Book Club Books for Summer 2024

Book Summary

Every woman Justin goes on a date with seems to find their soulmate right after breaking up with him. It’s his curse, and now, thanks to a Reddit thread, EVERYONE knows.

However, his viral embarrassment may have a silver lining. Emma has the same problem and has sent him a message. The solution is obvious. They’ll date each other, break up, and then destiny will bring them each their own soulmates.

Traveling nurse Emma finds a job in Minnesota and rents a cute cottage on Lake Minnetonka for her summer fling with Justin. But when Emma’s toxic mother shows up and Justin has to assume guardianship of his three siblings, they’re suddenly navigating a lot more than they expected. Will these challenges quickly rip them apart, or does fate have other plans?

Book Summary

The French Riviera’s glamorous hotels were dazzling in the summer of 1939 as the world’s wealthiest vacationers and Hollywood movie stars arrived for the first Cannes film festival. American Annabel Faucon has also arrived on the Côte d’Azur. She left a broken heart and a dead-end job back home in New York to work for her uncle at the Grand Hotel.

Annabel is selected to keep an eye on two stars staying at the hotel for the film festival – a mysterious screenwriter and a renegade actor. However, celebrity drama will seem insignificant when Nazi guests arrive during this last summer before the outbreak of war. Annabel’s new duties include disrupting a Nazi communication system.

Book Summary

While jogging near her home on Nantucket, novelist Vivi is killed in a hit-and-run accident. After her death, Vivi is granted the opportunity to watch what happens to her family for one final summer. In addition to watching, she gets three “nudges” to change the outcome of events on Earth.

Between troubles for her children, the investigation into her death, and a childhood secret wrapped into the final novel she was writing, Vivi must be cautious with her nudges while learning to let her family make decisions without her.

Book Summary

When her estranged mother passed away, Stella received a one-way ticket and a note reading, “Go to Paris.” While she is much more comfortable living within her strict routines, her boss encourages her to go on the trip.

In Paris, Stella continues to live as cautiously and frugally as she does at home until she stumbles upon a Dior dress in a vintage store. When the shopkeeper insists that it was meant for Stella, she impulsively purchases the dress, and it launches a new outlook on life.

When Stella meets Jules, an octogenarian art collector, he takes her under his wing and shows her the best of the literary, art, and culinary worlds of 1980s Paris.

Book Summary

Mary Jane tells the story of two very different family lifestyles and a 14-year-old girl trying to decide who she really is. Mary Jane is a quiet, book-loving girl from a traditional, conservative family in 1970s Baltimore. When she is offered a job as a nanny for a local doctor, her mom assumes their home is equally tidy and respectable.

However, the house is a huge mess, and it’s about to get crazier. The doctor has welcomed a rock star and his wife to stay at the house while he tries to get sober. Mary Jane has a lot to teach them about tidiness and schedules, and all the while, they are opening her eyes to the world outside her bubble. By the end of the summer, she’ll have a much better understanding of who she wants to be.

Book Summary

Set during the summer of 2020, Lara’s three adult daughters have returned home to quarantine at the family’s northern Michigan cherry orchard. As they pick cherries and go about running the family business in isolation, the sisters beg their mother to tell them the story of her long-ago romance with celebrity Peter Duke. When Lara was in her early 20s, she and Peter shared the stage during a Michigan summer stock theater run of the play Our Town.

Lara begins the story with her very first experience on stage in high school and works her way forward through her brief but eventful summer stock theater career. As the girls learn more about their mother’s life, they are forced to reconsider everything they thought they knew about her and their father.

Book Summary

In 1924, when Cecily was only 4, her mother reluctantly left her at an orphanage and promised to return when she had money to support her. However, three years later, her mother hasn’t returned, and Cecily is “adopted” by a traveling circus. She’s assigned to be the “little sister” of a glamourous bareback rider and believes she’s found the family she has always dreamed of. By the time Cecily is a teenager, she’s seen the problems in her traveling world. When she falls in love with a roustabout named Lucky, her life changes again in a dangerous way.

