As a transplant to California, albeit more than 50 years ago, I am still fascinated by what makes this place at the edge of the Pacific so unique. It has accepted so many people, from so many places over a fairly recent period. I always feel I can deduce more history from well rendered characters set in specific times and places. Their wholeness and their meaning, as well as that of their culture, are to be found in literature.
Ramona is the daughter of an indigenous woman and a Scottish man, living on a large ranchero in southern California in the early 19th Century. She falls in love with Alessandro, but must run away with him because her aunt canāt stand the fact that he is an Indian.
Alessandro progressively loses his land and his sheep, as Americans move into the area. Her story is somewhat based on the changing fortunes of a Tongva woman named Victoria Reid who was educated at Mission San Gabriel.
This beautifully told and romantic story thrilled me when I first moved into the Los Angeles area. It is celebrated as a pageant every year in Hemet, California.
Ramona (1884) is a novel by Helen Hunt Jackson. Inspired by her activism for the rights of Native Americans, Ramona is a story of racial discrimination, survival, and history set in California in the aftermath of the Mexican American War. Immensely popular upon publication, Ramona earned favorable comparisons to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and remains an influential sentimental novel to this day. Orphaned after the death of her foster mother, Ramona, a Scottish-Native American girl, is taken in by her reluctant foster aunt Senora Gonzaga Moreno. Early on, she experiences discrimination due to her mixed heritage and troubledā¦
Susan Ward joins her husband, a mining engineer, at a mercury mine near San Jose, California, coming west from New York.
She is an illustrator and writer and, as her grandson tells it, never completely adjusts to life in the West. We get much description of California, however, in the layered times in which her story is told. She and her husband settle in Grass Valley, where her husband works for quartz and gold mines.
Wallace Stegnerās use of Mary Hallock Footeās memoir and diaries as the basis for this story is still controversial. Foote lived from 1847 to 1938 and wrote beautifully, illuminating life during this time. The controversy makes the story even more intriguing.
The novel tells the story of Lyman Ward, a retired professor of history and author of books about the Western frontier, who returns to his ancestral home in the Sierra Nevada. Wheelchair-bound with a crippling bone disease, Ward embarks nonetheless on a search to rediscover his grandmother, no long dead, who made her own journey to Grass Valley nearly a hundred years earlier.
Twelve-year-old identical twins Ellie and Kat accidentally trigger their physicist momās unfinished time machine, launching themselves into a high-stakes adventure in 1970 Chicago. If they learn how to join forces and keep time travel out of the wrong hands, they might be able find a way home. Ellieās gymnastics andā¦
A street at the edge of the Pacific in Monterey where sardines are brought in to be canned, is the setting for a collection of colorful characters Steinbeck knew.
Chief among them is Doc, based on Steinbeckās friend Ed Ricketts, who operated a lab that collected and prepared aquatic specimens for schools and museums. The lab is still there, next to the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
The canneries closed by the 1970ās and today Cannery Row is a thumping tourist trap. But I loved the book because of Doc, a gentleman, and a scholar if there ever was one.
In the din and stink that is Cannery Row a colourful blend of misfits - gamblers, whores, drunks, bums and artists - survive side by side in a jumble of adventure and mischief. Lee Chong, the astute owner of the well-stocked grocery store, is also the proprietor of the Palace Flophouse that Mack and his troupe of good-natured 'boys' call home. Dora runs the brothel with clockwork efficiency and a generous heart, and Doc is the fount of all wisdom. Packed with invention and joie de vivre CANNERY ROW is Steinbeck's high-spirited tribute to his native California.
The juxtaposition of Eve Babitzās unabashed hedonism and her incisive ability to nail a situation are not what you normally expect.
This book ranges all over southern California of the 1960s and 1970s, always coming back to the place Eve loved best, Los Angeles, a place of āvast sprawls, smog, and luke nights: L.A. It is where I work best, where I can live, oblivious to physical reality.ā
When I moved to Los Angeles, I was disposed to love it, but it was hard to find any confirmation in books! I am delighted with Eve Babitz, who, with extravagant and precise language, celebrates the place.
No one burned hotter than Eve Babitz. Possessing skin that radiated āits own kind of moral laws,ā spectacular teeth, and a figure that was the stuff of legend, she seduced seemingly everyone who was anyone in Los Angeles for a long stretch of the 1960s and ā70s. One man proved elusive, however, and so Babitz did what she did best, she wrote him a book.
Slow Days, Fast Company is a full-fledged and full-bodied evocation of a bygone Southern California that far exceeds its mash-note premise. In ten sun-baked, Santa Ana windāswept sketches, Babitz re-creates a Los Angeles of movieā¦
A witchy paranormal cozy mystery told through the eyes of a fiercely clever (and undeniably fabulous) feline familiar.
Iām Juno. Snow-white fur, sharp-witted, and currently stuck working magical animal control in the enchanted town of Crimson Cove. My witch, Zandra Crypt, and I only came here to find her missingā¦
In San Diego, āLittle Angelā visits his half-brother, the patriarch of a large Hispanic clan at what they both suspect will be his last birthday party. āBig Angel,ā grew up in Mexico and Urrea treats us to the story of his life, how he won his wife, how he ended up in San Diego. āLittle Angel,ā the author, tries to locate himself in this family, though he is half Gringo.
I loved the deep honesty that goes on in this family gathering, the fun and the sorrow. And it certainly locates the reader in place, in time, and in a culture. All of Urreaās books are amazing.
"All we do, mija, is love. Love is the answer. Nothing stops it. Not borders. Not death."
In his final days, beloved and ailing patriarch Miguel Angel de La Cruz, affectionately called Big Angel, has summoned his entire clan for one last legendary birthday party. But as the party approaches, his mother, nearly one hundred, dies herself, leading to a farewell doubleheader in a single weekend. Among the guests is Big Angel's half brother, known as Little Angel, who must reckon with the truth that although he shares a father with his siblings, he has not, as a half gringo,ā¦
In this last book in my series about the Mikkelson siblings, Line and her husband Stephen are an integral part of the small, vibrant community of Santa Cruz with its new university. Their grown children are dispersing. On the mountain above, her sister Marty moves in with the love of her life, Doug, a viticulturalist who maintains the ranch for a small winery. She happily becomes a step-mom to Dougās four young children. Despite full California lives, Line and Marty keep in touch with Paul, who is helping revive the family cabin on a Minnesota lake.
Haunted by her choices, including marrying an abusive con man, thirty-five-year-old Elizabeth has been unable to speak for two years. She is further devastated when she learns an old boyfriend has died. Nothing in her lifeā¦
In an underground coal mine in Northern Germany, over forty scribes who are fluent in different languages have been spared the camps to answer letters to the deadāletters that people were forced to answer before being gassed, assuring relatives that conditions in the camps were good.Ā
