Friday Finds: California on the Page

Recent fiction and non-fiction books about life in the Golden State.

L.A. Weather: A Novel

By Maria Amparo Escandón

You’ll never forget the Alvarado family: Dad wants nothing more than rain (and for his secrets to stay hidden); Mom feels pushed to divorce by Dad’s obsession with the weather; and each of their three daughters? TV chef, architect and social media whiz—isn’t quite sure what they want, but they’re pretty sure none of what they have now is it. With quick-wit and humor, Maria Amparo Escandón follows the Alvarado family as they wrestle with impending evacuations, secrets, deception, and betrayal, and their toughest decision yet: whether to stick together or burn it all down.

Hollywood Eden: Electric Guitars, Fast Cars, and the Myth of the California Paradise

By Joe Selvin

From surf music to hot-rod records to the sunny pop of the Beach Boys and the Mamas & the Papas, Hollywood Eden captures the fresh blossom of a young generation who came together in the epic spring of the 1960s to invent the myth of the California Paradise. Central to the story is a group of sun-kissed teens from the University High School class of 1959―a class that included Jan & Dean, Nancy Sinatra, and future members of the Beach Boys―who came of age in Los Angeles at the dawn of a new golden era when anything seemed possible. These were the people who created the idea of modern California for the rest of the world. From the Beach Boys’ “California Girls” to the Mamas & the Papas’ “California Dreamin’,” they crafted an image of the West Coast as the promised land―a sun-dappled vision of an idyllic life in the sand and surf.

We Are the Land: A History of Native California

By Damon Akins and William J. Bauer Jr.

We Are the Land is the first and most comprehensive text of its kind, centering the long history of California around the lives and legacies of the Indigenous people who shaped it. Beginning with the ethnogenesis of California Indians, We Are the Land recounts the centrality of the Native presence from before European colonization through statehood—paying particularly close attention to the persistence and activism of California Indians in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The book deftly contextualizes the first encounters with Europeans, Spanish missions, Mexican secularization, the devastation of the Gold Rush and statehood, genocide, efforts to reclaim land, and the organization and activism for sovereignty that built today’s casino economy.

Damnation Spring

By Ash Davidson

Colleen and Rich Gundersen are raising their young son, Chub, on the rugged California coast. It’s 1977, and life in this Pacific Northwest logging town isn’t what it used to be. For generations, the community has lived and breathed timber; now that way of life is threatened. Told in prose as clear as a spring-fed creek, Damnation Spring is an intimate, compassionate portrait of a family whose bonds are tested and a community clinging to a vanishing way of life. An extraordinary story of the transcendent, enduring power of love—between husband and wife, mother and child, and longtime neighbors.