True American Hero

If it weren't true, we wouldn't believe it! At Bookenders book discussion, we discussed the amazing life of Louis Zamperini, as it was masterfully told by best-selling author, Laura Hillenbrand.

Louis was:

a teen-age troublemaker

Olympic runner

WWII bomber

plane crash survivor

tortured prisoner of Japanese

but more importantly,

he used his ingenuity, his perseverance, his strong will, his resilience,

his forgiveness,

to thrive.

He spent his life helping troubled youth

and inspiring people around the world

with his extraordinary story.

A New Year of Bookenders

Bookenders book group will get together at the library on Wednesday, September 28th at 7 p.m. The featured book for the evening is Unbroken:A World War II Airman's Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand. The discussion will be led by Eloise Fugal. 

Everyone is invited to attend.

We will also be choosing the book selections for the coming year at this meeting. Plan now to attend and bring suggestions on great books for discussion.

Unbroken is the inspiring true story of a man who lived through a series of catastrophes almost too incredible to be believed. 

Louie Zamperini

In evocative, immediate descriptions, Hillenbrand unfurls the story of Louie Zamperini--a juvenile delinquent-turned-Olympic runner-turned-Army hero. During a routine search mission over the Pacific, Louie’s plane crashed into the ocean, and what happened to him over the next three years of his life is a story that will keep you glued to the pages, eagerly awaiting the next turn in the story and fearing it at the same time. You’ll cheer for the man who somehow maintained his selfhood and humanity despite the monumental degradations he suffered, and you’ll want to share this book with everyone you know.  

Laura Hillenbrand

Laura Hillenbrand was born on May 15, 1967 in Fairfax, Virginia. She spent much of her childhood riding bareback "screaming over the hills" of her father's Sharpsburg, Maryland farm. She studied at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio but was forced to leave before graduation when she contracted Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, which she has struggled with ever since. She now lives in Washington D.C., and rarely leaves her house because of the condition. On the irony of writing about physical paragons while being so incapacitated herself, she says, "I'm looking for a way out of here. I can't have it physically, so I'm going to have it intellectually. It was a beautiful thing to ride Seabiscuit in my imagination. And it's just fantastic to be there alongside Louie as he's breaking the NCAA mile record. People at these vigorous moments in their lives - it's my way of living vicariously."

Hillenbrand married Borden Flanagan, a professor of Government at American University and her college sweetheart, in 2008.

She is the author of the critically acclaimed Seabiscuit: An American Legend, which spent 42 weeks at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, in hardcover and paperback. It was made into the Academy Award nominated film Seabiscuit. After this success it took her almost a decade of research and writing before Unbroken was published.

Hillenbrand is a co-founder of Operation Iraqi Children, a charitable program created in 2004 to send school supplies to Iraqi children. 

 

The Street of a Thousand Blossoms

Bookenders Book Group will be discussing The Street of a Thousand Blossoms by Gail Tsukiyama on Wednesday, May 25 at 7:00 p.m.

We will be meeting downstairs in the library. 

Everyone is invited to attend.

 

 Tsukiyama is a mesmerizing storyteller who focuses on family, tradition, and the solace of nature and art. Of both Chinese and Japanese descent, she has explored the history and culture of both lands, here imagining life in Japan during its most catastrophic time as experienced by the orphaned brothers Hiroshi and Kenji. Raised by their loving grandparents in Yanaka, a residential area of Tokyo, they are opposites. Big, strong, and confident, Hiroshi believes he is destined to be a sumo wrestler. Slight, quiet, and artistic, Kenji discovers his love for mask making and Noh theater by accident. They each secure mentors, but just as the good brothers embark on their demanding apprenticeships, war breaks out. Tsukiyama's spare prose reflects the clean-lined, distilled-to-the-essence aesthetic of Japanese art as she writes appreciatively and informatively about the arts of sumo and Noh, and piercingly about the horrific deprivations and tyranny of war, the firebombing of Tokyo, the American occupation, and the rapid evolution of modern Japan. As her endearing characters attempt to adjust to the new while preserving the old, Tsukiyama evokes a classic vision of a blasted world returning to life. Tsukiyama's historically detailed and plot-driven story of resilience, discipline, loyalty, and right action is popular fiction at its most intelligent, appealing, and rewarding.

