Binchy’s best?
The winning title for that is endlessly debated in Facebook reading groups, but having just completed my third (fourth?) reread, I can say that this is the one for me. It’s hard to synopsize Scarlet Feather, because there’s so much going on all at once in different arenas, but I’ll give it a shot.
Cathy Scarlet and Tom Feather met and became fast and eternal friends in catering school; both of them have had the unwavering aspiration to start a catering company together. Not a restaurant, but rather a company that cooks for large functions and intimate dinner parties alike and delivers (and sometimes serves) the food to whatever venue is required. The story begins on New Year’s Eve; Cathy is catering a party for her harridan of a mother-in-law, while Tom is out walking the streets trying to cool down after a jealous outburst when he saw his girlfriend on the dance floor with a drunken, handsy party goer. Tom happens upon a “premises” that would be perfect for their business, while Cathy encounters her husband’s niece and nephew, the twins Maud and Simon, at the NYE party. This evening kicks off the book.
Cathy is married to Neil, the son of Hannah and Jock Mitchell. Cathy’s mother, Lizzie Scarlet, used to clean for Hannah and bring Cathy along with her when Cathy was small, so the fact that Cathy has wedded the son of the snobbish Hannah is a big deal. Lizzie’s husband/Cathy’s father Muttie is a sweet man whose “bad back” has kept him from doing any meaningful work in his life but hasn’t prevented his frequenting the local bookie’s and spending every penny he can scrounge on the horse races. Neil is a barrister with big ideals to help people with immigration problems and find solutions for the homeless, and is constantly on call to deal with important issues.
Tom is involved with the beautiful Marcella, who aspires to be a model while working as a manicurist at Hayward’s, the big department store. She spends her off hours working out and attending any function where she has a chance of getting her picture taken and into the society pages in the newspaper, all to advance her dream career.
Maud and Simon are the young children of Jock Mitchell’s brother, Kenneth, and his wife Kay; Kenneth travels quite a bit with his friends, while Kay has a drinking problem, and their elder son, Walter, isn’t, shall we say, a responsible individual, so when the twins find themselves alone in the house on New Year’s Eve, they decamp to their uncle’s and become a problem that has to be solved by anyone willing to take it on. This turns out to be Cathy and Neil, aided by Lizzie and Muttie.
The feature that makes Scarlet Feather the one for me is Binchy’s treatment of the characters and how she shows their interactions, changes and growth. Specifically:
- Tom and Cathy and their passionate aspirations. I love a story about people who are determined in every way to do whatever they set their hearts on, and won’t be deterred. And the contrast between what they were doing and the lofty heights to which Cathy’s husband Neil aspired was a good reminder that yes, there are more important things in the world than running a small business, but the truth is, you never know what is your role in life, and how it will impact those around you. So it’s best to be focused on being impactful from whatever position in which you find yourself.
- Maud and Simon, the nine-year-old twins who are tossed from pillar to post throughout this story. There needs to be more emphasis on and exposure (in fiction and in life) of the plight of children who are not wanted by their biological family but who may be badly wanted by the many caregivers who step up to help them when they’re in need, as was also noted in the history between two other characters in the book. Also, the twins are so hilariously written, it’s a joy every time they appear on the page.
The one thing that irritates me about Binchy’s books, because it feels like simple laziness, is her insistence on using the same five surnames (and many of the same given names too!) for every character in every book she wrote. Scarlet and Feather were the anomalies in this one, for obvious reasons (had to have a title and a name for the catering company), but the rest are a small assortment of Ryans, Flynns, Daleys, Hayes, and Nolans, without an O’this or an O’that to be found, and I swear there is a girl named Orla in every book but it’s never the same girl. Since Irish monnikers run to two pages on the internet, a little more imagination in the naming would have been good. But that’s just pickiness—I really do enjoy her books to an extraordinary degree. You might, as well!
Binchy’s last
Before I began writing this, I did a search of my own blog to see if I had reviewed a Maeve Binchy book previous to this one, and I was surprised to find that I hadn’t. But I read all of them for the first time so many years ago that I guess they predate the inception of my becoming an independent reviewer. I am sure that I probably reviewed some for my library’s blog once upon a time, but after my retirement the new and “progressive” library director decided that a book review blog was unnecessary for a library (yeah, just ponder that for a minute) and discontinued it, so that legacy is lost.
