“New” mystery writer
I have just discovered the County Kerry mysteries by writer Carlene O’Connor, who is American by birth but Irish by heredity and has made the most of it. I initially thought she was a new author, because she only had two books out in this series, one written last year and one this: No Strangers Here, and Some of Us Are Looking. But it turns out she has been penning mysteries for some time, but in a different subcategory. She has two other series, both of them “cozy” mystery: The Irish Village Mystery Series, (8 books so far), and The Home to Ireland Series (2 books). But these County Kerry ones are not cozies, they are straight-up mystery.
You could maybe call them borderline cozy, because one of the regularly featured characters isn’t a detective, she’s a veterinarian—the diminutive but feisty Dr. Dimpna Wilde. But there is also a main policeman, Detective Inspector Cormac O’Brien, recently transplanted from Killarney to the Dingle peninsula, and a local policewoman, Barbara Neely, under whose jurisdiction the somewhat grisly murders from both books fall. In addition to these principal protagonists, there is a highly colorful bunch of characters who could only be Irish, including Dimpna’s idiosyncratic extended family (parents, brother, son, and a few more sinister connections), Cormac’s Mam, office staff members at the veterinary clinic, subordinate officers at the police station, and a plethora of fascinating villagers only too ready to get up in each other’s business and then spread the gossip far and wide. There are also, thanks to Dr. Wilde’s veterinary practice, a supporting cast of endearing animals, from cats and dogs to donkeys, sheep, bulls, and bunnies.
The world-building is effective, making excellent use of the natural setting of the Dingle peninsula and all the towns, villages, nature preserves, cliffs, harbors, and wild places that exist there, nicely described and incorporated into the action.
The mysteries are complex, there are plenty of promising red herrings, and the personal relationships developing amongst the characters—particularly between Dr. Wilde and DI O’Brien—keep you reading to see what happens. In short, based on these two books I will definitely keep going. And, also based on these, I will try out her cozy series, even though my general preference is for mainstream mystery, because the totality of her story-telling is that good.
Unhappy fans
I miraculously got a checkout from my library for Emily Henry‘s latest, Happy Place, in about a third of the time I expected to wait. Then I read the reviews on Goodreads, which may furnish some explanation. Don’t get me wrong, every second or third review awarded five stars, but there were also those critical reviews between them for three, or even two or one star, a phenomenon I believe has not previously been experienced by this popular author.
The story involves six friends, five of whom bonded in college and have remained uncommonly close, and one extra who was pulled into the group when she became part of a couple with one member. In fact, four of the original five have coupled up with one of the others, and this is the source of the current problem.
Their “leader,” Sabrina (I call her that because she’s the impetus behind keeping them all together), comes from wealth, and a tradition the group has had for their entire friendship has been to spend a summer week together at her father’s Maine “cottage.” But her dad’s most recent spouse doesn’t want to maintain the association of the cottage to his first wife and insists that he sell it, so this is the friend-group’s last gasp at a holiday together there, fraught with all of the traditions they have created over the years.
Sabrina and Parth have made the week into even more of an event by surprising their friends with their engagement, with a wedding planned for the end of the week on Saturday before they all pack up to leave the cottage forever on Sunday. Given this special occasion, none of the friends feels like they can refuse the invitation, let alone spoil it with bad news, so this makes it difficult for Harriet and Wyndham, who broke up four months ago but haven’t told anyone. Their plan was for Wyn to bow out of the week with some excuse while Harriet broke the news to the rest of them, but instead they are both on premises with nothing revealed, and have been awarded the best room together, a double en suite featuring a bathroom with no door. Awkward. And painful, and sensitive, and embarrassing and almost impossible to endure. But Harriet and Wyn don’t want to spoil the week for the others, and they do want to be at the wedding, so they are gritting their teeth and playing a part in public while taking turns sleeping on the floor in private. The third couple, Cleo and Kimmy, have secrets of their own, and there is building resentment between Cleo and Sabrina to cap off the basic tension in the air.
