• March’s Book of the Month

    Author: Toews, Miriam 1964

    Publisher: Waterville, Maine : Thorndike Press, a part of Gale, a Cengage Company, 2019.

    Summary: Between 2005 and 2009, in a remote religious Mennonite colony, over a hundred girls and women were knocked unconscious and raped, often repeatedly, by what many thought were ghosts or demons, as a punishment for their sins. As the women tentatively began to share the details of the attacks — waking up sore and bleeding and not understanding why — their stories were chalked up to ‘wild female imagination’. Women Talking is an imagined response to these real events. Eight women, all illiterate, without any knowledge of the world outside their colony and unable even to speak the language of the country they live in, meet secretly in a hayloft with the intention of making a decision about how to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm. They have two days to make a plan, while the men of the colony are away in the city attempting to raise enough money to bail out the rapists (not ghosts as it turns out but local men) and bring them home. How should we live? How should we love? How should we treat one another? How should we organise our societies? These are questions the women in Women Talking ask one another.

  • February’s Book of the Month

    Author: Sullivan, Tom

    Publisher: New York, NY : Balzer + Bray, Harper Alley, imprints of HarperCollins Publishers, [2021]

    A minute-by-minute account of the only unsolved airplane hijacking in the United States uses reproductions of FBI files and investigation photographs to chronicle the events surrounding an unidentified extortionist’s 1971 hijacking and disappearance.

  • January’s Book of the Month

    Author: Hur, June

    Publisher: New York : Feiwel and Friends, 2021.

    1426, Joseon (Korea). Hwani’s family has never been the same since she and her younger sister went missing and were later found unconscious in the forest near a gruesome crime scene.Years later, Detective Min-Hwani’s father-learns that thirteen girls have recently disappeared from the same forest that nearly stole his daughters. He travels to their hometown on the island of Jeju to investigate… only to vanish as well.Determined to find her father and solve the case that tore their family apart, Hwani returns home to pick up the trail. As she digs into the secrets of the small village-and collides with her now estranged sister, Maewol-Hwani comes to realize that the answer could lie within her own buried memories of what happened in the forest all those years ago.