Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

Next Book Club Meeting - Sunday, August 24th. 7:00 pm (Mary's)

Jacob Jankowski says: "I am ninety. Or ninety-three. One or the other." At the beginning of Water for Elephants, he is living out his days in a nursing home, hating every second of it. His life wasn't always like this, however, because Jacob ran away and joined the circus when he was twenty-one. It wasn't a romantic, carefree decision, to be sure. His parents were killed in an auto accident one week before he was to sit for his veterinary medicine exams at Cornell. He buried his parents, learned that they left him nothing because they had mortgaged everything to pay his tuition, returned to school, went to the exams, and didn't write a single word. He walked out without completing the test and wound up on a circus train. The circus he joins, in Depression-era America, is second-rate at best. With Ringling Brothers as the standard, Benzini Brothers is far down the scale and pale by comparison.
Water for Elephants is the story of Jacob's life with this circus. Sara Gruen spares no detail in chronicling the squalid, filthy, brutish circumstances in which he finds himself. The animals are mangy, underfed or fed rotten food, and abused. Jacob, once it becomes known that he has veterinary skills, is put in charge of the "menagerie" and all its ills. Uncle Al, the circus impresario, is a self-serving, venal creep who slaps people around because he can. August, the animal trainer, is a certified paranoid schizophrenic whose occasional flights into madness and brutality often have Jacob as their object. Jacob is the only person in the book who has a handle on a moral compass and as his reward he spends most of the novel beaten, broken, concussed, bleeding, swollen and hungover. He is the self-appointed Protector of the Downtrodden, and... he falls in love with Marlena, crazy August's wife. Not his best idea.

The most interesting aspect of the book is all the circus lore that Gruen has so carefully researched. She has all the right vocabulary: grifters, roustabouts, workers, cooch tent, rubes, First of May, what the band plays when there's trouble, Jamaican ginger paralysis, life on a circus train, set-up and take-down, being run out of town by the "revenooers" or the cops, and losing all your hooch. There is one glorious passage about Marlena and Rosie, the bull elephant, that truly evokes the magic a circus can create. It is easy to see Marlena's and Rosie's pink sequins under the Big Top and to imagine their perfect choreography as they perform unbelievable stunts. The crowd loves it--and so will the reader. The ending is absolutely ludicrous and really quite lovely. --Valerie Ryan

Skylight Confessions - by Alice Hoffman

Book Club Meeting - Sunday, June 29th at Lori R.

Here website/ Blog http://www.alicehoffman.com/hoffman-skylight.htm

A stunning new novel about three generations of a family haunted by love from the bestselling author of Practical Magic and Here onEarth. Arlyn Singer believes in destiny and in love.But fate seems to be playing a trick on the night when John Moody knocks onher door to ask for directions. Opposites who cannot understand each other,they are drawn to one another even when it's clear they're bound to bringeach other grief. Their marriage is dangerous territory, tracing a map noone should follow. It leads them and their children to the Connecticut countryside, the avenues in Manhattan, the blue waters of the Long IslandSound, all in a search for family and identity.There is Sam, the brilliant explosive artist who is drawn toself-destruction and dreams. Blanca, the beautiful loner who triesdesperately to protect her brother from his destiny and lives her own lifein a world of books. And Will, the grandson, who is left a legacy of brokenpieces he needs to put together, an emotional and mysterious puzzle made upof people who don't know the first thing about love.Here is a family so real, so tragic, so devoted it is as if they havewritten their own riveting history--a quest for love and truth. Glassbreaks, love hurts, and families make their own rules. SKYLIGHT CONFESSIONS is a luminous and elegant work of true originality. No one who reads thisnovel will ever forget it or look at their own family in quite the sameway

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir
by Bill Bryson

From one of the most beloved and bestselling authors in the English language, a vivid, nostalgic, and utterly hilarious memoir of growing up in the 1950s

Bill Bryson was born in the middle of the American century—1951—in the middle of the United States—Des Moines, Iowa—in the middle of the largest generation in American history—the baby boomers. As one of the best and funniest writers alive, he is perfectly positioned to mine his memories of a totally all-American childhood for 24-carat memoir gold. Like millions of his generational peers, Bill Bryson grew up with a rich fantasy life as a superhero. In his case, he ran around his house and neighborhood with an old football jersey with a thunderbolt on it and a towel about his neck that served as his cape, leaping tall buildings in a single bound and vanquishing awful evildoers (and morons)—in his head—as "The Thunderbolt Kid."

