Adult Book Club

**Rescheduled**

SML Adult Book Club will meet on Thursday, April 4, at 4:00 p.m. at the Library to discuss The Henna Artist by Alka Joshi.

“It took years of painstaking work, but Lakshmi has finally built a life for herself in the pink city of Jaipur, India. After escaping the abusive marriage she had been forced into as a teenager in her rural village, she learned how to use her artistic skills to find work as a henna artist, inking elaborate designs on wealthy women and learning some of their deepest desires in the process. Now, with building work almost complete on her own home, Lakshmi begins to feel safe at last—until the younger sister she never knew she had is brought to her doorstep by Lakshmi’s husband. Set in the 1950s, just eight years after India’s independence from Britain, this lush novel reveals the intimate lives of India’s elite while reckoning with the hardscrabble lot of the people who served them. Lakshmi’s sister soon learns her own hard lesson about the entitlement of the upper classes, a lesson that threatens the independence Lakshmi has slowly earned for herself. Joshi has constructed a bewitching glimpse into the not-so-distant past with a tough heroine well worth cheering on.” — Bridget Thoreson (Reviewed 2/15/2020) (Booklist, vol 116, number 12, p37)