Interrobang?! Co-ed Book Club

April 28, 2024 - The Tiger's Wife, by Téa Obreht

Topics: Literary Fiction, Magical Realism, Folk tales, WWII, Historical Fiction

General overview of a meeting
Our meetings start with an icebreaker question and a chance for each person to introduce themselves. We then move to rating the book with a thumbs up/down/sideways. We spend most of the meeting discussing the book, including strong opinions, questioning why the author made the choices they did, personal reactions to the story and characters, and wondering how it could have been improved. We end each meeting by giving everyone the opportunity to propose a book for the next meeting, and voting on the choices.

You don't need to finish reading the whole book to come to the meeting! However, if you haven't finished the book, please be OK with hearing spoilers.

Description of the Book
In a Balkan country mending from years of conflict, Natalia, a young doctor, arrives on a mission of mercy at an orphanage by the sea. By the time she and her lifelong friend Zóra begin to inoculate the children there, she feels age-old superstitions and secrets gathering everywhere around her. Secrets her outwardly cheerful hosts have chosen not to tell her. Secrets involving the strange family digging for something in the surrounding vineyards. Secrets hidden in the landscape itself.

But Natalia is also confronting a private, hurtful mystery of her own: the inexplicable circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather’s recent death. After telling her grandmother that he was on his way to meet Natalia, he instead set off for a ramshackle settlement none of their family had ever heard of and died there alone. A famed physician, her grandfather must have known that he was too ill to travel. Why he left home becomes a riddle Natalia is compelled to unravel.

Grief struck and searching for clues to her grandfather’s final state of mind, she turns to the stories he told her when she was a child. On their weekly trips to the zoo he would read to her from a worn copy of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, which he carried with him everywhere; later, he told her stories of his own encounters over many years with “the deathless man,” a vagabond who claimed to be immortal and appeared never to age. But the most extraordinary story of all is the one her grandfather never told her, the one Natalia must discover for herself. One winter during the Second World War, his childhood village was snowbound, cut off even from the encroaching German invaders but haunted by another, fierce presence: a tiger who comes ever closer under cover of darkness. “These stories,” Natalia comes to understand, “run like secret rivers through all the other stories” of her grandfather’s life. And it is ultimately within these rich, luminous narratives that she will find the answer she is looking for.

Welcome to Interrobang?! Book Club’s Decolonize Your Bookshelf Summer series! The goal of this series is to introduce people to new authors and books that you might not see on Booktok or on common reading lists. We will focus on works by and about people in non-US/UK countries, and from non-white perspectives. This includes books from Indigenous, formerly enslaved, and displaced or immigrant peoples.

Given the goals of our series, some of the books might be a little hard to find! So we are posting the whole series now to give you plenty of time to track down the books from your library or local bookstore.

The series will take place the 2nd Tuesday of each month at Taplands Bar in Santa Clara.

May - Ghana - His Only Wife, by Peace Adzo Medie
June - Jamaica - Black Leopard, Red Wolf, by Marlon James
July - Indonesia - Fall Baby, by Laksmi Pamuntjak
August - Sudan/Australia - Hopeless Kingdom, by Kgshak Akec
***If there is enough demand we will expand to September with Island of a Thousand Mirrors, by Nayomi Munaweera, from Sri Lanka.

General Overview of a Meeting
Our meetings start with an icebreaker question and a chance for each person to introduce themselves. We then move to rating the book with a thumbs up/down/sideways. We spend most of the meeting discussing the book, including strong opinions, questioning why the author made the choices they did, personal reactions to the story and characters, and wondering how it could have been improved.

You don't need to finish reading the whole book to come to the meeting! However, if you haven't finished the book, please be OK with hearing spoilers.

About the Book - His Only Wife, by Peace Adzo Medie
Afi Tekple is a young seamstress whose life is narrowing rapidly. She lives in a small town in Ghana with her widowed mother, spending much of her time in her uncle Pious’s house with his many wives and children. Then one day she is offered a life-changing opportunity—a proposal of marriage from the wealthy family of Elikem Ganyo, a man she doesn’t truly know. She acquiesces, but soon realizes that Elikem is not quite the catch he seemed. He sends a stand-in to his own wedding, and only weeks after Afi is married and installed in a plush apartment in the capital city of Accra does she meet her new husband. It turns out that he is in love with another woman, whom his family disapproves of; Afi is supposed to win him back on their behalf. But it is Accra that eventually wins Afi’s heart and gives her a life of independence that she never could have imagined for herself.

