Depending on what decade you are interested in, or whether you want to read about families, love, and of course, sex, here are two of my books that may entice you, if you are a reader of historicals. What they have in common, besides driven young protagonists, are Southern California settings.
Leaving is the same as arriving.
In pursuit of her art, fleeing an unhappy affair, Nola Lynch sails from New York, through the Panama Canal, to California. Alone.
The year is 1914. Nola anticipates romance, excitement, adventure, and she finds it all in a ship-board magician with a dark secret and in a seance gone horribly wrong.
But a shipwreck changes the course of her life when Nola becomes the hostage of a Mexican revolutionary who is not what she expects, and his brutal brother who is everything fearful. After her release, she is rescued by those enthralled by the chaos of motion pictures making and finally makes her way to Los Angeles.
Can a young woman alone in a rapidly changing United States find the strength to survive? Or will society and propriety defeat her independence in the end?
In 1948 post-war Hollywood, young Hank Cleveland discovers sex, long-buried family memories and scandal, and a lost love, when the ashes of the dead give up their secrets.
An industry is thriving, but this is not Hollywood. Clay and mineral deposits feed the famous California potteries: Metlox, Bauer, Franciscan, and 19-year-old Hank Cleveland leaves his Hollywood family for his much older lover, Susan, one of the top designers.
But Hank’s world is overturned when encounters with strangers and lost friends unravel Cleveland family history—bright as a Bauer bowl, fragile as a Metlox figurine, and layered with a glaze of lies.
Jill Zeller 