The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls
Read The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls Online
Authors: Julie Schumacher
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2012 by Julie Schumacher
Jacket photograph copyright © 2012 by Ghislain & Marie David de Lossy/Getty Images
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon in a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Susan Bergholz Literary Services for permission to reprint excerpts from
The House on Mango Street
by Sandra Cisneros, copyright © 1984 by Sandra Cisneros. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Susan Bergholz Literary Services, New York, NY, and Lamy, NM.
Brief excerpts in this book have been reprinted from the following:
The Left Hand of Darkness
by Ursula K. Le Guin;
Frankenstein
by Mary Shelley;
The Awakening
by Kate Chopin; and “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Schumacher, Julie.
The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls / Julie Schumacher. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: When four very different small-town Delaware high school girls are forced to join a mother-daughter book club over summer vacation, they end up learning about more than just the books they read.
eISBN: 978-0-375-98571-3
[1. Books and reading—Fiction. 2. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 3. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 4. Book clubs (Discussion groups)—Fiction. 5. Delaware—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.S3916Un 2012 [Fic]—dc23 2011010266
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
v3.1
For Bella and Emma and Lawrence Jacobs—
my all-time favorite real-life raucous group
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Name:
Adrienne Haus
Assignment:
Summer Essay
Instructor:
Ms. Radcliffe
Class:
English 11 Advanced Placement
Thesis statement:
Book clubs can kill you. (This essay ends with a person drowning. It turns out you don’t need much water for a person to drown.)
Essay options: Check A or B. Whichever you choose, you must include a bibliography and demonstrate—in your own words—an understanding of at least twenty literary terms listed on the English 11 AP website
.
[ ] Option A: argument and analysis
[X] Option B: creative narrative. For example, how have the books you chose to read for this assignment affected you?
Please explain your project in the space below
.
I was planning to choose option A because I thought it would be easier. But that was before I dragged myself through the gates of the West New Hope Community Swim Club, before the monster in the closet and the hermaphrodite sex scene and the stolen pills and the revolving blue and red lights of the ambulance and the crazy woman who locked herself away in a yellow room
.
I want to apologize for some of the things you’ll read in this essay: they might not be appropriate for the assignment. In
The Left Hand of Darkness
Genly says, “I’ll make my report as if I told a story.” That’s what I’m going to do. And I’ll explain how the books affected me—because whoever I was at the beginning of the summer, I am not that person anymore
.
1. SETTING: The place where the author puts the characters. It’s like setting a table, except that instead of using plates and silverware, you’re using people
.
O
n our first day of membership in what CeeCee would later call the Unbearable Book Club, I was sitting in a plastic lounge chair at the West New Hope, Delaware, community pool, reading a dog-eared copy of “The Yellow Wallpaper.” According to the thermometer on the lifeguard stand, it was ninety-seven degrees. My hands were sweating so much they left stains on the pages.
CeeCee paused by the empty recliner next to mine. She was wearing a white crocheted bikini and dark sunglasses, and I saw a copy of “The Yellow Wallpaper” sticking out of her polka-dot bag. CeeCee’s thighs didn’t touch at the top, I noticed. We weren’t friends.
“Don’t you think we’re too old for this?” she asked.
I wasn’t sure she was talking to me: I wasn’t the sort of person CeeCee Christiansen usually talked to. The two of
us chatting? It was like a dolphin hanging out with a squirrel. “It wasn’t my idea,” I said as a river of sweat worked its way down my spine. “I think our mothers set it up. They were in a yoga class together.”
CeeCee didn’t glance in my direction. She unpony-tailed her long blond hair and let it fall toward the ground like a satin curtain. “Believe me,” she said. “It wasn’t
my
mother’s idea. She doesn’t have the imagination.”
“Good to know.” I wiped my hands on my towel.
Twenty feet from the edges of our chairs, across a stretch of cement too hot to stand on, the pool flashed and glittered, a turquoise rectangle full of multicolored bodies leaping in and out of the water like flying fish.
CeeCee was staring at one of the lifeguards, who was staring back at her and twirling his whistle around his finger on a string: three twirls to the right, three to the left. She had apparently finished talking to me, so I picked up my book.
“You’re actually reading it.” She sat down and took the cap off a bottle of sunblock. When I turned toward her she smiled a closed-lipped smile, making me think of an alligator sunning itself on a riverbank.
