Aloha Friday

Welcome to this week’s edition of Aloha Friday!  Every Friday (well, ok, almost every Friday) I ask a simple question--nothing that requires a lengthy response. 

Here's my question....

Have you ever read a book set in your home state or somewhere else you had lived? If so, what book was it, and did it capture the feeling of the place, or leave you feeling the author had never been there? (If you read several, what was the best or worst?)

Please leave your answer in a comment below.  And, if you have a blog and would like to post your own question you can leave your link at An Island Life.


And here's my answer (way longer than yours has to be...a sentence is fine):
My favorite book set in California  is All the Way Home by Ann Tatlock.  Actually only the first half was set there, but vividly so.  Though set in the 40s through the 60s, long before my time, reading it I felt like I was walking down California streets I knew (ones that had probably been built around that time). It's a book that starts at a peaceful, meandering pace and slowly turns into a page turner filled with suspense, as it draws you into the lives of the characters it portrays so well. The characters didn't seem "stuck in history" like they can seem in some historical novels (something I never fully realized until I had this book to compare them with); nor did they seem like people from today inhabiting another time (another common historical fiction pitfall). No, these characters seemed like real people, and it brought both the book and the places and times it was set in alive for me.