I did find, however, that I had mentioned various writers and their books in connection to her, most of them falling short of the simple genius that was Maeve’s gift; usually, the publisher’s blurb that this or that tome was “perfect for fans of Maeve Binchy” just led to disappointment and unfavorable comparisons.
A Week in Winter is unfortunately her last book; she wrote it in early 2012, then passed away unexpectedly that July, and the book came out in October. She suffered terribly from osteoarthritis in her latter years, and also had heart disease, and died of a heart attack after hip surgery at age 72. But before that she wrote 17 novels, half a dozen short story collections, and a couple of plays, and was also a columnist for The Irish Times for about a decade. I started reading her in the ’90s, I think, and mostly kept up with every novel she wrote, with a couple of exceptions. But I somehow never went back and read this one, so when it came up on the Facebook “Friends and Fiction” page, it was a welcome reminder to do so.
It’s hard to say why her books are such genius—they are set in Ireland, either in the country or in Dublin, and center around family life, small businesses, and the tensions between Irish rural and urban life as influenced by the cultural changes that took place from World War II to the new century. They are small stories, in the sense that they focus in on one protagonist and the people—family, friends, work colleagues—directly connected to them in some way, and are both wholesome and somewhat uneventful, in contrast to so much that’s currently being published—no mysteries or thrills here. But Binchy had a way of understanding universals and then bringing them home at an intimate level that spoke to people, and with a couple of exceptions I have read her books two and three times to remind myself of how much I received from them.
This latest built on a formula she had used before, in which she began with the story of one character who she explored in detail, and then branched out to incorporate short vignettes of the lives of those who revolved around this character for some reason. She did it in her popular book Evening Class, which features Nora (known as Signora) as a teacher of Italian and then explores the back stories of all the students who enroll in her night class, going on to send them all together on a trip to Italy.
In A Week in Winter, the protagonist is Chicky Starr, who decides to turn an old mansion on the western coast of Ireland into a small hotel; the second half of the story develops around the people she recruits to help her, and all the guests who book in for the first week the hotel is open. But first we get the story of Chicky—who she meets and loves, why she leaves her family home in Stoneybridge and ends up in an impersonal existence in a boarding house in New York City, and what brings her back to Ireland to set up as a hotelier.
I will say that while I enjoyed reading this, it wasn’t my favorite of Binchy’s by a long shot; while I do like this formula, I find that I have preferred her novels that focus more closely on one set of people and don’t bring in so many attenuated stories of strangers to fill their pages—books such as Firefly Summer, Tara Road, The Glass Lake, and Scarlet Feather. But there was definitely an appealing story line that wended its way through all the connected lives, and it also made me want to travel to Chicky’s place and spend my own week in its comfortable, well-heated rooms, eating Orla’s good cooking, taking bird-watching walks along the rugged coastline, and finding a pub alive with good Irish music for an evening’s entertainment.
If you haven’t experienced Binchy’s books, you might be wondering what is so special about them. I don’t know that I can adequately explain it: They are cozy but not sappy, unchallenging but not unintelligent; and the characters and stories are so engaging that they make you want to know these people—frequent their restaurants and hotels and shops, live in their neighborhoods, have a mid-morning coffee break with them. The only writer whose name comes up consistently when anyone says they want to read someone who writes like Maeve Binchy is another of my favorites, Rosamunde Pilcher. They also remind me of a more old-fashioned version of Jenny Colgan’s books, but slightly less twee. (No offense to Colgan—I love her books—but they aren’t quite as universal as those of Binchy or Pilcher.)
If you haven’t read Binchy, don’t start with this one—pick one of the ones I named above, with characters you stick with throughout. Oprah featured Tara Road as one of her book club books in 1999, which may account for the exponential growth of Binchy’s readership; but I think she would have been a big seller, regardless. Try one and see if you agree.
Not so magical
I am a huge Alice Hoffman fan. I love magical realism, particularly the brand of it to which she introduced me in early works such as Seventh Heaven, Turtle Moon, and (perhaps her most famous) Practical Magic. I also love her books that don’t contain that specific element but that do include a well-developed sense of whimsy, like one of my personal favorites, Second Nature. I haven’t loved all of her books unreservedly; some are too dark for me. But I’m always willing to give a book of hers a try.
