Tag Archives: Book Club

New Book in our Online Book Club: The Hundred-Foot Journey by Richard C. Morais


Welcome all book lovers to our Online Book Club

Today at Find The Treasure, our Online Book club, we have started reading a new book, The Hundred Foot Journey by Richard C. Morais. This book will soon be coming out in a movie starring, Helen Mirren. On the surface, the story is about a restaurant, however underneath it is about life and relationships.

To Join our discussion, please click on the page tab on the right. Find the Treasure – Online Book Forum, and then click on “The Hundred Foot Journey”

We hope you join us and we look forward to hearing all your comments and feedback.

Book details as outlined on Amazon.com

“Soon to be a major motion picture starring Helen Mirren and Om Puri, directed by Lasse Hallstrom, and produced by Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg, Juliet Blake, DreamWorks Studios, and Participant Media.

“That skinny Indian teenager has that mysterious something that comes along once a generation. He is one of those rare chefs who is simply born. He is an artist.”

And so begins the rise of Hassan Haji, the unlikely gourmand who recounts his life’s journey in Richard Morais’s charming novel, The Hundred-Foot Journey. Lively and brimming with the colors, flavors, and scents of the kitchen, The Hundred-Foot Journey is a succulent treat about family, nationality, and the mysteries of good taste.

Born above his grandfather’s modest restaurant in Mumbai, Hassan first experienced life through intoxicating whiffs of spicy fish curry, trips to the local markets, and gourmet outings with his mother. But when tragedy pushes the family out of India, they console themselves by eating their way around the world, eventually settling in Lumière, a small village in the French Alps.

The boisterous Haji family takes Lumière by storm. They open an inexpensive Indian restaurant opposite an esteemed French relais—that of the famous chef Madame Mallory—and infuse the sleepy town with the spices of India, transforming the lives of its eccentric villagers and infuriating their celebrated neighbor. Only after Madame Mallory wages culinary war with the immigrant family, does she finally agree to mentor young Hassan, leading him to Paris, the launch of his own restaurant, and a slew of new adventures.

The Hundred-Foot Journey is about how the hundred-foot distance between a new Indian kitchen and a traditional French one can represent the gulf between different cultures and desires. A testament to the inevitability of destiny, this is a fable for the ages—charming, endearing, and compulsively readable.”

The Invention of Wings is the next book in the Online Book Club


The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd is the next book in our Online Book Club. We are reading this book from February 22 until March 31. This should be a great book, because it is by the same author who brought us The Secret Lives of Bees and it is a story about two incredible women.  This looks to be an uplifting story, and if it is anything like The Secret Lives of Bees.

To join us in reading this book, or to share your thoughts on the book club, click on this link https://books-treasureortrash.com/find-the-treasure/

“A remarkable novel that heightened my sense of what it meant to be a woman – slave or free. . .will resonate with anyone who has ever struggled to find her power and her voice. . .Sue Monk Kidd has written a conversation changer.  It is impossible to read this book and not come away thinking differently about our status as women and about all the unsung heroines who played a role in getting us to where we are.”—Oprah Winfrey, O The Oprah Magazine

This is a summary of the book from Sue Monk Kidd’s website:

The Invention of Wings

Overview

  • Published by Viking, January 7, 2014
  • Selected for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0
  • A New York Times #1 Bestseller

From the celebrated author of The Secret Life of Bees: a masterpiece of hope, daring, the quest for freedom, and the desire to have a voice in the world.

Hetty “Handful” Grimke, an urban slave in early nineteenth century Charleston, yearns for life beyond the suffocating walls that enclose her within the wealthy Grimke household. The Grimkes’ daughter, Sarah, has known from an early age she is meant to do something large in the world, but she is hemmed in by the limits imposed on women. Continue reading The Invention of Wings is the next book in the Online Book Club

The Signature of All Things is the next book in the Online Book Club


Welcome all book lovers to our Online Book Club

Today at Find The Treasure, our Online Book club, we start reading a new book, The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert. This historical fiction spans almost two centuries, through the age of enlightenment and into the industrial revolution. The story covers the adventures of one family. Henry is the founder, and he is also a successful and intelligent botanist who becomes wealthy. Alma is his daughter and she not only carries on the family tradition, but she also reaches far past it and in the process gets drawn into the realm of the mystical.

To Join our discussion, please click on the page tab on the right. Find the Treasure – Online Book Forum, and then click on “The Signature of All Things”

We hope you join us and we look forward to hearing all your comments and feedback.