Harriet is a surgical resident in a prestigious program in San Francisco, and Wyn was living with her before going home to Montana to deal with family issues and never coming back. The two had been together for eight years, and happy for the first six, but once they relocated to San Francisco everything seemed to go wrong for them, as individuals and as a couple. But Harriet never dreamed the result would be a few devastating sentences on the phone that severed their connection permanently.
I personally enjoyed the book, both because I am apparently a hopeless romantic at heart and because I relished the vicarious experience of having a solid group of friends on whom I felt like I could depend forever. Who doesn’t want people in their lives who know you, are there for you, and will reliably show up for your highs and your lows? It threw me back to seeing the movie The Big Chill in 1983 and wondering, 10 years after high school graduation and five years after college, who of my friends I would still know 10, 15, or 20 years later (answer: one). So I liked being immersed in the group dynamic.
I also found Harriet’s and Wyn’s descriptions and chemistry with one another compelling, and cringed at what they had to go through as they maintained a façade for their friends. And I coveted everything about that vacay in Maine, from the weather to the food to the Lobster Festival to the opulent yet cozy cottage. Basically, I plopped myself down in the middle of the plot and went with it.
Others, however, were not pleased. One pointed out that “miscommunication” was the worst trope ever, and when I reflected on it, I had to agree; I realized that I myself didn’t identify that as a problem because I, like Harriet, tend to hang back, keep my mouth shut, and wait for someone else to make the important moves, so it seemed familiar and therefore not bad. But it was! They were both thinking one thing in their heads and allowing different information to come out of their mouths; they were both pretending to be happy while being oh so sad; they were lying a lot; and if, after eight years together, neither of them could bring themselves, through embarrassment or shame or fear, to fight for the other person or for the relationship, they probably deserved to be unhappy. Another reader actually said “The pacing of this book, the alternating timelines, the character development, the relationships were all beautifully and expertly written,” and then gave it three stars because of that trope. Finally, one of the one-star awarders said “Fake, awkward, contrived, and so, so dull. I simply cannot read another novel held together by the characters’ absolute refusal to communicate.” So there’s that…
Someone else said they felt the side characters had no personality, that they had been crafted as one-note cardboard characters whose most prominent feature was anxiety, and then left to function on their own. Another called them “unlikeable and underdeveloped…I just didn’t feel like I could root for them as I have others of Emily Henry’s characters.” I certainly didn’t feel this way about the characters during the flashback portions of the book, but in the present-day renderings I could kind of see it.
Finally, a surprising number of people found fault with the sex scenes, which I personally thought were both convincing and, well, sultry!
My conclusion is that with this story you will either identify with some/one of the characters and go with the flow, or you will get caught up in the frustration presented by the miscommunication trope and dislike it. I imagine that my review and thoughts will have absolutely no affect on those who are die-hard fans, while others may broach the book out of curiosity, taking a 50-50 chance on their reaction. Feel free to comment below on which person you ended up being!
Frivolous
The dictionary definition of that title is “not having any serious purpose or value.” You would think that at my age I would consider carefully the books on which I am going to spend my remaining reading time, and look for those that are worthwhile, or profound, uplifting, meaningful,, maybe educational; but it seems that I instead have the occasional need to abandon all thoughts of quality of phrase, good characterization, or realistic world-building to read something that is the snack food equivalent of Cheetos or Skittles. I believe there’s no type of book more addictive than a good thriller, and even the bad ones have the power to keep your attention if the plot points are sufficiently twisty. I proved that point to myself by reading The Housemaid, by Freida McFadden, and then the sequel, The Housemaid’s Secret.
