Wonderland Book Club (in store)
Wonderland meets the last Friday of each month from 10:15 until noon. Wonderland Book Club is OPEN to the public and is an outreach effort of the NC Writers' Network for Raleigh and Wake County.
This month's discussion: The Girl Who Feared Trains by Padgett Gerler
Over one hundred years before COVID-19, the flu pandemic of 1918 sweeps through Georgetown, South Carolina, claiming the life of young, pregnant Alice Virginia Freeman Pow. Alice’s little girls, three-year-old Tante and five-year-old Dixie, board the train for Savannah, Georgia to live with their grandmother, Aunt Sissy, leaving their beloved father alone in Georgetown. When, after seven years, Daddy remarries, Tante and Dixie return to their father and his new wife, losing yet another mother, Aunt Sissy. Shortly after the girls’ arrival, The Great Depression engulfs the country, followed closely by Daddy’s sudden and tragic illness. Tante equates train rides with tragedy and loss, but, despite the heartache of separation and the uncertainty that awaits at the end of each journey, the young woman recalls a childhood of family who loves and nurtures her and the Real Mother who promises she’ll never leave.
Padgett Gerler was born in South Carolina, where her family lived in the quaint, picturesque coastal town of Georgetown. When she was a child, her family relocated to the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, nestled in the majestic Appalachian Mountains. Leaving the Virginia mountains for college, Padgett graduated from North Carolina State University with an accounting degree. After earning her CPA certificate, she practiced accounting until, in 2010, she left her career to pursue fiction writing. Padgett resides on pastoral and inspirational Winchester Lake in Raleigh, North Carolina.
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