Last night, we hosted our first “Bookaccino Live” Book Group event with Jeanine Cummins, the author of AMERICAN DIRT, as our guest. We went with a new format for this program. I interviewed Jeanine at the start, and then we invited eight readers to join us to ask questions. We wrapped up with a Q&A from the audience.
I had been looking forward to this interview for a long time. I read an advance copy of the book in June 2019, and when it came out in January of this year (which feels like a lifetime ago), it was a Bookreporter.com Bets On selection. It is now a finalist for the Goodreads Choice Awards in the Fiction category, which makes me so happy. Voting is open until November 30th. In our conversation, we talked about her research for the book, the stops and starts it had, and her various inspirations, as well as what the last 10 months have been like since it came out. Readers who joined us asked about the title, the cover design, her incorporating Spanish into the prose, and what she hoped people would take away from it. And there also was a lively conversation about the audio edition.