Book 312: Jackaby

"The chief inspector did not seem like the sort of man who could ever be overwhelmed by empathy. He would fit right in to the crime adventures in my magazines. He held the little pad like a shield, stoically barricading himself from the human tragedy. I wondered why Jackaby didn’t carry a little notebook. It struck me that a detective should have a little notebook." 

Dates read: April 26-20, 2019

Rating: 6/10

Sometimes I feel like I pigeonhole my own reading. I try to read across genres, but often gravitate towards the serious stuff ("literary" fiction and non-fiction) because I just assume that it's more likely to be something I'll enjoy. And while I do like a lot of the kind of things that tend to win writing prizes, that doesn't mean it's the only sort of thing for me. I am a creature of habit, especially in my reading habits, but breaking out of a slump often reaps rewards.

What if you took a Sherlock Holmes type, made him someone sensitive to magic and occult rather than the "real world", and then gave him a plucky female Watson? Well, you'd get something much like William Ritter's Jackaby. The titular fellow (that's his last name) is the aforementioned supernatural detective. The high-spirited lady sidekick is Abigail Rook, newly arrived in Victorian-era New England from Britain. She's fled the fancy upbringing she had back home, first trying to follow in her archeologist father's footsteps, ultimately winding up in America. She needs a place to stay, which means she needs money, which means she needs a job. But no one in the town of New Fiddleham seems willing to hire her...and that's when she sees an advertisement for a detective's assistant, which leads her to Jackaby.

On her very first day, she and her new employer find themselves a case to investigate: a murder. The police (with whom Jackaby has a rocky relationship) think it probably has a mundane explanation, but the detective thinks otherwise. Abigail's keen eye makes her a valuable asset as the murders continue and the team investigates, and a budding flirtation between her and young policeman Charlie Cane keeps them clued into the official inquiry as well. There are ghosts, werewolves, banshees and more as they race against time to try to stop the killer before the next victim falls.

This isn't anything that could be called literature by any stretch of the imagination. But it's not trying to be. It's trying to be an enjoyable, easy-reading fun supernatural mystery story, and it largely succeeds. The vibe between Jackaby and Rook will be instantly familiar to anyone who's ever watched Doctor Who (and if you do watch and enjoy that show, this book will definitely be right up your alley), and is blessedly free of romantic tension. Abigail's story, while definitely a familiar one, is well-told, and she feels like more than just a stock character due to Ritter's characterization. Indeed, of everyone in the story, it's Jackaby himself who feels the flattest...his aloofness renders him challenging to understand or particularly like. I think it's supposed to come off as being mysterious and Holmesian, but for me it just made him boring.

Another area where this doesn't quite succeed is as an actual mystery. I am legit terrible at figuring out the who-dun-it question in virtually every mystery I've ever read, and I was calling the big twists by about halfway through the narrative. I think it was supposed to be a fun and exciting mystery more than a genuinely suspenseful and thrilling one, but it could have leaned a little more heavily towards the latter without giving too much ground on the former. On a writing-quality level, Ritter's prose (like much in this genre) is unspectacular, though he does have a pretty good ear for dialogue. So while going into this expecting greatness, or even very-good-ness, is likely to set you up for disappointment, if you just want a tasty little snack of a book, something light and engaging, this is for you. I did enjoy reading it, enough to download the second one in the series to read later, so as long as you know what you're getting going in and keep your expectations reasonable, I'd recommend this!

One year ago, I was reading: Can't Even

Two years ago, I was reading: The Sisters of Henry VIII

Three years ago, I was reading: Once Upon A River

Four years ago, I was reading: The Lady Elizabeth

Five years ago, I was reading: Seating Arrangements

Six years ago, I was reading: All The King's Men

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Book 312: Jackaby

Book 310: The Fever

 

"As Deenie walked out, a coolness began to sink into her. The feeling that something was wrong with Lise, but the wrongness was large and without reference. She’d seen Lise with a hangover, with mono. She’d seen girlfriends throw up behind the loading dock after football games and faint in gym class, their bodies loaded with diet pills and cigarettes. She’d seen Gabby black out in the girls’ room after she gave blood. But those times never felt like this. Lying on the floor, her mouth open, tongue lolling, Lise hadn’t seemed like a girl at all."

Dates read: April 15-20, 2019

Rating: 6/10

Teenage girls can be sociopaths. With many of the same destructive urges as boys, but less access to sanctioned casual physical aggression, we end up with a capacity for true interpersonal viciousness. I know I did some totally ice cold mean girl stuff when I was in high school, and wound up on the receiving end of something similar as a college freshman. I cut off my best friend for years over a dust-up I can't even remember. I was awful to my own little sister. Those emotions, the bad ones just as much or more than the good, are so close the surface at that time of life. I look back on it now and feel a lot of regret, but I remember how right it all seemed at the time.

I might have had smoother skin and been much thinner, but I wouldn't go back to being a teenage girl and feeling all those feelings again for anything. It's such a confusing and heady place to be, and Megan Abbott's The Fever really digs into the murky territory that friendships at that age can turn into. Deenie Nash and Lise Daniels have been best friends since they were small, but things are starting to change. They've recently started hanging out with Gabby, who a parent would probably euphemistically describe as coming from "a troubled home". And Lise has grown from a cute little kid into a pretty teenager. This has not escaped notice by Deenie, or her older brother Eli (himself the subject of significant attention for his looks), or even her father Tom, a teacher at the high school. This is all putting strain on Deenie and Lise's friendship, and then one day during class, out of nowhere, Lise falls out of her chair and has a seizure.

This alone is troubling, but then Gabby has a seizure too. One girl having a mysterious medical episode in a small town is cause for concern. Two is cause for alarm, especially as the doctors can provide no answers. Deenie thinks it might have been caused by a lake, rumored to be unclean, that all the girls spent time in together shortly before the episodes began. She worries that she might be next. Parents want to protect their daughters, start looking for a culprit. Hysteria starts to build as yet another girl is stricken, much of it focusing on the HPV vaccinations that the school mandated for the girls. The entire Nash family find themselves drawn further and further into the mystery and when it's finally unraveled, it's a doozy.

I won't spoil anything, but the real villain of this book is teenage sexuality. Specifically, teenage girls having sex. That's what the real terror of the parents over the HPV vaccine is driven by, the idea that their daughters might be sexually active. But it's not just the parental fear. The book is steeped in sex in a very realistically teenage way: girls worrying about who's having it, who isn't, if the boy you like is sleeping with someone, if you think he might want to sleep with you, wanting to do it, not wanting to do it. For all I know, boys probably have the same kinds of thoughts, but having been a girl, I know that for all of the innocence that's attributed to female-shaped persons, they are often consumed with questions of sex. Like Deenie with Lise and Gabby, you measure yourself against your friends: who's the desirable one? Who's the innocent? Who's the slut?

Thematically, this is a potent work. Abbott beautifully captures the atmosphere of small town paranoia and the thrill and terror of being what Britney Spears would call not a girl, not yet a woman. But reading this book had its frustrations as well: the tension ratcheted up too high, too soon, leaving it nowhere to really go once things got really dramatic. The plot felt slightly underbaked and the pacing was kind of stop and start. And I thought having the dad, Tom, as a main character didn't really work. I appreciated the inclusion of Eli, the perspective on teenage boys and sex made the book as a whole feel more balanced, but Tom didn't add much for me. All together, I think this was an interesting, well-written novel and I'd recommend it if teenage psychological thriller is a genre you enjoy!

One year ago, I was reading: Plain Bad Heroines

Two years ago, I was reading: The Talented Mr. Ripley

Three years ago, I was reading: Uncle Tungsten

Four years ago, I was reading: The House of Mirth

Five years ago, I was reading: Eleanor of Aquitaine

Six years ago, I was reading: Oriental Mythology

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Book 310: The Fever

Book 302: The Club

 

"Long before that evening, in my first boxing lessons, I’d learnt that it’s not the punch that hurts, because skulls are hard: it’s the humiliation. And because I was a small man who no one would expect to beat a hundred-kilo hulk in a light blue blazer, I could only win. You can’t box well if you’re afraid."

