The Midway Woods Book Club has picked Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason by Gina Frangello as the next book to read and discuss, and will be gathering to discuss it on Wednesday, July 14.

If you’d like to participate in the discussion of this book, just send an email to midwaywoodscommunications@gmail.com and let us know you’d like to join!

Here’s a synopsis of the novel:

Gina Frangello spent her early adulthood trying to outrun a youth marked by poverty and violence. Now a long-married wife and devoted mother, the better life she carefully built is emotionally upended by the death of her closest friend. Soon, awakened to fault lines in her troubled marriage, Frangello is caught up in a recklessly passionate affair, leading a double life while continuing to project the image of the perfect family. When her secrets are finally uncovered, both her home and her identity will implode, testing the limits of desire, responsibility, love, and forgiveness.

Blow Your House Down is a powerful testimony about the ways our culture seeks to cage women in traditional narratives of self-sacrifice and erasure. Frangello uses her personal story to examine the place of women in contemporary society: the violence they experience, the rage they suppress, the ways their bodies often reveal what they cannot say aloud, and finally, what it means to transgress “being good” in order to reclaim your own life.

 More information on the book can be found at https://www.counterpointpress.com/dd-product/blow-your-house-down/ 

All of the copies of the book available at the Dekalb County Public Library are currently checked out, but you can order a copy of the book online through Bookshop.org, where a portion of the book sales go to local bookstores, or through your favorite online or offline retailer.