Olive Days (2024) Jessica Elisheva Emerson "Olive Days is a completely immersive novel, unlike anything I've read. We're in so deep with Rina, as she navigates the complicated restraints of her Orthodox Jewish community, that every meal, every walk, every discovery of her possible choices feels immediate. Emerson's prose is not about religion or desire, those abstract ideas, but about a woman's burning disbelief in the very structure of her life, and her absolute insistence on sexual passion and freedom."
Perris, California (2024) Rachel Stark "Perris, California is a remarkable, audacious, and truly original debut. Stark's characters are incandescent in their fierce desire not just for survival but for love and redemption. This novel will live alongside classics of young womanhood by Kaye Gibbons, Helena Maria Viramontes, Maya Angelou, and yes, Dorothy Allison."
What We Kept to Ourselves (2023) Nancy Jooyoun Kim "Those of us who love southern California know it's an entire universe where people's dreams and loves and families orbit and dance and collide in neighborhoods as diverse as the world. Nancy Jooyoun Kim knows Los Angeles so deeply that her novel brings to life loquat trees, the melancholy of staying where new roots sometimes cannot flourish, and the geography of neighbors and strangers whose loyalties turn into what might be love."
The Earthquake Child (2023) Elayne Klasson "The Earthquake Child is a clear-eyed look at the most complicated of family lives, bound tightly by loyalty and ineradicable love."
Sing Her Down (2023) Ivy Pochoda "Sing Her Down is an incantation, a hallucination, a fiery odyssey of women taking back the power stolen and leached from body and mind, while their souls got harder and harder-like diamonds. Ivy Pochoda's women inhabit a world everyone should walk into with them, a universe everyone should know."
The Shining Mountains (2023) Alix Christie "The Shining Mountains is a rousing historical novel that kept me up late, with woven story lines of fascinating characters moving across the Pacific Northwest seeking fortune and the thrill of survival and, of course, love. I especially loved the women, their bravery and clear-eyed vision of this world, from ancestral legends to the danger of the new."
On the Savage Side (2023) Tiffany McDaniel "Tiffany McDaniel's characters will break a reader's heart with their longing and vulnerable loves. 'A trio of women who could have been queens in a different parade,' they tell stories of an America that deserves a closer look, from a writer who delineates their lives with tenderness."
A Country You Can Leave (2023) Asale Angel-Ajani "A journey through the California everyone should know, a place America needs to see, a world of desperation and beauty, collaboration and redemption. In the best tradition of fiercely perceptive daughters fighting to survive dangerous lives, from Betty Smith to Janet Fitch to Helena Maria Viramontes, the debut of Asale Angel-Ajani was ever surprising, a novel I read in one day."
She Is Haunted (2022) Paige Clark "She Is Haunted kept me looking forward to a new story each day, with anticipation for something that would absolutely surprise me, make me think all the next day about how we operate as humans, as creatures, as lovers. Never predictable, riveting and trembling with the unexpected, this book is a remarkable debut, and Paige Clark a writer to celebrate."
Ocean State (2022) Stewart O'Nan "From Speed Queen to The Good Wife to Emily, Alone, Stewart O'Nan has been one of the best chroniclers of the lives of American women. He writes about the single mothers, the watchful daughters, the neighborhoods where loyalty and struggle are echoed in hard work and marriages on the rocks. In Ocean State he writes once again about the women I know so well--who work as convalescent aides, in grocery stores and factories, mothers searching for one more chance at love, and daughters finding their first loves, with tragic consequences. I could not put this book down, and finished it so fast, and I keep seeing the rainy shores and abandoned mills, the three generations of women in America."
The Lockhart Women (2021) Mary Camarillo "The Lockhart Women is deeply and thoroughly Southern Californian-in all the perfectly detailed cities and streets and, of course, freeways, but also in the evocation of its time: the 1990s. These women in this page turner-flawed and desperate and seeking redemption-are vivid portraits."
Catalina (2017) Liska Jacobs "Catalina is true California, down to the bones and skin, a novel about the places Liska Jacobs knows in her soul. Beauty and the body as currency and betrayal, seekers of love and comfort--her characters blow all that up, and just when you think you know what will happen, Catalina swerves and you are along for the ride."
Further Adventures in the Restless Universe (2010) Dawn Raffel "Dawn Raffel's stories are like prismatic drops of rain, hanging from the edge of a roof or sliding down a windshield, reflecting an entire world within. The language of motherhood, of adulthood, of childhood-the language of family and individual-has never been like this."
This Time Tomorrow (2010) Michael Jaime-Becerra "Michael Jaime-Becerra writes about a Southern California that not enough people know, and This Time Tomorrow opens a window and lets readers step through into this place he loves and details so carefully and lyrically."
Where No Gods Came (2010) Sheila O'Connor "For a single mother of three, and a writer who reads countless books a year, to stay up most of the night to finish a novel means it must be a heck of a story: and Sheila O'Connor's novel was, so compelling in the landscape of urban hardscrabble Minneapolis, and the interior horizons of a damaged mother and her two daughters trying to build their own fable of a family. Fervent and despairing and truth-hard, this novel kept me spellbound, hurtling toward a hoped-for redemption."
Southland (2003) Nina Revoyr "[A]n absolutely compelling story of family and racial tragedy. Revoyr's novel is honest in detailing southern California's brutal history, and honorable in showing how families survived with love and tenacity and dignity."
