Navola
That was…an experience.
When I was 20 percent in, I actually wrote on Paolo Bacigalupi’s Facebook page that I was enjoying his world-building and the use of language and nuance in his new novel, Navola. (As has been previously commented upon, I am a stickler for authentic world-building.) He responded that he had enjoyed creating them, and I can believe that, because there is a lot of loving detail in this book. As it turns out, maybe too much? At first it reminded me of my best-beloved fantasy series, The Queen’s Thief, by Megan Whelan Turner, and also gave me the feel of Ursula LeGuin’s masterpiece of pseudo-historical fiction, Malafrena. But as it went on, I felt so overwhelmed by the discussion of every niggling detail (and the need to figure out what was meant by all the semi-Italian, sometimes Latin-based lingo) that it almost felt like being back in English class, being forced to read a classic work about which I felt reluctant, since it wasn’t my choice. I couldn’t help but contrast this with Bacigalupi’s excellent Shipbreaker series, in which he masterfully paints the scene using just what he needs, and then jumps full-force into the story.
The world of Navola seems to be based on a loosely historical evocation of city-states from the Italian Renaissance. There is all the intrigue of the Borgias, with both front-facing and behind-the-scenes manipulation of absolutely everyone by everyone else, except by our protagonist, Davico, son and heir to the wealthy and successful merchant banker, Devonaci di Regula da Navola, who is the power behind the titular heads of state of Navola. Di Regulai rules by maintaining a calculated balance between greed and politics, alternately controlling and rewarding his many clients within Navola and in all the surrounding states. But despite Davico’s training in all the arts both physical (knife- and sword-fighting, equestrian, etc.) and mental/political (negotiation, the reading of faces and body language, the subtle acquisition of background information), he remains largely ignorant (or innocent) of the real breadth of knowledge necessary to step up to the challenge presented by his father—to rule Navola as Devonaci has done. Davico is a tragic hero: His honesty and authenticity is a liability in the world to which he has been born, and although he toys with rejecting his heritage, he is not strong enough to stand up to the culture within which he is embedded, nor to the expectations of his father.
Although I have always been a proponent of thorough world-building, I found myself overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the information Bacigalupi attempts to convey throughout this nearly 600-page tome. There are multiple information dumps—my least favorite parts of the book—and even in the course of the sometimes exciting and action-packed scenes, the “behind-the-hand” translations of the language, the explanations about the involved parties, and the setting of context weigh down the actual events to the point where I felt I was constantly digging for the meat of the story.
There is a fantasy element (introduced on the cover by the depiction of a dragon’s eye, an actual artifact Devonaci keeps on his desk in his library), but while its presence is strong in the parts of the story in which it is included, those are few and far between. Its significance to Davico is toyed with early on, and then mostly recedes until near the end of the book, almost past the point where anyone would care.
There is also a grimness to this story that may be disturbing to some; in addition to the mental manipulation, there is no escape from murder, rape, or graphic revenge amidst the noble families’ bloody pursuit of power. It’s not quite as overwhelming as, say, Jay Kristoff’s Nevernight Chronicles, but it has its moments of queasy-making horror.
The real fault I have to find with this book, however, is the complete lack of foreshadowing by anyone—the author, the publisher, Goodreads—that this is merely the opener for a continuing story! I began to realize, at about the 80 percent mark, that this would have to be the case, because the events took such a back seat to the development of the venue itself that there would be no time, unless it was criminally truncated, to resolve the hero’s situation and provide a satisfactory ending, and indeed I was right; it’s one of those cliffhangers where the hero lives to fight another day. It’s not abrupt, but the story is by no means at an end and, if it is, then I would have to say, What was the point of all that? Navola is too well written to give it a bad rating, but if, when perusing the teaser for the book on Goodreads, it had said “volume one,” I would have approached it with a completely different attitude that wouldn’t have left me feeling duped.
Maybe the lack of this was the author’s way of leaving himself an out; if the first book doesn’t go over so well, do you really want to invest the time in writing a sequel? But I am here to say, Paolo Bacigalupi, you owe us all the rest of the story, having made us endure through the laborious stick-upon-stone of the world you built to house it!
