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Summary
Summary
I'm Adrienne Haus, survivor of a mother-daughter book club. Most of us didn't want to join. My mother signed me up because I was stuck at home all summer, with my knee in a brace. CeeCee's parents forced her to join after cancelling her Paris trip because she bashed up their car. The members of "The Unbearable Book Club," CeeCee, Jill, Wallis, and I, were all going into eleventh grade A.P. English. But we weren't friends. We were literary prisoners, sweating, reading classics, and hanging out at the pool. If you want to find out how membership in a book club can end up with a person being dead, you can probably look us up under mother-daughter literary catastrophe . Or open this book and read my essay, which I'll turn in when I go back to school.
Author Notes
Julie Schumacher received an undergraduate degree from Oberlin College and an MFA degree in fiction from Cornell University. She is a professor of English at the University of Minnesota. A short story she wrote while attending Oberlin College was reprinted in The Best American Short Stories. She is the author of several books for adults and younger readers including The Book of One Hundred Truths, The Chain Letter, Grass Angel, and Dear Committee Members.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 8 Up-Presented as an AP English essay assignment, with each chapter heading containing a definition of a literary term, this novel feels like a take on Ann Brashares's The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (Delacorte, 2001). Fifteen-year-old Adrienne Haus is laid up with a fractured kneecap and torn ACL for the summer so her mother forces her to join a mother-daughter book club. Wealthy, rebellious CeeCee; Jill, an adopted Asian girl; and mysterious, secretive Wallis are the other unlikely teen members. Adrienne is a moody, self-conscious girl, and the complexity of the relationship with her unflappable mother is a pleasure to read, especially as she falls further and further under CeeCee's bad influence. Exceptionally strong characterization and attention to detail thoroughly place readers in a summer suburb in Delaware. Teens need not have read all the classics discussed throughout the book (e.g., The Yellow Wallpaper, Frankenstein, The Left Hand of Darkness, The House on Mango Street, and The Awakening), although some familiarity with them certainly enriches the story. Adrienne is a thoughtful reader, applying quotes from each of the books to real-life situations. However, like Catherine in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, she lets her imagination run away with her and incorrectly dreams up horrible scenarios that lead to a highly foreshadowed, yet suspenseful, tragic ending.-Madigan McGillicuddy, Gwinnett County Public Library, GA (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Horn Book Review
Bookish, quiet Adrienne is stuck in her small Delaware town for the summer with nothing to do except read books for eleventh-grade AP English. When her single mom insists they join a mother-daughter book club, Adrienne's proscribed world opens up, but her new experiences and self-knowledge come at a price. Chock-full of literary references and wry humor, this is a thought-provoking novel. (c) Copyright 2012. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
In a novel tailor-made for literature teachers, four unwilling high-school girls and their mothers join a summer book club with both comic and tragic results. In the summer before her junior year, Adrienne, recovering from a knee injury, falls under the influence of beautiful and irresponsible CeeCee, another reluctant member of the book club. Adrienne has always had a good relationship with her mother, but CeeCee flippantly bullies her into late-night excursions that do not end well and pesters Adrienne about her absent father. Reluctant to blame CeeCee for anything, Adrienne instead begins to worry that her single mother sees her as a "mistake." Meanwhile the two other girls, Jill and Wallis have problems of their own. Adrienne constantly re-injures her knee during CeeCee's midnight outings, the mothers begin quarreling with one another and circumstances deteriorate until the girls' final nighttime jaunt ends tragically. Schumacher weaves the narrative around common literary terms, such as setting, mood and conflict, which she illustrates in their respective chapters. Always a bookworm, Adrienne also ties her first-person narration into the five books the club reads, including The Left Hand of Darkness, Frankenstein and The Awakening. The characters, especially the four girls, sparkle, and even amid drama the narration remains lighthearted enough to appeal beyond bookish readers. Smart and insightful. (Realistic fiction. 12 up)]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Despite the chick-lit-at-the-pool cover image, this story has both significant momentum and substance. Narrated by 15-year-old Adrienne, stuck for the summer in humid suburban Delaware, Schumacher's latest follows the exploits of four girls who are thrown together in a mother-daughter book club. In this entertaining AP English variation on The Breakfast Club, Adrienne begins each chapter with her definition of a literary term, such as epiphany, which she likens to an EpiPen: something that gets injected into the main character so she suddenly sees things differently. The book-club selections, such as Frankenstein and Kate Chopin's The Awakening, and the related discussions, are woven into the narrative, but it is Adrienne's new acquaintances who drive the plot: CeCe, the popular girl with a need to provoke, pushes Adrienne and the others into several dicey situations. Schumacher offers up sharp dialogue throughout as well as a compelling, insecure, always-questioning narrator. And although the ending feels rushed, leaving loose ends, the book should at least spur further reading.--Nolan, Abby Copyright 2010 Booklist
