Santa Fe 20s-40s Ladies Book Club

Let’s meet up at Beastly Books for a free Valentine crafting party at the bookstore. Supplies are provided but they encourage you to bring extras to use/share! M

The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters' storylines intersect?

Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person's decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.

Environmental degradation is measured in numbers but felt in human loss. Please join us for a discussion of the insidious, often surprising ways in which industrial pollution has affected our lives, featuring three authors whose work is increasingly relevant as environmental protections and regulations are dismantled at an alarming rate. Pulitzer Prize–winning author Caroline Fraser grew up in the Pacific Northwest during Ted Bundy’s horrifying killing spree in the region. In Murderland, she examines how the increased incidence of serial killings in the 1970s and 1980s coincided with a rise in toxic emissions from smelters across the country. Were the two connected? In They Poisoned the World, investigative journalist Mariah Blake reveals the chemical industry’s decades-long cover-up of the dangers of forever chemicals and how one New York town was profoundly affected. The conversation will be led by Laura Paskus, author of At the Precipice and producer and host of the New Mexico PBS series Our Land: New Mexico’s Environmental Past, Present and Future.