Funny story
I was headed towards a long, intense perusal of Paolo Bacigalupi’s latest, Navola, but just as I was about to open it, the library popped up in my email to tell me this Emily Henry book was now available for checkout, and I decided to prioritize a shorter, lighter read in the midst of ranting about the Republican convention and scolding Democrats trying to ditch Biden in a last-minute bid for the nonexistent “perfect” candidate. And I’m glad I did.
I was surprised by this one, because I have read four other Emily Henry books and enjoyed them all, but so far Funny Story is my favorite. It’s surprising because a bunch of die-hard Emily fans gave it a low rating and found many things to pick at about the protagonists, the set-up, the story, the writing…not a bestie for many.
I may have been prejudiced by a few things: Daphne, the protagonist, is a somewhat buttoned-up children’s librarian. Miles, the other MC, is scruffy, mischievous, but also deep and troubled, and dead sexy. I also liked the opening premise: Daphne is engaged to Peter, and the wedding is imminent. Peter has a lifelong best friend named Petra, who is dating/living with Miles. Everything is on track when Peter and Petra decide, at his bachelor’s party no less (to which she was, of course, invited), that they are in love with each other, and dump Daphne and Miles. Peter then gives Daphne a week to move out of “their” house, to which he holds exclusive title and, given her limited options as a poorly paid librarian (trust me, there is no other kind), she moves into the second bedroom of Miles’s apartment. So yeah, she’s now living with her ex-fiancé’s new fiancée’s ex…
The next inevitable step is that Daphne, motivated by panic (and by revenge fantasies), intimates to Peter that she and Miles are a couple, and then she has to confess this to Miles. He is surprisingly sanguine about this lie, and promptly starts taking couples selfies to post on Daphne’s social media. And…you can probably guess the rest, although it’s nicely written and plotted, with a fair number of roadblocks in various directions, and also features some wonderful side characters, such as Miles’s sister Julia and Daphne’s new friend Ashleigh, and explores familial issues that illustrate why the MCs are the way they are.
The title may have been misleading for some, hence the disappointment when the book didn’t turn out to be particularly humorous (although it has its moments). It alludes to the story that all couples have and, if it’s a good one, like to tell, about the moment they met. Peter was fond of recounting his with Daphne, but it turns out not to hold a candle to how Daphne and Miles start their relationship. I really liked this book, beginning to end; some of Henry’s others have lagged for me at key points, but this one kept me going, start to finish. Don’t listen to the naysayers on Goodreads—check it out!
Book pharmacy
The pandemic did something to our libraries from which I’m not sure they will ever recover completely: It made the in-person experience first precarious, then impossible, and then precarious again, as libraries first changed policies to prevent close contact, then completely closed their doors, and finally opened again only to discover that their patrons were either still being cautious or had completely changed their methods of book access and weren’t readily returning to their former habits.
My experience has been particularly acute, since, in the year after the formal lockdown when we were all mostly still staying away from any public place with more than half a dozen people in it, my disability began to ramp up to the point where making my weekly rounds to the market, the post office, the feed store, and the library became at first painful and then fairly impossible. The only time I go to the library nowadays is if I am booked to teach an art workshop at one of the local branches, and it takes me two hours to get ready and a double dose of Tylenol to weather climbing in and out of the car four times (leave-arrive, leave-arrive) and walking from the parking lot to the meeting room to set up for contour drawing or watercolor or T-shirt stenciling.
My previous library habits were filled with serendipity for my reading life; I had a particular routine that varied but usually included most of the same checkpoints. I would return my books and then look at the return shelves to see what “everyone else” had been reading and whether any of it looked intriguing to me. I would check the new books shelves and grab at least one or two unknown and untried authors. I would look to see if the latest volume in half a dozen mystery series I read had arrived, or if there was new science fiction, and I would visit the YA section for fantasy, because some of the best fantasy writers live there. And if all that failed to garner me at least half a dozen books to take home, I would stroll languidly up and down the aisles, looking for beloved authors, and would consider re-reading one of their books; but then I would also look around them on the shelves to see who I might discover because they were shelved close by. That’s how, while looking to see if there were any Rumer Goddens I hadn’t read, I noticed and borrowed the books of Robert Goddard. That’s how, while standing by the shelf containing Betty Smith and Dodie Smith, I found A Simple Plan, by Scott Smith. The books of Robert Heinlein led me to the Dune saga by Frank Herbert “next door.” In short, I can’t say enough about the expansion of one’s reading life through the luxury of browsing.
