Best Book Club Crew EVER.

You all are so sweet to give me such a WONDERFUL gift. I absolutely love the Kindle and wanted one for some time now. I greatly appreciate you thinking of me. Love you and thank you so very much!

August 25 - Cherie's Book Club

August 25th at 7pm location TBA
A Dog's Purpose by W. Bruce Cameron

Publishers Weekly - A tail-wagging three hanky boo-hooer, this delightful fiction debut by newspaper columnist Cameron (8 Simple Rules for Marrying My Daughter) proposes that a dog's purpose might entail being reborn several times. Told in a touching, doggy first-person, this unabashedly sentimental tale introduces Toby, who's rescued by a woman without a license for her rescue operation, so, sadly, Toby ends up euthanized. He's reborn in a puppy mill and after almost dying while left in a hot car, he's saved again by a woman, and he becomes Bailey, a beloved golden retriever, who finds happiness and many adventures. His next intense incarnation is as Ellie, a female German shepherd, a heroic search and rescue dog. But the true purpose of this dog's life doesn't become totally clear until his reincarnation as Buddy, a black Lab. A book for all age groups who admire canine courage, Cameron also successfully captures the essence of a dog's amazing capacity to love and protect. And happily, unlike Marley, this dog stays around for the long haul. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Like cats, dogs have multiple lives. At least, Bailey, the canine narrator of this first novel, has more than one. Bailey’s first life is spent as a feral puppy who learns to trust humans after living with a loving but slightly dotty woman who owns too many dogs to suit the county. Bailey is removed by animal control, and his next life brings him to young Ethan, the human Bailey will love and search for through all his subsequent lives, first as part of K-9 Search and Rescue and then as a dumped and mistreated mutt. Through all these lives, Bailey contemplates his purpose in a voice full of curiosity and humor. He ruminates on the usefulness of cats (“none”) and the strange natures of humans (“Am I a good dog or a bad dog? They can’t decide”). This quickly paced, touching novel will charm all animal fans, especially those who loved Garth Stein’s The Art of Racing in the Rain (2009) and Vicki Myron’s Dewey (2008), the best-selling saga of a library cat. --Kaite Mediatore Stover

NOTE: September 22 Book Club - Kimbril's Pick is A Stolen Life: A Memoir by Jaycee Lee Dugard.

ALSO, Dana is being induced on August 24th so we will be celebrating the birth of her new baby at book club the next night! Can't wait to meet him!

Friday July 22 at 7pm - Dana's The Paris Wife

When: Friday, July 22nd @ 7PM

Where: Flamestone Grill
4009 Tampa Road
Oldsmar, FL, 34677
Phone 813-814-7778
http://www.flamestonegrill.com/

Upcoming dates:
Thursday August 25, Cheri
Thursday September 22, Kimbril
Thursday October 27, Denise
Thursday or Friday December 1 or 2, Paula

July Book - The Paris Wife by Paula McLain - Dana's Pick

Next book is.....

The Paris Wife by Paula McLain

$13.95 on Amazon....
http://www.amazon.com/Paris-Wife-Novel-Paula-McLain/dp/0345521307/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1309281869&sr=8-1

Hope you all enjoy it!!!

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Paula McLain on The Paris Wife

Most of us know or think we know who Ernest Hemingway was -- a brilliant writer full of macho swagger, driven to take on huge feats of bravery and a pitcher or two of martinis -- before lunch. But beneath this man or myth, or some combination of the two, is another Hemingway, one we’ve never seen before. Hadley Richardson, Hemingway’s first wife, is the perfect person to reveal him to us -- and also to immerse us in the incredibly exciting and volatile world of Jazz-age Paris.

The idea to write in Hadley’s voice came to me as I was reading Hemingway’s memoir, A Moveable Feast, about his early years in Paris. In the final pages, he writes of Hadley, “I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her.” That line, and his portrayal of their marriage -- so tender and poignant and steeped in regret -- inspired me to search out biographies of Hadley, and then to research their brief and intense courtship and letters -- they wrote hundreds and hundreds of pages of delicious pages to another!

I couldn’t help but fall in love with Hadley, and through her eyes, with the young Ernest Hemingway. He was just twenty when they met, handsome and magnetic, passionate and sensitive and full of dreams. I was surprised at how much I liked and admired him -- and before I knew it, I was entirely swept away by their gripping love story.

I hope you will be as captivated by this remarkable couple as I am -- and by the fascinating world of Paris in the 20’s, the fast-living, ardent and tremendously driven Lost Generation.

