Pre-Teen Girls Bond Over Books in The Mother-Daughter Book Club

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.

From Walden Pond to Sleepy Hollow, Live Deliberately in Concord, Massachusetts

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life. And see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." This iconic thought by Henry David Thoreau is one that has been quoted in many an English literature class, and certainly by one Mr. Healey, a passionate high school teacher who made a profound impact upon me and my friend Erica, whose Massachusetts home I recently visited. Erica and her husband Art live just outside of Boston - or, if you like, just outside of Concord, the site of Walden Pond, which so inspired Thoreau and, in turn, us.

We saved Concord for the second full day of my trip, a Friday; we wanted to get Boston out of the way on Thursday, before the weekend rush, and Saturday looked to be full of showers (though that prediction came to naught, at least in Salem). The day dawned rainy, but the weather forecast promised a drier afternoon, so we headed out around noon with umbrellas in hand, just as a precaution. We'd made a Target run in the morning for a second memory card for my camera in case my first ran out; when I arrived at the state park, I discovered that when I placed the card in my camera to ensure it fit, I failed to return the camera to its case. So Erica and I shared her camera at picturesque Walden Pond as we slowly wandered the pathways, keeping a careful eye out for animals and unique plant formations. Because of the rain, we had to negotiate our way around several mud puddles that filled the whole walkway, but this just added to the sense of adventure. Meanwhile, the overcast weather cut down on the number of visitors, so we had the trail to ourselves most of the time, though we spotted several people splashing their way through the pond, preferring an immersive experience of Walden.

We didn't go in the water, but we certainly went near it, snapping several photos of its reflective surface and peeking down at the fish swimming near its shores. The trail (which is punctuated by signs, including an ever-so-helpful one pointing to the perpetually visible pond) teems with life, from wildflowers to fungus, though our most exciting discoveries weren't quite so stationary. Eagle-eyed Erica alerted Art and me to the presence of a large black snake with yellow stripes curled quietly in the leaves. It kindly posed for a few pictures before slithering languidly into the trees. Several blue jays chattered to each other from lofty branches, and one decided to tease us by leading us onward, always taking flight just as Erica was about to snap its picture. In one marshy area, we heard several bullfrogs before we spotted them. There were a couple sitting down below in the shade of the trees, and as we crossed a makeshift bridge, one fearless frog stood inches away from us, calmly observing our intrusion.

Of course, if you're literarily inclined, as all three of us are in the extreme, the highlights of Walden are Thoreau's cabins: the replica that greets visitors as they arrive and the original site about halfway along the trail that makes the circuit of the pond. The replica was closed when we got there, so we contented ourselves with peering in the windows and walking the circuit of the tiny house before posing for the obligatory pictures with the statue of Thoreau. When we returned to the car, however, we noticed that the cabin door was ajar, so we went to investigate and found ourselves able to go inside and check out the interior, with its bed, desk, stove, fireplace and broom. As an avid LOST fan, I found myself reminded of the mysterious cabin where Jacob is said to dwell. Likewise, whenever I watch season three's The Man Behind the Curtain, when Ben warns John, upon their approach to the cabin, to turn off his flashlight because "Jacob feels the same way about technology that you do," I catch myself thinking about Thoreau. There's also a sign with a list of the materials Thoreau used to build the cabin and how much they cost. Less than thirty dollars for the whole works? Sounds all right to me! The actual cabin site is just as neat, nestled in a small clearing in the woods with short stone pillars marking the spot where it once stood. The woodshed is also sectioned off. This is where you will find the sign with the opening quote and the large pile of stones, many of them decorated, left in Thoreau's honor. I spent several minutes wandering around this pile, which is bigger than the cabin itself, and reading the messages people had left on the rocks.

Before we left, we had to stop into the gift shop. I'd been specifically warned about the eight-dollar finger puppets, but of course, I succumbed to the temptation of a squirrel. I also bought a deck of cards featuring famous authors, a few postcards - sixty cents each, which is a bit on the high end, but I wasn't able to find Walden postcards anywhere else - and, for my peripatetic brother, Thoreau's Walking, which was on prominent display because we'd happened to come on World Sauntering Day. If you forget your camera like I did and don't have somebody else in your party who remembered, the store also sells disposable cameras. Unlike Boston and Salem, Concord isn't much of a tourist trap. Admission to the park is only five dollars per car, and Sleepy Hollow, the other big destination, offers free one-hour parking. It's likely this will be the only gift shop you enter in this area, and it sells several items you probably won't find in other places, so don't feel too badly about spending some money there.

Sleepy Hollow Cemetery is not far from Walden Pond, where we stayed for two or three hours. It might seem a bit morbid that we went to a cemetery during each of the three day trips we took during my visit, but each one features graves of historical significance. Sleepy Hollow has Authors Ridge, where one can find the surprisingly humble markers for Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Louisa May Alcott. There's something especially poetic about Thoreau's tiny stone, nestled amongst the graves of his relatives, which simply reads "HENRY". Scattered around and on top of each of these graves are trinkets from visitors, including pennies, pebbles and, most appropriately, pencils and pens. One hour is plenty of time to see these famous stones, which are all clustered together, and still have an opportunity to appreciate the unusual markers belonging to less famous folks and drink in the natural beauty of the grounds. Among the more striking monuments we found were a tall, stately Celtic cross and the tiny, accidentally amusing stone bearing the initials "M. L. B." Alas for the death of the great American pastime... We also stumbled upon a rock memorializing "Kirkegaard", just a letter away from Soren the philosopher. I also just discovered that this is not the Sleepy Hollow of which Washington Irving wrote; that cemetery is in New York, a destination for an entirely different trip.

But who needs Irving when you've got four fantastic authors to visit? If you're a literature lover or a nature enthusiast, Concord is a wonderful place in which to spend the afternoon, and the price to visit Walden and Sleepy Hollow is certainly right. If this is the way to live deliberately, count me in!