Hello Friends!
Welcome to the first book club pick of 2019 – for the entire year, we’ll be announcing a book club on the first Sunday of every month.
We do hope you’ll join the fun!
Our first pick is The Almost Sisters, by Joshilyn Jackson. I’m a huge fan of Joshilyn, (you can read my interview with her here.) Her writing is completely entrancing – and I cannot wait to dig into The Almost Sisters!
Here’s the official book blurb:
With empathy, grace, humor, and piercing insight, the New York Times bestselling author of gods in Alabama pens a powerful, emotionally resonant novel of the South that confronts the truth about family, race, and the distinctions between perception and reality—the stories we tell ourselves about our origins and who we really are
Superheroes have always been Leia Birch Briggs’s weakness. One tequila-soaked night at a comics convention, the usually level-headed graphic novelist is swept off her barstool by a handsome and anonymous Batman. She remembers he was tall, black, and an excellent French kisser—but not much else.
It turns out the caped crusader has left her with more than just a fond, fuzzy memory. That pink plus sign on the stick isn’t wrong: she’s having a baby boy—an unexpected but not unhappy development. She always wanted to fall in love and have a child, but as a young woman, she learned exactly what betrayal felt like. Now she’s thirty-eight and dead single, having walked—no, run—away from every man she might have married, trying to avoid more loss, more regrets.
Before Leia can break the news of her impending single-motherhood (including the fact that her baby is biracial) to her conventional lily-white Southern family, her perfect stepsister Rachel’s marriage implodes. Leia wants to help, but Rachel is married to the very man who broke her heart all those years ago. Worse, she learns her beloved ninety-year-old grandmother, Birchie, has been conspiring with her lifelong best friend to hide her rapidly progressing dementia. Birchie is Leia’s only living paternal relative, a proper yet fierce woman who has long lived by her own rules in Birchville, Alabama, the small town her family founded generations back. Now this grand dame has started a row at the church fish fry that has set every tongue in wagging, pitted neighbor against neighbor, and has made it plain to Leia that her grandmother needs some serious looking after.
Heading 700 miles south, Leia plans to put Birchie’s affairs in order, clean out the big Victorian that has been in the Birch family for generations, and break the news of her blessed event. Once home, she learns that illness is not the only thing Birchie’s been hiding. Tucked away in a trunk in the attic is a dangerous secret with roots that reach all the way back to the Civil War. Its exposure threatens the family’s freedom and future, and will change everything about how Leia sees herself and her sister, her unborn son and his missing father, and the beloved—yet deeply flawed and contradictory—world she thinks she knows.
Enchanting, wry, honest, and hopeful, The Almost Sisters compels us to explore our own origins, and the stories we tell ourselves.
Join the book club magic and follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook! Order your copy of The Almost Sisters here.
Live, Love, Learn,
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