Sip your favorite brew as Addictive Books explores captivating stories, shares diverse perspectives, and creates a haven for bookworms once a month on Saturday at Union Coffee in Oak Lawn.

This month's read: In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado’s engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming.

And it’s that struggle that gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope―the haunted house, erotica, the bildungsroman―through which Machado holds the events up to the light and examines them from different angles. She looks back at her religious adolescence, unpacks the stereotype of lesbian relationships as safe and utopian, and widens the view with essayistic explorations of the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships.

We meet in the glass conference room on the first floor.

Order the book through DPL at the following link:

https://catalog.dallaslibrary.org/polaris/search/title.aspx?ctx=1.1033.0.0.6&pos=1&cn=3292644