This book has been touted on the “Friends and Fiction” Facebook page I have started to follow as a slightly more upscale version of the “What Should I Read Next?” crowd. The post-ers on F&F seem to read more, more varied, and generally better fiction, but the common denominator of “Oooh, I couldn’t put it down!” still prevails, regardless of quality. Here I am, sounding like a total snob, when one of the tenets of readers’ advisory is “Never apologize for your reading taste!” (Betty Rosenburg’s first law of reading, Genreflecting, 1982), and another is “There is no such thing as an objectively ‘good’ book.” While I try hard to refrain from shaming people for their book choices, what would a review blog be without a little gentle mockery now and then? Especially when it’s directed at myself…
The Housemaid and its sequel star Millie, a down-on-her-luck ex-con who’s trying desperately to find a job that will give her somewhere to sleep besides the back seat of her Nissan. Since she went to prison in her teens and stayed there for 10 years, she has few marketable skills; while she has done her share of fast food gigs, the holy grail at the moment is a job as a live-in housekeeper. The problem is, most people run a background check on someone they plan to hire to fill that role, and once they find out Millie’s past, they politely shut the door. But finally, Millie’s luck changes: Nina Winchester, beautiful and poised on the surface but giving off a bit of a weird vibe, offers Millie a position cleaning, cooking, and occasionally nannying for her little family—husband Andrew and daughter Cecelia—and Millie jumps at the chance. She rapidly discovers some disturbing nuances in the household, but beggars can’t be choosers, so she puts up with Nina’s foibles and her spoiled brat of a daughter, all the while trying not to covet Nina’s lifestyle, not to mention her handsome, soulful, and much put-upon husband. Then things take a dark turn…Dum Dum DUUUUUMMMMM!
The narrative in this book is first-person, and pretty much at the level of “Dear Diary.” It’s hard to tell whether the characterizations are kept purposefully opaque or whether McFadden is just not a good describer. The point of view switches around for sections of the book, but the voice stays a little bit too much the same. The plot twists are arresting, but some of the events on which they are based are laugh-oud-loud ridiculous, as in sitting in your chair reading along and then shouting “Oh, C’MON!” at the text as your cat bolts off your lap in terror. The redemptive value of bits of dark humor here and there can’t be overstated. But still…there’s something that keeps you reading. I loved how one Goodreads reviewer, Dan, put it in his synopsis:
This book is not as clever as it thinks it is. You probably won’t want to put it down. But you may be asking yourself what the hell you just read.
DAN, GOODREADS REVIEWER
As for the sequel, it is exponentially less believable than the first. And yet, I finished it and went looking on Goodreads to see when book #3 in this series will be published (June 2024). Let’s face it: Even Cheetos and Skittles can be addictive.
Psycho Thriller
Yes, “psycho” is an abbreviation for psychological thriller, but also…well, there are characters in this book that might qualify for the title without the abbreviation.
The Fake Wife was not my favorite Sharon J. Bolton thriller, but at this point Bolton is almost an automatic read for me. The book is certainly full of twists and turns, some expected and some definitely not. It’s complex and intriguing, but you really have to pay attention to know what’s happening at any given moment. There are multiple flashbacks from several characters to follow, and we get threads of the story from all directions—the victims, the perpetrators, the cops—that all weave together to gradually reveal what’s going on.
As the book opens, Olive Anderson is having dinner on her own in her hotel dining room in Hexham. A beautiful stranger walks up and seats herself at Olive’s table as if she belongs there, and then starts an elaborate game of pretense, engaging the waiter in banter and implying she is Olive’s wife. Olive is intrigued and decides to play along—it’s a lot more fun than sitting there by herself mulling over her marriage to Labour MP Michael Anderson. But as the evening goes on, the lighthearted pretense morphs into something else, and soon Michael is reporting Olive as missing and DS Lexy Thomas and traffic cop PC Garry Mizon are teaming up to try to solve what becomes an increasingly complex and bewildering situation.
This is an immersive domestic puzzle combined with a police procedural, adding more characters into the mix as the plot continues, with back stories that completely change what you were thinking at the beginning. It’s almost impossible to figure out who is telling the truth—if anyone is. The characterizations are excellent, and as for the setting, the beautiful but frigid winter scenery in the north of England provides both background and an extra sense of menace. If you like reading books that are set at the same time of year and in the same climate you are currently inhabiting, this is definitely a winter tale!