I am also a huge fan of time travel stories. My absolute favorites are by Connie Willis (Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog), but I have 25 novels on my Goodreads “time travel” list, and there are only three or four that I didn’t love. If the author takes proper account of the anomalies and forms a logical theory of the mechanics of time travel itself, I’m in. And sometimes, even if they don’t, I’m down with it if the story is sufficiently engrossing.
Finally, I seek out books about books, and this one is definitely a love letter to literature with its focus on the redeeming power of reading and specifically on the life and works of American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Given those three overwhelmingly positive statements—Hoffman fan, time travel aficionado, lover of books about reading—you would think that Hoffman’s latest book, The Invisible Hour, would be a big-time winner with me. I liked the premise: It’s about a young girl who grows up as a member of a cult in western Massachusetts. Mia is the daughter of Ivy Jacob, child of an affluent Boston family, who got pregnant as a teenager, ran away from home, and joined the Community, mostly as a result of the charismatic influence of its leader, Joel Davis, whom Ivy later marries. But Joel turns out to be a repressively controlling personality, imposing strict rules and regulations on members of the commune and forbidding them contact with the outside world. Ivy, who regrets marrying him and who loves her daughter more than anything, contrives to provide a bit of an outside life for Mia by introducing her to the library in the nearby town and abetting her in borrowing and hiding books to read. At the library, Mia discovers a first edition of The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the story’s similarity to her mother’s intrigues her, as does the strange inscription in the book. Later, in an extreme moment in her life, Mia is transported back to the year 1837, where she meets the young Nathaniel Hawthorne some years before he writes what is considered to be his career masterpiece.
The first half of the book revolves around this mother-daughter relationship and explores themes such as familial love, the power of books and reading, and women’s rights, the last theme quite relevant at the current moment as we seem to be reverting in our country to the denial of female autonomy. While the story dealt with the cult years and focused on Mia and Ivy, it was compelling and immediate, containing all the beautiful prose for which I love Alice Hoffman’s books. But once Mia leaves the Community, there is a shift in the narrative so that it becomes much less richly detailed, a chronicling of events rather than an immersive, imagery-filled experience.
And then, when the time travel happens, it feels abrupt and insufficiently explained, and the narrative changes once more, becoming a dry, biographical account of the life of Nathaniel Hawthorne. While the character himself is intimately painted at his introduction and has moments of vulnerability that make him appealing, the discursive nature of the text regarding his timeline and career kept throwing me out of the story and into fact-absorbing mode, and I found it quite jarring. Additionally, the fascinating part of Alice Hoffman’s use of magical realism has always been, to me, the way she sprinkles it throughout a story, letting odd incidents pop up in the midst of an otherwise ordinary sequence of events; but in this book, there is none whatsoever in the first two-thirds of the book, and then the last third is completely focused on the magic. I can’t believe I’m saying this about a book of Hoffman’s, but it just doesn’t work.
I was sufficiently invested in Mia’s story that I was willing to go with it, so I did finish reading the book; but there was one “what the hell?” moment that set me back on my heels. I actually went to Goodreads before writing this and combed through every review on there looking for a “spoiler” entry about this anomaly and, unbelievably, absolutely no one mentioned it as a problem. I won’t say what it was, but it has to do with creating a thoroughly predictable character and then having that person act so uncharacteristically as to invalidate everything that went before. It was an awkward contrivance and frankly made me mad, given that it takes place just pages from the end.
I’m starting to feel like I should be working for Kirkus Reviews (librarians who regularly read reviews know theirs are always the most scathing), and I never intended this blog to be like that, but…do yourself a big favor and read some other Alice Hoffman books, and/or maybe go reread The Scarlet Letter, just for kicks. I won’t say you shouldn’t read this book, because for every person who dislikes it there is one or more who loves it, but that’s my opinion, for better or worse.
An author new to me
I have somehow gotten through a long life of reading without ever broaching Tess Gerritsen‘s catalogue of novels, even though my genre divisions on Goodreads show that I have read more than twice the number of mysteries than I have read books in any other genre. That’s probably more common than you’d think, if you are a mystery reader, simply because mystery writers are, as a rule, prolific, and also tend to define a character and then stick with him or her, so that if you like continuity, you will probably embrace a series of, say, 18 books featuring the same protagonist.
I decided to start with one of her recent novels, The Spy Coast, which is the “Martini Club” series, book #1. When I began it, though, I didn’t realize just how new it is—the #2 book isn’t even due out until March of next year. So after I finished it and found it good, I went looking at the rest of her backlist, and I’m not sure, even though I enjoyed this one, that I will continue with any of her others. That is because they are divided into one long series—Rizzoli and Isles—and a bunch of stand-alones categorized as medical mysteries, no doubt based on her previous life as a doctor.