“That’s the assignment,” I said. “We have to read ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and four other books.”
“
And
learn a list of literary terms
and
write an essay,” CeeCee said. “This teacher’s insane. No one else assigns that kind of homework during the summer. I don’t care if it is AP.”
I squeegeed the sweat from my eyebrows with an index finger. I didn’t mind doing the reading—whatever I read
would be more interesting than my day-to-day life—but I wasn’t looking forward to the essay. Most of the papers I wrote for school came back with suggestions in the margins about how my ideas could be organized. “I can’t find an argument here,” my tenth-grade history teacher had said.
“So you’re not going to read the books?” I asked CeeCee. I didn’t know Ms. Radcliffe yet, but she had a reputation for being stern and precise. I imagined her snapping a steel-edged ruler on my desk.
“It doesn’t matter if you read them.” CeeCee squirted a white ribbon of lotion onto her stomach. “Most of the books we read for school are crap. I usually just read the summary online, or I read the first couple of pages and then skip to the end.” She glanced at my copy of “The Yellow Wallpaper.” “You’re planning to read the whole thing?”
“I think that’s the point of a book,” I said. “You start at the beginning and you read to the end.” I hadn’t learned how to read until halfway through first grade, and I still felt grateful to my teacher, Ms. Hampl, who had knelt by my desk one afternoon and smoothed her finger across the parallel rows of two-dimensional black marks in my book—and as if she had opened a hidden door, I felt the patterned surface break and give way, and the words let me in. I still loved opening a book and feeling like I was physically entering the page, the ordinary world fizzing and blurring around the edges until it disappeared.
“You don’t have to take Advanced Placement,” I pointed out.
“Right. Only the helpless take regular English.”
CeeCee squeezed some lotion onto her arms, which were thin and hairless. “AP classes have two kinds of kids in them: the kids who are smart, and the kids who don’t want to spend the year in a room full of losers. Do you have a four-oh?”
“A four-oh grade average? No.” I wasn’t sure what my average was. Teachers often referred to me as a student with “a lot of potential.” This meant they
expected
me to be smart; but in fact my mind was often packing a mental suitcase and wandering off on its own. I sometimes pictured all the things I had learned during the previous week at school jumping into brightly painted railroad cars and disappearing into the distance on a speeding train.
CeeCee scanned the perimeter of the pool, presumably for more-worthwhile people to talk to. The pickings were slim. “So what’s your deal?” she asked. “I don’t really know you. Who are you supposed to be?”
Who was I
supposed
to be? I was Adrienne Haus. I was fifteen. I lived in West New Hope with my mother, who had signed me up for a summer book club. Now I was reading—or trying to read—a book at the pool.
CeeCee recapped her lotion. “Are you a religious freak?” she asked.
“No.”
“A shoplifter?”
“No.”
“A partier?”
“No.” I was waiting for her to come up with something else. “Are those my only choices?”
“Those are three of them.” She picked up her cell
phone and frowned at its screen. “You’d look better if you parted your hair on the other side. Why do you have that thing on your leg?”
One of the lifeguards, his calves dangling like dark, hairy fruit from the perch of his chair, blew his whistle at a cluster of boys who were holding each other’s heads underwater.
“It’s a knee brace,” I said.
“Can’t you take it off?” CeeCee asked. “It’s going to stink.”
“I don’t think it stinks.” I sniffed at the thick black cloth on my leg, then gently unfastened its Velcro straps and looked at my knee: it was swollen and fleshy, like an unidentified vegetable discovered at the bottom of a bin. “I fractured my kneecap,” I said, talking more to myself than to CeeCee. “And tore my ACL. I’m supposed to exercise my leg in the water.”
I expected CeeCee to be disgusted by the sight of my scar—a pink wrinkled worm—but she lifted her sunglasses and leaned toward me for a better look.
“You probably heard about it at school,” I said. “An ambulance came for me after lunch.” I explained to CeeCee that about a week before the end of the school year, I had tripped over nothing in a crowded stairwell, and even before my knee hit the metal riser I understood that the six-week canoe trip I had signed up for with my best friend, Liz, was going to happen without me and I would be stuck in West New Hope, alone. “Liz left last weekend,” I said. “I saved four hundred dollars toward that trip.” Liz was probably paddling across the Canadian border on her
way to being friends with someone else. “Anyway,” I said. “You probably knew most of that already.”