Andrew Bayne Memorial Library

Join us for book discussion, April 11, 2023 at 10:30 a.m. when we discuss Room by Emma Donoghue

Held captive for years in a small shed, a woman and her precocious young son finally gain their freedom, and the boy experiences the outside world for the first time.

To five-year-old-Jack, Room is the world. It’s where he was born, it’s where he and his Ma eat and sleep and play and learn. At night, his Ma shuts him safely in the wardrobe, where he is meant to be asleep when Old Nick visits.

Room is home to Jack, but to Ma it’s the prison where she has been held for seven years. Through her fierce love for her son, she has created a life for him in this eleven-by-eleven-foot space. But with Jack’s curiosity building alongside her own desperation, she knows that Room cannot contain either much longer.

Stop by the Library to pick up a copy today!

Join us 3/28/23 at 10:30 a.m. when we discuss North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

Having grown up in London and rural southern England, Margaret Hale moves with her father to the northern industrial city of Milton. She is shocked by the poverty she encounters and dismayed by the unsympathetic attitude of the textile-mill owner John Thornton, whose factory workers are engaged in an acrimonious strike. Against this backdrop of social unrest, the relationship between the two is tumultuous, and it takes further upheaval and tragedy for them to see each other in a different light. First serialized in Dickens’s magazine Household Words in the same period as Hard Times, North and South shares its famous counterpart’s concern with the inequality and hardship generated by the Industrial Revolution in northern England, while at the same time creating one of the nineteenth century’s most memorable and engaging female protagonists in Margaret Hale.