Although several readers say that the TV show is quite different from the books, I will probably avoid both the series and the stand-alones, simply because I am not a fan of medical mysteries. I read some of the seminal volumes with that theme by author Robin Cook back when I was a teenager, and also followed Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta series for the first 10 books or so. Although I enjoy a pandemic when it’s the kick-off for a good dystopian novel, I discovered that I don’t care for all the other medical details included in this sub-genre. I don’t like the mad scientist vibe, the experimenting, the gory details of unnecessary operations and deliberate dismemberments. I prefer the focus to be on the mystery, the whodunnit, the why and the who, not the (sometimes excruciatingly detailed) how. I don’t mind a good pathologist as one of the team, but I’m not so interested in their work that I want that to be the featured character.
This Tess Gerritsen novel has none of the medical aspects, and initially appealed to me because it’s about retired people! For the same reason that I enjoyed the movies Red and Red II, in which Bruce Willis as Frank Moses “gets the band back together” when he calls up Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, and Helen Mirren as delightfully quirky retired Black-ops agents to tie up some decades-old loose ends that are threatening all their lives, the description of the Martini Club as a bunch of elderly hyper-talented CIA agents now existing quietly in a small coastal village in Maine piqued my imagination.
Main character Maggie Bird (who could definitely also be played appealingly by Helen Mirren) is happily living in an upscale log cabin and collecting blue eggs every morning from her flock of Araucana chickens until a youthful agent, organization unknown, arrives and asks about a still-secret mission from Maggie’s past, then turns up dead in her driveway a day later. The town’s acting police chief, Jo Thibodeau, is baffled by why Maggie doesn’t seem more emotionally affected by this, and her suspicions grow when she discovers Maggie and four of her neighbors taking potluck the following evening while looking over a topographical map of the area and discussing shoe prints, tire tracks, and firepower rather than having quiet hysterics at the news of murder in their town, as she believes “normal” seniors would. But Jo won’t get much out of these close-mouthed individuals beyond a bland expression and polite agreement with whatever she says.
Gerritsen does a nice job of splitting the book between the main narrator and several temporary ones as she jumps back and forth between past and present, revisiting the events that perpetuated the current crisis. Both the complicated plot and the colorful travelogue are vivid, as are the characterizations, and I didn’t see most of the events or the resolution coming. I’ll definitely read the sequel to this one; I’m just regretful that the discovery of this author won’t lead to a long binge of her back catalogue.
Binchy lite?
Several people on the Friends and Fiction page on Facebook have noted, “I love Maeve Binchy, who else can I read who writes like she does?” Most have answered “Rosamunde Pilcher,” but that’s a fairly limited list of books, and then what? Several others mentioned a writer I’d never heard of, also Irish, named Patricia Scanlan, so I decided to check her out (yes, that’s a pun).
The first book I had sent to my Kindle was Francesca’s Party, written in 2020. It’s a classic scenario without the expected resolution: Loving wife (and housewife) of 20 years discovers her husband is cheating on her with a younger “career woman” from his office and goes to pieces. But before we get the scenes of weeping in the bathtub and eating tubs of ice cream, Francesca follows hubby Mark and new squeeze Nikki to the airport, gets their destination, and figures out where they will be staying. She then goes home, packs up a couple of suitcases of his clothes, flies there herself, and knocks on their door to dump the bags at his feet and tell the mistress he’s her problem now. And then she goes home and changes the locks.
So far, so good. But then we get a long slow narrative of rage, bitterness, humiliation, and hibernation on the part of Francesca, interspersed with commentary from the cheating spouse and triumphant girlfriend, and this portion of the book shows how dated the story has become. Somehow Binchy’s books manage to keep their sense of timelessness (for the most part), but this one of Scanlan’s goes in a bit too much for the clichés, and lets you know it’s definitely a product of its time. Scanlan’s writing is also not up to the standard of Binchy or Pilcher; it’s not bad, but it’s nothing out of the ordinary.
Francesca’s Party is, nonetheless, a successful story with a refreshing resolution that one wouldn’t necessarily expect, given the subject matter and the timestamp, and I might try another sometime. I would call it true chick lit; but hey, sometimes that’s what you want, right?
