Full booklist

The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein: Enzo knows he is different from other dogs: a philosopher with a nearly human soul (and an obsession with opposable thumbs), he has educated himself by watching television extensively, and by listening very closely to the words of his master, Denny Swift, an up-and-coming race car driver.

Set on a Louisiana sugarcane plantation in the 1970s, A Gathering of Old Men is a powerful depiction of racial tensions arising over the death of a Cajun farmer at the hands of a black man. 

"Poignant, powerful, earthy...a novel of Southern racial confrontation in which a group of elderly black men band together against whites who seek vengeance for the murder of one of their own."--Booklist

"A fine novel...there is a denouement that will shock and move readers as much as it does the characters."--Philadelphia Inquirer

Note: This meeting is the first of two sessions.

In this charming departure for Lamb (The Hour I First Believed), feisty fifth grader Felix Funicello (yes, distant cousin to Annette) anticipates Christmas. It's 1964 in blue-collar Connecticut, and Felix worries that he's caused Sister Dymphna's mental breakdown. When the school's Christmas pageant rolls around, the school brown-noser and the new Russian girl duke it out over who gets to play Mary. Full of pop-culture references of the day (the Beatles, for example, as well as the Queen Mouseketeer), this will have broad appeal.

In 1894 Carrie McGavock is an old woman, an old woman who has only her former slave to keep her companyalong with the almost 1,500 soldiers buried in her backyard. Years ago, rather than let someone plow over the field where these young men had been buried, Carrie dug them up and buried them in her own personal cemetery. Now, as she walks the rows of the dead, an old soldier appears. It is the man she met that day of the battle that changed everything.

A New York Times bestseller. Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is brutally arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel' d'Hiv' roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family's apartment, thinking that she will be back within a few hours.

It was splashed across every newspaper in 1999: a woman doctor in Antarctica finds a lump in her breast and after performing her own biopsy realizes that she has a particularly aggressive form of cancer. But no planes can land during the long winter months, and she must administer her own chemotherapy. That woman was Nielsen, and this is her story of her battle with cancer and the extreme conditions of the South Pole. Alone and scared, Nielsen describes the feelings that washed over her that long winter.