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2008 - 2009
Run
by Ann Patchett
Bernard Doyle didn’t get the life he wanted. His beloved wife died when their children were young, and years later his oldest son, Sullivan, was involved in a scandal that ended Doyle’s career as mayor of Boston. Now he has pinned his hopes on his adopted younger sons, Tip and Teddy, confident that with his encouragement one of them will achieve the political success that was denied him. Leaving a Jesse Jackson speech one cold night, Tip slips on an icy sidewalk and is saved from injury by a woman who throws herself between him and an oncoming car. This seemingly coincidental encounter will change all of their lives.
Questions
Trespass
by Valerie Martin
Chloe, a book illustrator, looked forward to a peaceful life in the country house she shares with her retired professor husband. Lately she feels menaced by the poacher who’s appeared several times in the woods and who seems to defy her. She’s also dismayed that her son Toby’s girlfriend, a young Bosnian woman whom Chloe finds brusque and an “ungrateful outsider”, is pregnant. As family tensions mount, she feels off-balance and increasingly threatened by these intrusions into her complacent domesticity and family life.
Questions
The Shadow Catcher
by Marianne Wiggins
Every picture tells a story, but how true to life is that story? In this novel with two plotlines, writer Marianne Wiggins is pitching her novel about photographer Edward S. Curtis to a Hollywood producer, when she’s notified that her father is unconscious in the ICU of a Las Vegas hospital. The news stuns her, because her father has been dead for 30 years. The second story tells of Curtis’s marriage to Clara, who is an orphan, and his obsession with photographing Native Americans. During his life he took more than 40,000 pictures, capturing for posterity images of what he believed was a vanishing civilization. Both of these stories are set against the vast landscape of the American West.
Questions
Web Sites
Edward S, Curtis's North American Indian Photographs
Edward S. Curtis - Shadow Catcher
The Handmaid's Tale
by Margaret Atwood
Offred is a handmaid in the household of the Commander and his wife. In the Republic of Gilead, where society is modeled on the precepts in the biblical book of Genesis, handmaids serve as surrogate mothers for infertile couples. Her survival depends on her ability to reproduce. Since reading and all forms of entertainment are forbidden to her, Offred spends her empty hours recalling her past life with her husband and child, before women were forbidden from holding jobs and handling money. Now that her activities are severely restricted and her every movement spied upon, Offred considers whether her life is worth living.
Questions
Titles Selected by Suzanne Fisher, Librarian
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