Laredo Public Library Book Clubs June Meetings
Written by Post Public Information Representative, Jun 14, 2012, 0 Comments
Courtesy Xochitl Mora,
The Laredo Public Library’s two book club’ June meetings are just around the corner and they are inviting Laredoans to settle into summer with the two titles selected for the upcoming meeting, set for Wednesday, June 20, 2012, at the Laredo Public Library at 6 PM for the mystery book club and 7 PM for the contemporary author book club.
If you want to figure out “who dunnit?” then the “Scene of the Crime” club’s selection is for you. “Favorite Sons” by Robin Yocum is “a riveting novel in which old friends must excavate the formative event of their childhood—a murder—and determine how to pit truth against justice.”
Narrator of Favorite Sons Hutch Van Buren is fifteen years old, playing sports and searching for arrowheads in a small industrial town in Ohio with his three closest friends when an altercation between the comrades and Petey Sanchez, a troubled seventeen- year-old, leads to Petey’s accidental death. Together, Hutch and his friends become ensnared in a web of secrets and moral dilemmas. A local ne’er-do-well goes to jail for the crime while the boys keep their pact of silence. Each boy shoulders the burden of truth in his own way as each attempts to leave the past behind.
Thirty-three years later, in 2004, Van Buren is the prosecuting attorney in Summit County, Ohio, and a candidate for state attorney general when he learns that he and his boyhood friends weren’t the only ones keeping a secret about Petey’s death. A convicted sex offender in need of a favor attempts to blackmail Van Buren in return for his silence. Van Buren must decide between his political career and the duty of the office he has sworn to uphold. With the clock ticking, Van Buren has a week to seek out his boyhood friends and search his soul while he sorts out three decades of deceit he helped create.
Favorite Sons is a wonderful, suspenseful novel with nuanced, memorable characters and unpredictable plot twists.
For books by contemporary authors, the “Gateway City Book Lovers” tome of choice are just for you. “The Good Father” by Noah Hawley is “an intense, psychological novel about one doctor’s suspense-filled quest to unlock the mind of a suspected political assassin: his twenty-year old son.”
As the Chief of Rheumatology at Columbia Presbyterian, Dr. Paul Allen’s specialty is diagnosing patients with conflicting symptoms, patients other doctors have given up on. He lives a contented life in Westport with his second wife and their twin sons—hard won after a failed marriage earlier in his career that produced a son named Daniel. In the harrowing opening scene of this provocative and affecting novel, Dr. Allen is home with his family when a televised news report announces that the Democratic candidate for president has been shot at a rally, and Daniel is caught on video as the assassin.
Daniel Allen has always been a good kid—a decent student, popular—but, as a child of divorce, used to shuttling back and forth between parents, he is also something of a drifter. Which may be why, at the age of nineteen, he quietly drops out of Vassar and begins an aimless journey across the United States, during which he sheds his former skin and eventually even changes his name to Carter Allen Cash.
Told alternately from the point of view of the guilt-ridden, determined father and his meandering, ruminative son, “The Good Father” is a powerfully emotional page-turner that keeps one guessing until the very end. This is an absorbing and honest novel about the responsibilities—and limitations—of being a parent and our capacity to provide our children with unconditional love in the face of an unthinkable situation.
The book clubs meet at the Laredo Public Library, 1st Floor Conference Room, 1120 E. Calton Road. The “Scene of the Crime” Mystery Book Club meets from 6-7PM and immediately following, from 7-8 PM, the “Gateway City Book Lovers’ Book Club meets. There are no dues, no roll call, and no tests! Just Laredoans having fun reading and discussing a book.
All books are available for check-out at the Reference Desk at the Laredo Public Library or available for purchase at Books-A-Million at Mall Del Norte. For more information, contact Pam Burrell by calling 795-2400, x2268 or via e-mail at pam@laredolibrary.org.