Gail Tsukiyama was born in San Francisco, California to a Chinese mother from Hong Kong and a Japanese father from Hawaii. She attended San Francisco State University where she received both her Bachelor of Arts Degree and a Master of Arts Degree in English with the emphasis in Creative Writing.  Most of her college work was focused on poetry, and she was the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Award. She was one of nine fiction authors to appear during the first Library of Congress National Book Festival. A resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, she has been apart-time lecturer in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, as well as a freelance book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle.   Her works include The Samurai's Garden, Women of the Silk, Night of Many Dreams , The Language of Threads, The Street of a Thousand Blossoms, and Dreaming Water. 

A Long Way Gone

Bookenders will be discussing Ishmael Beah's book, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, on Wednesday, April 27. Etta McQuade will be leading the discussion.

We will be meeting in the basement of the library.

Everyone is invited to attend.

Ishamel Beah was born in Sierra Leone West Africa in 1980. He had a peaceful childhood until his parents separated. Then the rebels came to his village and his entire family were killed. After months of traveling alone, he came to a village that was occupied by Sierra Leone Military Forces. He was coerced into recruiting and spent the next three years as a boy soldier, witnessing and participating in countless atrocities.

UNICEF workers rescued him and patiently helped him regain his humanity. He was chosen to speak about his experiences at the United Nations, where he met Laura Simms, who later became his foster mother.

He graduated from high school in New York City and earned a degree in Politics from Oberlin College.

“If I choose to feel guilty for what I have done, I will want to be dead myself,” Beah said. “I live knowing that I have been given a second life, and I just try to have fun, and be happy and live it the best I can.”  

Still Alice

Join us for a lively, insightful discussion of the book Still Alice by Lisa Genova on Wednesday, March 30th in the basement of the Pleasant Grove Library.

Eloise Fugal will lead the discussion and there will be refreshments.

Alice Howland, happily married with three grown children and a house on the Cape, is a celebrated Harvard professor at the height of her career when she notices a forgetfulness creeping into her life. As confusion starts to cloud her thinking and her memory begins to fail her, she receives a devastating diagnosis: early onset Alzheimer's disease. Fiercely independent, Alice struggles to maintain her lifestyle and live in the moment, even as her sense of self is being stripped away. In turns heartbreaking, inspiring and terrifying, Still Alice captures in remarkable detail what's it's like to literally lose your mind.

This award-winning book is a favorite of book clubs all over the country.

Lisa Genova

Lisa Genova graduated valedictorian from Bates College with a degree in Biopsychology and has a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Harvard University. She has done research on the molecular etiology of depression, Parkinson's Disease, drug addiction, and memory loss following stroke. Her second novel, LEFT NEGLECTED, also a New York Times bestseller, is about a woman with a traumatic brain injury. She is currently writing her third novel, LOVE ANTHONY, about a boy with autism. Lisa lives with her husband and three children on Cape Cod.

What inspired Lisa to write the book:

Her grandmother suffered from Alzheimer's. She started doing research on it, but could never answer the question, "What does it feel like to have this?" because her grandmother was already too far gone.

Lisa's research:

Lisa did a ton of research. Her "Ph.D. in neuroscience from Harvard was like a golden, all-access pass" with neurologists, genetic counselors, researchers and about a dozen people who were suffering from Alzheimer's. They e-mailed almost daily while she was writing the book and made sure her writing rang true.

Lisa's previous writing experience:

The only writing Lisa had done previously was scientific research papers, with the exception of a Short Story class her freshman year in college. However, she was training as a Meisner actress at the same time she was writing the book and felt that the skills she learned in acting class translated well in the writing process.