Dates read: March 12-26, 2019

Rating: 6/10

There's a reason there's so much media focused on the elites: our culture is both fascinated and repulsed by them in equal measure. We love to read about and watch the ways the rich are "just like us" and then, at the end, not like us at all. The teenagers at the exclusive Constance Billiard School on Gossip Girl want to be liked and accepted and fight with their friends and worry about grades like every teenage girl, but The Great Gatsby's Daisy Buchanan is able to just...move on with her life after committing vehicular homicide. And even as many of us proclaim that we like our lives and wouldn't want the scrutiny and pressure that wealth and fame brings, we all buy lotto tickets when the jackpot gets high enough.

In Takis Wurger's The Club, we first meet our protagonist Hans as a young boy, solitary at heart but happy, living with his parents in a small town in Germany. But when both of those loving parents die in quick succession, his only living relative is his strange aunt Alex, a professor at Cambridge University. She sends him off to boarding school, where one of the teachers helps him to channel his depression into athletics and he becomes a skilled boxer. When he graduates, his aunt approaches him with an offer: she will get him into Cambridge, in exchange for his agreement to infiltrate the Pitt Club, one of the campus's private social groups.

Once Hans reaches England, Alex arranges for him to meet up with Charlotte, one of her graduate students. At first, Charlotte is necessary for Hans to gain entry to the Pitt Club's world, through her wealthy and well-connected father, but the two form a genuine connection. Hans gets drawn deeper into the Club as his pugilistic talents cement his place inside of it. But Alex didn't ask him to become one of them for his own enjoyment...she has plans to expose a secret and revenge a wrong in a way that could bring it all crashing down.

Look away if you're not interested in spoilers! Though it hardly feels fair to talk about it as such. The secrets here are not too difficult to guess at: there's no surprise that groups of young, privileged men engage in drug use and sexual assault, and then manage largely to escape consequences for it. What makes this particular account of this phenomenon more interesting than many is its air of reality: Wurger himself attended Cambridge and was a member of the Pitt Club before leaving the university. And the book is lucky that it has that additional angle, because as a mystery/thriller it isn't really successful...the plot development is straightforward and goes pretty much exactly where you expect it to go.

Which isn't to say that it doesn't do some things well! Wurger's technique of narrating the story through multiple perspectives (Hans is the most prominent, but Charlotte, Alex, fellow Club member Josh, and a Chinese student desperate to be accepted are heard from, among others) is effective and keeps the story moving forward briskly. Hans, drawn as a self-sufficient introvert, is a refreshing character to spend time with...while he certainly does appreciate the finer things in life he's able to access once he's inside, we don't get the dazzled-then-disillusioned arc typical in this kind of work. The subject matters feels timely and relevant. If you like these kinds of books, you'll likely find this solid yet unremarkable. If you're looking for something to take you somewhere unexpected, though, look elsewhere.

One year ago, I was reading: Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.

Two years ago, I was reading: Empire Falls

Three years ago, I was reading: The Luminaries

Four years ago, I was reading: Duel with the Devil

Five years ago, I was reading: The Wolf in the Attic

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Book 302: The Club

Book 297: The Silkworm

 

"Pain and fear were making him angry: fear that he would have to give up the prosthesis and resort to crutches again, his trouser leg pinned up, staring eyes, pity. He hated hard plastic chairs in disinfected corridors; hated his voluminous notes being unearthed and pored over, murmurs about changes to his prosthesis, advice from calm medical men to rest, to mollycoddle his leg as though it were a sick child he had to carry everywhere with him. In his dreams he was not one-legged; in his dreams he was whole."

Dates read: February 28-24, 2019

Rating: 7/10

Like any people pleaser, I'm always both desperately curious about and deeply afraid of learning what other people really think of me. I try to be a person that I myself would like, but you never know how it's coming off. Do people think I'm fake? Irritating? A disastrous social experience my freshman year of college made it hard for me to trust my own perceptions of how I'm actually thought of by others. It's one of the reasons they say you shouldn't snoop: you might not like what you find.

In Robert Galbraith/J.K. Rowling's second entry in the Cormoran Strike mystery series, The Silkworm, private detective Strike is hired to investigate the disappearance of small-time novelist Owen Quine. Quine seemed right on the verge of potentially making it big: he'd written a "poison pen" novel revealing the secrets of all his acquaintances, including the ones much more famous than he. But as Strike and his assistant, Robin Ellacott, are busier than ever in the wake of solving the Lula Landry murder, Owen's wife Leonora approaches him to help find her husband. He's always been mercurial and has disappeared before, but she needs him to come back home, and blithely assures them that his agent, Elizabeth Tassel, will pay for the investigation. Intrigued despite himself (and despite the fact that Tassel does not in fact want to pay him), Strike digs in.

What he finds is first the body of Owen Quine, and then, as the investigation continues, the remnants of the life of a very unhappy man. Quine was unfaithful and often cruel to his wife, and bitter about the success his former friend Michael Fancourt had experienced as a writer. The manuscript of his latest work, the "poison pen" one (called Bombyx Mori, the silkworm of the title), is utterly rife with contemptuous portraits of others. And perhaps that is why his body is grotesquely disfigured, the result of a certainly painful death. As Strike and Ellacott get closer to tracking down who might have killed Quine, they find themselves increasingly in danger.

If you liked The Cuckoo's Calling, you'll also enjoy this. They proceed in a similar way: interview-by-interview investigation, with occasional indulgences of the writing "hiding" the answers from the reader in a trope that I tend to find highly irritating. Because we did a lot of the introductory work in the previous entry in the series, Rowling is able to better flesh out the characters: both Cormoran and his family and Robin and her fiance Matthew get more layers to them this time. I particularly enjoyed that Rowling gives Robin stunt-driving skills, as they play against the "spunky but ultimately passive" type I thought the character was starting to fall into.

I have liked reading both of the books in this series, but not enthusiastically. Part of it is that the genre doesn't especially appeal to me. I'm just not big into mysteries. Part of it is the way she characterizes Cormoran as someone who thinks of himself as ugly but has no problem attracting attention from women, which is something I do not care when either men or woman are written that way. The prose and plot are mostly fine, though I did think this had a few too many characters. There's obviously plenty good here, as you can tell by my rating, but I don't know that this is going to be a series that I feel compelled to closely follow. I do recommend it, but be prepared for some gruesomeness in the text.

One year ago, I was reading: Ivanhoe

Two years ago, I was reading: Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams

Three years ago, I was reading: The Informant

Four years ago, I was reading: The Sense of An Ending

Five years ago, I was reading: A Passage to India

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Book 297: The Silkworm

Book 286: The Cuckoo's Calling

 

"Her bloodshot eyes squinted at nothing; she seemed momentarily mesmerized, lost in contemplations of sums so vast and dazzling that they were beyond her ken, like an image of infinity. Merely to speak of them was to taste the power of money, to roll dreams of wealth around in her mouth."

Dates read: January 1-6, 2019

Rating: 7/10

Lists/awards: The New York Times best-seller

I can't imagine the pressure of being the author of a wildly successful and beloved series and getting ready to write your next book. The expectations are so high. People already have a set opinion about who you are and what you do as a writer, and are extremely attached to that opinion. Writing a book that's solid but not sensational means getting pilloried, having your whole career questioned. Anything less than magic creates its own news cycle.

For what it's worth, I thought The Casual Vacancy was good. Not great, flawed, but good. But from the reaction to it on the internet, you'd have thought J.K. Rowling followed up Harry Potter with a total dud. So I understand why, when she started her next project, she opted for a pseudonym. It's under "Robert Galbraith" that she's publishing her next series, mystery novels set in England starring a private detective called Cormoran Strike. In The Cuckoo's Calling, the first entry, we meet Strike, the illegitimate son of a rock star and a groupie, and veteran whose service in Afghanistan cost him part of a leg. We also meet his brand-new temp assistant, the young, intelligent, and newly-engaged Robin Ellacot. She's only supposed to stay for a week, as Strike can't afford an assistant and she's interviewing for "real jobs", but when she proves capable as a new case is brought into the office, she winds up staying on. The new case is a doozy, too: a young supermodel called Lula Landry has fallen from her balcony to her death, ruled a suicide, but her brother wants to prove that she was murdered.

The investigation takes Strike inside the worlds of the wealthy and high fashion, neither of which he fits into with any grace. He conducts his investigation methodically and thoroughly, interviewing her neighbors, the upper-class white mother that adopted the biracial Lula, her designer and model friends, shopgirls who saw her the day she died. When one of his contacts, a poor girl from a rehab group, turns up dead, Strike knows he's on the trail of someone truly dangerous. With Robin's help, he draws a trap for his suspect...while dealing with his own personal drama, like a sister he loves but struggles to connect with and the breaking of his engagement to a beautiful, unpredictable socialite.

