The Best Book Club Books of the Year, Part I

After taking a night time holiday lights tour in Boston, we were gifted gold-dusted hot chocolate bombs. It was some of the best hot chocolate I’ve had, and I’m hoping I can find a recipe to replicate it. Mashed promises that this recipe only takes 20 minutes, so I’m hoping it’s a match.

When Joan was 10, her mother moved her and her younger sister away from her violent father. They went back to her grandmother’s house in Memphis, a house that was built by Joan’s grandfather who was lynched shortly after becoming a detective in Memphis. There’s a history of violence surrounding Joan’s family, which is explored in this multi-generational novel. The narrative shifts back and forth through 70 years to show the trials of Joan’s matrilineal family, and how she tries to express this generational trauma through art.

This book starts in the 1600s with a discovery made by Robert Hooke and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. What they saw when they looked in their microscopes would go on to be called “cells,” the idea of which would change the field of science forever. By looking at living organisms as being comprised of tiny, self-contained cells, we’ve been able to understand human bodies and come up with advanced treatments. Pulitzer Prize-winning Mukherjee writes of complex science terms clearly and in an engaging way as he details this turning point in biology.

Kiara and her brother Marcus have dropped out of high school and their family has been torn a part by tragedy, so she works to take care of them and the nine-year-old boy next door who was abandoned by his parents. When she discovers the dark world of night crawling as a way to make money, she jumps at what seems to her like a good opportunity. But with it comes involvement in a huge scandal involving the Oakland Police Department.

In 1912, an exiled 18-year-old enters the Canadian wilderness and hears a violin being played. A couple hundred years later, an author goes on tour to promote a book that has a strange passage about a man playing a violin as a forest rises around him. Then there’s the detective who is sent to investigate something strange happening in the North American wilderness involving an exiled earl driven to madness and a writer away from home…Metaphysics, time travel, and a particular set of violin notes all converge in this imaginative novel.