Cozy
I felt the need to read something simple and comforting after my unexpected discovery that Miss Benson’s Beetle was anything but (see previous post), so when someone on the Facebook reading page asked for cozy mystery recommendations, I decided to do likewise and find a new author in a gentler genre.
I ended up with the Julia Bird mysteries by Katie Gayle, beginning with An English Garden Murder. I’m a sucker for anything with small quaint British villages, cottage gardens, and hey, a chocolate labrador puppy named Jake as one of the main characters.
Julia Bird has fled London after a somewhat unexpected retirement from a career as a social worker and an extremely surprising divorce in which her husband Peter leaves her for a garden designer named Christopher. She ends up in a picturesque and cozy cottage in the Cotswolds, and settles into a life she expects to contain no bigger excitement than adding a chicken coop and some laying hens to her backyard potagère. But when the local handyman and his son tear down a garden shed in order to replace it with the coop, they find a dead body buried underneath, apparently for decades. No one in the village (including the police) has a clue who it could be, so Julia decides to do her own investigation, which leads, dismayingly, to another dead body! Oops. Someone in the village has apparently killed twice—is Julia in peril as she moves closer to the truth?
I enjoyed the delineation of the characters in this series quite a bit. They are all individuals, with enough detail given about appearance, mannerisms, and possible agendas that you don’t have to keep reminding yourself who is whom, sometimes a problem when there is a fairly large cast. The scene-setting details likewise gave a complete picture of the surroundings, which is always pleasing. There is, every once in a while, a passage filled with so much detail that it seems over the top—a description, say, of the person’s entire morning routine with all the minutiae included, that has no bearing on the story—but this was a fairly minor flaw in what proved an enjoyable read. So, I went on to the next two books: Murder in the Library, and A Village Fete Murder.
This is when I started to think that I would have done better to seek out a more well known cozy series instead of this trio of quickly turned out (all three within nine months!) books by what turns out to be two authors (Katie and Gayle) working together. Say, the Stephanie Plum books by Janet Evanovich or, hey, Agatha Christie! That’s because each of the next two had almost the identical formula to the first. Julia finds the bodies; Julia can’t resist being a busybody by soliciting local gossip and visiting possible suspects on her own without benefit of police oversight; and her poking around then results in another body because someone has caught on to something as a result of the extra attention, and doesn’t want to be found out. No blame to poor Julia, of course (although some of the villagers have nicknamed her the Grim Reaper).
In the second book, the minute one character confided, in front of three other people, that she needed to talk to Julia about something, I knew she was body #2. In the third, Julia carries on a conversation with the local police officer on her cell phone in a public place, and I knew that someone was listening (wasn’t sure who, but someone) who would benefit from the indiscreet conveyance of important information.
So…while I continued to enjoy both the character creation and the descriptions of both the surroundings and the small-town events, the fact that I had solved the crime a while before Julia in each book was a bit off-putting. If you are a person who enjoys having the advantage in this way, you may really like these books, but as for me, even in a cozy genre I prefer my stories to be more challenging. (There will be a fourth book, but I think I’m done with Julia. But if you are intrigued, it’s called Murder at the Inn, due out in August.)
Quirky?
On the strength of enthusiastic comments on What Should I Read Next?, I picked up Miss Benson’s Beetle, by Rachel Joyce. I haven’t read anything by her before, but saw some raves for two of her previous books, and I’m usually a fan of quirky characters—Eleanor Oliphant, Fern Castle, Don Tillman, Leonard Peacock, A. J. Fikry, have all figured on the list of characters’ stories I have enjoyed.
While there were parts of this book in which the characters rose to the level of those, some of the events of the story, paired with uneven character development, made it not quite my cup of tea.
Margery Benson owns a certain level of eccentricity (for instance, in the seminal moment when she steals a pair of lacrosse boots from a fellow teacher), but she is largely too dour and sad to be considered quirky. The assistant she ultimately hires to go with her to New Caledonia in search of the golden beetle is obviously written to up the quirkiness factor exponentially, but Enid Pretty is so frenetically over the top for about 90 percent of the book that rather than being engaging, she just makes you tired. And the story line takes the serendipity one would expect in an offbeat novel and turns it into caricature or farce, with aspects that are simply unbelievable, not to mention contradictory. I know I’m sounding like a curmudgeon here, and perhaps it just wasn’t my week to read this book, but honestly it was all too much.