I don't often read mysteries...the genre just doesn't do much for me. If it's too simple, I'm bored, but if it's convoluted, I get annoyed. This mystery wasn't much of the exception I was hoping it might be. I followed the interviews one-by-one, and while I can say that I never guessed the outcome, I also didn't quite buy it. The murderer's motives never really fell into place for me. It also just feels like the first in a series. There are plenty of allusions to both Cormoran and Robin's personal lives and issues, and they're given a little bit of context, but it seems clear that they're meant to be fleshed out properly with later books.

That being said, though, Rowling's writing is as good as ever. Both of the primary characters are vivid, and I enjoyed the non-romantic relationship she built between them. As to be expected, the world-building is also a high point. Rowling's London feels like neither the brightly burnished version we see on tourism ads nor Dickensian in its roughness. It feels like a modern, cosmopolitan city, with wealth and class and race divides and pockets of ease mixed alongside areas you might not want to walk alone at night. The storyline was engaging enough, for what it was, but I'm not much of an expert on what makes a good mystery. This is a promising series debut, and I'm interested to see how it develops!

One year ago, I was reading: The Space Between Us

Two years ago, I was reading: Midnight's Children

Three years ago, I was reading: The Sky Is Yours

Four years ago, I was reading: The Panopticon

Five years ago, I was reading: Shylock Is My Name

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Book 286: The Cuckoo's Calling

Book 277: Dark Places

 

"I am a liar and a thief. Don't let me into your house, and if you do, don't leave me alone. I take things. You can catch me with your string of fine pearls clickering in my greedy little paws, and I'll tell you they reminded me of my mother's and I just had to touch them, just for a second, and I'm so sorry, I don't know what came over me. My mom never owned any jewelry that didn't turn her skin green, but you won't know that. And I'll still swipe the pearls when you're not looking."

Dates read: November 19-22, 2018

Rating: 6/10

When I was in high school, I tore through true crime books. I loved the sense of controlled fear they gave me...sure, people did terrible things, but I knew the police got them in the end. My mom always thought it was a little macabre that I so frequently came home from the library or bookstore with an Ann Rule anthology. These days, though, true crime is big business. Not just books, but the first season of "Serial" kicked off the podcast boom...in particular, those revisiting old crimes. Some of them are more respectful than others (I'm side-eying you, My Favorite Murder), but as a culture, there's no denying we're obsessed with these mysteries, both solved and unsolved.

It wasn't that long ago, though, that people on the whole viewed true crime more along the lines my mother did: kind of morbid. So, in Gillian Flynn's Dark Places, when Libby Day, the only survivor of the murder of her entire family (besides her absentee father and the murderer himself), finds herself hard enough up for cash to attend the meeting of a group of true crime enthusiasts, the people she meets are very weird. The testimony Libby gave as a child put her older brother, Ben, behind bars, where he's been for the 25 years since. Little Libby had attracted donations for her future, and spent years living off of the proceeds, her unhealed psychological wounds (and not especially high levels of motivation) keeping her out of the workforce. But when she encounters the group, she's flat broke, and they offer her money to go back and talk to the people that were around back then...they believe Ben was innocent, and want Libby to help prove it.

The book is told through three perspectives: Libby in the present day, as well as Ben and their mother Patty in the past. We learn about the poverty the four Day children lived in on the family farm, their father's cruelty towards them, their mother's despair. We watch Libby's certitude about what happened on that terrifying night begin to erode as she digs deeper into the story, becomes invested despite herself. And we finally learn the truth of what happened, and Libby finds herself in danger of not surviving this time.

If you've read Flynn's enormously-bestselling Gone Girl (and you probably have, everyone has at this point, right?), you know that she really enjoys writing unlikable characters. Dark Places is not different on that score: Libby is prickly and angry, and although she obviously suffering from untreated PTSD and depression, it doesn't make her a pleasant person to spend time with. Teenage Ben has an inexplicable relationship with his rich and mean high school girlfriend, and a deeply problematic involvement with an elementary school girl. Patty is probably the most sympathetic, but her inability to protect her children from their father and the consequences of her own decisions make her difficult to really emotionally invest with. Everyone here is miserable and unable to cope with it, and while they do all feel realistic, it's very dark to spend time with them.

Unpleasant though they may be, the characters are richly realized, and Flynn's writing is compelling and vivid. The plot mostly hangs together through its twists and turns...at least, until the end. I'm not going to spoil it, but the ending feels incongruous with the rest of the book, taking a very different tone, and feels very out-of-left-field in a bad way. I'm not big into mystery/thrillers, so I'm not really sure how this fits into it and who exactly Flynn was writing for. It, like Gone Girl, is very interested in exploring female rage, and it feels by virtue of its character development more literary than typical for the genre. But it's also very bleak, with very little humor or lightness to break it up. It's well-constructed and interesting, but was not especially enjoyable for me to read. If what I've written sounds like something you're interested in checking out, I'd recommend it. But if it doesn't sound like it's for you, I assure you this is not a must-read.

One year ago, I was reading: White Teeth

Two years ago, I was reading: The Rules of Attraction

Three years ago, I was reading: Of Human Bondage

Four years ago, I was reading: Stranger in a Strange Land

Five years ago, I was reading: Sex with Kings

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Book 277: Dark Places

Book 262: The Luminaries

"But there is no truth except truth in relation, and heavenly relation is composed of wheels in motion, tilting axes, turning dials; it is a clockwork orchestration that alters every minute, never repeating, never still."

Dates read: September 13-22, 2018

Rating: 9/10

Lists/awards: Booker Prize

I am usually a fairly smart, rational human, but ever since I was a kid I've been super into astrology. I know, I know, the idea that where the stars are in the sky has literally anything to do with what kind of person I am is silly. But we all have our weird, kind-of woo-woo things, right? Some people believe in ghosts, some people believe in the power of positive energy, and I not-entirely-but-more-than-I-should believe in astrology.

Eleanor Catton's Booker Prize-winning novel The Luminaries, is many things. It's a depiction of life in a gold-rush-era town in New Zealand. It's a story about families. It's a mystery. It's several mysteries, each unspooling at its own pace. And true to its title, it takes inspiration from the moon (each chapter is shorter than the one proceeding it, meant as a reference to the waning of the moon) and the planets/stars (some characters are based on astrological signs, others to the typical traits associated with the planets). It begins when a Scottish lawyer named Walter Moody arrives in the small town of Hokitika to make his fortune as a prospector. The ship on which he arrived, the Godspeed, was wrecked and he has to make his way ashore without his trunk. He decides to spend his time in the Crown Hotel while he waits for the wreck to be plunged and his belongings to be recovered, and shortly after he arrives, he manages to find himself in the bar of the hotel with twelve men who are clearly all gathered for a purpose. He manages to draw out from them a strange tale of several tragedies and mysteries that all seem to have happened at about the same time.

Shortly before Moody's arrival, a local politician, Alistair Lauderback, arrives in town to stump for votes. On the outskirts of town, he arrives at the cabin of a recluse, Crosbie Wells, and finds the man very recently deceased. And then, on the same night, a lucky young prospector, Emery Staines, goes missing, and a prostitute, Anna Wetherell, publicly overdoses on the opium to which she is addicted and is imprisoned. Each of the men in the bar of the Crown Hotel has a little piece of the story, and even more develops as time goes on. Bit by bit, the full story in all its beauty and tragedy is revealed, connecting the threads of each seemingly-separate piece together.

This is a big, ambitious novel that requires a lot of attention to keep the characters and their relationships with each other in mental order. In lesser hands, it would be confusing, but Catton keeps it engaging, requiring enough consideration to feel compelled to really focus on the book without making it feel like studying. The characters are complex and interesting, and the tangled web of their interactions with each other keep the tension from slacking. Indeed, for such a long book, it keeps itself going remarkably well, a testament to Catton's skill with prose and plotting. The way the layers of the mysteries the book presents are gradually peeled back and revealed is gratifying, feeling like tiny rewards doled out along the way until the end. The themes of loneliness, the role of chance, truth and lies, and revenge all come in and out of focus throughout, each feeling like it's given time and space to develop without being unduly flogged. For me, it was a wonderful book. It's hard to strike the balance between "passively entertaining" and "too much information management required to properly enjoy", but The Luminaries was right in the sweet spot. I got lost in it.

