The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri is a sad and beautiful novel about Syrian refugees leaving their peaceful life in the countryside to escape war. Nuri is a beekeeper and his wife Afra a painter whose grief has caused her to lose her sight. Lefteri, who worked as a volunteer at a refugee camp in Athens, infuses the novel with the humanity and pain behind this crisis. As Nuri and Afra make their way through Turkey and Greece, trying…
The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep by H.G. Parry is a clever, magical mystery that brings alive Dicken’s characters, among others, read straight out of the pages of books into modern day London. While they fight to stay alive the lines between fiction and reality begin to blur, and at the heart of the novel is Dicken’s scholar Charlie Sutherland and his brother. A fun, literary read, enjoyable especially for fans of Dickens. Even though I don’t consider myself a…
Sabrina & Corina by Kali Fajardo-Anstine, an indigenous Latina woman, is a book of short stories that highlights the lives of indigenous women in the American West, specifically Colorado. They are personal, honest, unrelenting and often painful. They are also full of truth and strength, family, heritage and a sense of place. Fajardo-Anstine writes of fierce, strong, bold women. Although I found some of the subject matter depressing, the characters were so real and vividly alive I could almost hear…
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens is a beautiful meditation on life in the Marshlands of the North Carolina coast. It is also a coming of age story, a love story and a murder mystery. I loved Owen’s descriptions of the natural beauty of the place, it was haunting, wonderful, mysterious, sometimes scary and lonely, I felt transported there. However, I didn’t love the ending of this book. After such a long slow unfolding, everything was wrapped up too…
The Bones of Grace by Bangladeshi author Tahmima Anam is a beautiful yet sad love story moving from Boston to Bangladesh, as Zubaida, a graduate student in Archeology at Harvard, falls in love with Elijah on the eve of her departure to a dig on the other side of the world. She ends up back home in Dhaka, married to her childhood sweetheart; then accepts a job in Chittagong to work on a documentary about the brutal lives of the…
Island Beneath the Sea by Isabel Allende is an epic saga following the life of a slave, Zarite, on the island of Saint-Domingue in the late 1700’s. Her life becomes tied to her French master from the time she is a teenager through the next four decades. Moving from the Carribean and the founding of Haiti, to New Orleans, Allende explores slavery in all its cruelty. This is a generational saga in the true Allende sense; dense and packed with…
Surpassing Certainty, What My Twenties Taught Me, by Janet Mock is the follow up to her autobiography Redefining Realness. Mock is a Hawaiian, African American trans-gender woman who is an author, journalist, magazine editor, public speaker and much more. This book focuses on her twenties and her journey to love her self, be loved by others and coming out with her story when the time was right for her. A powerful and moving memoir, brutally honest and brave. a book…
This is How it Always is by Laurie Frankel is a novel about one family’s journey raising their children and all the challenges and transformations they have to go through. Their youngest child Claude, born a boy, believes he is a girl. He begins wearing dresses and changes his name to Poppy. The parents, who are almost too good to be true, support him fully, move the family and keep their secret, until they no longer can. Although filled with…
The House of Broken Angels by Luis Alberto Urrea is a novel loosely based on his family. The whole family gathers for their Mother’s funeral and within a week, Big Angel the eldest son dies of cancer; but first they gather one more time to celebrate his birthday as only Mexicans can. An entertaining story full of family memories and little moments of grace, however not my favorite book by Urrea. Urrea is the author of The Devils Highway, the…
The World to Come by Dara Horn begins when a million dollar Chagall is stolen from a museum. The story moves from the past to present day, from Russia to Vietnam to New Jersey, following an unlikely thief who believes the drawing once hung in his living room. This beautifully written novel is nothing short of magical; wonderfully imagined and filled with Jewish mysticism, it blurs the barriers that separate this world from the next. A great read.