Let's Talk About Texts - Trust Exercise
TONIGHT at 7:00pm   Sign-up Required   - Click Here to Register Online!  
Join us at Grape Water Wine Bar (7466 Hubbard Ave) to discuss Susan Choi's novel "Trust Exercise." A limited number of copies are available for checkout at the library's reference desk. Please RSVP if you plan to join the discussion. In an American suburb in the early 1980s, students at a highly competitive performing arts high school struggle and thrive in a rarefied bubble, ambitiously pursuing music, movement, Shakespeare, and, particularly, their acting classes. When within this striving “Brotherhood of the Arts,” two freshmen, David and Sarah, fall headlong into love, their passion does not go unnoticed―or untoyed with―by anyone, especially not by their charismatic acting teacher, Mr. Kingsley. The outside world of family life and economic status, of academic pressure and of their future adult lives, fails to penetrate this school’s walls―until it does, in a shocking spiral of events that catapults the action forward in time and flips the premise upside-down. What the reader believes to have happened to David and Sarah and their friends is not entirely true―though it’s not false, either. It takes until the book’s stunning coda for the final piece of the puzzle to fall into place―revealing truths that will resonate long after the final sentence. As captivating and tender as it is surprising, Susan Choi's Trust Exercise will incite heated conversations about fiction and truth, and about friendships and loyalties, and will leave readers with wiser understandings of the true capacities of adolescents and of the powers and responsibilities of adults.

Let's Talk About Texts - Educated
Monday March 23 at 7:00pm   Sign-up Required   - Click Here to Register Online!  
Join us at Grape Water Wine Bar (7466 Hubbard Ave) to discuss Tara Westover's memoir "Educated." A limited number of copies are available for checkout at the library's reference desk. Please RSVP if you plan to join the discussion. An unforgettable memoir about a young girl who, kept out of school, leaves her survivalist family and goes on to earn a PhD from Cambridge University Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Her family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education, and no one to intervene when one of Tara’s older brothers became violent. When another brother got himself into college, Tara decided to try a new kind of life. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge University. Only then would she wonder if she’d traveled too far, if there was still a way home.

Let's Talk About Texts - On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
Monday May 11 at 7:00pm   Sign-up Required   - Click Here to Register Online!  
Join us at Grape Water Wine Bar (7466 Hubbard Ave) to discuss Ocean Vuong's book "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous." A limited number of copies are available for checkout at the library's reference desk. Please RSVP if you plan to join the discussion. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard. With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years.