Now that I've just gushed about it, it does have some issues. It's a slow starter, taking advantage of its prodigious length to stretch the story out perhaps more than really necessary. Some characters feel like they get the short shrift and if Catton was less wedded to her astrology conceit, should have been cut. The way Catton reveals a bunch of pertinent information right at the end of the book in flashback, almost like a coda after the "real" ending of the story, does feel a little too cute by half. But honestly, those are mostly nitpicks. I'm not the sort to wish that a book would never end (I'm always excited about something on the horizon), but I did close it with a satisfied sigh and think "what a great book". It's not something to read when you're looking for something breezy and light, but otherwise, I highly highly recommend it. 

One year ago, I was reading: The Sisters of Henry VIII

Two years ago, I was reading: Once Upon a River

Three years ago, I was reading: The Lady Elizabeth

Four years ago, I was reading: Seating Arrangements

Five years ago, I was reading: All The King's Men

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Book 262: The Luminaries

Book 239: Motherless Brooklyn

"Minna Agency errands mostly stuck us in Brooklyn, rarely far from Court Street, in fact. Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill together made a crisscrossed board game of Frank Minna's alliances and enmities, and me and Gil Coney and the other Agency Men were the markers- like Monopoly pieces, I sometimes thought, tin automobiles or terriers (not top hats, surely)- to be moved around that game board. Here on the Upper East side we were off our customary map, Automobile and Terrier in Candyland- or maybe in the study with Colonel Mustard."

Dates read: June 5-8, 2018

Rating: 3/10

One of the things that writing this blog over the years has done is help me get a better sense of who I am as a reader. Thinking about my reactions to a book in a critical way has really done a lot towards making sense of what appeals to me and what doesn't. Even writing out the plot summaries that I do helps me figure out what aspects of the stories were most salient and important in my memory (as well as trying to give anyone that reads here enough of a preview that they can figure out if the book might be right for them). I used to comb through lists of what other people were reading and add to my own list books that they liked, but now I usually skim, looking for key words (like "character-driven", "spellbinding", "beautifully written") that usually correlate with my own tastes. I still take chances on things that are outside my usual wheelhouse, but I know my own preferences much better.

Jonathan Letham's Motherless Brooklyn was a book that I'd originally added to my list because I'd seen something positive about it on the internet. Then I came across a copy when I was browsing for a buy and reading the back and skimming the text, decided it might not actually be for me. A couple years later, it was selected as a book club read, so this felt like a good test of my own ability to predict whether or not a book would work for me. And it turns out I do know myself: this subversive take on a noir detective story fell completely and totally flat for me. Part of it, I think, is due to my own lack of depth in the mystery/detective genre (the enjoyment in watching tropes get undermined is best enjoyed when you're already familiar with the tropes), but part of it was just that I didn't think it was very good.

The story centers on Lionel Essrog, one of four men who grew up in an orphanage taken under the wing of Frank Minna, a small-time gangster in (pre-gentrification) Brooklyn. Despite the criminal acts into which Frank draws him beginning when he's just a teenager, Lionel is deeply loyal to Frank, one of the only people who has ever shown compassion for and understanding of his severe case of Tourette's Syndrome. When Frank is murdered at the beginning of the book, Lionel puts all his sleuthing skills to work to find the killer: could it be Frank's mysterious wife, Julia? Could it be "the clients", the old Italians who dole out tasks to the team? Could it even be another member of the team looking to create a leadership vacancy? And how does the Zen Buddhist center where Frank was last seen alive tie into everything, if it does at all?

I'll start with the positive, as I often like to. Even with a relatively limited reference point for the cliches of noir, I could understand the way that Lethem was playing with them: the silent, repressed detective hero is completely turned on its head with Lionel's Tourette's making him fidgety and unable to keep quiet. The femme fetale, Frank's wife Julia, instead of tempting Lionel with her sensuality, reveals she's slept with every member of the team besides him and doesn't intend to change that. Lionel at one point gets bounced from a Buddhist meditation session by obvious criminals and no one lifts a finger to stop it because they're too absorbed in their practice. It's over the top and ridiculous in a way that's clever and meant to be funny.

But for me, all of that humor failed to land. I didn't get involved at all in the story because I didn't care for a second about any of the characters. I couldn't have cared less who killed Frank or even Lionel's journey, because Lethem didn't bother to write Lionel (or anyone else) as remotely compelling. The entire book felt like an exercise in intellectual masturbation, in which Lethem decided he wanted to engage in wordplay and wrote the Tourette's into the story to give him the opportunity to do so. After a while I found myself skimming virtually all of the dialogue because it got tiresome to read. And don't even get me started on the sex scene, one of the most cringeworthy ones I've ever read and that I dearly wish I could un-read so as to never think of again. Y'all, I hated this (though I was definitely in the minority of my book club in so doing) and I recommend avoiding it at all costs.

One year ago, I was reading: Amsterdam (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: Perfect Murder, Perfect Town

Three years ago, I was reading: Spook

Four years ago, I was reading: Zero K

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Book 239: Motherless Brooklyn

Book 199: Fourth of July Creek

"Regretted saying the word the moment it slipped out of his mouth and they looked at him like he’d broken out in French. Literature. What drugs and literature in the houses in and around Tenmile, Montana. Louis L’Amour and James Michener, and comic books, furled and foxed Penthouses, some marijuana. Popular Mechanics and some truckers’ speed. The Bible, if you were lucky."

Dates read: December 29, 2017- January 3, 2018

Rating: 6/10

There's a certain kind of person attracted to life in a rural area. I've never lived in a truly rural area (I grew up in a small town, but it was exurban more than rural), but I live in an area now that's only a short drive from the middle of nowhere, and I've met plenty of people who think of property lines in acres rather than yards. When you go out to the wide-open areas in the West, there's an undeniable thrill to it: the possibility in that remoteness. There's a dark side to it, of course: you're that much farther away from medical or police help if anything bad were to happen, it's harder to make sure you get your trash picked up regularly. There's a reason most of us live relatively near a city, at the end of the day, but there's something appealing in the wildness of off-the-grid.

In the West, especially, there is a not-small portion of the people who live in areas sometimes still officially deemed "frontier" who don't just do it for the excitement of living unplugged and off the land, they do it because they don't really fit in with mainstream life. This is true for Montana social worker Pete Snow, in Smith Henderson's debut novel Fourth of July Creek, but it's even more true for most of his clients. He's already got a pretty full plate between his current caseload and his rocky home life when a young boy wanders into a school, dirty and wildly undernourished. Pete's attempts to help the child, Benjamin, bring him into contact with Benjamin's father, Jeremiah, who lives so deeply off the grid and is so proud that Benjamin's not even allowed to retain the clothes Pete buys to replace the rags he found the boy in. He is, happily, allowed to keep the medicine for his scurvy.

This story forms the borders of the larger narrative. In the meantime, Pete's trying to deal with his unruly clients and his own personal struggles. His brother is on the lam from his parole officer, Pete's got some alcohol issues, and he's recently separated from his wife, who goes to Texas with their teenage daughter, Rachel, to follow a new boyfriend. And then Rachel goes missing, and Pete's desperate to find her. But she's gone, and figuring out what's going on with Benjamin and Jeremiah begins to overwhelmingly dominate his life.

This book is a relentless downer. Nearly everyone involved is damaged and acting out in some way, from the clients all the way up to our protagonist. And not like, in a quirky or reasonably socially adaptive way, but in a very serious Real Problems way. There's a realism to that sort of portrayal that can be appreciated, but the small spots of hope and happiness are very few and far between. I found myself drawn into the central mystery of what was going on with Jeremiah and Benjamin and that family, but most of the characters just made me sad.

On a technical level, Henderson is a very talented writer. His writing was clear and insightful, and while they were depressing, his characters rang very true. My major issue with the book from a craft perspective is that he used a rhetorical device interspersed throughout the book, in which an unidentified interviewer is talking to Rachel about what happened to her. We never know the context in which this dialogue is taking place, which leaves her plotline frustratingly unresolved. If you want to read a well-written book that has a compelling central mystery and don't mind if that book is very bleak, you'll likely enjoy this. I certainly think it was well-crafted and appreciated Henderson's skill, although I don't think I'd say I enjoyed reading it. I'd recommend only to someone that feels up for an unhappy look at life.