In my readers’ advisory class at UCLA, I used the book Reading Still Matters, by Catherine Sheldrick Ross, as one of the texts; Ross and her colleagues did multiple in-depth surveys and studies of thousands of readers to discover how they select, but I never realized, until I just now took the time to describe my own exact experience, that I almost perfectly characterize the habits of the successful readers she catalogues. Part of that book is also dedicated to the purpose of discovering what happens when a person’s own habits and methods fail them and they are flailing about trying to find a book. And now, I can relate to that, too….
These days, being so nearly housebound as I am, my choices suffer from a certain paucity. Although I belong to a couple of Facebook groups of avid readers, most of the time they all seem to be reading the same two dozen or so books, many of which are not to my taste. I have never been a peruser of the bestseller or award-winner lists in the newspaper or online, mostly because long experience has shown me that the former are not as good as their publisher’s blurbs declare, while the latter have won awards simply because some esoteric bunch of people decided they should, and we apparently have little in common! So without my library routine, I struggle to find what I want, just as much as any more naive reader with fewer developed resources. I wasn’t conscious of this until my annual Goodreads challenge (how many books you read in a year) began to number fewer and fewer books, mostly because I am not finding the ones that would hold my attention and keep me reading on a continuous basis. One year, while working full-time (at the library) with a long commute, I nonetheless managed to clock more than 150 books; but last year I struggled to complete 80, despite being retired and mostly at loose ends. Part of it, of course, is a certain lack of concentration that comes with my physical challenges, but I blame most of it on the functional lack of choice.
Being a readers’ advisor carries a certain amount of responsibility with it to keep up with current literary output while having a deep base of older choices on which to fall back, and I confess that I’m not as good at it as I have been in the past. But I still manage, in the Facebook reading groups (and sometimes on Goodreads) to find the books people want, if they give the slightest bit of personal information that would lead me to their preferences. And that brings me to the book I am currently reading (at last! you may be exclaiming with relief), which is called Found in a Bookshop, by Stephanie Butland, and which is resonating so closely with certain parts of my own personal experience that I am finding it positively cathartic.
I didn’t know, until I had already reached chapter 11, that it is actually a sequel to Butland’s book The Lost for Words Bookshop. But several Goodreads reviewers said you could read the second as a stand-alone, and I somehow couldn’t bring myself to stop, once started, so I’ll get to the first one when I am done with the second. (EDITED TO ADD: I apparently did read the first book, back in 2018, and gave it five stars. I didn’t review it here, since I hadn’t yet started this blog, and I don’t remember a thing about it! That’s kinda scary….)
A couple of Goodreads reviewers groused about the book being set during the Covid lockdown (“outdated” said one, while the other elaborated: “Boring. Too many characters. Hate Covid books. Could do without the author’s opinions. Glad I only spent 99 cents.”) but that was precisely what I loved most about it. Butland so perfectly captures the feeling of being isolated from everyone, from standing on one side of a door but not allowed to open it, the nervous retreat from other people when encountering them in public places, the quiet of the streets with nothing but essential traffic…it brought the whole thing back with complete clarity. I suppose some people wouldn’t want to experience that again, and while I didn’t precisely crave it, I found it comforting, in a way, to recognize that this author’s experience (and that of her characters) so perfectly echoed my own.
The description of the pervasive quiet of the bookshop without any of its customers and the nervousness of its proprietor and her employees as the lockdown went from weeks to months with no sign of abatement was evocative and painful. The vignettes of the various people who were tenuously connected through their previous status as customers of the bookshop were likewise poignant and familiar. But the thing that really got me, in the end, was that this was a story not just about Covid but about readers’ advisory. At some point, after one long-time patron mails a check and requests that the bookshop send her books each week—leaving the selection up to the staff—the owner, Loveday Carew, decides that she will enlist her employee, Kelly, to craft more of a presence on social media and then to advertise their services as a “book pharmacy.” Basically, they tell the town of York that they will be happy to select books for people who aren’t sure what it is they want or need, a sort of reading prescription, and either deliver them to their porch via bicycle, make them available for pickup, or send them in the post. And then the emails and letters start to arrive, some requesting specific genres or types of reading but others simply describing the feeling the reader wishes to experience and hoping the bookshop staff can figure out what book will produce that. The books couldn’t cure Covid, but they could do something about fear, boredom, loneliness, and the desire for escape. It was like this author took my favorite area of study—and my life’s preferred work—and laid it all out on the pages of her book.
