I wish that everything was different. I wish that I was a part of something. I wish that anything I said mattered, to anyone.
Evan Hansen dreads the new school year. He’ll be a senior, and his arm is strapped with a cast from when he fell from a tree over the summer. His father left for Colorado and lives with a new wife, while his mother works as a nurse and takes classes, and so is rarely around. Evan has social anxiety and takes Atavan to calm down. His therapist, Dr.
Our group is called The Page Turners, and since we began in 1994, we have turned a lot of them! We are a group of women in our 50s, and we meet monthly (except for June and July) at our members’ homes. We start with a planning weekend every August at a member’s lake house, where we organize our year, play in the lake, eat, and have fun catching up with each other. We each take a month to choose a book and lead the discussion.
A mythic city known for its jazz, Cajun cuisine, French Quarter and life along the Mississippi, New Orleans is also steeped in literary history. From its annual Tennessee Williams festival to its independent bookshops, the Big Easy offers a sanctuary for readers.
As always, we looked for a variety of ways for readers to connect to book groups and enjoy bookish conversation. Several of the clubs are deeply connected to the city and region that inspires them.
For her interview with Reading Group Choices, Kate Quinn spoke about her research process, women in the military, creating vivid landscapes, and the fascinating true stories that she just had to include in the book.
Reading Group Choices: Which voice was the first to appear?
Kate Quinn: Technically, Jordan’s—my youngest heroine, the teenaged photographer in Boston.
There are certain perennial questions for a book lover: hardcover or paperback? E-reader or print? Write in the margins or never, ever mark a page?
And then there’s the matter of organizing your book collection, open to eternal debate. Genre, color, no scheme at all? Reading Group Choices understands, and we offer a few ideas to help readers arrange that growing home library!
When looking at your shelves or piles of books, first decide your goal: Are you frustrated because you can never find that title you’re looking for?
Two hundred years separate Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice from the new novel by Sonali Dev, Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors. Yet the line between these two romantic comedies is clear. And Dev’s book pays homage to the Austen classic while placing its storyline squarely into our current world.
Pride and Prejudice has been called the original romantic comedy, pitting the witty and headstrong Elizabeth Bennet against (and ultimately with) Fitzwilliam Darcy. The novel established the ground rules for how these romantic stories play out:
Two characters share a dislike of each other,
