Faint praise
The phrase “damning with faint praise” (from a poem by Alexander Pope) keeps coming to mind as I think about the book The 100 Years of Lenni and Margot, by Marianne Cronin. But I think what my reaction to this book really suffers from is damning from excessive praise!
It’s just another lesson to me to go my own way when I pick things to read instead of following the popularity contest of a narrow number of books that “everyone” on Facebook is reading and about which they are raving.
I did love the opening lines, in which Lenni hears the word “Terminal” (in reference to her condition, from her doctors and nurses in the hospital in which she now lives) but instead pictures an airline terminal, where she is awaiting imminent departure on a flight to…somewhere.
I also liked Lenni’s narrative about the life she was living in that hospital, with its boredom occasionally alleviated by an interesting person (like an old woman wearing a purple bathrobe and clinging to the side of a trash bin while trying to reach something within its depths, or a priest who doesn’t know what to make of Lenni and her questions). But once Lenni, the 17-year-old terminal patient, and Margo, her 83-year-old friend, met and became friends, I felt the focus moved so much more toward Margo that further character development of Lenni was suspended until near the end of the book, to its detriment.
As a painter, I loved the concept that the pair came up with as a project for their art class. Added together, their ages (17 + 83) made 100, a nice round number on which to base a goal, which they do:
So, we will paint a picture for every year we have been alive. One hundred paintings for one hundred years. And even if they all end up in the bin, the cleaner who has to put them there will think, Hey, that’s a lot of paintings. And we will have told our story, scratching out one hundred pictures intended to say: Lenni and Margot were here.
As an artist, I wish there had been more detail about the individual paintings. They were supposedly each based on an event from one year in the life of each person, but the stories themselves took precedence and there were mere glimpses of the art, not the full descriptions they deserved as the central theme! I also felt like the narrative kept pulling and pushing between the two characters while giving Margot the advantage, with the result that I never felt fully engaged and emotionally invested like all the other people who loved this book seemed to be. I felt like too much importance was given to Lenni’s interactions with Father Arthur, the hospital priest, and too little to her own personal story; and Margot’s tales were all over the map—as they would be covering an 83-year span—taking too much away from the present-day events.
The language was lovely, and there was a lot to like about the book, but it didn’t wow me the way I expected. On to the next….
Back to Ardnakelty
After weeks or months of reading nothing but formulaic genre fiction—some of it quite entertaining but none of it particularly special—I forgot what it’s like to suck up some genuine literary prose. While reading The Hunter, I was reminded that Tana French’s characters are so immediate and solid that they jump off the page at you—their physicality, their mannerisms, their patterns of speech, their inner thoughts, all draw such a finely tuned picture of who they are that you are right there inhabiting the story alongside them. And not just the characters, but the setting, the look and feel of the natural world she portrays, lets you perceive the particular texture of the dirt under your bare feet and the golden-green hills silhouetted against the horizon.
The Hunter is the second of her books set in the village of Ardnakelty in the west of Ireland and centered around the American transplant, Cal Hooper, and the local teenager, Trey Reddy, with whom he has bonded. And as with its predecessor (The Searcher), French is telling a story that, while it has a mystery of sorts at its heart, is more a tale of people, of community, of life-changing choices.
In the first book, Hooper, a former Chicago detective, had recently moved to this small community and started making it his home, although he will always be an outsider to its provincial inhabitants. But it’s now two years on, and Cal has settled more deeply into his role as a citizen of Ardnakelty, in a relationship with local woman Lena and still serving as a foster father of sorts to Trey Reddy. He and Trey have built up a nicely profitable woodworking business, repairing old and building new furniture for the locals, and their future seems like clear sailing until Trey’s wayward father Johnny shows up, bringing along an Englishman whose ostensible purpose is the exploration of his Irish roots. But Johnny Reddy is an opportunist bent on exploiting the easy advantage, and his scheme to find gold in the townland sets everyone at odds and leads Trey astray as she tries to cope with the fallout from her father’s return.
Johnny Reddy has always struck Cal as a type he’s encountered before: the guy who operates by sauntering into a new place, announcing himself as whatever seems likely to come in handy, and seeing how much he can get out of that costume before it wears too thin to cover him up any longer.
Trey, two years older, has neither forgiven nor forgotten the unidentified villagers’ role in the disappearance of her brother, Brendan, and thoughts of revenge smolder close under the surface of her thoughts. Johnny’s scheming and double-dealing with the tourist Englishman and the participation of the men of Ardnakelty give her what she sees as the perfect opportunity to get back at them, but there are events, intentions, and emotional currents she’s too young and too fixated on her goal to suss out for herself. It’s left to Cal and Lena to help her walk a perilously narrow path without falling off an unanticipated cliff.
