The Bookies is Goodwin Library’s Book Club! This month’s pick is Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands by Chris Bohjalian.
The book club meeting can be attended virtually or in person. Please reach out to Joyce at jwhite@goodwinlibrary.org if you would like to attend on Zoom.
If you are attending in person, please note that we lock our doors at 6:50pm, so you may want to arrive a bit earlier. If the doors are locked when you arrive, try the doorbell (back door) or give Joyce a call. Thank you!
Summary: Emily Shepard is a homeless teen living in an igloo made of ice and trash bags filled with frozen leaves. Half a year earlier, a nuclear plant in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom had experienced a cataclysmic meltdown, and both of Emily’s parents were killed. Devastatingly, her father was in charge of the plant, and the meltdown may have been his fault. Was he drunk when it happened?
Thousands of people are forced to flee their homes in the Kingdom; rivers and forests are destroyed; and Emily feels certain that as the daughter of the most hated man in America, she is in danger. So instead of following the social workers and her classmates after the meltdown, Emily takes off on her own for Burlington, where she survives by stealing, sleeping on the floor of a drug dealer’s apartment, and inventing a new identity for herself inspired by her favorite poet, Emily Dickinson.
When Emily meets a homeless boy named Cameron, she protects him with a ferocity she didn’t know she had. But she still can’t outrun her past, can’t escape her grief, can’t hide forever – so she comes up with the only plan that she can.
