This month we will meet in Recoleta.  Please send your RSVP to jimvillage@yahoo.com for the exact address.

At the April meeting we will be discussing Gone So Long by Andre Dubus III. Dubus III’s first novel in a decade is a masterpiece of thrilling tension and heartrending empathy.Few writers can enter their characters so completely or evoke their lives as viscerally as Andre Dubus III. In this deeply compelling new novel, a father, estranged for the worst of reasons, is driven to seek out the daughter he has not seen in decades.Cathartic, affirming, and steeped in the empathy and precise observations of character for which Dubus is celebrated, Gone So Long explores how the wounds of the past afflict the people we become, and probes the limits of recovery and absolution.

The book we will read in May 2019 is described below.  If you have suggestions or comments, send them to tonilin@aol.com.

Please join us for the discussion.  Whether or not you have read the book you are welcome to participate.  We meet on the second Tuesday of each month.

May — Hope, Jahren. Lab Girl. New York: Vintage, 2017. 290 pp.

Acclaimed scientist Hope Jahren has built three laboratories in which she’s studied trees, flowers, seeds, and soil. Her first book is a treatise on plant life—but it is also so much more. Lab Girl is told through Jahren’s remarkable stories: about her childhood in rural Minnesota with an uncompromising mother and a father who encouraged hours of play in his classroom’s labs; about how she found a sanctuary in science, and learned to perform lab work done “with both the heart and the hands”; and about the inevitable disappointments but also the exhilarating discoveries of scientific work. Central is a relationship Jahren forged with a brilliant, wounded man, who becomes her lab partner and best friend. Their adventures in science take them from the Midwest across the U.S.  and back again, over the Atlantic to the ever-light skies of the North Pole and to tropical Hawaii, where she and her lab currently make their home.  Lab Girl opens your eyes to the beautiful, sophisticated mechanisms within every leaf, blade of grass, and flower petal.