July reading groups round-up
Looking for a new title for your bookgroup or reading circle? Look no further – here are two very different titles that have reading group resources available right here on Bookhugger.
The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver
The Lacuna is the story of a man’s search for safety in the grinding jaws of two nations, at a moment when the entire world seemed bent on reinventing itself at any cost.
Born in the US, reared in a series of provisional households in Mexico, Harrison Shepherd is mostly a liability to his social-climbing flapper mother, Salomé. From a coastal island jungle to the unpaved neighbourhoods of 1930s Mexico City, through a disastrous stint at a military school in Virginia and back again, his fortunes never steady as Salomé finds her rich men-friends always on the losing side of the Mexican Revolution. Sometimes she gives her son cigarettes instead of supper.
He aims for invisibility, observing his world and recording everything with a peculiar selfless irony in his notebooks. Life is whatever he learns from servants putting him to work in the kitchen, errands he runs in the streets, and one fateful day, by mixing plaster for famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. Making himself useful in the household of the muralist, his wife Frida Kahlo, and exiled Bolshevik leader Lev Trotsky, young Shepherd inadvertently casts his lot with art and revolution, and the howling gossip and reportage that dictate public opinion.
A violent upheaval sends him north to a nation newly caught up in the internationalist goodwill of World War II. In the mountain city of Asheville, North Carolina, he remakes himself in America’s hopeful image. Under the watch of his peerless stenographer, Violet Brown, he finds an extraordinary use for his talents of observation. But political winds continue to push him between north and south, in a plot that turns many times on the unspeakable breach – the lacuna – between truth and public presumption.
This is a gripping story of identity, connection with our past, and the power of words to create or devastate. Like no other novel yet written, it illuminates an era when bold internationalism gave way to a post-war landscape of narrowly defined ‘Americanism’. Crossing two decades, from the vibrant revolutionary murals of Mexico City to the halls of a Congress bent on eradicating the colour red, The Lacuna is as deep and rich as the New World itself.
Beautiful Malice, by Rebecca James
So. Were you glad, deep down? Were you glad to be rid of her? Your perfect sister? Were you secretly glad when she was killed?
Following a horrific tragedy that leaves her once-perfect family devastated, Katherine Patterson moves to a new city, starts at a new school, and begins a new life of quiet anonymity.
But when Katherine meets the gregarious and beautiful Alice Parrie her plan to live a solitary life becomes difficult. Katherine is unable to resist the flattering attention that Alice pays her and is so charmed by her contagious enthusiasm that the two girls soon become firm friends.
But being friends with Alice is complicated – and as Katherine gets to know her better she discovers that although Alice can be charming, she can also be selfish. Sometimes, even, Alice is cruel.
