Short stories
I get offered daily e-book bargains—freebies, or super-cheap prices—by BookBub, and sometimes I take them. I have learned, however, to first look up each one on Goodreads to see its average star rating and read some reviews; sometimes they are a bargain simply because they will never make it any other way. Also, BookBub has a habit of offering #3 in a series, with the hope, no doubt, that you will acquire it, realize there are two books before it, and buy them at full price. Nope. That’s what the library is for.
Anyway, some recent freebies were short stories by prominent authors and, while in general I dislike the very idea of short stories, being offered something for free by the likes of Margaret Atwood and Alice Hoffman definitely made me pause…and then say yes! So I acquired and read The Bookstore Sisters, by Alice Hoffman, and My Evil Mother, by Margaret Atwood.
I read these stories solely because of who wrote them. I have never understood the motivation behind writing short stories: Why go to all the trouble of selecting a venue and creating complex characters, only to write 34 pages about them and stop? I would think it would be as unsatisfying for the writer as for the reader!
I checked some reviews after finishing The Bookstore Sisters, and had to agree with someone else on Goodreads who summarized it as “Good, if a little twee.” Although I gave it four stars for the writing and characters, I was disappointed in this effort by Hoffman, because it is essentially a shorthand version of every “relationship” book written by lesser writers in the past five years: Two sisters, estranged—one remains at the “homestead” while the other goes off to, of course, NYC, and “forgets” her past. The homebody runs into crisis, the stray returns home to help, a breakthrough is made, the family income is saved, a love is rekindled, and…scene. Meh.
I had more initial hope that My Evil Mother, by Margaret Atwood, would rise to the level of the few short stories I ever really appreciated, chief among them those by that mistress of the unsettling tale, Daphne du Maurier. (I do love her compilation called Don’t Look Now.) While told in the voice of the daughter, the story showcases Mom, who is giving a perfect performance as a 1950s housewife, attired in pin-striped shirtwaist dresses protected by flowered aprons, delivering the occasional tuna casserole to a sick neighbor, while hiding her true self. The reality is that the daughter never knows whether, when Mom takes out her mortar and pestle to grind something up, it will be the garlic and parsley she needs to mix into her meat loaf, or something concocted from the plants in her off-limits herb garden in the back yard and sold to a weeping woman who visits their kitchen after dark. (Coincidence: Shades of Alice Hoffman here, with the aunts providing contraband love spells for the ungrateful townsfolk in Practical Magic.)
There are funny bits, as the mother tries to convince the daughter that her gym teacher is an ancient nemesis who may work a spell with the daughter’s hair if she isn’t assiduous about collecting it from her hairbrush and burning it. Or that the mother has turned the girl’s absent father into the oversize garden gnome who stands on their front step. But ultimately, there’s not much of a story here, only “stories,” anecdotes about a girl growing up with a peculiar, eccentric mother and coming to certain realizations, once grown, that help her deal with her own surly teenage daughter.
Ultimately, My Evil Mother had a certain novelty and a lot of imagination (I loved the mother’s voice), but it wasn’t a satisfactory experience. All you get with a story like this is a skim off the surface of these people’s lives, when you want their full depth and presence—the entire bowl of pudding. I think I won’t spend time on them again, even if they are written by authors I love and admire.
Metaphor
If I had to define the central theme of the book Black Cake, by Charmaine Wilkerson, it would probably be summed up by this quote:
“But the fact was, when you lived a life, under any name, that life became entwined with others. You left a trail of potential consequences. You were never just you, and you owed it to the people you cared about to remember that.”
ELEANOR BENNETT
The cake in the title, made with blended fruits soaked in liquor and with burnt sugar added to produce its distinctive black color, is a symbol of family, tradition, a thread of familiarity that stretches back to connect all the disparate parts down through generations. It’s also a metaphor for the complexities of culture, in which such issues as colonization, slavery, immigration, assimilation, and social, racial, and political borders figure into every aspect of life—or a recipe.
