The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd, author of The Secret Life of Bees, is historical fiction based on the life Ana, the wife that Monk Kidd imagines Jesus may have had. I found this novel fascinating, well written and the story immediately pulled me in-I couldn’t put it down! Who is to say for sure whether or not Jesus had a wife? If he did, I can think of no better person than Ana, a true scholar in…
The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli, author of Lost Children Archive, is a wholly original book, not fitting into any category. Written in collaboration with Jumex Juice factory workers in Mexico City, this novel-essay took form by drawing on the tradition of tobacco readers in mid-19th century Cuba, who read to factory workers to alleviate the tedium. Luisella decided to write this novel, in installments, for and with the factory workers. Gustav Sanchez Sanchez, known as Highway, is…
Orange World and Other Stories is the new collection of short stories by Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia! Russell is such an original writer with a fantastic imagination, she gets the reader to suspend their disbelief and follow her into previously inconceivable worlds. Whether she is writing about young women during the depression spending an evening dancing with young men who don’t know they’re dead, or a boy who falls in love with a 2000 year old girl found in…
Of Women and Salt is the debut novel by Gabriela Garcia. It follows generations of a family of Cuban women from cigar factories in Cuba to present day Miami, to Mexico and ICE detention centers. Garcia shows the hard choices immigrants must make while suffering abuses both self inflicted and inflicted by others. This book is also a meditation on mothers and daughters and families, the ones we are born into and the ones we find. At times I found…
The Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead is a big epic adventure novel, based very loosely on the life of Jean Batten and other female aviators during WWII. The protagonist, Marion Graves, escapes a sinking ship with her twin brother when they are only babies. Raised in Missoula Montana, by a largely absent uncle, the kids grow up wild and free. When barnstormers come to town, Maggie knows she will do anything to fly and thus begins her lifelong obsession. Maggie…
M Train by Patti Smith is a collection of essays written later in her life while sitting in some of her favorite cafes around the world. Smith is one of my favorite writers/poets/musicians and spending a little time inside her head is always a joy. There are reflections of her early life with Fred Sonic and their young children before his death, and pilgrimages Smith makes to Mexico City and Tangier, among other places around the world. Smith also shares…
The Henna Artist by Alka Joshi tells of an Indian girl in the 1950’s escaping and abusive arranged marriage and making her way alone to Jaipur to become a henna artist for the wealthy ladies in the city. Lakshmi overcomes so many challenges to make it on her own and when she is finally about to finish building a home of her own, a younger sister she didn’t know she had left behind shows up and turns her world upside…
I was so excited to read The Lost Apothecary by Sarah Penner, but after reading it, my favorite thing about it is the cover. Caroline, a modern day aspiring historian, finds an old bottle in the Thames while on a trip to London, which leads her to discover the ruins of a mostly forgotten 18th century apothecary run by women. The apothecary harbored a secret room where things much stronger than normal healing teas and herbs were brewed. The men…
Vesper Flights is a collection of essays by Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk. Macdonald has a keen eye for observation and writes about birds and nature in a way that is original, fully her own, always giving the reader a unique perspective and a new way of seeing the world. However, I am always left feeling slightly unsettled by her writing. Macdonald refers to herself an “amateur gothic naturalist” which in and of itself is interesting, but…
Kindred by Octavia E. Butler is partly a science fiction/time travel novel and part historic African American fiction. Dana, a modern black woman in CA, is celebrating her 26th birthday when she is transported back in time more than 150 years to the antebellum South. There in the slave quarters she learns that she is in the home of her ancestors. Tied to a white boy whose life she saves, she is pulled back and forth through time over and…