One year ago, I was reading: The Luminaries

Two years ago, I was reading: Stay With Me

Three years ago, I was reading: The Professor and the Madman 

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Book 199: Fourth of July Creek

Book 191: In The Woods

"I am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in retrospect. My gift, or fatal flaw, is for nostalgia. I have sometimes been accused of demanding perfection, of rejecting heart's desires as soon as I get close enough that the mysterious impressionistic gloss disperses into plain solid dots, but the truth is less simplistic than that. I know very well that perfection is made up of frayed, off-struck mundanities. I suppose you could say my real weakness is a kind of long-sightedness: usually it is only at a distance, and much too late, that I can see the pattern."

Dates read: November 22-26, 2017

Rating: 8/10

I feel like my childhood wasn't that long ago, but it also feels like the world is so different than it was then that I can't imagine my own future hypothetical children having the same kind of experience. There weren't cell phones yet, so when we went outside to play there wasn't any real way to get ahold of us. I grew up on a bay on an inland lake, so the neighbor's houses where we went to play were usually within sight distance, but it's not like my mom just sat there and stared out the window until we came home. There was a freedom, an untethered-ness, that I just don't know would even be possible for a kid today. That doesn't mean that it's worse now, it just means it's different.

After all, there are always bad things that can happen when kids are playing outside. In Tana French's In The Woods, our protagonist, Adam Robert Ryan, is playing with his two best friends in their Dublin suburb when something goes wrong. The children vanish. After a few hours of searching, Adam is found, but the other two are gone. And Adam is covered in blood and has been rendered completely mute by whatever it was he'd experienced. He recovers after a few weeks in the hospital, but has no memory of what might have transpired that day. He's pulled out of his old school and put in a boarding school in England, where he starts going by his middle name and grows up more or less like any other kid. He goes back to Ireland, becomes a cop, and manages to work his way into his dream job working on a murder unit in Dublin, where's he's partnered with Cassie Maddox, the only other person as young as he is. Although they're not dating, they have become intensely emotionally intertwined.

For the first time since he left it as a child, Ryan is pulled back to his hometown when a teenage girl is found murdered on an archaeological dig site. As he and Maddox try to figure out why someone might have killed the aspiring ballerina, he can't help but also start to try to dig around inside his own past for any clues it may offer. They chase down leads and become even closer as the stress mounts, creating a combustible situation as Ryan becomes less and less able to separate the crime at hand from whatever might have happened to him that long-ago summer day.

I very much enjoyed this book...while mystery doesn't tend to be my genre of choice (I find it too often dependent on hiding information from the reader and/or ridiculous plotting to build suspense), French also creates excellent, compelling characters and allows their development to be just as crucial to the story as the twists and turns of the investigation. I was emotionally invested in both Ryan and Maddox and wanted to know more about them and the ways their personal lives impacted their police work. And I thought the central mystery was also very well-done and nicely walked the line between dropping clues that fed into the ending without just spelling it out and laying it out there on a plate for you. Then again, "figuring it out" too early doesn't usually detract from my ability to enjoy the work...I've long maintained that if your story doesn't work unless the reader is surprised, it's not a good story, it's just a good twist.

And while the central mystery is wrapped up, I will warn you away from this book if you hate books that have significant ambiguity to the ending: Ryan is never quite able to piece together what happened that day in the woods. I personally didn't mind it and thought French did a good job with keeping that part of the story relevant even if it never came together, if only for the way it impacted Ryan and his mental/emotional state. This is the first in a series, and I've actually heard quite often that it's the weakest of them, so if this is as bad as it gets (and I thought it was really good), I'm excited to read the rest of them. I'd recommend it to everyone, even if you don't usually like mysteries.

One year ago, I was reading: The Pleasing Hour

Two years ago, I was reading: Station Eleven

Three years ago, I was reading: Behave

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Book 191: In The Woods

Book 175: The Sisters Chase

"The Chase girls stayed the next morning until it was time to check out, lying on the bed and basking in the infinitude of being nowhere. The motel served Saran-Wrapped Danish, hard-boiled eggs, and orange for breakfast, and Mary and Hannah ate them in their room, Hannah feeling the optimism of going somewhere, Mary feeling the relief of having left. The Chase girls were always happiest in those brief moments of in-between, when neither of them was sacrificing, neither of them being sacrificed."

Dates read: September 6-9, 2017

Rating: 2/10

To be honest, I was not very excited about my sister when she arrived. I'd been perfectly happy as an only child, thank you very much. When she was about 6 weeks old (I was 4 and a half), my mom caught me carrying my sister towards the kitchen. She asked me what I was doing, so I told her that I was throwing her away because all she did was cry. When I was informed that I couldn't actually toss her in the trash, I tried to bargain down to returning her to the hospital. No dice. We fought like crazy growing up, but now that we're all grown up, she's someone I love and cherish. Thanks for not letting me bin her, Mom.

The titular sisters of Sarah Healy's The Sisters Chase couldn't be more different. Fourteen years older, Mary has dark coloring and a corresponding dark personality...she's ruthlessly pragmatic, manipulative, proud and ungovernable. Hannah, however, is blonde and takes after the nursery rhyme in that she seems to be made of sugar and spice and everything nice. Their single mother owns and runs a hotel in a seaside town on the East Coast and has a night shift at a nearby casino to keep their family going during the off-season. But when she's killed in a car crash, Mary and Hannah find themselves on their own. Back taxes on the hotel and no life insurance mean that they're broke, and so Mary takes Hannah and leaves the only home they've ever known to try to take care of her.

After Mary successfully prises some seed money from wealthy relatives in Florida, she and Hannah (who Mary calls "Bunny") connect with an old acquaintance of hers in New England. Things seem stable, and even like they might end up happy, but Mary's past shows up to bite them and they leave. As Hannah grows up, they continue to travel, Mary refusing to put roots down anywhere for too long, until they wind up in California. Hannah, now on the cusp of her teenage years, wants desperately to stay in one place and so several months pass, but the idyll can't last and eventually tragedy strikes.

All of that is super vague, I know, because I do try to avoid spoilers and this book is very much "about" its plot and its mysteries. You'll notice above that I've rated this book quite poorly, and part of that is that is just because the kind of book that it is: plot-over-character is not my cup of tea, but this was a book club pick after a couple months of heavier, slower material so I gave it a shot. Turns out, I still don't get a lot out of this style of novel, and that's okay. Not every book is for every person, and my ratings are intended to be a reflection, at least in part, of my own experience of reading the book and the enjoyment I got out of it. But my ratings are also informed by my opinion of the quality of the book and how well it did what it was trying to do, and this is where The Sisters Chase really took a nosedive.

One of the reasons I tend to be personally pro-spoiler is that I feel like if "the twists" are all you have, you don't have a story. The Sisters Chase indulges heavily in one of the ways I find most irritating of shielding "the twists"...it deliberately hides information known to the characters from the reader. It's not that this can't be done well (the way Gone Girl "hides" that Nick Dunne's mysterious calls are actually from his mistress because he's a bad husband, not from a conspirator because he's a murderer, for example), it's that this book doesn't do them well. I guessed the big twist long in advance and I'm awful at guessing the twist. And I had a huge issue with characterization, too. The book actually has very few characters it spends any significant amount of time with (primarily Mary and Hannah), so should be able to round them out more fully. Instead, both the girls are flat. Mary is the kind of "she's beautiful...but wild" stereotype I've always found deeply irritating, and Hannah is so milquetoast that she's barely there. I've always thought that the three most important elements of a novel are plot, character, and writing, and a book needs two of three better than average to be good, and all three to be truly great. This book was not successful, for me, in any of those areas. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

Tell me, blog friends...do you try to rate books? If you do, are your rankings purely objective or is there subjectivity there too?

One year ago, I was reading: Sophia of Silicon Valley

Two years ago, I was reading: Moonglow

Three years ago, I was reading: Suspicious Minds

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Book 175: The Sisters Chase

Book 156: The Good German

"Clean. Hardworking. Just like us. Then they'd seen the camps, or at least the newsreels. How could they do it? The answer, the only one that made sense to them, was that they hadn't—somebody else had. But there wasn't anybody else. So they stopped asking."

