MHC Club of Central & Northern Arizona Book Group (Phoenix, AZ)

The next meeting of the Mount Holyoke Club of Central & Northern Arizona book group will be on Tuesday, July 28, 2015 at 7 pm at Barbara Burkholder’s home in east-central Phoenix. Our group has selected All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (the 2015 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction) for our next reading. Please join us for an evening of interesting and lively discussion, and dessert.

Our book group meets about every 6 to 8 weeks to discuss a book we have all read. We also select the next book to read from suggestions by members of our book group. During the evening we have a chance to catch up with each other’s activities and interests and often have a lively discussion about other matters, often stemming from the book we may have just read or current events. We also encourage members of our book group to attend even if they have not finished reading the book – we realize many of us are busy and do not need added pressure about reading the entire book. This is intended to be an enjoyable social gathering for MHCers in the area. If you would like additional information, please contact Liz Roe, our club’s book group coordinator, at 480-363-8203 or by e-mail at:elizabethroe1@gmail.com. Also, please contact Liz Roe if you plan to attend or if you have any questions.

All the Light We Cannot See

“A novel to live in, learn from, and feel bereft over when the last page is turned.” — Booklist

“Tackling questions of survival, endurance and moral obligations during wartime, the book is as precise and artful and ingenious as the puzzle boxes the heroine’s locksmith father builds for her. Impressively, it is also a vastly entertaining feat of storytelling.” –New York Times Book Review

About the Book: Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When Marie-Laure is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris, and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great-uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.

In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge.