Hurricane Sisters is a novel by Dorthea Benton Frank set in Charleston, South Carolina. It focuses on the lives of three generations of women. Told from several points of view, sometimes the novel worked and sometimes it didn’t. It was a little preachy about domestic violence and abuse against women. There are some very sobering facts here about how many women die each day due to domestic violence and how South Carolina leads the country in the number of homicides….
In the Memorial Room by Janet Frame (author of An Angel at My Table) is a newly published novel ten years after Frame’s death and forty years after it was written. Harry Gill has been awarded the Watercress-Armstrong Fellowship, and he arrives in the small French village of Menton, only to find the Memorial Room where he is supposed to write, cold, dank and with no facilities. Frame is a wonderful writer, and this is quite a funny little novel…
The Valley of Amazement is the new novel by Amy Tan. This book is set in Shanghai at the turn of the century and follows the lives of an American mother who runs a high class courtesan house and her half-Chinese daughter, who has never met her father. Tan is a great writer of historical fiction, and often explores mother-daughter relationships, as she does here. However, I felt like this thick book needed to be edited down from 600 pages…
The Shores of Paradise by Shirley Streshinsky is historical fiction set in Hawaii, telling of the final decades of the 1800’s, marking the end of the Hawaiian monarchy and continuing into the early 1900’s. The book tells the story of True Lindstrom and Martha Moon, two orphan girls who becomes close friends with Princess Victoria Kaiulani. This is a wonderfully written epic novel following the lives of these girls, as they grow up and they move in different directions, yet…
The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred Price Purveyor of Superior Funerals, by Wendy Jones, is a novel set in a small Welsh town in1924. It tells of Wilfred Price, a funeral director coming of age in this very small town, who impulsively asks a girl to marry him, then quickly realizes he has made a mistake. The book starts as a comedy of manners, and indeed would make a good movie, but then tackles more serious subjects as the novel…
The Orchard of Lost Souls by Nafida Mohamed is set in Hargeisa, Somalia in 1987during the civil war. It tells the stories of three different women, Kawsar, a widow in her late 50’s who has been badly beaten in prison, Filsan a soldier in her late 20’s from Mogadishu, and nine year old Deqo, an orphan who has run away from the refugee camp where she was born, and is trying to survive on her own in the city. This…
China Dolls is the new novel by Lisa See, one of my favorite authors of historical fiction. See writes about Chinese and Chinese American women. If you haven’t read Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, or Peony in Love, you should. In her latest, she tells of the time during the height of the Chinese nightclub scene in the 30’s and 40’s, especially the famous Forbidden City nightclub in San Francisco run by Charlie Low. See does so much research…
Boy, Snow, Bird is the new novel by Helen Oyeyemi. I had read rave reviews about this book and really wanted to read it. It is very loosely based on Snow White. Set in a small town in New England in 1953, we meet Boy, a girl running away from her abusive father, who marries a man with a young beautiful daughter, Snow Whitman. When Boy has her own daughter, Bird, and sends Snow away, she fulfills the inevitable part…
The Aviator’s Wife by Melanie Benjamin is historical fiction about Anne Morrow Lindbergh, author, pilot, and wife of Charles Lindbergh. This is the little known story of Anne’s life, as she was often in the shadow of her husband. I loved her famous book Gift from the Sea, but knew little else about her. Benjamin tells the story through Anne’s voice, starting with her early life as the daughter of the Ambassador to Mexico, where she meets Lindbergh while still…
Blood Orchids by Toby Neal is a crime mystery set in Hawaii. This is not the type of book I normally read, and for good reason. I found it disturbing and not to my taste. Neal is a local author so I was interested to read her book for this reason only. The heroine is Lei Texeira, a Big Island cop with a troubled past who finds herself in the middle of a murder mystery, while also being stalked herself….