In 2015, Cecily is 94 and has a quiet Minnesota life with her daughter, granddaughter, and great-grandson. When her great-grandson has a project for school, the family takes DNA tests, and the results reveal a tragic story Cecily has kept secret for decades. Four generations are forced to reevaluate what “family” really means.

Book Summary

On Memorial Day in 1958, the residents of Jewel, Minnesota, are shocked to discover the dead body of the town’s most powerful citizen, wealthy landowner Jimmy Quinn. Sheriff Brody Dern must investigate, but he’s still carrying the physical and emotional scars of his military service, which complicate his career.

The townspeople have a prime suspect before Dern even has the autopsy report. Noah Bluestone, a Native American WWII veteran, has recently come back to town with a Japanese wife. But does the couple’s return have anything to do with this case?

The River We Remember explores midcentury life in America and highlights how countless small towns were affected by the WWII scars that remained well after the last shots were fired.

Book Summary

Best friends Laurel and Paris have a summer book club with three simple rules: (1) no sad books; (2) no pressure; and (3) yes to wine. It’s meant to be an escape from the chaos of their business and family lives. And this summer, they are excited to welcome Cassie to the club.

These three women don’t have the best luck with men. Laurel is recently divorced and fears that her skepticism of men is going to rub off on her daughters. Cassie is only drawn to men who need “fixing.” And Paris is reeling from her last relationship.

Can the heroines of their heartwarming book club picks inspire these friends to take big chances in writing their new chapters – in both life and love?

Book Summary

Frances “Frankie” McGrath is a 21-year-old nursing student who has been raised by her conservative parents to always do “the right thing.” But when her brother ships out for Vietnam in 1965, she begins to change her views of right and wrong. Frankie impulsively joins the Army Nurses Corps and follows her brother to Vietnam. As she tends to the green and inexperienced young men who have been sent to fight the war, she is overwhelmed by the chaos and destruction. Returning home to a changed America doesn’t prove to be any easier.

While The Women is the story of Frankie going to war, it also shines a light on the story of all women who risk everything to help others. The publisher’s description describes this book as “a novel of searing insight and lyrical beauty” that is “profoundly emotional” and “richly drawn.”

Book Summary

Greta James had musical talent from childhood, but her parents had different visions of where that talent would lead. While her mother was her biggest fan, her dad could only see the likely pitfalls of a music career.

She has spent years trying to prove him wrong and reached the point of appearing on magazine covers and playing sold-out shows. However, with the pressure of a sophomore album and the shock of her mother’s recent death, Greta has an on-stage meltdown that goes viral.

She very reluctantly agrees to join her dad on an Alaskan cruise because she hopes it will give her an escape from media coverage and the pressure of her struggling career. Their relationship is as icy as the Alaskan waters. But together aboard the ship, they will finally come to terms with the baggage of their past so that they can face the future.

Book Summary

When bombings began in London in 1939, 14-year-old Hazel and her 5-year-old sister, Flora, were evacuated to a rural village in the English countryside. Living with a woman and her teenage son in a charming stone cottage, Hazel comforts Flora by telling her stories of a magical fairy tale land. It provides the sisters with a fictional place where they can escape the fears and hardships of war.

One day, while playing near the banks of the River Thames, Flora disappears. Hazel blames herself and carries the guilt into adulthood. Twenty years later, Hazel’s life looks ideal from the outside – charming boyfriend, a nice flat in London, and a good job at a rare bookstore. But on the eve of her new career at Sotheby’s, she unwraps a package that changes everything.

It’s an illustrated first-edition book called “Whisperwood and the River of Stars.” It’s the imaginary world that she created for Flora – one that she never wrote down and never told anyone else about. What does it mean? Is Flora still alive? And does this fairy tale hold the truth about her disappearance? Hazel embarks on a feverish quest for answers. Along the way, she’ll reconnect with people from her past and put her future in jeopardy.

