Our book club will focus on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. The League’s Board has chosen our first book, however the members of the book club will choose the books after the first. If you are interested in joining the book club email Barbara Connolly at email@lwvlehighcounty.org.
Our Next Selection:
Warmth of Other Suns
by Isabel Wilkerson
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Happy Land
by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Our May selection is a novel based on the real-life American Kingdom. (From amazon.com) A 2026 NAACP Image Award Nominee for Outstanding Literary Work in Fiction.
A woman learns the incredible story of a real-life American Kingdom—and her family’s ties to it—in this enthralling novel from the New York Times bestselling, NAACP Image Award-winning author of Take My Hand. Nikki hasn’t seen her grandmother in years. So when the elder calls out of the blue with an urgent request for Nikki to visit her in the hills of western North Carolina, Nikki hesitates only for a moment. After years of silence in her family, due to a mysterious es-trangement between her mother and grandmother, she’s determined to learn the truth while she still can. But instead of answers about the recent past, Mother Rita tells Nikki an incredible story of a kingdom on this very mountain, and of her great-great-great grandmother, Luella, who would become its queen.
Book Club Meeting Date
Monday, May 11, 2026 1:30 pm
An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s by Doris Kearns Goodwin
March 2, 2026 at 1:30 PM.
One of America’s most beloved historians, artfully weaves together biography, memoir, and history. She takes you along on the emotional journey she and her husband, Richard (Dick) Goodwin embarked upon in the last years of his life.
Dick and Doris Goodwin were married for forty-two years and married to American history even longer. In his twenties, Dick was one of the brilliant young men of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier. In his thirties he both named and helped design Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and was a speechwriter and close advisor to Robert Kennedy. Doris Kearns was a twenty-four-year-old graduate student when selected as a White House Fellow. She worked directly for Lyndon Johnson and later assisted on his memoir.
Over the years, with humor, anger, frustration, and in the end, a growing understanding, Dick and Doris had argued over the achievements and failings of the leaders they served and observed, debating the progress and unfinished promises of the country they both loved.
Killers of the Flower Moon: the Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
A True Life Bestseller by David Grann
Jan 5th 1:30 at Barb Connolly’s house (snow date 1/26)
In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe.
Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. The family of an Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, became a prime target. One of her relatives was shot. Another was poisoned. And it was just the beginning, as more and more Osage were dying under mysterious circumstances, and many of those who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered.
As the death toll rose, the newly created FBI took up the case, and the young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to try to unravel the mystery. White put together an undercover team, including a Native American agent who infiltrated the region, and together with the Osage began to expose one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history.
Ginny Moon
by Benjamin Ludwig
November 3rd at 1:30. Barb Connolly’s house
From Amazon.com: Ginny Moon is exceptional. Everyone knows it—her friends at school, teammates on the basketball team, and especially her new adoptive parents. They all love her, even if they don’t quite understand her. They want her to feel like she belongs.
What they don’t know is that Ginny has no intention of belonging. She’s found her birth-mother on Facebook, and is determined to get back to her—even if it means going back to a place that was extremely dangerous. Because Ginny left something behind and she’s desperate to get it back, to make things right.
But no one listens. No one understands. So Ginny takes matters into her own hands…
Benjamin Ludwig’s whip-smart, unforgettable novel is an illuminating look at one girl’s journey to find her way home and one of the freshest debuts in years.
The Lion Women of Tehran
August 25th, 2025 1:30
An “evocative read and a powerful portrait of friendship, feminism, and political activism” (People) set against three transformative decades in Tehran, Iran—from nationally bestselling author Marjan Kamali.
In 1950s Tehran, seven-year-old Ellie lives in grand comfort until the untimely death of her father, forcing Ellie and her mother to move to a tiny home downtown. Lonely and bearing the brunt of her mother’s endless grievances, Ellie dreams for a friend to alleviate her isolation.
Luckily, on the first day of school, she meets Homa, a kind girl with a brave and irrepressible spirit. Together, the two girls play games, learn to cook in the stone kitchen of Homa’s warm home, wander through the colorful stalls of the Grand Bazaar, and share their ambitions of becoming “lion women.”
But their happiness is disrupted when Ellie and her mother are afforded the opportunity to return to their previous bourgeois life. Now a popular student at the best girls’ high school in Iran, Ellie’s memories of Homa begin to fade. Years later, however, her sudden reappearance in Ellie’s privileged world alters the course of both of their lives.
Together, the two young women come of age and pursue their own goals for meaningful futures. But as the political turmoil in Iran builds to a breaking point, one earth-shattering betrayal will have enormous consequences.
“Reminiscent of The Kite Runner and My Brilliant Friend, The Lion Women of Tehran is a mesmerizing tale” (BookPage) of love and courage, and a sweeping exploration of how profoundly we are shaped by those we meet when we are young.
Becoming Madam Secretary
June 23, 2025 1:30 PM
Excerpted from Bookshop.org’s review:
New York Times bestselling author Stephanie Dray returns with a captivating and dramatic novel about an American heroine Frances Perkins.
