January Book Club: "Don't Know Much About the Presidents" AND "Vinnie and Abraham"

Our January book club meeting will be on Thursday, January 7, 7-8 pm. We are reading TWO books for January: "Don't Know Much About the Presidents" by Kenneth Davis and "Vinnie and Abraham" by Dawn FitzGerald. The later is a picture book written for juvenile readers and we will read this together at our meeting. Both books are about Presidents of the United States. The Davis book is a highly readable collection of amazing facts and little known trivia about each of the U.S. Presidents from George Washington to Barack Obama. The FitzGerald book tells the story of Vinnie Ream, a sixteen-year-old young women with an awesome talent for sculpture. She became the youngest artist to be commissioned to sculpt a statue of a U.S. president. Her sculpture of Abraham Lincoln is still displayed in the Capitol rotunda today.

December Book Club: Because of Winn Dixie

Each year in December our book club reads a book that has also been made into a movie. It's fun for the kids to compare the book to the movie, note how the script was changed and adapted, and decide which they like best. This year we read "Because of Winn Dixie" by Kate DiCamillo. This book was a 2001 Newbery Honor winner. It is a lovely story about 10-year-old Opal, her preacher father, and the small Florida town of Naomi. Winn-Dixie is a mottley stray dog that Opal rescues from a wild escapade through the Winn-Dixie grocery story (hence the dog's name!) and talks her father into letting her keep him. Winn-Dixie quickly becomes Opal's best friend and confidante. He is better at making friends than any human and soon Opal has cast of unlikely new friends--Miss Franny Block, the town librarian, Gloria Dump, an elderly and nearly blind woman, and Otis, an ex-con who runs a pet shop and has a magically ability to calm the animals with his guitar playing. Opal's new friends help her cope with lonliness, feelings of abandonment (her mother has left) and her father's tendency to close up his emotions. In turn, Opal and Winn-Dixie bless the lives of everyone they come in contact with because of their irrepressible joy and acceptance. The movie is a delightful adaptaton of the book and really brings the characters of the book to life. We all enjoyed this year's book/movie connection.