Book details as outlined on Amazon.com

A glorious, sweeping novel of desire, ambition, and the thirst for knowledge, from the # 1 New York Times bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love and Committed

In The Signature of All Things, Elizabeth Gilbert returns to fiction, inserting her inimitable voice into an enthralling story of love, adventure and discovery. Spanning much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the novel follows the fortunes of the extraordinary Whittaker family as led by the enterprising Henry Whittaker—a poor-born Englishman who makes a great fortune in the South American quinine trade, eventually becoming the richest man in Philadelphia. Born in 1800, Henry’s brilliant daughter, Alma (who inherits both her father’s money and his mind), ultimately becomes a botanist of considerable gifts herself. As Alma’s research takes her deeper into the mysteries of evolution, she falls in love with a man named Ambrose Pike who makes incomparable paintings of orchids and who draws her in the exact opposite direction—into the realm of the spiritual, the divine, and the magical. Alma is a clear-minded scientist; Ambrose a utopian artist—but what unites this unlikely couple is a desperate need to understand the workings of this world and the mechanisms behind all life.

Exquisitely researched and told at a galloping pace, The Signature of All Things soars across the globe—from London to Peru to Philadelphia to Tahiti to Amsterdam, and beyond. Along the way, the story is peopled with unforgettable characters: missionaries, abolitionists, adventurers, astronomers, sea captains, geniuses, and the quite mad. But most memorable of all, it is the story of Alma Whittaker, who—born in the Age of Enlightenment, but living well into the Industrial Revolution—bears witness to that extraordinary moment in human history when all the old assumptions about science, religion, commerce, and class were exploding into dangerous new ideas. Written in the bold, questing spirit of that singular time, Gilbert’s wise, deep, and spellbinding tale is certain to capture the hearts and minds of readers.

 

The Outside Boy is the next book in the Online Book Club

Welcome all book lovers to our Online Book Club


Today at Find The Treasure, our Online Book club, we start reading a new book, The Outside Boy by Jeanine Cummins. The focus of our book club is on uplifting books and The Outside Boy seems to include an uplifting tale about young Irish gypsy  boy. While travelling, his Grandda dies and this starts him on the road to change and a search to find belonging. 

To Join our discussion, please click on the page tab on the right. Find the Treasure – Online Book Forum, and then click on “The Language of Flowers

or just click on this link Find the Treasure

We hope you join us and we look forward to hearing all your comments and feedback.

Editorial Reviews from Amazon.com

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Christy, nearly 12, is an Irish Traveller, a Pavee, a child of motion who, with his family, journeys restlessly from town to town, never staying in any place long enough to call it home. But when his beloved Grandda dies, family secrets begin to spill out, and things begin to change, perhaps irrevocably. Set in Ireland in 1959, Cummins’ first novel (she’s also the author of the memoir A Rip in Heaven, 2004) is a deeply moving and elegiac look at a vanishing culture. Told in Christy’s vernacular but often poetic first-person voice, The Outside Boy is gorgeously written and an implicit celebration of Irish storytelling. And it offers a convincing and evocative look at a way of life little known or understood by the many foreign to it. Though Cummins’ treatment of the Pavee may sometimes seem idealized, she is quick to acknowledge their occasional petty thefts and tradition of mooching. Her overriding, beautifully realized theme is larger than that, however: it is the universal desire to find a place where one belongs and people—whether one’s own family or as-yet-unknown others—whose presence provides essential comfort, contentment, and completion. –Michael Cart

The School of Essential Ingredients is the next book in the Online Book Club

Welcome all book lovers to our Online Book Club

 Today at Find The Treasure, our Online Book club, we start reading a new book, The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister. Our Focus is on uplifting books and The School of Essential Ingredients looks as though it will have some great tales about food, dreams and hope.

To Join our discussion, please click on the page tab on the right. Find the Treasure – Online Book Forum, and then click on “The School of Essential Ingredients

or just click on this link https://books-treasureortrash.com/find-the-treasure/?mingleforumaction=viewforum&f=5.0

We hope you join us and we look forward to hearing all your comments and feedback.

 

Editorial Reviews from Amazon

From Publishers Weekly

In this remarkable debut, Bauermeister creates a captivating world where the pleasures and particulars of sophisticated food come to mean much more than simple epicurean indulgence. Respected chef and restaurateur Lillian has spent much of her 30-something years in the kitchen, looking for meaning and satisfaction in evocative, delicious combinations of ingredients. Endeavoring to instill that love and know-how in others, Lillian holds a season of Monday evening cooking classes in her restaurant. The novel takes up the story of each of her students, navigating readers through the personal dramas, memories and musings stirred up as the characters handle, slice, chop, blend, smell and taste. Each student’s affecting story—painful transitions, difficult choices—is rendered in vivid prose and woven together with confidence. Delivering memorable story lines and characters while seducing the senses, Bauermeister’s tale of food and hope is certain to satisfy. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Online Book Club Starts Today

Welcome all,

Today we start our new online book club, Find The Treasure. Our focus is on uplifting books and our first book is Where We Belong by Emily Giffin

 

To join our discussion, please click on the page tab on the right: Find the Treasure – Online Book Forum, and then click on “Where We Belong”

 

The first line reads “I know what they say about secrets.” The little I know about this book revolves around secrets, and this first line really sums it up and grabs the readers interest.  I am anxious to keep reading, to find out what happens next, and to see where this story is going to end.