The story isn’t without its merits; there are some genuinely amusing situations, and also some truly touching moments. The best part about it is the evolution of the friendship between the unlikely adventurers (Margery and Enid), and I would have enjoyed learning more about the two of them, as well as about Gloria, and even Dolly. But there was also a subplot involving a former prisoner of war who became obsessed with and was stalking Miss Benson that I found both unpleasant and unnecessary, and I ended up highly resentful of how this ultimately affected the plot. So while I appreciated the beautiful language Ms. Joyce uses to describe Margery’s experience of the natural world, and really liked the evolution of Margery from a passive, uptight, somewhat frightened person into the take-charge, open individual she becomes, my reaction to the novel as a whole was a little sad with a touch of frustration. Over all, not a particularly pleasant experience.
Misspers
Quite by chance, I ended up reading two books in a row about missing persons. The first was Force of Nature, by Jane Harper, one of her Aaron Falk series, and the second was Liane Moriarty’s latest, Apples Never Fall. I didn’t plan it that way (maybe the library did?), but it made for some fun comparing the two as regards suspense, the form of the narrative, and so on. I enjoy the works of both authors, so it wasn’t really a quality comparison, although they brought different things to the table despite their common theme. They are also both set in Australia, another coincidence? Synchronicity strikes again.
In the first, a company that is secretly being examined by Aaron Falk and his partner for financial crimes sends 10 of its personnel—five men, five women—on a retreat into the wilderness of the Australian bush that is intended as a character-building and bonding exercise. The groups are divided by gender, the men taking one route, the women another. They pack in enough supplies for the first day, and the rest of their food and fuel is stashed for them at two way-stations, each of which they are supposed to reach within a day’s hike. The men successfully complete their retreat and emerge at the expected time, but the women are significantly delayed and, when they do turn up, are exhausted, starving, slightly hysterical, and missing one of their number, Alice Russell. Vague and conflicting accounts are given by the four remaining women and, as the rangers and regular police set up for a comprehensive search of the Giralang range, Federal Police investigator Falk tries to puzzle out whether the missing woman could possibly have met with foul play due to her clandestine connection with his investigation.
I enjoyed the personalities that Harper created—they were both original and yet clichéd in the best manner, in that you could see reflected in them all the characteristics, positive and negative, of the people you yourself might have worked with in a corporate setting—the bully, the ambitious but obsequious assistant, the entitled boss, the low-level couldn’t-care-less data entry clerk, and so on. I also really liked the chemistry and interplay between Aaron Falk and his partner, Carmen. And, as in her novel The Dry, the scene-setting is excellent; you soon feel overwhelmed by the claustrophobic closeness of the trees and the sense that perhaps something is watching from beyond the light of your fire. The book did take a long time to get where it was going, but the jumps from present to past and between multiple narrators/points of view keep it interesting and vibrant. I will continue with this series.
Moriarty’s book is a much more conventional misspers narrative, in that she’s a retired businesswoman and mom from the suburbs. The story opens with a cinematic shot of a deserted bicycle by the side of the road, with a flat front tire and a bunch of apples spilling out of its basket. Then someone comes along and steals the bike, and we realize that a key piece of evidence has just gone missing in a way that guarantees misdirection.
Stan and Joy Delaney, married for 50 years and also partners in a tennis coaching enterprise, have just sold their business and retired, and it’s not going so well. Their four grown children are largely oblivious to this, although certain incidents let them know the marriage is no longer as amicable as they would hope. Then Joy sends the kids a garbled text saying she’s going “off-grid” for a while, and disappears, but Stan doesn’t know anything about where she’s gone or for how long, and has scratches on his face that look like they were inflicted in a struggle. As Joy remains missing day after day with no word and the police seem ever more inclined to look at Stan as their prime suspect in his wife’s disappearance, their children try to come to terms with what they will do if their mother remains missing and if, indeed, their father is the one responsible.
