Poll: Pick three out of these four books for Book Club

[ufcasey]

TLDR: Four books in this poll, you can vote for up to three, the three highest will be selected for book club monthly discussions. If there's a tie I will flip a coin because to heck with it haha

Long version:
It turns out I don't know how to add because I accidentally only created polls that would lead to us having only 10 books total instead of 12, so we need to select two more. Add on top of that, the fact that "The Water Dancer" by Ta-Nehisi Coates won in the Debut category and the Historical Fiction category so I wasn't sure under which of those two categories I should select the second place winner as the official winner instead. So here's the four highest voted books that almost won but didn't and we need to select three of them so we can get to a total of 12 books.

Here are the nine other winners:
The Bookish Life of Nina Hill by Abbi Waxman (Fiction)

A Woman Is No Man by Etaf Rum (Fiction)

My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite (Mystery)

The Mother-in-Law by Sally Hepworth (Mystery)

The Dutch House by Ann Patchett (Historical Fiction)

The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Historical Fiction/Debut)

Know My Name by Chanel Miller (Memoir)

On the Come Up by Angie Thomas (Young Adult)

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern (Fantasy)

[travella]

I cannot pick up Giver of Stars after the accusations against JoJo Moyes and that book. The story broke shortly after I read Ladder to the Sky. After making that association, I just cannot get myself to read that book. I guess Boyne's book had more of an influence than I initially expected.

Just in case you don't know what I'm talking about:
www.google.com/amp/s/www.buzzfeednews.com/amphtml/tomiobaro/jojo-moyes-the-giver-of-stars-kim-richardson-bookwoman-of

[ufcasey]

Jan 6, 2020 11:11:37 GMT -5 travella said:

I cannot pick up Giver of Stars after the accusations against JoJo Moyes and that book. The story broke shortly after I read Ladder to the Sky. After making that association, I just cannot get myself to read that book. I guess Boyne's book had more of an influence than I initially expected.

Just in case you don't know what I'm talking about:
www.google.com/amp/s/www.buzzfeednews.com/amphtml/tomiobaro/jojo-moyes-the-giver-of-stars-kim-richardson-bookwoman-of

So I have already read The Giver of Stars (and liked it for the record) so I don't care if we choose that book to read or not, but I will say I had not heard of this controversy before now.

I have not read Richardson's book, but reading the comparisons between the two that Richardson provided in the Buzzfeed article, I don't know - those don't seem like groundbreaking similarities. I'll break them down below for those who are interested, but I'll tag them as spoilers just in case. But in general, there is no way that two books published only a handful of months apart could be plagiarized to any large degree - books have to be turned into editors and have to be printed before their release dates. When you add in the time it takes just to write a book - the timing just doesn't work out. Joyes at the very least had to have written most of her book already before seeing Richardson's book and then would have had a very small window of opportunity to make revisions to her own story to include things from Richardson's book. But even that seems unlikely considering this quote:

"According to the Pamela Dorman spokesperson, Moyes turned in a first draft to her editor on Oct. 23, 2018, a month after electronic galleys of Book Woman were first made available. The spokesperson noted that seven out of the eight passages Richardson highlighted in her comparison were included in that first draft. The only exception was the mention of the book The Good Earth, which was added in April 2018, but as Buck’s novel was the winner of the 1932 Pulitzer Prize, it would be a logical historical reference. “Neither the author nor anyone at Pamela Dorman Books was aware of The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek at this time,” according to the spokesperson."

You would have to assume the publisher was lying about either the timing of the first draft and/or the content of the first draft. But even then, I still don't see anything that was "stolen" that are of actual significance to Joyes' book:

SPOILER: Click to show

1. Getting accosted by someone who thinks that spreading books/knowledge seems like a logical point of "action" in a book that would otherwise be dull if the librarians just rode out and gave out books with nothing ever happening to them and everyone thinking what they were doing was lovely.

2. The character that attacked them ending up being dead, also seemingly a logical end to that story point otherwise what would stop them from being continually accosted? I also found it interesting that Richardson didn't point out that 'how' the man died actually was a significant part of Joyes' plot, which makes me believe that it was not a major point in her book, which is a pretty big difference.

3. A cast full of white people and a token POC character in a book written by two white women? Not surprising.

4. I thought this one was a legit point until later on in the article it's noted as a Pulitzer Prize book at the time of the setting, so that seems like not such a large coincidence after all, they just both googled popular books in that time period.

5. They were both given poems from a guy as a sign of romantic interest - this is pretty basic stuff.

6. Both weddings being on a pretty day in October is a coincidence, but it's not like they were going to be married on a rainy day, this is fiction HEA 101. The baby's age thing is also interesting but note that in Richardson's book it's the main character who adopts the baby and in Joyes' book it's a secondary character who has a baby out of wedlock which was one of two key points about why her character was looked down upon by the town and why she was so surprised they came to the wedding. Those seem like two very different stories.

7. A gift of a homemade quilt is hardly a key plot point, is Richardson really trying to say Joyes specifically included this very generic detail just to plagiarize off of her? This is silly to be included at all, along with the poem thing previously.

8. The "Women’s Home Companion" is mentioned several times in Joyes' book, and based on what the (real) magazine was about, of course calming a baby would be one of the reasons a character living in the backwoods of Kentucky in the 30's would want to theoretically want to read it. 

[travella]

It's not only the plot, but there were many paragraphs that were very similar in how they were worded. Almost too similar. I've never had controversy over a book bother me so badly as this instance. For some reason, probably the book I finished right before my Facebook blew up about this, I suddenly refuse to budge on this. It will be interesting to see if others from the group see a similarity though.

[meowmaps]

I heard some rumblings of this controversy after reading the first few pages of The Giver of Stars. Since it didn't immediately grab me the controversy was enough for me to return the book without reading further.