" ... [our review] will not be able to capture the ferocious, astonishing experience of being inside this deceptively slim book ... a dramatic social novel, a successful entwining of people that comes to signify the Big Moment of history"

- San Francisco Chronicle

From the O. Henry Award-winning author of the story collection The Bostons; an exquisite first novel set at a disintegrating New England prep school.

It's 1968. The prestigious but cash-strapped Goode School in the town of Cape Wilde is run by its aging, philandering headmaster, Goddard Byrd, known to both his friends and his enemies as God. With Cape Wilde engulfed by the social and political storms of integration, coeducation and the sexual revolution, God has confidently promised coeducation "over my dead body." And then, through a clerical error, the Goode School admits its first female student: Carole Faust, a brilliant, intractable fifteen-year-old black girl.

What does it mean to be the First Girl?

Carolyn Cooke has written a ferociously intelligent, richly sensual novel about the lives of girls and women, the complicated desperation of daughters without fathers and the erosion of paternalistic power in an elite New England town on the cusp of radical social change. Remarkable for the precision of its language, the incandescence of its images, and the sly provocations of its moral and emotional predicaments, Daughters of the Revolution is a novel of exceptional force and beauty.

Please join us as we welcome Carolyn Cooke on Thursday, June 23 at 7pm.

"Three generations of women converge on the family beach house in this wickedly funny, emotionally resonant story of love and dysfunction from the author of the best-selling novel Commencement ... One of this year's most inviting summer novels" 

-The New York Times

- San Francisco Chronicle

The Kelleher family has been coming to Maine for sixty years. Their beachfront cottage,won on a barroom bet after the war, is a place where children run in packs, showers are taken outdoors, and threadbare sweaters are shared on chilly nights. It is also a place where cocktail hour follows morning mass, nosy grandchildren snoop in drawers, and ancient grudges simmer below the surface. As Maggie, Kathleen, and Anne Marie descend on Alice and the cottage, each woman brings her own baggage-a secret pregnancy, a terrible crush, and a deeply held resentment for misdeeds of the past.

By turns uproarious and achingly sad, Maine unveils the sibling rivalry, alcoholism, social climbing, and Catholic guilt at the center of one family, along with the abiding, often irrational love that keeps them coming back, every summer, to the family house, and to one another.

Please join us as we welcome J. Courtney Sullivan on Sunday, June 26 at 3pm.

Not only are mother-daughter book groups a fantastic way to explore literature together, but also to see each other in context of other mothers and daughters.

Join Lori Day and her daughter Charlotte Kugler as they discuss how they formed a mother-daughter book group when Charlotte was in third grade, and how it was able to run successfully for six years. They formed lasting friendships, strengthened their own bonds, and discussed books that ranged from childhood classics to popular series.

The mother-daughter pair will share tips on forming a book group - what worked for them, and what they might have changed in retrospect. They'll discuss how they dealt with busy schedules, and the guidelines the group used for admitting new members when others moved from the group.

What makes a book a good pick for a mother-daughter discussion? Which books lend themselves to supplemental activities? How does a group choose what it reads, who hosts the meetings, and what happens at them? These questions and more will be answered on Sunday, July 24 at 3pm in a one-hour workshop at the Concord Bookshop.

Charlotte Kugler

Pre-registration is required; call 978-369-2405 or stop at our front desk the next time you're in the bookshop. Reserve a seat (or a pair of seats!) for $10, returned to you on the day of the workshop in the form of a Concord Bookshop gift certificate.

Lori, formerly Director of Admissions at The Fenn School, is an educational consultant who focuses on admissions and special education. She writes the It's Your Day blog, and can be found on the Huffington Post and in the pages of the Concord Journal. Charlotte, who just finished her freshman year at Mount Holyoke College, wrote the "Notes from Charlotte's Web" column in the Concord Journal for five years and is spending her summer writing for the Concord Journal and several other local newspapers.