‘The Blackout Book Club’
Amy Lynn Green
(371 pages, Historical Fiction, 2022)
It is 1942, in the small town of Derby, Maine. Avis Montgomery’s brother is leaving for Europe to fight in the war. He’s the town’s librarian, and asks Avis to fill in for him. Avis is not keen. She is not a reader. But when the war threatens to close the Library, Avis must find a way to keep it open for her brother’s sake. She proposes a book club, and starts to recruit members. She discovers that once blackout is in place, people are bored and lonely and don’t have much to do. Avis doesn’t have any experience running a book club, and things start out slowly. She suspects that people are coming more for the meager refreshments than anything else. Avis also needs to choose books to read.
The club has a wide variety of members – a stressed mother, a rich elderly woman, and a young war worker. Gradually, the group comes together, and despite the ongoing tensions from the war, they begin to depend on each other.
Each chapter is told from a different person’s perspective. I really enjoyed getting to know the characters. This is a charming book about how the power of reading and the love of books can bring a community together.
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Robbin Bailey
