Gena's Reads

Sabrina & Corina by Kali Fajardo-Anstine, an indigenous Latina woman, is a book of short stories that highlights the lives of indigenous women in the American West, specifically Colorado. They are personal, honest, unrelenting and often painful. They are also full of truth and strength, family, heritage and a sense of place. Fajardo-Anstine writes of fierce, strong, bold women. Although I found some of the subject matter depressing, the characters were so real and vividly alive I could almost hear…

Read More Read More

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens is a beautiful meditation on life in the Marshlands of the North Carolina coast. It is also a coming of age story, a love story and a murder mystery. I loved Owen’s descriptions of the natural beauty of the place, it was haunting, wonderful, mysterious, sometimes scary and lonely, I felt transported there. However, I didn’t love the ending of this book. After such a long slow unfolding, everything was wrapped up too…

Read More Read More

The Bones of Grace by Bangladeshi author Tahmima Anam is a beautiful yet sad love story moving from Boston to Bangladesh, as Zubaida, a graduate student in Archeology at Harvard, falls in love with Elijah on the eve of her departure to a dig on the other side of the world. She ends up back home in Dhaka, married to her childhood sweetheart; then accepts a job in Chittagong to work on a documentary about the brutal lives of the…

Read More Read More