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Book Summary and Reviews of The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls by Julie Schumacher

The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls by Julie Schumacher

The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls

by Julie Schumacher

  • Critics' Consensus (1):
  • Readers' Rating (2):
  • Published:
  • May 2012, 240 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

I'm Adrienne Haus, survivor of a mother-daughter book club. Most of us didn't want to join. My mother signed me up because I was stuck at home all summer, with my knee in a brace. CeeCee's parents forced her to join after cancelling her Paris trip because she bashed up their car. The members of "The Unbearable Book Club," CeeCee, Jill, Wallis, and I, were all going into eleventh grade A.P. English. But we weren't friends. We were literary prisoners, sweating, reading classics, and hanging out at the pool. If you want to find out how membership in a book club can end up with a person being dead, you can probably look us up under mother-daughter literary catastrophe. Or open this book and read my essay, which I'll turn in when I go back to school.

Ages 12+

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Starred Review. The characters, especially the four girls, sparkle… Smart and insightful." - Kirkus Reviews

"Her story is packed full of references to literature, not only the books that the club reads but also others that Adrienne correlates to her life and her story. The structure of the story and these references give it the feel of reading an essay while still reading like a narrative, and much to the true form of a story, it has a twist at the end. Required summer reading never seemed so exciting before." - VOYA

This information about The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Reader Reviews

Write your own reviewwrite your own review

avid

Solid teen fiction
A solid teen book with a bit of a twist at the end. I thought the situation - a summer book club forced on a small group of unrelated girls by their moms - was unrealistic, but once I accepted that as a given, the rest of the story worked. A little different take on the "book club" novel.

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Author Information

Julie Schumacher Author Biography

Julie Schumacher grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, and graduated from Oberlin College and Cornell University, where she earned her MFA. Her first novel, The Body Is Water, was published by Soho Press in 1995 and was an ALA Notable Book of the Year and a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her 2014 novel, Dear Committee Members, won the Thurber Prize for American Humor; she is the first woman to have been so honored. She lives in St. Paul and is a faculty member in the Creative Writing Program and the Department of English at the University of Minnesota.

Link to Julie Schumacher's Website

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Read-Alikes

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