November 23 - A Star for Mrs. Blake

Our next bookgroup meeting will be on Monday, November 23rd at 3pm in the Turner Room.  Please note the date is a week earlier due to Thanksgiving. We will be discussing A Star for Mrs. Blake by April Smith. Copies of the book are available at the LME Library front desk and the discussion guide is available for pick-up or online.  The bookgroup is available to any adult reader so please join us!

Summary: "An emotionally-charged, brilliantly realized novel set in the 1930's about five American women--Gold Star Mothers--who travel to France to visit the graves of their WWI soldier sons. The women meet for the first time just before their journey begins: Katie, an Irish maid from Dorchester, Massachusetts; Minnie, wife of an immigrant Russian Jewish chicken farmer; Bobbie, a wealthy Boston socialite ; Wilhelmina, a former tennis star in precarious mental health; and Cora Blake, a single mother and librarian from coastal Maine. In Paris, Cora meets a journalist whose drug habit helps him hide from his own war-time fate--facial wounds so grievous he's forced to wear a metal mask. This man will change Cora's life in wholly unexpected ways. And when the women finally travel to Verdun to visit the battlegrounds where their sons fought as well as the cemeteries where they are buried, shocking events -a death, a scandal, a secret revealed--will guarantee that Cora's life and those of her traveling companions will become inextricably intertwined, and only now will they be able to emerge from their grief and return home to their loved ones. This is a timeless story set against a footnote of history: little known but unforgettable."

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