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Book Group Summer Reads

Red Water
by Judith Freeman

In 1857 in southern Utah, a band of Mormons and Indians massacred 120 emigrants. Twenty years later, the slaughter was blamed on one man named John D. Lee, previously a member of Brigham Young's inner circle. Red Water imagines Lee's extraordinary frontier life through the eyes of three of his nineteen wives. These spirited women describe their struggle to survive Utah's punishing landscape and the poisonous rivalries within their polygamous family, led by a magnetic, industrious, and considerate husband, who was also unafraid of using his faith to justify desire and ambition.

The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint
by Brady Udall

Half-Apache and mostly orphaned, Edgar Mint survives being run over by the mailman, a hellish boarding school for Native American orphans, a well-meaning but wildly dysfunctional foster-family, and the loss of most of the illusions that are supposed to make life bearable. What persists is Edgar's innate goodness, his belief in the redeeming power of language, and his determination to find and forgive the man who almost killed him. The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint is a high-spirited, inexhaustibly inventive novel bursting with heartache and hilarity and inhabited by characters as outsized as the landscape of the American West.

The Virgin Blue
by Tracy Chevalier

The first novel-never before published in the United States-by the critically acclaimed author of The New York Times bestsellers Girl With a Pearl Earringg and Falling Angels. Meet Ella Turner and Isabelle du Moulin-two women born centuries apart, yet bound by a fateful family legacy. When Ella and her husband move to a small town in France, Ella hopes to brush up on her French, qualify to practice as a midwife, and start a family of her own. Village life turns out to be less idyllic than she expected, however, and a peculiar dream of the color blue propels her on a quest to uncover her family's French ancestry. As the novel unfolds-alternating between Ella's story and that of Isabelle du Moulin four hundred years earlier-a common thread emerges that unexpectedly links the two women. Part detective story, part historical fiction, The Virgin Blue is a novel of passion and intrigue that compels readers to the very last page.

When the Elephants Dance
by Tess Uriza Holthe

As the Japanese and Americans battle for the possession of the Philippines, the Karangalan family huddles for survival in the cellar of a house, telling magical stories based on Filipino myth and legend, helping to fuel their courage and teach lessons of hope. Their tales - based on family stories handed down to Holthe from her Filipino grandmother - beautifully reveal the dramatic history of the Islands and the passions of its people while the war outside brutally forces dreams and joys to be placed on hold. Told through three very different narrators -a 13-year-old boy, his older sister, and a passionate guerilla commander - this novel places Holthe alongside writers Arundhati Roy, Manil Suri, and Amy Tan.

The Heaven of Mercury
by Brad Watson

Finus Bates has loved Birdie Wells (modeled on Watson's own feisty grandmother) since the day he saw her do a naked cartwheel in the woods in 1916. Later he won her at poker, lost her, then nearly won her again after the mysterious poisoning of her womanizing husband. Does Vish, the old medicine woman down in the ravine, hold the key to Birdie's elusive character? Or does Parnell, the town undertaker, whose unspeakable desires bring lust for life and death together? Or does the secret lie with some other colorful old-timer in Mercury, Mississippi, not such a small town anymore? A potent cocktail of Southern gothic and classical mythology, this is a novel only Brad Watson could have written-an unforgettable portrait of the most romantic aspirations and most twisted inclinations of the bleak and lovely human heart.

Fox Girl
by Nora Okja Keller

With characteristic sensitivity to the horror and honor of women, the author of Comfort Women now marches us into America Town, Korea where the occupying forces are American and the women who serve them are mothers, sisters, and the throwaway children of American GIs and Korean prostitutes. Fox Girl covers the lives of three America Town teenagers whose lives begin in school with a regular feeling of promise, yet all slide into futures that feed on violence and the degradation of each other, because there are truly no other options for these half-breed kids of mixed races and whores. Behind their stories is a daring look at the subjects of race, misogyny, families, and the casualties of war. Fox Girl is also a look at the souls of these casualties and their responses to the tragedies heaped upon them. One young girl within the vibrant pages of Fox Girl has the craftiness to survive and the desire to hope, and she may just succeed.

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