Dayton's Bluff Book Club: 2023-2024 Books

In LOCKER ROOM TALK, we listen in on the epic and ordinary moments that happen when women are together. Subverting the traditional idea of "locker room talk," this collection illuminates the conversations women share with family, friends, and strangers, whether at the sinks of a nightclub ladies' room, on a bus heading to the Women's March, or in the kitchen of an elder relative. Cumulatively, they reveal the myriad ways women care for themselves, each other, their communities, and our world. Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Fiction. Essay. Women's Studies.

Killers hiding in plain sight. Small-town secrets. A girl who knows too much. From the Amazon Charts bestselling author of Unspeakable Things and Bloodline comes a nerve-twisting novel inspired by a shocking true crime. Minnesota, 1977. For the teens of one close-knit community, summer means late-night swimming parties at the quarry, the county fair, and venturing into the tunnels beneath the city. But for two best friends, it's not all fun and games. Heather and Brenda have a secret. Something they saw in the dark. Something they can't forget. They've decided to never tell a soul. But their vow is tested when their friend disappears--the second girl to vanish in a week. And yet the authorities are reluctant to investigate. Heather is terrified that the missing girls are connected to what she and Brenda stumbled upon that night. Desperately searching for answers on her own, she learns that no one in her community is who they seem to be. Not the police, not the boys she met at the quarry, not even her parents. But she can't stop digging because she knows those girls are in danger. She also knows she's next.

When Ojibwe historian Brenda Child uncovered the Bureau of Indian Affairs file on her grandparents, it was an eye-opening experience. The incendiary correspondence, full of incendiary comments on their morals and character, demonstrated the breathtakingly intrusive power of federal agents in the early twentieth century. Child tells her own family's stories from the Red Lake Reservation, as well as stories of Ojibwe people around the Great Lakes, examining the daily work, family life, and culture faced by her grandparents' generation--a generation of Ojibwe people raised with traditional lifeways in that remote area. The challenges were great: there were few opportunities for work in the Government-controlled reservation economies, and those authorities opposed Ojibwe traditions of culture and work. Nevertheless, Ojibwe men and women patched together sources of income and took on new roles as labor demands changed through World War I and the Depression. Child writes of men knocking rice at wild rice camps, work customarily done by women; a woman who turns to fishing and bootlegging when her husband is unable to work. She also recounts a new tradition of healing and anti-colonial resistance, the jingle dress dance. Emerging a hundred years ago, amidst a global influenza pandemic that killed thousands of Native Americans, this revolutionary practice shows how Ojibwe people retained and passed on their identity and culture to their children.

Set on a small and struggling family dairy operation in southern Minnesota, The Complicated Calculus (and Cows) of Carl Paulsen follows fifteen-year-old Carl as he confronts his crush on Andy Olnan, a handsome and confident but secretive "city boy" recently transplanted to farm life from Minneapolis who may or may not share the same feelings. At the same time, Carl and his father clash over the future of their farm, a legacy of Carl's late mother: how do they honor her dream for the family while also ensuring financial security? Carl discovers his own resilience in the face of grief, adult-sized decisions, and unrequited love, and along the way learns to cope with both the challenges and rewards of being different.

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST FOR THE PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD From U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón comes The Carrying--her most powerful collection yet. Vulnerable, tender, acute, these are serious poems, brave poems, exploring with honesty the ambiguous moment between the rapture of youth and the grace of acceptance. A daughter tends to aging parents. A woman struggles with infertility--"What if, instead of carrying / a child, I am supposed to carry grief?"--and a body seized by pain and vertigo as well as ecstasy. A nation convulses: "Every song of this country / has an unsung third stanza, something brutal." And still Limón shows us, as ever, the persistence of hunger, love, and joy, the dizzying fullness of our too-short lives. "Fine then, / I'll take it," she writes. "I'll take it all." In Bright Dead Things, Limón showed us a heart "giant with power, heavy with blood"--"the huge beating genius machine / that thinks, no, it knows, / it's going to come in first." In her follow-up collection, that heart is on full display--even as The Carrying continues further and deeper into the bloodstream, following the hard-won truth of what it means to live in an imperfect world.

Winner of the Minnesota Book Award and a 2022 Great Group Reads Selection "The Barrens grabbed me from the opening pages and never let go."--Michael Punke, author of The Revenant Two young women attending college decide to have a summer adventure canoeing the rapids-strewn Thelon River that runs 450 miles through the uninhabited Barren Lands of subarctic Canada. Holly made the trip once before with a group of skilled paddlers she trained with at camp, and she wants to share that experience with her friend and lover, Lee, believing it will draw them closer. But a week in, Holly, the risk-taker, falls while taking a selfie near the edge of a cliff. She is left injured and comatose, and soon dies. Their locator beacon for summoning rescue was smashed in Holly's fall. It remains to Lee, the inexperienced paddler, to continue the grueling and dangerous trip alone, to save herself and return her lover's body to civilization and Holly's family. In their relationship, Holly and Lee had always told each other stories; Lee had called Holly a "storyist." Storytelling helps Lee endure the rigors of her journey and engage her grief as she explores her relationship with Holly while chronicling her own coming-of-age off the grid in Nebraska with her estranged eco-anarchist father, who is now serving time in prison.