California Books: The Best Books Set in the Golden State

Book Summary

Rockwell “Rocky” Rhodes and his wife, Lou, raised their twins on their California ranch. Rocky and the kids have remained on the ranch even after Lou’s death. Throughout those years, Rocky has been fiercely protecting his property from the LA Water Corporation.

When the US enters WWII, Rocky’s son Stryker joins the fight and deploys to Pearl Harbor not long before it is attacked. Then, the government decided to build a Japanese-American internment camp next to the Rhodes ranch. Rocky realizes that his land now faces a much bigger threat than the watermen. 

The idealistic Department of the Interior employee assigned to build the camp only begins to understand the horror of his task after it may be too late. The employee also spends enough time in the area to become infatuated with Rocky’s daughter, Sunny.

Book Summary

Ever since her husband died, Bea has been barely making ends meet. When she falls victim to a phone scam, she loses everything. She heads for the Pacific Ocean with nothing but her cat, her old van, and ⅔ of a tank of gas.

Fifteen-year-old Allie is sent to live in a group home after her parents are sent to jail on tax fraud charges. Allie doesn’t feel safe in the home and escapes, but she has nowhere to go. 

When Bea and Allie’s paths cross, they are reluctant to trust one another. As they warily make their way up the Pacific Coast together, they form a friendship that becomes more like the family they both desperately need.

Book Summary

In East Oakland, Kiara and her brother, Marcus, have both dropped out of high school as their family has been fractured by both prison and death. Their rent has doubled, and Kiara is struggling to find work that will not only support herself and aspiring rapper Marcus, but also the 9-year-old next door who seems to have been abandoned.

Kiara’s income solution comes after a drunken misunderstanding with a stranger. She begins sex work, aka “nightcrawling”. It’s not wanted, but it’s desperately needed to survive. When she’s named as a key witness in a massive scandal within the Oakland Police Department, everything shifts in her life.

Book Summary

When family tragedy strikes, Uncle Patrick needs to take custody of his niece and nephew for the summer. Forty-three-year-old GUP (Gay Uncle Patrick) loves the kids, but he’s used to them going home after a weekend.

Once a famous sitcom star, Patrick’s career is stalled. His Palm Springs lifestyle of cocktails at brunch isn’t exactly ideal for a 6 and 9-year-old. He quickly realizes that having the kids longer than a few days means he needs to be more of a parent figure. But in order to help the kids, Patrick will also have to figure out how to help himself. This means facing some difficult memories from his past and deciding what he wants for his future.

Book Summary

Poppy’s parents are Napa Valley hoteliers, but she left home to become a perfumer in Paris. However, when her heightened sense of smell disappears, her career is in danger, and she retreats home to California. She hopes that tending to her grandmother’s aromatic garden will restore her gift. 

However, when she arrives, the garden has been uprooted and destroyed. This is a visceral reminder of how her ties to home have been weakened while she was away. Now, to heal, she must juggle family drama, old friendships, and a former love.

Book Summary

As the Dust Bowl drought gripped the Great Plains, millions were out of work, crops failed, water dried up, and farmers fought to keep their land. This is the story of Elsa Martinelli, who is forced to make an agonizing choice: fight for her land in Texas or move west to California in search of a better life. 

Like so many of her neighbors, Elsa courageously faces the hardships and sacrifices that came to define an entire generation during the Great Depression as they fought for the American Dream.

Book Summary

Rich Gunderson comes from a long line of loggers. For generations, his family has made their living off of the Redwood trees, but now his way of life is threatened as the National Park Service is expanding to protect tens of thousands of acres of trees. Additionally, environmentalists are protesting the logging operations on the remaining private lands, raising concerns about water contamination. In an effort to secure his family’s future, Rich secretly spends their savings on a grove of ancient Redwoods that he hopes to harvest.

Rich’s wife, Colleen, is an amateur midwife who hopes for a second child of her own. She has suffered a long string of miscarriages and has begun to see a disturbing number of birth defects and fetal deaths throughout her small community. She begins to suspect that the herbicides used by the logging company that employs her husband might be to blame.

Book Summary

Juliet is working hard to grow her dog grooming business when her best friend needs a big favor. Her future mother-in-law runs a company that provides seat fillers to Hollywood award shows. It’s an easy gig. She just has to move around to sit in any temporarily empty seats so the audience looks full the whole time. And she must do that without speaking to all the celebrities in the audience.

Except she’s forced to speak to heartthrob Noah, whose poster she had on her wall as a teenager. Her night and life take an unexpected turn as their relationship builds, but it’s all based on one lie that can cause everything to fall apart.

