Riot Reads!

For January, we’ll read James by Percival Everett! This is a Pulitzer Prize-winning retelling of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim.

James:
The Mississippi River, 1861. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a new owner in New Orleans and separated from his wife and daughter forever, he flees to nearby Jackson’s Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father who recently returned to town.

So begins a dangerous and transcendent journey along the Mississippi River, towards the elusive promise of the free states and beyond. As James and Huck navigate the treacherous waters, each bend in the river holds the promise of both salvation and demise. And together, the unlikely pair embark on the most life-changing odyssey of them all . . .

Masks welcome but not mandatory.

***

From our host, Indy Reads:

If you would like to own a copy of the book and support Indy Reads' English literacy students, you can purchase a copy here:
https://bookshop.org/p/books/james-pulitzer-prize-winner-a-novel-percival-everett/fce7471c153c9b3c?ean=9780385550369&next=t

Join the Indy Reads Literacy League and receive one FREE used book each month! For a monthly payment of $5 (or more!), you can unlock a brighter future for their students AND find your next read. You'll also receive your name on their Literacy League board at Indy Reads in Fountain Square.
Sign up here: indyreads.org/league

For February, we’ll read Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabreille Zevin! If you're planning on loaning the book from the library, you should place a hold early because there tends to be a wait.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow:
On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn’t heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom.

These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won’t protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.

Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love.

Masks welcome but not mandatory.

***

From our host, Indy Reads:

If you would like to own a copy of the book and support Indy Reads' English literacy students, you can purchase a copy here:
https://bookshop.org/p/books/tomorrow-and-tomorrow-and-tomorrow-gabrielle-zevin/2338d0ae999f188c?ean=9780593466490&next=t

Join the Indy Reads Literacy League and receive one FREE used book each month! For a monthly payment of $5 (or more!), you can unlock a brighter future for their students AND find your next read. You'll also receive your name on their Literacy League board at Indy Reads in Fountain Square.
Sign up here: indyreads.org/league

For March, we’ll read Bunny by Mona Awad! If you're planning on loaning the book from the library, you should place a hold early because there tends to be a wait.

Bunny:
Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more different from the other members of her master's program at New England's elite Warren University. A self-conscious scholarship student who prefers the company of her imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort—a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other "Bunny," and are often found entangled in a group hug so tight it seems their bodies might become permanently fused.

But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies' exclusive monthly "Smut Salon," and finds herself drawn as if by magic to their front door—ditching her only friend, Ava, an audacious art school dropout, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into Bunny world, and starts to take part in the off-campus "Workshop" where they devise their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur, and her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies are brought into deadly collision.

A spellbinding, down-the-rabbit-hole tale about loneliness and belonging, creativity and agency, and female friendship and desire, Bunny is the dazzlingly original second book from an author with tremendous "insight into the often-baffling complexities of being a woman" (The Atlantic).

Masks welcome but not mandatory.

***

From our host, Indy Reads:

If you would like to own a copy of the book and support Indy Reads' English literacy students, you can purchase a copy here:
https://bookshop.org/p/books/bunny-a-novel-mona-awad/fe202d272fb07e0e?ean=9780525559757&next=t

Join the Indy Reads Literacy League and receive one FREE used book each month! For a monthly payment of $5 (or more!), you can unlock a brighter future for their students AND find your next read. You'll also receive your name on their Literacy League board at Indy Reads in Fountain Square.
Sign up here: indyreads.org/league