by Wendy Webb

From award-winning novelist Wendy Webb comes a spine-tingling mystery about family meets secrets set in a big, old haunted house on Lake Superior.  Grace Alban has spent twenty years away from her childhood home, the stately Alban House, for reasons she would rather forget.  But when her mother's unexpected death brings Grace and her teen-age daughter home, she finds more haunting the halls and passageways of Alban House than her own personal demons.  Could her mother have been murdered?  Or was she the victim of the supposed Alban curse?

Author Wendy Webb will attend the meeting to discuss this haunting story with us.

by Donald M. Hall

A Central Minnesota boy of the 1940's and 1950's interprets his life for meaning and truth and in the process describes what happens to a person's heart.  Don Hall mourns the list freedom of youth, recounts the drunken groping of adolescence, relives the search for meaningful work, the disillusionment with early beliefs, and the quest for comfort and love, and then finally addresses death with understanding and hope.  Written with tenderness and humor, you will recognize parts of yourself here as well. 

Author Don Hall, who grew up in St. Cloud and Collegeville, will attend this meeting to discuss his memoir with us.

Memoir of a Gravedigger's Daughter,

by Rachael Hanel

You don’t grow up in cemeteries without becoming an adept and sensitive observer of death and loss as experienced by the people in this small town. For Rachael Hanel, wandering among tombstones, reading the names, and wondering about the townsfolk and their lives, death was, in many ways, beautiful and mysterious. Death and mourning: these she understood. But when Rachael’s father—Digger O’Dell—passes away suddenly when she is fifteen, she and her family are abruptly and harshly transformed from bystanders to participants. And for the first time, Rachael realizes that death and grief are very different.

Author Rachael Hanel will join us at the meeting to discuss this unique, moving perspective of a gravedigger’s daughter and her lifelong relationship with death and grief.