Fri Apr 3: what we talked about

  • Posted April 6, 2020
Screenshot of first Starbooks book club meet

  • We missed you all! Thank you for joining us for our first Starbooks Book Club Google Meet.

  • Emily Jones and Emily Sontag win the "Most Prepared Reader" award for stocking up at Aspen Drive branch of Cook Memorial Public Library before it closed. Bad news: Emily Sontag has already read 15 of the 20 books she checked out.

  • Social highlights:

    • "We're teaching my mom to play Mario Cart."

    • "I'm re-reading my favorite book series with my mom. She's bored, and she wants to read."

    • "I left Oreos on my friend's front porch for her birthday."

    • New member status granted to:

      • Sasha's cat

      • Ashleigh's guinea pig

      • Yona's younger sister

    • "I'm just trying to get through the days. It's pretty boring just chilling at home."

  • Some of you said you are re-reading favorite books, such as Harry Potter (ALL available through Sora for unlimited users!)

  • 2020 Illinois Teen Choice Award

  • The Forgotten Book by Mechthild Glaser

    • Summary: A girl who goes to a boarding school finds a magical book that has the power to bring to life anything she writes down.

    • Genre: fantasy

  • Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

    • Summary: A fourth-generation German-American is tortured by his memories of the firebombing of Dresden in 1944 which he witnessed while a prisoner or war.

    • Genre: classic

  • The Toll by Neal Shusterman

    • Summary: Citra and Rowan have disappeared. Endura is gone. It seems like nothing stands between Scythe Goddard and absolute dominion over the world scythedom. With the silence of the Thunderhead and the reverberations of the Great Resonance still shaking the earth to its core, the question remains: Is there anyone left who can stop him? The answer lies in the Tone, the Toll, and the Thunder.

    • Genre: science fiction

    • Sequel to Scythe and Thunderhead

  • These Shallow Graves by Jennifer Donnelly

    • Summary: A young woman in nineteenth-century New York City must struggle against gender and class boundaries when her father is found dead of a supposed suicide, and she believes there is more than meets the eye, so in order to uncover the truth she will have to decide how much she is willing to risk and lose.

    • Genre: historical

  • The Book of Essie by Meghan MacLean Weir

    • Summary: A debut novel of family, fame, and religion that tells the emotionally stirring, wildly captivating story of the seventeen-year-old daughter of an evangelical preacher, star of the family's hit reality show, and the secret pregnancy that threatens to blow their entire world apart.

    • Genre: realistic

  • The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

    • Summary: Fifteen years after the events of The Handmaid's Tale, the theocratic regime of the republic of Gilead maintains its grip on power, but there are signs it is beginning to rot from within. At this crucial moment, the lives of three radically different women converge, with potentially explosive results. Two have grown up on opposite sides of the border: one in Gilead as the privileged daughter of an important Commander, and one in Canada, where she marches in anti-Gilead protests and watches news of its horrors on TV. The testimonies of these two young women, part of the first generation to come of age in the new order, are braided with a third voice: that of one of the regime's enforcers, a woman who wields power through the ruthless accumulation and deployment of secrets. Long-buried secrets are what finally bring these three together, forcing each of them to come to terms with who she is and how far she will go for what she believes.

    • Genre: science fiction

    • sequel to The Handmaid's Tale

  • Forward Me Back to You by Mitali Perkins

    • Summary: Katina King is the reigning teen jujitsu champion of Northern California, but she's having trouble fighting off the secrets in her past. Robin Thornton was adopted from an orphanage in Kolkata, India and is reluctant to take on his future. Since he knows nothing about his past, how is he supposed to figure out what comes next? Robin and Kat meet in the most unlikely of places — a summer service trip to India to work with survivors of human trafficking. As bonds blossom between the travel-mates, Robin and Kat discover the healing superpowers of friendship.

    • Genre: realistic

  • The Guardians by John Grisham

    • Summary: In the small north Florida town of Seabrook, a young lawyer named Keith Russo was shot dead at his desk as he worked late one night. The killer left no clues behind. There were no witnesses, no real suspects, no one with a motive. The police soon settled on Quincy Miller, a young black man who was once a client of Russo’s. Quincy was framed, convicted, and sent to prison for life. For twenty-two years he languished in prison with no lawyer, no advocate on the outside. Then he wrote a letter to Guardian Ministries, a small innocence group founded by a lawyer/minister named Cullen Post. Guardian handles only a few innocence cases at a time, and Post is its only investigator. He travels the South fighting wrongful convictions and taking cases no one else will touch. With Quincy Miller, though, he gets far more than he bargained for. Powerful, ruthless people murdered Keith Russo, and they do not want Quincy exonerated. They killed one lawyer twenty-two years ago, and they will kill another one without a second thought.

    • Genre; mystery

  • Graceling by Kristin Cashore

    • Summary: In a world where some people are born with extreme and often-feared skills called Graces, Katsa struggles for redemption from her own horrifying Grace of killing and teams up with another young fighter to save their land from a corrupt king.

    • Genre: fantasy

  • The Rule of Thre3 by Eric Walters

    • Summary: A teen's suburban neighborhood bands together for its own survival in a world stricken by a catastrophic blackout.

    • Genre: science fiction

  • Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

    • Summary: Galaxy "Alex" Stern is the most unlikely member of Yale's freshman class. Raised in the Los Angeles hinterlands by a hippie mom, Alex dropped out of school early and into a world of shady drug-dealer boyfriends, dead-end jobs, and much, much worse. In fact, by age twenty, she is the sole survivor of a horrific, unsolved multiple homicide. Some might say she's thrown her life away. But at her hospital bed, Alex is offered a second chance: to attend one of the world's most prestigious universities on a full ride. What's the catch, and why her? Still searching for answers, Alex arrives in New Haven tasked by her mysterious benefactors with monitoring the activities of Yale's secret societies. Their eight windowless "tombs" are the well-known haunts of the rich and powerful, from high-ranking politicos to Wall Street's biggest players. But their occult activities are more sinister and more extraordinary than any paranoid imagination might conceive. They tamper with forbidden magic. They raise the dead. And, sometimes, they prey on the living.

    • Genre: supernatural