As the year moves along, many clubs have opened up, one being a book club, where discussions and deep conversations open up. This club is run by President Sophie Leblanc Vice President Abigael Fesehaie and Kimberlee Smith. Leblanc is a junior at Malden High School and hosts this club event once every month in Ms. Messana’s room in J248. The second book that has been chosen is Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid.
The book is about the band, Fleetwood Mac in the 1960s who gave individual interviews until their final show. In between all this, there is drama and love between different characters making the story a lot more suspenseful and interesting. The main characters Daisy and Billy cross paths unexpectedly and make the best combination for success, leading to their eventual fame.
The book has recently gained more popularity as it was featured as a mini-series on Amazon Prime and trended on TikTok’s “Book Tok” section. Reid has also published several other books that have drawn some traction, such as The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.
LeBlanc noted that she picked the book for the club because she mentioned how it was chosen as a club and so she usually chooses three books and they talk about them. All the books they picked this month were about romance due to February being the “month of love.” When she’s trying to figure out what books we can choose from, for example, if it’s 600 pages she won’t choose it because she knows people don’t have time for that. For example, she stated “I wouldn’t choose Macbeth, I try to lean towards more popular books, like book tok books, and because there’s so much discussion around them, its easy to talk about, and in the future I want to start to talk about underground books that aren’t usually talked about.”
LeBlanc started this club because she searched for book clubs to see if she could find any and joined due to her love for reading and discussing, but she couldn’t find any in the high school so decided to take matters into her own hands. She said “I’ve always had a passion for reading and I was concerned that there wasn’t any book club at school, and I wanted to find people who found reading as enjoying as me, and so I wanted to discuss and talk with people about books,” LeBlanc wanted to help grow her love for reading and help others people do the same.
She hopes that with this club she can build a good community to start a book drive, and moving forward, people can donate books to charities, she also mentioned how she’d like to get involved with the Malden public library at one point. Leblanc just wants, “an environment people can be chill in.”
Her passion comes from the way reading makes her feel. She explained, “I feel like reading is kind of an escape from regular life, when you read you’re almost embraced into the story, at least for me I get really attached to the characters if it’s a good book, and I view them as almost real people or friends to me.”
Reading has had a huge impact on LeBlanc as a person. She explained, “I’ve been reading ever since I can remember, ever since I was a kid until now, it helped me in classes because reading in past time helps with comprehension, and there are so many messages in books that aren’t noticed, and the impact that goes in books go very unsaid, that also why I started the club because so many people don’t read, but came up to me and said they’d like to, and that felt so regarding knowing that I could help people find the same passion as me.”
LeBlanc thinks reading is something that many people should try. She stated, “I think reading has impacted me in a lot of ways, just that there are so many books out there, there is not just one thing about them, and you might discover something you may have not known before, you can seriously discover so much and I really think people should look into it.” Leblanc explains reading is almost like a new world.
For upcoming books, LeBlanc said ‘”I’m not sure for the moment, but I try to choose books that are talked about often, like Jenkin’s books, I think her books are good, I don’t really have an exact option but I try to choose easier books so they are discussed about more.”
Overall, this book club has a lot of love and passion added to it, and the owner herself recommends it. So what are you waiting for? Join now and grow the community, you can get in touch with the book club by contacting club leaders and following their Instagram, mhsbo.okclub!
