The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls by Julie Schumacher

Adrienne Haus did not picture spending her summer reading books in a mother-daughter book club. Her summer plans included spending time in the Canadian wilderness with her best friend, but that trip was scuttled once her knee brace was slipped on. The book club was her mother's idea, and the three other girls joining them in the club (Jill, CeeCee, and Wallis) are also going into the same AP English class - but they're not friends. Together the girls and their mothers will cover five of the books on their class syllabus, and the girls (without their mothers) will get to know each other in unusual and possibly dangerous ways. By the end of the summer, there will be lots of questions, a few answers...and one dead body.

One of the blurbs that I received along with a review copy said that this is a great book for both people who love to read and people who hate to read. I think it does ably straddle that bridge (can you straddle a bridge? maybe just a fence) by both having characters who read but also having characters who are not thrilled about reading. As a reader who loves to read, I liked hearing the discussions about different books. A prior knowledge of the stories isn't needed (I've only read one of the books that they discuss in the novel, and even on that one I was a little sketchy on the plot), but I think if you have read one or more of the books, you might get something more out of the book. It wasn't as light of a story as I was expecting based on the cover ("You know what they say..."). There is a lot of drama that happens in the book, but it all comes from a grounded, realistic place. Not all of the loose ends are tied up at the end of the story, so we might not have seen the last of one or more of these girls.

Check out Julie Schumacher's website.

I received a review copy from NetGalley courtesy of Random House.

Find it at IndieBound.

Read it with:
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin
The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
The Awakening by Kate Chopin