The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams is a wonderful novel based on the writing of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary and the real women who worked on it but went largely un-credited. Set in Oxford at the Scriptorium, Esme grows up amidst words and definitions, as defined by men, while she sees the words pertaining to women and the poorer classes often discarded. As she gets older, she starts actively collecting these words from women…
Sweet Bean Paste is a lovely novel by Durian Sukagawa. Sentaro works in a confectionary shop making and selling dorayaki, a pancake filled with sweet bean paste. He only works here to repay a debt to the owner, as his past criminal record keeps him from other jobs and his dream of becoming a writer. One day, an older woman with disfigured hands walks into his shop and his life changes. Tokue makes the best sweet bean paste he has…
The Tobacco Wives by Adele Myers is historical fiction set in North Carolina in the late 1940s. Maddie Sykes, the 16 year old protagonist and budding seamstress, stays with her aunt in Bright Leaf every Summer. It is a town built on the tobacco industry; everyone smokes and celebrates with lavish balls all that tobacco has brought to their town. A coming of age story set in post WWII America, Myers examines the early days of the women’s movement, and…
O Beautiful by Jung Yun is a novel set in a small town in North Dakota where fracking has taken over the town. Elinor, a forty something Asian model, now a freelance writer, grew up in the area and is on assignment to write a piece about how the town has changed for a large magazine. What starts out as one story quickly turns into a much more complicated story as Elinor digs deeper into the racial politics of what…
The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections by Eva Jurczyk is a book lovers book. Set in the rare books department of a large University, a mystery unfolds when a priceless manuscript goes missing, along with a librarian. Clever, intelligent, well written; a look into the rarefied lives of obsessive book collectors, and one woman’s struggle to move out from the shadows of the men who dominate this world. A glimpse into the lives of the undervalued librarians we…
As I was starting this post I couldn’t even remember the title of this book, one clue to how utterly forgettable it is. This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub is a time travel novel, which usually I love. Alice is turning 40, her Dad is dying and she is working in admissions at the private high school she attended in NYC. Her Dad wrote one very famous time travel novel that was turned into a movie and thus all the…
The Last Romantics by Tara Conklin is a novel about an East Coast American family shattered by and ultimately brought together through loss. It took me a while to get into this book as I found it hard to care much for any of the characters. The youngest of four siblings, Fiona becomes a poet of some renown, and near the end of her life she is asked to tell the inspiration for her most famous work, The Love Poem;…
The Three-Year Swim Club, The Untold Story of Maui’s Sugar Ditch Kids and Their Quest for Olympic Glory by Julie Checkoway is the fascinating story of the least likely underdogs becoming world champion swimmers. It is a remarkable history of the Pu’unene Sugar Mill camps on Maui and the people who came to work and live there at time when Wailuku was the center of life on Maui and the island was a little known small town country place. It…
American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins is a novel every American should read. It chronicles in detail one mothers attempt to flee Mexico alive with her young son after her entire family has been murdered. What they go through is beyond horrific and all too real for so many refugees fleeing Mexico and Central America, only to be met by racism and bitterness at the US border. It’s a harrowing story, a true page turner which had me from the opening…
A Ballad of Love and Glory by Reyna Grande, author of The Distance Between Us, is historical fiction based on the Mexican-American War. In 1846. after the controversial annexation of Texas, the US army provokes a war with Mexico over the disputed Rio Grande boundary. In the novel, a Mexican healer falls in love with an Irish soldier who defects from the US army and joins the Mexicans forming St. Patrick’s Battalion. Meticulously researched and based on historical figures and…