Raised on tales of her revolutionary ancestors, Frances Perkins arrives in New York City at the turn of the century, armed with her trusty parasol and an unyielding determination to make a difference.
When she’s not working with children in the crowded tenements in Hell’s Kitchen, Frances throws herself into the social scene in Greenwich Village, befriending an eclectic group of politicians, artists, and activists, including the millionaire socialite Mary Harriman Rumsey, the flirtatious budding author Sinclair Lewis, and the brilliant but troubled reformer Paul Wilson, with whom she falls deeply in love.
But when Frances meets a young lawyer named Franklin Delano Roosevelt at a tea dance, sparks fly in all the wrong directions. She thinks he’s a rich, arrogant dilettante who gets by on a handsome face and a famous name. He thinks she’s a priggish bluestocking and insufferable do-gooder. Neither knows it yet, but over the next twenty years, they will form a historic partnership that will carry them both to the White House.
April 28, 2025 at 1:30 pm
Description from Bookshop.org: This unforgettable novel puts human faces on the Syrian war with the immigrant story of a beekeeper, his wife, and the triumph of spirit when the world becomes unrecognizable.
Nuri is a beekeeper and Afra, his wife, is an artist. Mornings, Nuri rises early to hear the call to prayer before driving to his hives in the countryside. On weekends, Afra sells her colorful landscape paintings at the open-air market. They live a simple life, rich in family and friends, in the hills of the beautiful Syrian city of Aleppo—until the unthinkable happens. When all they love is destroyed by war, Nuri knows they have no choice except to leave their home. But escaping Syria will be no easy task: Afra has lost her sight, leaving Nuri to navigate her grief as well as a perilous journey through Turkey and Greece toward an uncertain future in Britain.
OUR SIXTH BOOK
Description from Amazon: Antonia Vega, the immigrant writer at the center of Afterlife, has had the rug pulled out from under her. She has just retired from the college where she taught English when her beloved husband, Sam, suddenly dies. And then more jolts: her bighearted but unstable sister disappears, and Antonia returns home one evening to find a pregnant, undocumented teenager on her doorstep. Antonia has always sought direction in the literature she loves—lines from her favorite authors play in her head like a soundtrack—but now she finds that the world demands more of her than words.
OUR FIFTH BOOK
Book description from Amazon.com.
Thirty years since its original publication, Ceremony remains one of the most profound and moving works of native American literature, a novel that is itself a ceremony of healing. Tayo, a World War II veteran of mixed ancestry,returns to the Laguna Pueblo Reservation. He is deeply scarred by his experience as a prisoner of war of the Japanese and further wounded by the rejection he encounters from his people. Only by immersing himself in the Indian past can he begin to regain the peace that was taken from him. Masterfully written, filled with the somber majesty of Pueblo myth, Ceremony is a work of enduring power.
Meeting Friday, January 26, 2024 at 1:30 PM.
OUR FOURTH BOOK
Blurb from the book cover: Meet the Ganguli family, new arrivals from Calcutta, trying their best to become Americans even as they pine for home. The name they bestow on their firstborn, Gogol, betrays all the conflicts of honoring tradition in a new world – conflicts that will haunt Gogol on his own winding path through divided loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. In The Namesake, Lahiri brilliantly illuminates the immigrant experience and the tangled ties between generations.
Meeting December 5, 2023 @ 1:30 PM
OUR THIRD BOOK
Blurb from the New York Journal of Books: “The Personal Librarian is a good, well-paced creative nonfiction book about a real person that will snag the reader and hold his or her attention from beginning to end.”
The Personal Librarian is a perfect example of creative nonfiction. It benefits the reader from both types of reading — it is educational and it is entertaining.
The authors picked their subject, Belle da Costa Greene (aka Belle Marion Greener), with care. A true to life person, Belle, chose to work with John Pierpont Morgan establishing his library, is a fair-skinned Black woman who spends her life passing as a white woman.
This thread carries through the entirety of the story. Belle’s mother — also fair skinned, as are her other children — encourages Belle to continue the deception. She knows this is the only way her daughter will succeed in life.
It’s a heavy weight that Belle carries, never sure if her secret will be exposed. There are points in the book where she steps to the edge, almost exposing herself, but catches herself before she steps over.
OUR SECOND BOOK
Blurb from Amazon.com: NEW YORK TIMES ONE OF 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2021 – Weaving together American history, dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, Annette Gordon-Reed’s On Juneteenth provides a historian’s view of the country’s long road to Juneteenth, recounting both its origins in Texas and the enormous hardships that African-Americans have endured in the century since, from Reconstruction through Jim Crow and beyond. All too aware of the stories of cowboys, ranchers, and oilmen that have long dominated the lore of the Lone Star State, Gordon-Reed―herself a Texas native and the descendant of enslaved people brought to Texas as early as the 1820s―forges a new and profoundly truthful narrative of her home state, with implications for us all.
OUR FIRST BOOK
Blurb from Amazon.com: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER – REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK – From a leading voice on racial justice, an eye-opening account of growing up Black, Christian, and female that exposes how white America’s love affair with “diversity” so often falls short of its ideals.
Our first book club gathering was held on July 28.
