NJSOC Book Club: The Seed Keeper
Join us as we read together The Seed Keeper, a novel by Diane Wilson. Participants will read at their own pace, with the opportunity to discuss virtually via the Heylo app. You’ll receive weekly discussion points to ponder that will guide our group conversation. We’ll meet to discuss the book face-to-face on Saturday, March 14th, at the School of Conservation from 10:30 to noon. This meeting will also include an outdoor activity related to our reading.
High School students and up are welcome to join. Participants will provide their own copy of the book. We will officially begin reading on Sunday, February 15th. Please feel free to register and jump in any time. Participants will receive additional instructions via email (don’t forget to monitor the email address you use to register!).
About The Seed Keeper:
“A 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Big Reads Selection
Winner of the Minnesota Book Award
A haunting novel spanning several generations, The Seed Keeper follows a Dakhóta family’s struggle to preserve their way of life, and their sacrifices to protect what matters most.
Rosalie Iron Wing has grown up in the woods with her father, Ray, a former science teacher who tells her stories of plants, of the stars, of the origins of the Dakhóta people. Until one morning, Ray doesn’t return from checking his traps. Told she has no family, Rosalie is sent to live with a foster family in nearby Mankato—where the reserved, bookish teenager meets rebellious Gaby Makespeace, in a friendship that transcends the damaged legacies they’ve inherited.
On a winter’s day many years later, Rosalie returns to her childhood home. A widow and mother, she has spent the previous two decades on her white husband’s farm, finding solace in her garden even as the farm is threatened first by drought and then by a predatory chemical company. Now, grieving, Rosalie begins to confront the past, on a search for family, identity, and a community where she can finally belong. In the process, she learns what it means to be descended from women with souls of iron—women who have protected their families, their traditions, and a precious cache of seeds through generations of hardship and loss, through war and the insidious trauma of boarding schools.
Weaving together the voices of four indelible women, The Seed Keeper is a beautifully told story of reawakening, of remembering our original relationship to the seeds and, through them, to our ancestors (Amazon).”
