DISCUSSION GUIDES

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.

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.

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.

Summary: A stunning novel about love, work, and marriage that asks how far one family and one community will go to protect their future.

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.

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.

Summary: A heartbreaking and uplifting mother-daughter drama with a steamy romantic backstory.

Summary: Working at the local processing plant, Marcos is in the business of slaughtering humans--though no one calls them that anymore.

His wife has left him, his father is sinking into dementia, and Marcos tries not to think too hard about how he makes a living. After all, it happened so quickly. First, it was reported that an infectious virus has made all animal meat poisonous to humans. Then governments initiated the "Transition." Now, eating human meat--"special meat"--is legal. Marcos tries to stick to numbers, consignments, processing.

Then one day he's given a gift: a live specimen of the finest quality. Though he's aware that any form of personal contact is forbidden on pain of death, little by little he starts to treat her like a human being. And soon, he becomes tortured by what has been lost--and what might still be saved.

Summary: A gripping mystery about a woman who thinks she’s found the love of her life—until he disappears.

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.