All the Light We Cannot See,  by Anthony Doerr                        2/12/15

Hostess - Betty Rose Gibbs

Rating 4.5 (Overall Enjoyment)

Interest of Topic: 4.5 - we knew alot about WWII, but learned a lot about island of Saint Malo, France and the impact of the radio as the only form of outside communication during the war

Character Development - 5.0 - great character development

Plot Development - 4 - overall good, but some stuggled with the jump back and forth between different storylines and different times

Author's creativity - 4.5 (author's inspiration came from seeing a man on a train who was annoyed with the slow speed of his internet access)

Discussion Generated - 5

We discussed examples of good vs evil in the book.  For example: - Instructors at Werner's school (evil) / Fredrick who refused to abuse the other boys at the school (good).  Jutta also represented good.

We thought that Werner was inherently good, but just in a hopeless situation.  Even if he had defended Fredrick against instructors and other students, he would have been sent back to orphanage to work in the mines (or worse)

The House Girl by Tara Conklin - January 8, 2015

Hostess:  Nan    Attendees:  Cheryl, Michelle, Myra, Pat, Mary Margaret, Jana, Pam 

Some yummy chili on a very chilly night

We all read the book!





We had a guest appearance by Nan's husband, Buddy Hawkins. He pulled up a chair and joined in with us! He was quite entertaining with his comments.

This book was two stories in one – present day and a look back to the time of slavery during the pre-Civil War days. The present day story was about a young lawyer, Lina, who was involved with a reparation case in which she had to locate a descendant from the slavery era. The other story was about Josephine, a slave who worked in the plantation house, who began to paint pictures. (Her mistress was credited with Josephine’s artwork.) The book compared Lina and Josephine’s individual stories.

 The summary of our discussion was that we were interested in Josephine’s story, but not so much in Lina’s story. There were lots of random characters that were not developed fully. Pam mentioned that an English teacher would have said to “go back and fix the story”.

Book Rating: 3