How to Read a Book

Violet Powell is twenty-two and leaving prison in Maine after twenty-two months. She was convicted of a drunk-driving crash in her hometown of Abbott Falls that killed a kindergarten teacher, and she now has to build a life with that fact attached to her name.

Two other people are tied to her past. Harriet Larson, a retired English teacher, runs the book club inside the prison and is bracing for an empty house at home. Frank Daigle, a retired machinist, was married to the woman Violet killed, and he has not settled the tangled feelings that marriage left him with.

The three meet by chance one morning in a Portland bookstore. Violet has come to buy the novel she was reading with the prison club before her release. Harriet is choosing the group's next title for the women still inside. Frank is there working as the store handyman. From that meeting their lives start to cross.

This is a contemporary novel told through these three perspectives. It deals with guilt, forgiveness and second chances, and it leans toward warmth and humor without brushing past the harm at its center. Books and shared reading are what draw these strangers together, so expect a character-driven story of small kindnesses rather than a fast plot.