DISCUSSION GUIDES
- 1.
Butter Side Up: How I Survived My Most Terrible Year and Created My Super Awesome Life
Summary: How often have you heard someone say, “I hate change?” That’s because most people do. The reality is, whether you like it or not, life puts us all through changes—some challenging, and many joyful—that shape our day-to-day experiences. Sometimes , though, in the blink of an eye, the unthinkable can happen. This begs the question: when the unexpected occurs, how do successfully navigate change so you land butter side up when life turns the tables?
- 2.
Lemons In The Garden of Love: A Novel
Summary: In Ames Sheldon’s third award-winning historical novel, graduate student Cassie Lyman travels to her sister’s shotgun wedding in 1977. On her way Cassie discovers suffrage cartoons, diaries, and letters of Kate Easton, the founder of the Birth Control League of Massachusetts, and then she discovers that she and Kate are closely related, even though Cassie had never heard of Kate before then.
- 3.
Dear Bobby: A Portrait of Addiction, Depression, Love and Loss
Summary: If you are the mother, father, sister, brother, friend, co-worker, boss of a drug-dependent person, this book is especially for you.
- 4.
When Women Were Dragons: A Novel
Summary: The first adult novel by the Newbery award-winning author of The Girl Who Drank the Moon is a rollicking feminist tale set in 1950s America where thousands of women have spontaneously transformed into dragons, exploding notions of a woman’s place in the world and expanding minds about accepting others for who they really are.
- 5.
Remarkably Bright Creatures: A Novel
Summary: For fans of A Man Called Ove, a charming, witty and compulsively readable exploration of friendship, reckoning, and hope that traces a widow's unlikely connection with a giant Pacific octopus.
- 6.
Damnation Spring
Summary: A stunning novel about love, work, and marriage that asks how far one family and one community will go to protect their future.
- 7.
Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance: A Novel
Summary: From Alison Espach, author of the New York Times Editor’s Choice novel The Adults, comes a breathtaking love story about two broken people who find themselves drawn to each other again and again across their lives, and a funny, uncommonly wise coming-of-age tale set in the early 90s that brims with unexpected moments of joy.
- 8.
Eva and Eve: A Search for My Mother's Lost Childhood and What a War Left Behind
Summary: To Julie Metz, her mother, Eve, was the quintessential New Yorker. Eve rarely spoke about her childhood and it was difficult to imagine her living anywhere else except Manhattan. After her mother died, Julie Metz discovered a keepsake book filled with farewell notes from friends and relatives addressed to a ten-year-old girl named Eva. This long-hidden memento was the first clue to the secret pain that Julie’s mother had carried as a refugee and immigrant from Nazi-occupied Vienna, shining a light on a family that had to persevere at every turn to escape the antisemitism and xenophobia that threatened their survival.
- 9.
The Red Bike
Summary: A heartbreaking and uplifting mother-daughter drama with a steamy romantic backstory.
- 10.
Greenwich Park
Summary: “A twisty, fast-paced” (The Sunday Times, London) debut thriller, as electrifying as the #1 New York Times bestseller The Girl on the Train, about impending motherhood, unreliable friendship, and the high price of keeping secrets.
- 11.
The Last Thing He Told Me: A Novel
Summary: A gripping mystery about a woman who thinks she’s found the love of her life—until he disappears.
- 12.
Who Will Accompany You?
Summary: Award-winning memoirist Meg Stafford has an adventurous spirit, and this time she takes us along for the ride. When her daughters venture into terra incognita—one of them meditating in the Himalayas and the other negotiating with the Colombian military—Stafford decides to go too. In the process, she reflects on her own lifetime of wanderlust and what it means for a parent to love and to let go. Generous, insightful, and deeply funny, Stafford is the ideal tour guide for a journey as big as the world and as intimate as the human heart.
- 13.
The Red Kitchen: A Memoir
Summary: The Red Kitchen is the story of Barbara and her mother, who, like many women, surrender to society’s expectation to be one thing while yearning to be another. Both women—in very different ways—come of age, find the loving parts of their mother-daughter relationship, and start living their best lives.
- 14.
The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek: A Novel
Summary: The bestselling historical fiction from Kim Michele Richardson, this is a novel following Cussy Mary, a packhorse librarian and her quest to bring books to the Appalachian community she loves, perfect for readers of Lee Smith and Lisa Wingate.
- 15.
Truly, Madly: Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, and the Romance of the Century
Summary: "A "well rounded and entertaining" (New York Times) Hollywood biography about the passionate, turbulent marriage of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh.
- 16.
Beat the Devils
Summary: An inventive, page-turning crime thriller with "palpable emotional depth" (New York Times Book Review) in which the Red Scare never ended.
- 17.
The Book Woman's Daughter: A Novel
Summary: The new novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek!
- 18.
Copy Boy: A Jane Benjamin Novel
Summary: It’s 1937. Jane’s on the run. She’s left her pregnant mother with a man she hates and left her father for dead in an irrigation ditch. To survive on her own, Jane remakes herself as a man. Everything’s getting better, until her father turns up on the newspaper’s front page, in a picture that threatens to destroy the life she’s making.
- 19.
The Chosen and the Beautiful
Summary: “A vibrant and queer reinvention of F. Scott Fitzgerald's jazz age classic. . . . I was captivated from the first sentence.”—NPR
- 20.
Wisdom from the Wild: The Nine Unbreakable Laws of Leadership from the Animal Kingdom
Summary: Nature is the perfect teacher for the challenging and very personal concept of leadership. And no one knows this better than former zoo and aquarium senior leader turned leadership consultant Julie C. Henry. Wisdom from the Wild shows you―whether you’re a new or experienced leader―how to learn from and be inspired by the wildlife and wild places all around you. This fun, new approach to leadership presents nine “Unbreakable Laws” from the animal kingdom. These true, fundamental guidelines with concrete examples from wildlife can steer your work and decisions as a leader.
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