Bella events are for dues current members of the Bend Bella Cyclists. To become a member, please join HERE.
Our Ride Coordinator, Audrey Murray, can help you map out rides and/or suggest routes of your preferred length and level of difficulty. You can contact her at [email protected].
- This event has passed.
Bend Bella Cyclists Book Club
May 11 @ 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm
There is nothing better than curling up with a good book. Plan to join us on Thursday, May 11th at 5:30 PM for this month’s meeting, where we will meet, eat, drink and discuss this months selection, ‘Forbidden City: a novel’ by Vanessa Hua
NATIONAL BESTSELLER A teenage girl living in 1960s China becomes Mao Zedong’s protégée and lover—and a heroine of the Cultural Revolution—in this “masterful new novel” (The Washington Post)
“A new classic about China’s Cultural Revolution . . . Think Succession, but add death and mayhem to the palace intrigue. . . . Ambitious and impressive.”—San Francisco Chronicle
On the eve of China’s Cultural Revolution and her sixteenth birthday, Mei dreams of becoming a model revolutionary. When the Communist Party recruits girls for a mysterious duty in the capital, she seizes the opportunity to escape her impoverished village. It is only when Mei arrives at the Chairman’s opulent residence—a forbidden city unto itself—that she learns that the girls’ job is to dance with the Party elites. Ambitious and whip-smart, Mei beelines toward the Chairman.
Mei gradually separates herself from the other recruits to become the Chairman’s confidante—and paramour. While he fends off political rivals, Mei faces down schemers from the dance troupe who will stop at nothing to take her place and the Chairman’s imperious wife, who has secret plans of her own.
When the Chairman finally gives Mei a political mission, she seizes it with fervor, but the brutality of this latest stage of the revolution makes her begin to doubt all the certainties she has held so dear.
Forbidden City is an epic yet intimate portrayal of one of the world’s most powerful and least understood leaders during this extraordinarily turbulent period in modern Chinese history. Mei’s harrowing journey toward truth and disillusionment raises questions about power, manipulation, and belief, as seen through the eyes of a passionate teenage girl.