January 2022: The Girl Who Fell from the Sky by Heidi W. Durrow

 Cass has picked The Girl Who Fell from the Sky by Heidi W. Durrow for our first book of 2022. 

ABOUT THE BOOK

“[A] breathless telling of a tale we’ve never heard before. Haunting and lovely, pitch-perfect, this book could not be more timely.”

—Barbara Kingsolver

A timely and moving bicultural coming-of-age tale about the daughter of a Danish immigrant and a black G.I. that is now a New York Times Bestseller and already a book club favorite.

A beauty with light brown skin and blue eyes, 11-year-old Rachel attracts much attention in her new home. The world wants to see her as either black or white, but that’s not how she sees herself.

Meanwhile, a mystery unfolds, revealing the terrible truth about Rachel’s last morning on a Chicago rooftop. Interwoven with her voice are those of Jamie, a neighborhood boy who witnessed the events, and Laronne, a friend of Rachel’s mother.

Inspired by a true story of a mother’s twisted love, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky reveals an unfathomable past and explores issues of identity at a time when many people are asking “Must race confine us and define us?”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Heidi W. Durrow is the New York Times best-selling author of The Girl Who Fell From the Sky (Algonquin Books), which received writer Barbara Kingsolver’s PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, and is a book club favorite. The Girl Who Fell From the Sky has been hailed as one of the Best Novels of 2010 by the Washington Post, a Top 10 Book of 2010 by The Oregonian, and named a Top 10 Debut of 2010 by Booklist.

Ebony Magazine named Heidi as one of its Power 100 Leaders of 2010 along with writers Edwidge Danticat and Malcolm Gladwell. Heidi was nominated for an 2011 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Debut.

Heidi—the first-generation in her family to attend college—is a graduate of Stanford University, Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism and Yale Law School. Originally from the Pacific Northwest, Heidi has worked as a corporate attorney at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, and as a Life Skills trainer to professional athletes of the National Football League and National Basketball Association.

She was the founder and producer of the now defunct Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival, but now heads the Mixed Remixed Festival, an annual free public event, that celebrates stories of the Mixed race and multiracial experience through films, books and performance. She is an award-winning podcaster and currently the host of a new audio and video podcast called The Mixed Experience.

Heidi is also a highly acclaimed and sought-after public speaker who has spoken at Brown, Exeter, Yale Law School and many other universities nationwide. She has also been a featured speaker at Sundance and other popular festivals, conferences and high schools on creativity, women’s empowerment, and multicultural and multiracial issues. She has been featured as a leading expert on multiracial and multicultural issues and identity by the NBC Nightly News,the New York Times, CNN, National Public Radio, the BBC, Ebony Magazine and the San Francisco Chronicle. She has served as an occasional contributor to National Public Radio and blogs for the Huffington Post.

Heidi W. Durrow is available for speaking engagements and is widely considered an expert on issues about mixed-race and multiracial identity and experience as well as writing.

 

December 2021: No book, just party

 Bring on the sock exchange!

November 2021: Dear Committee Members by Juile Schumacher

 Becky picked Dear Committee Members by Juile Schumacher for us to read in November. It's a funny one - especially for us English majors!!

ABOUT THE BOOK

A Best Book of the Year:  NPR and Boston Globe

Finally a novel that puts the "pissed" back into "epistolary."

Jason Fitger is a beleaguered professor of creative writing and literature at Payne University, a small and not very distinguished liberal arts college in the midwest. His department is facing draconian cuts and squalid quarters, while one floor above them the Economics Department is getting lavishly remodeled offices. His once-promising writing career is in the doldrums, as is his romantic life, in part as the result of his unwise use of his private affairs for his novels. His star (he thinks) student can't catch a break with his brilliant (he thinks) work Accountant in a Bordello, based on Melville's Bartleby. In short, his life is a tale of woe, and the vehicle this droll and inventive novel uses to tell that tale is a series of hilarious letters of recommendation that Fitger is endlessly called upon by his students and colleagues to produce, each one of which is a small masterpiece of high dudgeon, low spirits, and passive-aggressive strategies. We recommend Dear Committee Members to you in the strongest possible terms.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Julie Schumacher grew up in Wilmington, Delaware and graduated from Oberlin College and Cornell University.

Her first published story, “Reunion,” written to fulfill an undergraduate writing assignment (“tell a family tale”) was reprinted in The Best American Short Stories 1983. Subsequent stories and essays were published in The Atlantic, The New York Times, MS, The Chronicle for Higher Education, Prize Stories: The O.Henry Awards , and other venues.

Her first novel, The Body Is Water , was published by Soho Press in 1995 and was an ALA Notable Book of the Year and a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Schumacher’s other books include the national best-seller, Dear Committee Members (winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor); The Shakespeare Requirement , Doodling for Academics (a satirical coloring book); and five novels for younger readers.

Schumacher lives in St. Paul and is a Regents Professor at the University of Minnesota, where she teaches in the Creative Writing Program and the Department of English. She has won multiple teaching awards and has been recognized as a “Scholar of the College.”

From https://julieschumacher.com