The story is told from a “now” viewpoint and also via a series of flashbacks that cover the past six months or so. Complicating the narrative is the appearance, six months previous, of a stranger—the elfin and bedraggled Savannah—on Stan and Joy’s doorstep, asking for temporary shelter from her abusive boyfriend. The couple welcome her in, but soon her extended stay coupled with her lack of a substantial back story has the Delaney children worried that their kind and gullible parents are being taken in by a grifter.
Moriarty is, as always, a master at creating and developing her characters, and by the end of this you feel like you know each of the Delaneys well enough to predict their actions in any situation. Less predictable is the enigmatic Savannah, and Stan is likewise tough because he holds everything inside and presents a gruff and seemingly uninterested façade to everyone. Although the book probably could have been a bit shorter and still succeeded, I did like the jumping around, as in Harper’s book, from time period to time period and to all the variety of narrators. The one weird thing about the book was its ending, which I should characterize as endings, plural. I read a chapter and the final sentence seemed to put a period on both the scene and the book; then I turned the page to find another chapter, which also seemed conclusive; and this went on for about five more chapters! When the end finally came, it was almost surprising, because Moriarty had dragged it in so many different directions. I found it kind of irritating, but since it also imparted a bunch of information we wouldn’t otherwise have had, I ultimately couldn’t find fault with it, though I feel like it might have been more effective to reveal it all as more a part of the story instead of as a series of addendums, which is how it read. Still, I liked the book a lot, and don’t understand why so many of her readers found it disappointing compared to some of her others. No, it’s not Big Little Lies—but it’s not Nine Perfect Strangers (which I found both weird and unsuccessful) either!
Murder in Alaska
I just finished the first two Kate Shugak mysteries by Dana Stabenow—A Cold Day for Murder, and A Fatal Thaw. Stabenaw started publishing this series in 1992, so I don’t know how I have completely overlooked it until now, but the first book popped up in my Kindle freebies and I gave it a try. I wasn’t really looking for a new mystery series, but I will most likely dip back into it from time to time, now that I have found it.
It’s one of those in which the locale plays as big a part as any protagonist, so you have to be at least marginally interested in the scene-setting because there’s a lot of it. This one takes place in a remote area of Alaska, inside a national park that is largely inaccessible (no roads) for more than half the year and so beloved of its few residents that they want to keep it that way. Niniltna, the closest “town,” consists of about 800 people, but that swells to thousands (flown in) from (very) late spring through summer as the thaw sets in and the various hunting and fishing seasons begin.
Kate Shugak is a member of the Aleut people and, although she has many relatives in the area (including her grandmother, Ekaterina Moonin Shugak, head of the local tribal council), lives alone on a 160-acre homestead, except for her half-wolf, half husky, Mutt. She is in emotional recovery, as the series opens, from a traumatic incident during her tenure as a police officer in Anchorage that left her with a lot of anger, a growly voice, and a ropy white scar that stretches from ear to ear. She mostly keeps to herself, engaged in doing all the things a homesteader in Alaska has to do to get by, but occasionally, when the local police and the FBI can’t seem to solve a case for themselves, they appeal to Kate to get involved, since for all her solitude she has a better handle than they on her neighbors—the miners, hunters, trappers, fishermen, bush pilots, and pipeline workers who populate the area.
The first book was a bit slow, because the author focused almost exclusively on drawing a picture of the Alaskan scenery and outlining the main players, with all their quirks. It picks up in the second half as Kate gets closer to figuring out what happened to two missing men and turns into more of a mystery, but in general it was pretty low-key. The second book made up for that by opening with a literal bang as a man goes about shooting everyone in sight, and although it bottomed out a little in the middle while Kate ponders her course of action (which she keeps close to the chest and doesn’t share), it had a dramatic ending as well.
