Our first HPB Book Club pick of 2020 is the fictional retelling of the true life of Maud Baum. Maud was not only the wife of L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wizard of Oz, but also the daughter of Matilda Joslyn Gage, a women’s rights activist who fought alongside Susan B. Anthony. From the late 1800s to the early 1900s, we see Maud become the strong and courageous woman that she was always destined to be. Finding Dorothy is the perfect inspirational read for lovers of all things Oz and historical fiction.

After being freed by the Russians from the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, Cilka Klein is charged with working for the Nazis and hauled away to a Siberian prison camp. Only eighteen-years old, Cilka finds herself held captive once again, surrounded by more guards, and more determined than ever to survive. Too weak to do the manual labor of working in the mines, Cilka is assigned to help in the hospital, where she discovers she has a talent for soothing patients and helping others. However, when another girl discovers why Cilka is in the camp, she blackmails Cilka into stealing drugs from the hospital. In order to free herself from this threat and from her own guilt, Clika will have to find the courage to speak about the unspeakable. Based on a true story, Cilka’s Journey is the powerful follow up to Morris’ international bestseller, The Tattooist of Auschwitz.

Cassie Hanwell is a tough-as-nails Austin firefighter who has just won an award and is up for a promotion, but when an unexpected encounter costs her her job, she moves to Massachusetts to live with her estranged mother and start anew at a fire station that has never had a female firefighter… and doesn’t want one. As Cassie fights to earn the respect of the others on her crew, she finds herself falling for another firefighter, which could be another career-ending move. Not to mention the threatening messages she starts finding in her locker, on her car and even at her home. To find peace in her new life, Cassie is going to have to find the strength to forgive her mother, her stalker and herself, and open herself up to the love that is waiting for her. A wonderful follow up to Center’s How to Walk Away, Things You Save in a Fire is a heartfelt novel about true strength and courage and the healing power of forgiveness.

In 1939, when twelve-year-old Rill Foss’s father rushes her mother from their Mississippi River shantyboat to the hospital, a group of strangers arrive to rip Rill and her siblings away from their parents and take them to the Tennessee Children’s Home. Though they are promised that they will soon be returned to their parents, Rill soon discovers that the only way out of the Tennessee Children’s Home is through adoption or death. Faced with the home’s sadistic director and its pedophilic groundskeeper, Rill struggles to keep her family together. In the present day, Avery Stafford is being groomed to take her father’s place in the Senate, should his failing health require it. However, when she meets an old woman at a nursing home, she begins to question the woman’s links to her family and starts a journey to unearth a long-buried family secret. Wingate expertly weaves the past and present together to create a riveting and heart-wrenching novel that still manages to be hopeful and uplifting.