{"id":47954,"date":"2023-07-07T06:00:52","date_gmt":"2023-07-07T11:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/?p=47954"},"modified":"2023-07-05T13:40:02","modified_gmt":"2023-07-05T18:40:02","slug":"julys-celebrity-book-club-picks-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/julys-celebrity-book-club-picks-3\/","title":{"rendered":"July’s Celebrity Book Club Picks"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s a new month which means that Jenna Bush Hager and Reese Witherspoon have picked new books for their book clubs! Reminder that if you join\u00a0Simply Held<\/a>, these titles will automatically be put on hold for you.<\/p>\n

_________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Jenna Bush Hager has selected Banyan Moon<\/i><\/b><\/a> by Thao Thai for her July pick.<\/p>\n

Curious what Banyan Moon<\/strong><\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/em><\/i><\/b>is about? Check out the following description provided by the publisher.<\/p>\n

A sweeping, evocative debut novel following three generations of Vietnamese American women reeling from the death of their matriarch, revealing the family\u2019s inherited burdens, buried secrets, and unlikely love stories.<\/em><\/p>\n

When Ann Tran gets the call that her fiercely beloved grandmother, Minh, has passed away, her life is already at a crossroads. In the years since she\u2019s last seen Minh, Ann has built a seemingly perfect life\u2014a beautiful lake house, a charming professor boyfriend, and invites to elegant parties that bubble over with champagne and good taste\u2014but it all crumbles with one positive pregnancy test. With both her relationship and carefully planned future now in question, Ann returns home to Florida to face her estranged mother, Hu\u01a1ng.<\/em><\/p>\n

Back in Florida, Hu\u01a1ng is simultaneously mourning her mother and resenting her for having the relationship with Ann that she never did. Then Ann and Hu\u01a1ng learn that Minh has left them both the Banyan House, the crumbling old manor that was Ann\u2019s childhood home, in all its strange, Gothic glory. Under the same roof for the first time in years, mother and daughter must face the simmering questions of their past and their uncertain futures, while trying to rebuild their relationship without the one person who\u2019s always held them together.<\/em><\/p>\n

Running parallel to this is Minh\u2019s story, as she goes from a lovestruck teenager living in the shadow of the Vietnam War to a determined young mother immigrating to America in search of a better life for her children. And when Ann makes a shocking discovery in the Banyan House\u2019s attic, long-buried secrets come to light as it becomes clear how decisions Minh made in her youth affected the rest of her life\u2014and beyond.<\/em><\/p>\n

Spanning decades and continents, from 1960s Vietnam to the wild swamplands of the Florida coast, Banyan Moon is a stunning and deeply moving story of mothers and daughters, the things we inherit, and the lives we choose to make out of that inheritance.<\/em><\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Reese Witherspoon has selected\u00a0Yellowface<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>by R.F. Kuang for her July pick.<\/p>\n

Curious what Yellowface<\/strong><\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/em><\/a>is about? Check out the following description provided by the publisher.<\/p>\n

Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars. But Athena\u2019s a literary darling. June Hayward is literally nobody. Who wants stories about basic white girls, June thinks.<\/em><\/p>\n

So when June witnesses Athena\u2019s death in a freak accident, she acts on impulse: she steals Athena\u2019s just-finished masterpiece, an experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese laborers during World War I.<\/em><\/p>\n

So what if June edits Athena\u2019s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song\u2014complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? Doesn\u2019t this piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller? That\u2019s what June claims, and the New York Times bestseller list seems to agree.<\/em><\/p>\n

But June can\u2019t get away from Athena\u2019s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens to bring June\u2019s (stolen) success down around her. As June races to protect her secret, she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.<\/em><\/p>\n

With its totally immersive first-person voice, Yellowface grapples with questions of diversity, racism, and cultural appropriation, as well as the terrifying alienation of social media. R.F. Kuang\u2019s novel is timely, razor-sharp, and eminently readable. <\/em><\/p>\n

Join\u00a0Simply Held<\/a>\u00a0to have Oprah, Jenna, and Reese\u2019s adult selections automatically put on hold for you!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s a new month which means that Jenna Bush Hager and Reese Witherspoon have picked new books for their book clubs! Reminder that if you join\u00a0Simply Held, these titles will automatically be put on hold for you. _________________________________ Jenna Bush Hager has selected Banyan Moon by Thao Thai for her[Read more]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10,1,8],"tags":[7192,5267,1765,7257,6397,7193,7256],"class_list":["post-47954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-reference","category-staff-picks","tag-banyan-moon","tag-jenna-bush-hager","tag-reese-witherspoon","tag-rf-kuang","tag-simply-held","tag-thao-thai","tag-yellowface"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pd0CXx-cts","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47954"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47954\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48450,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47954\/revisions\/48450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}