I’m kind of hoping Bolton decides to bring back the odd police couple in another book—their relationship provides both depth and humor in a story that is otherwise kind of dark. But if you enjoy dark (and confusing and exciting and suspenseful), this book might be a good one for your reading list.
Life
Every once in a while I want a break from the drama of a murder mystery, a thriller, a fantasy of some kind. I want to read about and immerse myself in the personal and intimate details of one particular life, to match my emotions to the character’s and perhaps compare how we deal with the daily events that are, on the surface, mundane, and yet affect each of us dramatically when experienced. I suppose there are a lot of authors who write that kind of story, but I find there are few who keep things strictly to the believable without unnecessary embroidery, and without feeling the need to ameliorate discomfort. One of those, in his own small way, is Robin Pilcher, the author son of Rosamunde Pilcher, whose books I have mentioned here.
He sets his books in venues similar to those of his mother, having grown up, of course, in the same environment as she, in England and Scotland, partly in the city and partly in the countryside. He definitely has a formula, which is the triumph over personal adversity, many of his characters picking themselves up from some disaster and starting over, whether emotionally or financially (or both). Again, a familiar theme, but there’s something both sweet and intense about his characters that make his books rise above a simple statement of events to involve the reader more closely than perhaps other authors are able to achieve.
I had read and enjoyed his work before, and when I hit a lull in the parade of new books from favorite authors, I looked at my backlist of “want to read” and, seeing a couple of his titles, decided he was just the thing for me right now. I’m having a bit of a difficult time with my health and find myself wanting something immersive but not overly stimulating, if that makes sense. You could call it comfort reading, but it’s not the type like Jenny Colgan, which is more like wish fulfillment; it’s about real people who work things out, which is encouraging in itself.
The first book I picked up happened to be the first one he wrote, called An Ocean Apart. It’s about a man in pain who can’t quite figure out how to get past it. He’s the father of three children, and his wife, who felt meant to be his life partner from the first time he met her, has died of cancer. The children are coping fairly well, mostly by going back to boarding school and immersing themselves in familiar routines with schoolwork and friends, but David can’t seem to deal with the reality of her absence, and has desperately pursued the hard physical labor of restoring the gardens at his family’s ancestral home where his parents live, as a distraction from his thoughts.
In his despair, he has shunned his place of work, leaving his father and a new employee to fill the gap left in his absence; the family owns a whiskey distillery, and David is meant to be the marketing manager. An emergency of sorts comes up that needs addressing, and the new operations officer persuades David’s father that they should send David to a series of meetings in New York to cope with it, hoping that a change of scenery will work a transformation. Instead, David comes straight up against his memories of Rachel when one of their new client’s administrators asks if his wife will be joining him, and has an emotional breakdown complicated by a bad bout of the flu.
He ends up deciding that he simply cannot go back to Scotland yet to face his regular life, and takes a job as gardener to a family living on Long Island. The interlude provides the respite he needs, until a threatened takeover of the distillery wakes him up to his responsibilities to save the family business for his father, his children, and his community.
This book has just the right balance in its story and was quietly involving from beginning to end. It’s a bit of a slow start, but by the end I couldn’t put it down. So when I was finished, I decided to move on to…
The Long Way Home. I think I liked this book even more, although I didn’t know if I would at the beginning of it. Claire’s father dies when she is young, and her mother remarries to a man named Leo, with two children of his own. Although neither her mother nor she get along with the new steps, they try their best for Leo to create a family, and the three of them, at least, are very happy with one another at Leo’s large estate in the Scottish countryside. Claire also has a best friend, Jonas, who lives at the neighboring farm tied to the property, and the two are inseparable until one day when Jonas rejects her and walks away from the friendship without explanation.
Claire, who has had a crush on Jonas for the last couple of years, is devastated, and goes traveling for her gap year between high school and college to try to forget. She ends up meeting Art, a young chef, in Australia; the two of them migrate to America, and she never goes back to her childhood home until her mother dies and she returns for the funeral and for Leo.