The writing/publishing experience:

Lisa wrote Still Alice at Starbucks while her daughter was in school. She was too distracted by things at home--phone calls, laundry, food in the fridge. She wasn't successful initially with finding an agent or a publisher so she self-published, selling the book out of the trunk of her car. It paid off. Simon & Schuster took it on and it became a best-seller and has been translated into over 20 languages.

Lisa Genova talks about Still Alice:

Eve Green

On Wednesday, February 23 at 7 p.m. the Bookenders book group will meet at the library to discuss Eve Green by Susan Fletcher. Everyone is invited to attend.

Pregnant with her first child, Eve Green recalls her mother's death when she was eight years old and her struggle to make sense of her parents' mysterious romantic past. Eve is sent to live with her grandparents in rural Wales, where she finds comfort in friendships with Daniel, a quiet farmhand, and Billy, a disabled, reclusive friend of her mother's. When a ravishing local girl disappears, one of Eve's friends comes under suspicion. Eve will do everything she can to protect him, but at the risk of complicity in a matter she barely understands. This is a timeless and beautifully told story about family secrets and unresolved liaisons.

This debut novel is written with exquisite sensitivity, the chapters brimming with images of the Welsh countryside.

Fletcher perfectly captures Welsh country life with lyrical passages as moving as the story itself. Eve's tart, childish perceptions and the comfort of the natural world that feeds her soul create a wonderful portrait of a bereaved child searching for roots. Her incisive observations, a toussle of red curls and freckles, capacity for love, even her mistakes, make Eve a memorable character.

Like an artist painting so Susan Fletcher paints with words. The book is written with a great deal of feeling. The pages are rich with the description of the small details of everyday country life with its gossip, animosity and mysteries.

The description of the breathtaking beauty of the Welsh countryside in this book illustrates the author's love of it. She said, "I was keen to set the book in rural Wales. It is this wild, lonesome landscape that first led me to want to write."

Susan Fletcher was born in Birmingham, England in 1979. She grew up in Solihull, in the English West Midlands, and attended St. Martin's school from the age of 7 until she was 16, and then joined the 6th form at Solihull School. She studied for a B.A.degree in English at the University of York and then went touring for a year to Australia and New Zealand. When back in England she studied Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia where she received her M.A. and lived in Stratford-upon-Avon. She now lives in Warwickshire, England.

Her first novel, Eve Green (2004), tells the story of eight-year-old Evie, who is sent to a new life in rural Wales, where she discovers a family secret. Eve Green won the 2004 Whitbread First Novel Award and the 2005 Betty Trask Prize.

Her second novel, Oystercatchers, was published in 2007, and her third, Corrag, in 2010. Corrag was shortlisted for the 2010 John Llewellyn-Rhys Memorial Prize.

Outliers

On Wednesday, January 26th, Bookenders book group will be discussing Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell at 7 p.m. downstairs in the library. Everyone is invited and encouraged to attend.

 

In this provocative and inspiring book, Malcolm Gladwell examines everyone from business giants to scientific geniuses, sports stars to musicians, and reveals what they have in common. He looks behind the spectacular results, the myths and the legends to show what really explains exceptionally successful people. Gladwell argues that, when we try to understand success, we normally start with the wrong question. We ask 'what is this person like?' when we should really be asking 'where are they from?' The real secret of success turns out to be surprisingly simple, and it hinges on a few crucial twists in people's life stories - on the culture they grow up in and the way they spend their time.

Malcolm Gladwell is a United Kingdom-born, Canadian-raised journalist now based in New York City. He is a former business and science writer at the Washington Post. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. He is best known as the author of the books The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (2000), Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005), and Outliers: The Story of Success (2008) all of which were number one New York Times bestsellers. His latest book, What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures (2009) is a compilation of stories published in The New Yorker.

