August 20 | 2PM | JCA & Zoom
From beloved author Hannah Orenstein, this love letter to lake life is “the Parent Trap for adults,” the story of two half-sisters who meet for the first time at their father’s cabin in Maine after his unexpected death.
Every summer, Vivian Levy and Lucy Webster spend a month with their father at his lake house — separately. Raised in New York City, Vivian is an ambitious sommelier with a secret that could derail her future. Lucy grew up in a tiny Maine town, where she now teaches high school English while watching her marriage unravel. They’ve never met. While Lucy envied her half-sister from afar, their father kept Vivian in the dark.
When Vivian arrives at the lake to spread his ashes and sell his cabin, she's shocked to find Lucy there, awaiting his return. In an ideal world, they’d help each other through their grief. Instead, forced to spend the summer together, they fight through a storm of suspicion and hostility to untangle the messy truth about their parents’ pasts. While Lucy is desperate to hold onto the house, Vivian is scrambling after a betrayal. After thirty years apart, is it too late for them to be a family?
For fans of Carley Fortune and Elin Hilderbrand, this sister story set on a lush lake brims with the undeniable heart, depth, charm, and humor that have endeared Hannah Orenstein to legions of readers.
Join the Wise Ventures Book Group to participate in this discussion in-person at the JCA or register for the Zoom link to join remotely! This event is free but registration is required. Book sales will be available at the JCA courtesy of our friends at Longfellow Books. Book club members are also entitled to 20% off the list price at in-store purchases at Longfellow Books - just mention that you're part of a club at checkout!
September 4 | 2PM | JCA & Zoom
An enigmatic painting. The mystery of who painted it. A riveting thriller from the bestselling author of The Art Forger.
In a gripping novel full of plot twists, B. A. Shapiro embeds us in a circle of famous painters in late-nineteenth-century Paris, centering on the anguished Impressionist artist Berthe Morisot—the one woman in their midst who never got her due—and the story of Morisot’s great-great-great-great granddaughter, Tamara Rubin, who has inherited Édouard Manet’s Party on the Seine, a painting that completely upends her life.
When Tamara inherits Party, she discovers a long-hidden family history replete with unanswered questions: How had it been stolen by the Nazis? How had the painting managed to survive three disasters that destroyed every other artwork around it? And most of all, why had she never known about her ancestor, Berthe Morisot? As the painting begins to metamorphose into darker and more terrifying versions of itself, Tamara’s ordinary life is thrown into turmoil. What wounds and resentments plagued Morisot, and to what lengths will her spirit go for revenge?
The Lost Masterpiece is a story of love, adultery, betrayal, family secrets, and the grueling birth of Impressionism, taking the reader on a whirlwind adventure from the streets of Paris in the late 1800s and the studio Berthe Morisot shared with Manet, Degas, and Renoir to the present day. Shapiro brings Berthe’s world to life, tracing her work through generations of descendants and introducing us to a painter as brilliant and original as her male counterparts across 150 years of triumphs, struggles, passions, animosities, and malevolence.
About the Author
B. A. Shapiro is the bestselling author of The Lost Masterpiece, The Collector's Apprentice, Metropolis, The Muralist, and The Art Forger, which won the New England Book Award for Fiction and the Boston Authors Society Award for Fiction, among other awards. Her books have been selected as community reads in numerous cities and translated throughout the world. Before becoming a novelist, she taught sociology at Tufts University and creative writing at Northeastern University. She and her husband, Dan, divide their time between Boston and Florida.
Join the Wise Ventures Book Group to participate in this discussion in-person or register for the Zoom link to join remotely! This event is free but registration is required. Book sales will be available at the JCA courtesy of our friends at Longfellow Books. Book club members are also entitled to 20% off the list price at in-store purchases at Longfellow Books - just let them know that you're part of a book club at checkout!
September 16
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Beejhy Barhany & Margaret Boyle
October 30
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Sharon Ann Musher
March 8th at 2PM
Stay tuned, more information is coming soon!
