Karen Karbo Books in Order

A group of Russian émigrés connected to a Southern California university’s Slavic languages department tries to build new lives in an unfamiliar culture. Their intersecting stories find humor, longing, and unexpected possibility in the gaps between languages and worlds.

Documentary filmmaker Mouse FitzHenry returns to Los Angeles after sixteen years in Africa and gets pulled into family trouble, an old love, and an engagement she is not sure she wants. Meanwhile, secret film projects turn her wedding plans into a comic mess.

Gabrielle Reece and Karen Karbo combine memoir with a season on the professional beach volleyball circuit. Reece reflects on modeling, athletic ambition, childhood, and public expectations while her Team Nike squad struggles to find its footing.

New mother Brooke tries to make sense of life with six-month-old Stella, a distracted husband, and a best friend facing an unplanned pregnancy. As family complications grow, Brooke navigates friendship, loyalty, motherhood, and the strange new rules of adulthood.

Karbo combines her own experience with stories from friends to examine divorce, remarriage, stepfamilies, and the lingering pull of ex-spouses. With humor and practical honesty, she maps the crowded emotional territory of modern blended families.

After a lightning strike leaves her unexpectedly fearless, thirteen-year-old Minerva Clark finds herself drawn into a murder investigation. Raised by three older brothers in Portland, she follows clues that lead alarmingly close to people she knows.

When a classmate’s valuable red diamond vanishes, Minerva cannot resist taking the case. Her investigation leads to crooked animal shelter workers, three corgis, a troublesome carrier pigeon, and plenty of chances for the young detective to get in over her head.

Minerva’s mother returns with a new husband, just as the owners of a haunted grocery store ask the teen detective to find their missing ghost. To solve the odd case, Minerva must also uncover who burned the store down.

Karbo revisits Katharine Hepburn’s long life and career to find useful lessons in brashness, discretion, resilience, and independence. The result is an informal guide shaped by Hepburn’s films, relationships, family history, and refusal to fit expectations.

When Karen Karbo’s father is diagnosed with lung cancer, she becomes his reluctant caregiver while balancing work and family in Portland. This memoir follows their final year together with grief, frustration, old arguments, practical messes, and affection.

Part biography and part practical reflection, this book follows Coco Chanel from a difficult childhood to the fashion house that changed women’s clothes. Karbo draws lessons about style, money, work, passion, self-invention, and living on your own terms.

Karbo looks past the familiar image of Georgia O’Keeffe to trace the young artist’s search for a life and work of her own. O’Keeffe’s ambition, relationship with Alfred Stieglitz, and fierce independence become prompts for thinking about creativity and self-direction.

Using Julia Child’s eventful life as a guide, Karbo explores curiosity, work, love, food, and the pleasure of starting late. It follows Child from her California childhood and wartime work to Paris, cooking school, and television fame.

Gabrielle Reece, with Karen Karbo, takes apart the fairy-tale idea of perfect marriage and motherhood. Drawing on Reece’s own relationship, parenting, health, and setbacks, the book offers blunt, funny reflections on building a less-than-perfect life.

Big-wave surfer Garrett McNamara recounts his pursuit of the world’s most dangerous swells, including record-setting rides at Nazaré, Portugal. The memoir looks beyond adrenaline to the fears, losses, family pressures, and determination behind a life spent chasing huge waves.

Karbo profiles 29 women, including Frida Kahlo, Nora Ephron, Carrie Fisher, and Amelia Earhart, who refused to live quietly or neatly. These short, lively portraits consider what independence, ambition, anger, and being called difficult can teach us.

Karen Karbo pushes back against the self-improvement industry aimed at women, from beauty routines to impossible productivity standards. Blending cultural history, interviews, and her own struggles with anxiety and dieting, she argues for self-care without the constant fixing.