All My Rage by Sabaa Tahir

 Salahudin and Noor are a part of a small Pakistani community in Juniper, CA. Both  extremely bright, neither has the kind of life that means college after graduation but still they dream. Salahudin is busy being the adult to his often drunk father. He is trying to keep the Cloud Rest Inn Motel afloat - an immigrant dream of his late mother.  Noor is living with an abusive uncle forever in his debt for saving her from the rubble of an earthquake in Pakistan. They have been friends forever and seem destined to be a couple but life history and secrets get in the way.  When Salahudin makes a decision he believes necessary to save his mother's dream, their lives are forever altered.  Although classified as a Young Adult novel because of the age of the main characters, it is a reminder both of the struggles of many immigrant families and our tendency to accept the "I'm fine" response to avoid the responsibility of addressing a real pain in those we meet. 

The Golden Couple by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen

 This story of a not so perfect marriage would make great film noire. Marissa and Matthew seem to have it all - successful careers, a lovely home in the suburbs of D.C. a charming little boy. Then Marissa has an affair. Matthew seems distraught. Marissa still loves him. They seek family counseling from Avery who has lost her license because of her unorthodox methods. It's all so desperate - and all soooo not what it appears. Not quite sure how this got on the book group list.

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

 It has been a while since a book seemed so destined to fall in my hands at just the right time. Tom Lake is a small community in Michigan with a very active community theater. Years ago, Lara Nelson played Emily in a production of Our Town there opposite Peter Duke who went on to be a famous actor. Now it is 2020 and Lara and her husband own a cherry orchard not far fromTom Lake. Her three daughters have returned home to wait out the pandemic and help harvest the fruit. In the hours spent picking cherries, the four women revisit, question, examine the time Lara spent at Tom Lake.  As I regret not having asked my parents or grandparents questions about their life before me and ponder if there will be a time when my own children have those same regrets, there is the question of what would I share and what I would not. What record do we leave behind? What are the defining moments in our life? I loved every moment spent with this family - the story, the writing, the connection - all of it.

Kill Switch by Adam Jentleson

 Subtitle: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy.

 Simply put, the Kill Switch references Rule 22 which was devised to bring a filibuster to an end. Back in the day when being a Senator carried with it a responsibility to reasonably debate and debate and debate..., it kept the southern group from blocking Civil Rights legislation through the filibuster. It comes with a need for a super majority (currently 60) to end the filibuster. In a ferociously divided Senate, whose job it seems to be just to keep the other side from getting what it wants, it means that just a small few can keep something from even being voted on - even if the country has made it clear that they want something done. It is what  kept universal background checks from being passed after the Newtown shootings. 55 Senators wanted to vote yes but not 60 - not enough to stop the filibuster.  It never came to a vote.  There is a lot of fascinating history about the Senate and disturbing revelations about the current cast of bad actors. It is frightening but Jentleson does offer some hope for a fundamental change.

Hello Beautiful

I understood that this book was intended to pay homage to Little Women. And it kinda does - there are four sisters who are very close and one does die. There is a male who disrupts the equilibrium of their relationship. There is a father who adores them but it is his hapless nature that forces their rigidly Catholic mother to demand that each one go to college to be self supporting. When one of them becomes pregnant with no father in sight and is determined to keep the child - well it all starts to drift far from Little Women at some point. It is a story of family and how it can become dysfunctional - although not all family members or readers would agree on where the dysfunction lies. It came highly recommended and led to a good book group discussion about family in general and Louisa May Alcott in particular but most of the group considered it an elevated kind of chick lit.

A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes

 First of all, kudos to anyone who can keep the characters in Greek mythology straight! All those names made the reading of this book a little clumsy until I got comfortable with the fact that I didn't really need to keep them all correct genealogically to understand their anger, jealousy, revenge, etc.  This is Homer's Illiad and Odyssey from the women's perspective. I particularly enjoyed the snarky voice of Penelope (abandoned wife of Odysseus).  The absurdity of war, men's senseless need for "victory", the god/mortal (read fate/freewill) struggle, the profound mother/child connection - all here in more readable prose than Homer for sure. The Afterward is an entire curse in Greek Literature and history. Kudos to you if you read that as well. 

Hell of a Book by Jason Mott

 I had to read this book twice to really appreciate the writing since I was so caught up in the story. A never named, brilliant, but often hapless black author is on a book tour to promote his novel, Hell of a Book. Believed to be plagued by an overactive imagination, he struggles to account for the appearance of a young boy - so black he is called Soot - beside him in cab rides, in his hotel room, out of nowhere. Meanwhile, the lead story in the news of the day involves the death of a young black male - one of many victims of the senseless racist nature of today's society. How are these three individuals connected? Is it important that we know? Sometimes funny, sometimes intimate, it is mostly a meditation on what it means to be black and male in America. In an interview, Mott indicated that he kept waiting for someone to write the kind of book he thought needed to be written about the topic. When no one did, he decided to write a hell of a book.