All readers are welcome to join our informal monthly book club meeting. This month’s book suggestion is “Before We Were Yours” by Lisa Wingate. However, if you prefer nonfiction, you could read the complimentary book – “Before and After: The Incredible Real-Life Stories of Orphans Who Survived the Tennessee Children’s Home Society” also written by Lisa Wingate in collaboration with Judy Christie.  As always, there is no required reading to attend the meeting. Please email us at lislefreelibrary@gmail.com if you would like to attend virtually. Copies available at the circulation desk.

“Poignant, engrossing.” (People) “Lisa Wingate takes an almost unthinkable chapter in our nation’s history and weaves a tale of enduring power.” (Paula McLain)

Memphis, 1939. Twelve-year-old Rill Foss and her four younger siblings live a magical life aboard their family’s Mississippi River shantyboat. But when their father must rush their mother to the hospital one stormy night, Rill is left in charge – until strangers arrive in force. Wrenched from all that is familiar and thrown into a Tennessee Children’s Home Society orphanage, the Foss children are assured that they will soon be returned to their parents – but they quickly realize the dark truth. At the mercy of the facility’s cruel director, Rill fights to keep her sisters and brother together in a world of danger and uncertainty.

Aiken, South Carolina, present day. Born into wealth and privilege, Avery Stafford seems to have it all: a successful career as a federal prosecutor, a handsome fiancé, and a lavish wedding on the horizon. But when Avery returns home to help her father weather a health crisis, a chance encounter leaves her with uncomfortable questions and compels her to take a journey through her family’s long-hidden history, on a path that will ultimately lead either to devastation or to redemption.

Based on one of America’s most notorious real-life scandals – in which Georgia Tann, director of a Memphis-based adoption organization, kidnapped and sold poor children to wealthy families all over the country – Lisa Wingate’s riveting, wrenching, and ultimately uplifting tale reminds us how, even though the paths we take can lead to many places, the heart never forgets where we belong.

Publishers Weekly’s Number Three Longest-Running Best Seller of 2017 Winner of the Southern Book Prize  If All Arkansas Read the Same Book Selection

All readers are welcome to join our informal monthly book club meeting. This month’s book suggestion is “Women in White Coats” by Olivia Campbell, but you do not have to read the book to come to the meeting. Please email us at lislefreelibrary@gmail.com if you would like to attend virtually. Copies available at the circulation desk.

For fans of Hidden Figures and Radium Girls comes the remarkable story of three Victorian women who broke down barriers in the medical field to become the first women doctors, revolutionizing the way women receive health care.

In the early 1800s, women were dying in large numbers from treatable diseases because they avoided receiving medical care. Examinations performed by male doctors were often demeaning and even painful. In addition, women faced stigma from illness—a diagnosis could greatly limit their ability to find husbands, jobs or be received in polite society.

Motivated by personal loss and frustration over inadequate medical care, Elizabeth Blackwell, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Sophia Jex-Blake fought for a woman’s place in the male-dominated medical field. For the first time ever, Women in White Coats tells the complete history of these three pioneering women who, despite countless obstacles, earned medical degrees and paved the way for other women to do the same. Though very different in personality and circumstance, together these women built women-run hospitals and teaching colleges—creating for the first time medical care for women by women.

With gripping storytelling based on extensive research and access to archival documents, Women in White Coats tells the courageous history these women made by becoming doctors, detailing the boundaries they broke of gender and science to reshape how we receive medical care today.