes, Lily is separated from her husband and children. She survives the winter helped by Snow Flower's husband, a lowly butcher, until she is reunited with her family. As the years pass, the women's relationship changes; Lily grows more powerful in her community, bitter, and harder, until at last she breaks her bond with Snow Flower. They are not reunited until Lily tries to make the dying Snow Flower's last days comfortable.
	The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls Walls, who spent years trying to hide her childhood experiences, allows the story to spill out in this remarkable recollection of growing up. From her current perspective as a contributor to MSNBC online, she remembers the poverty, hunger, jokes, and bullying she and her siblings endured, and she looks back at her parents: her flighty, self-indulgent mother, a Pollyanna unwilling to assume the responsibilities of parenting, and her father, troubled, brilliant Rex, whose ability to turn his family's downward-spiraling circumstances into adventures allowed his children to excuse his imperfections until they grew old enough to understand what he had done to them--and to himself. His grand plans to build a home for the family never evolved: the hole for the foundation of the "The Glass Castle," as the dream house was called, became the family garbage dump, and, of course, a metaphor for Rex Walls' life. Shocking, sad, and occasionally bitter, this gracefully written account speaks candidly, yet with surprising affection, about parents and about the strength of family ties--for both good and ill.

About ML About ML

Merrick Library

Reader's Blog

Facebook

Flickr

Twitter

Book Club in a Bag

About ML

BCIB ...