JUSTICE UNBOUND BOOK CLUB

All are welcome to join Legal Aid Society’s book club, Justice Unbound. We believe that stories have the power to create empathy and connect communities. Our book club aims to explore issues related to civil legal justice, better understand the challenges facing low-income communities, and inspire creative solutions to complicated and systemic issues.

Benefits of Joining

20% discount on all book club books at Carmichaels Bookstore
Invitation to our Books and Breakfast series (our book discussion events)
Connection with a community of individuals passionate about civil legal justice

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now reading

James By Percival Everett

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.

Summary from Goodreads.

About Percival Everett

Percival L. Everett (born 1956) is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.

There might not be a more fertile mind in American fiction today than Everett’s. In 22 years, he has written 19 books, including a farcical Western, a savage satire of the publishing industry, a children’s story spoofing counting books, retellings of the Greek myths of Medea and Dionysus, and a philosophical tract narrated by a four-year-old.

Everett’s writing has earned him the PEN USA 2006 Literary Award (for his 2005 novel, Wounded), the Academy Award for Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award (for his 2001 novel, Erasure), the PEN/Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature (for his 1996 story collection, Big Picture) and the New American Writing Award (for his 1990 novel, Zulus). He has served as a judge for, among others, the 1997 National Book Award for fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1991

You’re invited

Books & Breakfast

Thursday, February 26

8:30 AM to 10 AM

Location To Be Determined

Join us for the companion event where we dive deeper into the book and it’s themes as they related to poverty in our community, legal aid, and the role of the legal system.

RSVP TO BOOKS & BREAKFAST

what’s next

Women Talking, by Miriam Toews

SAVE THE DATE - BOOKS & BREAKFAST for Women Talking will be on Wednesday, April 22

One evening, eight Mennonite women climb into a hay loft to conduct a secret meeting. For the past two years, each of these women, and more than a hundred other girls in their colony, has been repeatedly violated in the night by demons coming to punish them for their sins. Now that the women have learned they were in fact drugged and attacked by a group of men from their own community, they are determined to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm.

While the men of the colony are off in the city, attempting to raise enough money to bail out the rapists and bring them home, these women—all illiterate, without any knowledge of the world outside their community and unable even to speak the language of the country they live in—have very little time to make a choice: Should they stay in the only world they’ve ever known or should they dare to escape?

Based on real events and told through the “minutes” of the women’s all-female symposium, Toews’s masterful novel uses wry, politically engaged humor to relate this tale of women claiming their own power to decide.

Past Reading

Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts

“The concept of the kitchen ghosts came to me years ago when I realized that my ancestors are always with me and that the women are most present while I’m chopping or stirring or standing at the stove. The art of cooking and engaging with my kitchen ghosts made me realize that food is never just about the present—every dish”
The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek by Kim Michele Richardson

“Their hunger for books could teach them of a better life free of the hunger, but without food they'd never live long enough or have the strength to find it.”
MAID by Stephanie Land

March 2025
“I had to stop hoping for someone to come along and love me. I had to do it myself, ducking my head and barreling through anything life brought. I felt like sitting down meant I wasn't doing enough - like the sort of lazy welfare recipient I was assumed to be.”
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

October 2024
“Live long enough, and all things you ever loved can turn around to scorch you blind. The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.”
Other Suggested Reading

View from the Bench by Judge McKay Chauvin
“I Left Poverty After Writing ‘Maid.’ But Poverty Never Left Me.” By Stephanie Land.