Hi everyone, here is the Book Club for Adults Overview for September 2023! Our September Read was Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid.

Malibu Rising unfolds in the Malibu region of California over a few days at the end of August 2023, with interspersed back stories telling the tale of the main characters: Famous rock star Mick Rivara, Mick’s first wife June Costas Rivara, and their children Nina a model and surfer, Jay a championship surfer, Hud a surfer and photographer and Kit, a college student and the best surfer of the bunch.

The main action unfolds in 1983 with the Riva siblings, who form a close family unit, getting together and catching up in the days prior to Nina’s annual end of summer party; which is the party to attend and to be seen to attend by the famous and influential people in the media industry of the day.  

The author then fills in the back story of the parents, Mick & June, their backgrounds, how they met and were married and how June supported Mick and held down the home front taking care of their two eldest children Nina & Jay, while ladies man Mick became a big rock star and focused on his career, spending most of his time away from home.

Mick it transpired, was incapable of fidelity, and despite many assurances that he would reform, eventually, after June married and divorced him and married him again, and they added more children to the family, Mick walked out to pursue his carefree lifestyle; and June; who was awarded money in their second divorce but never received it, and choose not to go after Mick to get it, wound up working at her parent’s fish fry restaurant and providing a paycheck-to-paycheck existence for her kids.

In the years after the second divorce, June becomes an alcoholic. And after eldest child Nina turned 17, she drowned in the family’s bathtub never really having a chance to reach for her highest potential in life as she wished to do. In the aftermath of June’s death, not quite 18-year-old Nina took charge, taking care of her siblings, dropping out of high school to work in the family restaurant and struggling to take care of the Rivara household; before being spotted by a modeling agent while surfing and beginning a lucrative modeling career. The novel goes on to relay what each of the Rivara children have been doing as adults and the fact that all four of them are at a crossroad in their lives.

Things come to a crux during the days just before the end-of-summer-party, during the party itself and in its aftermath, during which Mick makes an appearance. All four children choose new paths to take in their lives and Mick, self-centered and carless individual that he is, and always has been, inadvertently makes sure the 1983 end-of-summer bash is the last one – when he carelessly throws away a cigarette end starts a wildfire that burns Nina’s house down.  

Malibu Rising was a popular summer read the year it was published 2021. The book club members thought the book was a lightweight summer read and could have been better written.

–

The next SSC Library Book Club for Adults Meeting will be held at the library the second Friday in October – that is Friday, October 13, 2023 from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m.

Our October Read is The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams

Copies should be available at the library soon – I have a list of people who I will call when they come in – if you’d like to be added to the list, please let me know!

And here is an overview of the plot of:

The Dictionary of Lost Words

DEBUT Esme Nicoll’s love of words began underneath her father’s desk inside the Scriptorium, a garden shed where a team of lexicographers and assistants fashioned the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. One day, a slip falls from a Scriptorium desk and lands in Esme’s lap. Believing it to be discarded, Esme pockets the slip and stores it in a wooden chest. As she grows, Esme continues to collect words and slowly begins to understand that the words used by women and poor people are often deemed unworthy to be immortalized in print. As she diligently devotes her life to the Oxford English Dictionary, Esme decides to give voice to the unwritten words by writing her own lexicon in secret–the Dictionary of Lost Words. Set in England in the harrowing era of women’s suffrage and the Great War, this fiction debut, by social researcher and memoirist Williams (One Italian Summer), uncovers perspectives that might have been lost if not for Esme’s love and dedication. VERDICT Enchanting, sorrowful, and wonderfully written, the book is a one-of-a-kind celebration of language and its importance in our lives. A must-have for every library collection. – Starred Library Journal Review

 –

Book Club Members Recommended Reads: September 2023

Everything’s Fine by Cecilia Rabess

On Jess’s first day at Goldman Sachs, she’s less than thrilled to learn she’ll be on the same team as Josh, her white, conservative sparring partner from college. Josh loves playing the devil’s advocate and is just…the worst.

But when Jess finds herself the sole Black woman on the floor, overlooked and underestimated, it’s Josh who shows up for her in surprising—if imperfect—ways. Before long, an unlikely friendship—one tinged with undeniable chemistry—forms between the two. A friendship that gradually, and then suddenly, turns into an electrifying romance that shocks them both.

Despite their differences, the force of their attraction propels the relationship forward, and Jess begins to question whether it’s more important to be happy than right. But then it’s 2016, and the cultural and political landscape shifts underneath them. And Jess, who is just beginning to discover who she is and who she has the right to be, is forced to ask herself what she’s willing to compromise for love and whether, in fact, everything’s fine.