Using this persona as a springboard, Bill Bryson re-creates the life of his family and his native city in the 1950s in all its transcendent normality—a life at once completely familiar to us all and as far away and unreachable as another galaxy. It was, he reminds us, a happy time, when automobiles and televisions and appliances (not to mention nuclear weapons) grew larger and more numerous with each passing year, and DDT, cigarettes, and the fallout from atmospheric testing were considered harmless or even good for you. He brings us into the life of his loving but eccentric family, including affectionate portraits of his father, a gifted sportswriter for the local paper and dedicated practitioner of isometric exercises, and OF his mother, whose job as the home furnishing editor for the same paper left her little time for practicing the domestic arts at home. The many readers of Bill Bryson’s earlier classic, A Walk in the Woods, will greet the reappearance in these pages of the immortal Stephen Katz, seen hijacking literally boxcar loads of beer. He is joined in the Bryson gallery of immortal characters by the demonically clever Willoughby brothers, who apply their scientific skills and can-do attitude to gleefully destructive ends.

Warm and laugh-out-loud funny, and full of his inimitable, pitch-perfect observations, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is as wondrous a book as Bill Bryson has ever written. It will enchant anyone who has ever been young

The Bastard of Istanbul - by Elif Shafak

The Bastard of Istanbul - by Elif Shafak

In her second novel written in English, Elif Shafak confronts her country's violent past in a vivid and colorful tale set in both Turkey and the United States. At its center is the “bastard” of the title, Asya, a nineteen-year-old woman who loves Johnny Cash and the French Existentialists, and the four sisters of the Kazanci family who all live together in an extended household in Istanbul: Zehila, the zestful, headstrong youngest sister who runs a tattoo parlor and is Asya's mother; Banu, who has newly discovered herself as a clairvoyant; Cevriye, a widowed high school teacher; and Feride, a hypochondriac obsessed with impending disaster. Their one estranged brother lives in Arizona with his wife and her Armenian daughter, Armanoush. When Armanoush secretly flies to Istanbul in search of her identity, she finds the Kazanci sisters and becomes fast friends with Asya. A secret is uncovered that links the two families and ties them to the 1915 Armenian deportations and massacres. Full of vigorous, unforgettable female characters, The Bastard of Istanbul is a bold, powerful tale that will confirm Shafak as a rising star of international fiction

Life of Pi - by Yann Martel

Life of Pi - by Yann Martel
After the tragic sinking of a cargo ship in the Pacific, one solitary lifeboat remains, carrying a hyena, a zebra, a female orangutan, a Bengal tiger, and a 16-year-old Indian boy named Pi. His story is a dazzling work of imagination that will delight and astound listeners in equal measure. It is a triumph of storytelling and a tale that will as one character puts it, make you believe in God. (from PPL catalog record)

The Senator's Wife - By Sue Miller

For our first book we will be reading will be reading The Senator's Wife by Sue Miller
Once again Sue Miller takes us deep into the private lives of women with this mesmerizing portrait of two marriages exposed in all their shame and imperfection, and in their obdurate, unyielding love. The author of the iconic The Good Mother and the best-selling While I Was Gone brings her marvelous gifts to a powerful story of two unconventional women who unexpectedly change each other’s lives.

Meri is newly married, pregnant, and standing on the cusp of her life as a wife and mother, recognizing with some terror the gap between reality and expectation. Delia Naughton—wife of the two-term liberal senator Tom Naughton—is Meri’s new neighbor in the adjacent New England town house. Delia’s husband’s chronic infidelity has been an open secret in Washington circles, but despite the complexity of their relationship, the bond between them remains strong. What keeps people together, even in the midst of profound betrayal? How can a journey imperiled by, and sometimes indistinguishable from, compromise and disappointment culminate in healing and grace? Delia and Meri find themselves leading strangely parallel lives, both reckoning with the contours and mysteries of marriage, one refined and abraded by years of complicated intimacy, the other barely begun.

Here are all the things for which Sue Miller has always been beloved—the complexity of experience precisely rendered, the richness of character and emotion, the superb economy of style—fused with an utterly engrossing story that has a great deal to say to women, and men, of all ages.

Welcome to the Kendall Hill Book Club

The Kendall Hill Book Club was the idea of Laurie Roy l.kaseyz@verizon.net and Tricia Smith tsmith53@aol.com.

The idea of a blog was Mary Marotta's as a way to keep us connected while reading each month.

We will meet once a month, the hostess will select the book for the following month. We will aim for the last Sunday of the month, but will be flexible around holidays, etc.

Recommendations for future meetings
Also if anyone would like to add to our recommendation list of books they have enjoyed,... Please send post a comment

Kendall Hill Book Recommendations List:
Kendall Hill Book Recommendations List:
1. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
2. The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom
3. The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards
4. Quaker Summer by Lisa Samson
5. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
6. Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon ( small book)
7. Case Histories by Kate Atkinson
8. Atonement by Ian Mcewan
9. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
10. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
11. The Doctor's Wife by Elizabeth Brundage
12. The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeannette Walls
13. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle