Dragon Springs Road by Janie Chang is a magical novel set in a once prosperous estate in Shanghai at the beginning of the 20th century. A young Eurasian girl is abandoned by her mother and becomes a bond servant to the estate’s new owners. Disliked by both Chinese and Europeans for her mixed blood, her only true friend is a fox spirit who has resided in the courtyard for centuries. Chang has written a novel full of myth and legend,…
The Tiger’s Wife is the amazing debut novel by Tea Obreht. Set in an unnamed Balkan country still reeling from war, a young doctor follows in the footsteps of her Grandfather’s last days as she pieces together the story of his life. Moving back and forth from the past to the present, Obreht weaves a tale full of myth and legend, folk tales and reality; wholly imaginative and original, full of magic, yet also rooted in history. Beautifully written, a…
A Good Neighborhood by Therese Anne Fowler is set in Oak Knoll, a tight-knit neighborhood in North Carolina. When a semi-famous, rich white celebrity moves in with his family next door to Valerie, a single black Mom, an ecology professor, and her teenage son, at first things seem like they might be ok. But when the building of their new mansion and fence begins to encroach upon and slowly kill her 100 year old oak tree, Valerie finds it increasingly…
The Beautiful Ones by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, author of Mexican Gothic, is a wonderfully written novel set in late 19th century France. The Upper Class is enjoying the Grand Season while young Nina makes her first appearance in the city and is immediately drawn to a performer with telekinetic powers much like her own. This is a novel of manners and rules, passions and betrayals, where class and status are everything and marriages are rarely made for love. The slightest scandal…
Song of a Captive Bird by Jasmin Darznik is historical fiction based on the life of Forugh Farrokhzad, Iran’s most famous female poet. In Tehran in the 1950’s Persian daughters were expected to be quiet, remain indoors unless in the company of an escort and their voices were unilaterally silenced. Farrokhzad rebelled against these traditions writing and eventually publishing some of the boldest poetry ever to come out of Iran. Breaking free of a difficult marriage, Farrokhzad is forced to…
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…