About this Event
* *Note: $5 registration fee can be used as a credit toward a purchase in-store. The credit expires the night of book club.**
Join us for Book Club!
Sidetrack Bookshop is a mission-driven bookstore, which means (in part) that we are committed to providing a welcoming and inclusive space for people of all identities. In order to maintain our welcoming and inclusive space in the context of what we hope will be a lively and productive book club discussion, we have developed the following house rules.
By attending a book club meeting, you agree to the following:
- Share the floor: Be sure to let everyone talk and express their thoughts on the book. If you feel like you're talking a lot, you probably are! Invite others to speak.
- Be respectful: We'll no doubt have differing opinions. Seek to understand first, then to be understood. Check your privilege, and take special care with others who have lived experience differing from your own.
- Comments or behavior that demean a specific person, identity, or culture will not be tolerated.
Book club hosts will keep these house rules in mind and will redirect you or the conversation as a whole if we feel they aren't being honored. We also reserve the right to ask an attendee to leave if we feel they're contributing to an unwelcome space.
About the Book
A threatened mother and a relentless detective collide when a series of murders awaken something long buried in the New Mexican desert in this mesmerizing novel of literary horror, perfect for fans of Carmen Maria Machado and Stephen Graham Jones.
A mother’s love is the oldest curse
Fortuna Miércoles has finally moved her family to a better neighborhood across the Rio Grande, desperate to outrun the curse that’s stalked her bloodline since her greatest grandmother crossed the desert with a cactus thorn splitting her throat. But burying a family’s violent legacy—or her own haunting secret—isn’t so easy. Twenty years ago, girls and women vanished into the Albuquerque night, their bones later unearthed on the mesa. The so-called Reaper was never caught. Now, beneath the dormant volcanoes called the Sleeping Sisters, the killings have begun again, and they’ve called forth something in Fortuna that she has long fought to keep buried...
Detective Jeanette Palacio has spent decades promising justice to the ghosts of her murdered cousins—alongside the memory of the other women she couldn’t avenge. When a new body turns up in Fortuna’s backyard, both women are pulled into a dangerous, ancient plot. Are the Sleeping Sisters awakening—or has someone in Fortuna’s family set a trap?
Inspired by true events, The Sleeping Sisters begins as a taut mystery shot through with myth and a Chicana-Indigenous reimagining of the legend of the headless woman—but by its cataclysmic end has spiraled into a fevered, feral hymn to motherhood and a mesmerizing portrait of trauma and the monstrous bargains we make to protect those we love.
About the Author
Jennifer Givhan is a Mexican American and Indigenous poet and novelist from the Southwestern desert and the recipient of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices. She holds a Master’s degree from California State University Fullerton and a master’s in Fine Arts from Warren Wilson College. Givhan is the author of five full-length poetry collections and the novels River Woman, River Demon, Jubilee, Trinity Sight, and Salt Bones. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico with her family.
Event venue & nearby stays
325 S Washington Ave, 325 South Washington Avenue, Royal Oak, United States
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