By Karon Winzenz

Karon Winzenz has offered to be the UU Book Group liaison/communicator (winzenzk@msn.com). Please note that the time for all future meetings is 1:30.

In January we will be discussing The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Amiee Bender, a novel centering on Rose, who, on the eve of her ninth birthday, eats a slice of homemade lemon cake and tastes the profound despair of her outwardly cheerful, can-do mother. The child discovers she has the gift – or curse – of tasting emotions in food. Readers are also privy to the inner feelings, desires, and secrets of the other characters. “Through Rose’s new awareness, the author explores the relationship between knowledge and love, and how well we can ever really know even those people closest to us.” (excerpted from review by Dallas Woodburn in the Sycamore Review).

In February we will discuss The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry about a woman (now 100 years old) wrongly committed to an insane asylum fifty years earlier by a Catholic clergyman who deemed her licentious–thus a threat to society–and took away her illegitimate newborn child for adoption. She decides to write an autobiography which she keeps hidden. The counter narrative is in the daily journal of the current chief psychiatrist of the hospital who is concerned about his elderly patient. “Both Roseanne and her doctor have differing stories about her incarceration and her early life, but what is consistent in both narratives is that Roseanne fell victim to the religious and political upheavals in Ireland in the 1920s – 1930s.” (from Wikipedia).