June Book Club - Never Let Me Go - by Kazuo Ishiguro

June 22, 2011 7pm CEVICHE

Amazon.com Review

All children should believe they are special. But the students of Hailsham, an elite school in the English countryside, are so special that visitors shun them, and only by rumor and the occasional fleeting remark by a teacher do they discover their unconventional origins and strange destiny. Kazuo Ishiguro's sixth novel, Never Let Me Go, is a masterpiece of indirection. Like the students of Hailsham, readers are "told but not told" what is going on and should be allowed to discover the secrets of Hailsham and the truth about these children on their own.

Offsetting the bizarreness of these revelations is the placid, measured voice of the narrator, Kathy H., a 31-year-old Hailsham alumna who, at the close of the 1990s, is consciously ending one phase of her life and beginning another. She is in a reflective mood, and recounts not only her childhood memories, but her quest in adulthood to find out more about Hailsham and the idealistic women who ran it. Although often poignant, Kathy's matter-of-fact narration blunts the sharper emotional effects you might expect in a novel that deals with illness, self-sacrifice, and the severe restriction of personal freedoms. As in Ishiguro's best-known work, The Remains of the Day, only after closing the book do you absorb the magnitude of what his characters endure. --Regina Marler --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

May 26 Book Club Amy Gall

The Long Walk, like The Running Man and The Regulators, is a novel that was penned under Stephen King’s pseudonym, Richard Bachman. There’s something a bit more sadistic about King’s Bachman books, which may very well be why he began writing them under a penname. The Long Walk, however, might just be the most disturbing and depressing of the Bachman books.

The Long Walk takes place is dystopian future where hope is no longer a commodity. The story itself surrounds a contest involving 100 contestants – all young boys – who must continue walking at four miles per hour until only one contestant is left standing. The grand prize and, as it is, the only prize, is that the winning contestant will receive whatever it is in life they most desire. Contestants who either stop or fall below the four mile per hour guideline are given a warning. After the third warning, the contestant is shot by one of the contest guardsman who watch from the halftracks. The contest itself is overseen by a mysterious, authoritative figure that goes by the title of “The Major.

The protagonist of the story is a 16-year-old boy by the name of Ray Garraty. During his walk, he befriends three other walkers. After Garraty watches his friends shot down one by one, he grows increasingly delirious, frightened, and hopeless.

Reminiscent of the Roman-era coliseum bloodbaths, the spectators care little for who wins. It’s only the death of the losers that they come to see. However, it is the suspense of seeing what finally happens to Garraty that keeps readers turning the pages.

The Long Walk, while depressing and surreal, is also highly metaphorical as readers watch Garraty as he in turn watches his friends die one by one as they attempt to make it toward their life’s goal. It’s flinchingly devastating to watch the characters go through such psychological trauma as they push their minds and bodies to the limit.

Like the Cell much later, King leaves his readers hanging on the very last page, forcing them to decide for themselves what the outcome actually is. However, unlike Cell, The Long Walk is a true achievement among King’s works.

Friday April 29th, The Kitchen Boy, JC's house

The Kitchen Boy, novel of the last Tsar by Robert Alexander

In the turbulent early days of revolutionary Russia, Bolshevik agents herded the deposed Tsar Nicholai II, his family and aides into the basement of a Siberian house and executed them all in a blaze of gunfire. Details of what happened that fateful night have taken decades to emerge, reaching a terrible climax with the 1991 excavation of a mass grave believed to be the one in which some of the members of the Romanov family were buried. Writer Robert Alexander, a fluent Russian speaker who studied in Leningrad, became fascinated with an obscure reference in the Empress Alexandra's personal journal shortly before her death, noting that their kitchen boy had been sent away. This brief reference from a forgotten 1918 diary took root in Alexander's imagination and, after much research, blossomed as his new novel The Kitchen Boy. This intriguing work of speculative historical fiction re-creates the last days of the tsar through the eyes of the young Leonka, who recalls how he secretly returned to the Siberian house that served as the Romanovs' prison and witnessed their execution.

The novel successfully maintains an intense atmo-sphere of peril and suspense despite the reader's foreknowledge of the Romanovs' fate. The calamity is heightened by the fierce, almost primal protectiveness the parents showed toward their children who nevertheless would die with them invoking compassion for the royal family as people rather than dusty national symbols.

Despite the sympathetic portrayal of the tsar and his family, Alexander doesn't ignore the judgment of history. As Leonka notes, however well-intentioned Nicholai and his empress may have been, their rule over Russia was a legacy of war, revolution, corruption and oppression. But the thuggish Bolshevik revolutionaries fare no better under the novel's scrutiny.

The Kitchen Boy is a fascinating and suspenseful glimpse of a tempestuous but shadowy period in Russian history. It's also a moving portrait of a family that, despite their legendary role in world events, proved in the end to be as mortal as the rest of us.