By Brooke Mortsolf

Each semester the English Club, along with faculty, hold a book discussion with high school junior students from Bishop Ward. The Bishop Ward students have read the book as well as the USM students, faculty and staff helping with the book discussion. This year they are reading and discussing Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere. The book discussion starts at 9 a.m. and goes until noon. Students from Saint Mary come at 8 a.m. to help set up and get in groups. Those groups set up smaller groups where the Ward students rotate. Each group has a certain topic to talk about the book. Each group has about ten to fifteen minutes before the Ward students go on to the next group. Once all of the Ward students have been at each group, they all meet at the end and talk about the book as a whole and ask their opinions of the book. What did they like, what they didn’t, was it hard to understand, or was the underlying meaning easy to pick out.

For the last book discussion the book club hosted, The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman was chosen. This book has been used for the discussion for the past few years. However, this year a different book, Little Fires Everywhere, was chosen.

This semester the book discussion is on October 29 at 9 a.m. The English Club provides drinks, usually some sort of juice or lemonade and donuts for the students who are helping with the book discussion as well as the students from Bishop Ward. There is a lot of planning that goes into making these book discussions successful.

Brooke Mortsolf is an English and Digital Communications Major at the University of Saint Mary.