The October Book Club meeting will be at Erin Tolman's house on Thursday, October 1.
Please review her book options below and then vote for your choice in the poll on the side of this blog.
genre: fiction
rating: 5/5
This beautiful African story, set in post-genocide Rwanda, is not only compellingly and simply told - but also touches on much of what makes us truly happy in life.Angel is a Tanzanian living in Rwanda with her husband and the five grandchildren she's raising. Her claim to fame in the town of Kigali is her extraordinary and unique cakes. The process of designing the perfect cake for her customers lets her into their lives - they share their stories. Through these stories we see in many people a remarkable ability to adapt and to survive, to change and grow and find goodness wherever they are. We also see great depravity and horror as those who managed to live through the genocide begin to put heir lives and their country back together, with the help of people from many nations.I loved so much about this book - I loved Angel's listening ear and her desire to look at things truthfully. I loved how the plot revolved around her cakes, those scrumptious creations designed for so many different reason and for so many different kinds of people. And the people! A cross section of humanity - UN workers, refugees, professors, volunteers, orphans, chauffeurs, stay-at-home moms and poor AIDS patients that are trying to gain skills to make a living. We meet so much of Africa and her people - as well as those from near and far who legitimately desire to help Rwanda come back to life. The educated and illiterate are living side by side - Hutus and Tutsis are choosing to look beyond their past to a larger-than-life future. I loved the depth of this charming story.Read it.
genre: fiction
This is the first novel I've read whose protagonist is, actually, a giant, and not in the fairy tale way. Truly Plaice (LOVE the name) is born huge and grows even more huge. Her early years are taut and miserable, living with an alcoholic father in a tiny town where being anything extreme is discouraged. Her older sister, a model of beauty and decorum, only serves to set Truly off as even more vast and unacceptable. As the years go by and things only seem to get harder, Truly has to search hard and cling tight to the people and things in life that can serve her a tiny bit of happiness.And while Truly is not a fairy tale giant, the book does seem to have a sheen of rural mythology about it. A handed down quilt, a ramshackle family farm, a letter - these seemingly innocuous heirlooms change the course of Truly's life in ways as tremendous as Truly herself. Life and death are constantly demanding to be accounted for and acknowledged while Truly finds a way to pick through the rough parts and find the gems in surviving and moving on. The Little Giant of Aberdeen County earns five stars from me for not only its plot, which winds through Truly's life, but especially for its language - the prose of this book is poetic and tight. I found I couldn't read without a pencil to underline passages that struck me as either beautiful or profound.Truly's way of looking at the world is emotionally charged and yet so aware of the bigger picture. Her story gives us the freedom to look at life and death and the choices we make, hoping all the while that, in the end, we'll be happy in our own skin.
rating: 5/5
A sequestered life - a "chosen" people, Kyra's family life is guided by the revelations of the "prophet." It's the prophet who decides what wives will marry and belong to each man and it's the prophet and his "God Squad" who help enforce God's laws and dispense holy discipline as necessary.This way of life - one father and many mothers - was Kyra's only experience until two chance meetings open her eyes to the beauty that life has to offer. As she tries to reconcile her absolute love for her parents and siblings with her "sinful" desires, she discovers something her 13 years have not prepared her for: she has been chosen to marry her father's brother.Her instincts and the traditions of her family clash in this fantastically gripping and horrifying look at a fundamentalist cult. I fully believed Kyra's voice as an early teen - her frustration and the depth of her emotion. I even could relate to and pity her father and mothers, their blind belief in the prophet and his work - the book is that well written. Whether or not you are a fan of young adult fiction, this suspenseful novel of polygamist life will knock your socks off.
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