From 1987 to 1996, he was a reporter with the Washington Post, where he covered business, science, and then served as the newspaper's New York City bureau chief. He graduated from the University of Toronto, Trinity College, with a degree in history. He was born in England, grew up in rural Ontario, and now lives in New York City.

Summer Movie (and Chocolate Pie, of course)

We couldn't discuss The Help without serving chocolate pie and this one from Kneaders was scrumptious.

(That pie is a pivotal part of the plot.)

If you want to try your hand at making your own pie, here is the recipe that Kathryn Stockett grew up on, made by her beloved maid, Demetrie.

Demetrie's Chocolate Pie

1-2/3 cups water

5 tablespoons sweetened cocoa powder, such as Ghiradelli

3 tablespoons cornstarch

1 (14 ounce) can sweetened condensed milk

3 egg yolks, beaten

2 tablespoons butter

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

1 9-inch pie shell, prebaked plain or graham cracker

Whipped cream (or if it’s not too humid, you can top with meringue)

Shaved chocolate to sprinkle on top, for looks

1. In a medium sized, cool saucepan, mix water, cocoa, and cornstarch with a whisk until all the lumps are gone, making a paste. Stir in condensed milk and egg yolks. Heat to just under a boil and stir until it’s thick.
   
   
2. Reduce heat to low and stir in butter. Add in your good vanilla, and keep stirring well. Turn off the heat and let it cool some. Pour into a prebaked pie shell, storebought if that’s how you do things.
   
   
3. Let the pie set-up in a cool spot, like a plug-in refrigerator, covering with wax paper so you don’t get a skin. Dollop cream on top or top with meringue.

Yield: 1 9 inch pie, 6-8 servings

For all those who loved the book and thought that it would make a great movie you won't have long to wait.

The Help movie

Release date: August 2011

Emma Stone plays Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan

Skeeter with her friends:

Ahna O'Reilly as Elizabeth Leefolt

Bryce Dallas Howard as Hilly Holbrook

Viola Davis plays Aibilene, and Octavia Spencer plays Minny, a fabulous cook who becomes known for chocolate pie. 

Interesting fact:

Kathryn Stockett's childhood friend, Tate Taylor, introduced her to Octavia Spencer while she was researching The Help and Octavia became the inspiration for sassy Minny.

Another interesting fact:

Kathryn Stockett's friend, Tate Taylor, wrote the screenplay and directed the movie.

Sissy Spacek as Missus Walters

Cicely Tyson plays Constantine, Skeeter's childhood maid.

The author, Kathryn Stockett, has a cameo in the movie with a lovely Beehive hairdo.

Can't wait for summer.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

Bookenders book group will meet on Wednesday, November 17 at 7 p.m. to discuss The Help by Kathryn Stockett. Everyone is invited to attend. If you have read this book and loved it like we have, please come and join us!

The Help is about a young white woman in the early 1960s in Mississippi who becomes interested in the plight of the black ladies' maids that every family has working for them. 

Miss Eugenia Phelan ("Skeeter" to her friends) is a young woman of privilege who enjoys her fellow Junior Leaguers but sometimes finds their ways at odds with her own principles. She plays the part of her station in 1960s Mississippi but can't help feeling dissatisfied with keeping house and acting as recording secretary at league meetings, and yearns for something more.

Minny, Miss Celia, Aibileen, and Yule May are maids employed by Skeeter's friends. Each woman cooks, cleans, and cares for her boss's children, suffering slights and insults silently and sharing household
secrets only among themselves. 

Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.

 

In the wake of the Junior League push to create separate bathrooms for the domestic help within private homes, Skeeter contacts a New York book editor with an idea. Soon she's conducting secret meetings with "the help" to capture their stories for publication. It is a daring and foolhardy plan, one certain to endanger not only the positions but the lives of the very women whose stories she transcribes -- as well as her own. 

In pitch-perfect voices, Kathryn Stockett creates these extraordinary women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever changes a town, and the way women--mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends--view one another. A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humor, and hope, The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don't.

