Mother of Pearl by Melinda Haynes – Oprah’s Book Club Selection #27

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Apr 132012
 

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Mother of Pearl
By Melinda Haynes
Oprah Book Club® Selection #27, June 1999

Editorial Review:

Twenty-eight-year-old Even Grade is a black man who was orphaned as a child; 15-year-old Valuable Korner is a white girl who might as well have been. Petal, Mississippi, circa 1956, seems an unlikely spot for these two to connect, but it soon becomes apparent in Mother of Pearl that a friendship across race lines is just one of many miracles waiting to happen in this small Southern town. Melinda Haynes’s remarkable debut novel begins in a hot August, when young Val’s lifelong friendship with Jackson McClain is starting to change into something more profound, and Even is falling crazy in love with Joody Two Sun, a mixed-race woman with amazing powers.
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White Oleander by Janet Fitch – Oprah’s Book Club Selection #26

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Apr 112012
 

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White Oleander
By Janet Fitch
Oprah Book Club® Selection #26, May 1999

Editorial Review:

Astrid Magnussen, the teenage narrator of Janet Fitch’s engrossing first novel, White Oleander, has a mother who is as sharp as a new knife. An uncompromising poet, Ingrid despises weakness and self-pity, telling her daughter that they are descendants of Vikings, savages who fought fiercely to survive. And when one of Ingrid’s boyfriends abandons her, she illustrates her point, killing the man with the poison of oleander flowers. This leads to a life sentence in prison, leaving Astrid to teach herself the art of survival in a string of Los Angeles foster homes. Continue reading »

The Pilot’s Wife by Anita Shreve – Oprah’s Book Club Selection #25

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Apr 102012
 

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The Pilot’s Wife
By Anita Shreve
Oprah Book Club® Selection #25, March 1999

Editorial Review:

With five novels to her credit, including the acclaimed The Weight of Water, Anita Shreve now offers a skillfully crafted exploration of the long reach of tragedy in The Pilot’s Wife. News of Jack Lyons’s fatal crash sends his wife into shock and emotional numbness:

Kathryn wished she could manage a coma. Instead, it seemed that quite the opposite had happened: She felt herself to be inside of a private weather system, one in which she was continuously tossed and buffeted by bits of news and information, sometimes chilled by thoughts of what lay immediately ahead, thawed by the kindness of others … frequently drenched by memories that seemed to have no regard for circumstance or place, and then subjected to the nearly intolerable heat of reporters, photographers and curious on-lookers. It was a weather system with no logic, she had decided, no pattern, no progression, no form. Continue reading »

The Reader by Bernhard Schlink – Oprah Book Club Selection #24

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Apr 092012
 

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The Reader
By Bernhard Schlink
Oprah Book Club® Selection #24, February 1999

Editorial Review:

Originally published in Switzerland, and gracefully translated into English by Carol Brown Janeway, The Reader is a brief tale about sex, love, reading, and shame in postwar Germany. Michael Berg is 15 when he begins a long, obsessive affair with Hanna, an enigmatic older woman. He never learns very much about her, and when she disappears one day, he expects never to see her again. But, to his horror, he does. Hanna is a defendant in a trial related to Germany’s Nazi past, and it soon becomes clear that she is guilty of an unspeakable crime. As Michael follows the trial, he struggles with an overwhelming question: What should his generation do with its knowledge of the Holocaust? “We should not believe we can comprehend the incomprehensible, we may not compare the incomparable…. Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame, and guilt? To what purpose?” Continue reading »

Jewel by Bret Lott – Oprah’s Book Club Selection #23

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Apr 092012
 

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Jewel
By Bret Lott
Oprah Book Club® Selection #23, January 1999

Editorial Review:

The year is 1943 and life is good for Jewel Hilburn, her husband, Leston, and their five children. Although there’s a war on, the Mississippi economy is booming, providing plenty of business for the hardworking family. And even the news that eldest son James has enlisted is mitigated by the fact that Jewel, now pushing 40, is pregnant with one last child. Her joy is slightly clouded, however, when her childhood friend Cathedral arrives at the door with a troubling prophecy: “I say unto you that the baby you be carrying be yo’ hardship, be yo’ test in this world. This be my prophesying unto you, Miss Jewel.” Continue reading »

Where the Heart Is by Billie Letts – Oprah’s Book Club Selection #22

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Apr 082012
 

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Where the Heart Is
By Billie Letts
Oprah Book Club® Selection #22, December 1998

Editorial Review:

A funny thing happens to Novalee Nation on her way to Bakersfield, California. Her ne’er-do-well boyfriend, Willie Jack Pickens, abandons her in an Oklahoma Wal-Mart and takes off on his own, leaving her with just 10 dollars and the clothes on her back. Not that hard luck is anything new to Novalee, who is “seventeen, seven months pregnant, thirty-seven pounds overweight–and superstitious about sevens…. For most people, sevens were lucky. But not for her,” Billie Letts writes. “She’d had a bad history with them, starting with her seventh birthday, the day Momma Nell ran away with a baseball umpire named Fred…”

