Fee: $22/$18 members - includes an autographed copy of White Collar Girl, refreshments by MKELocalicious and admission to the sculpture garden. Bronze Optical invites you to arrive early to browse a diverse, vibrant selection of frames--mirror provided, of course!--while they clean and tighten the screws in your current eyewear. Register by phone at 414-446-8794.

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

Lynden Sculpture Garden's Women's Speaker Series, Bronze Optical, and Boswell Books welcome Renée Rosen, author of White Collar Girl, to the Lynden Sculpture Garden, Monday, November 16, 7-9 pm. Daniel Goldin and Jane Glaser of Boswell Books will start off the evening with a run-down of their recommendations for book clubs--a quick introduction to the new and noteworthy books available this fall.

In her novels author Renée Rosen expertly combines Chicago’s rich history with remarkable storytelling. Her first book, Dollface, was set in a 1920’s Chicago filled with flappers and gangsters like Al Capone. Her follow-up, What the Lady Wants, imagined the Gilded Age rise of the department store magnate Marshall Field. Now in White Collar Girl, Rosen transports readers back to The Windy City, exploring The Chicago Tribune newsroom in the 1950’s.

Based on Rosen’s extensive research and hours of interviews with former Chicago Tribune employees, White Collar Girl is set in the boisterous world of 1950’s Chicago where Jordan Walsh, a woman from a family of esteemed reporters and with connections to luminaries like Mike Royko, Nelson Algren, and Ernest Hemingway, struggles to be taken seriously when she’s hired as a society reporter at The Chicago Tribune. Like the other women at the Tribune, Jordan is labeled a ‘sob sister’ – a nickname given to them by their male colleagues who believe women are too emotional to be successful.

Every second of every day, something is happening. There’s a story out there buried in the muck, and Jordan Walsh wants to be the one to dig it up. But it’s 1955, and the men who dominate the city room of the Chicago Tribune have no interest in making room for a female cub reporter. Instead Jordan is relegated to society news, reporting on Marilyn Monroe sightings at the Pump Room and interviewing secretaries for the White Collar Girl column.

Even with her journalistic legacy and connections to local luminaries, Jordan struggles to be taken seriously. Of course, that all changes the moment she establishes a secret source inside Mayor Daley’s office and gets her hands on some confidential information. Now careers and lives are hanging on Jordan’s every word. But if she succeeds in landing her stories on the front page, there’s no guarantee she’ll remain above the fold.

"White Collar Girl is an unforgettable novel about an ambitious woman’s struggle to break into the male dominated newspaper world of the 1950s."
-- Sara Gruen, New York Times Bestselling Author of Water for Elephants and At the Water’s Edge

About the Author

As clichéd as it sounds, Renée is a former advertising copywriter who always had a novel in her desk drawer. When she saw the chance to make the leap from writing ad copy to fiction, she jumped at it. A confirmed history and book nerd, Renée loves all things old, all things Chicago and all things written.

A graduate of American University in D.C., Renée has contributed to many magazines and newspapers, including Chicago Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, Complete Woman, DAME, Publisher’s Weekly and several other now sadly defunct publications. She is the bestselling author of What The Lady Wants: A Novel of Marshall Field and the Gilded Age, Dollface: A Novel of the Roaring Twenties and Every Crooked Pot. She lives in Chicago where she is currently working on a new novel about the Chicago blues and Chess Records coming from Penguin/Berkley fall 2016.

   

Fee: $25/$20 members - includes an autographed copy of The Cartographer of No Man's Land, refreshments by MKELocalicious and admission to the sculpture garden. Bronze Optical invites you to arrive early to browse a diverse, vibrant selection of frames--mirror provided, of course!--while they clean and tighten the screws in your current eyewear. Register online now.

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

Lynden Sculpture Garden's Women's Speaker Series, Bronze Optical, and Boswell Books welcome P.S. Duffy, author of The Cartographer of No Man's Land, to the Lynden Sculpture Garden, Tuesday, September 29, 7-9 pm.

From a hardscrabble village in Nova Scotia to the collapsing trenches of France, a debut novel about a family divided by World War I.

In the tradition of Robert Goolrick’s A Reliable Wife and Karl Marlantes’s Matterhorn, P. S. Duffy’s astonishing debut showcases a rare and instinctive talent emerging in midlife. Her novel leaps across the Atlantic, between a father at war and a son coming of age at home without him.

When his beloved brother-in-law goes missing at the front in 1916, Angus defies his pacifist upbringing to join the war and find him. Assured a position as a cartographer in London, he is instead sent directly into the visceral shock of battle. Meanwhile, at home, his son Simon Peter must navigate escalating hostility in a fishing village torn by grief. With the intimacy of The Song of Achilles and the epic scope of The Invisible Bridge, The Cartographer of No Man’s Land offers a soulful portrayal of World War I and the lives that were forever changed by it, both on the battlefield and at home.

