Books Set in North America, Washington State

Remarkably Bright Creatures, by Shelby Van Pelt (2022)

Read: June 12, 2026

4 Stars

Books Set in North America, Washington State and New York City

Heart of a Stranger, by Angela Buchdahl (2025)

Heart of a Stranger is a memoir of Rabbi Angela Buchdahl.  She was born in Korea to a  Korean Buddhist mother and an American Jewish father.  When she was five-years-old, her family moved to a small town in Washington State, where she met her father's family and embraced Judaism.  Although she her mother was not Jewish, she was raised in the Jewish religion.  It wasn't until she was a teenager, that she learned that many because her mother was not Jewish, she would not be considered Jewish by all denominations.  This book follows her path to become an ordained Reform rabbi to leading one of the largest Reform synagogues in the United States.  At the end of each chapter, Rabbi Bachdahl provided a brief d'var Torah, a spiritual reflection on the preceding chapter.

The book is well written and explores her path to becoming the first Asian-American Rabbi.

Read: April 6, 2026

5 Stars

Books Set in North America; Washington State

Between Sisters, by Kristin Hannah (2003)

Read:  September 30, 2025

3 Stars

Books Set in North America, Washington State, United States

Snow Falling on Cedars, by David Guterson (1995)

 

Snow Falling on Cedars is part trial novel, part mystery.  Set in San Piedro, a remote island in the Puget Sound in the 1950s, it takes place in the years after World War II, where Kabuo Miyamoto, a Japanese-American stands trial for the murder of fellow fisherman, Carl Heine.  Many of the men of San Piedro had fought in the War, and many are still skeptical of the Japanese.

 

Although Kabuo was born in the United States, and thus was American, he was born of immigrant parents.  Even before the War, there was considerable prejudice against the Japanese who lived on the island.  Furthermore, there were laws which prevented its Japanese citizens from owning land.  Underlying this novel is a feud between the Heine and Kabuo families.  Carl’s father had an arrangement to sell Kabuo’s father 7 acres of property for growing strawberries.  Kabuo’s father was making regular payments, but before he could make the final two payments, he and his family were sent off to an internment camp.  While Miyamoto family was interned, Carl Heine’s father died.  Carl’s mother, Etta, was a bitter and prejudiced woman, who took the opportunity to sell the land to another strawberry family.  When the Miyamoto family tried to claim their land, they were surprised to find it had been sold out from under them.  This feud brewed for many years.

 

When Carl was found drowned under suspicious circumstances, the local law enforcement was quick to settle on Kabuo as their prime suspect.  The novel begins with the trial, but the story is told in flashbacks as the reader meets the characters.  The reader learns their backstories and the interactions between the townspeople and the island’s Japanese community.  As evidence piles up against Kabuo, prejudices of the entire community are exposed.  The novel builds the suspense to the end.

 

Read first: December 29, 2003 / Second time: October 21, 2021 (for Hadassah Attorney Council Book discussion)

 

4 Stars

Books Set in North America, United States, Seattle, Washington

Firefly Lane, by Kristen Hannah (2008)

 

This is a novel about a life-long friendship between two women who couldn’t be more different.  They became friends as young teens, when Tully Hart and her hippy mother, Cloud, moves into the house across the street from Kate Mularkey.  Although Kate and her mother have the normal teen mother-daughter struggles, she comes from a stable middle-class family.  Tully, on the other hand, lives mostly with her grandmother unless her mother floats into her life for brief periods.

 

Tully is a risk taker.  She decided early on that she was going to become a star reporter.  Nothing will stop in her way.  As teens, both girls were going to pursue that path, but that wasn’t the route that Kate wanted.  Kate knows that Tully always gets what she wants.  When both young women intern at the local television station, both are smitten by Johnny.

 

Sadly, this book is filled with cliches.  I quickly tired of the constant pop culture references beginning in the 1970s and continued throughout the length of the book, which ended around 2008.  The author constantly teases the reader into thinking that a rift will divide the friendship, and hints that the rift will be over Johnny.  The rift, which the reader knows is coming, is actually over another matter.

 

As Kate and Johnny’s daughter, Marah, becomes a teenager, she and Kate enter into their own teen-age mother/daughter struggle.  Marah turns to her “Aunt Tully”, who typically takes Marah’s side.  Hence the rift, which actually came about when Tully basically accused Kate of being an overprotective mother on live television.  After this event, the two women didn’t speak to each other for some unspecified years.

 

The point the author is trying to make is that in life, family is what matters most.  This comes only in the last 30 or so pages (and this is quite a long book).  As the book nears the end, we learn that Kate, who married Johnny after she became pregnant, has inflammatory breast cancer (IBC) and is dying.  She thinks that Tully is after Johnny but has reconciled with that thought.  Although Johnny had a one-night stand with Tully before he and Kate married, he was truly in love with Kate.