It gradually becomes clear that Leo’s memory isn’t what it once was, and that he will need some significant assistance to continue living at the estate. His two children prove both uninterested and unhelpful, so Claire and Art step up, as does Jonas, who has returned to the neighborhood and bought his father’s farm from Leo, and is high in Leo’s confidence.
Claire and Art have the idea to turn Leo’s house into a conference center—it’s in the middle of golf course territory in Scotland and everyone thinks it’s a wonderful idea—and build him his own adjacent apartment near his beloved greenhouses. But as their plans move forward long distance while they run their restaurant in New York City, they gradually realize that both Jonas and another consortium of buyers are scheming to take over the property, pushing Leo out into a retirement home. Claire is determined this won’t happen, but she and Art first have to figure out what’s going on, and (whether it’s for profit or for revenge) how to make it work for Leo.
I think the thing I enjoyed most about this book was that it didn’t end in what I call a “reconciliation romance.” You know, those stories where the woman returns to the town of her youth, runs meet-cute into the former love of her life, and ultimately abandons everything to fall into his arms. There was a point early in the book where I thought, “Oh no, he’s going to tank Claire’s relationship with Art somehow, so she can finally be with Jonas,” but Pilcher is a better author than that, and actually allowed for the possibility of a story being sufficiently engaging without total wish fulfillment being satisfied! And he did it cleverly and with much entertainment value.
These are not scintillating NYT bestsellers, and since they were mostly set in the 1980s you will have some issues with the technology (especially the prevalence of the fax machine!), but if you are looking for a quiet but satisfying read that will leave you with a happy feeling without going over the top, you might want to try a few books by Robin Pilcher.
Another old faithful
I first discovered the books of Robert Crais when I picked up one of his stand-alones at a library sale, and that one—Demolition Angel—remains a favorite; I think I have read it three or four times over the years. I found and read his other stand-alone novels, and liked them all quite a lot (my next favorite being The Two Minute Rule), so then I went on to his series, based on a private detective named Elvis Cole and (after book #10) his enigmatic pal, Joe Pike. The first Elvis Cole book is The Monkey’s Raincoat, and he’s pretty much on his own until The Watchman, which is Cole’s 11th outing and Pike’s debut.
I have an up-and-down relationship with these, because I find them to be somewhat uneven. Elvis is kind of a goofy guy, always joking around (although he takes his work seriously), and sometimes there’s just too much tongue-in-cheek banter. Joe Pike is the ultimate wordless action hero, and sometimes there’s too little personality there to make you care. And the mysteries are sometimes compelling, sometimes weird, and occasionally implausible. So although I think I have read most of the series (which is long—10 books for Cole, nine with Cole and Pike, and another seven with just Pike), I never know whether I will finish up the current book with a sense of satisfaction or feel vaguely let down.
In general, however, this is a reliable series and, like Michael Connelly’s Bosch, Elvis lives in the Hollywood Hills, so all the terrain is familiar to this Los Angeles resident, which is always a bonus. Who doesn’t like to be able to know exactly where the characters are and what things look, feel, smell, and taste like while reading a book? Or maybe that’s just me? Crais is particularly adept at both scene-setting and dialogue, having been (before his career as a novelist) a screenwriter for the TV shows Hill Street Blues, Cagney & Lacey, and Miami Vice. These, coupled with his love for such writers as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, gave him the basis for his mysteries.
Anyway, I just finished the latest offering in the Cole+Pike batch, called Racing the Light, and it definitely didn’t disappoint. Although it starts out with everyone (i.e., the reader and Elvis himself) thinking that Adele Schumacher may be paranoid and possibly crazy when she asks Elvis to find her son, plunks down a bag full of cash, and starts talking about aliens and government conspiracies, it soon becomes clear that there is something going on with “Josh Shoe,” a controversial though small-time podcaster.
