MARTHA MERRELL’S BOOK CLUBS
Martha Merrell’s hosts a variety of book clubs and is pleased to offer the following services free-of-charge to area clubs.
We can:
- Provide a meeting space for clubs
- Provide a selection of books for your club to choose from
- Special order club selections
- Provide a 15% discount on club selections
- Facilitate discussions
- No-charge consulting on new books and current trends
- Share what other clubs are reading
We invite you to stop by our location at 231 West Main Street in the Avalon Square Building.
Discover what we have to offer!
Contact us to set up your club meeting at the store on a regular monthly basis. If you are interested in using our space on a more occasional basis, feel free to schedule a time with us as well. (New surroundings can be just what your book club needs to invigorate itself.) We will gladly accommodate your group’s needs including light refreshments, lunch or dinner.
UPCOMING BOOK CLUBS
Monday Morning Group meets at 10:30 AM
3/13/23 Honor by Umrigar Thrity
Indian American journalist Smita has reluctantly returned to India to cover a story. Long ago she and her family left the country with no intention of ever coming back. As she follows the case of Meena–a Hindu woman attacked by members of her own village and family for marrying a Muslim man–Smita comes face to face with a society where tradition carries more weight than one’s own heart. It’s a story that threatens to unearth the painful secrets of Smita’s own past. While Meena’s fate hangs in the balance, Smita tries in every way she can to right the scales. She also finds herself increasingly drawn to Mohan, an Indian man she meets while on assignment. But the dual love stories of Honor are as different as the cultures of Meena and Smita themselves.
4/13/23 The Ride of Her Life by Elizabeth Letts
In 1954, sixty-three-year-old Maine farmer Annie Wilkins embarked on an impossible journey. She had no money or family, had just lost her farm, and her doctor had given her only two years to live. Annie wanted to see the Pacific Ocean before she died. She ignored her doctor’s advice to move into the county charity home and instead bought a cast-off brown gelding named Tarzan, donned men’s dungarees, and headed south in mid-November, hoping to beat the snow. Annie had little idea what to expect beyond her rural crossroads; she didn’t even have a map. But she did have her ex-racehorse, her faithful mutt Depeche, and her own unfailing belief that Americans would treat a stranger with kindness. The three rode straight into a world transformed by the rapid construction of modern highways. Between 1954 and 1956, the three travelers pushed through blizzards, forded rivers, climbed mountains, and clung to the narrow shoulder as cars whipped by them at terrifying speeds. Annie rode more than four thousand miles, through America’s big cities and small towns. Along the way, she met ordinary people and celebrities–from Andrew Wyeth (who sketched Tarzan) to Art Linkletter and Groucho Marx. She received many offers–a permanent home at a riding stable in New Jersey, a job at a gas station in rural Kentucky, even a marriage proposal from a Wyoming rancher. In a decade when car ownership nearly tripled, when television’s influence was expanding fast, when homeowners began locking their doors, Annie and her four-footed companions inspired an outpouring of neighborliness in a rapidly changing world.
Monday Afternoon Group meets at 2:30 PM
3/13/23 Anxious People by Fredrik Backman
Looking at real estate isn’t usually a life-or-death situation, but an apartment open house becomes just that when a failed bank robber bursts in and takes a group of strangers hostage. The captives include a recently retired couple who relentlessly hunt down fixer-uppers to avoid the painful truth that they can’t fix their own marriage. There’s a wealthy bank director who has been too busy to care about anyone else and a young couple who are about to have their first child but can’t seem to agree on anything, from where they want to live to how they met in the first place. Add to the mix an eighty-seven-year-old woman who has lived long enough not to be afraid of someone waving a gun in her face, a flustered but still-ready-to-make-a-deal real estate agent, and a mystery man who has locked himself in the apartment’s only bathroom, and you’ve got the worst group of hostages in the world. Each of them carries a lifetime of grievances, hurts, secrets, and passions that are ready to boil over. None of them is entirely who they appear to be. And all of them–the bank robber included–desperately crave some sort of rescue. As the authorities and the media surround the premises these reluctant allies will reveal surprising truths about themselves and set in motion a chain of events so unexpected that even they can hardly explain what happens next.
4/10/23 Take It Back by Kia Abdullah
Zara Kaleel, one of London’s brightest legal minds, shattered the expectations placed on her by her family and forged a brilliant legal career. But her decisions came at a high cost, and now, battling her own demons, she has exchanged her high-profile career for a job at a sexual assault center, helping victims who need her the most. When Jodie, a sixteen-year-old girl with facial deformities, accuses four boys in her class of an unthinkable crime, the community is torn apart. These four teenage defendants are from hard-working immigrant families with proven alibis. While even Jodie’s best friend doesn’t believe her, Zara does–and she is determined to fight for Jodie–to find the truth in the face of public outcry. Issues of sex, race and social justice collide with the most explosive criminal trial of the year building to a shocking conclusion.