In addition to all of this synchronicity with my own life’s experience, I love that in the “prescriptions” the bookshop staff write out for their customers I discovered at least a dozen intriguing titles with which I was unfamiliar, and which I promptly noted and added to my Goodreads “want to read” list. After doubling back to peruse the first book in this duology, I can scarcely wait to explore that extra list of smart suggestions from an author who has obviously done her homework. Great work, Ms. Butland!
Retrograde
The blurb for this book describes it as “funny and heartfelt.” It’s also supposed to be a romance about a woman who writes romances for a living and wants to open a romance-only bookstore with her two best friends, also authors. So you would think I would love it, or at least find it charming and/or germane to my interests. I’m beginning to think all the books I want to read have banded together to evade me on purpose, leaving me with a bunch of hopeful choices that don’t quite pan out.
Penelope in Retrograde, by Brooke Abrams, isn’t a bad book, and I didn’t hate it; but it’s too slight to make much of an impression. It’s also annoying in some specific ways. I feel like the author is trying too hard to include all the romance memes, from the meet-cute to the friends-to-enemies-to-friends, and throwing in a conflicted familial situation to spice it all up—none of which turns out to be satisfying.
The main character, Penelope (Penny) has been, not exactly estranged from her family, but out of regular contact for about a decade. Her father is a workaholic businessman in finance; her twin, Phoebe, graduated with honors from college and works in his firm; and Penny has always been the odd one out. Phoebe is successful, Phoebe has a relationship, Phoebe lives close to her parents and sees them on a regular basis, while Penny lives more than half the state of California away from them, and writes romance novels. She is so insecure about her lack of acceptance from her family (her mother wants her to dress better and get a husband and maybe have some kids) that she hasn’t even told them the pen name she uses to write her books.
Once upon a time, Penny was briefly married to Smith, with whom she grew up. She had a better relationship with his family than she does with hers, and mourns the loss of them more than the marriage. The present-day setting of the book is the Thanksgiving holiday, for which Penny is finally returning home after 10 years of avoiding every family gathering. And why is she gracing them with her presence? She needs money to open her bookstore. This immediately made me think poorly of her, since the only reason she’s willing to connect again is to get the funding.
Karma trips her up when she phones for a rideshare from the airport and ends up sharing the Úber with her ex, Smith, who is also returning home to spend the holiday with his sister. Penny then discovers two things: Her parents have invited a young and handsome colleague from her father’s company to dinner, because they never give up matchmaking (even after 10 years of no contact?), and Smith is dating someone new. So Penny immediately decides it’s a good idea for Martin, the set-up guy, to pretend to be her boyfriend. The problem is, her whole family knows he’s not, so he has to convince Smith without revealing what he’s doing in front of her family. The whole thing is cloyingly cute. (Sorry, that was all a little spoiler-y.)
Basically, I agreed with one Goodreads reviewer who said that the story tries way too hard to be funny. Penny’s compulsive avoidance of any genuine conversational moment by turning everything into a joke is grating, while the ride-share scene stretches out forever and is patently silly. Penny’s narrative paints her as the victim of her family’s rigid expectations, but her own behavior shows her up as kind of selfish, and definitely as tone-deaf to their needs as she feels they are to hers. And everybody fights nonstop, which is likewise wearing.
The other thing about this story is that it’s so, so easy. Martin immediately falls in with her plans; Smith turns out not to be plotting what she thinks he is; her father has changed drastically in completely implausible ways while her mother has remained distressingly static; and Nana Rosie as the comic relief is too, too coy. And even though her sister is justifiably irate at how Penny is constantly stealing her thunder, forgiveness also comes easily. Despite Penny raging about how they are all hostile to her, everybody cooperates with hardly a whimper, and then when a stressful life event occurs, Penny transforms into someone else and we have a qualified HEA like all good romance novels. I was surprised when I discovered I had already turned the last page, because I kept expecting things to become, well, more. The desire for more seems to be the one bell I keep ringing lately.
Can anybody recommend something to me that will generate some genuine feelings of joy when I read it?