Kathryn Stockett was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. After graduating from the University of Alabama with a degree in English and Creative Writing, she moved to New York City where she worked in magazine publishing and marketing for nine years. She currently lives in Atlanta with her husband and daughter. The Help is her first novel.

Like so many children from her youth in the south and reflective of her first novel, Stockett was raised by an African American domestic worker in lieu of an absentee mother.

 

In Her Own Words:

Our family maid, Demetrie, used to say picking cotton in Mississippi in the dead of summer is about the worst pastime there is, if you don't count picking okra, another prickly, low-growing thing.  Demetrie used to tell us all kinds of stories about picking cotton as a girl.  She'd laugh and shake her finger at us, warning us of it, as if a bunch of rich white kids might fall to the evils of cotton-picking, like cigarettes or hard liquor.

"For days I picked and picked.  And then I looked down and my skin had bubbled up.  I showed my Mama.  None of us ever seen sunburn on a black person before. That was for white people!"

I was too young to realize that what she was telling us wasn't very funny.  Demetrie was born in Lampkin, Mississippi in 1927.  It was a horrifying year to be born, just before the depression set it.  Right on time for a child to appreciate, in fine detail, what it felt like to be poor and female on a sharecropping cotton farm.

Demetrie came to cook and clean for my family when she was twenty-eight. My father was fourteen, my uncle seven.  Demetrie was stout and dark skinned and, by then, married to a mean, abusive drinker named Plunk.  She wouldn't answer me when I asked questions about him.  But besides the subject of Plunk, she'd talk to us all day.

Oh, how I loved to talk to Demetrie.  I'd sit in my grandmother's kitchen with her, where I went after school, listening to her stories and watching her mix up cakes and fry chicken.  Her cooking was outstanding.  It was something people discussed at length, after they ate at my grandmother's table.  You felt loved when you tasted Demetrie's caramel cake.

But my older brother and sister and I weren't allowed to bother Demetrie during her lunch break.  Grandmother would say, 'Leave her alone now, let her eat, this is her time,' and I would stand in the doorway itching to get back with her.  Grandmother wanted Demetrie to rest so she could finish her work, not to mention white people didn't sit at the table while a colored person was eating.

That was just a normal part of life, the rules between blacks and whites.  As a little girl, seeing black people in the colored part of town, even if they were dressed up or doing fine, I remember pitying them.  I am so embarrassed to admit that now.

I didn't pity Demetrie, though.  There were several years when I thought she was immensely lucky to have us.  A secure job in a nice house cleaning up after white Christian people.  But also because Demetrie had no babies of her own and we felt like we were filling a void in her life.  If anyone asked her how many children she had, she would hold up her fingers and say three.  She meant us, my sister Susan, my brother Rob and me.

My siblings deny it, but I was closer to Demetrie than any of the kids.  Nobody got cross with me if Demetrie was close by.  She would stand me in the mirror next to her and say, "You are beautiful.  You a beautiful girl," when clearly I was not.  I wore glasses and had stringy brown hair.  I had a stubborn aversion to the bathtub.  My mother was out of town a lot.  Susan and Rob were tired of me hanging around and I felt left over.  Demetrie knew it and took my hand and told me I was fine.

Scene from The Help, a movie currently being filmed.

My parents got divorced when I was six.  Demetrie became even more important to me then.  When my mother would go on her frequent trips, Daddy put us kids in the motel he owned and brought in Demetrie to stay with us.  I'd cry and cry onto Demetrie's shoulder, missing my mother so bad, I'd get a fever from it.

"This where you belong.  Here with me," she said and patted my hot leg.  Her hands were always cool.  I watched the older kids play cards, not caring as much that Mother was away again.  I was where I belonged.