Constructive maundering
This week my breakfasts were beguiled by a book I have meant for some time to read: Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), by Jerome K. Jerome. You may or may not have heard of it; although it is considered a classic, it’s not the kind typically assigned as part of a high school curriculum. Nonetheless, as Wikipedia cites, “The book, published in 1889, became an instant success and has never been out of print. Its popularity was such that the number of registered Thames boats went up 50 percent in the year following its publication, and it contributed significantly to the Thames becoming a tourist attraction. In its first 20 years alone, the book sold over a million copies worldwide.”
I only know about it because I am a science fiction fan(atic), and a reader of the books of Robert Heinlein and Connie Willis. Three Men in a Boat is mentioned in Heinlein’s Have Spacesuit—Will Travel, wherein it inspired Willis to read it and then title one of her time travel series To Say Nothing of the Dog, the actions in that book being a loose tribute to the original.
I have mentioned Willis’s book here before, describing it as a sort of French farce featuring a hapless cast of misfits and, now having read the original inspiration, I can see even more clearly where the frenetic, chase-your-tail style in which Willis wrote her book originated. Three Men is chock full of the most hilarious minutiae of everyday life, not to mention the mental maunderings of its narrator, who wanders away from each topic to discuss the most useless and suspect bits of information, only to eventually work his way back again to the original subject, pulling himself up and getting on with the narrative.
It’s not exactly a story, per se; its main protagonist and first-person voice, “J.,” is more concerned with travelogue—commenting on points of interest as the boat advances up the Thames—coupled with self-indulgent flights of fancy about Man and Nature and the recounting of numerous ridiculous anecdotes about his fellow travelers, his dog, random bartenders and fishermen he has encountered during his life, and so on. He will ramble on about the next stop along the river—its history and monuments, what events transpired, who slept in what public house and which one now stocks the best ale, who is buried there, etc.—and then comment about the petty details of their day on the boat—who inadvertently dragged whose shirt through the water, what food they had to eat and its effect on their mood and/or bowels—interrupting all this once in a while to recount a close call with a launch or a ferry, a hang-up of their boat inside one of the river’s locks, and then switching to laudatory ravings about nature…and so it goes for about 185 pages.
An example of the flowery language he uses when making his observations about the natural world:
“Sunlight is the life-blood of Nature. Mother Earth looks at us with such dull, soulless eyes, when the sunlight has died away from out of her. It makes us sad to be with her then; she does not seem to know us or to care for us. She is as a widow who has lost the husband she loved, and her children touch her hand, and look up into her eyes, but gain no smile from her.“
One reviewer on Goodreads remarked that the book is abrupt and atonal, what with the author occasionally forgetting that he’s writing a comic novel to come out with these paeans and flights of fancy but, for me, that’s the fun of it, the whimsical British humor.
The account, once they have made their decision to go on holiday on the Thames for a fortnight, is completely driven by the sights they see and the stops they make up the river, so one can see why the book was popular when first published and how it generated so much interest in boating as a tourist activity; people would naturally want to observe all these things for themselves. But 135 years later, although some of the landmarks will retain their ruins and their burial grounds, all else will have changed enough to be unrecognizable, so the pleasure in reading Three Men in a Boat becomes more nostalgic than anything else.
I must say, however, that the humor with which Mr. Jerome tells his tale is so engaging that I actually saved bits to read out loud to my cousin when she came by the other day. He has a way of having his protagonist say something so that you don’t know whether it is meant for him to be serious or tongue in cheek; it’s hard to pull off being ironic and gently making fun of your characters but at the same time presenting them and some of their views in all seriousness. I laughed out loud a few times.
Here’s an example: They had just finished eating supper, which they really wanted after a long day of rowing.
“How good one feels when one is full—how satisfied with ourselves and with the world! People who have tried it, tell me that a clear conscience makes you very happy and contented; but a full stomach does the business quite as well, and is cheaper, and more easily obtained. One feels so forgiving and generous after a substantial and well-digested meal—so noble-minded, so kindly-hearted.
“It is very strange, this domination of our intellect by our digestive organs. We cannot work, we cannot think, unless our stomach wills so. It dictates to us our emotions, our passions. After eggs and bacon, it says, “Work!” After beefsteak and porter, it says, “Sleep!” After a cup of tea, it says to the brain, “Now, rise, and show your strength. Be eloquent, and deep, and tender; see, with a clear eye, into Nature and into life; spread your white wings of quivering thought, and soar, a god-like spirit, over the whirling world beneath you, up through long lanes of flaming stars to the gates of eternity!”
