Episode 10-07: A book with “Girl” in the title

Reading With Libraries season ten logo

Welcome to Reading With Libraries!

Thank you for joining us again on our book group and Reader’s advisory podcast! 

We are here to talk about books and share library ideas!

This season we are exploring all new ideas for books and book suggestions, so you can expand your reading horizons, and share more information with your library community. We are looking at prompts from the 2023 PopSugar reading challenge this season. You can read along with their challenge, linked in our show notes, or just enjoy some different books. 

This week’s books are a slightly strange genre – easy to pick out but not always easy to categorize. They can be all kinds of genres and all kinds of different stories, and that is the fun of exploring these books!

Check out our show notes page for links to our beverages, our resources, and the books we share today.

Beverages:

This is, of course, a book group. And every book group needs to have beverages, so 

you really get the feel for your reading! 

Lemon Drop Martini

The Lemon Drop first squeezed to life in San Francisco sometime during the 1970s. Its inventor, Norman Jay Hobday, an out-of-work Vietnam vet turned saloon owner, is also credited with opening the country’s first fern bar, a concept that mixed house plants and Tiffany lamps with throngs of upwardly mobile urbanites.

Both were an instant hit. And for two-plus decades, the Lemon Drop dominated cocktail menus from North Beach to Bangkok, hooking a generation of bar patrons on its boozy-tart-sweet mélange of vodka, citrus and sugar. In 2006, Oprah famously served one to Rachael Ray on her show, which is like the ultimate nod of widespread acceptance and further solidified the drink’s place in popular culture.

Ingredients

  • 2 ounces vodka
  • 1/2 ounce triple sec
  • 1 ounce lemon juice, freshly squeezed
  • 1 ounce simple syrup
  • Garnish: sugar rim

Steps

  1. Coat the rim of a cocktail glass with sugar and set aside (do this a few minutes ahead so the sugar can dry and adhere well to the glass).
  2. Add the vodka, triple sec, lemon juice and simple syrup to a shaker with ice and shake until well-chilled.
  3. Strain into the prepared glass.

Woo-Woo

Like a Sex on the Beach without the O.J., this fruity favorite screams to be consumed poolside. It couldn’t be easier to make: Mix vodka, peach schnapps and cranberry juice together in a tall glass with ice, and throw in a lime wedge if you’re feeling festive. (And if you’re drinking this particular cocktail, you’re definitely feeling festive.) 

Typically thought of in the same mental breath as its ’80s-era cranberry-juice brethren such as the Sea Breeze and the aforementioned SotB, the Woo Woo doesn’t need to be relegated to Me Decade history. Its timeless blend of flavors renders it worthy of sailing into modern drinking repertoires, too. 

Ingredients

  • 2 ounces vodka
  • 1 ounce peach schnapps
  • 3 ounces cranberry juice
  • Garnish: lime wedge

Steps

  1. Add the vodka, peach schnapps and cranberry juice into a highball glass filled with ice and stir briefly to combine.
  2. Garnish with a lime wedge.

Genre Discussion:

This week is a strange one to discuss, because there is not a big thread of connection across all the books we are sharing. But that is part of the fun of a book challenge like this one: you read unexpected books from places you would not look for them. You find unexpected new authors. You explore ideas and stories and tropes that are beyond your expectations. Some of them will be…not so great. Some of them may be your new favorite books. It is really easy to find these books, even if you don’t check out any of our many suggestions. So this week, let’s explore some new books!

Suggested Reading Resources:

Our Book Discussion

We have our beverages, we are familiar with this week’s genre, let’s get to the book discussion! We will give you a list of all the books we share today. You can click on any of these links to go to Amazon.com for more information.  

The November Girl Lydia Kang

I am Anda, and the lake is my mother. I am the November storms that terrify sailors and sink ships. With their deaths, I keep my little island on Lake Superior alive.

Hector has come here to hide from his family until he turns 18. Isle Royale is shut down for the winter, and there’s no one here but me. And now him.

Hector is running from the violence in his life, but violence runs through my veins. I should send him away, to keep him safe. But I’m half human, too, and Hector makes me want to listen to my foolish, half-human heart. And if I do, I can’t protect him from the storms coming for us.

All American Girl, by Meg Cabot

Samantha Madison is just your average disenfranchised sophomore gal living in DC when, in an inadvertent moment sandwiched between cookie buying and CD-perusing, she puts a stop to an attempt on the life of the president. Before she can say “MTV2”, she’s appointed Teen Ambassador to the UN and has caught the eye of the very cute First Son.

Mean Girl Murder (Merry Wrath Mysteries, #8), by Leslie Langtry 

The Halloween Parade is coming up, and former CIA agent-turned-suburbanite Merry Wrath’s Girl Scout Troop hopes to repeat a 1st place trophy for the 3rd year in a row. But when they find a dead woman dressed as a witch, a mysterious treasure, and face a ruthless kidnapping, it looks like Merry’s in for a different kind of triple threat.

To add fuel to her bonfire, Mom’s in town—meaning Merry has to replace all that bullet-riddled furniture in the guest room—and with her wedding date approaching, her groom-to-be’s twin taxidermist sisters are insisting on doing the decorating.

