Paul Knopick
The Just Good Readin’ Book Club will meet on Monday, June 2, to discuss John Steinbeck’s classic, Cannery Row. The book follows the adventures of Mack and the boys, a group of unemployed yet resourceful men who inhabit a converted fish-meal shack on the edge of a vacant lot down on the Row in California. The poignant and humorous novel features the residents of the Row, an interesting group of humans.
Robson’s group meets in the clubhouse at 7 p.m., always on Monday. All are invited.
On July 7 the club will discuss The Berry Pickers. A group of pickers from Nova Scotia arrive in Maine to work, only to have their four-year-old girl go missing from the blueberry fields. The tragic mystery haunts the survivors, unravels the community, and is finally solved 50 years later.
The Aug. 4 meeting features Erik Larson’s In the Garden of the Beasts, a nonfiction look at Hitler’s evil through the eyes of America’s ambassador to Germany. It is a stunning, eyewitness perspective on horrible events as they unfold in real time.
Kristen Hannah’s very popular The Women is about nurses who served during the Vietnam conflict and returned to an America still angry about the war. The book shines a light on all heroic women who put themselves in harm’s way and whose sacrifice and commitment to their country has too often been forgotten. It will be discussed on Aug. 4.
The Frozen River will be the topic on Monday, Oct. 6. The novel introduces an unsung heroine who refused to accept anything less than justice at a time when women were considered best seen and not heard. The Frozen River is a thrilling, tense, and tender story about a remarkable woman who left an unparalleled legacy.
At the Nov. 3 meeting we will introduce Celine, by Peter Heller. It features a private eye investigating a murder, and it is called a gorgeously wrought story.