Giving up Cheetos
If you read only my last couple of posts, you would conclude that I am an overly critical nonreader rather than a lover of books who wants to share my experiences! I assure you that’s not the case, but…hmm.
Last year I read The Housemaid and The Housemaid’s Secret, by Freida McFadden, and likened them to Cheetos: Addictive and entertaining but not in any way subtle or nutritionally redemptive. At the conclusion of my review of the two books, I commented that I was looking forward to book #3 in the junk food franchise. The Housemaid is Watching released a couple of weeks ago, on June 11th, and somehow there was an E-book copy available from my library’s catalog (maybe that should have seemed more revelatory), so I checked it out and got ready to pick up Millie’s story the minute I was done with Veridian’s and with Walt’s (see last two blog posts).
I went to Goodreads and read the synopsis, which places us 11 years after the activities of book #2; Millie has married Enzo and they have a couple of kids, and after scraping and saving for years they have managed to buy a house in a somewhat snooty suburban neighborhood. Millie is thrilled to have finally achieved this pinnacle, but soon, inevitably, things begin to go wrong, starting with weird neighbors, children acting out, shady/skeezy behavior from her husband…in other words, typical Millie World.
I was all set to start indulging in a feast of salty orange puffery when I paused to read some reviews. The first one was a five, but the rest…well…some adjectives included “underwhelming,” “unbelievable,” “messy,” “predictable”…. As a result, what this turns out to be is not a review but a renunciation of a certain level of junk food. Some of the complaints served to remind me of the frankly unbelievable plot points from the previous book and my reaction to them, and I decided to follow my instincts with reading the way I have learned to with actual food: Seek out something that has both substance and the flavor factor—in other words, get the yummy potato chips that are kettle-cooked in the good oil and are doused in half the salt, and forego the fake cheesy stuff that will tantalize but not satisfy.
I guess I now have a new category: Instead of “DNF” for “Did Not Finish,” it’s “DNS” for “Did Not Start.” It won’t count for my Goodreads total for the year, unfortunately. Now to scope out my next book with high hopes for a good report….
Colonel Custard…
On the plains of Montana, with a Remington…
I couldn’t resist! One of the reviewers on Goodreads called it “Custard’s Last Stand” (without irony), and the vision of a Clue board swam through my mind….
I am, of course, talking about Craig Johnson’s 16th book in his Walt Longmire series, in which Walt is called in to explore a possible art heist of the famous painting Custer’s Last Fight, by Casilly Adams, which was supposedly lost in a fire in 1946, although a lithograph copy of that painting was the most reproduced print of the 19th and 20th centuries.
I was actually pleased by the prospect of a somewhat less fraught plot for a Longmire novel, given the bad reaction I had to #14 (Depth of Winter) and my so-so response to #15 (Land of Wolves). I felt like Johnson betrayed all the essential ideals of the character in #14, and that the following book was a confusing mess because of the fallout in Walt’s life from his previous experiences, so I was hoping this one would bring us back to “normal” Longmire life. I also, of course, love reading any book that’s about painting. I hadn’t realized, until a friend mentioned reading the latest in this series, that I am actually four books behind, Walt’s story having progressed to #20, which just came out last month, so I have some catching up to do. And whether I chose to do so hinged on this book, Next to Last Stand.
At this moment the book is looking like my last stand with this series. I opened it up and started reading, and the initial scene in which we meet the inhabitants of the Wyoming Home for Soldiers & Sailors was such a disaster that I closed the book again and put it in my “abandoned for now” category on Goodreads. I was astonished by this, because one thing Craig Johnson has always been good at is carefully crafting the voices of his characters so that they are distinctive and memorable. The extended exchange between the group of veterans sitting in their wheelchairs out by the highway was not only stilted and hard to believe as an actual conversation, but each person’s dialogue jumped back and forth between formal and informal English within the same sentence, with the effect of jerking the reader out of the flow of the story with every jarring transition. I know that to some, grammar issues will sound like a ridiculous reason for not reading a book, but I honestly couldn’t get past this scene into the story.
Has Johnson changed editors? Has he quit vetting his own books as extensively? Has he gotten bored and lost his motivation? I can’t say, but this is the third book of his I have found problematic. In writing circles, the Rule of Three is a storytelling principle that suggests people better understand concepts, situations, and ideas in groups of three. But for me, it works equally to say that if you are disappointed by a storyteller three times in a row, it’s time to move on. I’m sad to do so, but I’ll have to find out about the fate of this painting some other way.
