Episode 807: A book with two POVs

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Welcome to Reading With Libraries!

Thank you for joining us on the eighth season of our book group and Reader’s advisory podcast! 

Our organization is the Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange, and we work with all types of libraries. Schools, public, academic, history centers, and more! We are here to support you and to bring you new knowledge to inform your library work. 

This season we continue to explore a wide variety of book genres and topics so you can expand your reading horizons and share more information with your library community. 

This week we are continuing to look at the prompts from the PopSugar challenge. Check it out for yourself, so you can keep finding all kinds of new books for yourself and to share with your library community! Let’s check out some books with two points of view.

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! This week’s beverages go along with our genre by having two separate layers. Be patient with yourself if you need a little practice to get these – even the imperfect ones will be fun. These come from the website The Spruce Eats, and there are a lot of other good beverages to try there.

The Easter Bunny

“A sweet vodka cocktail, the Easter bunny is a fun drink that is sure to satisfy your springtime sweet tooth. It’s a delicious treat and gives you an opportunity to practice a simple bartending skill to create a tempting layer of chocolate and cherry.”

Ingredients

  • 1/2 ounce vodka
  • 1 1/2 ounces dark crème de cacao liqueur
  • 1 teaspoon cherry brandy
  • 1 teaspoon chocolate syrup

Steps to make it:

Vertigo Cocktail

“This drink couldn’t be easier to mix up. There’s no need to shake it and you won’t need any special bar tools; you’ll simply pour. But it’s not the ordinary mixed drink because it’s dressed up wonderfully with a simple bartender’s trick.”

Ingredients

Steps to Make It

  1. Gather the ingredients.
  2. In a highball glass, stir the lemon juice and ginger ale with ice.
  3. Float Averna on top by slowly pouring it over the back of a bar spoon.
  4. Garnish with a lime wedge. Serve and enjoy.

Genre Discussion:

The books with stories told from two different perspectives can be really entertaining, because you get so much information about the events in the story from those two perspectives. No one person can know everything that happened in a story. This is especially true when the story involves people who may be hiding things from one another. You can find an increasing number of books about crimes that are told from two perspectives – one is the person who did the bad thing and one the person who is trying to uncover the truth. If this is done well, it really builds suspense, because you – as the reader – know things the investigator does not, and you have to wait to see how long it takes for them to catch up with you.

Writing these kinds of stories come with their own challenges. The website Writers Edit gives a good perspective on the issues writers should consider in this genre: 6 Quick Tips For Writing Multiple Points of View

  • Make sure you have good reason to be writing multiple points of view
  • Ensure each POV character has their own distinct voice
  • Don’t have too many POV characters
  • Stick to a one-chapter-per-POV approach
  • Choose carefully which POV you write each scene from
  • Consider choosing one ‘main’ POV character

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. If you buy anything while you are there, Amazon will give us a small percent of their profits from your purchase. Thanks in advance for helping to support the mission of CMLE – we appreciate it! 

You Say it First, by Katie Cotugno

One conversation can change everything.

Meg has her entire life set up perfectly: she and her best friend, Emily, plan to head to Cornell together in the fall, and she works at a voter registration call center in her Philadelphia suburb. But everything changes when one of those calls connects her to a stranger from small-town Ohio.

Colby is stuck in a rut, reeling from a family tragedy and working a dead-end job. The last thing he has time for is some privileged rich girl preaching the sanctity of the political process. So he says the worst thing he can think of and hangs up.

But things don’t end there.…

That night on the phone winds up being the first in a series of candid, sometimes heated, always surprising conversations that lead to a long-distance friendship and then—slowly—to something more. Across state lines and phone lines, Meg and Colby form a once-in-a-lifetime connection. But in the end, are they just too different to make it work?

You Say It First is a propulsive, layered novel about how sometimes the person who has the least in common with us can be the one who changes us most.

Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo

Camino Rios lives for the summers when her father visits her in the Dominican Republic. But this time, on the day when his plane is supposed to land, Camino arrives at the airport to see crowds of crying people…

In New York City, Yahaira Rios is called to the principal’s office, where her mother is waiting to tell her that her father, her hero, has died in a plane crash.

Separated by distance—and Papi’s secrets—the two girls are forced to face a new reality in which their father is dead and their lives are forever altered.

And then, when it seems like they’ve lost everything of their father, they learn of each other.

