Requests for registration links will be accepted until 60 minutes before program begins.
Do you enjoy a light and entertaining read? We do too!
We usually meet on the first Wednesday of every month.
This discussion will be a Zoom meeting. Please email mweyeneth@dunlaplibrary.org for a meeting invite registration. Requests for registration links will be accepted until 60 minutes before the program begins.
1940, England: Evelyne Redfern, known as “The Parisian Orphan” as a child, is working on the line at a munitions factory in wartime London. When Mr. Fletcher, one of her father’s old friends, spots Evelyne on a night out, Evelyne finds herself plunged into the world of Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s cabinet war rooms.
However, shortly after she settles into her new role as a secretary, one of the girls at work is murdered, and Evelyne must use all of her amateur sleuthing expertise to find the killer. But doing so puts her right in the path of David Poole, a cagey minister’s aide who seems determined to thwart her investigations. That is, until Evelyne finds out David’s real mission is to root out a mole selling government secrets to Britain’s enemies, and the pair begrudgingly team up.
With her quick wit, sharp eyes, and determination, will Evelyne be able to find out who’s been selling England’s secrets and catch a killer, all while battling her growing attraction to David? – Baker & Taylor
June 5 – Death in D Minor by Alexia Gordon
This discussion will be in-person at the library.
Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on South India’s Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning—and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the turn of the century, a twelve-year-old girl from Kerala’s long-existing Christian community, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old husband for the first time. From this unforgettable new beginning, the young girl—and future matriarch, known as Big Ammachi—will witness unthinkable changes over the span of her extraordinary life, full of joy and triumph as well as hardship and loss, her faith and love the only constants.
A shimmering evocation of a bygone India and of the passage of time itself, The Covenant of Water is a hymn to progress in medicine and to human understanding, and a humbling testament to the difficulties undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today. It is one of the most masterful literary novels published in recent years. – Baker & Taylor
June 6 – The Girl with the Louding Voice by Abi Dare
This discussion will be via a Zoom meeting. Please email mweyeneth@dunlaplibrary.org for a meeting invite registration. Requests for registration links will be accepted until 60 minutes before the program begins.
What have you been reading? There are so many books out there! It’s time to share. You’ll have a chance to talk about your recent read…good, bad, or mediocre.
Creative Soul Gallery (208 N Second St) in Dunlap and the library are joining together to discuss “arty” reads. *Registration required.
Email mweyeneth@dunlaplibrary.org to receive the Zoom registration meeting invite to attend virtually or you may attend in-person at Creative Soul Gallery. Requests for registration links will be accepted until 60 minutes before the program begins.
Please indicate how you wish to attend. If you would like to attend in person, please include your phone number in your response.
Manchester, England, 1857
Rosanna Hawkins is one of Manchester’s finest artists, even though no one knows her name. She reproduces “parlor versions” of classic masterpieces with near-perfect precision, which her employer then sells to the emerging upper-middle class families of Manchester.
When the largest art exhibition ever to be held in Manchester opens, Rosanna attends, excited by the chance to sketch such famous works. When she meets the handsome Detective Martin Harrison, who is head of security for the exhibition, she is immediately intrigued by his charm, confidence, and canvas-worthy good looks. The two spend many a flirtatious afternoon exploring the exhibition hall, discussing art and sharing their secret hopes. Rosanna dreams of painting something original and meaningful, and Martin hopes to one day shed the shadow of his father’s notorious past.
The couple’s blossoming summer romance takes a strange turn when Rosanna recognizes her own works on display in the exhibition hall. Someone is stealing paintings and replacing them with her parlor version reproductions. When the evidence casts suspicion on her, Rosanna must convince Detective Harrison of her innocence and proposes a plan to capture the real art thief.
It is a daring race to catch the criminal before he disappears with the most priceless piece in the collection—Michelangelo’s Manchester Madonna. If Rosanna and Detective Harrison fail, not only will the painting be lost forever but so will their chance to rekindle their romance and paint their own happily ever after. -Baker & Taylor
June 12 – Fake Like Me by Barbara Bourland
This discussion will be via a Zoom meeting. Please email kkerckhove@dunlaplibrary.org for a meeting invite registration. Requests for registration links will be accepted until 60 minutes before the program begins.
Mystery, suspense, thriller – fiction and nonfiction! No cozy titles here!
Emma Carpenter lives in isolation with her golden retriever Laika, house-sitting an old beachfront home on the rainy Washington coast. Her only human contact is her enigmatic old neighbor, Deek, and (via text) the house’s owner, Jules.
