Harrigan’s inclusion of a botanist as one of the fictional characters we follow across Texas, makes this book a great one for this challenge, but the pervasive mythology of the Alamo makes it an essential one. I am reading my way across the USA–5 or so books from each state, with an emphasis on those […]
I’m not sure what happened with this one. It was a great one for setting–Frazier gives us some fabulous descriptions of North Carolina. And it’s not just the area around Cold Mountain itself–Inman walks away from the hospital where he is recovering, across much of the state. But I lost interest in the story pretty […]
This was an excellent, thought-provoking look at a little-known historical event which had far-reaching consequences that continue to ripple through today’s headlines. The Ni’ihau Incident was used as a justification for the US government’s policy of imprisoning Japanese-Americans during World War II. Historians today recommend the usage of the phrase “concentration camps” for these places […]
Well, I have some mixed feelings about this one. I wasn’t all that into the story itself, and was pretty disappointed at what I felt was an abrupt ending. (To be fair, Murayama wrote a second book about the Oyama family–Five Years On a Rock–so maybe the story picks up where it left off.) In […]
Wow! This book has it all when it comes to setting and our reading challenge–geography, history, all the different people who make up Hawaii–and the setting is so integral to the story! So many aspects of the story are uniquely Hawaiian, there’s nowhere else it could be set. I am reading my way across the […]
This was a really nice book, and a great opening for Hawaii! It’s not only the story of Spencer taking care of his dying mother, it also tells the story of how he unexpectedly went from being the middle son to being the only son. The childhood flashbacks take place in the 1950s and 1960s, […]
I love Hawaii! I’ve visited the Big Island twice, and I love it. However, visiting someplace as a tourist can be very different from living there, and that’s very true of Hawaii. Its physical isolation means that the cost of living is very high, and most items are much more expensive than on the mainland. […]
Lake of the Woods is the perfect getaway. Tim O’Brien’s novel is set, in part, in that little bit of land, connected to Manitoba, and separated by the lake from the state of Minnesota of which it is actually a part. … an old yellow cottage in the timber at the edge of Lake of […]
In the early- to mid-1990s, I lived in Massachusetts, outside of Lawrence, along New Hampshire’s tiny coastal strip, and worked for a Girl Scout council on the North Shore, which included Lawrence, Lowell and Lynn, Salem, Marblehead and Gloucester. I also did an internship a bit to the west, around Worcester. What I remember the […]
I’m reading my way across the USA–3-5 books from each state, with an emphasis on books where the setting becomes another character, and which teach us something about the people, history, and/or geography of a particular state. We are just starting Georgia, and we have a good one here. The Last Buffalo Soldier is a […]