Some Girls Do, by Jennifer Dugan

Morgan, an elite track athlete, is forced to transfer high schools late in her senior year after it turns out being queer is against her private Catholic school’s code of conduct. There, she meets Ruby, who has two hobbies: tinkering with her baby blue 1970 Ford Torino and competing in local beauty pageants, the latter to live out the dreams of her overbearing mother. The two are drawn to each other and can’t deny their growing feelings. But while Morgan–out and proud, and determined to have a fresh start–doesn’t want to have to keep their budding relationship a secret, Ruby isn’t ready to come out yet. With each girl on a different path toward living her truth, can they go the distance together?

Parachutes by Kelly Yang

They’re called parachutes: teenagers dropped off to live in private homes and study in the United States while their wealthy parents remain in Asia. Claire Wang never thought she’d be one of them, until her parents pluck her from her privileged life in Shanghai and enroll her at a high school in California.

Suddenly she finds herself living in a stranger’s house, with no one to tell her what to do for the first time in her life. She soon embraces her newfound freedom, especially when the hottest and most eligible parachute, Jay, asks her out.

Dani De La Cruz, Claire’s new host sister, couldn’t be less thrilled that her mom rented out a room to Claire. An academic and debate team star, Dani is determined to earn her way into Yale, even if it means competing with privileged kids who are buying their way to the top. But Dani’s game plan veers unexpectedly off course when her debate coach starts working with her privately.

As they steer their own distinct paths, Dani and Claire keep crashing into one another, setting a course that will change their lives forever.

Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know, by Samira Ahmed

Discover New York Times bestseller Samira Ahmed’s romantic, sweeping adventure through the streets of Paris told in alternating narratives that bridge centuries, continents, and the lives of two young Muslim women fighting to write their own stories.

Smash the patriarchy. Eat all the pastries.

It’s August in Paris and 17-year-old Khayyam Maquet—American, French, Indian, Muslim—is at a crossroads. This holiday with her parents should be a dream trip for the budding art historian. But her maybe-ex-boyfriend is ghosting her, she might have just blown her chance at getting into her dream college, and now all she really wants is to be back home in Chicago figuring out her messy life instead of brooding in the City of Light.

Two hundred years before Khayyam’s summer of discontent, Leila is struggling to survive and keep her true love hidden from the Pasha who has “gifted” her with favored status in his harem. In the present day—and with the company of Alex, a très charmant teen descendant of Alexandre Dumas—Khayyam searches for a rumored lost painting, uncovering a connection between Leila and Alexandre Dumas, Eugène Delacroix, and Lord Byron that may have been erased from history.

Echoing across centuries, Leila and Khayyam’s lives intertwine, and as one woman’s long-forgotten life is uncovered, another’s is transformed.

Final Girls, by Riley Sager

Ten years ago, six friends went on vacation. One made it out alive…

In that instant, college student Quincy Carpenter became a member of a very exclusive club – a group of survivors the press dubbed “The Final Girls”: Lisa, who lost nine sorority sisters to a college dropout’s knife; Sam, who endured the Sack Man during her shift at the Nightlight Inn; and now Quincy, who ran bleeding through the woods to escape the massacre at Pine Cottage. Despite the media’s attempts, the three girls have never met.

Now, Quincy is doing well – maybe even great, thanks to her Xanax prescription. She has a caring almost-fiancé; a popular baking blog; a beautiful apartment; and a therapeutic presence in Coop, the police officer who saved her life. Her mind won’t let her recall the events of that night; the past is in the past…until the first Final Girl is found dead in her bathtub and the second Final Girl appears on Quincy’s doorstep.

Blowing through Quincy’s life like a hurricane, Sam seems intent on making her relive the trauma of her ordeal. When disturbing details about Lisa’s death emerge, Quincy desperately tries to unravel Sam’s truths from her lies while evading both the police and bloodthirsty reporters. Quincy knows that in order to survive she has to remember what really happened at Pine Cottage.

Because the only thing worse than being a Final Girl is being a dead one.

The Thorn and the Blossom: A Two-Sided Love Story by Theodora Goss

One enchanting romance. Two lovers keeping secrets. And a uniquely crafted book that binds their stories forever.

When Evelyn Morgan walked into the village bookstore, she didn’t know she would meet the love of her life. When Brendan Thorne handed her a medieval romance, he didn’t know it would change the course of his future. It was almost as if they were the cursed lovers in the old book itself . . .

The Thorn and the Blossom is a remarkable literary artifact: You can open the book in either direction to decide whether you’ll first read Brendan’s, or Evelyn’s account of the mysterious love affair. Choose a side, read it like a regular novel—and when you get to the end, you’ll find yourself at a whole new beginning.

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!

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