Book Clubs

I love talking to book clubs, face to face or using Google Meet or Zoom. Contact me if you want to schedule a book club book talk. 

I have discussion questions for Books One and Two, which you can download and use. I'm happy to sit in on a book club meeting and answer questions.

We had such fun discussing The Gift with one book club here at the Western Home Communities last summer. 

We had lunch at Gilmore's Pub and then went back to the Market, and gathered around a couple of tables, as shown below.

Images for Book One, The Gift

1) Gracie's basket. 

2) My mother, Charlotte, in California during WWII. 

3) Book Cover with two of the sisters--Grace has the camera with Violet beside her. 

4) My aunt Jeanne at 96 in 2021. She read my first draft & loved it. She is the inspiration for Aunt Violet while my mother is the inspiration for Grandma Grace. Both of them worked at Rohr's aircraft factory building planes for the war. Aunt Jeanne & Uncle Wendell drove their jalopy to California from Iowa; he was a trained mechanic. When she got pregnant, he wrote a letter to my mother, asking her to come out. So, she took the train to California and ended up staying there for several years. 

5) The iconic war poster, "We can do it!" for the Rosie the Riveters across the country who stepped up to "man" the factories and do a thousand other jobs once done by the men who were now fighting overseas.

Images for Book Two, The Legacy

1) My Rustic Rose quilt, dated 1860 & verified by a slip of paper safety pinned to the quilt identifying who made it.  Taken to the Grout Museum in Waterloo, Robin confirmed the date based on the pattern, dyes, etc. She said I had the provenance, or history, from my grandma's note.

2) Google Images -- I visualized this as Sarah, the young widow. She makes a promise to her sister, Emily, to take Rebecca and her son Bobby to freedom.

3) The book cover, generated by AI to get the two women posing together. The young Black woman is actually Queen Victoria's God-daughter.

4) Google Images -- I used this image as I wrote, representing Rebecca, Emily's nurse and a trained natural healer using herbs.

Coming Soon -- Book Three, The Promise

Images for Book Three, The Promise

1. Ruby Collins. 2. Mary and Anna Carlson. 3. Most recent draft of the book. 4. Sketch of the trenches in France. 5. Early gas station in Iowa.