Dates read: June 27- July 1, 2017

Rating: 7/10

Black and white thinking about the world is tempting. It would be easier that way, to separate it into good and bad without overlap or complication. But the world is a complication, and nearly everyone lives inside a shade of gray. Like most people, I like to think about myself as a good person, but of course (also like most people), I've been rude and thoughtless and even occasionally cruel. I mean girled a close friend in high school and made her cry. I stole a sweater that fell off of someone's laundry pile in college. I've said vicious things to my sister. Those aren't things a "good person" does, and the guilt I feel when I think about them inspires me to try to be better moving forward, to try to at least be on the lighter side of gray.

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the victorious Allies found themselves trying to figure out how to deal with a whole mess of dark-gray-but-not-quite-black. There were a few obvious evildoers that were put on trial and executed, but what to do with the vast majority of German people who were on some level complicit with Nazi rule but didn't really do anything? And what about people who might have been more directly involved with the machinery of the Nazi state but have something valuable to offer? Joseph Kanon's The Good German is deeply steeped in these hard, serious questions, which serve as background to a complicated romance and a twisty thriller, both centering on American journalist Jake Geismar.

Geismar arrives in Berlin to cover the Potsdam Conference, but he's not new to the city. He lived and worked there for years, including the early years of the Nazi regime, before the war. His assignment might be to cover Potsdam, but he's really there to find Lena, the beautiful married woman with whom he was having a passionate affair before he left. But before he can find her, he finds something else: a young American soldier, floating dead in a lake with a bullethole through him and thousands of dollars still on him. His investigation of the dead man leads him back to Lena, but along with Lena come questions about her husband, Emil. Emil, a literal rocket scientist, has vanished and both the Americans and the Russians are very, very interested in what might have happened to him.

I've always enjoyed books that go right for the kind of moral relativity that can be very uncomfortable to contemplate, and The Good German is rife with it. Who is the titular good German anyways? Is it Lena and the thousands of others like her who tried to live their lives as normally as possible, pretending they didn't know what was happening, not speaking out or acting out against the regime but not really having done anything affirmatively to participate in it either? Is it someone like Emil, who did have more active participation but has skills that can help the victors achieve great things? Is it Emil's father, an academic who dropped out of public life with the rise of the Nazis but didn't do anything to actively resist? What about the former detective, very much a part of the Nazi state, but who helped his Jewish wife survive until she was spotted by someone else, and providing testimony against the woman who betrayed his wife to her death?

That the betrayer was, in this case, herself Jewish led me down a disturbing Wikipedia deep dive. I knew there was some level of individual Jewish cooperation with the Nazi state in situations like ghetto leadership, but I never knew there were Jewish people who helped "out" Jews that were in hiding to the Nazis. The novel's character seems to be loosely based on Stella Kubler, who initially began her work in order to protect her parents and husband, as well as herself. But even after they were deported to death camps, she continued to catch other Jews for two years! After serving time in Russia, she converted to Christianity and eventually ended up committing suicide but not until the 1990s. So I learned something completely new, which is always interesting.

As for the book itself, I enjoyed it and would recommend it. It sounds like kind of a "dad book" (WWII-era, thriller, older male protagonist) but it's quite good. Kanon draws interesting characters and puts them into difficult situations, and with the thriller elements there's a nice balance of plot and character. I did get a little confused near the end trying to keep track of who was on what side and who was double crossing who, but on the whole the book was involving and prompted a lot of thought. I tend to be a little wary of World War II books because I feel like a lot of them go over the same territory again and again, but this one was a new take (for me, anyways), and is very much worth a read.

Tell me, blog friends...do you believe in moral relativity or is it more black and white for you?

One year ago, I was reading: In The Woods

Two years ago, I was reading: The Emigrants

Three years ago, I was reading: Oriental Mythology

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Book 156: The Good German

Book 139: Big Little Lies

"It was stupid for them to be fighting about this. A rational part of her mind knew this. She knew that Ed didn't really blame Jane. She knew her husband was actually a better, nicer person than she was, and yet she couldn't forgive him for that 'silly girl' comment. It somehow represented a terrible wrong. As a woman, Madeline was obliged to be angry at Ed on Jane's behalf, and for every other 'silly girl', and for herself, because after all, it could have happened to her too, and even a soft little word like 'silly' felt like a slap."

Dates read: April 9-13, 2017

Rating: 7/10

Lists/Awards: New York Times Bestseller

I'm a lobbyist, and my sister is a nurse. We're both "high achievers", so to speak. Part of that is because of who we are, but part of that is because my mom pushed both of us to be academically successful too. On the one hand, she wanted us to always be able to support ourselves...being able to take care of not only herself but two little girls enabled her to escape a bad marriage. On the other hand, she was one of very few single mothers in the small town I grew up in and she didn't want to have to face the patronizing pity of the stay-at-home moms who would have judged her for it if we turned out anything less than model students.

Mommy wars are hardly anything new, of course. They've probably been going on as long as there have been moms (i.e. forever). Liane Moriarty's Big Little Lies has its roots in drama between mothers, but there's a bigger story here. It begins on the first day of kindergarten in a small seaside Australian town, drawing together a group of women who all have children starting school that day: hotheaded Madeline, her ex-husband's serene yoga instructor wife Bonnie, her beautiful best friend Celeste, and the new arrival in town, young and insecure single mother Jane. Of these women, only Madeline is much like she seems to be on the surface.

It seems frothy, this story about the bonds between women, and in some ways it is, but there's a lot of darkness behind the surface veneer of fun. I hope enough people have seen the HBO show or read the book by now that this won't be considered much of a spoiler, but lovely Celeste with her perfect life and doting husband is hiding years of domestic abuse, Jane's sweet little boy is the product of a one-night stand with a sadistic jerk, and Bonnie's secrets are too much a part of the suspense to give away. All we know when we begin the book is that there was a death a school function, and interviews with the police frame the chapters, dropping little hints about what might have happened and to whom.

I'll be honest...this is a genre of book that I tend to see on airport bookstore shelves and walk right past. But Big Little Lies is a great example of why it's often a fruitful exercise to get outside my comfort zone every once in a while. I found the story of the relationships that grew (and frayed, sometimes) between the women to be well-told and emotionally resonant, which meant that by the time all is revealed at the end, the payoff was earned and carried weight. The mystery of what happened keeps the plot moving forward through character-building beats, resulting in a book that's well-balanced between the story and the people who populate it (in other words, both plot and character lovers will find something to enjoy here).

After I finished this book, I found myself wondering why domestic drama stories are so often relegated to the pile of "chick lit" and treated as insubstantial. A book like Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections is entirely the story of a family and their relationships, but it's treated as Serious Literature while something like Big Little Lies, which actually wrestles with weightier topics, is considered to be Women's Literature, For Women Only. There's still a great deal of institutional bias against books written by women about women: Liane Moriarty is very successful, but her work is treated as niche interest instead of relevant to everyone. If stories about men engaging in self-discovery, exploring the world around them and finding their places in it are marketed widely, why shouldn't stories about women doing the same be given the same treatment?

Tell me, blog friends...do you turn up your nose a bit at "women's books"?

One year ago, I was reading: Station Eleven

Two years ago, I was reading: Behave

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Book 139: Big Little Lies

Book 130: Die A Little

"The words, their whispery, insinuating tones, their voices blending together- I can't tell them apart, they seem the same, one long, slithery tail whipping back and forth. My head shakes with the sounds, the hard urgency, and my growing anxiety at being somehow involved in this, even if by accident, by gesture."

Dates read: March 2-6, 2017

Rating: 6/10

Ah, the American Dream. A loving spouse, 2.5 kids, a 4-bedroom 3-bathroom home with a white picket fence, and a Golden Retriever named Lucky. Baseball games, road trips, and family hikes with a picnic lunch brought along. There have been no shortage of movies and TV shows, from Twin Peaks to American Beauty, that try to roll back the curtain and show the dysfunction that lurks behind even those who seem to have what we're told to want. But the genre most dedicated to showing the seamy underbelly of America and our dream is noir.

When we think of noir, we usually think of a morally compromised cop at the center of the story, a femme fatale, and often some kind of good girl set against her. And Megan Abbott's debut novel, Die A Little, has all of these elements. But it's not a straightforward noir. The driver of the action is the good girl, schoolteacher Lora King, and her cop brother Bill is the one that she has to save from the clutches of the femme fatale: his wife, Alice.