In my review of the first book, I called it subtle, lovely, and special, and this continuation is no less nuanced and intriguing. But you have to be able to sufficiently immerse yourself in that subtlety in order to appreciate it. French’s books always get radically opposite reviews from readers, with some lauding their slow burn, intricate plots, and gorgeous prose while others liken reading them to watching paint dry! I am obviously of the former opinion, loving every small shift of expression and change of attitude and tone by each character and holding my breath to see which way the wind will blow next. You will have to decide for yourself where you land. But if you enjoy the work of such writers as Donna Tartt, Kate Morton, and Diane Setterfield, give this book (and its predecessor) a try. There are rumors of a third book to round this out into a trilogy, and I say, Bring it on!
Jakarta farce
I just finished reading The Good, the Bad, and the Aunties, the third book in the series by Jesse Q. Sutanto, and I have to say I am glad the trilogy ends here. Again, as in the second book, it wasn’t bad…but it didn’t make it to great either. The book suffers from the droning extended inner dialogue of its main character, Meddy, who is a mass of frets and worries about everything under the sun, with no real ideas of her own for how to combat them. She has been dominated her whole life by her Ma and her four aunties, and while one would hope to see some evolution from the first book to the third—particularly because during that timespan she has reconnected with her long-lost love, gotten married, and killed and disposed of at least two people—she’s essentially the same self-deprecating bundle of nerves we met on page one of the first book.
Similarly, the aunties are characterized each by their one or two distinguishing qualities, and never expand into fully fleshed-out human beings. Big Aunt is dictatorial and imposing, Second Aunt is sly and competitive, Ma is loud and bossy, and Fourth Aunt, the most cosmopolitan of the women, fancies herself as the coolest (she is a singer) and comes across as disdainful and dismissive. They have a few wee moments, here and there, of dropping out of character to become more humanized, but the overall picture hasn’t changed.
Nathan is a nice addition to the family, now that we are past the wedding, but his personality is mainly filtered to us through Meddy’s astonishment at how well he is getting along with her crazy family, and aside from some random observations by Meddy on the excellence of his abs, is likewise kind of faceless
The premise of this one is that Meddy and Nathan, after an extended honeymoon tour around Europe, have met up with the aunties in Jakarta to spend Chinese New Year with the Indonesian side of the family, which is vast and lively and shares many of the qualities we have come to expect from the aunties themselves—overly concerned with things like good manners, saving face, being extravagantly hospitable, and so on. I did enjoy the group scene of them all celebrating together, the cousins and children bonding over food and fun and much eye-rolling over the burden of dealing with the older generation. But this isn’t enough to carry the rather silly plot, and all too soon it’s back to the aunties doing the wrong thing in the clutch and Meddy having to figure out how to save the day despite her crippling anxiety and low self-esteem.
At the big celebration, an old beau of Second Aunt’s shows up to reclaim her affection, bearing extravagant gifts. “Red envelopes” are given out to the children—packets of cash that are traditional gifts for the new year—but there is one packet amongst them that was intended for someone else entirely (a business associate of the beau’s) but got mistakenly gifted to who knows who in the confusion of the celebration. Now those in the know (the beau, the aunties, and Meddy and Nathan) have to figure out who has it, get it back, and give it to the business rival to avoid dire consequences. But, as is usual with this cast of characters, things go typically awry and get ever more complicated.
Maybe I’m just in a weird mood—not the one to sufficiently appreciate this book—since many people gave it four and five stars. I found it more stressful than enjoyably chaotic, and was glad when it was over. I vastly preferred her stand-alone book that I read a few weeks ago, and hope she writes more like that one.
California Bear
I posted on author Duane Swierczynski‘s Facebook page this week that I thought it highly suspect that this “Would you prefer to be lost in the woods with a man or a bear?” online meme took root just as his new book came out. In return, I only received a laughing emoji, so I’m not entirely convinced he didn’t plan the whole thing, LOL.
The male characters in this book would certainly make women tend to choose the real bear over any of them as a preferred companion. We have an opportunistic, venal ex-LAPD cop; another man convicted of murder who is out of prison after just a few years due to a technicality that overthrew his sentence; a dormant but still terrifying serial killer; at least one copycat; and a Hollywood producer; and it’s hard to say in the beginning which of them is the worst!
