I remember one very obnoxious classmate of mine in a creative writing program. She said she was "suspicious" of any writing that began with physical (topographical, geographical, botanical) descriptions.
PASADENA by DAVID EBERSHOFF : CHRISTINE TRZYNA BOOK REVIEW
This is a book about class and changing status. Of a certain rich poverty, of people who make the best of that long moment called life, and who seem to have privilege but when it comes to what's really valuable in life, have little to nothing.
This is a book about fallible people making the best they can do in the long moment called life.
Each and every one of them lives disappointment. If they have hopes of romance, well, that is not how it turns out, and yet, they succeed at least temporarily at something.
It's pleasing to read a book, be it fiction or nonfiction, that takes place where you live. "Pasadena," is a book set in Los Angeles, Pasadena and La Jolla, during the first half of the 20th century, and it pleased me to no end as historical fiction, especially because the rich detail was of natural pre-city world, at the time when the building boom had just begun and southern California was being transformed from a small town dotted map into what you see when you fly into Southern California at night; lights for hundreds of miles of cities joined together.
At the center of this story is a girl of German immigrant father and refugee Mexican mother born high above a beach cliff in 1903, a girl who sets out lobster pots and swims without fear, and cannot imagine how her adult life will be so little of her own choosing. That girl will one day marry into Pasadena wealth, but her life will go wrong anyway.
So, as you know, I read and review a lot of old books, books that and longer being marketed. I know I would get more hits on this blog if I only reviewed the books that were just published and being marketed now. As a relatively unknown reviewer I could keep getting to the back of that parade but I love discovering a new author even if the work is "old."
C 2002 author
Random House is publisher.