I wouldn’t call these books page-turners, but there’s something about them that is appealing, enough so to keep me reading beyond these (although not right now, I have two books about to be due back to the library that I have to finish first). Although there are certain passages involving scenery description that seem a little stiff and extraneous, there are equally beautiful paragraphs that let you know both the author and the protagonist are people who love and are focused on the natural world. There is an element of humor that gives the stories a kick in the pants when needed, and the complex relationships between a lot of people with unmeeting wishes when it comes to their surroundings makes for both interest and fireworks. The book I just started (Jane Harper’s second book, Force of Nature, starring Aaron Falk) beckoned to me, but I admit there was a little reluctance to leave Kate Shugak behind; I had gotten used to hanging out with her.
Authenticity rant
I just finished reading a book that’s popular on the Facebook page “What Should I Read Next?” (The Reading List, by Sara Nisha Adams), and although I quite enjoyed the concept of someone finding someone else’s reading list and following in their steps by reading all the books on it, and also sharing and discussing the list with others, some of the simplistic details of the book were so flat-out wrong that I feel the need to correct them here, at least.
For any other venue or atmosphere chosen as the backdrop to the action in a book, the author would probably take at least minimal pains to research the details of the world-building. But everyone in America apparently believes they all know how libraries work, and this presumption has perpetuated a lot of stereotypes that are highly inaccurate. Even those who profess to love the library, as both the author and the characters in this story do, are doing their local library and its staff a disservice when portraying them in this way. The flyers being passed out to “Save our library!” in this story become necessary when people fail to realize exactly what a library is or can be, depending on who staffs it.
One of the two main characters in this book, a teenager named Aleisha, gets a part-time job for the summer at the local branch library. Her brother, Aidan, has always loved the library, so when she can’t get the retail job she’s been trying for (clothing discounts being important to teenagers), he encourages her to take the position at the library. She designates it in at least one conversation as a “shit summer job,” and is no way invested in it, to the point where she sits at the information desk with headphones on and pointedly ignores a patron (the other protagonist, Mukesh, an elderly Indian man) who can’t figure out how to operate the automatic door opener. When this man then approaches her at the desk to ask for reading recommendations, she summarily dismisses him by saying she doesn’t read “stories,” she only reads true things, so she can’t help him, sorry.
Throughout the rest of the book, this person is referred to, by both the public and by her co-workers in the library, as a librarian.
It should be obvious, but I’m going to make it crystal clear: Not every person who works in a library is a librarian, just as not every person who works in a law firm is a lawyer. Just as with a lawyer, a librarian is a trained professional. Being a professional means that your work depends on special skills and qualifications you have acquired through study and practice, and involves holding that work to a specific standard.
In order to achieve the title of “librarian” in most related venues, you must have a bachelor’s degree in an unspecified area (English literature, art history, or science are helpful, depending on your future plans), followed by a two-year master’s degree in library information studies that will include acquiring such areas of expertise as cataloging, collection development, services specific to a particular demographic (for instance, children’s librarian or teen librarian), and readers’ advisory. There are also a variety of categories and kinds of librarian—archivist, information specialist, public librarian, college or university librarian, law librarian, and so on—that require further special training in that area of knowledge.
I have that master’s degree, plus at least half a dozen upgrades via individual classes in specific subjects, and I also teach in the masters program at the University of California in two areas of special knowledge—Young Adult Literature, and Readers’ Advisory. And the idea that the way librarians recommend books, as is presented in The Reading List—they read the books themselves so they have something to recommend—is inaccurate and misleading. Do I recommend books I have enjoyed to others looking for a good read? Sure. But I don’t do so without first performing an extensive deep dive into their personality, reading preferences, and previous reading experiences, because until you know with what kind of reader you are interacting, it is impossible—unless you’re exceedingly lucky—to hit on the perfect book for them. Further, if I relied only on the books I had actually read in order to satisfy the requests of my patrons, it would be severely limiting to what’s actually out there in the world. A trained librarian finds books for any and all purposes and tastes, regardless if she has read them or not.
