JRC Book Group | The Lake on Fire by Rosellen Brown
Join the engaging conversation with your JRC community. JRC’s Book Group meets on the second Sunday of every month. This month’s book is The Lake on Fire by Rosellen Brown and will be on Zoom only. Click here to join via Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/OB3FSNDUTKaFGvsjJTbIXA#/registration
About the book:
The Lake on Fire is an epic narrative that begins among 19th-century Jewish immigrants on a failing Wisconsin farm.
Dazzled by the lore of the American dream, Chaya and her strange, brilliant, young brother Asher stow away to Chicago; what they discover there, however, is a Gilded Age as empty a facade as the beautiful Columbian Exposition luring thousands to Lake Michigan’s shore. The pair scrapes together a meager living–Chaya in a cigar factory; Asher, roaming the city and stealing books and jewelry to share with the poor, until they find different paths of escape. An examination of family, love, and revolution, this profound tale resonates eerily with today’s current events and tumultuous social landscape.
The Lake on Fire is robust, gleaming, and grimy all at once, proving that celebrated author Rosellen Brown is back with a story as luminous as ever.
Upcoming Books
5/2/2027 | Porcupines by Fran Fabriczki
In-Person & Zoom
A fresh and witty debut about a young immigrant mother and her increasingly inquisitive daughter, who wakes up one day and decides to find out who her father is.
Sonia is a Hungarian immigrant who is raising her daughter, Mila—her beloved Milosh—on her own in sunny Los Angeles. Her days are a blur of not-quite-illegal business activities, dodging PTA moms, and baking birthday cakes laced with rum—minor mistakes that nevertheless continually remind her of everything she doesn’t understand about America and parenthood. Mila, meanwhile, is juggling violin and swimming lessons and navigating the treacherous social politics of school with the help of a less-than-helpful guidebook on how to be cool in the sixth grade—all the while trying to get her secretive mother to share something, anything, about her past.
Sonia is sure that their bond, stitched from drive-through dinners, extracurricular activities, and a lot of exasperated affection for each other—will be enough to satisfy her daughter. But her guarded lifestyle has left Mila lonely, isolated, and ready to write herself into a bigger story. When she stumbles across emails between her mother and a man she’s never met, Mila decides to take matters into her own hands and forms a plan that will implode their carefully constructed lives.
Moving between Budapest before the fall of the Berlin Wall; Washington, DC, in the tense years of the Cold War; and the bright sunshine of early aughts Los Angeles, Porcupines is an irresistible novel about mothers and daughters, secrecy and loneliness, belonging and reinvention—and what happens when the truth can’t be held back any longer.