Our next book club meeting will be in October.
We will be reading Keeping the House by Ellen Baker.
This looks like a fun book by the looks of the cover.
My members will kill me because if they knew why I picked it, they will think I am crazy.
I literally judged the book by it cover. Maybe I should skip town till after all of them read the book or hide under a rock.
I will then be able to breathe a sigh of relief, especially by one of my members. I promised her this is a good book.
There are some book club members who don't like to do anything different. They just like to read and discuss the book.
I usually like to stir things up a bit. Have a conference call with the author. Lunch out with the girls have some connection with the book. Well this time I am doomed untill I hear from one of the most judgemental people in my club. Than I will feel better. I just hope the author is not reading this. This may scare her away. Our book club won a contest with the author with a conference call and she is shipping us her cookies from the book.
You can visit her website here, and you can find Ellen's recipe for the cookies here
Keeping the House
*A Booksense Notable Pick*
When Dolly Magnuson moves to Pine Rapids, Wisconsin in 1950, she discovers all too soon that making marriage work is harder than it looks in the pages of the Ladies’ Home Journal. Dolly tries to adapt to her new life—keeping the house, supporting her husband’s career, fretting about dinner menus. She even gives up her dream of flying an airplane, and instead tries to fit in at the stuffy Ladies Aid quilting circle. Soon, though, her loneliness and restless imagination are seized by the vacant house on the hill, and, as Dolly’s own life and marriage become increasingly difficult, she begins to lose herself in piecing together the shocking story of three generations of Mickelson men and women: Wilma Mickelson, who came to Pine Rapids as a new bride in 1896, and fell in love with a man who was not her husband; her oldest son, Jack, who fought as a Marine in the trenches of the First World War; and Jack’s son, JJ, a troubled veteran of World War II, who returns home to discover Dolly in his grandparents’ house. As the crisis in Dolly’s marriage escalates and she seeks answers from JJ’s stories of his family’s past, KEEPING THE HOUSE moves back and forth in time, exploring themes of wartime heroism and passionate love, of the struggles of men with fatherhood and war, of women with conformity, identity, forbidden dreams and love. Rich in period atmosphere and in 1950s detail, KEEPING THE HOUSE illuminates the courage it takes to shape and reshape a life, and the difficulty of ever knowing the truth about another person’s desires. KEEPING THE HOUSE is an unforgettable novel about small town life and big matters of the heart.