Bill and Lora are a closely bonded sibling pair: their parents died when they were teenagers, and they've been all the other could really count on ever since. But their cozy life in Los Angeles sharing a home and serving as each other's support system is thrown into turmoil when Bill meets Alice, a lovely and charming wardrobe assistant at a movie studio. He's smitten and they marry and set up their own housekeeping fairly quickly. Alice is the perfect little wife, energetically keeping the home and throwing delightful parties for Bill's police coworkers and their wives. She soon becomes employed at Laura's school teaching home ec. But there are cracks in her shiny surface: she has a best friend who's always coming by with fresh bruises and dark insinuations, and questions about Alice's claimed teaching certification start to pop up, and soon Lora is wondering who her brother is really married to.

What exactly is in Alice's past? Lora's concern for her brother leads her down a twisty, winding path that draws her into drugs, prostitution, and Hollywood clean-up men. The way the story unravels is compelling and enjoyable, but the weakness is the characters. While Alice is drawn vividly (the villain is oftentimes the most interesting character in morality tales), Bill is a cipher, and Lora's development is honestly not especially believable. A naive teacher manages to take on an investigation of sophisticated underworld players and put nary a foot wrong? It seems Lora "just knows" how to react in situations which would have been terrifyingly alien to someone of her background a little too often for my taste. But if you don't think about the little shortcuts that Abbott takes too hard and let yourself get drawn into its well-created atmosphere, you'll enjoy it. I've got several other of Abbott's works on my TBR, and this book has me intrigued to get into her catalog.

Tell me, blog friends...what's your favorite noir (book or movie)?

One year ago, I was reading: Migraine (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: Devil In The White City

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Book 130: Die A Little

Book 124: Flowertown

"Contamination and containment became the buzzwords, replaced quickly with quarantine and treatment, all to the musical backdrop of international media and outrage as the world demanded to know who was responsible for the poisoning of seven and a half square miles of America's heartland. There were Senate hearings and criminal investigations. Some people died and many more people suffered, but as weeks turned into months, most people outside of the Penn County spill zone went back to their jobs and their newscasts and their horror at the other atrocities available on every continent, on every channel."

Dates read: February 6-9, 2017

Rating: 6/10

When it comes to corporate scandals, there's little that it's hard to believe in this day and age. The Ford Pinto incident seems especially egregious, but even the recent enormous price hikes of life-saving medication like the Epi-Pen should remind us all that for companies, the value of human life often gets lost somewhere in the cost-benefit analysis matrix. For all that mega-corporations try to create brand loyalty and convince us that they do actually care, the bottom line is that the entire point of a publicly-traded company is to maximize value for stockholders. If there is little-to-no impact on their income reports, sure, some companies will do the right thing. But when it comes down to it, nearly all the time they will chose profit over any other factor.

In S.G. Redling's Flowertown, it's a company called Feno Chemical that finds itself mired in controversy after a disastrous pesticide spill in a small town in Iowa. The area is quarantined by the Army as large numbers of residents begin to die from exposure to the toxin, and Feno's pharmaceutical subsidiary develops a drug regime to try to treat them. For those who manage to survive, the drugs have a side effect: a sweet smell that emanates from those who've been dosed, leading to the nickname Flowertown. Even with the drugs, though, the chemicals are excreted from the body through any liquid and prove impossible to remove through filtering, so the people who remain have to stay to avoid infecting anyone else.

Ellie Caulley had just quit her job in advertising and was visiting her boyfriend's hometown before they were to take off on a trip overseas when the accident happened. Her boyfriend and his family died, but Ellie lived, and after seven years of being trapped in the confines of Flowertown, she only manages to keep a lid on her anger by being high all the time and sleeping with one of the Army officers assigned to keep the peace. She has only two friends: her sweet-natured roommate Rachel and the hyper-paranoid Bing, who keeps her in pot. When bombs start going off, though, she finds herself increasingly drawn into the local events: who's setting off the explosions? The local resistance movement? Feno Chemical trying to rid itself of a problem? The Army?

This is a mystery/thriller, but once events are set into motion, it's not too hard to figure out what the deal is (I'm not good at that kind of thing at all, but I still figured it out). The character development is surprisingly decent...Redling's Ellie is a prickly heroine who takes some warming up to but captures your sympathies. It's not hard to imagine how awful it would be to find yourself in the situation she does, how it would drive you almost crazy with loss and regret. With most of the books in this genre that I've read, creating characters doesn't seem like a big priority, but this book is less plot and more character driven, which worked for me. If you're looking for a thriller-style book based in people and personalities, this is a solid (albeit unspectacular) read.

Tell me, blog friends...have any stories about corporate greed come out that you had an especially hard time believing?

One year ago, I was reading: Big Little Lies

Two years ago, I was reading: Dead Wake

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Book 124: Flowertown

Book 110: The Wonder

"A fast didn't go fast; it was the slowest thing there was. Fast meant a door shut fast, firmly. A fastness, a fortress. To fast was to hold fast to emptiness, to say no and no and no again."

Dates read: December 9-15, 2016

Rating: 3/10

What makes something a miracle? It's that we can't explain it, right? To someone living in the Middle Ages, air travel would seem like a miracle. People climbing into a metal tube and traveling thousands of miles in a matter of hours would have been well beyond their capacity to understand. Even simple penicillin would seem like a miracle to people who regularly died from basic infections. So when we hear about events that defy explanation in the modern world, I usually think our science just isn't advanced enough to understand it yet.

But I know from growing up Catholic that in religious communities, miracles are a very big deal, sent from God. There need to be documented miracles before a person can be canonized as a saint. That tension, between science and faith, is a very salient one and it is exactly this that drives a lot of the action in Emma Donoghue's The Wonder. Florence Nightingale-trained English nurse Lib Wright is sent out to a village in rural Ireland to help determine what is going on with 11 year-old Anna O'Donnell. The claim is that the child hasn't taken any earthly nourishment since her birthday...four months prior. Lib and another nurse, a nun, are engaged by a council of local citizens to monitor little Anna in shifts, to watch her for two straight weeks to see if her claims are true or if she has, in fact, been eating somehow.

Lib, coming from a more scientific perspective, is sure that the child has been consuming food. She's suspicious of her fellow nurse and the entire O'Donnell family because of their Catholicism, which she believes blinds them to the reality that bodies need food to continue functioning. She institutes strict control over Anna's routine immediately, stopping a flow of visitors that have come to see the little miracle girl. But over the first week, she softens toward the girl herself even as she continues to try to figure out how she's eating. Anna is a sweet, obedient, faithful child, still mourning the recent loss of an older brother, her only sibling. She finds herself wondering if it might somehow be real, if maybe Anna is surviving off of what she says she is: manna from heaven. But Anna starts to take a turn for the worse, and Lib has to figure out what's going on and if she can somehow be saved.

This book was such a disappointment. It indulged in what is one of my least favorite plot devices...to create tension and an atmosphere of suspense, it backloads all the payoff into the end of the book. So, basically, it crawls along with about 25% for about 75% of the book, and then stuffs the last 25% of the book with 75% of the plot. I've never enjoyed consuming books or movies that do this, I think it's a sign of lazy storytelling (which is probably why I don't read a lot of mysteries or thrillers, because it's much more common in those genres). In this case, some of that stuff did need to be left until the end, but there were some revelations about Lib's personal life that could have provided some badly-needed character development up front without compromising the reveals toward the end. And that's not the only example of lazy writing: when a sparkly-eyed, charming reporter shows up at the same rooming house Lib is staying at, it would take an idiot to not recognize that he's going to be a love interest, which is of course exactly what happens. And though good quality prose could have done a lot to make the story flow more smoothly, Donoghue's writing is utilitarian at best.

The Wonder actually reminded me a lot of book I read several months ago: Yesternight. Both concern a woman in a medical/scientific professional world that's not really comfortable with a female presence. Both concern that woman examining a young female child who claims an extraordinary power. Both women are regarded suspiciously by that girl's family, worried about what the examination of the child might mean. Both women are struggling with significant difficulty in their personal lives that can't help but bleed over into their relationship with the girl in question. But while Yesternight was a fast-paced, twisty-turny delight until the total ruiner of the ending, The Wonder isn't ever really enjoyable to read. I found it a boring slog and would not recommend it.