This is one of the things that frustrates me about such interactions as “What Should I Read Next?” on Facebook. Someone puts out a reading request with minimal parameters, and 300 people immediately proffer their favorite book. No one stops to ask, What kind of experience are you looking for? What elements of a book are most important to you: characters? world-building? mood? Are there specific genres you like, and why? Do you read to gain knowledge or to experience emotion? and any of the dozens of other questions that make it possible for one person to recommend a book to another with any hope of success. What people without librarian training fail to realize is that the recommendation of a book must be preceded by knowledge about that reader.
Why is success so important? Well, what happens if this person hasn’t been much of a reader but is resolved to do more reading? They take multiple recommendations from people touting their own favorites and, one after another, find them disappointing because the books are not to their taste. Do you think that person will become discouraged and maybe believe that reading just isn’t for them? That’s what happens with many children or teenagers who get frustrated after the second or third book that doesn’t resonate. They give up on reading forever—or maybe, if luck plays a hand, they come around to the idea again in their 40s when some book grabs them by surprise.
Although I certainly wouldn’t put librarians’ level of professionalism on the same par with, say, a doctor or a lawyer (considering their many extra years of study and also the relative importance of their actions), it is every bit as offensive to us as a profession for others to assume that anyone could do our job. Furthermore, the misrepresentation of every library employee as a librarian would never happen in real life. If you work in a public library as a page (one of the people who shelves books and does auditorium set-ups) or a circulation clerk (one of the people who checks books in and out and maintains the integrity of the books), one of the first things you are trained to do, should a patron ask an information-related question, is to send them to the reference or information desk to speak with a librarian who is qualified to answer that question.
Non-librarian staff are sometimes even discouraged from providing simple directions, because they can’t know what informational needs back up that query. Someone might ask, Where is the history section? and you as a page know where it is, so you escort them there. But what they really wanted was guidance in finding a book about a particular battle that took place during World War II, and being escorted to the history section did exactly nothing for them on that quest besides narrow down their choice of books from millions to thousands or from thousands to hundreds. If they had been directed to a librarian, who would have drawn them out about the exact nature of what they were looking for, they would be standing in the history section with three books on that subject in their hands for further consideration.
So, Sara Nisha Adams, although there are parts of your book that are personally compelling, evocative, and engaging, you have done yet another disservice to the profession of librarian by perpetuating all the misinformation that puts our libraries in constant peril of being shut down. Yes, a library is (or can be) a dynamic community space. Yes, it can serve many functions for its neighborhood. But the reading-specific needs that it fulfills are best realized by the participation of real librarians, whose purpose in taking on this career is to find the right book for the right person by using training and experience, not random personal preference, as their methodology.
Secondary characters
Do you ever love a book not for its main protagonists but for its secondary characters? I think that was the case with me and JoJo Moyes’s new book, Someone Else’s Shoes. The two protagonists, Nisha and Samantha, certainly drive all the action with their stories, but it is when the secondary and peripheral people get involved that those stories really come to life.
Part of this is because neither of the protagonists is particularly likeable. Samantha’s okay, I guess, but she spends so much of her downtrodden existence reacting like a confused limp noodle that it’s easy to grow impatient with her and snap “Buck up!” every time you encounter her on the page. With Nisha, it’s the opposite problem—she’s so entitled that your constant response is to want to do anything to stymie her, and follow up by smacking her silly. So when you first start reading this book, it may make you wonder why you should keep going. The answer is the others.
The basic story: Sam and Nisha are at the same gym. After their respective workouts, somehow they end up accidentally switching gym bags. Nisha’s contains a Chanel jacket and a pair of custom red crocodile Christian Louboutin high heels, while Sam’s has a pair of practical black flats and the British equivalent of an outfit bought at Target.
The switch proves initially beneficial for Sam, because she’s teed up for a series of business meetings and, forced to don the Louboutins (or wear gym flip-flops), she gains some needed confidence and lands three deals in a row for the printing company for which she works.
Nisha, on the other hand, wouldn’t otherwise be caught dead in Sam’s flats, but when she steps outside the gym wearing those and a bathrobe only to discover that her car and driver are nowhere in sight and she can’t raise anyone on her phone, she’s stuck. Little does she know how stuck, however, until it becomes clear that her husband has taken this inopportune moment to shut her out—out of her penthouse suite at London’s poshest hotel, out of her custom wardrobe, out of her bank accounts and credit cards—she’s literally destitute in the space of a few minutes, and has no idea how to recover.