Still, finding herself alone and penniless in Sequoyah, Oklahoma is enough to make even someone as inured to ill fortune as Novalee want to give up and die. Fortunately, the Wal-Mart parking lot is the Sequoyah equivalent of a town square, and within hours Novalee has met three people who will change her life: Sister Thelma Husband, a kindly eccentric; Benny Goodluck, a young Native American boy; and Moses Whitecotton, an elderly African American photographer. For the next two months, Novalee surreptitiously makes her home in the Wal-Mart, sleeping there at night, exploring the town by day. When she goes into labor and delivers her baby there, however, Novalee learns that sometimes it’s not so bad to depend on the kindness of strangers–especially if one of them happens to be Sam Walton, the superchain’s founder. Continue reading »

Midwives by Chris Bohjalian – Oprah’s Book Club #21

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Apr 082012
 

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Midwives
By Chris Bohjalian
Oprah Book Club® Selection #21, October 1998

Editorial Review:

On a violent, stormy winter night, a home birth goes disastrously wrong. The phone lines are down, the roads slick with ice. The midwife, unable to get her patient to a hospital, works frantically to save both mother and child while her inexperienced assistant and the woman’s terrified husband look on. The mother dies but the baby is saved thanks to an emergency C-section. And then the nightmare begins: the assistant suggests that maybe the woman wasn’t really dead when the midwife operated:

Did she perform at least eight or nine cycles as my mother said, or four or five as Asa recalled? That is the sort of detail that was disputable. But at some point within minutes of what my mother believed had been a stroke, after my mother concluded the cardiopulmonary resuscitation had failed to generate a pulse or a breath, she screamed for Asa and Anne to find her the sharpest knife in the house. Continue reading »

Why the Oprah Book Club Collection?

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Apr 072012
 

I know that it looks like my blog has gone back to the late 1990s, but I assure you that it is temporary. Well, maybe not so temporary since at the pace that I am going it will probably take me (hmm, get out the calculator – click start, then run, type calc, ok – I love this thing) approximately 24 more days. Maybe even longer if I can’t manage to post two books a day. And if I do that, it means that I won’t be posting anything else but Oprah’s Book Club Selections for the next month. Last count, I think there were 67 selections, with the last one including two books. I’ve posted 20 Book Club Selections, so far, leaving 47 to go.

What’s the big deal about Oprah’s Book Club you ask? Well, it’s something that I started years ago, when Oprah first started her book club on The Oprah Winfrey Show. I was maintaining a list of the book collection and even posted some of them on an old website. Somewhere along the way, I left it behind.

It has been said that because of Oprah’s Book Club popularity, many of the older/obscure titles became bestsellers and sales increased dramatically. It just shows you how much influence Oprah had on the reading public. A couple of her selections caused much controversy, such as The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen and James Frey’s memoir, A Million Little Pieces. Read more at Wikipedia.org.

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What Looks LIke Crazy On an Ordinary Day by Pearl Cleage – Oprah’s Book Club Selection #20

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Apr 062012
 

WImage of What Looks LIke Crazy On an Ordinary Dayhat Looks LIke Crazy On an Ordinary Day
By Pearl Cleage
Oprah Book Club® Selection #20, September 1998

Editorial Review:

What makes Pearl Cleage’s novel so damned enjoyable? At first glance, after all, What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day seems pretty heavy going: HIV, suicide, sudden infant death syndrome, and drunk driving all figure prominently in the lives of narrator Ava Johnson and her older sister Joyce. It isn’t long before crack addiction, domestic violence, and unwed motherhood have joined the list–so, where’s the pleasure? The answer lies in the sharp and funny attitude Cleage brings to her depiction of one African American community in the troubled ’90s. Ava Johnson, for example, might be HIV-positive, but she’s refreshingly forthright about it: “Most of us got it from the boys. Which is, when you think about it, a pretty good argument for cutting men loose, but if I could work up a strong physical reaction to women, I would already be having sex with them. I’m not knocking it. I’m just saying I can’t be a witness. Too many titties in one place to suit me.”
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I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb – Oprah’s Book Club Selection #19

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Apr 062012
 

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I Know This Much Is True: A Novel (P.S.)
By Wally Lamb
Oprah Book Club® Selection #19, June 1998

Editorial Review:

What if you were a 40-year-old housepainter, horrifically abused, emotionally unavailable, and your identical twin was a paranoid schizophrenic who believed in public self-mutilation? You’d either be a guest on the Jerry Springer Show or Dominick Birdsey, the antihero, narrator, and bad-juju magnet of I Know This Much Is True. Somewhere in the recesses of this hefty 912-page tome lurks an honest, moving account of one man’s search, denial, and acceptance of self. This is no easy feat considering his grandfather seemed to take parenting tips from the SS and his grandmother was a possible teenage murderess, his stepfather a latent sadist, and his brother, Thomas, a politically motivated psychopath. Not one to break with tradition, Dominick continues the dysfunctional legacy with rape, a failed marriage, a nervous breakdown, SIDS, a car crash, and a racist conspiracy against a coworker–just to name a few.
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