 

The Help is fiction, by far and wide. Still, as I wrote it, I wondered an awful lot what my family would think of it, and Demetrie too, even though she was long dead.  I was scared, a lot of the time, that I was crossing a terrible line, writing in the voice of a black person.  I was afraid I would fail to describe a relationship that was so intensely influential in my life, so loving, so grossly stereotyped in American history.

  

I was truly grateful to read Howell Raines' Pulitzer Prize winning article, "Grady's Gift:"

I read that and I thought, how did he find a way to put it into such concise words?  Here was the same slippery issue I'd been struggling with and couldn't catch in my hands, like a wet fish.  Mr. Raines managed to nail it down in a few sentences.  At least I was in the company of others in my struggle.

Like my feelings for Mississippi, my feelings for The Help conflict greatly.  Regarding the lines between black and white women, I am afraid I have told too much.  I was taught not to talk about such uncomfortable things, that it was tacky, impolite, they might hear us.

  

I am afraid I have told too little.  Not just that life was so much worse, for many black women working in the homes in Mississippi.  But also, that there was so much more love between white families and black domestics, that I didn't have the ink or the time to portray.

  

But what I am sure about is this: I don't presume to think that I know what it really felt like to be a black woman in Mississippi, especially the 1960's.  I don't think it is something any white woman, on the other end of a black woman's paycheck, could ever truly understand.  But trying to understand is vital to our humanity.  In my book there is one line that I truly prize:

  

Wasn't that the point of the book?  For women to realize, we are just two people.  Not that much separates us.  Not nearly as much as I'd thought.

  

I'm pretty sure I can say that no one in my family ever asked Demetrie what it felt like to be black in Mississippi working for our white family.  It never occurred to us to ask.  It was everyday life.  It wasn't something people felt compelled to examine.

  

I have wished, for many years, that I'd been old enough and thoughtful enough to ask Demetrie that question.  She died when I was sixteen.  I've spent years imagining what her answer would be.  And that is why I wrote this book.

Discussion questions to enhance your reading:

1. Who was your favorite character? Why? 

2. What do you think motivated Hilly? On the one hand she is terribly cruel to Aibileen and her own help, as well as to Skeeter once she realizes that she can’t control her. Yet she’s a wonderful mother. Do you think that one can be a good mother but, at the same time, a deeply flawed person? 

3. Like Hilly, Skeeter’s mother is a prime example of someone deeply flawed yet somewhat sympathetic. She seems to care for Skeeter— and she also seems to have very real feelings for Constantine. Yet the ultimatum she gives to Constantine is untenable; and most of her interaction with Skeeter is critical. Do you think Skeeter’s mother is a sympathetic or unsympathetic character? Why? 

4. How much of a person’s character would you say is shaped by the times in which they live? 

5. Did it bother you that Skeeter is willing to overlook so many of Stuart’s faults so that she can get married, and that it’s not until he literally gets up and walks away that the engagement falls apart? 

6. Do you believe that Minny was justified in her distrust of white people? 

7. Do you think that had Aibileen stayed working for Miss Elizabeth, that Mae Mobley would have grown up to be racist like her mother? Do you think racism is inherent, or taught? 

8. From the perspective of a twenty-first century reader, the hairshellac system that Skeeter undergoes seems ludicrous. Yet women still alter their looks in rather peculiar ways as the definition of “beauty” changes with the times. Looking back on your past, what’s the most ridiculous beauty regimen you ever underwent? 

9. The author manages to paint Aibileen with a quiet grace and an aura of wisdom about her. How do you think she does this? 

10. Do you think there are still vestiges of racism in relationships where people of color work for people who are white? 

11. What did you think about Minny’s pie for Miss Hilly? Would you have gone as far as Minny did for revenge?

Bookenders

Bookenders book group met to discuss The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton on October 27th.  Diane Marsh did a great job at leading an interesting and thought-provoking discussion.  

Everyone enjoyed the book.  They found the fairy tale feeling of the book endearing.  The female characters were strong and memorable.  The mystery was intriguing.

