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Patricia Forde

Book Club Report: The List, by Patricia Forde

An update from our tenth and eleventh Book Club meetings! Over the past two weeks, the Stone Soup Book Club has discussed The List, by Patricia Forde, a dystopian novel that lended itself to very fun conversations! In The List, words are treated as very dangerous, and very important. In our first week of discussions, we delved into why words are so important, and how the characters in the book view words in a different way than we do. We also went around and listed which words are most important to us, or the ones we feel that we need in order to survive. Next, we had a whole group discussion about the characters in The List, where we shared out our personal thoughts on the characters. Our second week started off with a very fun discussion about movie adaptations, where we broke into two groups to try and decide whether The List would make a good movie. To help us in our decision-making, we identified which types of books do make a good movie. We decided that a book needs to be very dramatic in order to become a movie, and that The List was just not dramatic enough. However, that discovery lended itself to a very fun conversation about which ways a movie would make the book more dramatic. Altogether, it was a very fun exercise. Next, we had a discussion about symbolism and themes in the novel, and talked about the significance of words, and all that they mean in society. Finally, this week, we had a delayed-tenth-week-anniversary (due to technical difficulties on our tenth week). We broke into small breakout rooms, and got to share out our favorite books, and discuss books we have in common. It was very fun to hear more about which types of books everyone likes! We also chose our next book this week, as well as the one after it. The titles and dates are written below. Our Next Book (7/1 and 7/8): Amal Unbound, by Aisha Saeed Our Second-Next Book (7/15 and 7/22): Harbor Me, by Jacqueline Woodson The Stone Soup Book Club is open to all Stone Soup contributors and subscribers, age 9-13, throughout the summer. We meet every Wednesday at 1pm PST (4pm EST) for one hour via Zoom to discuss our chosen book. Join us!