An oddly small group. Me and Susan and another Susan, and Heidi, who really works at Hollywood but spent the day here subbing, and was drafted into facilitating this group when Kim went home with the nasty cold that's going around. She hadn't actually read the book, so part of the time we were explaining plot and characters and what-not to her.

Susan had problems with the book, partly because she knew the area and felt the need to pin all of the locations to their proper places. Despite the fact that Obreht purposefully shuffled around the names and places, to try to make it more universal, and not tied to a particular war in a particular country. The other Susan immersed herself in it (having read it in the course of two days) and reveled in the sense of place that she found in it. I loved it as an example of story-telling, a tangled skein of threads interweaving generations back. And Heidi decided that Hollywood would just have to read it next year.