Beneath the Book Club: April’s choices include a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and tales of love and family.
It’s time to choose Beneath the Book Club’s April read.
This month’s picks include a Pulitzer Prize-winner and tales of love, marriage and family.
All three come highly-rated.
The book with the most votes will become April’s official read and I will announce the winner on Monday, April 1.
Book 1: Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
Winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for fiction • A New York Times Ten Best Books of 2022 • An Oprah's Book Club selection • Instant New York Times bestseller • Instant Wall Street Journal bestseller • #1 Washington Post bestseller
WHAT AMAZON SAYS: “Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, Demon Copperhead is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival.
“Relayed in his own unsparing voice, Demon braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves and crushing losses.
“Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society.
“Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens' anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story.
“Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can't imagine leaving behind.”
Book 2: Tom Lake by Ann Patchett
#1 New York Times bestseller • A Reese’s book club pick
WHAT AMAZON SAYS: “In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan.
"While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake.
“As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.
"Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born.
“Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics.
“The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.”
Book 3: Happy Place by Emily Henry
Instant #1 New York Times bestseller • Best Book of the Year 2023
WHAT AMAZON SAYS: “Harriet and Wyn have been the perfect couple since they met in college—they go together like salt and pepper, honey and tea, lobster and rolls. Except, now—for reasons they’re still not discussing—they don’t.
“They broke up five months ago. And still haven’t told their best friends. “Which is how they find themselves sharing a bedroom at the Maine cottage that has been their friend group’s yearly getaway for the last decade.
“Their annual respite from the world, where for one vibrant, blissful week they leave behind their daily lives; have copious amounts of cheese, wine, and seafood; and soak up the salty coastal air with the people who understand them most.
“Only this year, Harriet and Wyn are lying through their teeth while trying not to notice how desperately they still want each other. Because the cottage is for sale and this is the last week they’ll all have together in this place.
“They can’t stand to break their friends’ hearts, and so they’ll play their parts. Harriet will be the driven surgical resident who never starts a fight, and Wyn will be the laid-back charmer who never lets the cracks show.
“It’s a flawless plan (if you look at it from a great distance and through a pair of sunscreen-smeared sunglasses).
“After years of being in love, how hard can it be to fake it for one week…in front of those who know you best?”
So, fellow book clubbers, which will we read?