(I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I have ever been quite that inspired by a cup of tea!) He then goes on for another entire paragraph delineating the effects of muffins, brandy, and so on, and concludes with this thought:
“We are but the veriest, sorriest slaves of our stomach. Reach not after morality and righteousness, my friends; watch vigilantly your stomach, and diet it with care and judgment. Then virtue and contentment will come and reign within your heart, unsought by any effort of your own; and you will be a good citizen, a loving husband, and a tender father—a noble, pious man.”
And thus it goes, with the conversation moving from the positive effects of a good meal to the discussion of whether they would be happier away from the world living on a desert island, to fears about damp and drains, to the recounting of an anecdote about sleeping in the same bed with a stranger at a crowded inn…
This book is not one I would unreservedly recommend that everyone should read, but it has a certain reminiscent air for me of the beloved antics of Bertie Wooster, Jeeves and Co. in the tomes of P. G. Wodehouse and, if you like that kind of story where the characters are disingenuous and rather simple-minded while the writing itself is quite clever, then you might enjoy Three Men in a Boat. But even if you don’t read it, do have a go at To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis.
Silence is golden
I picked up The Silent Patient, by Alex Michaelides, on the basis of a bunch of enthusiastic reviews by people on two Facebook reading group pages, and after finishing it, I have to ask…WHY?
I’m not going to use up a lot of space on this one. You may decide to read it anyway, and be as enamored of it as the many who gave it five stars on Goodreads. But here are my thoughts:
The main character is a psychotherapist, but his actions in this book lack any credibility, and in fact may well do a disservice to those who are considering therapy. It’s not the character himself (although I found him to be an unsympathetic one practically from the first page), it’s the lack of knowledge exhibited by the author concerning mental health diagnoses, treatments, and medications. Yes, it’s fiction, and in some instances I would say, Read it for the plot, the suspense, the twists, and don’t pay too much attention to minor inaccuracies; but this book goes too far. The drugs he mentions don’t act as he says they do. The treatment methods are slipshod and would never be tolerated by any facility for whom a licensed psychotherapist would work. The procedures in the supposedly locked and secure facility are laughable. The personal interactions between doctors and patients, doctors and doctors, spouses, and strangers on the street are not believable.
Aside from that, the characters are wooden, the plot is all over the place—including half a dozen unnecessary sub-plots that are nothing but blatant red herrings to distract you from what the other hand is doing—and there’s a fair bit of misogyny exhibited by most of the male characters, and uniformly negative portrayals of the female ones.
My headline for this review may be misleading: You could have taken it to imply that this book with “silent” in the title is golden, i.e., I’m recommending it. You would be wrong. While it may have turned out to be golden in terms of profits, my sole piece of advice would be to take it off your TBR list and breathe a sigh of relief that I saved you from wasting valuable leisure reading time.
Third time continues the charm
I just finished Alix Harrow’s third full-length novel, Starling House, and was nearly as taken with it as I was by her other two (The Once and Future Witches, and The Ten Thousand Doors of January). That’s saying something—if you read my reviews, you will know how blown away I was by every aspect of those two amazing stories.
This one is perhaps not as original an idea as either of the other two; instead, it takes some trope stuff and makes it fresh and interesting. It’s a combination of a Southern Gothic fantasy/horror hybrid and a coming-of-age story, and has a lot of levels.
In some ways it is a commentary on the bigotry and trauma one encounters as an outsider in a small town, particularly a small “company” town in the deep South. This one is Eden, Kentucky, and the town’s reason for existence is the working of the coal mines owned by the Gravely family. The town and its residents are either singularly unlucky or the story of a curse is true, because a sadder and less hospitable place could scarcely be conceived. The supposed origin of the curse is tied up with the history of E. Starling, a 19th-century children’s book author who was married to one of the three original Gravely brothers, wrote a story about a creepy place called Underland, built a mansion for herself after her husband’s death, and ultimately disappeared. Starling House has since been host to a number of owners, all of whom show up just when the previous owner dies or leaves, but such is its unsavory reputation that the people of the town cross the road rather than walk on the sidewalk near its gates.