A stunning debut that introduces Cecilia Rabess as a blazing new talent, Everything’s Fine is a poignant and sharp novel that doesn’t just ask will they, but…should they?

–

Heaven And Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe’s theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe.
    

As these characters’ stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town’s white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community—heaven and earth—that sustain us.

–

The Murder of King Tut: The Plot to Kill the Child King – A Nonfiction Thriller by James Patterson

The mystery of King Tut’s death in Ancient Egypt has haunted the world for centuries. Discover the ultimate true crime story of passion and betrayal, where the clues point to murder.

Thrust onto Egypt’s most powerful throne at the age of nine, King Tut’s reign was fiercely debated from the outset. Behind the palace’s veil of prosperity, bitter rivalries and jealousy flourished among the Boy King’s most trusted advisors, and after only nine years, King Tut suddenly perished, his name purged from Egyptian history. To this day, his death remains shrouded in controversy.

Now, in The Murder of King Tut, James Patterson and Martin Dugard dig through stacks of evidence-X-rays, Carter’s files, forensic clues, and stories told through the ages-to arrive at their own account of King Tut’s life and death. The result is an exhilarating true crime tale of intrigue, passion, and betrayal that casts fresh light on the oldest mystery of all.

–

Random Acts of Medicine: The Hidden Forces That Sway Doctors, Impact Patients, and Shape Our Health by Anupam B. Jena and Christopher Worsham

As a University of Chicago–trained economist and Harvard medical school professor and doctor, Anupam Jena is uniquely equipped to answer these questions. And as a critical care doctor at Massachusetts General who researches health care policy, Christopher Worsham confronts their impact on the hospital’s sickest patients. In this singular work of science and medicine, Jena and Worsham show us how medicine really works, and its effect on all of us.

Relying on ingeniously devised natural experiments—random events that unknowingly turn us into experimental subjects—Jena and Worsham do more than offer readers colorful stories. They help us see the way our health is shaped by forces invisible to the untrained eye. Is there ever a good time to have a heart attack? Do you choose the veteran doctor or the rookie?  Do you really need the surgery your doctor recommends? These questions are rife with significance; their impact can be life changing. Addressing them in a style that’s both animated and enlightening, Random Acts of Medicine empowers you to see past the white coat and find out what really makes medicine work—and how it could work better.

–

Revival Season: A Novel by Monica West

Every summer, fifteen-year-old Miriam Horton and her family pack themselves tight in their old minivan and travel through small southern towns for revival season: the time when Miriam’s father—one of the South’s most famous preachers—holds massive healing services for people desperate to be cured of ailments and disease. But, this summer, the revival season doesn’t go as planned, and after one service in which Reverend Horton’s healing powers are tested like never before, Miriam witnesses a shocking act of violence that shakes her belief in her father—and her faith.

When the Hortons return home, Miriam’s confusion only grows as she discovers she might have the power to heal—even though her father and the church have always made it clear that such power is denied to women. Over the course of the following year, Miriam must decide between her faith, her family, and her newfound power that might be able to save others, but if discovered by her father, could destroy Miriam.

Celebrating both feminism and faith, Revival Season is a “tender and wise” (Ann Patchett) story of spiritual awakening and disillusionment in a Southern, Black, Evangelical community.

–

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family’s orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today

–

The Zookeepers’ War: An Incredible True Story from the Cold War by J.W. Mohnhaupt and Shelley Frisch

Living in West Berlin in the 1960s often felt like living in a zoo, everyone packed together behind a wall, with the world always watching. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, East Berlin and its zoo were spacious and lush, socialist utopias where everything was perfectly planned… and then rarely completed.

Berlin’s two zoos in East and West quickly became symbols of the divided city’s two halves. So no one was terribly surprised when the head zookeepers on either side started an animal arms race—rather than stockpiling nuclear warheads, they competed to have the most pandas and hippos. Soon, state funds were being diverted toward giving these new animals lavish welcomes worthy of visiting dignitaries. West German presidential candidates were talking about zoo policy on the campaign trail. And eventually politicians on both side of the Wall became convinced that if their zoo proved to be inferior, that would mean their country’s whole ideology was too.

A quirky piece of Cold War history unlike anything you’ve heard before, The Zookeepers’ War is an epic tale of desperate rivalries, human follies, and an animal-mad city in which zookeeping became a way of continuing politics by other means.

–