The December 2023 Celebrity Book Club Spoilers to Enjoy Now

Before We Were Innocent by Ella Berman

December 2023 Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick

Three best friends go on a trip to Greece and only two come home. Bess and Joni were cleared of any involvement. Now, ten years later, Joni, a motivational speaker, becomes involved in a crime very similar to Greece’s all those years ago. When she calls Bess to ask for help, Bess must decide if she can expose the woman she once was.

We Must Not Think of Ourselves by Lauren Grodstein

December 2023 Read with Jenna Book Club Pick

A heart-wrenching story of love and defiance set in the Warsaw Ghetto, based on the actual archives kept by those determined to have their stories survive World War II

On a November day in 1940, Adam Paskow becomes a prisoner in the Warsaw Ghetto, where the Jews of the city are cut off from their former lives and held captive by Nazi guards, and await an uncertain fate. Weeks later, he is approached by a mysterious figure with a surprising request: Will he join a secret group of archivists working to preserve the truth of what is happening inside these walls? Adam agrees and begins taking testimonies from his students, friends, and neighbors. He learns about their childhoods and their daydreams, their passions and their fears, their desperate strategies for safety and survival. The stories form a portrait of endurance in a world where no choices are good ones.

The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon

December 2023 Good Morning America Book Club Pick

I’m so excited to read this pick from the December 2023 new releases. This historical mystery is inspired by the diary of Martha Ballard, an 18th-century midwife, who investigated a murder in her small community. When a man found entombed in ice, also happens to be the same man accused of an attack, Martha is sure what happened, and six justice on behalf of those that no one else wants to protect.

Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward

October 2023 Oprah Book Club Pick

Let Us Descend is a reimagining of American slavery, as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching. Searching, harrowing, replete with transcendent love, the novel is a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation.
 
Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the reader’s guide through this hellscape. As she struggles through the miles-long march, Annis turns inward, seeking comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother. Throughout, she opens herself to a world beyond this world, one teeming with spirits: of earth and water, of myth and history; spirits who nurture and give, and those who manipulate and take. While Ward leads readers through the descent, this, her fourth novel, is ultimately a story of rebirth and reclamation.

From one of the most singularly brilliant and beloved writers of her generation, this miracle of a novel inscribes Black American grief and joy into the very land—the rich but unforgiving forests, swamps, and rivers of the American South. Let Us Descend is Jesmyn Ward’s most magnificent novel yet, a masterwork for the ages. MORE