The Book Club discussion

Use this thread for comments about our June selection.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news...

Link about purchase of film rights to Calling Me Home.

Likens the story to The Help and Driving Miss Daisy.

"Home was released Feb. 12, garnering strong reviews from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly. The weepie is proving to be a reader favorite on book sites like GoodReads, and many are pegging it as this year’s Help, which became a word-of-mouth sensation and eventual best picture Oscar nominee.

"The studio and Lee now will seek out a writer to adapt the material."

Sundown Towns

"Don't let the sun set on YOU"

"This is typical wording on a sign at the edge of what was called a 'sundown town,' which gained its name because these towns required people of color to leave their perimeters – not surprisingly – by sundown. These towns, found throughout the USA not just in the South, were explicitly all-white towns. Sometimes the segregation was created by actual town policy, sometimes through restrictive covenants created and maintained by real estate brokers, and sometimes by sheer intimidation from local town employees like police officers and even regular citizens. It is not clear how many of these towns existed but an estimate cites that at one point there were several thousand across the United States, and ..."



http://www.bookbrowse.com/reviews/ind...

Video interview with author Julie Kibler (~ 5 min):

http://www.wfaa.com/news/local/Local-...#

Prefers her book be considered a cross between Fried Green Tomatoes and The Notebook. (I am presuming this one by Nicholas Sparks.)

Dorrie in the novel is compared in personality to Julie's black hairdresser.

Said she comes from a "permission-giving" family.

Has some novels "under the bed," unlikely to see the light of day.

Publication history according to Goodreads:

Published February 12th 2013 by St. Martin's Press (first published August 20th 2012)

Another good interview here, not a video. As a person, Julie Kibler is growing on me.

She liked Laura Ingalls Wilder -- my reaction was that Julie's mode of story-telling and very sentence structure and organization is reminiscent of Wilder. (In the video interview, Julie indicated she was influenced by a college professor to especially like Southern stories.)

Also interesting here are the descriptions of her interactions with her father, her (dead) grandmother, her daughters, and her hairdresser as and after she wrote the story.

The picture of Julie here is more flattering than her appearance in the TV interview -- and the words of both suggest perhaps truer to her personality.

http://bookmagnet.wordpress.com/2013/...