A brilliant scholar and a fierce advocate for women’s rights, author Peace Adzo Medie infuses her debut novel with intelligence and humor. For readers of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Candice Carty-Williams, His Only Wife is the story of an indomitable and relatable heroine that illuminates what it means to be a woman in a rapidly changing world.

May 26, 2024 - Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries, by Heather Fawcett

Topics: Fantasy, Romance, Cozy, Fairy Tales, Dark Fairy Tales

General overview of a meeting
Our meetings start with an icebreaker question and a chance for each person to introduce themselves. We then move to rating the book with a thumbs up/down/sideways. We spend most of the meeting discussing the book, including strong opinions, questioning why the author made the choices they did, personal reactions to the story and characters, and wondering how it could have been improved. We end each meeting by giving everyone the opportunity to propose a book for the next meeting, and voting on the choices.

You don't need to finish reading the whole book to come to the meeting! However, if you haven't finished the book, please be OK with hearing spoilers.

Description of the Book
A curmudgeonly professor journeys to a small town in the far north to study faerie folklore and discovers dark fae magic, friendship, and love in the start of a heartwarming and enchanting new fantasy series.

Cambridge professor Emily Wilde is good at many things: She is the foremost expert on the study of faeries. She is a genius scholar and a meticulous researcher who is writing the world's first encyclopaedia of faerie lore. But Emily Wilde is not good at people. She could never make small talk at a party--or even get invited to one. And she prefers the company of her books, her dog, and the Fair Folk.

So when she arrives in the hardscrabble village of Hrafnsvik, Emily has no intention of befriending the gruff townsfolk. Nor does she care to spend time with another new arrival: her dashing and insufferably handsome academic rival Wendell Bambleby, who manages to charm the townsfolk, get in the middle of Emily's research, and utterly confound and frustrate her.

But as Emily gets closer and closer to uncovering the secrets of the Hidden Ones--the most elusive of all faeries--lurking in the shadowy forest outside the town, she also finds herself on the trail of another mystery: Who is Wendell Bambleby, and what does he really want? To find the answer, she'll have to unlock the greatest mystery of all--her own heart.

Welcome to Interrobang?! Book Club’s Decolonize Your Bookshelf Summer series! The goal of this series is to introduce people to new authors and books that you might not see on Booktok or on common reading lists. We will focus on works by and about people in non-US/UK countries, and from non-white perspectives. This includes books from Indigenous, formerly enslaved, and displaced or immigrant peoples.

Given the goals of our series, some of the books might be a little hard to find! So we are posting the whole series now to give you plenty of time to track down the books from your library or local bookstore.

The series will take place the 2nd Tuesday of each month at Taplands Bar in Santa Clara.

May - Ghana - His Only Wife, by Peace Adzo Medie
June - Jamaica - Black Leopard, Red Wolf, by Marlon James
July - Indonesia - Fall Baby, by Laksmi Pamuntjak
August - Sudan/Australia - Hopeless Kingdom, by Kgshak Akec
***If there is enough demand we will expand to September with Island of a Thousand Mirrors, by Nayomi Munaweera, from Sri Lanka.

General Overview of a Meeting
Our meetings start with an icebreaker question and a chance for each person to introduce themselves. We then move to rating the book with a thumbs up/down/sideways. We spend most of the meeting discussing the book, including strong opinions, questioning why the author made the choices they did, personal reactions to the story and characters, and wondering how it could have been improved.

You don't need to finish reading the whole book to come to the meeting! However, if you haven't finished the book, please be OK with hearing spoilers.

About the Book - Black Leopard, Red Wolf, by Marlon James
In the first novel in Marlon James's Dark Star trilogy, myth, fantasy, and history come together to explore what happens when a mercenary is hired to find a missing child.

Tracker is known far and wide for his skills as a hunter: "He has a nose," people say. Engaged to track down a mysterious boy who disappeared three years earlier, Tracker breaks his own rule of always working alone when he finds himself part of a group that comes together to search for the boy. The band is a hodgepodge, full of unusual characters with secrets of their own, including a shape-shifting man-animal known as Leopard.

Drawing from African history and mythology and his own rich imagination, Marlon James has written an adventure that's also an ambitious, involving read. Defying categorization and full of unforgettable characters, Black Leopard, Red Wolf explores the fundamentals of truths, the limits of power, the excesses of ambition, and our need to understand them all.