Gena's Reads

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven, is loosely based on the 2008 Ponzi scheme perpetrated by Bernie Madoff. Partially set in Canada at a remote five star hotel in the wilderness, this novel couldn’t be more different from Station Eleven, much to my disappointment. Jonathan Alkaita’s (the Madoff character) actions effect many characters throughout the book, and Mandel follows their different story lines. The setting becomes a powerful character as well, whether it is…

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Little Gods by Meng Jin is a novel set at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre, when Su Lan, a brilliant scientist gives birth to a daughter and becomes an ambivalent mother. This is an immigrant story, a story of identity, of trying to escape your past, but never really succeeding. Although beautifully written, from several different perspectives, I didn’t enjoy this book as much as I wanted to. I never really cared about any of the characters, they…

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Improvement by Joan Silber tells the story of Reyna, a single Mom whose boyfriend just got out of jail and tries to get her into a smuggling job with him and his friends. When she backs out at the last moment, the consequence of that action echos around the globe to many people in many places whose lives are loosely linked by one tragic accident. In this sparse and beautifully written novel, Silber weaves a wonderful tail rich in details…

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The Bookshop of Yesterdays by Amy Meyerson, set in Prospero Books in LA, is a mystery uncovered one clue at a time that dragged on a bit too long. Miranda returns home for her Uncle’s funeral, who she hasn’t seen since she was 12, and finds that he left her his bookstore. Through the scavenger hunt he has left for her, each clue in a different book, she sets out to discover long kept family secrets There are moments when…

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The Possibility of Everything, A Memoir by Hope Edelman, author of Motherless Daughters is a book that takes place over a couple of weeks when Edelman’s daughter Maya was 3 years old. When Maya suddenly starts exhibiting alarming and often violent behavior, in a quest to find a cure for her, she and her husband take Maya to visit a shaman in Belize; this is a chronicle of that journey. It was hard for me to understand Edelman, she was…

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A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabelle Allende is historic fiction set in Spain during the Civil War and following a couple on the SS Winnipeg, a boat chartered by Pablo Neruda, as they emigrate to Chile at the start of WWII. Although not my favorite of Allende’s books, it’s still full of her usual charm, interesting characters and masterful storytelling. I learned a lot of things I didn’t know about Spanish refugees at that time and what life…

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Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCraken is set in New England at the turn of the twentieth century. Full of all sorts of unusual characters starting with Bertha Truitt who appears out of nowhere passed out in the cemetery one day with nothing but a bowling ball, a candle pin and some bars of gold. From there the story unfurls and twists and turns and comes back on itself eventually through several generations of Truitts. McCraken’s writing is truly original, an unexpected…

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City of Girls is the new novel by Elizabeth Gilbert. It follows Vivian, a young, spoiled, naive girl who moves to NYC in the 1940’s and begins making costumes at a local theater. The parts describing her life as a seamstress I found really interesting. Otherwise, I found her shallow and boring and just not that original. Gilbert gives the reader a glimpse into the life of a showgirl in NYC at that time, but I still found this book…

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The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern, author of The Night Circus, is another book that takes the reader on a magical journey. This time through a magic door to an underground world full of books and stories and of bees and honey, keys and crowns and of course The Starless Sea. Morgenstern is a master of creating a fantasy world that the reader wants to live inside and not come out of, and in that sense this book doesn’t disappoint….

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Educated:A Memoir by Tara Westover is the best memoir Ive read since The Glass Castle. Raised in Idaho by a family of survivalists who stockpiled food and guns, preparing for the end of the world, never letting their kids go to the doctor or go to school, Westover didn’t even have a birth certificate until she was 9 years old. Her Father was a bi-polar owner of a scrapyard, her Mother a midwife and healer, her older brother was violent…

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