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 Join CPFA's Book Club
 
Our Reading and Discussion Schedule for 2026!
 
Reading the book is encouraged, but not required.
 

SAME TIME & LOCATION!

7:00-9:00 pm, Florham Park Diner
182 Ridgedale Avenue, Florham Park, NJ 07932

 
 
 It’s right across the road from Panera.  
 
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Jan 22, 2026  - Snow Child
Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart--he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season's first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone--but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees. This little girl, who calls herself Faina, seems to be a child of the woods. She hunts with a red fox at her side, skims lightly across the snow, and somehow survives alone in the Alaskan wilderness. As Jack and Mabel struggle to understand this child who could have stepped from the pages of a fairy tale, they come to love her as their own daughter. But in this beautiful, violent place things are rarely as they appear, and what they eventually learn about Faina will transform all of them.
 
April 23,2026 - James
A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view. When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he runs away until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck has faked his own death to escape his violent father. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond. Brimming with nuanced humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a literary icon, this brilliant and tender novel radically illuminates Jim's agency, intelligence, and compassion as never before. James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first-century American literature.
 
July 23,2026 - Go As a River
A sweeping, heart-stopping epic of a young woman's journey to becoming, set against the harsh beauty of mid-century Colorado. On a cool autumn day in 1948, Victoria Nash delivers late-season peaches from her family's farm set amid the wild beauty of Colorado. As she heads into her village, a disheveled stranger stops to ask her the way. How she chooses to answer will unknowingly alter the course of both their young lives. So begins the mesmerizing story of split-second choices and courageous acts that propel Victoria away from the only home she has ever known and towards a reckoning with loss, hope and her own untapped strength. Gathering all the pieces of her small and extraordinary existence, spinning through the eddies of desire, heartbreak and betrayal, she will arrive at a single rocky decision that will change her life forever. Go as a River is a heart-wrenching coming-of-age story and a drama of enthralling power. Combining unforgettable characters and a breathtaking natural setting, it is a sweeping story of survival and becoming, of the deepest mysteries of love, truth and fate.
 
October 22,2026 - Little
The wry, macabre, unforgettable tale of an ambitious orphan in Revolutionary Paris, befriended by royalty and radicals, who transforms herself into the legendary Madame Tussaud. In 1761, a tiny, odd-looking girl named Marie is born in a village in Switzerland. After the death of her parents, she is apprenticed to an eccentric wax sculptor and whisked off to the seamy streets of Paris, where they meet a domineering widow and her quiet, pale son. Together, they convert an abandoned monkey house into an exhibition hall for wax heads, and the spectacle becomes a sensation. As word of her artistic talent spreads, Marie is called to Versailles, where she tutors a princess and saves Marie Antoinette in childbirth. But outside the palace walls, Paris is roiling: The revolutionary mob is demanding heads, and... at the wax museum, heads are what they do. In the tradition of Gregory Maguire's Wicked and Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus, Edward Carey's Little is a darkly endearing cavalcade of a novel—a story of art, class, determination, and how we hold on to what we love.
 
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CPFA Adoption Book Group Meeting Date

Book Title

Author

Goodreads Weblink

23-Jan-25

Austerlitz

W.G.M. Sebald

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/88442.Austerlitz

24-Apr-25

The Heaven Earth Grocery Story

James McBride

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/65678550-the-heaven-earth-grocery-store

24-Jul-25

The Berry Pickers

Amanda Peters

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/123036004-the-berry-pickers

23-Oct-25

Unnatural Selection: A Memoir of Adoption and Wilderness

Andrea Ross

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54394278-unnatural-selection
 
 
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Please see the attached file to view all the books that have been discussed over the years in the CPFANJ Book Club: 
 
 
 
Please contact [email protected] with any questions!

 
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https://www.facebook.com/cpfa.newjersey.3

CPFA offers a great opportunity to network with other adoptive parents. CPFA is not an adoption agency, but a volunteer organization working to support those who wish to adopt, and provide educational and networking resources to those who have adopted. Membership is encouraged and is open to anyone concerned with adoption.
 
                      
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