Fee: $24/$19 members - includes an autographed copy of The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women, refreshments from MKE Localicious, and admission to the sculpture garden. Come early to stroll the grounds. Registration is closed. For info on future events, sign up for our e-list.

Margy Stratton, founder and executive producer of Milwaukee Reads produces this series of events featuring writers of particular interest to women.

Lynden Sculpture Garden's Women's Speaker Series and Boswell Books welcome Kate Moore, author of The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women, to the Lynden Sculpture Garden, Thursday, October 11, 7 pm. For more information on upcoming Women's Speaker Series Events, click here.

About The Radium Girls

The First World War rages across the globe, and hundreds of young women toil amidst the glowing dust of the radium-dial factories. With such a coveted job, these “shining girls” are the luckiest alive—until they begin to fall mysteriously ill.

As the fatal poison of the radium takes hold, their hopes and dreams crumble in one of the biggest scandals of America’s twentieth century, and a groundbreaking battle for worker’s rights. The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore is a rich, historical narrative of the young women exposed to the “wonder” substance of radium and their brave struggle for justice.

Their courage and tenacity saved many others, led to world-changing regulations, and even prevented nuclear war. Written with a sparkling voice and galloping pace, The Radium Girls is the first book that fully explores these women’s strength in the face of almost impossible circumstances and the incredible legacy they left behind.

About the Author

Kate Moore is a Sunday Times bestselling author with more than a decade’s experience writing and ghostwriting across varying genres, including memoir, biography, and history. In 2015, she directed a critically acclaimed play about the Radium Girls called These Shining Lives. She lives in the UK. Visit her at Kate-Moore.com.

Fee: $30/$25 members - includes an autographed copy of Undiscovered Country, refreshments from MKE Localicious, and admission to the sculpture garden. Come early to stroll the grounds. Register by phone at 414-446-8794.

Margy Stratton, founder and executive producer of Milwaukee Reads produces this series of events featuring writers of particular interest to women.

Lynden Sculpture Garden's Women's Speaker Series and Boswell Books welcome Kelly O'Connor McNees, author of Undiscovered Country, to the Lynden Sculpture Garden, Monday, September 24, 7 pm. For more information on upcoming Women's Speaker Series Events, click here.

About Undiscovered Country

In 1932, New York City, top reporter Lorena “Hick” Hickok starts each day with a front page byline—and finishes it swigging bourbon and planning her next big scoop.
But an assignment to cover FDR’s campaign—and write a feature on his wife, Eleanor—turns Hick’s hard-won independent life on its ear. Soon her work, and the secret entanglement with the new first lady, will take her from New York and Washington to Scotts Run, West Virginia, where impoverished coal miners’ families wait in fear that the New Deal’s promised hope will pass them by. Together, Eleanor and Hick imagine how the new town of Arthurdale could change the fate of hundreds of lives. But doing what is right does not come cheap, and Hick will pay in ways she never could have imagined.

Undiscovered Country artfully mixes fact and fiction to portray the intense relationship between this unlikely pair. Inspired by the historical record, including the more than three thousand letters Hick and Eleanor exchanged over a span of thirty years, McNees tells this story through Hick’s tough, tender, and unforgettable voice. A remarkable portrait of Depression-era America, this novel tells the poignant story of how a love that was forced to remain hidden nevertheless changed history.

About the Author

Kelly O’Connor McNees is the author of Undiscovered Country, The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott, The Island of Doves, and In Need of a Good Wife, a finalist for the 2013 Willa Award. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Toast, and in Rust Belt Chicago: An Anthology. Born and raised in Michigan, Kelly lives in Chicago with her family. Learn more at https://www.kellyoconnormcnees.com/.

Fee: $30/$25 members - includes an autographed copy of Beauty in the Broken Places, refreshments from MKE Localicious, and admission to the sculpture garden. Registration for this event is closed.

Margy Stratton, founder and executive producer of Milwaukee Reads produces this series of events featuring writers of particular interest to women.

Lynden Sculpture Garden's Women's Speaker Series and Boswell Books welcome Allison Pataki, author of Beauty in the Broken Places: A Memoir of Love, Faith, and Resilience, back to the Lynden Sculpture Garden, Monday, May 14, 7 pm.

About Beauty in the Broken Places

A deeply moving memoir about a young couple whose lives were changed in the blink of an eye, and the love that helped them rewrite their future

Five months pregnant, on a flight to their “babymoon,” Allison Pataki turned to her husband when he asked if his eye looked strange and watched him suddenly lose consciousness. After an emergency landing, she discovered that Dave—a healthy thirty-year-old athlete and surgical resident—had suffered a rare and life-threatening stroke. Next thing Allison knew, she was sitting alone in the ER in Fargo, North Dakota, waiting to hear if her husband would survive the night.