It seems that Elvis isn’t the only person looking for him, and the others are a few steps ahead in their search. Elvis needs to figure things out fast, before these guys with their sophisticated resources and extra knowledge do something permanent to keep Josh from telling what he knows. What starts out as humoring a mother about her maybe-missing adult son (who could just be ducking her calls because he’s trying to live his life) turns into a deadly race to save him from himself before he gets caught and dealt with by some people with a lot to lose if he exposes them.
Joe Pike is enlisted in the search and he, in turn, calls on Jon Stone, a former government “spook” with both connections and equipment a private eye can’t access, but this one will strain all their resources to figure out the magnitude and complexity of the government corruption over which Josh has stumbled.
Elvis’s private life also expands a bit in this one, with the return of his sometime girlfriend Lucy Chenier, who retreated to Baton Rouge a few books back after it became clear to her that the lifestyle of a private eye was too precarious for her to want it affecting her young son, Ben. But it’s been a few years; things have changed. Ben has grown up into a self-reliant teenager, and Lucy has realized that her overprotectiveness may have masked personal doubts, so she’s back to explore options, to Elvis’s simultaneous delight and dismay.
This was a solid offering, and I read it with quite a bit of breathless anticipation, particularly in the second half when the action starts to heat up and the players begin to come into focus. I don’t want to downplay the series too much; Crais won the Anthony and Macavity Awards for The Monkey’s Raincoat, and was nominated for the Edgar Award; and a later title, L.A. Requiem, was a New York Times and Los Angeles Times bestseller. So if you’re looking for a “new” series that has been around for a while and will therefore give you many hours of reading pleasure as you catch up, then check out the first Elvis Cole book, and also look into his non-series novels. (One of them, Hostage, is also a Bruce Willis movie….)
Writer of the dark
I have been a longtime fan of Sharon J. Bolton‘s books, variously characterized as mystery, suspense, or thriller. I defined the difference between those in a previous post; let me recap here:
First of all, neither a suspense novel nor a thriller is about solving a crime, they are about stopping a killer or a crime. So they are not necessarily a whodunit as is a mystery; we may know who the villain is from page one.
In a thriller, the protagonist is in danger from the outset, and action is a required element. Pacing is the key ingredient. In suspense, danger is more important than action, and the protagonist becomes aware of danger only gradually. Setting and mood are key. There must be terror, confusion, upset, and conflict.
A thriller has to start off with a bang, and have a clearly defined hero and villain, because the thriller is all about the push and pull between the two. By contrast, the only real requirement of a suspense story is that it build, and that it keep the reader on edge with a series of reveals or surprises until the final one. Suspense can be present in any genre; a suspense novel is simply one where the reader is uncertain about the outcome. It’s not so much about what is happening as what may happen. It’s about anticipation.
Bolton is a nuanced writer, with examples of all of these in her repertoire, sometimes putting the characteristics of all three into one volume. I would call Daisy in Chains a psychological thriller, and perhaps The Craftsman as well, while Dead Woman Walking would probably fall more into the suspense line. And then there is her ongoing mystery series, featuring Detective Constable Lacey Flint, from which I just read #5, The Dark. I am always thrilled when a new book in this series is published, because they are so involving, so ingenious, and so suspenseful—they leave me breathless. This one was no exception.
Lacey is, first of all, such an intriguing character. She comes out of nowhere, makes a name for herself by exhibiting “derring do,” aka extreme recklessness in solving cases for the London police by any means necessary (including dangerous undercover work), and then takes a baffling sidestep from advancement up the ladder to instead become part of the Marine Policing Unit, working on the Thames river. She’s aloof, almost secretive, even with her best friends and occasional love interests, and as the series progresses you learn that her secrets are not garden variety and she has a good reason (several, actually) for maintaining her solo status; but at the same time, you wish for her that she could let it all go and simply be happy! In short, it’s hard not to get involved with her life story.