The book revolves around Opal, a young woman who has never caught a single break. Her mother died in a car crash when she was a child, and she and her younger brother Jasper have continued to live in the motel room where they landed shortly before her death. Opal works a minimum wage job at the local hardware store, trying to save enough money to get her brother, a smart young man with debilitating asthma made worse by the miasma that hangs over the industrial town, into a private high school far from the environs of Eden; but there’s scant hope of that until she gets a job as a cleaner for Arthur Starling. She’s heard all the rumors about both the house and its owner, but she’d do almost anything to get Jasper the chance he deserves in life, so she begins the task of bringing this house full of dust and cobwebs (and other, more sinister things) back to life. But the feeling of sentience she gets from the house and the weird vibes coming off of Arthur, who seems alternatively tortured, coldly aloof, and strangely sympathetic, are getting under her skin, and she’s wondering where it’s all going to end…
You could scarcely find a less likable protagonist than Opal, but she somehow endeared herself to me. Maybe it’s because every small victory she has is so hard-earned that it’s almost not worth it, and you can feel the palpable intensity of her longing for things to change and her simultaneous hopeless conviction that they never will.
The best thing about this book for me was the language. Admittedly, it’s sometimes over the top or overly descriptive, but there are moments that struck me so forcefully that I marked them in my notes on my Kindle. Alix Harrow knows how, with one phrase, to invoke a memory or even an entire phase of life, as with this one, where she is describing some symbols incised into the wood of a door:
The carved symbols are still very slightly luminescent, like glowsticks the day after a sleepover.
I read that one sentence and jumped back to a moment in childhood: We were in someone’s yard at dusk, at the end of a birthday barbecue. We all cracked glowsticks that had been passed out by the birthday girl’s mother, manically waving the neon tubes and dancing around, lighting up the dark. By the next day, most of the chemical inside the sticks had finished its reaction and was subsiding, but there was still a dim glow to them if you turned out the lights in a windowless room.
The biggest flaw in the story for me is the revelation that Opal is 27 years old. Her character, while honestly and intricately drawn, seems more typical of a teenager—16, 17, maybe 18 tops—than of a young woman approaching her late 20s. Honestly, this book works better as a young adult novel, both in its characterizations and in the way the story is couched in a particular kind of gritty magical realism. But since I am a big fan of good young adult literature (note the emphasis on good), that’s fine with me. I simply decided to forget Opal’s age and read it as it reads. There are other problems—unresolved plot points, underutilized characters, unexplained mysteries—but ultimately it all worked for me, with its beautiful prose, interesting characters, and slow-burn sense of menace.
Reliable, still fresh
I just read Michael Connelly’s latest, the seventh in his books featuring Mickey Haller, the Lincoln Lawyer, and I was pleased and satisfied by Resurrection Walk. Those who follow/read this blog will know that I have expressed some degree of dismay about where the Bosch books are heading, with possible successors trying to take over but without either the pizzazz or the character depth that are inherent in Hieronymus “Harry” B. But Connelly has managed to map a new route for Haller, using as a starting point the exoneration of Jorge Ochoa from a previous book. Mickey got such a buzz from reopening that innocent client’s case and freeing him from prison that he has decided this will be a regular feature of his practice, his pro bono contribution to being a defense attorney. He calls the results the “Resurrection Walk,” because the person without hope gets to emerge from prison to walk free again. And he has enlisted veteran police detective and half-brother Harry Bosch to be one of his investigators.
Since Harry has such an aversion to helping the “other side” (defense) after a long and storied career as prosecution’s darling, he and Haller have agreed that he will only serve as a clearing house, and not take an active part in the actual defense process. Even though Harry is retired, he has a care for his reputation as a dogged seeker of justice for the criminals he has apprehended, and he also realizes that his participation for the defense could have repercussions for daughter Maddie, who’s just coming up through the ranks at LAPD. But after sorting through the pile of letters received by Haller from dozens of the incarcerated who maintain their innocence and are looking for his help, Harry finds one that rings true, and is drawn into a more active role.
He looks through the case of Lucinda Sanz, a wife and mother who was convicted of the shooting death of her ex-husband, sheriff’s deputy Roberto Sanz, and realizes that there is a lot of unexplained and unexplored territory in her case. The laser focus on her from the sheriffs’ department as the perfect and only suspect triggers the hairs on the back of Harry’s neck, and he tells Mickey he thinks they have a winner. The fact that they will now be pitted against a bureaucratic entity determined to protect one of its own makes the case a tricky one, ultimately fraught with danger for all involved.
