The Pocono Book Club

🧠 Our first non-fiction selection of the year, and one that has induced accolades far & wide! Our group has enjoyed memoirs, true crime, and historical development books, and this one follows American medical science and psychology through one "picture-perfect" mid-century American family. 🧠

A United States air force officer, his wife, and their 12(!!) children (10 sons & 2 daughters), are spotlighted for their initial and continued assistance in a number of scientific sub-fields we all benefit from today. A tv docuseries (available for streaming) has been adapted about the Galvin family. Almost 160,000 reviewers have given this title a 4.2/5-star rating on Goodreads and Amazon. Sure to induce lively conversation, let's explore some history that has occurred within our own lifetimes!

From Goodreads:

The heartrending story of a midcentury American family with twelve children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science's great hope in the quest to understand the disease.

Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don's work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their twelve children perfectly spanned the baby boom: the oldest born in 1945, the youngest in 1965. In those years, there was an established script for a family like the Galvins—aspiration, hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmony—and they worked hard to play their parts. But behind the scenes was a different story: psychological breakdown, sudden shocking violence, hidden abuse. By the mid-1970s, six of the ten Galvin boys, one after another, were diagnosed as schizophrenic. How could all this happen to one family?

What took place inside the house on Hidden Valley Road was so extraordinary that the Galvins became one of the first families to be studied by the National Institute of Mental Health. Their story offers a shadow history of the science of schizophrenia, from the era of institutionalization, lobotomy, and the schizophrenogenic mother to the search for genetic markers for the disease, always amid profound disagreements about the nature of the illness itself. And unbeknownst to the Galvins, samples of their DNA informed decades of genetic research that continues today, offering paths to treatment, prediction, and even eradication of the disease for future generations.

With clarity and compassion, bestselling and award-winning author Robert Kolker uncovers one family's unforgettable legacy of suffering, love, and hope.

🐎 This month we're heading to the borderland between Texas and Mexico. Winning several book awards after its 1992 publication, this title is arguably considered the best introduction to the praised yet controversial author's oeuvre, who is regularly hailed as one of the US's important modern authors (possibly the most important, according to the preeminent literary critic and Yale University professor Harold Bloom). 🐎

Not quite a western, not quite a thriller, but wholly a critique of the American social landscape, it's a coming-of-age tale for two boys set in 1949-50. If you wind up enjoying this novel, it's the first installment of the highly-acclaimed Border Trilogy.

From Goodreads:

The national bestseller and the first volume in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, All the Pretty Horses is the tale of John Grady Cole, who at sixteen finds himself at the end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself. With two companions, he sets off for Mexico on a sometimes idyllic, sometimes comic journey to a place where dreams are paid for in blood. Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction.

☀️ We're reading a lighter-toned book this month as Summer rolls up on us. It's also one of our shorter selections, coming in at around 165 pages. This is our book club's second selection by Anne Tyler, and hopefully receives as satisfied a reception by us as the first one did years ago. Some humor, some joy, some heartbreak, all centered around a family's June wedding. Some pre-beach reading awaits! ☀️

From Goodreads:

A new Anne Tyler novel destined to be an instant classic: a socially awkward mother of the bride navigates the days before and after her daughter's wedding.

Gail Baines is having a bad day. To start, she loses her job—or quits, depending on whom you ask. Tomorrow her daughter, Debbie, is getting married, and she hasn’t even been invited to the spa day organized by the mother of the groom. Then, Gail’s ex-husband, Max, arrives unannounced on her doorstep, carrying a cat, without a place to stay, and without even a suit.

But the true crisis lands when Debbie shares with her parents a secret she has just learned about her husband to be. It will not only throw the wedding into question but also stir up Gail and Max’s past.

Told with deep sensitivity and a tart sense of humor, full of the joys and heartbreaks of love and marriage and family life, Three Days in June is a triumph, and gives us the perennially bestselling, Pulitzer Prize–winning writer at the height of her powers

🖼️ This month we're going with a coastal summer story by a tried-&-true author appreciated by our club. This longer novel will be the third of his that we're reading together. As is typical of Backman, his latest work rocketed up the best-seller lists and has garnered a whopping 4.4/5-star rating on Goodreads with 265,000 readers and counting. This might turn out to be a great beach read for you as you dig your toes in the sand and take in the saltwater air! Especially if you're an art lover. 🖼️

From Goodreads:

#1 New York Times bestselling author Fredrik Backman returns with an unforgettably funny, deeply moving tale of four teenagers whose friendship creates a bond so powerful that it changes a complete stranger’s life twenty-five years later.

Most people don’t even notice them—three tiny figures sitting at the end of a long pier in the corner of one of the most famous paintings in the world. Most people think it’s just a depiction of the sea. But Louisa, an aspiring artist herself, knows otherwise, and she is determined to find out the story of these three enigmatic figures.

Twenty-five years earlier, in a distant seaside town, a group of teenagers find refuge from their bruising home lives by spending long summer days on an abandoned pier, telling silly jokes, sharing secrets, and committing small acts of rebellion. These lost souls find in each other a reason to get up each morning, a reason to dream, a reason to love.

Out of that summer emerges a transcendent work of art, a painting that will unexpectedly be placed into eighteen-year-old Louisa’s care. She embarks on a surprise-filled cross-country journey to learn how the painting came to be and to decide what to do with it. The closer she gets to the painting’s birthplace, the more nervous she becomes about what she’ll find. Louisa is proof that happy endings don’t always take the form we expect in this stunning testament to the transformative, timeless power of friendship and art.