Then there are the mysteries, and this latest is a doozy. It relates to what’s been happening in the world during the past few years as women’s rights have begun to be rescinded and certain men scheme to steal even more freedoms in their attempt to turn the world back to when they ran things without dispute and the women stayed home and had babies. In The Dark, there is an underground movement lurking on the dark web that is stirring up the “incels”—men who are involuntarily celibate and therefore harbor a deep dislike of the women who deny them—as well as any other guy who has felt overlooked in favor of a woman, for whatever reason. They target women who (they claim) have benefitted from affirmative action, those who they perceive as having favored the rights of women over men, and pretty much all women who choose more successful, more attractive men (or other women) over them.
And they aren’t just talking—they are inciting men to violence, staging actions such as harassment of women walking alone on the street after 10 p.m., intensive catfishing on dating sites, and the like. The women are both terrified and outraged, and the police are using every traditional and cyber tool at their disposal to figure out who are the ringleaders. And Lacey is, of course, smack dab in the middle of all of it, having been in the right place at the right time to foil their opening act, when a baby is stolen from its carriage and tossed into the Thames on a pool float and Lacey is in the area in her kayak to pull off an audacious rescue.
The scariest part of the story is when one of the incel leaders figures out that he has a past connection with Lacey, and she suddenly becomes the focus of everything he hates in women. All of the regulars from previous books—Dana, Helen, Victoria, Mark Joesbury—are present, along with some new characters from Joesbury’s team, plus Emma Boston, a reporter who plays a pivotal role. The book is as dark as its title, and scarily believable, given recent activities by the religion-obsessed right wing active in many countries today.
The suspense throughout is riveting, and I will confess I lost some sleep sitting up to read this. It’s been a while since Bolton wrote a Lacey Flint, and I was so glad she was back. Bolton has a new book (not in this series) coming out on November 9th, and I already have a pre-order destined for my Kindle the minute it’s 12:01 a.m. on that date! If you’re not familiar with Bolton’s books and you crave more thrillers and mysteries, start reading!
Fictional memoir
A Piece of the World, by Christina Baker Kline, is in a special category: Although the overall story is fiction, it is based on facts about real people, and reads like memoir.
The book is based on Andrew Wyeth’s painting called Christina’s World, pictured here. People have always noticed something slightly odd about the figure in this one—she’s not just reclining in that field, she looks like she’s wanting to get to that house, or perhaps even pushing or dragging her body along in the attempt. This is the germ of the idea for the entire book, which, although it does showcase some of Wyeth’s career, is primarily about the subject of the painting, Christina Olson of Cushing, Maine.
The book documents Christina’s entire life, which turns out to be a small one except insofar as she serves as muse to the famous painter. Christina suffers some kind of illness at age three (they never state what, but my thought was polio) that twists her legs up and makes her awkward and clumsy in all her movements. This and her own pride and self-reliance make her an outsider, both in her family and in her community, with the result that the chances others have for happiness seem to pass her by, no matter how hard she tries to grasp them. She grows up in the house previously occupied by generations of her ancestors; she cares for her brothers and her aging, ailing parents as her disability gradually worsens; and she is finally left with one brother to live out her days in an ever-diminishing daily routine circumscribed by her physical condition…until one day Andrew Wyeth’s young wife, Betsy, a family friend, brings him to visit, and he becomes fascinated with Christina, her brother Alvaro, and their house and farm in all its aspects. No detail is too large or too small for him to tackle in his art—he paints the rusty padlocks and spiderwebs, the sheer curtains blowing in the breeze from an upstairs window, Alvaro smoking his cigar—and this begins an almost 20-year relationship between himself and the two remaining Olsons, resulting in possibly his most famous picture/portrait.
“Later he told me that he’d been afraid to show me the painting. He thought I wouldn’t like the way he portrayed me: dragging myself across the field, fingers clutching dirt, my legs twisted behind. The arid moonscape of wheatgrass and timothy. That dilapidated house in the distance, looming up like a secret that won’t stay hidden.”