We hope you join us on this journey of discovery.

Here are some editorial reviews as posted in Amazon

Editorial Reviews

 “In another surefire hit, [Giffin] serves up pathos, humor, and one doozy of a twist.” —Entertainment Weekly

“Sharply drawn characters and finely honed sensibility add up to a story that’s as bittersweet as an August evening.” —Family Circle

“Book clubs will have a field day with this one. Thorny mother-daughter relationships and secrets we keep from loved ones burn up the pages.” —USA Today

“After five charming relationship-themed hits, Emily Giffin had a lot to live up to with WHERE WE BELONG. Luckily, the author executes with a thoughtful finesse that makes this easily her best work yet. [WHERE WE BELONG] is that special type of story that takes priority over getting to bed on time. And the payoff is well worth it.” —Boston Globe

“Emily Giffin ranks as a grand master. Over the course of five best-selling novels, she has traversed the slippery slopes of true love, lost love, marriage, motherhood, betrayal, forgiveness and redemption that have led her to be called ‘a modern-day Jane Austen.’ With Giffin’s use of humor, honesty, originality and, like Austen, a biting social commentary, this modern-day ‘woman’s novel’ sits easily on nightstands and in beach bags. Even Austen would find it hard to put down.” —Chicago Sun-Times

“Emily Giffin’s new novel about the legacy of adoption, WHERE WE BELONG, imagines what happens when an 18-year-old girl tracks down her birth mother…the latest in a string of provocative, imaginative novels that began in 2004 with SOMETHING BORROWED. All the characters [here] are on a journey to find ‘where we belong,’ and Giffin knits together their journeys with a masterly hand.” —Seattle Times

“Emily Giffin’s WHERE WE BELONG is a literary Rorschach test. The book, while thoroughly entertaining, will also prod readers to examine choices they’ve made in their lives. It will compel them to muse about things they’d like to do over, to do differently, to do better…[and] gracefully examines themes of identity, family and forgiveness.” —Miami Herald

“Emily Giffin has a wonderful way with words. [WHERE WE BELONG] is an emotionally powerful story that will ring true with women who have given a child away and with those who grew up wondering where they came from. Giffin may be working with a premise and plot that is fairly simple, but there’s nothing lightweight about the emotional turbulence she creates.” —Ft. Worth Star-Telegram

“[Giffin] shows that real love is messy but meaningful in this delicious, easygoing read.” —American Way

“[Giffin’s] novels present tough moral dilemmas all related to love. And her latest, WHERE WE BELONG, is no exception and perhaps her best yet…It’s a classic Giffin tale, nuanced and messy and utterly addictive, with fully fleshed-out characters who face morally ambiguous choices that aren’t resolved in neat bows.” —Austin American-Statesman

“A breezy, yet compelling read.” —Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Emily Giffin is back with another must-read summer novel!” —Harper’s Bazaar

“The next must-read book of the summer!” —Star

“WHERE WE BELONG is too suspenseful to be called chick lit and too relationship-centered to be labeled a thriller. But most readers will have little time to think of a genre for Emily Giffin’s latest novel as they race through this gripping story about the reunion of a high school senior and the woman who put her up for adoption 18 years earlier.” —Connecticut Post

“Giffin has a way of tugging on our heartstrings while still making us laugh out loud…[a] perfect recipe.” —Woman’s World

“Graceful and inviting prose, careful plotting and vivid characterizations…The coming together of two people who share a genetic heritage and little else is dramatically and emotionally risky. But Giffin makes the most of the opportunity, and WHERE WE BELONG had me riveted.” —Winston-Salem Journal

“The issue about secrets isn’t about keeping them. It’s the reveal and its consequences. That’s the challenge faced by the characters in Emily Giffin’s new, briskly paced…WHERE WE BELONG. Taking a somewhat more somber tone than she did in her [previous] bestselling novels, Giffin’s approach and style mature in this latest effort.” —Philadelphia Inquirer

“Breezy and fun, this is definitely one for the beach bag!” —All You magazine

“Giffin’s latest will make you shed a few tears – and call your mom.” —Ladies Home Journal

“You’re sure to spy lots of pale-orange book covers at the beach this summer, as Emily Giffin releases her latest in a series of successful reads. The book has heart, meat and realistic characters.” —am New York

“[WHERE WE BELONG] delivers the readable, addicting prose we have all come to love [but] delves deeper than ever before, showing that the author is capable of making her signature style work with topics beyond typical relationships. Through Marian, her daughter and the rest of those affected by Marian’s decisions, the author beautifully tackles the complex issues of sex, abortion, adoption and the difficult decisions that go along with each.” —Woodbury magazine

“A satisfying and entertaining read. Giffin is a gifted storyteller [and] writes smart, snappy prose that elevates this novel.” —Vancouver Sun

Believable characters, [a] page-turning plot and [an] unblinking look at the choices we make as women.” —WeightWatchers magazine

To Purchase: “Where We Belong” from Amazon, click here or on picture above