All Booked Up

Windsor Library's Newsletter for Readers

May 2023

Are you a book enthusiast? Do you want to know what the next best book to read is? Are you part of a book club and are looking for the next title to discuss? Join the Windsor Public Library in our Meeting Room 1 for a Book Buzz Event to discuss books and reading on Monday, May 15 from 7:00 to 8:30 PM. Registration Required. Free. 860-285-1918. Sponsored by the Windsor Library Association.

"But behind all your stories is your mother’s story, for hers is where yours begins". Mitch Albom, For One More Day

Book Club Corner

Untamed by Glennon Doyle

Soulful and uproarious, forceful and tender, Untamed is both an intimate memoir and a galvanizing wake-up call. It is the story of how one woman learned that a responsible mother is not one who slowly dies for her children, but one who shows them how to fully live. It is the story of navigating divorce, forming a new blended family, and discovering that the brokenness or wholeness of a family depends not on its structure but on each member’s ability to bring her full self to the table. And it is the story of how each of us can begin to trust ourselves enough to set boundaries, make peace with our bodies, honor our anger and heartbreak, and unleash our truest, wildest instincts so that we become women who can finally look at ourselves and say: There She Is.

Listen Up (Audiobook recommendation)

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gaily Honeyman

Narrated by Cathleen McCarron

Length: 11 hours

A socially awkward, routine-oriented loner teams up with a bumbling IT guy from her office to assist an elderly accident victim, forging a friendship that saves all three from lives of isolation and secret unhappiness. A Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick.

Spotlight: Be Glad She Was Not Your Mother

The Other Mother by Carol Goodman

Mood Disorder plays a central role in this story, where a new mother becomes convinced she is a risk to her infant daughter. Daphne Marist runs away from her life and her husband, when he threatens to take their baby Chloe away claiming she’s an unfit mother. Working up in the Catskills under an assumed name, Daphne tries to figure out what happened to her life. These puzzle pieces include an attempted overdose she doesn’t remember, a wet baby blanket, and her obsessive friendship with fellow new mother Laurel. Besides working out her past and trying to care for her baby, Daphne also works to resist an unravelling mystery at the local mental asylum.

God Help the Child by Toni Morrison

Disappointment mixed with a sort of revulsion is what overtakes Sweetness, a light-skinned black woman who gives birth to a “blue-black” baby in Toni Morrison’s novel. Sweetness hates her daughter Bride’s dark skin and Bride grows up without any love or tenderness; Sweetness won’t even touch her baby’s skin without a cloth or sponge. In the end, it’s Sweetness’s cruelty that impacts Bride’s life, far more than the color of her skin.

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Steinbeck doesn’t beat around the bush when it comes to Cathy Ames, introducing her as “a malformed soul.” Motherhood hardly reforms the former prostitute who killed her parents by setting fire to their house. After seducing both Trask brothers (thus leaving the parentage of her twins open to question), Cathy abandons her children. That’s not the worst fate, as it frees them from a woman who proceeds to murder her husband and run a brothel that’s involved in all kinds of drugs and violence. In Steinbeck’s nod to parable, Cathy is meant to evoke “Eve” and the introduction of sin into the world; he also set the bar for bad mothering extremely, and almost reassuringly, high.