This book is a kind of revelatory fiction; the story is told completely in third person, but from multiple voices and points of view, and a new bit of the story is revealed as another person takes up the narrative and adds his or her perspective. Situations are fleshed out by hearing about them from different voices and seeing them through different eyes, and each narrator has a reaction to share. Although Eleanor Bennett, the matriarch of this family, is the pivotal character, the story is moved forward by noting the effects all the secrets of her life have had on the members of her family, most specifically her children, and also by revealing the major impact that both significant and tertiary characters in her past have had on hers and everyone else’s future.
Although I had some difficulties with the book, the most persistent probably being that Wilkerson stuffed it as full of social issues as her black cake bulges with fruit, I appreciated it as a whole. I couldn’t wait, when I reached the end of a chapter, to turn the page and see what the next one would contain, and I was seldom disappointed. Murder, desperate acts, rebirths, aliases, grand secrets, it’s all there in Black Cake. The story is about decisions made that can never be taken back, about necessary sacrifice and stubborn persistence. It’s a powerful picture of what it means to be a survivor, and to preserve a sense of racial and cultural identity throughout. The thing I liked most about it was that the narrative evolved as a true storyteller would reveal it, carrying you along with her into an evocative past. Give it a taste and see if it’s to your liking.
The essence of a genre
As I discuss in my genre lecture in my readers’ advisory class at UCLA, crime fiction accounts for as much as a third of the fiction published in English worldwide. If you regard that statistic you must conclude that there are many for whom the reading of mysteries is an attractive or even compelling way to occupy their leisure time.
A basic definition of mystery fiction is “any work of fiction in which a crime or the threat of a crime is central to the theme or plot.” But there is so much beyond that basic definition—at the very least, Who are the characters? What is the situation? and Who will figure it out? Think about all the elements that can be components: the red herring, the false clues, the inside job; the amateur vs. the professional detective, the reconstruction of the scene and circumstances, the procedural details of discovering the means, motive, and opportunity—the list goes on. There is also, amongst mystery readers, a certain vicarious authority or presence indulged in by their choice of protagonist. In other words, since most mysteries are part of a series, you as the reader are going to be spending a lot of time with that protagonist, i.e., the detective or person acting as such. That protagonist is
going to become far more important to you than any individual plot or story.
If you ask a mystery reader to describe Harry Bosch, the main character in Michael Connelly’s long-running series set in Los Angeles, they can give you a complete catalogue of what he looks like, how old he is, where he lives, how many times he’s been married and to whom, his relationship with his daughter, how many times he has been hired and then fired by the LAPD, in what other capacities he has performed as a detective, and even his war record in Vietnam; but if you ask that same reader the plot of one of the 24 Harry Bosch novels, that person may say “they all run together after a while.” It seems that everything about a series protagonist is recalled as a unit, with little or no memory of which specific texts revealed these details.
That’s not to say that plot isn’t vitally important to the experience; by reading a mystery, you are participating in the process of going from the unknown (the whodunnit) to the known, and following many indicators to get to the resolution, and mystery readers are notoriously unforgiving of a poorly laid-out plot. But characterization, of both the protagonist and the other participants, is key to a successful mystery.
I say all this as a lead-in to discussion of the book I just read, the first of a fairly long (10 books) and apparently successful body of work by a well-respected author whose other, more recent writing (Shetland Islands) I have recently enjoyed. It was because of those books that I decided to sample Ann Cleeves’s more well-known series about Detective Inspector Vera Stanhope, beginning in 1999 with The Crow Trap.
Having finished the book, I am utterly baffled about why, once having read this first one, anyone would bother to continue onward with the rest. Perhaps, if I had first seen the television show Vera, based on the series and starring the wonderful Brenda Blethyn, I might barrel on through, convinced that things could only get better. But if it were left to The Crow Trap to convince me, it simply wouldn’t happen.
