It's time to vote!!

Hey Bookettes! Two business things:

1. We discussed Thursday, August 5 as a potential date for the meeting at Sarah's. Can we put that on the calendar?

2. At our last meeting we decided to wait to vote for our August book so that Jenna and Hannah could get in on the decision. The three choices and descriptions are below. When you are ready, place your vote! I created a poll to the right. Voting closes next Friday at 4 pm.

Is the teacher in me coming out?

"The Help" by Kathryn Stockett

Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned homeafter graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone. Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken. Minny, Aibileen's best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody's business, but she can't mind her tongue, so she's lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own.Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.

In pitch-perfect voices, Kathryn Stockett creates three extraordinary women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever changes a town, and the way women--mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends--view one another. A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humor, and hope, The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don't.

"Anthropology of an American Girl" by Hilary Thayer Hamann

A semi-autobiographical novel. It is the story of a young woman and her culture that strives for a measure of narrative depth, detail, and objectivity. It follows its protagonist, Eveline Auerbach, as she moves through a pre-digital American landscape during the 1970s and 1980s. In the most basic respect, it is a coming of age story that prescribes a return to simplicity as the most rational and ethical response to the chaos and confusion of upward mobility.

From the publisher:
"This ambitious work explores the sexual and intellectual awakening of a young American woman struggling to remain true to herelf as she encounters love, passion, and death amid the challenges and heartbreaks of growing up. Newly edited and revised, 'Anthropology of an American Girl' is an extraordinary piece of writing, original in its vision and thrilling in its execution."

From the author:
"The working title for the book was "Eveline," as I initially considered it to be the story of a girl. It became "Anthropology of an American Girl" when it began to describe more than one girl and when I could no longer separate what happened to my character from what happened around her. I chose the smallest thing I could imagine to explore the vastness of America—a single voice. The voice provided a thread to trace through the thickly woven tapestry of American ideology, with its legendary ethos of liberty, justice, equality, autonomy, self-discipline, and hard work and its conflicting legacy of prejudice, greed, abuse of privilege, excessive consumption, and lack of accountability."

"The Robber Bride" by Margaret Atwood

Set in present-day Toronto, the novel begins with three women (Roz, Charis, and Tony) who meet once a month in a restaurant to share a meal.The Robber Bride is inspired by "The Robber Bridegroom," a wonderfully grisly tale from the Brothers Grimm in which an evil groom lures three maidens into his lair and devours them, one by one. But in her version, Atwood brilliantly recasts the monster as Zenia, a villainess of demonic proportions, and sets her loose in the lives of three friends, Tony, Charis, and Roz. All three "have lost men, spirit, money, and time to their old college acquaintance, Zenia. At various times, and in various emotional disguises, Zenia has insinuated her way into their lives and practically demolished them.

To Tony, who almost lost her husband and jeopardized her academic career, Zenia is 'a lurking enemy commando.' To Roz, who did lose her husband and almost her magazine, Zenia is 'a cold and treacherous bitch.' To Charis, who lost a boyfriend, quarts of vegetable juice and some pet chickens, Zenia is a kind of zombie, maybe 'soulless'" (Lorrie Moore, New York Times Book Review). In love and war, illusion and deceit, Zenia's subterranean malevolence takes us deep into her enemies' pasts.