The County Library Book Club Sets

13 Book Club Questions to Energize Any Meetup from Bustle

50 Great Book Club Discussion Questions for Any Book from Book Riot

To find a discussion guide for this book in the NoveList Plus database, go to the Library's website, click on Novelist under "We Recommend" → "Book Services". Click on "Book Discussion Guides" in the right sidebar on NoveList's home page. Then, either enter the title in the Search box or search for the title alphabetically. (You will need your Salt Lake County Library card number to access this resource outside a county library.)

Light from Uncommon Stars at goodreads

Review from BookPage

Review from cannonball read

Review from The GEEKiary

Review from Kirkus Reviews

Review from LIGHTSPEED

Review from Reading the End

Review from The Suspected Bibliophile

Ryka Aoki interview at the Hugo awards 2022:

This title is available for download as an eBook and as an eAudioBook. Learn more about downloadables from the library here.

Title Read-alikes: The Library of the Unwritten by A.J. Hackwith; The Genesis of Misery by Neon Yang; The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune; Shakti by Rajorshi Chakraborti; August Kitko and the Mechas from Space by Alex White; Vampire Weekend by Mike Chen; Good Omens by Neil Gaiman; On Such a Full Sea by Chang-rae Lee; She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan; A Psalm for the Wild Built by Becky Chambers; A Dead Djinn in Cairo by P. Djèlí Clark; The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo and Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey.

Friday, January 14, 2022

The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune

Quirk and charm give way to a serious exploration of the dangers of complacency in this delightful, thought-provoking Orwellian fantasy…. By turns zany and heartfelt, this tale of found family is hopeful to its core. Readers will revel in Klune’s wit and ingenuity.

Linus Baker is a by-the-book case worker in the Department in Charge of Magical Youth. He's tasked with determining whether six dangerous magical children are likely to bring about the end of the world.

Arthur Parnassus is the master of the orphanage. He would do anything to keep the children safe, even if it means the world will burn. And his secrets will come to light.

The House in the Cerulean Sea is an enchanting love story, masterfully told, about the profound experience of discovering an unlikely family in an unexpected place—and realizing that family is yours.

398 pages (March 2020)

Lit Guide from LitLovers.

Reading Guide from ReadingGroupChoices.

Discussion Guide from BOOKCLUBS

13 Book Club Questions to Energize Any Meetup from Bustle

The House in the Cerulean Sea at goodreads

Review from And On She Reads

Review from GrimdarkMAGAZINE

Review from Kirkus

Review from The Librarian's Lunchbox

Review from The Suspected Bibliophile

Erica's Book Talk| The House in the Cerulean Sea (from Fountaindale Public Library) :

This title is available for download as an eBook and as an eAudioBook. Learn more about downloadables from the library here.

Title Read-alikes: Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki; Sourdough by Robin Sloan; The Guncle by Steven Rowley; Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire; Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson; The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers; A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman; The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern; The Reading List by Sara Nisha Adams; The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow; The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab; The Midnight Library by Matt Haig; and The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin.

Wednesday, October 16, 2019

The honey bus : a memoir of loss, courage and a girl saved by bees by Meredith May

An extraordinary story of a young girl who finds solace in one of nature’s most mysterious and beguiling creatures: the honeybee.

Meredith May recalls the first time a honeybee crawled on her arm.

She was five years old, her parents had recently split and suddenly she found herself in the care of her grandfather, an eccentric beekeeper who made honey in a rusty old military bus in the yard.

That first close encounter with a bee was at once terrifying and exhilarating for May, and in that moment she discovered that everything she needed to know about life and family was right before her eyes, in the secret world of bees.

May was drawn to the art of beekeeping as an escape from her troubled reality.

Her mother had receded into a volatile cycle of madness and despair and spent most days locked away in the bedroom. It was during this pivotal time in May’s childhood that she learned to take care of herself, forged an unbreakable bond with her grandfather and opened her eyes to the magic and wisdom of nature.

The bees became a guiding force in May’s life, teaching her about family and community, loyalty and survival and the unequivocal relationship between a mother and her child.

Part memoir, part beekeeping odyssey, The Honey Bus is an remarkable story about finding home in the most unusual of places, and how a tiny, little-understood insect could save a life.

318 pages (April 2019)

Lit Guide from LitLovers.

Reading Guide from BookMovement.
Discussion Guide from Meredith May's website

The Honey Bus at goodreads

Review at BookPage

Review at book reporter

Review from Kirkus Review

Review from Publishers Weekly

Book Trailer:

Meredith May Interview:

This title is available for download as an eBook and as an eAudioBook. Learn more about downloadables from the library here.

Title Read-alikes: A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings by Helen Jukes; How to Be a Good Creature by Sy Montgomery; H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald; Field Notes from an Unintentional Birder by Julia Zarankin; My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout; Fire Season by Philip Connors; The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Bailey; Wintering by Katherine May; Late Migrations by Margaret Renkl; The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek by Kim Michele Richardson; This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger; and Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler.

