Gena's Reads

I’ve come to love Susan Vreeland’s historical fiction based on famous works of art. Luncheon of the Boating Party is perhaps my favorite. It is based on Renoir’s famous painting Le Dejeuner des Canotiers. In it, the fourteen people captured enjoying lunch along the Seine in 1880’s France, come alive. Each modeled for Renoir for eight Sundays over the course of two months in late summer to complete the painting before the light of summer disappeared. Vreeland brings to life…

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The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell is a futuristic novel about a Jesuit mission to a newly discovered planet and an unknown species. Sounds far fetched? Doria Russell’s novels are so well researched and intriguing, I was captivated for most of the novel. This novel works because it is character driven, by the group of  mismatched friends sent on the mission, led by Puerto Rican Priest and linguist Emelio Sanchez. It was reminiscent of Star Trek, and in fact the…

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The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey is a wonderful novel, mixing fairy tale magic with the realities of life, homesteading in the Alaskan wilderness in the 1920’s. Mabel and Jack always wanted children, but this was never to happen. Searching for a different life, they head to Alaska, only to discover vast wilderness, bitter winters, and hard earth that doesn’t seem able to yield enough food to live on. One night, during the first snow of the season, they build…

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The Bird Sisters, the debut novel by Rebecca Rasmussen, is about two sisters, Milly and Twiss, who are old now, but are remembering back to the summer when they were teenage girls in Wisconson in 1947. That was the summer their cousin Bett came to live with them and everything in their lives changed. I wanted to like this novel more than I actually did.  It was lacking in plot and character development, and for some reason, it never fully…

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I find Sue Miller’s novels to be hit or miss. Her latest, The Lake Shore Limited, is, I believe, one of her most accomplished novels. She writes from the perspective of four different people whose lives all intersect around a play titled The Lake Shore Limited. It is very loosly based around events of 9/11 and the playwright’s own experience of losing her lover on that day. But this in no way is a story about 9/11. Is it about human…

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Labyrinth by Kate Mosse is an epic thriller similar in ways to the Da Vinci Code. It is a big, thick, historical mystery set in the Pyrenees mountains in modern day France and at the same location 800 years ago. Alice, a volunteer at an archaeological dig, uncovers a tomb by accident, setting into motion events beyond her control, and bringing up memories of the past, and a woman named Alais, that she is strangely connected to. The mysterious labyrinth…

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Agony of the Leaves by Laura Childs is the latest in the Tea Shop Mystery Series, reuniting us with Theodosia Browning and the crew of the Indigo Tea Shop in Charleston. This time, Theodosia is hot on the trail of the murderer of her ex-boyfriend Parker Scully. These books are formulaic and pretty silly, but full of fantastic tea lore that I love. So, if you’re looking for something light to read with a good cup of tea, it can be a satisfying…

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The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones, is one of the most disturbing books I’ve read in a long time. Sebold is a gifted writer who choses difficult subject matter to explore. Her writing can be compelling and absorbing, but her gifts were lost here, as there was so little to redeem this novel. The novel opens with Helen Knightly murdering her mother, who suffers from demention, and it spirals down from there into even more…

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The Saffron Kitchen is a bittersweet debut novel by Yasmin Crowther set in equal parts in London and Iran. Sara has grown up in London, the daughter of a British father and Iranian mother (like Crowther herself,) and always sensed a sadness in her mother when letters from Iran would arrive and her mother would be torn between her old life and new life.  This culminates in an event at the opening of the novel which sends Maryam, Sara’s mother, back to…

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Dreamers of the Day by Mary Doria Russell is a wonderful piece of historical fiction set during the time of the Cairo Conference in 1921. The ficticious main character, Agnes Shanklin, is in Cairo at the time, along with Winston Churchill, T.E. Lawrence, Gertrude Bell and others. This is fabulous storytelling mixed in with well researched historical fact. I was captivated from the beginning. Whether you want to find out more about Lawrence of Arabia and the creation of the…

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