When Dave woke up, he could not carry memories from hour to hour, much less from one day to the next. Allison had lost the Dave she knew and loved when he lost consciousness on the plane. Within a few months, she found herself caring for both a newborn and a sick husband, struggling with the fear of what was to come.

As a way to make sense of the pain and chaos of their new reality, Allison started to write daily letters to Dave. Not only would she work to make sense of the unfathomable experiences unfolding around her, but her letters would provide Dave with the memories he could not make on his own. She was writing to preserve their past, protect their present, and fight for their future. Those letters became the foundation of this beautiful, intimate memoir. And in the process, she fell in love with her husband all over again.

This is a manifesto for living, an ultimately uplifting story about the transformative power of faith and resilience. It’s a tale of a man’s turbulent road to recovery, the shifting nature of marriage, and the struggle of loving through pain and finding joy in the broken places.

About the Author

Allison Pataki is the author of the bestselling novels Sisi, The Traitor’s Wife, and The Accidental Empress, as well as the co-author of Where the Light Falls, with her brother Owen Pataki, and two children’s books. Her novels have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Pataki and her husband, Dave Levy, are passionate about raising awareness of the difficulties of life after a stroke or traumatic brain injury. The daughter of former New York State governor George E. Pataki, Allison Pataki graduated cum laude from Yale University and lives in New York City with her family.

Fee: $22/$18 members - includes an autographed copy of Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, refreshments from MKE Localicious, and admission to the sculpture garden. Come early to stroll the grounds. This event is now sold out. You may be interested in our next event with Jenna Blum, author of The Lost Family, August 9.

Margy Stratton, founder and executive producer of Milwaukee Reads produces this series of events featuring writers of particular interest to women.

Lynden Sculpture Garden's Women's Speaker Series and Boswell Books welcome Gail Honeyman, author of Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, to the Lynden Sculpture Garden, Wednesday, June 6, 7 pm.

About Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

No one’s ever told Eleanor that life should be better than fine.

Meet Eleanor Oliphant: She struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she’s thinking. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life of avoiding social interactions, where weekends are punctuated by frozen pizza, vodka, and phone chats with Mummy.

But everything changes when Eleanor meets Raymond, the bumbling and deeply unhygienic IT guy from her office. When she and Raymond together save Sammy, an elderly gentleman who has fallen on the sidewalk, the three become the kinds of friends who rescue one another from the lives of isolation they have each been living. And it is Raymond’s big heart that will ultimately help Eleanor find the way to repair her own profoundly damaged one.

Soon to be a major motion picture produced by Reese Witherspoon, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is the smart, warm, and uplifting story of an out-of-the-ordinary heroine whose deadpan weirdness and unconscious wit make for an irresistible journey as she realizes. . .

The only way to survive is to open your heart.

About the Author

Gail Honeyman is a graduate of the universities of Glasgow and Oxford. Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine was short-listed for the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize as a work in progress and is Honeyman’s debut novel. She lives in Glasgow, Scotland.

Fee: $29/$24 members - includes an autographed copy of Dreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories, refreshments from MKE Localicious, and admission to the sculpture garden. Register by phone at 414-446-8794.

Margy Stratton, founder and executive producer of Milwaukee Reads produces this series of events featuring writers of particular interest to women.

Lynden Sculpture Garden's Women's Speaker Series and Boswell Books welcome Kelly Barnhill, author of Dreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories, to the Lynden Sculpture Garden, Thursday, March 1, 7 pm.

About Dreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories

From award-winning, New York Times bestselling author Kelly Barnhill comes a stunning first collection of acclaimed short fictions, teeming with uncanny characters whose stories unfold in worlds at once strikingly human and eerily original.

When Mrs. Sorensen’s husband dies, she rekindles a long-dormant love with an unsuitable mate in “Mrs. Sorensen and the Sasquatch.” In “Open the Door and the Light Pours Through,” a young man wrestles with grief and his sexuality in an exchange of letters with his faraway beloved. “Dreadful Young Ladies” demonstrates the strength and power—known and unknown—of the imagination. “The Insect and the Astronomer” upends expectations about good and bad, knowledge and ignorance, love and longing. The World Fantasy Award–winning novella The Unlicensed Magician introduces the secret, magical life of an invisible girl once left for dead.

By an author hailed as “a fantasist on the order of Neil Gaiman” (Minneapolis Star Tribune), the stories in Dreadful Young Ladies feature bold, reality-bending fantasy underscored by rich universal themes of love, death, jealousy, and hope.

Jim Stingl of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reviews Dreadful Young Ladies here.

