Book Discussion: "Jasmine"

Join us for a discussion of "Jasmine" by Bharati Mukherjee. When Jasmine is suddenly widowed at 17, she seems fated to a life of quiet isolation in the small Indian village where she was born. But the force of her desires propels her explosively into a larger, more dangerous, and ultimately more life-giving worked. In just a few years, Jasmine becomes Jane Ripplemeyer, happily pregnant by a middle-aged Iowa banker and the adoptive mother of a Vietnamese refugee. Jasmine's metamorphosis, with its shocking upheavals and its slow evolutionary steps, illuminates the making of an American mind; but even more powerfully, her story depicts the shifting contours of an America being transformed by her and others like her.