Tell me, blog friends...do you like mystery stories?

One year ago, I was reading: The King Must Die

Two years ago, I was reading: Thirst

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Book 110: The Wonder

Top Ten Tuesday: Things That Will Instantly Make Me NOT Want To Read A Book

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week's topic is the opposite of last week's...rather than the things that make us intrigued when we're thinking about picking up a book, it's the things that make us put that book back down.

Mystery/Thriller: Remember how last week I was talking about my preference for character-heavy rather than plot-heavy books? While there are certainly mysteries and thrillers with fantastic character building and/or that I've enjoyed immensely, I've tried enough out that were duds that I tend to shy away from the genre unless it comes highly recommended.

Romance: The kind of tropes that tend to give a story with romance at its center its drama...the misunderstandings that could be sorted out with honest conversation, meddling side players like friends and family who try to get in the middle of things, big lies to cover up small mistakes, are just exhausting to me in real life. I have no desire to read about them in print.

A "boy becomes a man" storyline: Maybe it's just because I grew up in a family full of women, but stories focused on a specifically male experience of growing up (usually involving violence and/or repression) are so boring to me.

Memoir: This one, I'll admit, is odd. I love reading personal blogs and I love stories about people, but an entire book about a not-otherwise-remarkable person always makes me wonder why I'm supposed to care.

Avant-garde: I'm willing to give a little bit on certain things (like the way Blindness uses no quotation marks), but I hate Hunter S. Thompson and writers who are weird just for the sake of being weird.

Sparse: If a writer is described as Hemingway-esque, that's usually a sure sign I'll hate it. I like adjectives, thank you very much. I want to be immersed in a world when I read, not have to try to fill in all the color and interest on my own.

Poetry: I like the occasional poem here and there, but as a whole, poetry doesn't much speak to me. It's just never been a form I've particularly enjoyed.

Warfare: A book full of descriptions of troops and maneuvers is a book I have little interest in reading. I skimmed the portions of War and Peace and Vanity Fair that were just war stuff because snore.

Characters described as "quirky": I am so deeply over the tendency, especially for female characters, to give them a collection of quirks instead of an actual personality. But even for dudes, it's tiresome. 

Philosophical: This is an issue I've run into with some sci-fi (I'm looking at you, Dune and Stranger in a Strange Land) and some classics, where it's less about a story with a plot and characters and more about expressing the author's view of the world as it is/should be. It gets old fast for me. 

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Top Ten Tuesday: Things That Will Instantly Make Me NOT Want To Read A Book

Book 66: Missing, Presumed

"Her lonely bench, police blue, on a deserted Sunday platform; wondering what's left in the fridge for tea. The problem of food, for one: it symbolizes everything. She wants delicious morsels, yet cooking for herself is so defeating: a surplus of ingredients, the washing-up unshared, and the sense that it doesn't matter- the production of it or whether it's nice." 

Dates read: June 27- July 2, 2016

Rating: 7/10

Nothing sets off the media like the disappearance of a pretty young white lady. Pretty young white lady goes missing, and the news cycle promptly revolves around it. Dudes don't merit nearly the same kind of coverage, and for people of color, it's practically nonexistent. It's hard to see how it's not tied up in the "flower of white womanhood" thought pattern that posits pretty young white ladies as delicate symbols of purity (not human beings with the right of self-determination, oh no) that need to be protected (by white men, naturally) from evildoers (usually people of color). A pretty young white lady goes missing, and things go a little crazy.

And it's not just us in the US, apparently. In Susie Steiner's Missing, Presumed, the pretty young white lady, Edith Head, is also posh (her father is a physician for the Royal family and connected to top government officials), which means that things really go bonkers. The book isn't really about Edith, though. It's about how the way she suddenly vanishes one night after going out for drinks with her boyfriend and best friend sends shockwaves through a whole host of people: her mother (whose own medical career was forced into the backseat by her husband's), the aforementioned best friend (who worships her), and of course the police, particularly Manon Bradshaw, the detective assigned to the case and her sweet-natured partner Davy. When a seemingly unconnected body turns up in a river nearby not too long after the disappearance, Manon can't shake her sense that the two cases are somehow connected and she doggedly fights to find out what links them.

Steiner has done one of my favorite things with Manon: she's written a strong female character who's a bit of a mess without losing her strength. Manon's about to turn 40, desperate for a family, and can't quite seem to stop sleeping with just about every dude she meets from internet dating sites, no matter how terrible the date. She's not written as an out-of-control sad sack, though, just lonely and wanting a family of her own and having no idea how to get there. When she finally does find herself in a relationship, though, the way it plays out is so cringeworthily realistic to anyone who's ever been unhappily single (I have definitely been in that category before): how fast she falls, ignoring warning signs, and how gut-wrenching it is when it comes apart. I did find myself wishing that Steiner had either centered the entire story on Manon or made more use of the other narrators...Manon is by far the dominant voice, and the others are used so relatively little, that it feels like Steiner couldn't make up her mind which way she wanted it to go and tried to have it both ways.

The mystery part of the plot, which is secondary to the character development part of things, was suitably well-done for me in terms of not being really obvious (I'm not much of a mystery reader so your mileage may vary) but I found myself questioning the motivation behind the eventual solution: I didn't think that the driving character would have behaved in the way that they did and thought it all wound up a little too neatly tied in a bow. But since the focus was really on the characters and the characters were well-written, I really enjoyed it.

Tell me, blog friends...have you ever been unhappily single?

One year ago, I was reading: Without You, There Is No Us

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Book 66: Missing, Presumed

Book 61: Supreme Justice

"The next time he watched, Reeder concentrated on the shooter. As the man turned and blasted Venter, he was calm, not panicky, and took time to set his feet and aim. Hell, the shooter even slowly exhaled before he fired. This wasn't a stickup artist reacting to movement, freaking, and shooting. No."

Dates read: June 12-13, 2016

Rating: 4/10

When you spend time studying the Supreme Court, you grow a fondness for its members. Even the ones you disagree with. The way their personalities come through in their writing: Scalia's fierce intelligence and flair for drama, Ginsberg's incisive mind and iron will. You feel like you know them a little bit. So when they pass away, there's a sense of loss even if you're okay with that vote being gone on a personal level. I was gutted when I heard about Scalia dying even though I couldn't be farther from him, politically speaking.

There's never been a single successful Supreme Court assassination. I wonder why. Not that I think there should be, of course, but the executive and legislative branch don't seem to have any immunity. Even the lower levels of the court system see judges murdered. But not the nine. Not so far. Until a near future time in Max Allan Collins' Supreme Justice, anyways. Then suddenly there is not just one justice killed, but two. Two conservative justices, during the term of a Democratic president.

Joseph Reeder, a retired Secret Service agent, has earned the scorn of the law enforcement community for two reasons: his devotion to techniques of body and facial language reading to investigate crimes (earning him the nickname "Peep", which is never really satisfactorily explained) and the fact that when he took a bullet in an assassination attempt against a very conservative president, he was vocal about his regret for doing so, since Reeder is himself a liberal and believes that the country would have been better off without the continued leadership of that president. But when Gabe Sloan, one of Reeder's closest friends and godfather to his daughter, is named head of the task force investigating the assassinations, Reeder is drawn back into the fold to help. He's paired with Patti Rogers of the FBI, Sloan's usual partner, and the two try to figure each other out as they also try to solve the crime.

Perhaps I'd have been less harsh on this had I not just read an unspectacular thriller two books ago. While I enjoyed The Barkeep more than I thought I would, it also represented a break from a long stretch of literary fiction and high-intensity non-fiction that made it a nice diversion and a chance to get outside my usual box a little. Supreme Justice, coming so close in time, was more irritating than anything else. The characters are pure tropes, plot developments are telegraphed miles away (when Reeder's daughter is introduced early, it's eye-rollingly obvious that she is going to be put into peril at some later point in the book), and Collins is heavy-handed enough with his political statements that even though I share most of the expressed philosophy, I was over it pretty quickly. The writing isn't especially elegant or expressive. There's just not much here in the way of reasons to recommend it, so I'll recommend that you seek your thrillers elsewhere.

Tell me, blog friends...have you ever read Supreme Court decisions? Do you have a favorite justice?

One year ago, I was reading: Creative Mythology

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Book 61: Supreme Justice