Book Summary

For many actors and actresses, winning an Oscar is the pinnacle of success that sets them up for an even better future. But for Hattie McDaniel, her best supporting actress win after playing the role of Mammy in the controversial movie Gone With the Wind was life-changing in a different way.

After winning, Hattie was trapped between two worlds, neither of which appreciated her. White Hollywood saw her only as her character, Mammy. The Black community, led by the NAACP, detested the demeaning portrayal of their community and waged war against her.

Through it all, Hattie struggled but also continued her fight to pave a path for other Negro actors, focused on war efforts, fought housing discrimination, and navigated four failed marriages. Along the way, she was supported by a core group of friends including Clark Gable, Louise Beavers, Ruby Berkley Goodwin, and Dorothy Dandridge.

Book Summary

After losing her husband in WWII and her daughter to illness, Iris walled herself off from the world. She’s spent many decades hiding behind the tall fence around her home. In place of human connection, Iris has surrounded herself with a family of flowers. Propagating her daylilies and roses and tending to a garden that helps her keep memories of those she loved alive.

In the early 2000s, Abby is a young mother whose husband has recently returned from military service in Iraq. When Abby’s family rents a cottage along Lake Michigan, next door to Iris’ property, the older woman can’t help but view the young family as a window to the life she once had.

As Iris and Abby are drawn together by their shared love of flowers, the friendship that blossoms between them is a testament to the healing power of both gardening and human connection.

Book Summary

Do you dream of seeing the Venetian canals, the Amalfi Coast, or wandering through gorgeous Tuscan villages? This novel will transport you to all three dramatically different scenic Italian locations in vivid detail.

Two hundred years ago, Filomena Fontana cursed her sister. Ever since then, every 2nd born sister in the Fontana family has been unable to find love.

Some of the women believe in the curse, and others are skeptical, but when elderly Aunt Poppy invites two of the young second-born sisters to return to Italy with her, promising to have a plan to break the curse, they can’t pass up the chance. The trio of women travel throughout Italy, learning about their family history and uncovering secrets.

Book Summary

Single mom Mallory receives a devasting call that her son ingested a poisonous mushroom at summer camp. He’s alive but needs a kidney transplant. When she finds out that neither she nor her sister are a match, the hunt is on to find a donor. Her mom was adopted from an infamous Irish orphanage in 1952, so Mallory does an Ancestry.com-style DNA test, hoping to find more blood relatives.

In 1951, Hungarian refugee Hannah made a new life for herself after the war. Her husband is a British diplomat, and they’re currently stationed in glamorous Cairo. However, everything is at risk when an unexpected encounter with the manager of a spy-filled hotel leads to a passionate affair. As Cairo’s streets buzz with possible revolution, Hannah is snared in a game of intrigue between two men.

Book Summary

West With Giraffes is a charming tale of adventure that takes you on the ride of a lifetime from the East Coast of the US to the West, alongside a rowdy 17-year-old, a grumpy older man, and two giraffes. The year is 1938, and no American zoo has successfully housed giraffes before. The female zoo director of the San Diego Zoo believes she can do it. The giraffes have just survived a hurricane en route to the East Coast, and Riley Jones, the curmudgeonly head zookeeper, is responsible for safely transporting the giraffes from New York City to San Diego.

America is still in the throes of the Great Depression, and the Dust Bowl conditions continue to ravage the drought-stricken Southern Plains states. A coast-to-coast trek with giant animals is no easy feat. Jones begrudgingly teams up with a starving teenager named Woody to help him make the journey. The adventures along the way include run-ins with circus con artists, being tailed by a female photographer looking for a big scoop, an emotional visit to Woody’s hometown, and so much more.

At its heart, this is a coming-of-age story. Now, at the age of 105, Woody recounts his 12-day cross-country trip with Jones and the giraffes and how it shaped his life.