The MFAH Online Book Club summer selections—My Ántonia by Willa Cather and The Palace of Illusions by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni—invite you to venture across time and place! Book Club Visits for these books begin in June and will be offered through September 30, 2010.

• My Ántonia
  Willa Cather
  
  Originally published in 1918, My Ántonia is the intimate portrait of an American heroine, an elegy for a vanished frontier, and the story of a young man´s journey out of the innocence of childhood into adulthood. Cather paints her descriptions of the vastness of nature with strokes so vivid that readers feel as if they have just come in from a walk on the prairie. As the book progresses, Jim goes to college at the University of Nebraska, where he learns the Roman poet Virgil´s phrase, "Optima dies ... prima fugit," or "the best days are the first to flee." This could be said equally of childhood and the earliest hours of this country in which the open land, much like My Ántonia, was nothing short of a composition in prairie sky blue. A book that uniquely captures the settling of the American frontier, My Ántonia complements works of art in the museum´s American art galleries as well as in the Masterworks of Charles M. Russell exhibition.
  
  
  
  
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• The Palace of Illusions
  Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
  
  The Palace of Illusions (2008) transports us to a time that is part history, part myth, and fully magical. Written by Houston author Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and narrated by Panchaali, the wife of the legendary Pandavas brothers in the Indian epic The Mahabharat, the novel offers a new interpretation of this ancient tale.
  
  Similar to Homer´s Iliad or Odyssey in western literature, The Mahabharat is well known in India. Like Homer´s epics, The Mahabharat features hundreds of characters who intermingle with gods and goddesses; through their exchange, the fascinating, complicated story of a great war unfolds. Divakaruni gives us insight into this ancient tale through Panchaali, a princess who, at a young age, receives news from a sage that she is fated to cause the greatest war of her time. This book has it all: love, magic, deception, mystery, war, and cosmic super-powers. The Palace of Illusions is offered in conjunction with works of art in the Arts of India gallery at the MFAH.
  
  
  
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