5/8/23 Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear
Maisie Dobbs entered domestic service in 1910 at thirteen, working for Lady Rowan Compton. When her remarkable intelligence is discovered by her employer, Maisie becomes the pupil of Maurice Blanche, a learned friend of the Comptons. In 1929, following an apprenticeship with Blanche, Maisie hangs out her shingle: M. Dobbs, trade and personal investigations. She soon becomes enmeshed in a mystery surrounding The Retreat, a reclusive community of wounded WWI veterans. At first, Maisie only suspects foul play, but she must act quickly when Lady Rowan’s son decides to sign away his fortune and take refuge there. She hurriedly investigates, uncovering a disturbing mystery, which gives Maisie the courage to confront a ghost that has haunted her for years.
6/12/23 The President and the Freedom Fighter by Brian Kilmeade
Abraham Lincoln was white and born on an impoverished frontier farm. Frederick Douglass was black, a child of slavery who had risked his life escaping to freedom in the North. Neither man had a formal education, nor an easy path to influence. No one would have expected them to become friends–or to transform the country. But Lincoln and Douglass believed in their nation’s greatness. They were determined to make the grand democratic experiment live up to its ideals.
Lincoln’s problem: he knew it was time for slavery to go, but how fast could the country change without being torn apart? Would it be possible to get rid of slavery while keeping America’s Constitution intact? Douglass said no, that the Constitution was irredeemably corrupted by slavery–and he wanted Lincoln to move quickly. Sharing little more than the conviction that slavery was wrong, the two men’s paths eventually converged. Over the course of the Civil War, they endured bloodthirsty mobs, feverish conspiracies, devastating losses on the battlefield, and a growing firestorm of unrest that would culminate on the fields of Gettysburg.
Wednesday Evening Book Group meets at 5:45 PM
3/1/23 Miss Benson’s Beetle by Rachel Joyce
t is 1950. London is still reeling from World War II, and Margery Benson, a schoolteacher and spinster, is trying to get through life, surviving on scraps. One day, she reaches her breaking point, abandoning her job and small existence to set out on an expedition to the other side of the world in search of her childhood obsession: an insect that may or may not exist–the golden beetle of New Caledonia. When she advertises for an assistant to accompany her, the woman she ends up with is the last person she had in mind. Fun-loving Enid Pretty in her tight-fitting pink suit and pom-pom sandals seems to attract trouble wherever she goes. But together these two British women find themselves drawn into a cross-ocean adventure that exceeds all expectations and delivers something neither of them expected to find: the transformative power of friendship.
4/5/23 Radium Girls by Kate Moore
In the dark years of the First World War, radium makes gleaming headlines across the nation as the fresh face of beauty and wonder drug of the medical community. From body lotion to tonic water, the popular new element shines bright. Meanwhile, hundreds of girls toil amidst the glowing dust of the radium-dial factories. The glittering chemical covers their bodies from head to toe; they light up the night like industrious fireflies. With such a coveted job, these shining girls are the luckiest alive — until they begin to fall mysteriously ill. As the women start to speak out on the corruption, the factories that once offered golden opportunities ignore all claims of the gruesome side effects. As the fatal poison of the radium takes hold, the brave shining girls find themselves embroiled in one of the biggest scandals of America’s early 20th century: a groundbreaking battle for workers’ rights that will echo for centuries to come.
Avalon Book Group meets at 2 PM on the first Monday of the month
3/6/23 Her Hidden Genius by Marie Benedict
Rosalind Franklin has always been an outsider–brilliant, but different. Whether working at the laboratory she adored in Paris or at a university in London, she feels closest to the science, those unchanging laws of physics and chemistry that guide her experiments. When she is assigned to work on DNA, Rosalind knows if she just takes one more X-ray picture–one more after thousands–she can unlock the building blocks of life. Never again will she have to listen to her colleagues complain about her, especially Maurice Wilkins who’d rather conspire about genetics with James Watson and Francis Crick than work alongside her. Then it finally happens–the double helix structure of DNA reveals itself to her with perfect clarity. But what unfolds next, Rosalind could have never predicted.
4/3/23 Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin
On May 18, 1860, William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, Edward Bates, and Abraham Lincoln waited in their hometowns for the results from the Republican National Convention in Chicago. When Lincoln emerged as the victor, his rivals were dismayed and angry. Throughout the turbulent 1850s, each had energetically sought the presidency as the conflict over slavery was leading inexorably to secession and civil war. That Lincoln succeeded was the result of a character that had been forged by experiences that raised him above his more privileged and accomplished rivals. He won because he possessed an extraordinary ability to put himself in the place of other men, to experience what they were feeling, to understand their motives and desires. It was this capacity that enabled Lincoln as president to bring his disgruntled opponents together, create the most unusual cabinet in history, and marshal their talents to the task of preserving the Union and winning the war. Lincoln copes with incompetent generals, hostile congressmen, and his raucous cabinet. He overcomes these obstacles by winning the respect of his former competitors, and in the case of Seward, finds a loyal and crucial friend to see him through.