One day, she reads a poorly written—but gruesome—horror novel by the author H. G. Kane, and posts a one-star review that drags her into an online argument with none other than the author himself. Soon after, disturbing incidents start to occur at night. To Emma, this can’t just be a coincidence. It was strange enough for this author to bicker with her online about a lousy review; could he be stalking her, too?
As Emma digs into Kane’s life and work, she learns he has published sixteen other novels, all similarly sadistic tales of stalking and murder. But who is he? How did he find her? And what else is he capable of?
Displaying his trademark command of rapid-fire pacing, unnerving atmosphere, and razor-sharp characterization, Taylor Adams once again delivers a diabolically disturbing—and deadly—game of cat and mouse. – Baker & Taylor
June 10 – Bad Summer People by Emma Rosenblum
This discussion will be via a Zoom meeting. Please email mweyeneth@dunlaplibrary.org for a meeting invite registration. Requests for registration links will be accepted until 60 minutes before the program begins.
Emma loves her husband Leo and their young daughter Ruby: she’d do anything for them. But almost everything she’s told them about herself is a lie.
And she might just have got away with it, if it weren’t for her husband’s job. Leo is an obituary writer; Emma a well-known marine biologist. When she suffers a serious illness, Leo copes by doing what he knows best – researching and writing about his wife’s life. But as he starts to unravel the truth, he discovers the woman he loves doesn’t really exist. Even her name isn’t real.
When the very darkest moments of Emma’s past finally emerge, she must somehow prove to Leo that she really is the woman he always thought she was . . .
But first, she must tell him about the other love of her life. – Baker & Taylor
June 26 – Ellie and the Harpmaker by Hazel Prior
This discussion will be via a Zoom meeting. Please email mweyeneth@dunlaplibrary.org for a meeting invite registration. Requests for registration links will be accepted until 60 minutes before the program begins.
“Where I come from, we’ve learned to silence ourselves. We’ve been taught that silence will save us. Where I come from, we keep these stories to ourselves. To tell them to the outside world is unheard of‘dangerous, the ultimate shame.’
Palestine, 1990. Seventeen-year-old Isra prefers reading books to entertaining the suitors her father has chosen for her. Over the course of a week, the naïve and dreamy girl finds herself quickly betrothed and married, and is soon living in Brooklyn. There Isra struggles to adapt to the expectations of her oppressive mother-in-law Fareeda and strange new husband Adam, a pressure that intensifies as she begins to have children’four daughters instead of the sons Fareeda tells Isra she must bear.
Brooklyn, 2008. Eighteen-year-old Deya, Isra’s oldest daughter, must meet with potential husbands at her grandmother Fareeda’s insistence, though her only desire is to go to college. Deya can’t help but wonder if her options would have been different had her parents survived the car crash that killed them when Deya was only eight. But her grandmother is firm on the matter: the only way to secure a worthy future for Deya is through marriage to the right man.
But fate has a will of its own, and soon Deya will find herself on an unexpected path that leads her to shocking truths about her family’knowledge that will force her to question everything she thought she knew about her parents, the past, and her own future. – Baker & Taylor
June 18 – The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
Let’s get down to the facts!
This discussion will be a Zoom meeting. Please email mweyeneth@dunlaplibrary.org for a meeting invite registration. Requests for registration links will be accepted until 60 minutes before the program begins.
Meet in January – October.
In this account of America’s first women astronauts “Grush skillfully weaves a story that, at its heart, is about desire: not a nation’s desire to conquer space, but the longing of six women to reach heights that were forbidden to them” (The New York Times).
When NASA sent astronauts to the moon in the 1960s and 1970s the agency excluded women from the corps, arguing that only military test pilots—a group then made up exclusively of men—had the right stuff. It was an era in which women were steered away from jobs in science and deemed unqualified for space flight. Eventually, though, NASA recognized its blunder and opened the application process to a wider array of hopefuls, regardless of race or gender. From a candidate pool of 8,000 six elite women were selected in 1978—Sally Ride, Judy Resnik, Anna Fisher, Kathy Sullivan, Shannon Lucid, and Rhea Seddon.
In The Six, acclaimed journalist Loren Grush shows these brilliant and courageous women enduring claustrophobic—and sometimes deeply sexist—media attention, undergoing rigorous survival training, and preparing for years to take multi-million-dollar payloads into orbit. Together, the Six helped build the tools that made the space program run. One of the group, Judy Resnik, sacrificed her life when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded at 46,000 feet. Everyone knows of Sally Ride’s history-making first space ride, but each of the Six would make their mark. – Baker & Taylor
June 27– Crossings: How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of Our Planet by Ben Goldfarb
We will gather in the library parking lot and then walk the Rock Island trail* while we talk about what we’ve been reading, listening to, or watching…whatever comes to mind!
*Weather permitting.
Meets in June and July.