American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins is a novel every American should read. It chronicles in detail one mothers attempt to flee Mexico alive with her young son after her entire family has been murdered. What they go through is beyond horrific and all too real for so many refugees fleeing Mexico and Central America, only to be met by racism and bitterness at the US border. It’s a harrowing story, a true page turner which had me from the opening…
A Ballad of Love and Glory by Reyna Grande, author of The Distance Between Us, is historical fiction based on the Mexican-American War. In 1846. after the controversial annexation of Texas, the US army provokes a war with Mexico over the disputed Rio Grande boundary. In the novel, a Mexican healer falls in love with an Irish soldier who defects from the US army and joins the Mexicans forming St. Patrick’s Battalion. Meticulously researched and based on historical figures and…
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel is the latest from the author of Station Eleven. Here she continues to write post-apocalyptic, post-pandemic fiction at a time when people have started to colonize the moon. The story moves back and forth through time and posits some mind-bending concepts, yet at the end I found it too sparse and lacking in character development, I just didn’t really care. I truly loved Station Eleven and have felt only luke-warm about St….
If you haven’t read Ruth Ozeki then you’re in for a wild and wonderful ride; no one writes quite like Ozeki. Start with A Tale for the Time Being. The Book of Form and Emptiness is her latest novel. In it we follow 13 year old Benny Oh, who starts to hear ordinary objects talking to him after the death of his father. His mother is dealing with his father’s death in her own way and starts hoarding things, at…
Violeta is the new novel by Isabel Allende. Here she goes back to her roots in Chile. It is a sweeping saga of the century long life of Violeta De Valle, born during the Spanish flu pandemic and dying at the height of the Coronavirus pandemic. It is a story of family, love and loss, history, culture, politics, women’s rights and more. Although Allende is one of my favorite authors and undoubtedly a master story teller, this book left me…
The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak is historical fiction set in Cypress during the summer of ’74 when Civil War broke out, as well as in present day London. I didn’t know much about the fighting between Muslim Turkish Cypriots and Christian Greek Cypriots before reading this book. Shafak has crafted a novel that is both sad and hopeful, and told largely from the perspective of a Fig Tree. Magical, lyrical and beautiful written, Shafak explores love, family,…
Good Company by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeny, author of The Nest, is a novel about a happy marriage suddenly thrown into chaos by an accidental discovery. Sweeny digs deep into the depths of marriage, family life, motherhood, friendship and what it means to be in relationships. The story centers around a theater group called Good Company and moves between LA and New York, but it is not so much the plot that is the main draw but the internal struggles of…
The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune is a modern day fairy tale about magical children living at an orphanage on a magical island. A buttoned-up, lonely caseworker from The Dept. in Charge of Magical Youth is sent to check on the orphanage and needless to say, his life is forever changed, Although highly predictable, Klune writes with such charm and wit and has created such wonderful characters, it’s impossible not to fall a little in love with…
Sankofa by Chibundi Onuzu is a novel about race, identity, family and what home means to each of us. Anna, born and raised in London by a single mom, never knew her father. Only after her mother’s death does she discover a diary her father wrote when he was a poor student living in London. He had a short affair with Anna’s mother, but never knew he had a daughter. Decades later, he is the president, some would say dictator,…
China Room by Sunjeev Sahota is a novel inspired in part by his own family history. In 1929 Punjab, three young girls are married to three brothers and move into their mother-in-laws home, not knowing the identity of their own husbands, they are only with them at night in a darkened room. Mehar is curious and tries to figure out which brother is her husband, leading to a series of events that put several lives in danger. In 1999 her…