BOOK DISCUSSION DATE AND TIME: MONDAY, MARCH 14, 2016, AT 1:00 P.M.
In a poor, midcentury Italian neighborhood, two girls, Elena and Lila,
exhibit remarkable intelligence early in school, at a time when money is
scarce and education a privilege, especially for girls. Through the lives of these two friends, Ferrante tells the story of a neighborhood, a city and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between her two protagonists.
BOOK DISCUSSION DATE AND TIME: MONDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 2016, AT 1:00 P.M.
Spare and unsparing, God Help the Child is a searing tale about the way
childhood trauma shapes and misshapes the life of the adult. At the
center: a woman who calls herself Bride, whose stunning blue-black skin
is only one element of her beauty, her boldness and confidence, her
success in life; but which caused her light-skinned mother to deny her
even the simplest forms of love until she told a lie that ruined the
life of an innocent woman, a lie whose reverberations refuse to diminish
. . . Booker, the man Bride loves and loses, whose core of anger was
born in the wake of the childhood murder of his beloved brother . . .
Rain, the mysterious white child, who finds in Bride the only person she
can talk to about the abuse she's suffered at the hands of her
prostitute mother . . . and Sweetness, Bride's mother, who takes a
lifetime to understand that "what you do to children matters. And they
might never forget."