The book is a send-up of the true-crime franchise, particularly the television biopics that exploit the circumstances of people’s worst days ever by giving a voice to killers, rapists, and the like. The basic, initially somewhat confusing story is that Cato Hightower, a retired cop, has worked hard to get Jack “Killer” Queen out of prison because he wants a piece of the payoff Queen will receive for supposedly being wrongly convicted. But Hightower also has a vision of Jack helping him with ongoing “projects,” one of which is running down the serial killer known as the California Bear and blackmailing him to keep his name out of the spotlight. Ironically, however, the Bear (along with a few other people) is eager to get credit for his past reign of terror, over now for about 40 years, by working with a Hollywood producer named David Peterson to make a true crime feature with a big payoff.
The significant women “actors” are two: Hightower’s wife, Jeanie, who has turned her genealogy research into a business and in the process winkled out the identity of the California Bear; and Jack’s daughter, Mathilda Finnerty, who has just been diagnosed with a debilitating form of leukemia that keeps her hospital-bound but fails to dim her incisive mind as she seeks to prove her father’s innocence and also figure out the whole California Bear conundrum.
There’s plenty of exciting action in this book, although the switches from narrator to narrator prove occasionally confusing, especially when the story of the Bear takes an unexpected turn. But the charismatic characters of Mathilda and her anxious, guilt-ridden father carry the story and keep interest up to the end.
I promised a personal story to go along with this review, so here it is: Duane Swierczynski and his family were patrons at Burbank Public Library when I worked there as teen librarian from 2008 to 2019, and his two children participated in my teen programs. I was introduced to his books by one of my co-workers, who was a big fan, and we read his excellent book Canary in my high school book club. Later on, when I was teaching Readers’ Advisory and Young Adult Literature classes at UCLA in the masters program for librarians, I invited Duane to be a guest speaker, so I got to know him a little.
But the story involves the co-worker who was a major Swierczynski fan; when he was about to retire, I was racking my brain trying to think of a gift I could give him at his going-away party, and lit on the idea of contacting Duane to see if I could get an autographed book or poster or something to give him. Duane didn’t have anything lying around that would work, so instead he generously and surprisingly suggested that he could name a character after my friend in the book he was currently writing, and I enthusiastically accepted. Then I interviewed Duane about significant elements and settings in the book, and I made my co-worker a certificate to announce my gift to him, which was actually a gift from Duane! Here is the certificate:
And that is how the true-crime producer in California Bear was christened David Peterson! He’s a bit younger and better dressed, but talks almost as much as the real David, and it was really fun to read the book, knowing the back story.
There is another, sadder back story that involves Duane’s daughter, Evie, the model for the character of Mathilda, but I’ll let you discover that one for yourself by reading the book (and the afterword).
Weirdly, just a couple of weeks before I started reading this book I saw a notice on Facebook on the “Lost Angeles” page that Patrick’s Roadhouse, a major setting in the book, had closed; reopening is subject to the negotiation of a new lease, which depends on an initiative by a former customer to raise $250K through a GoFundMe to pay back rent (they got behind during Covid) and do some renovations. They have raised more than $70K so far; if you’d like to contribute to bring back this 50-year icon on the Santa Monica coast, here’s a link to the fundraiser:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-save-patricks-roadhouse-a-california-icon
Mystery?
This weekend I decided to read A Drink Before the War, the first book in Dennis Lehane’s Kenzie/Gennaro mystery series, and I admit my feelings about it are mixed. On the one hand, the guy can write—I knew this about him from reading a couple of his stand-alones, and in this one he really paints a vivid picture of both characters and environs, with an atmosphere that has all the gritty feel of the streets of Southie in Boston that we have seen in the movies.
On the other hand, the mystery wasn’t much, it was resolved a little too easily, and everybody in this book was so dark and dour that it was hard to fight against the mood seeping into my daily life. It may account for why I haven’t done much of anything during the past couple of days—a depressed mood makes for lethargic behavior.
I don’t want to jump too quickly to the conclusion, however, that this series (and this writer) are not for me; if I had stopped, for instance, with Still Life, the first book in Louise Penny’s Armand Gamache tales, I would have missed out on a lot, but that first volume was among the worst three in the entire series of 19 and counting.
I liked the main characters of Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro quite a lot—enough to want to know what happens to them next. But the story of corrupt politicians, depraved drug lords and their street gangs, and the misery and death that both sides bring to almost everyone around them was a little too much for me. You couldn’t call this noir, since that subgenre’s protagonists have nothing of the hero about them, which isn’t true of Kenzie and Gennaro. But the protagonists of noir are victims, suspects, or perpetrators, and the two private detectives featured here also share those aspects in the course of this story. They are gloomy, they are pessimistic, and there isn’t much that’s pretty about their lives. Still, there is definitely a good-guy/bad-guy divide here that has the pair on the right side, mostly.
