Leon-Saxeville Library

Thank you to everyone that made it to the last meeting of the Adult Book Club. Here's a look at the Club's next reading selection:

The Oracle of Stamboul by Michael David Lukas

"Late in the summer of 1877, a flock of purple-and-white hoopoes suddenly appears over the town of Constanta on the Black Sea, and Eleonora Cohen is ushered into the world by a mysterious pair of Tartar midwives who arrive just minutes before her birth. They had read the signs, they said: a sea of horses, a conference of birds, the North Star in alignment with the moon. It was a prophecy that their last king had given on his deathwatch. But joy is mixed with tragedy, for Eleonora's mother dies soon after the birth.

Raised by her doting father, Yakob, a carpet merchant, and her stern, resentful stepmother, Ruxandra, Eleonora spends her early years daydreaming and doing housework - until the moment she teaches herself to read, and her father recognizes that she is an extraordinarily gifted child, a prodigy.

When Yakob sets off by boat for Stamboul on business, eight-year-old Eleonora, unable to bear the separation, stows away in one of his trunks. On the shores of the Bosporus, in the house of her father's business partner, Moncef Bey, a new life awaits.

The Oracle of Stamboul is a marvelously evocative, magical historical novel that will transport readers to another time and place - romantic, exotic, yet remarkably similar to our own."

We have copies on reserve at the library for patrons interested in reading the new Adult Book Club Selection. The River's Edge Readers Book Club will meet to discuss The Oracle of Stamboul on Monday, May 21st at 7:00 p.m. at the library. All are welcome to join!