 

I read the book in its entirety.  If this had been the first book I read by Kristen Hannah, it would not have been inclined to read her other books.

 

Read:  October 10, 2021

 

3 Stars

Books Set in North America: United States, Madison, Wisconsin and Seattle, Washington

This Is How It Always Is, by Laurie Frankel (2017)

 

When Dr. Rosie Walsh is pregnant with her fifth child, she hopes for a girl.  Her four other children are all boys.  Her fifth child is also a boy, whom they name Claude.  By age 3, Claude announces that when he grows up he wants to be a fireman, a truck, a girl.  All the things that young children imagine they will be when they grow up.  By age 5, however, he is wearing dresses and wants to be a princess.

 

The family takes Claude’s quirks in stride.  Then they realize that Claude is transgender.  He decides his name is Poppy.  To her older brothers, Poppy is just another sibling.  In kindergarten, her classmates just treat him as another kid in the class.  All is well until the father of a classmate freaks out and threatens the family.

 

The family moves from Madison, Wisconsin to Seattle, Washington where they feel the environment will be more welcoming to a transgender child.  Once in Seattle, however, Poppy’s birth gender is kept a secret.  A secret that the whole family keeps, but one that can’t be hidden forever.

 

This novel dealt with the issue of raising a transgender child.  It provided a lot of research in the trials and tribulations that the family and the child encounter.  In this book, the family was loving and accepting, but the author also emphasized problems trans children encounter when their families are not so accepting.

 

Sadly, for me, this book fell apart in the last section when Poppy and her mother travelled to Thailand where Rosie would temporarily be practice in a remote clinic in the Thai jungle.  I understand why the author took us there, but it just didn’t seem in keeping the the tenor of the rest of the novel.

 

Read:  May 25, 2021

 

4 Stars

 

Books Set in the United States: Washington State

The Girl Who Wrote in Silk, by Kelli Estes (2015)

The Girl Who Wrote in Silk is a historical novel of a slice of Chinese live in the United States in the late 1800s in the Northwest.  The novel follows two young women ~ present day Inara Erickson, who’s family owns a large shipping company out of Seattle and Mei Lien, a young Chinese woman who lived in the late 1800s.  The novel goes back and forth between the lives of these two woman.

Inara inherited the estate of her single aunt who owned a home on an island off the coast of Seattle.  The estate brought back memories of her childhood, as she and her family summered there.  Initially, she sought to sell the estate, but decided to turn it into a boutique hotel. During the construction, she discovered an elaborately embroidered silk sleeve to a garment hidden in a staircase.  The sleeve depicted a strange story of a ship and people floating in the water.  She takes the sleeve to a Chinese professor at a university to inquire about its authenticity.

The late 1800s were terrible times for the Chinese living in the United States. The Chinese Exclusion Act had been signed in 1882, forbidding the immigration of Chinese laborers.  Mobs in various west-coast towns literally forced the Chinese from their homes.  Mei Lien and her father were forced onto a boat, ostensibly sending them back to China. When Mei Lien learned of their actual destination, she was literally thrown overboard and was rescued by Joseph McElroy, a farmer on one of the Orcas Island.

In the course of Inara’s research on the sleeve, she discovers a terrible family secret that has been in her family for years.  When she tells her father, he warns her to continue to keep the secret because it could destroy his shipping business.

The chapters of Mei Lien are very fascinating.  We see a young girl exposed to the prejudices of the whites, and how she learns to cope.  After she married a white man, his family refused to accept her.

The chapters on Inara are initially interesting, however, her renovation of the estate into a hotel do not ring true, nor does her budding romance with the professor.

Still, this was a good book and provided an insight into a piece of history that is not often addressed.

Read: July 11, 2018

4 Stars

Books Set in the United States: Seattle, Washington

Girl Last Seen, by Nina Lauren (2017)

Billed as a psychological thriller, Girl Last Seen was based on a very odd premise.  The novel opens when 13-year old Ella Santos was found by Office Sean Ortiz after having been abducted three years earlier.  She had been sexually abused during her abduction, and when she was finally freed, she was pregnant.

The abduction destroyed her, and 10 years later, she has changed her name to Laine Moreno, and is working as a bartender in a seedy bar.  She watches for abductions similar to hers.  When Olivia Shaw is abducted, Laine realized that this young girl has been stolen by the same person who captured her years ago.  Laine seeks to assist the police in finding Olivia.  What happens next defies logic.

The same police officer, Sean Ortiz, is involved in the Olivia Shaw kidnapping.  We also learn that  Olivia is Laine's daughter, who was taken from her immediately after her birth.  Laine then becomes friends with Olivia's adopted mother, although the adoptive father is distant.  The ending was not very satisfactory.

Read: April 30, 2018

2 Stars

Books Set in the United States: Washington State

The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, by Daniel James Brown (2013)

4 Stars

Read: February 5, 2016