Although the essence of Harry was, once again, a little bit lacking—he was portrayed somewhat woodenly, as has happened before when he is the secondary, rather than the main, character—it was less a problem this time, and the interactions between he and his half-brother and current employer were more characteristic. For instance, Harry agrees that he will be Mickey’s driver while they are investigating a case, but only if Mickey sits up front in the passenger seat, because Harry’s dignity won’t allow him to be cast as chauffeur. As far as the central mystery goes, it is often Harry’s intuition that brings out the facts necessary to make the case, although it is Mickey’s talents as the concocter of labyrinthine defense moves that ultimately wins through. The book has great suspense, with a lot of setbacks and some perilous moments, and ends with the promise of a twist in the future for Mickey. This is a solid and entertaining entry in Connelly’s franchise.
Parenthetically, if you are an Amazon Prime member and a Connelly fan, I can’t stress enough how wonderful is the “Bosch” series starring Titus Welliver in the title role, with fantastic portrayals of all the supporting characters by an array of both well known and relatively unknown actors. The TV series is pretty closely based on Connelly’s books in sequential order, and is every bit as involving. There are seven seasons of Bosch and, just when you sorrowfully get to the end of that binge, you discover that there is a new show, called “Bosch Legacy,” which has a somewhat narrower focus on Harry, his daughter Maddie, and defense attorney Honey Chandler. There are two seasons so far, with one more to come. I understand that there will also be a spinoff series featuring Detective Renée Ballard, hopefully with Welliver etc. still serving as secondary characters.
The test of a good book
When I first read The Gravity of Birds, by Tracy Guzeman, in 2013, I said, “This is one of those books that I wanted to turn around and read again as soon as I finished it.” After having read it for the second time 10 years later, I experienced the exact same impulse as soon as I turned the last page.
There can be a few reasons for doing that:
1. You liked it so much that you don’t want to be done;
2. It was so complex that when you got to the end you said, Hey, wait a minute…and went back to see if you completely understood how to get to where you “got”;
3. You wanted to wallow more in the writing or the characters or the imagery or the story.
Parts of all three of those play into my desire to start over. Paradoxically, this is a fairly simple story, and simply written, yet the complexity of human emotions and betrayals involved made it intricate and nuanced, as does the language.
A reclusive artist who quit painting 20 years ago summons an art authenticator and an art historian who has documented the artist’s career to reveal to them that there is a painting of his that no one has ever seen. It is a triptych that includes a self portrait of the artist, Thomas Bayber, with two young girls. Bayber has the main central panel, but the two side panels are missing; he wishes to sell the work, but will only do so if it is complete, and he tasks the two men with locating the other panels. The pair set out on this quest, but the historian, intimately familiar with Bayber’s foibles, soon realizes it’s not just about the paintings but about the subjects contained within them; Bayber wishes to track down the “girls,” now in their 60s.
Natalie and Alice Kessler (19 and 14, respectively) are sisters, spending a month with their parents at a cottage by a lake, next door to the precociously talented painter, Thomas Bayber (28). The family befriends the young man, but there is a special bond between him and the young Alice, who is just beginning a lifelong challenge from rheumatoid arthritis. Their friendship is resurrected eight years later when Alice is on the cusp of some life decisions and goes back to the cottage for a contemplative weekend, unexpectedly encountering Thomas, who is on the outs with his family and staying next door again. Their relationship shifts to something more intimate until Alice figures out something from the past that causes a permanent rift, and there is no contact between them for 30-odd years. Meanwhile, Natalie keeps her thoughts to herself…
The characters are complex and three-dimensional, especially the sisters. But there is a lot of set-up and it took a long time to appreciate their subtleties, so once I did, I wanted to spend more time understanding them than the author had given me.
The imagery is powerful and descriptive—I so wanted the artists in this book to be real, so that I could look them up on the internet and see their paintings and sculptures. I could almost picture them, but I wanted to see them “IRL,” as they say.
The story took place on a triple timeline in multiple locales, so I felt the need to go back and check exactly when certain things happened and who knew what at the time they did.
It was a compelling first novel, but although Guzeman mentions in her afterword that she is working on another, none has been forthcoming. It would be a shame if this author never wrote anything else; but this book is a solid accomplishment that can stand as a testament to her talent. An evocative book that will stick with you.
The Book Adept 