Between her family fiascoes and a dead witch who was loathed by everyone in town, Merry’s head is spinning faster than an apple in a bobbing barrel. Who wanted this mean girl dead? Will this Halloween end with a treat? Or has Merry been tricked?

JELL-O Girls: A Family History, by Allie Rowbottom

In 1899, Allie Rowbottom’s great-great-great-uncle bought the patent to Jell-O from its inventor for $450. The sale would turn out to be one of the most profitable business deals in American history, and the generations that followed enjoyed immense privilege – but they were also haunted by suicides, cancer, alcoholism, and mysterious ailments.

More than 100 years after that deal was struck, Allie’s mother Mary was diagnosed with the same incurable cancer, a disease that had also claimed her own mother’s life. Determined to combat what she had come to consider the “Jell-O curse” and her looming mortality, Mary began obsessively researching her family’s past, determined to understand the origins of her illness and the impact on her life of Jell-O and the traditional American values the company championed. Before she died in 2015, Mary began to send Allie boxes of her research and notes, in the hope that her daughter might write what she could not. Jell-O Girls is the liberation of that story.

A gripping examination of the dark side of an iconic American product and a moving portrait of the women who lived in the shadow of its fractured fortune, Jell-O Girls is a family history, a feminist history, and a story of motherhood, love and loss. In crystalline prose Rowbottom considers the roots of trauma not only in her own family, but in the American psyche as well, ultimately weaving a story that is deeply personal, as well as deeply connected to the collective female experience.

A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, by Holly Jackson 

Everyone in Fairview knows the story.

Pretty and popular high school senior Andie Bell was murdered by her boyfriend, Sal Singh, who then killed himself. It was all anyone could talk about. And five years later, Pip sees how the tragedy still haunts her town.

But she can’t shake the feeling that there was more to what happened that day. She knew Sal when she was a child, and he was always so kind to her. How could he possibly have been a killer?

Now a senior herself, Pip decides to reexamine the closed case for her final project, at first just to cast doubt on the original investigation. But soon she discovers a trail of dark secrets that might actually prove Sal innocent . . . and the line between past and present begins to blur. Someone in Fairview doesn’t want Pip digging around for answers, and now her own life might be in danger.

The Girl Before, by JP Delaney

Please make a list of every possession you consider essential to your life.

The request seems odd, even intrusive—and for the two women who answer, the consequences are devastating.

EMMA

Reeling from a traumatic break-in, Emma wants a new place to live. But none of the apartments she sees are affordable or feel safe. Until One Folgate Street. The house is an architectural masterpiece: a minimalist design of pale stone, plate glass, and soaring ceilings. But there are rules. The enigmatic architect who designed the house retains full control: no books, no throw pillows, no photos or clutter or personal effects of any kind. The space is intended to transform its occupant—and it does.

JANE

After a personal tragedy, Jane needs a fresh start. When she finds One Folgate Street she is instantly drawn to the space—and to its aloof but seductive creator. Moving in, Jane soon learns about the untimely death of the home’s previous tenant, a woman similar to Jane in age and appearance. As Jane tries to untangle truth from lies, she unwittingly follows the same patterns, makes the same choices, crosses paths with the same people, and experiences the same terror, as the girl before.

The Final Girl Support Group By Grady Hendrix

In horror movies, the final girls are the ones left standing when the credits roll. They made it through the worst night of their lives…but what happens after?

From chain saws to summer camp slayers, The Final Girl Support Group pays tribute to and slyly subverts our most popular horror films—movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Scream.

Lynnette Tarkington is a real-life final girl who survived a massacre. For more than a decade, she’s been meeting with five other final girls and their therapist in a support group for those who survived the unthinkable, working to put their lives back together. Then one woman misses a meeting, and their worst fears are realized—someone knows about the group and is determined to rip their lives apart again, piece by piece.

But the thing about final girls is that no matter how bad the odds, how dark the night, how sharp the knife, they will never, ever give up.

The Girl Who Played Go, by Shan Sa

As the Japanese military invades 1930s Manchuria, a young girl approaches her own sexual coming of age. Drawn into a complex triangle with two boys, she distracts herself from the onslaught of adulthood by playing the game of go with strangers in a public square–and yet the force of desire, like the occupation, proves inevitable. Unbeknownst to the girl who plays go, her most worthy and frequent opponent is a Japanese soldier in disguise. Captivated by her beauty as much as by her bold, unpredictable approach to the strategy game, the soldier finds his loyalties challenged. Is there room on the path to war for that most revolutionary of acts: falling in love?

Conclusion:

Thank you so much for joining us on Reading With Libraries! Join us next Thursday with another topic or genre and many more books to share and discuss. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you don’t miss a single episode! 

And if you want to hear more about the work we do in libraries or expand your library skills, check out our podcast Linking Our Libraries! Right now that is dropping short episodes with a few book suggestions; so subscribe to get that every Tuesday.

Bring your book ideas, bring your beverages, and join us back here on Thursday!