Reading, learning and sharing ideas can help nourish a daughter's confidence, strength, spirit and independence. It doesn't matter if you haven't had the time to read in years or if your daughter seems to read only what's assigned in school. A reading club offers a mother the opportunity to spend time conversing with her child and to enjoy her daughter's burgeoning mind as she moves toward womanhood. The Mother-Daughter Book Club works because it is not merely about books or reading. It is about mothers and daughters, girls and women, and how reading and talking enriches our relationships with each other.

FROM THE CRITICS Kirkus Reviews Searching for a way to "spend some special time" with her nine-year-old daughter that would "help us understand each other better," Dodson, the assistant director of the Smithsonian Institution's Center for African American History and Culture, hit upon the idea of forming a book club composed of mothers and their young daughters, who would work together to generate a reading list and then gather regularly to discuss what they had read. The idea was an immediate success. The group discussions, Dodson notes, "offered a unique combination of intellectual and personal sharing," bringing mothers and daughters (whose ages ranged from 9 to 12) closer together and allowing them to discuss some difficult issues in a nonconfrontational manner.