HPGM Book Club



Looking to add a few page-turners to your reading list? Look no further! HPGM's book club meets every other month to discuss great titles from a wide selection of topics and genres.


contact tessa bartels to join the club

next meeting



SATURDAY, JUNE 1, 3PM | ANTIGUA RESTAURANT
RSVP TO TESSA BY MAY 31



THE LINE BECOMES A RIVER: DISPATCHES FROM THE BORDER | FRANCISCO CANTU


For Francisco Cantú, the border is in the blood: his mother, a park ranger and daughter of a Mexican immigrant, raised him in the scrublands of the Southwest. Haunted by the landscape of his youth, Cantú joins the Border Patrol. He and his partners are posted to remote regions crisscrossed by drug routes and smuggling corridors, where they learn to track other humans under blistering sun and through frigid nights. They haul in the dead and deliver to detention those they find alive.


Cantú tries not to think where the stories go from there. Plagued by nightmares, he abandons the Patrol for civilian life. But when an immigrant friend travels to Mexico to visit his dying mother and does not return, Cantú discovers that the border has migrated with him, and now he must know the whole story. Searing and unforgettable, The Line Becomes a River makes urgent and personal the violence our border wreaks on both sides of the line.


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UPCOMING meeting



SATURDAY, AUGUST 3, 3PM | ANTIGUA RESTAURANT
RSVP TO TESSA BY JULY 31



THE ALCHEMIST | PAULO COELHO


Paulo Coelho’s enchanting novel in the eclectic “magical realism” category is dazzling in its powerful simplicity and inspiring wisdom. An Andalusian shepherd boy named Santiago travels from his homeland in Spain to the Egyptian desert in search of a treasure buried in the Pyramids. Along the way he meets a Gypsy woman, a man who calls himself king, a man who claims to be an alchemist and then a real one who doesn’t brag at all, all of whom point Santiago in the direction of his quest. No one knows what the treasure is, or if Santiago will be able to surmount the obstacles along the way. But what starts out as a journey to find worldly goods turns into a discovery of the treasure found within – the fine line between reality and the spiritual. Did he summon the sandstorm that led to his escape or was it a coincidence? Did he really feel Fatima’s kiss on his cheek at the end, or was it just a sense. Lush, evocative, and full of awesome quotes about being, the story of Santiago is a testament to the transforming power of our dreams, whether real or imagined, and the importance of listening to our hearts.


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UPCOMING MEETING



SATURDAY, OCTOBER 5, 3PM | ANTIGUA RESTAURANT
RSVP TO TESSA BY SEPTEMBER 31



LOVE AND GHOST LETTERS | CHANTEL ACEVEDO


On the day she is born, Josefina Navarro's nursemaid foretells misfortune. But for the young socialite in pre-Castro Cuba, her life in Havana with her Sergeant of police father is idyllic. That is, until she falls in love with Lorenzo, a penniless man who takes her away to the impoverished town of El Cotorro, and her father disowns her. Josefina comes to wish her father dead but regrets it after the Sergeant is assumed killed in a student-led riot. One day, mysterious letters from the Sergeant begin to arrive, telling her the truth about his past. The ghostly letters become her link to love.


Set in Miami and Cuba and covering nearly fifty years of that island's history, Love and Ghost Letters unfolds the lives of the members of the Navarro-Concepción families in the patterns and permutations of memory, and conjures a Cuban setting that evokes mysticism and magic


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UPCOMING MEETING



SATURDAY, DECEMBER 7, 3PM | ANTIGUA RESTAURANT
RSVP TO TESSA BY NOVEMBER 31



LATINOS IN MILWAUKEE | JOSEPH RODRIGUEZ & WALTER SAVA


"I didn't know there were Latinos in Wisconsin" is one of the more frequently heard comments when visiting outside of the state. In fact, more than 100,000 Latinos live in Milwaukee, and the continued growth of this community is visible in every segment of the city. Milwaukee's Latino community began humbly as a "Colonia Mexicana" in the 1920s, when Mexicans were recruited to work in the city's tanneries. Subsequent waves of workers came from Texas to work in Wisconsin's agricultural fields. In the early 1950s, Puerto Ricans began arriving to the area, and the population doubled in the 1990s.


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