About the Author

Kelly Barnhill writes books. It is a strange job, but, to be fair, she is a strange woman, so perhaps it makes sense. She is a former teacher, former bartender, former waitress, former activist, former park ranger, former secretary, former janitor and former church-guitar-player. The sum of these experiences have prepared her for exactly nothing – save for the telling of stories, which she has been doing quite happily for some time now.

She received the Newbery Medal in 2017, as well as fellowships from the Jerome Foundation and the Minnesota State Arts Board, and the McKnight Foundation. She is the winner of the World Fantasy Award, the Parents Choice Gold Award, the Texas Library Association Bluebonnet, and a Charlotte Huck Honor. She also was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award, the Andre Norton Award and the PEN/USA literary prize. She has been on the New York Times bestseller list for a bunch of weeks now, as well as the Indie Besteller list. She is the author of the novels THE GIRL WHO DRANK THE MOON, THE WITCH’S BOY, IRON HEARTED VIOLET and THE MOSTLY TRUE STORY OF JACK, as well as the novella, The Unlicensed Magician. She has also written a bunch of grownup-ish short stories of various descriptions (Literary, Speculative, Odd and Otherwise) that have appeared in a variety of venues, as well as essays, poetry, and a small collection of very strange nonfiction books for elementary students. She is a teaching artist with COMPAS, a statewide community arts program.

She has three completely fabulous children, an astonishingly talented husband (his name is Ted Barnhill and he designs beautiful and sustainable houses – including the one where her family lives – and he generally rules). She also teaches, freelances, volunteers, runs, canoes, camps, gardens (though badly), and hikes into the wilderness for days and days. She also bakes pie. It’s a pretty good life, actually.

She has the great fortune to be represented by Steven Malk of Writers House, who, it must be said, is a heck of a fellow.
https://kellybarnhill.wordpress.com/

Fee: $30/$25 members - includes an autographed copy of Hum If You Don't Know the Words, refreshments from MKE Localicious, and admission to the sculpture garden. Register by phone at 414-446-8794.

Margy Stratton, founder and executive producer of Milwaukee Reads produces this series of events featuring writers of particular interest to women.

Lynden Sculpture Garden's Women's Speaker Series and Boswell Books welcome Bianca Marais, author of Hum If You Don't Know the Words, to the Lynden Sculpture Garden, Sunday, July 23, 2-4 pm.

About Hum If You Don't Know the Words

Perfect for readers of The Secret Life of Bees and The Help, Hum If You Don't Know the Words is a perceptive and searing look at Apartheid-era South Africa, told through one unique family brought together by tragedy.

Life under Apartheid has created a secure future for Robin Conrad, a ten-year-old white girl living with her parents in 1970s Johannesburg. In the same nation but worlds apart, Beauty Mbali, a Xhosa woman in a rural village in the Bantu homeland of the Transkei, struggles to raise her children alone after her husband's death. Both lives have been built upon the division of race, and their meeting should never have occurred... until the Soweto Uprising, in which a protest by black students ignites racial conflict, alters the fault lines on which their society is built and shatters their worlds when Robin's parents are left dead and Beauty's daughter goes missing.

Told through Beauty and Robin's alternating perspectives, the interwoven narratives create a rich and complex tapestry of the emotions and tensions at the heart of Apartheid-era South Africa. Hum If You Don't Know the Words is a beautifully rendered look at loss, racism, and the creation of family.

"Hum If You Don't Know the Words is a marvel. Set in South Africa in 1978, this is the story of Robin, a white child, and Beauty, a black mother, both of whom experience immense loss after the Soweto student uprising. Bianca Marais has written a book about apartheid--a book about tragedy, injustice, grief, and survival--that manages to sparkle with wit, warmth, and charming secondary characters. Readers will love this rare and rewarding gem."
--Emilie Sommer, East City Bookshop, Washington, DC

"I enjoy reading novels about historical events that have occurred during my lifetime, but I don’t remember much about the Soweto uprising in South Africa in 1976. I was living in Buffalo, a self-absorbed ten years old, about the age of Robin Conrad in the terrific new novel, Hum If You Don’t Know the Words. Robin is a nine-year old white girl living with her family in Johannesburg, while Beauty Mbali is a black woman raising her children alone in Bantustan. The Soweto uprising causes both of their worlds to implode, when Robin’s parents are murdered and Beauty’s daughter, a student activist, disappears. When Robin’s aunt hires Beauty to look after Robin while she works, the two form a close bond. Events escalate when Robin conceals information about Beauty’s missing daughter. Robin learns that her family’s views about other races may not be correct, and Beauty comes to love Robin like one of her own children."
--Sharon K. Nagel, Boswell Book Company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

About the Author

Bianca Marais is from South Africa and moved to Toronto in 2012. Marais started work on Hum If You Don’t Know the Words while doing her Creative Writing Certificate through the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies. She lives with her long-suffering husband as well as a golden retriever, two cats and an overactive imagination.