This year’s selections were selected by book club members and center on powerful themes of trauma and loss. Join fellow readers – teens and adults ages 16+ as we celebrate the freedom to read and reflect on stories that challenge, heal, and inspire.
Free books while supplies last. Registration is required.
- Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
Saturday, September 20th | 3:00-5:00 pm
In a vase in a closet, a couple of years after his father died in 9/11, nine-year-old Oskar discovers a key…
The key belonged to his father, he’s sure of that. But which of New York’s 162 million locks does it open?
So begins a quest that takes Oskar – inventor, letter-writer and amateur detective – across New York’s five boroughs and into the jumbled lives of friends, relatives, and complete strangers. He gets heavy boots, he gives himself little bruises and he inches ever nearer to the heart of a family mystery that stretches back fifty years. But will it take him any closer to, or further from, his lost father? – Goodreads.com
- This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
Saturday, October 18th | 3:00-5:00 pm
Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandant finds a letter. It reads:
Burn before reading.
Thus begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a battlefield boast, grows into something more. Something epic. Something romantic. Something that could change the past and the future. Except the discovery of their bond would mean death for each of them. There’s still a war going on, after all. And someone has to win that war. – Goodreads.com
- The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
Saturday, November 15th | 3:00-5:00 pm
Four mothers, four daughters, four families, whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who’s telling the stories. In 1949, four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, meet weekly to play mahjong and tell stories of what they left behind in China. United in loss and new hope for their daughters’ futures, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Their daughters, who have never heard these stories, think their mothers’ advice is irrelevant to their modern American lives – until their own inner crises reveal how much they’ve unknowingly inherited of their mothers’ pasts.
With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery. – Goodreads.com
- The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Saturday, December 20th | 3:00-5:00 pm
The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father’s servant, The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption; and an exploration of the power of fathers over sons—their love, their sacrifices, their lies.
A sweeping story of family, love, and friendship told against the devastating backdrop of the history of Afghanistan over the last thirty years, The Kite Runner is an unusual and powerful novel that has become a beloved, one-of-a-kind classic. – Goodreads.com