Book Club

The Book Club will meet in-person at 7:15 p.m. on Thursday, May 22, 2025. We meet on the fourth Thursday of every month (with the exception of November and December when we meet on the third Thursday of the month due to the holidays). Meetings are free to members and $5 for non-member guests.

The May selection is The Girl With the Louding Voice by Abi Darè, published in 2020. The book portrays the difficult life of a young Nigerian girl named Adunni. The book was shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize for debut novelists and received a Goodreads Choice Award nomination for Best Fiction.

Adunni is a 14-year-old girl from a poor family in a small rural village near Lagos, Nigeria. Her mother always encouraged her to get an education and her mother “was paying for school fees and rent moneys and feeding money and everything money before she was dead.” When her mother dies there is no money for her education and Adunni leaves school. Against Adunni’s wishes, her father then marries her off to Morufu (Morufu’s third wife). Her father uses the money from the “bride price” to support himself and the boys in the family. Adunni encounters serious problems in her new husband’s household and runs away to Lagos. In Lagos, she works for—and is exploited and abused by—Big Madam.

In her New York Times review, Tsitsi Dangarembga notes that the “plot takes our protagonist on a whirlwind tour of the various horrors — pregnancy-related death, an inhuman criminal justice system, child sex trafficking, grueling labor and violence both physical and psychological — that millions of Nigerian girls face, and for which, Daré suggests, education is the only escape.” Darè is from Nigeria herself and she offers rich and vibrant descriptions of life in that country. The engaging story with its sassy protagonist introduces the American reader to vivid depictions of the poverty, sexism, child labor and child marriage that still occur in Nigeria. Readers will learn about life in Nigeria in this book and the book is likely to invoke a dynamic discussion.

Many members like to gather for dinner at 5:30 p.m. at Julia’s, before the Book Club meeting. To make a reservation at the 10-seat book club table, please call Julia’s Restaurant directly at 510-280-1547, not the Front Desk.

Contact Carolyn Whittle, Chair, at whittleinc@earthlink.net if you would like to be added to our mailing list.