(To my friends who also read this series, am I missing out? Should I change my mind? Speak up if you have a different perspective!)
Heists and capers
I am a big fan of heist plots, particularly if they are art-related. When I was a teen librarian I enjoyed the Ally Carter Heist Society books, and really liked the crew and their capers portrayed by Leigh Bardugo in the Six of Crows duology. One of my favorite fantasies is the Queen’s Thief series by Megan Whalen Turner, and I also thoroughly enjoy more mainstream heist books like The Great Train Robbery, by Michael Crichton, or The Lock Artist, by Steve Hamilton, which includes the ideal combination of safe-cracking and the creation of graphic novels. I also enjoy all the movies in this sub-genre, such as The Italian Job, The Thomas Crown Affair, Tower Heist, Baby Driver, and the Ocean franchise. And I just finished binge-watching the TV series White Collar, which follows a thief and forger who works with the FBI in order to achieve a limited amount of freedom (he’s not in jail, but wears an anklet that limits his radius to two square miles of New York City). So when I saw that one of last week’s Amazon Kindle First Reads was an art forgery mystery, I enthusiastically grabbed Veridian Sterling Fakes It, by Jennifer Gooch Hummer.
I won’t say that I was disappointed; it was sufficiently populated with interesting characters and situations and art-related historical facts that I read it with a certain amount of pleasure. But ultimately the book never really figured out what it wanted to be, and this lack of definitive direction made it a somewhat meandering and diffuse story with a lot of implausible elements and some clichés I could have done without. There are multiple different directions in which the author takes a few steps and then draws back instead of fully committing, which proves to be a frustrating narrative to read.
Veridian Sterling is a recent grad from the Rhode Island School of Design, with the typical hopes of everyone who excels in their art school classes and hopes that will translate into finding a gallery to display their work, interest (and sales) from the world of art aficionados, making a name for themselves…. And, like most art school grads, she quickly discovers that none of that is going to be forthcoming and that if she wants a place to live and food on her plate, she’d better find a “day job” to sustain her while she works on the rest of the dream. Veri has a job in the beginning at a laundromat/dry cleaners, but when she loses that she takes a position as an assistant at an art gallery that has rejected her paintings. The owner happens to be a former friend and roommate of Veri’s mother’s, when her mother was herself at RISD, and she is all too obviously modeled on Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada but without the icy demeanor and impeccable taste or, in fact, any redeeming qualities whatsoever. I found this character to be unnecessarily shrill and unlikeable and wished the author had chosen a different option.
We get a lot of stuff about working in the gallery and living her life, meeting an intriguing guy (the driver for a wealthy art dealer who visits the gallery regularly), discovering things she didn’t know about her mother, and various interactions with her best friend, all of which are overlaid with a level of stress that should be building up to something but takes an awfully long time to do so. By the time we finally get to the crux of the story (the mystery, the art crimes, the revelations), we’re just a teensy bit exhausted by the angst and the minutiae. Said plot point doesn’t even arrive until well past halfway through the book, and turns out not to be much of a mystery. While there was a build-up to what should have been the high drama, it felt like the stress level remained almost constant throughout, which did a big disservice to the revelatory bits.
In fact, while reading this book I was constantly reminded of one with a somewhat similar plot that I read and thoroughly enjoyed a few years back (in fact, I liked it enough to read it three times in six years!), so I’ll put in a plug for that one here. It’s The Art Forger, by Barbara A. Shapiro (see my review by clicking the title link), and that author achieved what I think this one was hoping to accomplish, by smoothly combining the multiple levels of mystery, art, and moral dilemma. One of the mistakes I think Hummer made was in attempting to include the slightly goofy humor and irony of such books as Finlay Donovan Is Killing It, by Elle Cosimano, but in trying to be all things to all readers, she couldn’t successfully pull together all the elements to make it work. So if you want a fairly lightweight version of the art forgery world, read this book; if you’d prefer an in-depth exploration of the same theme, go for Shapiro’s instead.
