About the book

Author:

Title: The Cherry Cola book club. Series: Cherry Cola Book Club ; 1

Publication: New York : Kensington Pub. Corp., 2013. ISBN 9780758273413.

DAISY audio format narrated by Marguerite Gavin. CELA library call number DA52856. 260 pages in the print edition; 7 hrs., 40 mins. as a recorded book.

About the story

I picked this one up because it was the first in a series. I almost didn’t, because the title seemed a bit twee, but obviously I changed my mind.

Set in the American South, it follows the travails of a small-town librarian (OK, maybe that’s a second reason) whose Evil City Councillor wants the Library Closed to Make Way for Industrial Development that Will Create Jobs. Sadly, this is an all-too-common meme in the library-o-sphere.

Also, I guess it’s part romance novel. One with proactive heroines, however.

Freshly graduated from library school, bright-eyed and idealistic Maura accepts a job in a small Mississippi town as librarian. Her corrugated-iron kingdom chugs indifferently along with a few core users, largely ignored by town residents until the threatened shut-down. Although it’s somewhat unclear why – given that she had supposedly “tried everything”. She had never thought of a book club (or even a Summer Reading Club or after-school programming, or …. but I quibble).

Anyway, she meets someone who had been in one, and decides to set up a book club with the help of various people she meets along the way. Very much a relationship book, it paints very strong characters and describes their interactions well and plausibly once the setup is over. It tackles some stereotypes (older-person romance, inter-generational friendships, historical racial discrimination, etc.) and focuses on mutual support and how that can achieve collective goals.

Oh, and one thing that I especially liked was that the book club focused on the literature of the American South, about which there were several discussions. They stuck to the Old Faithfuls: Gone With the Wind and To Kill a Mockingbird, but in the world that this creates, there promises to be lively discussions on other Southern writers. Since it is the first book in a series…

The narrator, Marguerite Gavin, was pleasant to listen to and kept what turned out to be a very large cast of characters straight. Well done!

A quick, light read set in a small-town library.