Upcoming Books:
April 17
Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You by Alice Munro
The Moons of Jupiter by Alice Munro
May 15
The Lowlands by Jhumpa Lahiri 

Award winning author and Book Club Extraordinaire member,  Carol Ferring Shepley introduces her new book Lori's Lessons: What Parkinson Teaches About Life and Love. 
The Goldfinch:
"Tartt's books submerge you for the duration until you emerge, blinking, in the sunlight at the end, wondering how the laundry pile got so big and just how many meals you might have missed," writes Yvonne Zipp in the  in the Oct. 17, 2013, Christian Science Monitor  review of The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. 

Read BExtraordinaire Blog for more reviews on our next book club selection. 

Author Bio:

American writer, Donna Tartt was born in 1964 in Mississippi. She published her first poem in a Mississippi literary journal by age 13. She attended the University of Mississippi and caught the attention of former editor of Harper’s Magazine during her freshman year in 1981. She later transferred to Bennington College in Vermont where she began her first novel, The Secret History published in 1992. Between novels, she wrote various essays for Harper’s magazine and ten long years later, she publishes her second novel The Little Friend, which received the W.H. Smith Literary Award in 2003 and was short-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her third book, The Goldfinch was published in 2013 and among the finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award She is influenced by the writings of Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling and Flannery O’Connor. 
is reading The Goldfinch written by Donna Tartt for March 27, 2014.

Charlotte Abbott at Publishers Weekly describes Donna Tartt, the author of this critically acclaimed novel as a Lolita-sized literary who can spout Nabokov and Eliot by heart. Tartt draws readers in by masterfully blending the grotesque, the humorous and the dramatic elements into a book that is hard to put down and after almost 800 pages leaves you wanting more.

The narrator and hero of the novel is thirteen-year-old Theo Decker, whose life changed in a matter of moments. One moment, Theo and his mother are admiring the Carel Fabritius painting The Goldfinch at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and in the next moment, his mother is dead and he is covered in rubble from a terrorist bombing at the museum. He crawls over to a dying stranger, who gives him a cryptic message and a ring then urges him to save the painting, which he does. And, like the little yellow bird in the painting fated to his perch by the chain around its "twig of an ankle," Theo is chained to The Goldfinch. 

To Theo, the attachment to the painting becomes the symbol of his attachment to his beloved mother making him unable to relinquish it. Guilt ridden, he carries this painting with him throughout the years. With this premise, Tartt takes us on Theo's wild and magical journey full of twists and turns, and richly complex and unforgettable characters.



Author Quotes: “I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive."
― Donna Tartt from Brainy Quotes