Family Book Club: Moon Over Manifest

For our latest family book club we read Moon Over Manifest by Clare Vanderpool. It was one of my most favorite books we have ever read! I loved the writing style, the story line, the foreshadowing, the characters....well, everything! I also loved that I got to pull out my Hungarian Fortune Teller voice (yeah, I do try to do different voices for all my characters! Good thing the kids don't know how professional narrators do it!) The book is all about a mining town full of immigrants from all around the world and it has a lot of train metaphors. It's almost like it could have been describing Price/Helper in it's early days! So for our book club activity we went to the Helper Mining and Railroad museum. It was so cool! I can't believe we have lived here for 6 years and never gone to the museum. I honestly want to go back there by myself sometime just so I can really spend some time reading everything. And it couldn't have been a better choice for our book club activity even if I had called ahead to tell them what to display. It seems like every room we went into had something that we could associate with our book from alcohol stills, an underground mine, a telegraph and post office, a handmade quilt, an old fashioned school, lots of train replicas, and even a company store.  Zac played the part of our unofficial tour guide since he had just visited the museum with his scout troop the week before.

We were glad to have Bill and Susan visiting with us for the day so they could share in our book club adventure. Everyone should have a "Bill" go through a museum with them.  He is a treasure trove of information about many, many things!

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Later that evening we finished up our book club by talking about the author, discussing the book, writing Remember When stories like they did in the book (i.e. remember when Garrett peed in the cactus plant at Grandma and Grandpa's house.....) and eating Gingersnaps (like Abilene, Ruth Ann and Lettie do in the book.) Here's the recipe for my Gingersnaps. We had a great time!