GPLD Book Club Bash - September 2024

Bea Abramovitz has a gift for math and numbers. With her father, she studies the burgeoning Wall Street market's stocks and patterns in the financial pages. After college she's determined to parlay her talent for the prediction game into personal and professional success. But in the 1920s, in a Lower East Side tenement, opportunities for women don't just come knocking. Bea will have to create them.

It's a doozy of a bad day for Beverly Diamond when she catches her husband, Larry, in a compromising position with his secretary. What's a DC suburban wife to do with a soon-to-be ex, two young kids, and no degree or financial support in 1962? Beat the louse at his own game, that's what. Larry runs the Maryland senatorial campaign for the incumbent candidate projected to win against his younger underdog opponent, Michael Landau. But Beverly has the...

"Growing up in Yakima, Washington, Noé Álvarez never knew his grandfather. Stories swirled around this mythologized, larger-than-life figure: that he had abandoned his family, and had possibly done something awful that put a curse on his descendants. About his grandfather, young Noé was sure of only one thing: That he had played the accordion. Now an adult, reckoning with the legacy of silence surrounding his family's migration from Mexico, Álvarez...

"The unbreakable bonds of family are explored in this brilliant and tender story from the author of Guy's Girl. On the day she arrives in Canada for her older brother's wedding, Eliot Beck hasn't seen her family in three years. The separation has been painful. Eliot adores her big, wacky, dysfunctional family. Still, there's a reason she fled to Manhattan and buried herself in her work, and that reason is a secret she's not willing to share with anyone....

"She's an icon. She's fun and aspirational. She's stirring controversy and outrage. Her name is Barbie. In 1956, Ruth Handler, cofounder of a budding toy company, embarks on a mission to upend the marketplace by creating a controversial doll: one that looks like a grown woman. Unlike the current trend of baby dolls that reinforces traditional roles of motherhood, this doll will empower little girls to be and do anything. And Barbie is born. Not everyone...

"A stunning, heartwrenching new novel from Abi Daré, New York Times bestselling author of The Girl with the Louding Voice. When Tia accidentally overhears a whispered conversation between her mother--terminally ill and lying in a hospital bed in Port Harcourt, Nigeria--and her aunt, the repercussions will send her on a desperate quest to uncover a secret her mother has been hiding for nearly two decades. Back home in Lagos a few days later, Adunni,...

"Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world's largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers, but with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants. Until, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman mysteriously washes ashore. Isolation has taken its toll on the Salts, but as they nurse the woman, Rowan, back to strength, it begins...

In 1950s Tehran, seven-year-old Ellie lives in grand comfort until the untimely death of her father, forcing Ellie and her mother to move to a tiny home downtown. Lonely and bearing the brunt of her mother's endless grievances, Ellie dreams of a friend to alleviate her isolation. Luckily, on the first day of school, she meets Homa, a kind, passionate girl with a brave and irrepressible spirit. Together, the two girls play games, learn to cook in the...

"1956, Malibu, California. Something is not right on Paradise Circle. With her name on the Hollywood blacklist and her life on hold, starlet Melanie Cole has little choice in company. There is her next-door neighbor, Elwood, but the screenwriter's agoraphobia allows for just short chats through open windows. He's her sole confidante, though, as she and her housekeeper, Eva, an immigrant from war-torn Europe, rarely make conversation. Then one early...