100 Rural Women

Book Club
2025-06-11 19:00 - 20:00, 2025-05-14 19:00 - 20:00, 2025-04-09 19:00 - 20:00, 2025-03-12 19:00 - 20:00, 2025-02-12 19:00 - 20:00, 2024-12-10 19:00 - 20:00, 2024-11-13 19:00 - 20:00 (America/Chicago)
Connect with other readers! Discuss the book, ask questions, and share your thoughts with people who are also reading!

Book Club
2024-10-09 19:00 - 20:00
Connect with other readers! Discuss the book, ask questions, and share your thoughts with people who are also reading!
Register HERE
The Women is the story of one woman gone to war, but it shines a light on all women who put themselves in harm’s way and whose sacrifice and commitment to their country has too often been forgotten. A novel about deep friendships and bold patriotism, The Women is a richly drawn story with a memorable heroine whose idealism and courage under fire will come to define an era.
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April Book Group: Horse
2024-04-10 19:00 - 20:00
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Kentucky, 1850. An enslaved groom named Jarret and a bay foal forge a bond of understanding that will carry the horse to record-setting victories across the South. When the nation erupts in civil war, an itinerant young artist who has made his name on paintings of the racehorse takes up arms for the Union. On a perilous night, he reunites with the stallion and his groom, very far from the glamor of any racetrack. New York City, 1954. Martha Jackson, a gallery owner celebrated for taking risks on edgy contemporary painters, becomes obsessed with a nineteenth-century equestrian oil painting of mysterious provenance. Washington, DC, 2019. Jess, a Smithsonian scientist from Australia, and Theo, a Nigerian-American art historian, find themselves unexpectedly connected through their shared interest in the horse–one studying the stallion’s bones for clues to his power and endurance, the other uncovering the lost history of the unsung Black horsemen who were critical to his racing success. Based on the remarkable true story of the record-breaking thoroughbred Lexington, Horse is a novel of art and science, love and obsession, and our unfinished reckoning with racism.
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October Book Group: Braiding Sweetgrass By: Robin Wall Kimmerer
2023-10-11 19:00 - 20:00
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Drawing from her experiences as an Indigenous scientist, botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer demonstrated how all living things―from strawberries and witch hazel to water lilies and lichen―provide us with gifts and lessons every day in her best-selling book Braiding Sweetgrass. With informative sidebars, reflection questions, and art from illustrator Nicole Neidhardt, Braiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults brings Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the lessons of plant life to a new generation.
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June Book Group: Windfall - The Prairie Woman Who Lost Her Way… By: Erika Bolstad
2023-06-14 19:00 - 20:00
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At first, Erika Bolstad knew only one thing about her great-grandmother, Anna: she was a homesteader on the North Dakota prairies in the early 1900s before her husband committed her to an asylum under mysterious circumstances. As Erika’s mother was dying, she revealed more. Their family still owned the mineral rights to Anna’s land―and oil companies were interested in the black gold beneath the prairies. Their family, Erika learned, could get rich thanks to the legacy of a woman nearly lost to history.
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May Book Group: In Reach By: Pamela Carter Joern
2023-05-10 19:00 - 20:00
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In Reach
By: Pamela Carter Joern
In writing both rich and evocative, Pamela Carter Joern conjures the small plains town of Reach, Nebraska, where residents are stuck tight in the tension between loneliness and the risks of relationships.
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February Book Club: We Should all be Feminists
2023-02-08 19:00
This is a small but powerful book. Please join us for the discussion of We Should All Be Feminists By: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. What does “feminism” mean today? That is the question at the heart of We Should All Be Feminists, a personal, eloquently-argued essay—adapted from her much-viewed TEDx talk of the same name—by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the award-winning author of Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun.

January Book Club - Where the Crawdads Sing
2023-01-11 19:00 - 20:00 | Zoom
This month we will be reading Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens!
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Book Synopsis
For years, rumors of the “Marsh Girl” haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet fishing village. Kya Clark is barefoot and wild; unfit for polite society. So in late 1969, when the popular Chase Andrews is found dead, locals immediately suspect her.
But Kya is not what they say. A born naturalist with just one day of school, she takes life’s lessons from the land, learning the real ways of the world from the dishonest signals of fireflies. But while she has the skills to live in solitude forever, the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. Drawn to two young men from town, who are each intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new and startling world–until the unthinkable happens.
In Where the Crawdads Sing, Owens juxtaposes an exquisite ode to the natural world against a profound coming of age story and haunting mystery. Thought-provoking, wise, and deeply moving, Owens’s debut novel reminds us that we are forever shaped by the child within us, while also subject to the beautiful and violent secrets that nature keeps.
The story asks how isolation influences the behavior of a young woman, who like all of us, has the genetic propensity to belong to a group. The clues to the mystery are brushed into the lush habitat and natural histories of its wild creatures.
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December Book Club - The Road Back to Sweetgrass
2022-12-14 19:00 - 20:00 | Zoom
This month we will be reading The Road Back to Sweetgrass by Linda LeGarde Grover!
