Contact: Sally Wainwright
617-328-6649
Meetings: first Tuesday of the month @ 7pm at
First Church of Squantum, Ladies Parlor, 164 Bellevue Road, Squantum

The Squantum Book Club is very informal and welcomes new members. The club is a wonderful opportunity to meet new people.  At the end of every meeting we discuss what we would like to read for the coming month.

November: Inside the O’Brien’s, Lisa Genova

This New York Times and USA Today bestseller from Lisa Genova is a powerful and transcendent new novel about a family struggling with the impact of Huntington’s disease.

Joe O’Brien is a forty-four-year-old police officer from the Irish Catholic neighborhood of Charlestown, Massachusetts. A devoted husband, proud father of four children in their twenties, and respected officer, Joe begins experiencing bouts of disorganized thinking, uncharacteristic temper outbursts, and strange, involuntary movements. He initially attributes these episodes to the stress of his job, but as these symptoms worsen, he agrees to see a neurologist and is handed a diagnosis that will change his and his family’s lives forever: Huntington’s Disease.

Huntington’s is a lethal neurodegenerative disease with no treatment and no cure. Each of Joe’s four children has a 50 percent chance of inheriting their father’s disease, and a simple blood test can reveal their genetic fate. While watching her potential future in her father’s escalating symptoms, twenty-one-year-old daughter Katie struggles with the questions this test imposes on her young adult life. Does she want to know? What if she’s gene positive? Can she live with the constant anxiety of not knowing?

As Joe’s symptoms worsen and he’s eventually stripped of his badge and more, Joe struggles to maintain hope and a sense of purpose, while Katie and her siblings must find the courage to either live a life “at risk” or learn their fate.

Praised for writing that “explores the resilience of the human spirit” (The San Francisco Chronicle), Lisa Genova has once again delivered a novel as powerful and unforgettable as the human insights at its core.

Read an excerpt from Inside The O’Briens

Books we’ve read include:
Boser, Ulrich, The Gardner Heist: The True Story of the World’s Largest Unsolved Art Theft
Brenner, Allan, Moloka’i
Brown, Dan, Inferno
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, The Great Gatsby
Follett, Ken, Winter of the World
Genova, Lisa, Love Anthony
Grisham, John, The Racketeer
Grisham, John, Sycamore Row
Hannah, Kristin, The Nightingle
Hillenbrand, Laura, Unbroken, A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption
Hoffman, Alice, The Dovekeepers
Junger, Sebastian, The Perfect Storm
McLain, Paula, The Paris Wife: A Novel
Moggach, Deborah, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
Patchett, Ann, State of Wonder
Sotomayor, Sonia, My Beloved World, an autobiography by Supreme Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor
Tartt, Donna, The Goldfinch
Zusak, Markus, The Book Thief