Saturday, May 18, 2019

The Overstory by Richard Powers

A monumental novel about trees and people by one of our most "prodigiously talented" (The New York Times Book Review) novelists.

An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These four, and five other strangers--each summoned in different ways by trees--are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent's few remaining acres of virgin forest.

In his twelfth novel, National Book Award winner Richard Powers delivers a sweeping, impassioned novel of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of--and paean to--the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond, exploring the essential conflict on this planet: the one taking place between humans and nonhumans. There is a world alongside ours--vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

The Overstory is a book for all readers who despair of humanity's self-imposed separation from the rest of creation and who hope for the transformative, regenerating possibility of a homecoming. If the trees of this earth could speak, what would they tell us? "Listen. There's something you need to hear."

502 pages. (April 2018)

Number pages (Pub Date)

Lit Guide from LitLovers.

The Overstory at goodreads

Review from The Boston Globe

Review at Full Stop

Review from The Guardian

Review from Los Angeles Review of Books

Review from The New York Times

Richard Powers reads from The Overstory:

This title is available for download as an eBook and as an eAudioBook. Learn more about downloadables from the library here.

Title Read-alikes: Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver; The Trees by Ali Shaw; Hollow Kingdom by Kira Jane Buxton; Greenwood by Michael Christie; Late Migrations by Margaret Renkl; Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver; The Flight of Birds by Joshual Lobb; Forage by Rose McLarney; Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy; The Inner Coast by Donovan Hohn; In Our Bones by Pernell Plath Meier; Black Sunday by Tola Rotimi Abraham; Doomstead Days by Brian Teare; and Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier.

Sunday, July 23, 2017

Mercies in Disguise : a story of hope, a family's genetic destiny, and the science that rescued them by Gina Bari Kolata

The phone rings. The doctor from California is on the line. "Are you ready Amanda?" The two people Amanda Baxley loves the most had begged her not to be tested--at least, not now. But she had to find out.

If your family carried a mutated gene that foretold a brutal illness and you were offered the chance to find out if you'd inherited it, would you do it? Would you walk toward the problem, bravely accepting whatever answer came your way? Or would you avoid the potential bad news as long as possible?

In Mercies in Disguise, acclaimed New York Times science reporter and bestselling author Gina Kolata tells the story of the Baxleys, an almost archetypal family in a small town in South Carolina. A proud and determined clan, many of them doctors, they are struck one by one with an inscrutable illness. They finally discover the cause of the disease after a remarkable sequence of events that many saw as providential. Meanwhile, science, progressing for a half a century along a parallel track, had handed the Baxleys a resolution--not a cure, but a blood test that would reveal who had the gene for the disease and who did not. And science would offer another dilemma--fertility specialists had created a way to spare the children through an expensive process.

A work of narrative nonfiction in the tradition of the The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Mercies in Disguise is the story of a family that took matters into its own hands when the medical world abandoned them. It's a story of a family that had to deal with unspeakable tragedy and yet did not allow it to tear them apart. And it is the story of a young woman--Amanda Baxley--who faced the future head on, determined to find a way to disrupt her family's destiny.

262 pages (March 2017)

Reading Guide from St Martin's Press.

Mercies in Disguise at goodreads

Review from BookPage

Review from Kirkus Reviews

Review from The New York Times

Review from Publishers Weekly

Mercies in Disguise Research Grant from the Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Foundation.

Gina Kolata discusses Mercies in Disguise:

Amanda's presentation at the 2016 Crutzfeldt-Jakob Disease 2016 Family Workshop:

This title is available for download as an eBook and as an eAudioBook. Learn more about downloadables from the library here.

Title Read-alikes: The Family Gene by Joselin Linder; Against Medical Advice by James Patterson; Patient H.M. by Luke Dittrich; The Angel and the Assassin by Donna Jackson Nakazawa; The Breakthrough by Charles Graeber; Ghost Boy by Martin Pistorius; The Philadelphia Chromosome by Jessica Wapner; The Lost Family by Libby Copeland; Happiness by Heather Harpham; Chasing My Cure by David Fajgenbaum; My Wife Said You May Want to Marry Me by Jason B. Rosenthal; A Mind Unraveled by Kurt Eichenwald; and Sophie and the Rising Sun by Augusta Trobaugh.

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Spare Parts : four undocumented teenagers, one ugly robot, and the battle for the American dream by Joshua Davis

Four undocumented Mexican American students, two great teachers, one robot-building contest...and a major motion picture.

In 2004, four Latino teenagers arrived at the Marine Advanced Technology Education Robotics Competition at the University of California, Santa Barbara. They were born in Mexico but raised in Phoenix, Arizona, where they attended an underfunded public high school. No one had ever suggested to Oscar, Cristian, Luis, or Lorenzo that they might amount to much - but two inspiring science teachers had convinced these impoverished, undocumented kids from the desert who had never even seen the ocean that they should try to build an underwater robot.

