Friday, August 10, 2012

Summer Reads

Summer has had some interesting discussions of our books.

For May we read Vanessa Diffenbaugh's Language of Flowers about a young girl who ages out of foster care and how she begins life on her own.  Through her interest in flowers she begins a job and a future.  During our meeting we discovered local organizations that help foster children who have out grown the system but still need support and encouragement.  When we chatted with Vanessa, we shared this info with her to add to her Camellia Network organization that helps these young people.

Pies, pies and more pies for our June meeting as we ate our way through Making Piece; A Memoir of Love, Loss and Pie by Beth Howard.  Most members brought their best pie to share while we chatted with Beth from her Gothic House. Losing a spouse is very difficult and we appreciated the frank sharing by Beth and our PQ's who have lost spouses.

Then for July we had a special meeting time at noon in order to Skype with author Lucinda Riley about her international bestseller The Orchid House.  She seemed a bit overwhelm by the success and shared that she used the names of her 5 children for characters in the book although the characters themselves had none of the characteristics of her children.  Her next book The Girl on the Cliff has much of herself woven into one of the characters and she asked that we read it and then Skype with her again to compare the two books.  Thanks to Queen Chris for hosting our special time meeting.

Our August selection will be One Foot in Eden by Ron Rash.  Unfortunately we won't be able to  visit with Ron as he has a previous engagement that evening.  Looking forward to meeting at Queen Beverly's and we will selecting the books for the next few months.

Hope you all are having a great summer!