CHRISTINA OLSON
In some ways this is a dark, dour portrayal, but it is rescued from being too depressing by Christina’s will and strength of spirit, and by wanting to know what happens next. The book deals with complex issues; resentment, shame, lost dreams, family challenges, and social classes are explored, and the writer makes us realize that there is depth and intensity to even such a simple existence devoid of major events. There are some fine lyrical moments of expression, and Kline paints pictures with the words she chooses. I didn’t expect to like this book as much as I did—it kept me reading through one sleepless night, and I was a little sorry when it ended. It’s a great example of what an author can do with the kernel of a story, some thorough research, and a vivid imagination to bring them both to life.
Two authors, one story?
In my last post, I wrote about two books by Jenny Colgan, set in a derelict bookstore in Edinburgh. The protagonist’s task is to work in the bookstore and try to help its elderly and somewhat hapless owner get it back in the black. In the course of doing this, she meets two men—one a wealthy, successful author, the other a penniless but quietly charming student—and has to choose between them. Against all odds, she manages to keep the bookstore going long after everyone thinks it will fail.
Just as I finished reading those, a hold from Los Angeles Public Library became available—The Lost and Found Bookshop, by Susan Wiggs. In it, the protagonist inherits her mother’s foundering bookshop in San Francisco. She needs to sell it, to settle the debts and also to provide for her grandfather, whose health is failing, but she can’t because it turns out he is the owner of record, and refuses to sell. So she has to jump in and try to save the store. In the process, she meets two men—one a wealthy, successful author who she persuades to do a book-signing, the other a carpenter/ handyman/musician who she hires to do some repairs around the place—and she has to choose between them. Through a series of happy accidents plus a lot of hard work, she keeps the doors open and makes her grandfather happy.
Leo Tolstoy said, “All great literature is one of two stories: A man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town.” A 1919 writing manual penned by Wycliff Aber Hill posited that there are only 37 basic plots in the world. In 2015, Matthew Jockers used a computer analysis of 40,000 novels to conclude that all literature follows only six possible stories. And how many people have repeated the old saw, “There is nothing new under the sun”? Still…when the formula already involves a bookshop in financial trouble and a young female protagonist sent in to save the day for its elderly owner, maybe its author could check other books about bookshops to see if at least some of the rest of the tropes could be tweaked or avoided?
Since The Lost and Found Bookshop‘s publication preceded that of Jenny Colgan’s books by about a year, Jenny is probably the one who should have done the checking; but I have to say that I preferred her books by a considerable margin for a couple of reasons, the first of which was a less-than-satisfying protagonist in this one. Natalie Harper is simply too self-involved and angsty to be as likeable as Carmen, and I found myself getting annoyed with the author about the things she left out that would have made this character more well rounded.
I did like the manner in which she addressed the subject of grief, and I enjoyed the mentions of actual books and authors throughout. Some of the historical back-story was interesting, especially the bits about the San Francisco earthquake. But the other reason I didn’t care for this one was the series of three discoveries based on that history, and how the characters dealt with them; this subplot was too implausible (and convenient).
There were also some nitpicky little omissions that bugged me. One example: One of the love interests notices that Natalie has amazing abs “that you only get from a lot of yoga,” but we never see her take an exercise class, participate in any kind of physical activity or, in fact, even mention something about exercise. Yeah, I know, it’s a small thing, but don’t you find it annoying when authors throw in details and then don’t follow through?
Finally, I hated the way she ended the book. I am a person who doesn’t care for totally open-ended stories; I like a real conclusion. But I also have a pet peeve, which is the use of an epilogue as a tool to tie things up with a bow (or multiple ribbons!) and that’s what Wiggs does here, in a cutesy way (everything is presented via a series of newspaper articles). I reviewed another book on this blog (Things You Save In A Fire, by Katherine Center) and panned it because I loved it until the 20-page epilogue, where the author ruined it for me by ruthlessly and thoroughly tying off every possibility other than the ones she chose.
So—not a bad read, but probably not one I would recommend over some other bookshop stories.
The Book Adept 