Gena's Reads

To the Bright Edge of the World by Eowyn Ivey, author of The Snow Child, is historical fiction based on the 1885 exploration of Lt. Henry T. Allen into Alaska after the US purchased it from Russia. In the novel, Colonel Allen Forrester leads a small party up the Wolverine River into totally uncharted territory encountering Native American Indians along the way, facing starvation, and meeting shamans and other mythic creatures that blur the lines between the human and animal…

Read More Read More

This Must Be the Place by Maggie O’Farrell is a novel set in the remote countryside of Ireland, in London and NYC. This is one of the few books I’ve read that skips around in time, is narrated by several different people, yet was very easy to follow. O’Farrell has crafted a wonderful story of a man in love with a reclusive ex-movie star, who has children in two different parts of the world and is thrown into chaos when…

Read More Read More

The Mortifications by Derek Palacio is a novel about a mother and her son and daughter who leave their father behind and escape Cuba on the Mariel Boatlift in 1980. They head north to start a new life in Connecticut. The mother eventually meets a Dutch tobacco farmer and they all seem to be settled in their new life in America. However, the call of one’s homeland is hard to silence. Palacio does a good job of showing just how…

Read More Read More

The Comet Seekers by Helen Sedgwick is a beautiful book which traces two families back and forth through centuries as they follow comets around the world. Francios, a French chef living with his mother who sees and talks to ghosts, family members who have passed; Roisin, an Irish astronomer who has left her small village to travel and see the world, struggling with ghosts of her own. When these two meet at a lonely outpost in Antarctica, they find an…

Read More Read More

Grief is the Thing With Feathers by Max Porter is a novella, a poem, a fable, an essay on grief; it is impossible to categorize, it is simply a brilliant piece of writing. After an accidental death leaves two young boys and their father alone without their mother, Crow comes to visit, and stay. Crow, trickster, therapist, shaman, baby-sitter, mythological figure, call him what you will, he is here to stay until he is no longer needed, kind of like…

Read More Read More

Hot Milk by Deborah Levy is a novel about Sofia, a daughter who has traveled to the coast of Spain with her mother Rose seeking a specialist to find a cure for Rose’s limb paralysis. It is a mysterious illness that has plagued her for most of her life, with no apparent cause. Sofia’s life is on hold while she tries to attend to her mother. This is her somewhat late coming of age story, a deep look into her…

Read More Read More

Sight Reading by Daphne Kalotay is a novel set in the world of classical music, from Boston  to Vienna and across Europe. Three lives intertwine as Hazel and then Remy fall in love with composer Nicholas Elko. What makes this book special is Kalotay’s writing and her ability to create characters full of flaws and emotions covering the full spectrum of what it means to be alive and human. Her love of music saturates the book. A good read.

A Sudden Light by Garth Stein is set in the Pacific Northwest. Fourteen year old Trevor and his father travel to his father’s childhood home to try to persuade his aging grandfather to sell the house and move into a retirement home, which would solve their financial problems, but of course things are a bit more complicated than that. What ensues is a journey into generations of the families past, some appearing as ghosts to tell their stories to Trevor…

Read More Read More

The Muse by Jessie Burton is her follow up novel to The Miniaturist. The novel focuses on two women, one a painter living in Spain in 1936, the other a Caribbean immigrant living in London in 1967 working at an art gallery. One mysterious painting links their lives together and it is an ongoing mystery throughout the novel to try to figure out exactly how. Beautifully written, full of gorgeous details and woven together in a way only Burton seems…

Read More Read More

Wake of Vultures/Conspiracy of Ravens-The Shadow Books 1 & 2 by Lila Bowen are fantasy horror books and not something I would normally read. I loved Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, but these books cannot compare. Set in the 1870’s Old West, we follow Nettie, a half black-half Indian slave girl who doesn’t know anything about her origins or what she really is. She escapes, dresses like a boy, changes her name to Rhett, gets a job with the Durango Rangers…

Read More Read More