About the Virtual Event

We are pleased to offer another fun Book Bingo (Women Warriors): A Virtual Adventure! If you are already familiar with our popular Southern California series that features NovelNetwork® authors, you will understand why we receive so many requests to expand the program nationwide. Pivoting to virtual events has made this not only possible, but offers up fun opportunities for exciting partnerships, participation by more of our over 125 book club favorite authors, and space to accommodate many more readers!

 The launch event features book club favorite authors who have written about or who personify Women Warriors: Tory Bilski, Elise Hooper, Kaylene Johnson-Sullivan, D.J. Lee, J.A. Wright, and Eilene Zimmerman, in conversation with Adventures by the Book® and NovelNetwork® founder Susan McBeth.

Join us at this free event, where we will bring you six fabulous authors, an interactive virtual game of bingo, and fun prizes, and all you have to do is show up (and why not invite your book club friends and fellow readers to join in as well) to learn about great new reads to add to your to be read list).

While this event is free, your purchase of a book(s) below (to be shipped to you within the U.S.) provides much-needed support to these authors whose book tours and events have been cancelled due to COVID-19.

Your Adventure includes a book discussion with all six authors, an interactive virtual game of Book Bingo, Q&A, prizes, and the opportunity to meet the authors via Zoom. Books may be ordered below for shipping within the U.S. and will include a signed bookplate. See below for registration information.

About the Authors

Tori Bilski is a travel writer based in Connecticut. She writes primarily about Iceland – its people, horses, and history. In 2013, she created an award-winning blog, Icelandica, featuring tales of adventure (and misadventure) with a group of fellow women travelers in Iceland. She has recently written for Atlas Obscura, Hartford Courant, Roads & Kingdoms, Iceland Review, and others. She has published short stories in literary journals, such as, Kenyon Review, 13th Moon and Black Warrior Review —the latter where her story was nominated for a Pushcart. She graduated Oswego State, Wesleyan University, and completed a year of her MFA program at Sarah Lawrence University. She is inexplicably drawn to old Norse and Anglo-Saxon history and pretends not to believe that it’s due to very exciting past life experiences.

Her debut memoir, Wild Horses of the Summer Sun, recounts how she and fellow women travelers escape their ordinary lives to live an extraordinary one at a horse farm perched at the edge of the world in northern Iceland, near the Greenland Sea.  If only for a short while. Filled with adventure and fresh humor, as well as an incredible portrait of Iceland and its remarkable equines, Wild Horses of the Summer Sun will enthrall and delight not just horse lovers, but those of us who yearn for a little more wild in everyday life.

To schedule a book club visit with Tory or any of our authors on NovelNetwork:

Elise Hooper is a native New Englander who spent several years writing for television and online news outlets before getting a MA and teaching high-school literature and history. She now lives in Seattle with her husband and two daughters.

Her previous works of historical fiction include The Other Alcott, about art, ambition, and the real women behind the March sisters in Louisa May Alcott’s beloved classic Little Women, and Learning to See, a biographical fiction about Dorothea Lange, the pioneering documentary photographer who captured iconic images of the Great Depression and the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.

Her recently released novel, Fast Girls, explores the gripping, real-life history of female athletes, members of the first integrated women’s Olympic team, and their journeys to the 1936 summer games in Berlin, Nazi Germany. This inspiring story is based on the real lives of three little-known trailblazing women Olympians. Perfect for readers who love untold stories of amazing women, such as The Only Woman in the Room, Hidden Figures, and The Lost Girls of Paris.

To schedule a book club visit with Elise or any of our authors on NovelNetwork:

Kaylene Johnson-Sullivan is an award-winning author, journalist, and documentary film producer, and long-time Alaskan who makes her home in Palmer. She has found adventure on Denali, the Chugach Mountains, and as a wrangler and cook in the Brooks Range. Her award-winning articles have appeared in Alaska magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the Louisville Review and other publications.

Her books include Our Perfect Wild: Ray and Barbara Bane’s Journeys and the Fate of the Far North; Canyons and Ice: The Wilderness Travels of Dick Griffith; Trails Across Time: History of An Alaska Mountain Corridor; and Portrait of the Alaska Railroad.

Her memoir, A Tender Distance: Adventures Raising My Sons in Alaska, is a mother’s story about raising her two boys in Alaska where wilderness is just out the back door of their home. Written with wit, wisdom, and a grateful heart, A Tender Distance presents fifteen finely-crafted vignettes that explore the perils and joys of raising two fearless boys from toddlerhood to young men. Mothers everywhere will relate to the hard, familiar choice between holding close and letting go.