And build a robot they did. Their robot wasn't pretty, especially compared to those of the competition. They were going up against some of the best collegiate engineers in the country, including a team from MIT backed by a $10,000 grant from ExxonMobil. The Phoenix teenagers had scraped together less than $1,000 and built their robot out of scavenged parts. This was never a level competition - and yet, against all odds... they won!

But this is just the beginning for these four, whose story - which became a key inspiration to the DREAMers movement - will go on to include first-generation college graduations, deportation, bean-picking in Mexico, and service in Afghanistan.

Joshua Davis' Spare Parts is a story about overcoming insurmountable odds and four young men who proved they were among the most patriotic and talented Americans in this country - even as the country tried to kick them out.

224 pages (December 2014)

Reading Guide from Reading Group Guides.

Spare Parts at goodreads

Review from Kirkus Reviews

Review at pop Matters

Review from Publishers Weekly

Review from The Toronto Star

Review from The Washington Post

Joshua Davis talks about the students on CNN:

Joshua Davis at the American Library Association Conference 2015:

This title is available for download as an eBook and as an eAudioBook. Learn more about downloadables from the library here.

Title Read-alikes: The Newcomers by Helen Thorpe; 14 Miles by D. W. Gibson; Science Fair Season by Judy Dutton; The New Cool by Neal Bascomb; School of Dreams by Edward Humes; The Newcomers by Helen Thorpe; The Smartest Kids in the World by Amanda Ripley; The Book of Isaias by Daniel Connolly; Hold Fast to Dreams by Beth Zasloff; A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves by Jason DeParle; The House of Broken Angels by Luis Alberto Urrea; The Distance Between Us by Reyna Grande; Some Assembly Required by Ann Andrews; and The Tortilla Curtain by T. Coraghessan Boyle.

Monday, July 18, 2016

A House in the Sky: a memoir by Amanda Lindhout & Sara Corbett

The dramatic and redemptive memoir of a woman whose curiosity led her to the world’s most beautiful and remote places, its most imperiled and perilous countries, and then into fifteen months of harrowing captivity—an exquisitely written story of courage, resilience, and grace.

As a child, Amanda Lindhout escaped a violent household by paging through issues of National Geographic and imagining herself in its exotic locales. At the age of nineteen, working as a cocktail waitress in Calgary, Alberta, she began saving her tips so she could travel the globe. Aspiring to understand the world and live a significant life, she backpacked through Latin America, Laos, Bangladesh, and India, and emboldened by each adventure, went on to Sudan, Syria, and Pakistan. In war-ridden Afghanistan and Iraq she carved out a fledgling career as a television reporter. And then, in August 2008, she traveled to Somalia—“the most dangerous place on earth.” On her fourth day, she was abducted by a group of masked men along a dusty road.

Held hostage for 460 days, Amanda converts to Islam as a survival tactic, receives “wife lessons” from one of her captors, and risks a daring escape. Moved between a series of abandoned houses in the desert, she survives on memory—every lush detail of the world she experienced in her life before captivity—and on strategy, fortitude, and hope. When she is most desperate, she visits a house in the sky, high above the woman kept in chains, in the dark, being tortured.

Vivid and suspenseful, as artfully written as the finest novel, A House in the Sky is the searingly intimate story of an intrepid young woman and her search for compassion in the face of unimaginable adversity.

373 pages (September 2013)

Lit Guide from LitLovers.

"How journalist Amanda Lindhout's brutal kidnapper was brought to justice" from NBC News

A House in the Sky at goodreads

Review from Kirkus Reviews

Review from The National Post

Review from The New York Times

Review from Publishers Weekly

Review from Minneapolis Star Tribune

Review from USA Today

"5 life lessons born of adversity from Amanda Lindhout" from myob

Book Trailer (Jessie Kain):

Amanda Lindhout interview (Citytv):

Title Read-alikes: In the Presence of My Enemies by Gracia Burnham; A Rope and a Prayer by David Rohde; Hostage by Paul Chandler; The Shattered Lens by Jonathan Alpeyrie; The ISIS Hostage by Puk Damsgard; Beneath the Tamarind Tree by Isha Sesay; Escape from Camp 14 by Blaine Harden; The Girl Who Escaped ISIS by Farida Khalaf; The Translator by Daroud Hari; Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink; Under an Afghan Sky by Melissa Funk; The Pearl That Broke Its Shell by Nadia Hashimi; From the Ashes by Jesse Thistle; One Day Closer by Lorinda Stewart; and The Price of Life by Nigel Brennan.

Saturday, May 26, 2012

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after 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.

451 pages (February 2009)

Lit Guide from LitLovers.