HPA Community Book Club to Meet Nov. 4

Hawai’i Preparatory Academy’s Community Book Club will meet at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 4.

The monthly bookstore will take place in the Dryer Memorial Library at the school’s Upper Campus.

Dryer Memorial librarian Lois Inman and Upper School English teacher Jaime Johnson will lead the group in its discussion of Mink River by Brian Doyle.

The Mink River brings a town to life through the jumbled lives and braided stories of its people.

In a small town on the Oregon coast there are love affairs and almost-love-affairs, mystery and hilarity, bears and tears, brawls and boats, a garrulous logger and a silent doctor, rain and pain, Irish immigrants and Salish stories, mud, and laughter.

There’s a Department of Public Works that gives haircuts and counts insects, a policeman addicted to Puccini, a philosophizing crow, beer, and berries. An expedition is mounted, a crime is committed, and there’s an unbelievably huge picnic on the football field. Babies are born. A car is cut in half with a saw. A river confesses what it is thinking.

It’s the tale of a town, written in a distinct and lyrical voice, and readers will close the book more than a little sad to leave the village of Neawanaka on the west coast of Oregon, beneath the hills that used to boast the biggest trees in the history of the world

HPA’s Community Book Club is free and open to the public. Light refreshments are served and attendees are invited to bring a snack to share with the group.

To learn more about the Community Book Club, contact Jamie Johnson via e-mail at jjohnson@hpa.edu.