She’s such an unlikeable character that you almost revel in the desperate straits she finds herself; fortunately for her, surrounding folk aren’t as gleefully vindictive as you are! She meets Jasmine, one of the head housekeepers at the hotel where Nisha and her husband Carl are staying, and Jasmine, at least initially, pretty much saves the day. Sam is similarly blessed, by a co-worker, Joel, who buoys her up when her confidence is lagging in the face of abuse from their new supervisor, Simon, and also by her best friend, Andrea, who is undergoing cancer treatment but can still be counted on to give sage advice about Sam’s depressed, unemployed husband.
Both women make an initial attempt to return the bags to the gym and retrieve their own, only to discover that the gym has financial woes and is closed until further notice, cutting off their access to the possibility of identifying who is now holding their belongings. The rest of the book is a sometimes funny, sometimes grim French farce about the efforts each woman makes to get her life back on track and retrieve the things that are important to her, enabled by the aforementioned wonderful secondary characters.
As you can guess, there is a fair share of heartwarming personal transformation, but it’s not maudlin, nor is it cute, so it rings true. The contrast in status of each woman with the people surrounding her and how that matters (or doesn’t) in the scheme of things is a big theme, as is discovering what each truly wants as opposed to what they have been accustomed to receiving as their due or enduring as their punishment. There are hints of developing romantic relationships between various characters, which is always nice if done properly, and also some comeuppance results, which are gratifying. All in all, I really enjoyed this latest from Moyes.
Two added notes: First, I am bemused by the choice of artwork for the cover. With a book completely centered around those shoes, why aren’t they on display in all their wildly expensive glory? Second, after finishing this I scanned the next five books up on my Kindle, wondering which to read, and noticed that The Reading List, which will be due at the library in a week so should probably be first, was written by Sara NISHA Adams. Having never previously encountered the name Nisha only to read a book with one as the protagonist, it seems too serendipitous that the following novel should be written by someone of the same name, doesn’t it? That’s my reading life…
Standards, genres
I find I don’t often enjoy the books that mainstream book clubs are out there touting like mad; or sometimes I do enjoy them, but it’s more like an unhealthy sugar rush than a savored meal, something you may regret later. Part of the reason usually turns out to be the frantic push to define a book as something more than it is.
That was the case when I read The Last Thing He Told Me, by Laura Dave. It’s not without merit: The central decision of the main character to do something that will forever deprive her of the thing she has discovered she wants was, to me, a compelling plot twist and the best part of the book. But the efforts of the publisher, the book clubs, and now Apple TV+ to convince us that this is an explosive mystery/thriller do a disservice to what is basically a domestic drama.
Hannah, a woman with an established life and an involving and creative career, meets Owen, and finds for the first time in her life that she can put aside all her reservations and enter wholly into a relationship. They take it to the next step, Hannah leaving her base in New York City for life on a houseboat in Sausalito with Owen and his 15-year-old daughter, Bailey. Her stepdaughter doesn’t warm up to her, and Hannah is, quite frankly, somewhat pathetic in the ways she tries to win Bailey over. Then, one day, Owen disappears, leaving behind a cryptic note that says “Protect her.” Bailey is the most important person in his life and, finding himself unable to be there for her himself, he asks Hannah to step up. This is where the contrived plot started to lose me because, as we discover as the story proceeds, there are specific people from whom Bailey needs protecting, but since Owen fails to mention any of them (a simple addendum of “Don’t go to this city!” would have sufficed), that leaves Hannah and Bailey walking right into danger as they do their amateur sleuth routine trying to find out why Owen has disappeared. For a person with as much talent for deception as Owen turns out to be, you’d think he would have thought ahead a little?
