The Secret Keeper

Author: Kate Morton

One-sentence summary: A young woman witnesses her mother kill someone and her pursuit of the truth behind that act unravels amazing and shocking secrets about her mother and family.

B.A.D. Girls Book Rating: 9 (unanimous rating)

Our favorite thing about it: It was actually unpredictable, unlike so many books.

Our least favorite thing about it: Hard to find something…maybe that there was a lot of tragedy in the stories of the characters. This is stretching.

Main Topics of Discussion: History, Family, Truth, WWII, Mystery, Relationships, Coping with Tragedy

Our favorite quote: “Life could be cruel enough these days without the truth making it worse.”

Notes: We all said that this book was really fun to read. It was a great story and had great characters. We all felt that it had plot twists that we couldn’t predict, which is unusual…we usually see things coming from a mile away. The story moved along at a nice clip while still taking time to flesh out characters and details that made it interesting. We appreciated the historical elements, as usual. The painting (with words) of WWII London and daily life in a city that was continually bombed was fascinating. The unraveling of the mysteries of Dolly and Vivien (and Jimmy) was the most enjoyable part and kept us on our toes, not wanting to put the book down.

Memorable Meeting Moments: This was our annual Christmas meeting, which we all look forward to. This year, for the first time, we drew names and bought a gift for one other member. It was a fun switch. We still did our book exchange and our annual-review Jeopardy-style. This year’s game was compiled and hosted by Dara, and Lindsay won! Salted Caramel Hot Chocolate seemed to be a popular thing this year.

What We Ate: Chef Josh prepared an appetizer pizza, lasagna, broccolini, and green salad for us. Dara made homemade gingerbread.

Love Does

Author: Bob Goff

One-sentence summary: Bob weaves stories of his incredible life with the theme of love in action.

B.A.D. Girls Book Rating: 8

Our favorite thing about it: The message of love in action was our favorite thing about the book.

Our least favorite thing about it: At least a couple of us came away with the feeling that you have to be a risk-taker in order to follow God’s plan for your life and in showing love to others. This was probably not the actual opinion of the author and probably not one he would have wanted to give, but nonetheless, some of us came away with that general feeling from the book.

Main Topics of Discussion: Friendship, Love, Relationship, Selflessness, Sacrifice, Risk

Our favorite quote: “Don’t take the bait that if we do incredible things Jesus will dig us more. He can’t.”

Notes: We really loved this book. Goff consistently had things to say that had us nodding our heads and highlighting the text. The book read like a conversation with him and his humor punctuated his amazing stories of love and friendship. We learned so much from reading this book about living on the “edge,” giving up on bible study (you’d have to read the book to understand that reference), and friendships without agenda. The theme of love and sacrifice pervades the whole book and we enjoyed reading about Goff’s life and thoughts on love.

Memorable Meeting Moments: We ate outside and enjoyed our potluck Thanksgiving meal. We missed Amberly who had to fly to Malaysia at the last minute.We took some selfies and sent them to her during the meeting. And we re-confirmed our gift exchange names when Lindsay thought we hadn't even drawn names yet!

What We Ate: Christina made the ham, salad, sweet potatoes, and her cauliflower casserole for us. Stephanie brought a green bean casserole, Rachel brought a corn casserole, Lindsay brought dressing, and Dara brought Pumpkin scones with chai tea for dessert.

The Wealth of the Poor

Author: Larry James

One-sentence summary: James lays out the realities of Dallas’s poverty issues and what has worked and not worked over the years to change the city.

B.A.D. Girls Book Rating: 7

Our favorite thing about it: We found it very interesting and helpful in many ways at it related to our perspectives and some of the methods used to fight poverty.

Our least favorite thing about it: It read more like a how-to manual than we expected.

Main Topics of Discussion: Poverty, “Charity”, Volunteers, Evangelism, Ministry, Relationships

Our favorite quote: “I’ve found that all of us are rich and all of us are poor, just in different ways.”

Notes: We really enjoyed this book and the insight it provided into the detailed history of what is currently City Square (formerly Central Dallas Ministries). The victories and failures of their various tactics in the war against poverty were enlightening and helpful. Some were revelatory and eye-opening. We appreciated learning more about how things really work and changing our perspectives on a few conventional ways of doing “charity.”

Picking out a least favorite thing just came down to our expectations being wrong to begin with. We expected less detail and manual-like writing. However, that being said, there are several really wonderful inspirational books out there that spur people (especially Christians) to begin a revolutionary life of service and generosity to work toward change. This book by James serves a different purpose, although it is inspirational in a way. It really lays out the nuts and bolts of working to overcome poverty and all its facets in a large city. This book definitely has its place especially because of the experience detailed within as well as the practicality of what it shares.

Some of the things that we took away from the book are: the benefit of flexibility, taking time to evaluate practices regularly for effectiveness, doing ministry where you are, and the importance of relationship…among others.

Memorable Meeting Moments: We drew names for our first-ever gift exchange and we decided what we would each bring for our Thanksgiving potluck meeting next month! And we celebrated Lindsay's birthday.

