MCPL Book Club Kits

Set in South Carolina in 1964, [this book] tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily's fierce-hearted "stand-in mother," Rosaleen, insults three of the town's fiercest racists, Lily decides they should both escape to Tiburon, South Carolina--a town that holds the secret to her mother's past. There they are taken in by an eccentric trio of black beekeeping sisters...

As an idealistic twenty-three-year-old English teacher at Wilson High School in Long Beach, California. Erin Gruwell confronted a room of "unteachable, at-risk" students. One day she intercepted a note with an ugly racial caricature, and angrily declared that this was precisely the sort of thing that led to the Holocaust - only to be met by uncomprehending looks ... With powerful entries from the students' own diaries and a narrative text by [her,...

Traces how three American women of different faiths worked together to understand one another while identifying the connections between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, during which they openly discussed the issues that divided them.

According to author Lear and the memory experts she taps in the book, the memory lapses that begin in middle age are typically no cause for alarm. In fact, remembering less in later years is rarely a sign of Alzheimer's or any other scary memory-loss condition. It's just a part of normal aging. On her hunt for answers, Lear explores why names are the first things to go and what can be done about it, why we forget certain things on purpose, why we...

A novel of star-crossed lovers, set in the circus world circa 1932. When Jacob Jankowski, recently orphaned and suddenly adrift, jumps onto a passing train, he enters a world of freaks, grifters, and misfits, a second-rate circus struggling to survive during the Great Depression, making one-night stands in town after endless town. A veterinary student who almost earned his degree, Jacob is put in charge of caring for the circus menagerie. It is there...

"The Hunger Games as you've never seen it before--in a remarkable illustrated edition. Even at the age of sixteen, Katniss Everdeen knows it takes hard work, keen observation, and inner fortitude to survive in the world. Her home, District 12, is under the merciless rule of the Capitol, continually forced to pay after losing a long-ago civil war in the nation of Panem. One of the ways the Capitol keeps control is its annual Hunger Games, a televised...

Nelson Mandela is one of the great moral and political leaders of our time: an international hero whose lifelong dedication to the fight against racial oppression in South Africa won him the Nobel Peace Prize and the presidency of his country. Since his triumphant release in 1990 from more than a quarter-century of imprisonment, Mandela has been at the center of the most compelling and inspiring political drama in the world. As president of the African...

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer, yet her cells--taken without her knowledge--became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first "immortal" human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer and viruses; helped lead to in vitro...

For much of her life, Anne Morrow has stood in the shadows of those around her. Then Anne, a college senior, travels to Mexico City to spend Christmas with her family. There she meets Colonel Charles Lindbergh, fresh off his celebrated 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic. Charles sees in Anne a kindred spirit, a fellow adventurer, and her world will be changed forever. The two marry in a headline-making wedding. Hounded by adoring crowds and hunted...

Set in the present day in the rural community of Feathertown, Tennessee, Flight Behavior tells the story of Dellarobia Turnbow, a petite, razor-sharp 29-year-old who nurtured worldly ambitions before becoming pregnant and marrying at seventeen. Now, after more than a decade of tending to small children on a failing farm, oppressed by poverty, isolation and her husband's antagonistic family, she has mitigated her boredom by surrendering to an obsessive...