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AAUW hopes you enjoy the 2005-2006 ¡Adelante! Book Club selections, and encourages members and nonmembers to open a dialogue of women and diversity in their communities.
September (Hispanic Heritage Month, Sept. 15-Oct. 15)
The Pearl of the Antilles
by Dr. Andrea O'Reilly Herrera (2000)
The Pearl of the Antilles chronicles the lives of several generations of Cuban women. The story focuses on Margarita, an exile in the United States, who struggles to come to terms with her divided identity, a past she has suppressed, and her failure to share her heritage with her children. The novel explores the ways in which culture and tradition have been preserved and passed down to Cuban Americans and portrays the cultural fragmentation and deep sense of loss that Cubans living in exile and their children continue to experience.
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October (Disability Awareness Month)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
by Mark Haddon (2003)
Christopher Boone, the autistic 15-year-old narrator of this revelatory novel, relaxes by groaning and doing math problems in his head, eats red foods and screams when he is touched. When his neighbor's poodle is killed and Christopher is falsely accused of the crime, he decides that he will take a page from Sherlock Holmes and track down the killer. As the mystery leads him to the secrets of his parents' broken marriage and then into an odyssey to find his place in the world, he must fall back on deductive logic to navigate the emotional complexities of a social world that remains closed to him.
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November (Native American Heritage Month)
The Trickster and the Troll
by Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve (1999)
Combining traditions from her own Lakota heritage and her husband's Norwegian background, Sneve weaves a thought-provoking story of the Sioux trickster Iktomi's encounter with a giant Troll who followed members of the Norwegian family he has guarded for generations to this country. The friendship that develops supports the figures as the people who once celebrated their exploits in family storytelling lose their languages and traditions and turn away. Time passes, then Lakota and Norwegian-American families of the next generation welcome the folk heroes back into their lives.
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December
Thinking in Pictures: and other reports from my life with Autism
by Temple Grandin (1996)
Writing from the dual perspectives of a scientist and an autistic person, Grandin tells us how that country is experienced by its inhabitants and how she managed to breach its boundaries to function in the outside world. What emerges in Thinking in Pictures is the document of an extraordinary human being, one who, in gracefully and lucidly bridging the gulf between her condition and our own, sheds light on the riddle of our common identity.
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January
Nickel and Dimed: On (not) Getting by in America
by Barbara Ehrenreich (2001)
In a portrait of the working poor, the author moves from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, taking a variety of jobs for poverty-level wages. She discovers that even the lowliest jobs require exhausting efforts and that you need two if you want to live indoors.
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February (Black History Month)
The Known World
by Edward P. Jones (2003)
Henry Townsend, a black farmer, bootmaker, and former slave, has a fondness for Paradise Lost and an unusual mentor — William Robbins, perhaps the most powerful man in antebellum Virginia's Manchester County. Under Robbins's tutelage, Henry becomes proprietor of his own plantation — as well as of his own slaves. When he dies, his widow, Caldonia, succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart at their plantation.
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March (Women's History Month)
Founding Mothers
by Cokie Roberts (2004)
While the "fathers" were off founding the country, what were the women doing? Running their husband’s businesses, raising their children plus providing political information and advice. This will be the story of some of those women, as learned through their seldom seen letters and diaries, and the letters from the men to them. It will be a story of the beginnings of the nation as viewed from the distaff side.
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April
She Says
by Venus Khoury-Ghata (2003)
Vénus Khoury-Ghata’s She Says explores the mythic and confessional attractions and repulsions of the French and Arabic imaginations with poems that open like “a suitcase filled with alphabets.” Sex, barrenness, grief, and death — the backdrop of a war-ravaged country — are always at the edges, made increasingly urgent by lines often jagged and spare, their music unaltered.
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May (Asian Pacific American Heritage Month)
The Red Azalea
by Anchee Min (1994/1999)
The autobiography of a young Chinese woman born in 1957 as the eldest of four children of an educated couple, describing their changed lives during the Maoist regime. Min survives farm life to be chosen to train as an actress , emigrating to the U.S. in 1984 when she could no longer tolerate life in China.
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June (Gay/Lesbian Pride Month)
Trans-sister Radio
by Chris Bohjalian (2001)
A compelling and often disturbing novel that challenges assumptions about gender, relationships, and sexuality. A powerful secret literally transforms four lives: Allison Banks, a sixth grade teacher; Will, her ex-husband and president of a local Vermont Public Radio station; their teenage daughter Carly; and Dana Stevens, a college instructor who falls in love with Allison. The four voices, performed by Kymberli Colbourne, alternate to reveal their own separate struggles. A demanding work that is often graphic, always gentle, and full of wisdom and surprising humor.
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July
Sugar's Life in the Hood: The Story of a Former Welfare Mother
by Tracy Ehlers & Sugar TurnerBachrach (2003)
Sugar Turner collaborates with anthropologist Tracy Bachrach Ehlers in telling her story of being an African American woman living in the inner city; she has been a single mother juggling welfare checks, food stamps, boyfriends and husbands, illegal jobs, and home businesses to make ends meet for herself and her five children. Ehlers also gives her reactions to Turner's story, discussing not only how it belies the "welfare queen" stereotype, but also how it forced her to confront her own lingering confusions about race, her own bigotry.
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August 
1,000 White Women
by Jim Fergus (1999)
The story of May Dodd and a colorful assembly of pioneer women who, under the auspices of the U.S. government, travel to the western prairies in 1875 to intermarry among the Cheyenne Indians. The covert and controversial "Brides for Indians" program, launched by the administration of Ulysses S. Grant, is intended to help assimilate the Indians into the white man's world. Toward that end May and her friends embark upon the adventure of their lifetime. Jim Fergus has so vividly depicted the American West that it is as if these diaries are a capsule in time.
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