FBS BOOKCLUBS Is it Worth the Hype?: ELiza Sunshine
Featured Book
Eliza Sunshine
"From the award-winning and bestselling author of Five Little Indians: a powerful family saga following three generations of Cree women and the storytelling tradition that connects them to each other. Sometimes I feel that I wasn't born at all, rather sculpted and formed by the storms of my grandmother's life. When Eliza comes home from her first year at residential school, she is barely recognizable to her Nohkum, Swan. Once bright-eyed and curious, Eliza is now stick-thin and silent, with roughly shorn hair and dull, listless eyes. Gathering bag in hand, Swan gently leads Eliza on long walks through untouched prairie grasses, harvesting medicines, certain that the power of the land will heal her. And as they walk, she shares stories of her own suffering when her traditional ways of being and living collided with the greed and violence of encroaching settlers. For Eliza, Swan's journey offers a master class on how to face unspeakable adversity and remain true to herself. Decades later, Eliza and her daughter are at a crossroads. When Ella comes home from her first year at university wearing bell bottoms, braids and a beaded headband, Eliza is horrified. Eliza fought her whole life to be free of the oppression that comes with being Cree and she can't fathom why her daughter would choose to proclaim her heritage so proudly, disregarding the consequences. With a steaming mug of tea in hand, Eliza follows in her grandmother's footsteps, sharing with Ella the story of the adversities she faced in her own relentless pursuit of freedom. But Ella's idea of freedom isn't the same as Eliza's. And when tragedy strikes, Ella must decide how to build her life in the aftermath, navigating how best to keep the stories of her family alive when the world around her seems to want them buried along with the legions of the missing and the dead."--
About This Event
IS IT WORTH THE HYPE? In December we will be reading Eliza Sunshine by Michelle Good!
From the award-winning and bestselling author of Five Little Indians: a powerful family saga following three generations of Cree women and the storytelling tradition that connects them to each other. Join us at the Fountain Bookshop in Washington Heights for "Is It Worth the Hype?," Fountain Bookshop's book club focused on contemporary fiction. Created by FBS owner, Karah Rempe Pinto, we're reading new fiction releases and discussing what makes it hot or not!
About the Venue
The Fountain Bookshop
The Fountain Bookshop is an independent bookstore & soda shop located in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City. We are a general interest store, with a robust children's section, adult fiction and non-fiction titles, as well as genre fiction in sci-fi, fantasy, mystery/thriller and romance. We carry titles in English and Spanish.
Visit store pageMore at The Fountain Bookshop
STORYTIME at the Fountain Bookshop (English/Spanish)
STORY TIME at the Fountain Bookshop (English)
FBS BOOKCLUBS The Classics: O Pioneers!
Join us at the Fountain Bookshop in Washington Heights for The Classics! Created by FBS General Manager Hilary in celebration of the stories you've always wanted to read or re-read.DescriptionThe novel that first made Willa Cather famous—a powerfully mythic tale of the American frontier told through the life of one extraordinary woman One of America’s greatest writers, Cather established her talent and her reputation with this extraordinary novel—the first of her books set on the Nebraska frontier. A tale of the prairie land encountered by America’s Swedish, Czech, Bohemian, and French immigrants, as well as a story of how the land challenged them, changed them, and, in some cases, defeated them, Cather’s novel is a uniquely American epic.Alexandra Bergson, a young Swedish immigrant girl who inherits her father’s farm and must transform it from raw prairie into a prosperous enterprise, is the first of Cather’s great heroines—all of them women of strong will and an even stronger desire to overcome adversity and succeed. But the wild land itself is an equally important character in Cather’s books, and her descriptions of it are so evocative, lush, and moving that they provoked writer Rebecca West to say of her: “The most sensuous of writers, Willa Cather builds her imagined world almost as solidly as our five senses build the universe around us.”Willa Cather, perhaps more than any other American writer, was able to re-create the real drama of the pioneers, capturing for later generations a time, a place, and a spirit that has become part of our national heritage. About the AuthorWILLA CATHER, author of twelve novels, including O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and Death Comes for the Archbishop, was born in Virginia in 1873 but grew up in Nebraska, where many of her novels are set. She died in 1947 in New York City.