VT Reads "Charity & Sylvia" Book Discussion

Join MRV Libraries for a discussion of this year's VT Reads title "Charity & Sylvia" by Tillie Walden. Free copies are available now at all three libraries. Weybridge, Vermont in February 1807 is small, cold, lonely, and beautiful. As an unwed woman with few prospects, Sylvia Drake resides with and cares for her sister’s rambunctious family. But today the house is abuzz awaiting a guest—Charity Bryant. So opens Charity and Sylvia by Tillie Walden, the award-winning, Vermont-based cartoonist and author of Spinning and On a Sunbeam. Created by Walden from archival materials at the Henry Sheldon Museum of Vermont History in Middlebury, and other primary and secondary sources, Charity and Sylvia is a groundbreaking biography that is also the story of 19th century America. For 44 years Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake lived together as life partners in small town Vermont. And in Walden’s graphic novel, America grows alongside these women. We see the arrival of railroads, the terms of 14 Presidents, riots, rebellion, and plagues. Since 2003, Vermont Humanities has invited students, adults, and seniors across the state to read the same book and participate in a wide variety of community activities related to the book’s themes.