Bookies of Central Minnesota, recommends:

Reconstructing Amelia by Kimberly McCreight (Harper Perennial, 2013), Fiction, 400 pages

"Amelia, a 15-year old girl who attends a private school, does not have a lot of friends. When she is asked to be a part of a secret club she is thrilled, even though she and her friend had promised each other they would never join one of the clubs. One day, Amelia's mom receives a phone call saying there had been an incident at the school; she arrives to discover that Amelia has jumped from the roof of the school to her death. This is hard to process as Amelia was a good girl with good grades, and never got into trouble.  Then Amelia's mom starts receiving anonymous texts saying, 'She did not jump.'

"Reconstructing Amelia brought out some passionate discussion about hazing and bullying.  Most of us have had an experience with bullying, either ourselves or with our children. We discussed social media and the question: How much information is really too much information to reveal?  Single parenting is also covered in this book and we talked about how hard it is to raise a child and maintain a job and household on your own." 

Paired with: "Hibachi, Amelia's favorite food. We also had an assortment of wines: we took the labels off and referred to them as Maggie's hazing potions. For dessert we had New York Cheesecake as the book is set in New York."

Lauren Hesse of Doubleday Marketing, recommends: 

"Mixing history with scandal, Belle Cora is a fantastic historical novel that covers the glitz, glamor and grit of the early 1900s from San Francisco to New York City. A story of love (and of loss) this book captures what happens when a good girl goes bad. Belle will bear a gambler's child, build a fortune, commit murder, leave a trail of aliases in her wake and sacrifice almost everything -- though perhaps not enough -- for the man whose love she cannot bear to lose.  At last her destiny will take her to Gold Rush California, to riches and power. That is, until the day she mysteriously disappears. Told with unflagging wit and verve, Belle Cora brings to life a turbulent era and an untamed America on the cusp of greatness. Its heroine is a woman in conflict with her time, who nevertheless epitomizes it with her fighting spirit, her gift for self-invention, and her determination to chart her own fate."