Book Summary

Ivy once considered her Hello, Juliet castmates as her family. Ten years later, she’s still not sure who turned them all against her and ruined her career.

A new celebrity exposé has resurrected all her past hurts and scandals, but there may be a way to benefit from the drama. Hoping to make a fresh start and add financial stability, Ivy agrees to a secret reunion episode.

Things don’t go smoothly when the cast reunites – Ivy and the man who once broke her heart find their costar dead. She could be next if she can’t uncover the chilling secrets that have plagued the Hollywood set from day one.

Book Summary

In the early 1900s, Irish immigrant Sophie was desperate to get out of a New York tenement. She answered a mail-order bride ad and agreed to marry a man named Martin Hocking in San Francisco. Martin is an aloof but handsome widower with a silent five-year-old daughter.

One evening, a young pregnant woman arrives at their doorstep. Sophie also learns of another woman, hundreds of miles away in Arizona, grieving the loss of everything she once loved. The fates of these three women become intertwined on the eve of the devastating San Francisco earthquake.

Book Summary

Dante O’Donnell wasted his younger years dreaming of stardom and picking the wrong men. Now in his 50s, he’s working as a concierge for a vacation rental company in Palm Springs.

When he discovers a dead body floating in the pool at one of the rentals, he knows he’s in trouble. Not because he did it, but because he was previously suspected of murdering his husband, making him an obvious suspect.

In order to clear his name, he’ll have to team up with the cop turned PI who nearly arrested him the last time around. Jazz had her career derailed by racism, her PI business is struggling, and she’s fighting for custody of her kid. She needs Dante just as much as he needs her. If they can solve the murder, they both be able to save themselves from personal and professional disaster.

Book Summary

For many actors and actresses, winning an Oscar is the pinnacle of success that sets them up for an even better future. But for Hattie McDaniel, her best supporting actress win after playing the role of Mammy in the controversial movie Gone With the Wind was life-changing in a different way.

After winning, Hattie was trapped between two worlds, neither of which appreciated her. White Hollywood saw her only as her character, Mammy. The Black community, led by the NAACP, detested the demeaning portrayal of their community and waged war against her.

Through it all, Hattie struggled but also continued her fight to pave a path for other Negro actors, focused on war efforts, fought housing discrimination, and navigated four failed marriages. Along the way, she was supported by a core group of friends including Clark Gable, Louise Beavers, Ruby Berkley Goodwin, and Dorothy Dandridge.

Book Summary

Ever since her teen years, Daphne Bell has known the universe has a plan for her. Everytime she meets a man she’s interested in (and sometimes even before she has any interest in him) she receives a piece of paper that tells her the exact number of days their relationship will last.

She knew from the outset that she’d only spend three days with Martin in Paris, that her relationship with Noah in San Francisco wouldn’t last past the five week mark, and that she and Hugo only would only spend three months as a couple (though he’d remain her best friend).

For years, Daphne has been waiting for the day she might meet a man with no expiration date – one with whom she could build a life. Finally, on the night of a blind date at her favorite restaurant in Los Angeles she receives a paper with only a name, but no number: Jake.

At first, the lack of an expiration date with Jake seems to be everything Daphne has been hoping for. But as their relationship progresses, Daphne is forced to face her biggest secret. It could change everything and break both their hearts.

Book Summary

Ashley Bennett grew up in LA in a wealthy and prominent family. She’s leading a charmed life where her senior year is split between the classroom and the beach.

Everything changes on an April afternoon when four LAPD officers are acquitted in the beating of Rodney King. As LA erupts in violent riots around her, Ashley tries to continue with her normal life, but she’s no longer just a teenager – now she’s a “black kid.”

Book Summary

Elizabeth Zott is a quirky and brilliant female chemist working with an all-male team at the Hastings Research Institute. But her scientific qualifications don’t stop the “good old boys” from being frustrated that she won’t get coffee or make copies for them. When Elizabeth meets Calvin Evans, another scientist at the Institute, another type of chemistry results.

Fast forward a few years. It’s 1961, and Elizabeth is a 30-year-old single mother and her career has been detoured. Instead of working for Hastings, she’s now (somewhat reluctantly) the star of a much-loved cooking show called Supper at Six. Her cooking methods are unusual (“combine one tablespoon of acetic acid with a pinch of sodium chloride”). As her popularity grows, it turns out she’s not just teaching women to cook, she’s also daring them to change the status quo.

Book Summary

Kate feels stuck in her family’s failing restaurant in San Fransisco. She jumps at the chance to escape when her grandfather makes a cryptic plea for her to “find a beautiful stranger.” This search takes her to the Hotel del Coronado near San Diego, where the movie Some Like it Hot is being filmed.

