February Meeting Wrap-Up

The Book Buddies Book Club met yesterday afternoon to discuss our February book, The Year of the Dog by Grace Lin.  We had a wonderful meeting with our largest turnout yet!  Thanks to everyone who came and participated.

We began with our Book Trivia lightning round which has become a fixture of our club meetings (and is a great way to refresh your memory on the details of the story!)  Everyone did a great job and obviously read the book very closely as they all knew all the answers! 

We began our book discussion by talking about the character of Pacy/Grace, what kind of person she is and why she has two names.  We thought that she seemed like a really nice person, someone that we might be friends with and that it wasn't really fair that she couldn't use her Chinese name "Pacy" at school.

We talked about the important Chinese traditions that Pacy's family observes, from the Chinese New Year dinner to the red egg party, and some of our own family traditions and why they are important to us. 

We discussed Pacy and Melody's friendship, what makes them such great friends and their challenges with the science fair project (which we all agreed sounded like a really cool and creative project, they just needed to consider the other variables a little more closely).

Finally we discussed Pacy's journey to finding her talent and thought about our own talents.  While we all have many talents to share some of us are particularly talented in singing, art, and dancing and others have talent handling and working with animals.

Following our discussion we looked Behind the Story, and discovered that a lot of The Year of the Dog is actually true.  In addition, we revisited our interview with Grace Lin from 2008 in which she talks about aspects of The Year of the Dog that are based on her childhood.

We also read The Story of the Chinese Zodiac and used the Chinese Zodiac Chart to figure out our animals signs.  (I am a horse!)

To celebrate the Chinese New Year, we finished up by making Chinese New Year banners celebrating either The Year of the Dog (in honor of our book) or The Year of the Snake (2013).  A few people choose to do their birth year instead and there were a couple of banners celebrating the Year of the Horse.

Our meeting would not have been complete without a few tasty, book-related snacks and so we indulged in fortune cookies and Pacy's favorite candy, M&Ms!

Thanks to all the Book Buddies members who attended and I look forward to seeing you all again in March!