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Book Synopsis
Set in northern Minnesota, The Road Back to Sweetgrass follows Dale Ann, Theresa, and Margie, a trio of American Indian women, from the 1970s to the present. The story observes their coming of age and the intersection of their lives as they navigate love, economic hardship, loss, and changing family dynamics on the fictional Mozhay Point reservation. As young women, all three leave their homes. Margie and Theresa go to Duluth for college and work. When there, Theresa gets to know a handsome Indian boy, Michael Washington. Soon, he invites her home to the Sweetgrass land allotment to meet his father, Zho Wash, who lives in the original allotment cabin. When Margie accompanies her, complicated relationships are set into motion, and tensions over “real Indian-ness” emerge.
Dale Ann, Margie, and Theresa find themselves pulled back again and again to the Sweetgrass allotment, a silent but ever-present entity in the book. Sweetgrass itself is a plant used in the Ojibwe ceremonial odissimaa bag, containing a newborn baby’s umbilical cord. In a powerful final chapter, Zho Wash tells the story of the first days of the allotment. Specifically, when the Wazhushkag, or Muskrat, family became transformed into the Washingtons by the pen of a federal Indian agent. This sense of place and home is both tangible and spiritual. The author, Linda LeGarde Grover skillfully connects it with the experience of Native women who came of age during the days of the federal termination policy and the struggle for tribal self-determination.
The Road Back to Sweetgrass is a novel that moves between past and present, the Native and the non-Native, history and myth, and tradition and survival, as the people of Mozhay Point navigate traumatic historical events and federal Indian policies while looking ahead to future generations and the continuation of the Anishinaabe people.
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November Book Club - The Undocumented Americans
2022-11-09 19:00 - 20:00 | Zoom
This month we will be reading The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio!
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Book Synopsis
One of the first undocumented immigrants to graduate from Harvard reveals the hidden lives of her fellow undocumented Americans in this deeply personal and groundbreaking portrait of a nation.
Writer Karla Cornejo Villavicencio was on DACA when she decided to write about being undocumented for the first time using her own name. It was right after the election of 2016, the day she realized the story she’d tried to steer clear of was the only one she wanted to tell. So she wrote her immigration lawyer’s phone number on her hand in Sharpie. Then, she embarked on a trip across the country to tell the stories of her fellow undocumented immigrants–and to find the hidden key to her own.
Looking beyond the flashpoints of the border or the activism of the DREAMers, Cornejo Villavicencio explores the lives of the undocumented–and the mysteries of her own life. She finds the nation of singular, effervescent characters often reduced in the media to political pawns or nameless laborers. The stories she tells are not deferential or naively inspirational. But, they show the love, magic, heartbreak, insanity, and vulgarity that infuse the day-to-day lives of her subjects.
In New York, we meet the undocumented workers who were recruited into the federally funded Ground Zero cleanup after 9/11. Then, in Miami, we enter the ubiquitous botanicas, which offer medicinal herbs and potions to those whose status blocks them from any other healthcare options. Up in Flint, Michigan, we learn of demands for state ID in order to receive life-saving clean water. Lastly, in Connecticut, Cornejo Villavicencio, childless by choice, finds family in two teenage girls whose father is in sanctuary. And through it all we see the author grappling with the biggest questions of love, duty, family, and survival.
In her incandescent, relentlessly probing voice, Cornejo Villavicencio combines sensitive reporting and powerful personal narratives to bring to light remarkable stories of resilience, madness, and death. Through these stories we come to understand what it truly means to be a stray. An expendable. A hero. An American.
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September Book Club - In Spite of Heroin
2022-09-14 19:00 - 20:00 | Zoom
This month we will be reading In Spite of Heroin by Dana Chase!
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Book synopsis
An idyllic upbringing, unconditional love, and the serenity of the Heartland USA were not enough to shield this close-knit family from heroin. In her moving, ultimately hopeful narrative of struggle and redemption, Dana Chase writes unsparingly of how she survived the shock of learning that her beautiful identical twin sons had become heroin addicts and the terror that unfolded as a result.
Chase and her husband returned to North Dakota in 1993 when their twins were ten months old to give them the same benefits she had as a child. But steadfast family values, and the manageable pace of North Dakota did not work their charm this time around. By the time the boys were twenty they were drug dealers, heroin addicts, and felons.
This family’s catastrophic status quo included overdoses, attempted suicide, court-mandated stays at rehab centers, and countless cycles of incarceration, including a federal indictment, none of which had been anywhere near Chase’s maternal radar. Chase had lived her entire adult life believing ‘what you think about, you bring about.’ In spite of her innate optimism she wondered… if I wasn’t thinking about it, how’d I bring it about?
This is a cautionary tale that delivers a blunt impact of reality to any parent who believes ‘this can’t happen to our family’. It portrays a courageous mother and her attempts to save her sons from wasted lives and tragic drug-related deaths.
In Spite Of Heroin reveals a parent’s nightmare and the struggle of a lifetime. Eminently readable, In Spite Of Heroin is a shocking true story that readers will sacrifice sleep to finish.
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August Book Club - Go Set a Watchman
2022-08-10 19:00 - 20:00 | Zoom
This month we will be reading Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee!