Finally, Christopher Booker famously made the case in 2004 for there being only seven basic narrative plots in all of storytelling and, having just finished watching White Collar, I do wonder whether part of this plot was a result of that coincidental symmetry or else this author did some binge-watching of her own….
Darlings
The title of this book is pretty good at pointing up the false affection shown to three foster children by a deeply narcissistic sociopath masquerading as a loving foster mother. I don’t have a lot to say about this book; I enjoyed it less than my favorite of Sally Hepworth’s (that would be The Good Sister) and more than my least favorite (The Mother-in-Law), so it falls somewhere in the middle with the others of hers I have read (three to date).
I did like the format Hepworth chose, in which we get the alternating point of view of each of the three foster sisters—Jessica, Alicia, and Norah—in adulthood and also in childhood (present and past). I didn’t care much for the psychiatrist session segments of the book, mostly because I was so uncomfortable with the way she wrote the therapist’s part (he was so repellent!), but it did render a little more intrigue as the story went on. I felt like the murder mystery was a bit generic—I mean, after we get an idea of who Miss Fairchild (the foster mother) is underneath her sugary sweet façade, it’s hard to believe any red herrings about who could have been responsible for the body buried under the house (that’s a minor spoiler, we find out about the body almost immediately). But the thought that the killer (if there is one) might get away with it definitely carried the suspense further, a good move on the author’s part.
I think part of the reason I didn’t love this book, apart from it feeling obvious in some respects, is that I didn’t feel a strong connection to at least one of the foster children (which turned out to have some basis in reality). I won’t say which one, because that would spoil things further. But it was a fairly engrossing read, and I think most people would find it a quite satisfying example of relationship fiction with a suspense twist. It also points up the ongoing problem of the way fostering is handled and the many opportunities for abuse of that system, which I appreciate.
Three stars out of five for me. But you might like it better.
Piglet
When they talk about reading this book, people have a lot to say about misogyny, about agency, about maintaining façades, but not so much about the thing that struck me, something pretty literal about the whole plot as it relates to the main character: People are failing her, life is failing her, and she is failing herself because she is trying to make and keep herself small.
A few people on Goodreads reacted negatively to this book as just another eating disorder saga. I didn’t read it like that at all. Yes, she has an intense relationship with food, but if everything else were copacetic, that would be considered normal—she’s a cookbook editor and a foodie, so what? But everything else isn’t right in Piglet’s life (imagine, for instance, going through life being called “Piglet” by all your loved ones!), and the common denominator is that she’s too big for the life she has been seeking.
She’s too big for the lower-middle-class background into which her parents and sister expect her to continue to fit herself; she’s too big for the upper-class environment to which she aspires—too flamboyant, too expressive, too filled with emotions. She’s too big to fit into the expectations of her fiancé, who wants her to act appropriately despite his own bad behavior. She’s too big physically—tall, awkward, a little overweight. And everyone faults her for this, and keeps encouraging her to cram herself into roles, relationships, corsets, dresses, mindsets, all of which goes against her nature. But it takes her just a little bit too long to figure out that none of the behavior she is forcing upon herself will fill up her hunger for love, for acceptance, for recognition. So she makes a series of disastrous decisions that feel inevitable in the moment, until they don’t and she rebels.
She has one voice of reason in all of this—her pregnant maid of honor, Margo, who ends up going into labor early and has to miss the wedding, but who persists in telling Piglet that she deserves more. Piglet doesn’t listen, but when she upends everything, Margo is the one she seeks out.
This is being touted as literary fiction, and I wouldn’t quite go there, but…the author is immensely skillful in the way she gets the reader to think about big-picture decisions by dwelling on seemingly incidental conversations and descriptions of food—choosing it, preparing it, eating it. She is also really good at creating essentially unlikeable characters and getting you to care about them. The book tells a story that is in one way small in scope, but in another is about a very big question: What’s the point? What do we want? In certain moments I felt an overwhelming impatience with Pippa’s choices (yes, that’s her real name)—or lack of them—but I have to confess that I mostly loved this book and found it as satisfying as one of the meals she makes during the course of the story.
Addendum: I found it fascinating that this novel was written by Lottie Hazell in conjunction with, and inspired by, getting her Ph.D. in Creative Writing, with a focus on food-writing in twenty-first-century fiction. I would definitely read another book by this author.