One person attending book group had personal experiences that were similar to a story in the book.  Her thoughts were very interesting and gave a whole new insight to adoption and not finding out about your biological history until you are older.

For refreshments after the discussion we had a tea party.  There were many delicious herb teas to choose from.  A favorite one for many was the Good Earth Sweet and Spicy Herb Tea.

We served British foods such as crumpets, scones, tea biscuits, HobNob cookies, Digestives and Lemon Curd.  We also served raspberry jam and Australian Minties candy.

Delicious British Scones

Ingredients:
2 cups (10 oz) unbleached all-purpose flour
1 Tbsp baking powder
3 Tbsp sugar (more for sprinkling)
1/2 tsp salt
5 Tbsp (2.5oz) cold, unsalted butter
1/2 cup dried currants *
1 cup heavy cream (more for brushing)

*Currants can be replaced with raisins although I’m not so keen on raisins. A variation that I like is to add 1 Tbsp grated orange zest and 1/2 cup dried cranberries instead of currants. You can also use dried cherries

Preheat oven to 425 F (220 C).

Place flour, baking powder, sugar and salt in a bowl and mix. Cut in butter until it resembles coarse meal.

Add currants. Mix. Stir in heavy cream until it comes together in a shaggy ball. It will still have lots of loose, sandy pieces. If you think it’s too loose and sandy, you can add a little bit more cream to bind it a bit more — it shouldn’t affect the outcome if a bit more cream is added. Pouring the cream in slowly and mixing it little by little is more efficient than dumping the cream in all at once.

Place batter on a floured surface and roughly work it into a ball. Press the ball down into a rectangular shape.

Fold the dough like you’re folding a business envelope (in thirds, first right fold to center, then left fold to center). Notice that it is still quite shaggy and loose. That’s ok.

Press the dough down again into rectangular shape in a vertical position. Do the business envelope fold again, this time top third to center then bottom third to center. The dough will still be a little sandy and loose–don’t worry about it…the less you work it, the flakier it will be.

Now, press the dough down into a circle. Cut it into 8 large or 16 small triangles.

Separate the individual scones and place them on a baking tray that is lined with parchment paper. Brush the top of the scones with cream and then sprinkle each one with a little sugar.

Bake for 12-15 mins until golden brown on top.

Recipe courtesy of House of Annie.

November's selection for Bookenders is The Help by Kathryn Stockett.  Everyone is invited to attend.

Forgotten Garden

On Wednesday, October 27 Bookender's Book Group will meet to discuss The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton downstairs in the library at 7:00 p.m. The discussion will be led by Diane Marsh. Everyone is invited to attend.

  

A foundling, an old book of dark fairy tales, a secret garden, an aristocratic family, a love denied, and a mystery. The Forgotten Garden is a captivating, atmospheric and compulsively readable story of the past, secrets, family and memory from the international best-selling author Kate Morton.

 In 1913, a four year old girl arrives by boat at a wharf in Brisbane, Australia.  When her parents do not show up to get her, a dock master takes pity on her, and takes her home to his wife. Having hit her head on board the boat, the little girl does not remember her name, and the only clue to her identity is a book of fairy tales tucked inside a white suitcase. The dock master and his wife decide to keep her and raise her as their own. They name her Nell. On her twenty-first birthday they tell Nell the truth, and with her sense of self shattered and with very little to go on, she sets out on a journey to England to try to trace her story, to find her real identity.  She starts to piece together bits of her story, but just as she's about to trace the mystery to it's source, her granddaughter, Cassandra is left in her care. It is not until her granddaughter, Cassandra, takes up the search that all the pieces of the puzzle are assembled.  When her grandmother dies, Cassandra finds herself on an unexpected adventure that leads her to England and to a small Cornish village, and finally, to Cliff Cottage and its walled garden...a garden that harbors the secrets of the 1900s and buried within its grounds the fascinating and tragic story of the Mountrachets and the woman her grandmother, as a child, had called the Authoress. 

