LeAnne Cantrell is a member of “Mandeville Hot Mamas” in Mandeville, LA. In this interview, LeAnne explains how reading not only enables engaging discussion, but also the opportunity for one to learn more about himself/herself. Because the group is based in a New Orleans suburb, LeAnne shares how Hurricane Katrina affected her and her fellow members, as well as how reading helped them cope with this difficult time.

Q: Does your group have a name and/or a theme? How long has your group been in existence?

A: “Mandeville Hot Mamas” has been around for a bit over five years and grows stronger every month! Our kids are between the ages of 18 months and 24 years, so our book club is a great way to make some dedicated “me” time for busy moms.

Q: How many members do you have? How many men, how many women? What age are most of your members?

A: We have a dozen moms in the club, with husbands or sitters thankfully watching the kids. Our ages range from mid-30s to nearly 50 (although we look MUCH younger, of course. Note the “hot” in Mamas!).

Q: How often do you meet? Where do you meet?

A: We meet monthly at one another’s homes and do our rotation by alphabetical order.

Q: Do you eat at your meetings? What do you eat? Who brings the food?

A: YES. Mandeville is a New Orleans suburb, so butter runs in our streets too, y’all! Our food, wine and iced tea (house wine of the South) are always fantastic and often “themed” to match that month’s book selection. However, we just read King Solomon’s Mines and are decidedly NOT eating elephant heart this week.

Q: Who leads the discussion? Do you use reading group guides?

A: We always use one of y’all’s guides --- even if the book is too new (or too old) to have one specifically written yet. We pass the guide around the room, and each member chooses her favorite question to pose to the others. From there, we take off on our own tangents and interpretations. Each guide is a really nicely organized springboard, but we then come up with many more questions on our own.

Q: What kind of books do you read?

A: We usually do literary fiction…good books that are discussion-worthy. We loved Peace Like a River, Run, Bel Canto, Middlesex and Water for Elephants, yet The Glass Castle and The Devil and the White City were excellent as well. We also enjoy classics, new fiction or nonfiction….we read anything good!

Q: How do you choose your books? Do you choose one new book at each meeting, or do you choose the books for a number of meetings ahead of time?

A: Since we use an alphabetical rotation, the February host will come to the January meeting prepared with either a single GOTTA READ IT book or a printout summary of two or three choices for the group to vote on. She who hosts, then, basically chooses the book and does her homework about six weeks ahead of time. Many of us hop onto y’all’s website to get ideas here.

Q: What were some of the best discussions or favorite books the group read?

A: Peace Like A River was a great discussion because there were some people who immediately saw the allegory in the tale (aside from the obvious symbols) and others who went “Ooooh! So that burning soil bed in the midst of the frozen tundra was really a symbol of hell? Man, I thought it was a geological hot spot!” There were some nice a-ha moments. Plus, this tale obviously wrapped around the love of families, and it hit an excellent chord.

Run was also a great book to go through, in that it touched on whether telling the entire truth was all that important, and whether blood ties were all that meaningful. One of our moms just adopted a child from Russia, so the adoption angle(s) in the book resonated. We really like books by Ann Patchett because the characters are so complex. Her story The Patron Saint of Liars was another one that made one think hard about truth.

Other books, like The Memory Keeper’s Daughter and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time were interesting in that two of us are mothers to special needs children, and another member works with special children. We were able to speak from a unique perspective for those books, and it made the discussion really rich. As mom to a little boy with autism, I was worried that these books would hit too close to home for me --- but it was liberating! People are often afraid to ask me what it’s like to deal with autism’s challenges, and this was a nice vehicle to let others understand our lives better.

Q: How do you keep things fun?

A: We DO come from the New Orleans area --- enough said? Sometimes trying to replicate the food or décor from the book can lighten a dark book. Even serious books like Those Who Save Us, Walk Back the Cat (by a local Mandeville writer!) or Sarah’s Key can still make for a light evening. For the first of these, the hostess served German food (and of course, pastries), the next had foil-wrapped chocolate coins on the table. Sarah’s Key was all French fare.

Q: What advice would you give to other reading groups?

A: If all the members are new to the reading group concept, maybe scratch down some guidelines after discussing them with one another. If the group leads busy lives, you may choose to limit your book selections to those under 300 pages, for example.

I strongly suggest that each member must pick a book or choice of books once a year. I also belong to a Classics book club, and though I usually enjoy the book picks, they come from only two very vocal members… just doesn’t engender a sense of ownership.

“Mandeville Hot Mamas,” however, has only this standard: each member can nominate any book she wants, but it has to be discussion-worthy. This way, if some new member really loves some trashy romance novel or action book, they know ahead of time it’s a no-go. I personally love books by Nelson DeMille and Richard Preston, but don’t use those for book clubs.

It’s not about how much you love the book. It’s about how much you love to learn about yourselves by discussing the book together.

Q: Do you have any horror stories, amusing anecdotes, or other special tales to tell?

A: OMG. If your group reads Peace Like a River, somebody will of course want to cook the infamous fish chowder.

Never, I repeat, NEVER use “salt cod” in place of cod or red snapper in your recipe. One gal used about three pounds of salt cod to make a big, fancy tureen of chowder, and we all actually SPAT it out into our beautiful china bowls. It took an hour to get our puckers unclenched! Horrid.

Taste it before serving, people!

Q: Is there anything else unique or noteworthy about your group that you would like to share?

A: Our gals all survived Hurricane Katrina in varying levels of trauma. Two gals’ homes were entirely destroyed, but all of us had damage of some sort. Other members moved out of state and we’ve not seen them again. Another was gone for nearly a year (but returned, hooray!).

We only took a three-month pause in our book club meetings --- not because we had ANY free time whatsoever to read, but because a beautifully written tale can take your mind away from your troubles. We all needed a bit of escapism --- we’d seen too much death and destruction not to. But we also needed one another terribly, and the book club helped us feel nearly normal again.

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