Books to TV (or movie)
I am usually quite critical of how a favorite book is translated to television or movie form, and in the past I would most likely have favored the book over the visual version almost every time. But in this day of bountiful offerings on a dozen pay channels, the properties are bought and transformed at such a rapid rate that I have found myself getting to know stories and characters on my television screen ahead of reading their origin stories, and in some cases I have to confess that I have enjoyed them far more than I later did the books.
Some for-instances: The writing is sharper and more clever in Shonda Rimes’s Bridgerton than in the books, so much so that I didn’t even finish reading the first book. The racial themes and the character motivations depicted in the Hulu production of Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere were less enigmatic and more relateable than in the written version. And although I read it first and gave five stars to Liane Moriarty’s suspenseful and engaging Big Little Lies, I equally loved the HBO version for the sheer star power represented and how well they pulled the whole thing off.
I also have to give exceedingly belated and somewhat awed credit to the team of Denis Villeneuve, John Spaihts, and Eric Roth (co-writers) and Villeneuve again as the director of the new version of Dune. After suffering through David Lynch’s 1984 version and Sci-Fi Channel’s three-part miniseries in 2000, I found myself devoutly hoping that no one else would try to take on the depiction of this classic on film or television, but the new one feels, finally, like the intentions of Frank Herbert have been realized.
This all brings me to my latest book-vs.-television experience, which has been quite a bit bumpier and more jarring than anything I have yet mentioned.
I started watching the ABC TV show Will Trent with its premier episode, and immediately fell in love with the protagonist, his dog, and the rest of the excellent cast. I didn’t even realize, until near the end of Season Two, that the material came from a series of novels by author Karin Slaughter; the minute the season ended I decided I would spend the time until Season Three reading the original stories. And what a shock it was….
First of all, let me say what things are similar about the series. Will Trent and Angie Polaski grew up as lifelong friends in the foster child system. Will now works for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI), while Angie is a police officer (Vice) for Atlanta PD. Will’s boss is named Amanda, and she knows a lot about him. Her secretary’s name is Caroline. There is a police officer named Michael Ormewood. And there is a cheeky chihuahua named Betty, an adorable but somewhat ludicrous pet for Will. And…that’s pretty much it.
In the TV series, Will is short, compactly built, and Latino. In the books, Will is tall, blond, and blue-eyed, with significant facial scarring. In the TV series, Angie is tough on the surface but exceedingly vulnerable not too far beneath; she is struggling desperately to stay clean from a severe drug habit, and is involved with Will in a sexual relationship that occasionally verges on emotional. In the book, Angie is tough almost through and through, with a tiny bit of her left open to caring for her friend Will; they “broke up” almost two years ago, because Angie knows she’s not good for him and needs to leave him alone if he’s ever to achieve happiness with someone else. On TV, Will is almost immediately paired with Faith Mitchell as his new partner, while in the books she is still on the horizon by the end of book #1. On TV, Michael Ormewood is Angie’s partner on the police force and also works frequently with Will. He’s not entirely likeable, being reckless and kind of a chauvinist, but he’s basically not a bad guy. In the books, well, that would be a spoiler, but Ormewood isn’t who he seems. He’s also short, compact, and dark-complected in the books, while he’s tall, blond, and blue-eyed in the TV show—the exact opposite of the Will-to-Will transition! The only consistent character between the two mediums is Betty.
After having loved the TV show so much, I struggled for the first third of the book with the written versions of these characters. I came to terms most quickly with the character of Will, because despite the physical differences, the inside person is consistent, from the crippling guilt to the dyslexia to the brilliant insights, and the outside Wills both wear three-piece suits as armor. But I mourned the loss of the vulnerable friend/lover Angie, and when I read in the afterword that there is a “legitimate” love interest for Will starting with book #2, I wasn’t sure I wanted to continue. As for Ormewood…I don’t know how I can look at TV Michael the same after reading about Book Michael. By the end of Triptych I had subconsciously decided that it was worth continuing with Slaughter’s written version, but I honestly don’t think I’ll ever find these people either as likeable or as engrossing as the TV characters, and that’s a real departure for me!
Someone in my “Friends and Fiction” Facebook group told me that I should go back and read the series Slaughter wrote before she arrived at the first Will Trent book in order to thoroughly understand the back story; perhaps I will do that and see where it gets me.
The Book Adept 