Sponsored by Under the Magnolias by T. I. Lowe
Magnolia, South Carolina, 1980. Austin Foster is barely a teenager when her mama dies, leaving her to care for her six siblings and try to stop her daddy from retreating into his personal darkness. As Austin finds herself relying upon some of Magnolia’s most colorful citizens to ease the Fosters’ hardships, her father makes a choice that will crack the family’s secrets wide-open. T. I. Lowe’s gritty yet tender tale reminds us that a great story can break your heart . . . then heal it in the best possible way.
Welcome to In The Club, a newsletter of resources to keep your book group well-met, well-read, and well-fed. Hola, book club fam! How’s everyone doing? I’m feeling a strange mix of look-out-world-here-I-come social and imma-need-a-few-days-alone-to-recharge exhausted this week, but it’s a pretty good feeling either way. It’s nice to get to go back to the office with the Portland Rioters and socialize a little more with the safety afforded to us by caution and vaccines. I hope you’re finding some kind of new normal to feel comfortable in, too—maybe even a return to more in-person book club meetings!
Speaking of which: to the club!!
Nibbles and Sips
Another week, another TikTok recipe. What ca I say, the Tok hasn’t let me down yet! This week I’m urging you to make these ooey gooey flourless peanut butter banana brownies. I made them this weekend and I almost ate the whole pan. Share them with your book club and avoid the stomach ache I gave myself, even if it was totally worth it.
Give Book Club a Sporting Chance
Real talk: the reason I picked books about/involving sports for this week’s newsletter is that I finally googled “what is Ted Lasso about” after weeks spent in the dark. I had no idea the show was about sports! So I made sports the theme. Deep, I know. Still, these books are all worth talking about!
Beartown by Fredrik Backman
I saw this book being compared to Friday Night Lights a lot when it came out. It’s about the small and struggling community of Beartown where the junior ice hockey team is about to compete in the national semi-finals. They actually have a shot at winning, which also means they’re carrying all of Beartown’s hopes and dreams on their shoulders. The pressure of representing an entire town is heavy, and those tensions lead to a violent act that leaves a young girl traumatized. The accusations that follow leave the town in turmoil.
Book Club Bonus: Discuss the pressure placed on young athletes and how it contributes to the larger culture around youth athletics, one that creates unrealistic expectations at best and is devastatingly toxic at worst. The book also foregoes the use of first names for a lot of its characters; discuss the significance of this choice.
Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley
Eighteen-year-old Daunis Fontaine is a biracial, unenrolled tribal member with dreams of studying medicine, dreams that are put on hold when she defers enrollment to care for her mother and grandmother. Then she witnesses the murder of her best friend, a killing tied to drug abuse that’s then followed by a strings of other deaths linked to a new lethal cocktail of meth. Daunis gets pulled into an undercover investigation into the source of the meth, one that brings her into close contact with a new boy in town who might be hiding something. She also pursues her own secret investigation, using her knowledge of chemistry and Ojibwe traditional medicine to uncover buried secrets in her community. (This book involves a hockey team, in case you wondering where the sports part comes in).
Book Club Bonus: Daunis has to decide far she’s willing to go to protect her community, which often means working in direct opposition to law enforcement. Discuss the community’s distrust of non-native legal intervention and treatment of indigenous peoples as a whole (You have twelve hours to dedicate to book club, right?)
Proud: My Fight for an Unlikely American Dream by Ibtihaj Muhammad
Ibtihaj Muhammad grew up in New Jersey as the only African American Muslim at school, so she was used to having to forge her own path. Then she discovered fencing, a sport traditionally reserved for the wealthy and one that didn’t exactly welcome with her with open arms. She didn’t let the hate stop her, though. She went only to defy expectations in becoming the only woman of color and the only religious minority on Team USA’s saber fencing squad. This story of her unlikely and odds-defying path towards Olympic glory in inspiring as it is thought-provoking.
Book Club Bonus: Muhammad is known for being the first woman to wear a hijab while competing for the United States in the Olympics. That was all in the last decade, and the Olympics have been around for (checks notes) A LOT LONGER THAN THAT. Discuss the ever-present challenges for women of color in athletics.
Suggestion Section
May 2021 Celeb Book Club Picks From Reese Witherspoon, Camilla Parker-Bowles, Carl Radke & More
Spread the word! Applications are still open for the LitUp Writer’s Fellowship. Reese’s Book Club. along with We Need Diverse Books, have created this fellowship to aid diverse emerging women writers. Five winners will each be offered an all-expenses-paid writer’s retreat, a three-month mentorship with a published author, and marketing support from Reese’s Book Club.
Thanks for hanging with me today! Shoot me an email at vanessa@riotnewmedia.com with your burning book club questions or find me on Twitter and the gram @buenosdiazsd. Sign up for the Audiobooks newsletter and catch me once a month on the All the Books podcast.
Stay bad & bookish, my friends.
Vanessa