To schedule a book club visit with Kaylene or any of our authors on NovelNetwork:

D.J. Lee is a writer, teacher, and regents professor in the English Department at Washington State University, whose theory of wilderness backpacking is this: for every day on the trail, you get two days of post-wilderness high. She gets into the backcountry as often as she can, and divides her time between Moscow, Idaho, and Oak Park, Illinois.

DJ believes that teaching and learning are humans’ two great gifts. The most exquisite forms of communication happen in that little petri dish called the classroom, whether the classroom is in a school, a field, a street corner, a mountain, or a dream, but she also does need to spend time a good deal of time alone, too.

Her memoir, Remote: Finding Home in the Bitterroots, first place winner in the 2020 Idaho Writers Guild competition, is a tale of survival in a wilderness of mountains and ghosts, and is one woman’s journey to learn the fate of a friend who has disappeared and to embrace her own family’s troubled past in a vast roadless landscape of Idaho and Montana. Like the surprise connections of a wild trail system, Remote is told in a nonlinear structure, engaging with dreams and apparitions, the familiar and the uncanny, and questions of history and memory.

To schedule a book club visit with D.J. or any of our authors on NovelNetwork:

J.A. Wright grew up in the Pacific Northwest of the United States and moved to New Zealand in 1990 with her young family. She has been in recovery since 1985.

In her debut novel, How to Grow an Addict, Randall Grange has been tricked into admitting herself into a treatment center and she doesn’t know why. She’s not a party hound like the others in her therapy group, but then again, she knows she can’t live without pills or booze.

To schedule a book club visit with J.A. or any of our authors on NovelNetwork:

Eilene Zimmerman has been a journalist for three decades, covering business, technology, and social issues for a wide array of national magazines and newspapers. She was a columnist for The New York Times Sunday Business section for six years and, since 2004, has been a regular contributor to the newspaper. In 2017, she also began pursuing a master’s degree in social work.

When Eilene’s ex-husband, a high-powered attorney working at a prominent lawfirm, seemed distracted, appeared thin, and was frequently absent from activities with their children, she thought he was ill and needed to see a doctor. On the surface, Peter seemed to have it all: a senior partnership, a beautiful house by the beach, expensive cars, and other luxuries that come with an affluent life. And while they were divorced, they remained partners and friends, so when he had not returned her calls for several days, she decided to drive to his house to check on him.

So begins Smacked, a brilliant and moving memoir of Eilene’s shocking discovery, one that sets her on a journey to find out how a man she knew for nearly 30 years became a drug addict, hiding it so well that neither she nor anyone else in his life suspected what was happening. Through extensive research and interviews, she presents a picture of drug dependence today while embarking on a journey to recreate her life in the wake of her profound loss. The book has been optioned for film by Elisabeth Moss’ new production company.

To schedule a book club visit with Eilene or any of our authors on NovelNetwork:

For Book Clubs or Author Live Chats

Are you in a book club, library reading group, or is your group of friends, colleagues, family members seeking fabulous authors who are excited and available to meet with you? Then you will be delighted to know that Tory Bilski, Elise Hooper, Kaylene Johnson-Sullivan, D.J. Lee, J.A. Wright, and Eilene Zimmerman are all  members of our wonderful community of over 125 NovelNetwork authors available to meet with small groups via video chat.

NovelNetwork is the nation’s first and only match(dot)com for authors and book clubs to find each other, so check it out today. Book clubs join for free and gain access to our database of dozens of authors, from NYT and international bestsellers, to debut authors, cookbook authors, mystery and non-fiction authors, and representing various regions of the United States, and even Alaska and Hawaii, all of whom want to meet with you!

To schedule a visit with Tory, Elise, Kaylene, D.J., J.A.or Eilene, or any of our authors, join FOR FREE  here.

Event Registration

This event is free and open to the public (on a first-come, first-served basis); however, registration below is necessary in order to receive your Zoom invite and virtual bingo card (bingo cards will only be available to those who register before August 25, 2020). You may attend the event without playing bingo.

While the event is free to attend, your purchase of a book(s) below offers support to these authors whose book tours and events have been cancelled. Book prices below include shipping within the U.S. and will include signed bookplates.