When she’s offered a position at the glamorous hotel, it feels like a dream come true. And her life continues to get better as new romance blossoms. However, the hotel has ghosts from the past, just like Kate. Sixty years earlier, a guest died at the hotel and still haunts the halls. The life of that turn-of-the-century guest and Kate’s present intertwine in surprising ways.

Book Summary

Fans of Finlay Donovan and Dial A for Aunties will love 60-year-old Vera Wong. She’s a self-proclaimed tea expert and a meddling matchmaker for her son. 

When she wakes up one morning to find a dead man in her tea shop in Chinatown, she decides to add detective to her resume. She’s convinced she’ll do a better job than the police, anyway, so she might as well catch the killer herself.

Book Summary

In 1957, McCarthyism and the Red Scare ruled Hollywood. Isabella is a young starlet with promise to become the next Gracy Kelly. Just after an audition with Hitchcock, she is sequestered by the studio’s “fixer” in a tiny Carmel cottage to ride out this dark period of American history.

Her new neighbor, Léon Chazan, was a successful screenwriter until he was blacklisted. He’s continued writing despite knowing he won’t be able to sell his next script and is annoyed when Iz interrupts his work. But he can’t stay mad at her long, and soon they are exploring the coast in his roadster despite the studio’s insistence that Iz not leave her cottage.

Sixty years later, twenty-six-year-old screenwriter Gemma Chazan is in Carmel to sell her grandfather’s cottage. She finds a safe of secrets, raising questions about her grandfather and whether she can live up to his name. Can his old friend Iz, who still lives next door, help her?

Book Summary

While Phoebe has given up on love for herself after leaving an abusive relationship behind in England, she hasn’t given up on it for others. After she arrives at her sister’s home in the Hollywood Hills, she begins playing matchmaker between Bel, her sister’s trainer, and Ren, the carpenter next door.

Since Phoebe writes greeting cards for a living, she begins writing love letters on Bel’s behalf. But as she falls in love with LA, she realizes she’s also falling for the man she’s been writing to on behalf of someone else. Along the way, she also forms a great friendship with an 82-year-old reclusive film star.

Book Summary

This 600-page generational epic is a retelling of Cane and Abel. The book is set amid Califonia’s rich farmland as it followers the intertwined destinies of the Trask and Hamilton families.

Adam Trask has come to California from the East in hopes of a better life with his wife. But when they have twins, Cal and Aaron, the birth of the boys brings his wife to the brink of madness. He must raise them as a single father, and despite being twins they have very different experiences.

Book Summary

India Allwood always wanted to be an actress and her dreams came true with success on Broadway and on TV. Now she’s making a movie about adoption, but she’s disheartened that the storyline doesn’t sit right with her.

India is an adoptive mom herself to twin 10-year-olds, and she’s tired of only seeing adoption stories in movies that are filled with pain and regret. So when she’s asked by a journalist, she tells the truth – she thinks the movie she’s making is a bad one. Soon, she’s caught in the middle of a media storm.

When her twins turn to family for help, things just get messier. One thing is for certain – no matter how families are formed, they are always complicated.

Book Summary

It’s 1954, and the Red Scare has infiltrated the US, including the life of seventeen-year-old Lily, who lives in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Deportation looms over her father, even though he has his hard-earned citizenship.

However, teenage problems don’t stop just because larger issues loom. Lily falls in love for the first time but is shocked to be attracted to Kathleen. It’s hard enough to be Chinese-American in 1954; to be in love with another girl is unheard of.

Book Summary

The successful Riva siblings are always the envy of those around them in Malibu. Their father is legendary 70s singer Mick Riva, but each of the four siblings found success of their own in pursuits, like professional surfing and photography.

The book is set in 1983 at sister Nina’s famous end-of-summer beach house party in Malibu. By midnight, the party is out of control. Before dawn, Nina’s mansion has been burned to the ground.

During this unforgettable night, each sibling has secrets revealed.

Book Summary

This memoir is a follow-up to The Distance Between Us, which covers Reyna’s childhood as her family immigrated to the United States. In A Dream Called Home, she covers the next chapter in her life as she experiences college as a first-generation Latina student. 

Her parents aren’t helpful, and she has few resources, but her love of reading and writing provided the knowledge and skill she needed to attend UC Santa Cruz. However, she quickly learned that being accepted was only the first barrier. Often her progress was driven by the pure determination to become a writer. 

Read along as she defies the odds by transitioning from undocumented immigrant to college graduate and bestselling author.