There were some nice moments as Bailey and Hannah come to trust each other (or more likely realize that there is no one else) and their relationship starts to unfold, but other aspects of the story (such as the involvement of the FBI and the ineffectiveness of the Witness Protection Program) are dealt with summarily to the story’s disadvantage. I did enjoy the sleuthing parts as they research Owen’s (and Bailey’s) past (probably the librarian in me), but the detecting bits don’t make this a mystery any more than the drama makes this a thriller. Many of the reviewers I saw on Goodreads disliked the book not because of its own inherent merits or failings but because its genre was misrepresented by the hype.
If you do decide to read it, therefore, go into it as an example of relationship fiction with a little extra excitement provided by the circumstances surrounding the central theme, and put those other genre labels out of your head. As a “What if?” story, it’s quite engaging enough to provide a pleasant afternoon’s read, but if you pick it up expecting Jennifer Hillier or Sharon Bolton-level thrills, you will be disappointed.
The pinnacle of Schwab
There are a few authors whose books I pretty consistently love and will always read, and V. E. (Victoria) Schwab is one of them…with a caveat. She writes adult books and she writes for young adults, and I am passionate about most of the adult ones but not so much for the YA, which is too bad, considering YA is my “specialty” (having been a teen librarian for all those years). I can’t quite figure out how someone can be brilliant for one age group and less so for another, but there it is; although I like a few of her YA books quite a bit, there are others I found somewhat “meh.” For instance, although I enjoyed the Cassidy Blake series (meant for middle-schoolers), both the Archived and the Monsters of Verity novels left me wishing they had better world-building, less confusion, and more logic. I should say, though, that there are many teens who absolutely love her YA series, so perhaps Schwab is actually good at gauging how to write for teens, and I am just not that demographic and should quit talking!
For me, the two adult series where she really shines are Shades of Magic and this week’s re-reads, Villains, which begins with one of my all-time favorite books, Vicious.
Vicious turns everything you think you believe on its head, in terms of likeable versus unlikeable protagonists (antagonists?), because it has one who is set up as a hero but who gives you the heebie-jeebies, and another, a supposed villain, who you root for even though in some ways he is a distinctly unpleasant person. Moral ambiguity is definitely the theme.
Vicious is elegant and spare, with just the right amount of detail and not an ounce more or less. It has an array of fantastic characters who come across fully fleshed out with only a few sentences of description. I can’t believe it was Schwab’s first book for adults—it’s masterful. I have read it at least three times (maybe four?), and its sequel, Vengeful, is equally as compelling. I wrote a review of the two books here, if you’d like to know more about them (before reading them yourself!). The other thing to know is that there is a third book coming. I don’t know when—Schwab has gone off in five different directions since she wrote this, from her massive The Invisible Life of Addie Larue to her ExtraOrdinary comics series (based on the Villains universe) and also the first book of a new YA series, Gallant—but we do know it will be called Victorious, and that there are already 25,000 people on Goodreads who have put it on their “TBR” list as soon as it hits the bookstores (no pressure, Vee!). I hope she doesn’t delay too much longer…
Endings
Does the ending of a book alter your perception of the entire story? This is what I’m pondering, a few minutes after turning the last page of The Moonlight Child, by Karen McQuestion. The book had a compelling premise and an engaging presentation, but the climax and aftermath of the story was too casually told for what had gone before. And that was the crux of the problem, I think—the author ceased showing us and instead starting telling, and the whole story suddenly lost its mojo.
Sharon Lemke is recently retired and reveling in the ability to call all her time her own. She had thought that she would be at loose ends and perhaps immerse herself in volunteer work, but instead she is simply enjoying each day. One night she stays up late to watch a lunar eclipse, and from an upstairs bedroom window she observes something that puzzles her. In the house behind hers, a little girl, perhaps five years old, is standing on a step-stool doing dishes while the lady of the house apparently berates her. First of all, why is a child of that age performing household chores at midnight? and second of all, Sharon knows a little bit about these neighbors, the Flemings, enough to know that they have one son, Jacob, who is 17. So who is the little girl?
