Home
Policies
Hours
Contact Us
Services
Calendar
Reader's Corner
Youth Services
Databases
Matagorda
Sargent
Friends' Info
Passport Info.
Genealogy

 

 

Bay City Public Library

Book Clubs

Online Book Club

Sign up for the online book club and receive previews of new books by e-mail each week. 

Brown Bag Book Club

Meets the second Thursday of each month.  Bring your lunch, enjoy a lively book discussion, and meet some new people.

June 12, 2008

The Year of Fog (Bantam Discovery)Year of the Fog by Michelle Richmond

From Booklist
Richmond's sophomore effort (after Dream of the Blue Room, 2003) traces a traumatic year in the life of photographer Abby Mason after she loses her fiance's six-year-old daughter. The moment Abby stopped to photograph a dead baby seal while walking on a fog-bound beach in San Francisco is one she will replay in her head a thousand times. That's the last time she saw Emma, who was racing ahead, eager to collect sand dollars. Panic and fear soon give way to sheer exhaustion and emotional shutdown as Abby and Emma's dad, Jake, immerse themselves in the desperate search for the missing first-grader. As the months tick by, Jake becomes convinced that Emma drowned, while Abby is sure that Emma was kidnapped. The trauma and the guilt wreak havoc with their relationship and with their struggle to regain a sense of normalcy. Richmond gracefully explores the nature of memory and perception in key passages that never slow the suspense of the search. Closely echoing Jacquelyn Mitchard's best-selling Deep End of the Ocean (1996), this is a page-turner with a philosophical bent.
Joanne Wilkinson

July 10, 2008
One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May DoddOne Thousand White Women:  The Journals of May Dodd by Jim Fergus

From Booklist
An American western with a most unusual twist, this is an imaginative fictional account of the participation of May Dodd and others in the controversial "Brides for Indians" program, a clandestine U.S. government-sponsored program intended to instruct "savages" in the ways of civilization and to assimilate the Indians into white culture through the offspring of these unions. May's personal journals, loaded with humor and intelligent reflection, describe the adventures of some very colorful white brides (including one black one), their marriages to Cheyenne warriors, and the natural abundance of life on the prairie before the final press of the white man's civilization. Fergus is gifted in his ability to portray the perceptions and emotions of women. He writes with tremendous insight and sensitivity about the individual community and the political and religious issues of the time, many of which are still relevant today. This book is artistically rendered with meticulous attention to small details that bring to life the daily concerns of a group of hardy souls at a pivotal time in U.S. history. Grace Fill