Hi! I am hosting book club next month and am desperately searching for a book that has a hopeful/heartwarming story with enough depth to have meaningful conversations around it.
Something like Remarkably Bright Creatures or House in the Cerulean Sea, perhaps 🤍 absolutely adored those two books!!
My women’s book club usually tends to pick historical and literary fiction, or an occasional thriller. We are reading Solito, a memoir following a young boy’s journey across the border, for our February selection and it is phenomenal but quite a heavy/emotional read with the way the world is right now. With that said, I think that everyone is itching for a lighter read next month.
For our selections the only requirements are that the book is 400 pages or less and that nobody has read the book yet (we are a small group, so usually this isn’t a huge impediment).
Edit: just wanted to add that whoever is hosting the book club picks three books for the rest of the group to vote on.
by pearlylobster_roll
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The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. I just finished this one last week and there was heartbreak and grief but also it was so heartwarming and touching.
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The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry.
A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman. It started out a little slow for me but it picks up, and the ending made me smile.
On my list to read that is supposedly the same vibe is The Guncle by Steven Rowley.
The Library of Lost Dollhouses or
The Berry Pickers
The Storied Life of AJ Fikry, by Gabrielle Zevin
West with Giraffes by Lynda Rutledge
This may be an odd recommendation, but *Warm Bodies* (Isaac Merion). It’s a zombie book (and movie). It’s a love story, both generally and between two people. It’s a bit of Romeo and Juliet. I love the movie but the book works well too.
ah, I came here to recommend Remarkably Bright Creatures and then saw that you had already mentioned it as an example.
It’s probably not quite in the genre you tend to read as group, but I think a book in Becky Chambers’ Wayfarer Series might accomplish that “a book that gives you the warm fuzzies” feeling similarly to Remarkably Bright Creatures or some of TJ Klune’s books. You don’t need to read them in order; they have some commonalities but stand on their own. Perhaps either “The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet” or “Record of a Spaceborn Few” might fit the bill.
Before the Coffee Gets Cold, Pride and Prejudice, Beartown, Hotel in the Corner of Bitter and Sweet