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Book synopsis
From Harper Lee comes a landmark new novel set two decades after her beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, To Kill a Mockingbird. Maycomb, Alabama. Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise Finch— “Scout”—returns home from New York City to visit her aging father, Atticus. Set against the backdrop of the civil rights tensions and political turmoil that were transforming the South, Jean Louise’s homecoming turns bittersweet when she learns disturbing truths about her close-knit family, the town and the people dearest to her. Memories from her childhood flood back, and her values and assumptions are thrown into doubt.
Featuring many of the iconic characters from To Kill a Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchman perfectly captures a young woman, and a world, in a painful yet necessary transition out of the illusions of the past—a journey that can be guided only by one’s conscience. Written in the mid-1950s, Go Set a Watchman imparts a fuller, richer understanding and appreciation of Harper Lee. Here is an unforgettable novel of wisdom, humanity, passion, humor and effortless precision—a profoundly affecting work of art that is both wonderfully evocative of another era and relevant to our own times. It not only confirms the enduring brilliance of To Kill a Mockingbird, but also serves as its essential companion, adding depth, context and new meaning to an American classic.
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July Book Club - Radium Girls
2022-07-13 19:00 - 20:00 | Zoom
This month we will be reading Radium Girls by Kate Moore!
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Book synopsis
The Curies’ newly discovered element of radium makes gleaming headlines across the nation as the fresh face of beauty, and wonder drug of the medical community. From body lotion to tonic water, the popular new element shines bright in the otherwise dark years of the First World War.
Meanwhile, hundreds of girls toil amidst the glowing dust of the radium-dial factories. The glittering chemical covers their bodies from head to toe; they light up the night like industrious fireflies. With such a coveted job, these “shining girls” are the luckiest alive – until they begin to fall mysteriously ill.
But the factories that once offered golden opportunities are now ignoring all claims of the gruesome side effects, and the women’s cries of corruption. And as the fatal poison of the radium takes hold, the brave shining girls find themselves embroiled in one of the biggest scandals of America’s early 20th century, and in a groundbreaking battle for workers’ rights that will echo for centuries to come.
Written with a sparkling voice and breakneck pace, The Radium Girls fully illuminates the inspiring young women exposed to the “wonder” substance of radium, and their awe-inspiring strength in the face of almost impossible circumstances. Their courage and tenacity led to life-changing regulations, research into nuclear bombing, and ultimately saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
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May Book Club - Educated
2022-05-11 19:00 - 20:00 | Zoom
This month we will be reading Educated by Tara Westover!
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Book synopsis
Tara Westover was 17 the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her “head-for-the-hills bag”. In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father’s junkyard. Her father forbade hospitals, so Tara never saw a doctor or nurse. Gashes and concussions, even burns from explosions, were all treated at home with herbalism. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education and no one to intervene when one of Tara’s older brothers became violent. Then, lacking any formal education, Tara began to educate herself. She taught herself enough mathematics and grammar to be admitted to Brigham Young University, where she studied history, learning for the first time about important world events like the Holocaust and the civil rights movement. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge. Only then would she wonder if she’d traveled too far, if there was still a way home. Educated is an account of the struggle for self-invention. It is a tale of fierce family loyalty and of the grief that comes with severing the closest of ties. With the acute insight that distinguishes all great writers, Westover has crafted a universal coming-of-age story that gets to the heart of what an education is and what it offers: the perspective to see one’s life through new eyes and the will to change it.
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April Book Club - Girl Runner
2022-04-13 19:00 - 20:00 | Zoom
This month, we will be reading “Girl Runner” by Carrie Snyder.
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Book synopsis
Girl Runner is the story of Aganetha Smart, a pioneering athlete who captured world attention during the 1928 Olympics. Now, at the age of 104, alone, and in a nursing home, she seems forgotten by history. But for the competitive and ambitious Aganetha, life remains present and unfinished in her mind. When her quiet routine is disturbed by two strangers, the past rattles up to meet them all.
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March Book Club - Nomadland
2022-03-09 19:00 - 20:00 | Zoom
This month, we will be reading “Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century” by Jessica Bruder.
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Book synopsis
From the beet fields of North Dakota to the National Forest campgrounds of California to Amazon’s CamperForce program in Texas, employers have discovered a new, low-cost labor pool, made up largely of transient older Americans. Finding that Social Security comes up short, often underwater on mortgages, these invisible casualties of the Great Recession have taken to the road by the tens of thousands in late-model RVs, travel trailers, and vans, forming a growing community of nomads: migrant laborers who call themselves “workampers.”
In a secondhand van she names “Halen,” Jessica Bruder hits the road to get to know her subjects more intimately. Accompanying her irrepressible protagonist, Linda May, and others from campground toilet cleaning to warehouse product scanning to desert reunions, then moving on to the dangerous work of beet harvesting, Bruder tells a compelling, eye-opening tale of the dark underbelly of the American economy—one that foreshadows the precarious future that may await many more of us. At the same time, she celebrates the exceptional resilience and creativity of these quintessential Americans who have given up ordinary rootedness to survive. Like Linda May, who dreams of finding land on which to build her own sustainable “Earthship” home, they have not given up hope.
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