Shifting back and forth over a span of nearly 100 years, this is a sprawling, old-fashioned novel, containing stories-within-stories, with a maze and even a Dickensian rag-and-bone shop.  It’s a satisfying read overall, just the thing for readers who like multigenerational sagas with a touch of intrigue.

Kate Morton

Kate Morton is the eldest of three sisters. She was born in South Australia and moved with her family numerous times before settling, finally, on Tamborine Mountain. There she attended a tiny country school and spent much of her childhood inventing and playing games of make-believe with her sisters. 

Kate fell avidly in love with books very early. Her favorites were those by Enid Blyton, and Kate escaped many times up the Faraway Tree or with the Famous Five into smugglers' cove. It was a love deeply felt, for it is still mysteries and secrets that dance around the edges of Kate's mind, keeping her awake deep into the night, turning or typing pages.

When she finished school, Kate studied and earned a Licentiate in Speech and Drama from Trinity College London. After an ill-fated attempt to do something sensible and obtain an Arts/Law degree, she went on to complete a summer Shakespeare course at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and for sometime believed her future lay in theater. Until one day, quite simply and clearly, she realized that it wasn't performing she was in love with. It was words.

Although she'd read and scribbled from before she could remember, it hadn't occurred to Kate, until that time, that real books were written by real people. She began writing in earnest and completed two full length manuscripts (which lie deep and determinedly within a bottom drawer) before settling finally into the story that would become The Shifting Fog (The House at Riverton).

Meanwhile, Kate graduated from the University of Queensland with First Class Honors in English Literature and took up a scholarship to complete a Masters degree focusing on tragedy in Victorian literature. Kate is currently enrolled in a PhD program researching contemporary novels that marry elements of Gothic and mystery fiction.

Kate Morton's books are published in 36 countries. The House at Riverton was a Sunday Times #1 bestseller in the UK in 2007 and a New York Times bestseller in 2008. The Shifting Fog won General Fiction Book of the Year at the 2007 Australian Book Industry Awards, and The House at Riverton was nominated for Most Popular Book at the British Book Awards in 2008. Her second book, The Forgotten Garden, was a #1 bestseller in Australia and a Sunday Times #1 bestseller in the UK in 2008. It won General Fiction Book of the Year at the 2009 Australian Book Industry Awards and was an Amazon Best of the Month pick and a New York Times bestseller in 2009.

Kate is married to Davin, a composer, and they have two young sons.  All four live together in a nineteenth century home replete with its own ghosts and secrets in Australia.

Watch as Kate Morton talks about writing The Forgotten Garden.

Discussion Questions for The Forgotten Garden

1. On the night of Nell's twenty-first birthday, her father Hugh tells her a secret that shatters her sense of self. How important is a strong sense of identity to a person's life? Was Hugh right to tell her about her past? How might Nell's life have turned out differently had she not discovered the truth?

2. Did Hugh and Lil make the right decision when they kept Nell?

3. How might Nell's choice of occupation have been related to her fractured identity?

4. Is it possible to escape the past, or does one's history always find a way to revisit the present?

5. Eliza, Nell and Cassandra all lose their birth mothers when they are still children. How are their lives affected differently by this loss? How might their lives have evolved had they not had this experience?

6. Nell believes that she comes from a tradition of "bad mothers." Does this belief become a self-fulfilling prophecy? How does Nell's relationship with her granddaughter, Cassandra, allow her to revisit this perception of herself as a "bad mother"?

7. Is The Forgotten Garden a love story? If so, in what way/s?

8. Tragedy has been described as "the conflict between desire and possibility." Following this definition, is The Forgotten Garden a tragedy? If so, in what way/s?

9. In what ways do Eliza's fairy tales underline and develop other themes within the novel?

10. In what ways do the settings in The Forgotten Garden represent or reflect the character's experiences? 

To find out more about Kate Morton and her other books you can visit her website here.