To compound my mood, the next book on my list (just arrived on my Kindle from the library) is California Bear, the brand-new book from Duane Swierczynski, who is known for his noirish way with a plotline. I do, however, have an upbeat, kind of funny story that goes with that book (I’ll tell you all about it when I write the review), so that may salvage my attitude going into that one.
Finlay’s road trip
I was excited to get the notice from the library that Finlay Donovan Rolls the Dice, the latest in the series by Elle Cosimano, had landed on my Kindle this week. The overwrought novelist-turned-criminal’s story continues right from where Book #3—Finlay Donovan Jumps the Gun—left off. The open questions at the end of that book: Will Finlay’s nanny, Vero, get out from under her debts to low-life underworld characters? Will her sister Georgia manage to make things last with new FBI girlfriend Sam? Will Finlay convince ex-hubby Steve that things are over between them, and will she finally manage to have a real relationship with police detective Nick—a problematic quandary since she has participated in so many criminal activities to which she can’t “cop,” pardon the pun. Will Finlay and Vero take back the Aston Martin that someone stole from them and also rescue Vero’s crush, kidnap victim Javi? There were so many dangling threads to remember that I almost immediately wished I had stopped to reread #3 before assaying #4!
Because I had read that book within days of its release more than a year ago, it took me a while to get into the rhythm of this new book. The series is really one long story, so you have to be up on all the events from page one of Book #1 in order to really get what’s going on. You also have to understand what this series is and what it is not; while there is a boatload of illegal activity taking place on its pages, it’s really more of a French farce than it is a mystery or thriller, although the fast pace and quick twists and turns certainly make it exciting. Someone on Goodreads compared Finlay and Vero to Lucy Ricardo and Ethel Mertz and, although they are smarter and more savvy, the relationship between them and among all the other disparate characters, from teen hackers to police officers to mob bosses, does bear a certain similarity—and that chemistry is Cosimano’s real advantage.
In Book #4, the cast all take a complicated road trip to Atlantic City in pursuit of their various objectives—and everybody, and I mean everybody, comes along, from Finlay’s mom, kids, and ex-husband to all the cops (crooked and straight) and criminals (major and minor). There are numerous misdirections of everyone involved, no one seems to have a real handle on what’s going on, and all are giving a good imitation of chickens minus their heads.
My ultimate conclusion after reading this chapter in Finlay Donovan’s story is that it was a little too busy. There were so many things happening to so many people all at once, and their connections were sometimes so confusing (wait—who is Ricky, again?) that it was hard to keep straight at times, which meant there was less focus on the strengths of the franchise—the snarky banter, the romantic entanglements, the misunder-standings that propel the heroine and her cohorts. I did enjoy it, but I’m glad that a few characters permanently exited the page (no, I’m not saying who, though some will be a surprise and others not) so that perhaps the next book will be less frenetic and more tightly focused. I did enjoy getting to know Finlay’s mom, Susan, but I also wanted a little more of the Nick/Finlay inter-action, I wanted to hear about Zach’s progress with potty training and Delia’s latest faux pas; and the characters’ days-long lack of sleep and irregular meals made me almost as tired as they were!
I hope that Elle takes a deep breath and keeps everyone closer to home for the next one. Yes, there will be a next one—there was a significant cliffhanger at the end of Dice about nosy neighbor Mrs. Haggerty that leaves us waiting eagerly for its resolution in (sigh) another year!
Marine biology and spies
While awaiting about six different e-books on my “holds” list at Los Angeles Public Library, I succumbed to one of those BookBub daily reading recommendation emails containing various books they offer for between 99 cents and a couple of bucks—which is unfortunately about what some of them are worth in terms of writing and readability. But I have to say that Immortal Red, by Keith Hummel, surprised me in a mostly positive way, and I enjoyed working my way through its labyrinthine story line and getting to know its many, mostly nefarious characters.
The description of the book in blurbs and on Goodreads leads one to believe that it’s heavy on science: A marine biologist snorkeling off the coast of Cape Fear, North Carolina makes the chance discovery that Turritopsis dohrnii, a dime-sized jellyfish with a bright red stomach, seemingly has the gift of immortality. At the moment of death due to old age or massive trauma, the jellyfish has the ability to fully rejuvenate at a cellular level and emerge as a young adult again. After collecting specimens and observing numerous repetitions of this phenomenon in her lab, the scientist applies for research grants and thus brings herself to the attention of an elderly black-ops CIA mastermind who wants her to develop practical applications for humans—in other words, make him immortal. He has a plan to dole out this secret miracle to an elite group of people who he envisions subsequently running the world, with him, of course, spearheading things.
