.Book Talk

Current Book for February/March 2026

We will meet on Saturday, March 14, 2026
at River House Grill in Portland (MI)
at 9:15 a.m. for breakfast to discuss the book.

The Girls in the Stilt House
by Kelly Mustian
Set in 1920's Mississippi, this debut Southern novel weaves a beautiful and harrowing
story of two young women cast in an unlikely partnership through murder.

Ada promised herself she would never go back to the Trace, to her hard life on the
swamp and her harsh father. But now, after running away and briefly knowing a
different kind of life, she finds herself with nowhere to go but back home. And she
knows there will be a price to pay with her father.
Matilda, daughter of a sharecropper, is from the other side of the Trace. Doing what
she can to protect her family from the whims and demands of some particularly callous locals is an ongoing struggle. She forms a plan to go north, to pack up the secrets she’s holding about her life in the South and hang them on the line for all to see in Ohio. 
As the two girls are drawn deeper into a dangerous world of bootleggers and moral corruption, they must come to terms with the complexities of their tenuous bond
and a hidden past that links them in ways that could cost them their lives. 
About The Author
Kelly Mustian is the USA Today bestselling author of The Girls in the Stilt House 
and The River Knows Your Name. She is the recipient of the Mississippi Library
Association’s 2023 Author Award for Fiction, and The Girls in the Stilt House was shortlisted for the 2022 Crook’s Corner Book Prize for best debut novel set in the
American South. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals and commercial magazines. Originally from Mississippi, she currently lives in North Carolina.

​Book Talk
Our book club is very casual and welcoming. 
Please plan to join us whether you read the book or not. 
We do discuss the book, but it's also about the fellowship.  The more the merrier!

Please feel free to contact us to confirm the date/time/locationfor our Book Talk, as
sometimes we do have to change it on short notice.  Our contact information can be
found by clicking on the Contact tab at the top of this page.
​
Click on the Book List tab near the top of the page for a
complete list of all of the books that Book Talk has read.  

Information about the book and the author from: kellymustian.com
This web-page updated 2-16-2026