In the Club 05/05/21

Darius knows more about Hobbit social cues than Persian customs and speaks better Klingon than Farsi. The son of a Persian mother and a white American father, he’s never felt like he fit in anywhere, a worry not at all helped by his clinical depression. When his family travels to Iran to visit his mother’s family, Darius meets Sohrab, the boy next door. Soon the boys are spending their every moment together, and Darius realizes he’s never felt more like himself.

Book Club Bonus: Discuss how two people with the same diagnosis can have very different experiences and won’t necessarily relate, and how challenging it can be to communicate mental illness to a different generation or culture.

Gifty is a Ghanian American working on a PhD in neuroscience, studying depression and addiction by observing the reward-seeking behavior of mice. This work is very personal: she was just a kid when her brother injured his ankle during a high school basketball game, then got hooked on Oxycontin and died of an overdose. Gifty turns to science to understand Nana’s addiction and the depth of her family’s loss, but also finds herself pulled in by the allure of salvation offered by the faith she thought she’d long abandoned.

Book Club Bonus: There’s a meaty discussion to be had here about the relationship between mental illness and religion, specifically how so many faith systems handle mental illness with a lot of dismissal and instructions to just “give it God” and pray.

Retired orthopedic surgeon Dr. Jennifer White is battling dementia and all of the life adjustments that come with her diagnosis. When her best friend is killed and found with several of her fingers removed with surgical precision, Dr. White is immediately the #1 suspect. The worst part: Dr. White could very well have done it, but she doesn’t know if she did. This thriller is well-paced and handles the subject of dementia with a lot of care.

Book Club Bonus: Dr. White’s dementia added a layer of complexity to what otherwise might have been a more straightforward thriller—explore that! Discuss the frailty of memory as both a blessing and a curse.

This one I haven’t read yet, but it was recommended to me by a reader (thank you so much!) after I talked about my love of Jane Eyre retellings.Wide Sargasso Sea gives a new voice to one of fiction’s most fascinating characters: the madwoman in the attic from Jane Eyre. Bertha, born Antoinette Cosway, is a protected young woman when she’s sold into marriage to the prideful Mr. Rochester. Her reputation is ruined by rumors about her past fueled by some really puritan attitudes towards sexuality, and her prideful husband becomes emotionally abusive and unfaithful. As he flaunts his affairs in her face, Bertha is continually gaslit until she reaches her emotional breaking point.

Book Club Bonus: Makes it kinda hard to write her off as “crazy,” doesn’t it? Discuss how a deeper examination of Mr. Rochester makes him a much more unsavory character than the one we’ve come to know in the original story, and how unfair Bertha’s narrative has been to her (and women in general).