Soon after this incident, Sharon’s daughter, Amy, an attorney, calls her to ask a rather large favor: She is a mentor for a teenager, Niki, a former foster child who at 18 has just aged out of the system. Niki hasn’t been able to find an appropriate place to live, and Amy wonders if Sharon would consider letting Niki stay with her for a while. Sharon somewhat reluctantly agrees, but after Niki arrives the two form a bond much like grandparent and grandchild, and both are pleased to go on with the situation.
Niki’s bedroom overlooks the Fleming family’s back yard, and after she, too, notices some odd occurrences surrounding the anonymous little girl who apparently lives with them, she and Sharon decide to call social services. But the wheels of bureaucracy turn slowly; the two become impatient and decide to do a little detective work on their own, to find out who this child is, and what relation she bears to the family. This sets some dramatic events in motion.
I really enjoyed about 85 percent of this book. The characters were interesting and memorable, their interactions dynamic, and the story moved along at an exciting pace, with numerous small surprises to keep things interesting. The psychological aspect of the antagonist—the sociopath, Suzette Fleming, whose selfish needs drive the story and motivate the actions of every member of the Fleming household—was fascinating to observe, and the differences between her perception of the world versus what other people were actually thinking were quite entertaining.
But…then a few things happened that turned me against it. First of all, although Sharon Lemke is initially set up as an important protagonist, she all of a sudden takes a back seat during the crucial action of the book, which was disappointing. I felt like the author decided to relegate her permanently to “grandma” status, rather than allowing her to keep her agency.
Second, the crucial scenes in the resolution of the child Mia’s situation were in some ways excitingly written, but we suddenly lost touch with the thoughts and emotions of Suzette, who was the driving force of all the internal action throughout, and the rest of the book becomes simply a series of narrated events without the context of her delusion. The whole ending resolved itself with comparative ease, but in the process it became truncated, leaving the reader (or, at least, this reader) feeling dissatisfied even though everything had been wrapped up.
So, my question: Does the ending ruin the rest? Not entirely, but sufficiently to change my opinion of this book from an enthusiastic five to a somewhat tepid three. All I could think, for the last 15 percent, was, Damn! and it was going so well!
How’s the weather?
I may have mentioned (once or twice or a dozen times) that I am not much of a romance reader. I’m not fond of the prevailing tropes of enemies-to-friends or city-folk-migrate-to-a-small-town-and-fall-in-love; I find the ways many romance authors choose to put their protagonists together to be manipulative in the extreme and not particularly clever; and a lot of the sex scenes turn out to be cringeworthy. But occasionally I come across one that feels genuine, despite itself, and worms its way into my affections, and that is the case with my most recent gamble on Kindle deals, Weather Girl, by Rachel Lynn Solomon.
Interestingly (to me, at least), many readers, both newbies and former fans of this author, did not like this book. But I guess I am usually the contrarian, so what the hey. I thought it was cute, poignant, more realistic than many, and included some elements not usually found in romance novels that made it appealing.
Ari Abrams is, first of all, a Jewish protagonist, which is rare; she is also a successful young TV meteorologist with a depression problem, who portrays herself as all sunshine and hides her dark side. Her love interest, Russell Barringer, also Jewish, is a sports reporter, a big teddy bear of a guy who is self-conscious about his weight. These two departures from the norm made me much more likely to enjoy this book.
Then there is the plot, which is silly enough to be light entertainment but plausible enough to carry the story: The two “bosses” of the TV station are a phenomenally popular meteorologist and her former husband, her producer, who make the station their daily battleground to the discomfort of all the other employees. But Ari and Russell see glimpses of former love and passion between these two and decide to “Parent Trap” them by trying to encourage them to renew/salvage their relationship; in the process, Ari and Russell also begin to find one another more appealing than their initial friendship would have indicated.
I enjoyed getting inside the head of someone who was fighting depression, mostly successfully, but who had deep doubts about her ability to be real with anyone and still be loved. I also liked finding out Russell’s secrets and wondering how they would fit into the mix. And finally, the sex scenes were steamy and appealing and not at all creepy, which is a big hurdle in most rom-coms.
So—a rare recommendation from me for a mostly cute, mostly light romance with some unexpectedly well handled serious subjects.
The Book Adept 