Adult Book Club Discussion
Yellow House
Please join us for one of our meetings of our Adult Book Club scheduled for Tuesday, April 9, at 1:00 p.m. and Friday, April 12, at 1:30 p.m. We will be discussing the book "Yellow House" by Sarah Broom.
In 1961, Sarah M. Broom's mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it. It was the height of the Space Race and the neighborhood was home to a major NASA plant - the postwar optimism seemed assured. Widowed, Ivory Mae remarried Sarah's father Simon Broom; their combined family would eventually number twelve children. But after Simon died, six months after Sarah's birth, the house would become Ivory Mae's thirteenth and most unruly child.
A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom's The Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America's most mythologized cities. This is the story of a mother's struggle against a house's entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map after Hurricane Katrina. The Yellow House expands the map of New Orleans to include the stories of its lesser known natives, guided deftly by one of its native daughters, to demonstrate how enduring drives of clan, pride, and familial love resist and defy erasure. Located in the gap between the 'Big Easy' of tourist guides and the New Orleans in which Broom was raised, The Yellow House is a brilliant memoir of place, class, race, the seeping rot of inequality, and the internalized shame that often follows. It is a transformative, deeply moving story from an unparalleled new voice of startling clarity, authority and power.
Copies of the book are available for checkout at the library.
What: Adult Book Club
When/Where: Tuesday, April 9, at 1:00 p.m. - Contact Library for Location
OR
When/Where: Tuesday, April 12, at 1:00 p.m. - East Troy Lions Public Library
East Troy Lions Public Library Adult Book Club Reading List 2024
January: The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson
February: Deep by James Nestor
March: Old Filth by Jane Gardam
April: Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom
May: Book of Lost Friends by Lisa Wingate
June: Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
July: Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown
August: Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty by Anderson Cooper & K. Howe
September: The Yellow Bird Sings by Jennifer Rosner
October: The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd
November: Lady Tan's Circle of Women by Lisa See
December: The Boys by Kate Hefner