The Lake Andes Carnegie Public Library is happy to announce that we are beginning an adult book club.

You may ask what is a “book club”. The answer is that a “book club” is a gathering of a group of people who are interested in reading and discussing books read by the group.

The newly formed book club will begin meeting Thursday, January 17th at 6:30 p.m., at the library located at 500 Main Street in Lake Andes. Our first meeting will be setting up guidelines for the members of the club and this includes how we will select the books to be read throughout the year. If you need more information on the book club please call the library at 487-7524 during the hours of 1-5 Monday-Saturday.

Our first book is “Some Luck” by Jane Smiley, a Pulitzer Prize author. “Some Luck” was the choice of the South Dakota Humanities Council in 2016 as the One Book South Dakota. The following summary of this book is from the website “Book Browse”.

On their farm in Denby, Iowa, Rosanna and Walter Langdon abide by time-honored values that they pass on to their five wildly different children: from Frank, the handsome, willful first born, and Joe, whose love of animals and the land sustains him, to Claire, who earns a special place in her father's heart.

Each chapter in Some Luck covers a single year, beginning in 1920, as American soldiers like Walter return home from World War I, and going up through the early 1950s, with the country on the cusp of enormous social and economic change. As the Langdons branch out from Iowa to both coasts of America, the personal and the historical merge seamlessly: one moment electricity is just beginning to power the farm, and the next a son is volunteering to fight the Nazis; later still, a girl you'd seen growing up now has a little girl of her own, and you discover that your laughter and your admiration for all these lives are mixing with tears.

Some Luck delivers on everything we look for in a work of fiction. Taking us through cycles of births and deaths, passions and betrayals, among characters we come to know inside and out, it is a tour de force that stands wholly on its own. But it is also the first part of adazzlingepictrilogy -aliterary adventure that will span a century in America: an astonishing feat of storytelling by a beloved writer at the height of her powers.