Calling Me Home by Julie Kibler

Calling Me Home by Julie Kibler was recommended by a member of our book club - she had found it at Target.  Our book club group tends to love all the Target Club Picks - good stories that aren't too demanding of a read.  This book is also a debut novel by Julie Kibler as so many of the books I have read lately!  This book is similar to The Help - I imagine that's why it's being promoted by Target as The Help was so awesome.

Calling Me Home is a good read and would be a great book club book for discussion.  There were no discussion questions in the back of my Kindle but I'm sure they would be available online.  As our club just read The Kitchen House - I think Calling Me Home would be best read next year for our group!  this book is about an elderly white woman - Isabelle McAllister and her journey across the country with her close friend and black hair stylist Dorrie.  As they travel to a funeral and their friendship deepens, Isabelle opens up about her past and her first love Robert Prewitt - who was black.  The story is set in modern times with the flashbacks to the 1930's.

I enjoyed this book and it would be a great book club read.  I'd give it 4 1/2 stars.

From Booklist

Comparisons to The Help (2009) are inevitable, and though there are echoes of Kathryn Stockett’s popular best-seller to be found in Calling Me Home, Kibler has crafted a wholly original debut. The novel, set in 1930s Kentucky, centers on a forbidden romance between a teenage white girl, Isabelle McAllister, and Robert Prewitt, the black son of the McAllister’s maid. Chafing under her mother’s restrictive notions of female propriety, Isabelle finds a kindred spirit in Robert. The two begin to meet clandestinely, but any hope of a future together is threatened by the overwhelming racism of the era. Against impossible odds, the pair elopes to neighboring Cincinnati, but their happiness is short-lived when Isabelle’s thuggish brothers drag her back to the family home. The sad story is presented in flashback, as told by a now-elderly Isabelle to her black hairdresser, Dorrie, while the two drive cross-country to a funeral. Some may object that the civil rights struggle is once again being filtered through a white perspective, but there’s no denying the pull of Kibler’s story. --Patty Wetli