Gena's Reads

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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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….

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Aunt Dimity and the Wishing Well by Nancy Atherton, is just one in a series of novels about life in a small English village called Finch. Finch is a very small town where everyone knows everything about everyone else, and when mysteries arise, Lori, with the help of her Aunt Dimity from beyond the grave, unravels them. Quick, easy, fun reading if this is your sort of thing, and many people seem to love these books. I found it a…

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The Word Exchange is the debut novel by Alena Graedon. Graedon writes of a time in the very near future where we are all addicted to our handheld devices called Memes.They can intuit what we want, order groceries for us, pay for a cab, make a call, etc and no one can remember how to live without them. In fact, people start forgetting how to use language itself, and need to purchase words and definitions on The Word Exchange. It…

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The Book of Life by Deborah Harkness is the final book in the All Souls Trilogy. Witch scholar Diana Bishop and her Vampire scientist husband Matthew Clairmont, travel back to the present time as they continue their search to find the missing pages of Ashmole 782, an alchemical manuscript said to hold the secrets of the origins of all Witches, Vampires and Daemons. If you enjoyed the first two books in the series, you will find more of the same…

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Moloka’i by Alan Brennert is historical fiction based on the lives of people living in Kalaupapa, the leper colony on Moloka’i. The book follows Rachel Kalama, who at seven years old is taken away from her family in Honolulu to live the rest of her life in Kalaupapa. This is a beautifully written book full of the untold tales of Kalaupapas residents daily lives, from the time of  King Kalakaua through WWII and into the the 1970’s. Brennert writes with…

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