How to Read a Book

Our Reasons meet us in the morning and whisper to us at night. In Monica Wood’s novel, that idea frames intersecting lives in Maine: Violet Powell, a twenty-two-year-old from Abbott Falls, is being released from prison after serving twenty-two months for a drunk-driving crash that killed a local kindergarten teacher. Harriet Larson, a retired English teacher, runs the prison book club and faces the unsettling prospect of an empty nest. Frank Daigle, a retired machinist, struggles with the complications of his marriage to the woman Violet killed. One morning in a Portland bookstore—Violet to buy the novel she read in the prison book club, Harriet to choose the next title, and Frank as the store handyman—the three encounter each other and begin to intersect in ways that test forgiveness, guilt, and second chances.