“It should do for WWI what Matterhorn did for Vietnam."
-Publishers Weekly, BEA preview

“I cannot believe this is a debut novel. Incredibly well written, with beautifully executed characters, and so obviously grounded in research without ever being didactic – I loved this book. It’s one of the best I’ve read in a long time.”
–Becky Day, TCC/City of Virginia Beach Joint Use Library

“Brilliant. The description of front line action in the trenches is impressively real, and the ending blessedly free from sentimentality. Altogether a remarkable debut.”
–Simon Mawer, author of Trapeze and The Glass Room

About the Author

P.S. Duffy lives in Rochester, Minnesota. She grew up in New England and Baltimore and spent 35 summers sailing in Nova Scotia, where her family roots go back to 1754. She has a degree in history from Concordia University in Montreal and a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and had a 25-year career in neurologically based communication disorders. She now balances writing in the neurosciences for Mayo Clinic with creative writing and is the author of a graduate textbook, flash fiction, essays, and creative non-fiction. The Cartographer of No Man’s Land (Liveright/W.W. Norton), is her first novel.

   

Fee: $25/$22 members - includes an autographed copy of Those Who Save Us, refreshments by MKELocalicious and admission to the sculpture garden -- come early for a stroll around the grounds! Register online now.

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

Lynden Sculpture Garden's Women's Speaker Series, Bronze Optical, and Boswell Books welcome Jenna Blum, author of Those Who Save Us, The Stormchasers and the novella "The Lucky One," featured in the collection Grand Central to the Lynden Sculpture Garden, Wednesday, August 12, 7-9 pm.

Jenna Blum is the New York Times and # 1 international bestselling author of novels Those Who Save Us (Harcourt, 2004) and The Stormchasers (Dutton, 2010); novella “The Lucky One” in the postwar anthology Grand Central (Penguin, 2014); and audio course “The Author At Work: The Art of Writing Fiction” (Recorded Books, 2014). Jenna is also one of Oprah’s Top 30 Women Writers.

Jenna’s debut novel Those Who Save Us is a New York Times and international bestseller and was Holland’s # 1 bestseller in 2011. Those Who Save Us is also a Boston Globe bestseller and 2005 winner of the Ribalow Prize, adjudged by Elie Wiesel. Those Who Save Us is a perennial book club favorite; to discuss the novel, Jenna visited over 800 book clubs in the Boston area alone.

Jenna’s second novel, The Stormchasers, which Jenna researched by chasing tornadoes for eight years, is an international bestseller, Boston Globe bestseller, Target Emerging Author Pick, Borders bestseller, and has been featured in French Elle.

Jenna earned a B.A. at Kenyon College and an M.A. in Creative Writing at Boston University, where she taught Creative and Communications Writing for 5 years and was editor of AGNI Literary Magazine. Jenna has taught fiction and novel workshops for Boston’s Grub Street Writers for almost 20 years and is a regular column contributor to Grub Daily. Based in Boston, Jenna travels nationally and internationally to speak about her novels; she visits book clubs in person, by phone, or via Skype. Follow Jenna on Facebook (Jenna Blum) and Twitter (@Jenna_Blum).

   

Fee: $22/$18 members - includes an autographed copy of Lydia's Party, refreshments by MKELocalicious and admission to the sculpture garden -- come early for a stroll around the grounds! Register online now. You may also be interested in Women's Speaker Series: Cristina Henríquez, author of The Book of Unknown Americans, April 8 at Lynden.

Lynden Sculpture Garden's Women's Speaker Series, Bronze Optical, and Boswell Books welcome Margaret Hawkins, author of Lydia's Party, to the Lynden Sculpture Garden, Wednesday, January 28, 7-9 pm.

Lydia is having a party. It’s the party that she hosts every year for a group of six women friends who have come to value the annual midwinter fête as a cherished ritual in their lives. Over a table laden with Lydia’s famous spicy chicken stew, a sumptuous spread of potluck dishes, at least one case of wine, and a decadent number of desserts, the women revel in sharing newsy updates, simmering secrets, and raucous laughter. Twenty years ago, these friends bonded over their budding careers, their love of art and food, their romances, their dogs, and now they think they know all there is to know about one another. On this particular evening, however, Lydia prepares to make a shattering announcement.

As we follow these women through their party preparations, we meet an unforgettable cast of characters, each of whom is navigating their everyday chores while also meditating in stolen moments on their greatest regrets, their complicated relationships, and their deepest desires. Having reached middle-age, all are pondering the states of their lives, wondering “what’s next?” now that the thought of a new romance or a new job no longer seems life-altering. But when Lydia delivers her news, she shocks them all, and they rediscover the enduring bonds of friendship and find their lives changing again in new and unexpected ways.

This exquisitely written novel delivers a funny and tender portrait of friendship, love, aging, romance, grief, and unexpected happiness. It is a story that will warm your heart—even in the middle of winter.

“Hawkins’s smart, crackling novel is a snowy, midwestern Mrs. Dalloway, with Elizabeth Berg-ish charm and Hawkins’s own edgy, artfully particularized humor. . . . As Lydia and her circle pull together in her time of need, Hawkins considers the profound gift of friendship and the ways art and life converge to forge meaning and preserve truth and memories.”
—Booklist

About the Author

Margaret Hawkins is a Senior Lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the author of two previous novels, A Year of Cats and Dogs and How to Survive a Natural Disaster, and a memoir about her sister, After Schizophrenia: The Story of My Sister’s Reawakening.