March Book Club Book Options

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender 


On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein bites into her mother's homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother’s emotions in the slice. To her horror, she finds that her cheerful mother tastes of despair. Soon, she’s  privy to the secret knowledge that most families keep hidden: her father’s detachment, her mother’s transgression, her brother’s increasing retreat from the world. But there are some family secrets that even her cursed taste buds can’t discern.

More Than a Hobby: How a $600 Startup Became America's Home and Craft Superstore  by David Green

(stay with me here...please don't think I am crazy...I have always wanted to read this...)

More than a Hobby takes readers inside the mind of a low-key, likable Oklahoma entrepreneur who has created a unique shopping experience. How did his company go from a $600 loan to $1.3 billion in annual sales in just thirty-one years-especially when he wasn't groomed for this work either by heritage or by education?

Green was willing to go against the tide, allowing faith to play a huge part in the business. More Than a Hobby describes how this wildly successful business was built not on business-school theory, but on the founder's own experience as a grassroots store manager.

The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd

In Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees, 14-year-old Lily Owen, neglected by her father and isolated on their South Carolina peach farm, spends hours imagining a blissful infancy when she was loved and nurtured by her mother, Deborah, whom she barely remembers. These consoling fantasies are her heart's answer to the family story that as a child, in unclear circumstances, Lily accidentally shot and killed her mother. All Lily has left of Deborah is a strange image of a Black Madonna, with the words "Tiburon, South Carolina" scrawled on the back. The search for a mother, and the need to mother oneself, are crucial elements in this well-written coming-of-age story set in the early 1960s against a background of racial violence and unrest. When Lily's beloved nanny, Rosaleen, manages to insult a group of angry white men on her way to register to vote and has to skip town, Lily takes the opportunity to go with her, fleeing to the only place she can think of--Tiburon, South Carolina--determined to find out more about her dead mother. Although the plot threads are too neatly trimmed, The Secret Life of Bees is a carefully crafted novel with an inspired depiction of character. The legend of the Black Madonna and the brave, kind, peculiar women who perpetuate Lily's story dominate the second half of the book, placing Kidd's debut novel squarely in the honored tradition of the Southern Gothic.

Please vote this week so we can be ready to read our next book after our discussion next week, I will post questions for "Such a Pretty Face" on the 15th.