Excerpts
Excerpts
"The Yellow Wallpaper" 1. SETTING: The place where the author puts the characters. It's like setting a table, except that instead of using plates and silverware, you're using people. On our first day of membership in what CeeCee would later call the Unbearable Book Club, I was sitting in a plastic lounge chair at the West New Hope, Delaware, community pool, reading a dog-eared copy of "The Yellow Wallpaper." According to the thermometer on the lifeguard stand, it was ninety-seven degrees. My hands were sweating so much they left stains on the pages. CeeCee paused by the empty recliner next to mine. She was wearing a white crocheted bikini and dark sunglasses, and I saw a copy of "The Yellow Wallpaper" sticking out of her polka-dot bag. CeeCee's thighs didn't touch at the top, I noticed. We weren't friends. "Don't you think we're too old for this?" she asked. I wasn't sure she was talking to me: I wasn't the sort of person CeeCee Christiansen usually talked to. The two of us chatting? It was like a dolphin hanging out with a squirrel. "It wasn't my idea," I said as a river of sweat worked its way down my spine. "I think our mothers set it up. They were in a yoga class together." CeeCee didn't glance in my direction. She unponytailed her long blond hair and let it fall toward the ground like a satin curtain. "Believe me," she said. "It wasn't my mother's idea. She doesn't have the imagination." "Good to know." I wiped my hands on my towel. Twenty feet from the edges of our chairs, across a stretch of cement too hot to stand on, the pool flashed and glittered, a turquoise rectangle full of multicolored bodies leaping in and out of the water like flying fish. CeeCee was staring at one of the lifeguards, who was staring back at her and twirling his whistle around his finger on a string: three twirls to the right, three to the left. She had apparently finished talking to me, so I picked up my book. "You're actually reading it." She sat down and took the cap off a bottle of sunblock. When I turned toward her she smiled a closed-lipped smile, making me think of an alligator sunning itself on a riverbank. "That's the assignment," I said. "We have to read 'The Yellow Wallpaper' and four other books." "And learn a list of literary terms and write an essay," CeeCee said. "This teacher's insane. No one else assigns that kind of homework during the summer. I don't care if it is AP." I squeegeed the sweat from my eyebrows with an index finger. I didn't mind doing the reading--whatever I read would be more interesting than my day-to-day life--but I wasn't looking forward to the essay. Most of the papers I wrote for school came back with suggestions in the margins about how my ideas could be organized. "I can't find an argument here," my tenth-grade history teacher had said. "So you're not going to read the books?" I asked CeeCee. I didn't know Ms. Radcliffe yet, but she had a reputation for being stern and precise. I imagined her snapping a steel-edged ruler on my desk. "It doesn't matter if you read them." CeeCee squirted a white ribbon of lotion onto her stomach. "Most of the books we read for school are crap. I usually just read the summary online, or I read the first couple of pages and then skip to the end." She glanced at my copy of "The Yellow Wallpaper." "You're planning to read the whole thing?" "I think that's the point of a book," I said. "You start at the beginning and you read to the end." I hadn't learned how to read until the middle of first grade, and I still felt grateful to my teacher, Ms. Hampl, who had knelt by my desk one afternoon and smoothed her finger across the parallel rows of two-dimensional black marks in my book--and as if she had opened a hidden door, I felt the patterned surface break and give way, and the words let me in. I still loved opening a book and feeling like I was physically entering the page, the ordinary world fizzing and blurring around the edges until it disappeared. "You don't have to take Advanced Placement," I pointed out. "Right. Only the helpless take regular English." CeeCee squeezed some lotion onto her arms, which were thin and hairless. "AP classes have two kinds of kids in them: the kids who are smart, and the kids who don't want to spend the year in a room full of losers. Do you have a four-oh?" "A four-oh grade average? No." I wasn't sure what my average was. Teachers often referred to me as a student with "a lot of potential." This meant they expected me to be smart; but in fact my mind was often packing a mental suitcase and wandering off on its own. I sometimes pictured all the things I had learned during the previous week at school jumping into brightly painted railroad cars and disappearing into the distance on a speeding train. CeeCee scanned the perimeter of the pool, presumably for more-worthwhile people to talk to. The pickings were slim. "So what's your deal?" she asked. "I don't really know you. Who are you supposed to be?" Who was I supposed to be? I was Adrienne Haus. I was fifteen. I lived in West New Hope with my mother, who had signed me up for a summer book club. Now I was reading--or trying to read--a book at the pool. Excerpted from The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls by Julie Schumacher All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
