Not long ago, I was shelving books in the intermediate section of the
bookstore where I work, and one of the titles caught my eye. The Mother-Daughter Book Club.
I’d never heard of it before, but I thought that seemed like a pretty
cool concept, and once I saw that it was the first installment of a
series whose subsequent volumes included copious references to Anne of Green Gables and Pride and Prejudice,
I decided that I needed to investigate further. I quickly put all four
books on hold at the library, and it wasn’t long before I concluded that
this was a series I would definitely want to see through to the finish.
Heather Vogel Frederick’s The Mother-Daughter Book Club
takes place over the course of nearly a year, starting on the first day
of school and extending into the summer. One of the first things I
noticed about the series was that it is written in the present tense,
which I tend to find rather annoying in fiction, but after a few pages,
it really didn’t bother me. The book is divided into four sections, each
simply named for the season, and within each section are four chapters.
These have no titles; instead, the name of the girl who is narrating is
listed at the top, and just underneath it is a quote from Little Women,
the book that the girls are taking the year to read. The order of these
chapters changes with each section; they are sequenced so that,
generally speaking, the character at the center of the chapter’s most
dramatic event serves as narrator. Each of the four girls has particular
quirks that help distinguish her voice from the others.
Emma
Hawthorne is the first character we meet. She lives in a cozy Cape Cod
cottage with her father, a freelance writer, and her mother, a librarian
and the driving force behind the idea of instituting the
mother-daughter book club that is so central to the series. This is a
tight-knit family, and Emma almost always gets along with her parents
and her easy-going older brother Darcy, whose athleticism and good looks
make him as popular around school as she is derided. Like the mother
who named her children after characters in Jane Austen novels, Emma is a
bookworm who has read dozens of classics, even though she’s only
eleven. An aspiring writer with no interest in fashion, she nonetheless
is embarrassed that most of her wardrobe consists of hand-me-downs from
an older girl at church, since several girls at school give her a hard
time about it.
Jess Delaney is Emma’s best friend. A quiet
animal lover who lives with her father and younger twin brothers, she
also endures relentless teasing, though in her case it’s generally
connected to the fact that she lives on a farm. “Goat Girl” is the
nickname of choice, and though she begins to find her voice later in the
novel, Jess initially suffers in silence, rarely speaking except in the
exclusive company of Emma or her family. Another source of scorn is the
fact that her mother skipped town for a shot at stardom on a cheesy
soap opera. Now Jess, the only book club member to attend without her
mother, watches her on TV after school every day but wishes she could
have her at home instead of in New York City, and it frightens her when
she hears rumblings of divorce in the musings of the townspeople.
Cassidy Sloane is new in town. She, too, has just one parent, but
unlike Jess, she knows with certainty that her father is not coming
back. That’s because he was killed in a car accident last year, when
they still lived in California. Now her mother, a former supermodel, has
uprooted her older sister Courtney and her to New England in order to
be closer to their grandparents. So deep is Cassidy’s grief that she
initially comes across as surly and aggressive, especially to her mom
and sister, but this tomboy begins to mellow out as she develops a close
friendship with Jess and Emma through the book club their parents
initially force on them. Cassidy is even less interested in fashion than
Emma and Jess; her hair is in a constant state of tangled frizz, and
she is violently opposed to dresses. Her greatest passion is sports,
especially hockey, and another reason for her dour demeanor toward the
beginning of the book is that she has learned that there is no girls’
hockey team in the immediate area, a problem to which she and her new
friends conspire to find a clever solution.
Finally, Megan
Wong is a member of the snobby clique known as the Fab Four. Led by
Becca Chadwick, a mean-spirited girl who seems to take after her battle
axe of a mother, this little group makes life miserable for the other
three with well-timed, withering slights. What makes this especially
unbearable for Emma is the fact that Megan used to be every bit as close
to her as Jess. But then Megan’s father invented a gadget that made him
a millionaire, and Megan was absorbed into the popular group, leaving
babyish Emma behind. A Chinese American and only child, she battles
constantly with her mother, who is a gung-ho activist who dreams of
Megan pursuing a career as an environmental lawyer. Whenever Megan tries
to protest that she longs to be a fashion designer, her mother chides
her for her frivolity. Initially, Megan’s voice isn’t very pleasant to
slip into, since she is largely sarcastic and snotty, but joining the
book club gradually chips away at her steely demeanor until she realizes
how much she misses the fun she and Emma used to have.
The series takes place in Concord,
Massachusetts, a town of incredible historical and literary
significance that I had the pleasure of visiting last year. Because the
girls are reading Little Women, the book is loaded with
references to the novel and to its author, Louisa May Alcott, but she’s
hardly the only writer to merit a mention. Emma’s cat is named Melville
after the author of Moby Dick. Cassidy orchestrates a prank that
occurs next to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s grave in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery,
and though Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is set in Sleepy Hollow, New York, that story is her source of inspiration.
The book also draws from more recent culture. For instance, Jess’s
father has two big Belgian draft horses named Led and Zep in honor of
the band Led Zeppelin. Emma makes several allusions to Rosalind
Wiseman’s Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of Adolescence, the self-help book from which the movie Mean Girls was adapted. Most notably, the Winter section is largely concerned with the middle school production of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast,
in which Megan and the rest of the Fab Four desperately want plum
parts, leading them to be even meaner than usual to the girl who is
awarded the starring role of Belle, especially since she gets to act
opposite Zach Norton, upon whom most of the girls in their class have
raging crushes.
I found The Mother-Daughter Book Club
an engaging and refreshing read. It grapples with many of the issues
that pre-teens face, from bullying and burgeoning hormones to family
squabbles and figuring out what their passions are. The series
emphasizes the value of literature as a unifying force and a lens
through which to examine everyday concerns. What’s more, it encourages
girls moving into their teen years to make an effort to maintain their
bonds with their families, even if that just means setting aside one day
a month to do something special together, and to embrace the
differences of their peers instead of treating them with derision. The
book has an extremely moral core to it, and there are consequences when
these girls make decisions that are harmful to others.
To help
drive home some of the issues raised in the novel, Fredericks includes a
discussion guide in the back of the book. Among the questions is an
inquiry as to whether the reader might be interested in participating in
such a club herself. I know of at least one friend who participates in a
mother-daughter book club; I don’t know if this book had anything to do
with its inception, but if Frederick helps to get girls and their
parents interested in forming such clubs all around the country, that
can only be a good thing.
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