When the scientist isn’t in agreement with his goals and hides any positive outcomes of her experiments, things don’t go well for her or her husband, a wannabe spy under the sway of the megalomaniacal CIA guy and his minions. Then ensues a breathless search for the scientist’s research, and the story morphs into a full-throttle CIA spy novel.
Reading this was initially a little slow, because almost the entire first half is basically developing knowledge and back story; but once the research is in the wind, things take off and get increasingly exciting. The writing flows naturally, the characters are fairly well developed (for a fast-paced thriller, that is, not at the level of literary fiction), and the conversations and interactions ring true.
This is a first novel for Hummel, who has on his resumé many elements that make him well qualified to write this book: “Keith Hummel has more than 70,000 hours as an emergency medicine physician. He has flown helicopters, driven tanks, and restored classic Porsches. He is currently the medical director for a major defense contractor.” He also operates as DoctorFiction on Tumbler, where he assists other novelists in the effective use of medical and trauma situations.
Word to those who don’t like sequels: The book wraps up some things, but ends on a pretty significant cliffhanger. So don’t put in the time if you aren’t willing to wait to see what happens to the survivors!
Delightful whodunnit
I guess that headline makes my blog post kind of unnecessary; but I could not wait to offer up a reaction to Vera Wong;s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, by Jesse Q. Sutanto.
Let me start by saying something unrelated about the text of this post: I had a rain leak in my roof right above my computer yesterday, and my keyboard got drenched. It is dried out now and still mostly works, but there are a couple of significant issues: The backspace (delete) key instead turns off the sound, and the apostrophe either appears as a semicolon or not at all. So as much as it pains me to write a review in which there are no apostrophes, since the book title itself contains one then needs must if I want to write it before I have access to a new keyboard, which I do! I will attempt to write without contractions as much as possible, apart from the book title, seen above with semicolon.
I previously reviewed two other books by Sutanto, and I liked them well enough (the first better than the second), but this one feels like a whole different level of enjoyment. It is as quirky as those, for sure, but it is less frenetic, more logical, and abounds with interesting and likable characters. The book is solidly based on the main title protagonist, while all others revolve around both her and a circumstance in which she finds herself embroiled; but there is no lack of either detail or interest in every other actor in this little play Vera Wong is creating in her attempt to solve a murder.
Vera is a small but intense lady with a tea shop in the middle of Chinatown in San Francisco. For the past few years her clientele has dwindled down to a single visitor per day, but Vera has not let this discourage her: She still arises before dawn, dons her athletic costume and gets in a brisk walk before opening the tea shop in anticipation of composing the perfect brew for every need from her vast store of jars and bottles full of exotic ingredients. But one morning Vera descends from her apartment to her shop to discover a body on the floor! Mostly unperturbed but intensely curious about who he is and how and why this young man has ended up dead inside her shop, Vera decides she is the ideal person to help the police investigate, and takes a few things into her own hands that would better have gone to the detectives who later respond. But when those detectives are then unable (or, in her view, uninterested and/or unwilling) to solve what Vera has decided must be a murder, Vera waits to see who else arrives and begins to compile her suspect list based on the level of interest each person shows. In her view, nobody is better suited to this task than a Chinese mother of a certain age!
Each of the people who subsequently turns up has some sort of connection to the dead man, and Vera is in her element as she alternatively prods and snoops in her attempts to get at the truth. The fact that she makes a friend out of each of them in the process (and also tries her hand at matchmaking) is not, in her eyes, a deterrent to exposing one of them as the killer. The humor and inevitability of her progression is equal parts poignant and hilarious.
The sole bone I have to pick about this story (and with this author) is the way Vera is persistently described—as a little old lady. The descriptions of Vera—her hair, her clothes, her mannerisms—suit the picture, but then Sutanto reveals her age and everyone reading this book above that age is going to be outraged, because Vera is 60! I think you have to add on a minimum of a decade, and probably half again or even double that, in order to legitimately be referred to in that precise way. As a woman of 68, I feel elderly in some ways (mainly in my crackly knees and blips in short-term memory), but I do not think I will consider myself as a little old lady until about the age of 84! Yes, Vera is a granny, but a little old lady she is not! Read it and see if you agree…
The Book Adept 