What We Ate: Taco Soup (al fresco!)

September 2013 Meeting: #doing40different(ly)

This was a special meeting and we celebrated Dara's 40th birthday! We met at Grimaldi's for dinner and almost completely finished off three large pizzas. Then we went to Dara's mom's house to watch a movie in her theater room...Life of Pi. Not officially a book club book, but almost all of us have read it. For most of us it was several years ago. Watching the movie together led to a discussion of the book and what we thought of it. It was interesting that we ended up discussing a book because we hadn't picked a book to read and discuss this time. We had lots of desserts: double chocolate pumpkin cake with pumpkin spice buttercream, homemade pumpkin and vanilla glazed donuts and some very refreshing autumn sangria. We also gave Dara her birthday cards and an Amazon gift card instead of books. Such a fun night!

Dad is Fat

Author: Jim Gaffigan

One-sentence summary: New York City-based comedian, Jim Gaffigan, spins humorous tales of parenting, drawing from his own experience as a father to five children.

B.A.D. Girls Book Rating: 7

Our favorite thing about it: It was quick and funny and very relatable since we’re all parents.

Our least favorite thing about it: There was only one comedic subject…parenting.

Main Topics of Discussion: NYC, big vs. smaller families, marriage, discipline, babies, childhood

Our favorite quote: “I sometimes believe preschool was created by a parent who needed a reprieve from the incessant questions of a three-year-old.”

Notes: There is no question that we all laughed out loud many, many times while reading this book. Despite the fact that he has more children than any of us and lives in NYC, we related to every single thing he wrote. It was a very fun and hilarious book. We had a great time reading the quotes we had all highlighted. Our only criticism against the book was that it felt a little one-note. Parenting was the entire subject matter. There may have been a couple of paragraphs about marriage…as it related to parenting. This is not entirely a bad thing and not entirely unexpected, but toward the end, it felt like we were hearing the same joke repeated again and again. Overall, this was a great book and a lot of fun to read.

Memorable Meeting Moments: We solved all the world’s problems in a few hours…like usual.

What We Ate: Greek Pitas with homemade Tzatziki sauce, roasted potatoes and carrots, and Greek salad. We had key lime pie with fresh whipped cream for dessert.

Gone Girl

Author: Gillian Flynn

One-sentence summary: A story of a missing wife turns from mystery to suspense to psychological thriller as the truth comes out about both main characters.

B.A.D. Girls Book Rating: 7

Our favorite thing about it: This was a fast and entertaining read.

Our least favorite thing about it: The ending (or lack thereof).

Main Topics of Discussion: Marriage, Dating, Relationships, Mystery, Dysfunctional Families, Lying

Our favorite quote: “It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters.”

Notes: Most of our discussion centered on how much we enjoyed this book in general. And how the twists and turns were so entertaining and genuinely surprised us, which is hard to come by in a book. We discussed the nuances of being completely misled by the first 1/3 of the book and how crazy the rest of the book was. Family dynamics, how men and women perceive each other, and the role of honesty were all discussed. We talked about how, even after the “big reveal” moment in the book, we all went back and forth between agreeing with and siding with the main characters. We felt some of the things they did were out of character even though they were both crazy and unpredictable.

Most of all, we talked about the ending. Or the fact that we felt the book didn’t really have one. Of course, there are certain books with endings that are up in the air or don’t really resolve and it just goes with the rest of the book and you’re okay with it. But we could not give this book a pass on the terrible ending. To us, it felt like the author just gave up and couldn’t figure out a way to end the book at all, so it just ended. We felt jipped.

Memorable Meeting Moments: We were at the lake house when we discussed this book!

What We Ate: This wasn’t a regular meeting (because we were at the lake house) so we didn’t have a meal for our discussion (but we did have LOTS of yummy food that weekend!)

5th Annual Lake House Weekend

At the end of July, we went on our 5th annual book club trip to the Fair's lake house at Possum Kingdom Lake. We did it right this time and left on a Thursday night and came back Sunday afternoon. That means we had two full, glorious days to spend together and relax. It was wonderful.

Less than an hour into our trip, we stopped for treats....at Dairy Queen! We have had a tradition in the past to stop at the Cracker Barrel for brunch when we've left on a Friday morning. But since this was night time and after dinner, we decided we'd just have to get dessert.

Few things say "road trip" more than Dairy Queen treats.

Thursday night we basically just got settled and went to bed. Sleeping is such a luxury for all of us moms that we have not problems just going to bed! On Friday morning, after a leisurely breakfast, we went out to the pool.

Meals outside are such a treat...especially with friends. (This was yummy Papa Murphy's pizza.)

More pool time...

And some jumping from Dara and Lindsay. They also showed off some gymnastics skills with their jumps.

The weather was so gorgeous for us...here we are on the porch in the evening drying off before we eat dinner.

And after dinner...s'mores. We had to make them in the oven after three explosions from the fire pit...we couldn't get it lit correctly. But the s'mores tasted great anyway. We also watched a couple of movies and generally just went from one lazy activity to another...in other words, it was a perfect weekend!