To me, this book violated so many of the criteria we mystery readers have come to expect from our genre: A compelling story, an interesting if not charismatic lead, an engaging mystery. Instead, there is a vaguely presented low-key conflict in a country town, about which even the principal players don’t seem passionate, and a detective who isn’t introduced (beyond a cameo appearance where she is mistaken for someone else) until about the 45-percent mark in a book that is about 150 pages too long. There are multiple murders of people that everyone, including the principals, seems hard-pressed to care about. The main characters are not well defined or described, and each of their personalities border on irritating to downright unlikeable. The detective herself is repellent in a way that would, for me, be hard to recover from in subsequent volumes, because I disliked her so much—both her manners and her methods. There is little order or logic to the investigation, and the resolution is so completely underplayed that I had a hard time understanding that yes, indeed, it was this person for these reasons, and the story is over.
This book received a preponderance of four-star ratings on Goodreads, while I struggled between the flat three-star “I liked it” score and the more accurate (but still maybe too enthusiastic) “it was okay” of two stars. I won’t descend to one star, giving Cleeves credit for at least creating an initial interesting scenario, but beyond that I would say, Read her Shetland books instead, or, hey, watch the TV series guilt-free.
Plausibility
Do romance novels have to have a plausible premise?
I ask this because so many don’t, in my experience. Every once in a while I go outside my preferred reader zone and assay one of the genres for which I have little affinity (these would be romance, horror, westerns, and pretty much all nonfiction!), because as a readers’ advisor I need to keep up with what’s current and have some titles ready to suggest, no matter what my personal preferences. So, after finishing the mammoth undertaking that was Demon Copperhead (see previous post), I decided to go for something light and frivolous.
My chosen book was When A Scot Ties the Knot, by Tessa Dare, a part of the “Castles Ever After” trilogy (which isn’t a series but rather a rough grouping of similar stories). I actually looked up a different book on Goodreads, but one reviewer said that in her opinion that one was a rip-off of this novel, and cited Dare’s book as the better read, so I believed her and switched. Ironically, all through this book I kept thinking, Ripoff? Yeah, of Outlander. The Scot in question spent the whole book calling the object of his affection “Mo chridhe,” which is a Jamie-ism if ever I heard one. No, I know Jamie Fraser was not the first to use that expression, but you have to admit that has become a signature phrase for him, along with “Mo nighean donn.” Also, the whole forced marriage thing…whoops!
On to the implausible plot: Madeline Gracechurch is shy. In fact, her introversion goes far beyond that—she suffers panic attacks in crowds. So when her family plans to send her to London for the Season, where she has to mingle with hundreds of people at balls and actually talk to men with a view of marrying one, she panics. She makes up a suitor that she supposedly met while in Brighton on vacay, but not just any suitor: He’s Scottish, he’s a Captain in the army, and he’s away at war. So obviously she has no need to go to London, because once the war is over, her Captain MacKenzie will come for her.
This begins a years-long deception in which Maddie writes letters to Captain MacKenzie and sends them off to the front…and receives letters from him in return, because after all, it would be a bit suspicious if he didn’t write back! There is no explanation of how she manages to arrange for the return letters, especially in someone else’s handwriting other than her own, but this is just the first (although admittedly most egregious) of implausibilities. The next is a much bigger surprise: Captain MacKenzie, the remainder of his men in tow, shows up at her castle in Scotland (she inherited it from her godfather), letters in hand, and informs her that they will be wed forthwith so that his men will have a place to live, their lands having disappeared while they were away fighting for the Brits, and if she won’t marry him, he will expose her deception.
So…how did Logan MacKenzie receive the missives Maddie expected to end up in the dead-letter box? Well, apparently the British mail system within the armed forces is just that good! (Anyone surprised by that?) Even though he wasn’t a Captain but a lowly private when she first began her correspondence with him at the age of 16, the letters somehow found their way to him and yes, actually inspired him to work hard enough over the subsequent years to make the rank of Captain a reality.
All those letters, though, that Maddie received in return—not a one of them was from him. He collected all of hers…but never had the impulse to write back and say, Um, who exactly are you, why are you writing to me, what the hell, young lady? Nope. But he saved all of hers with the plan to confront her and demand her hand in marriage on his return.
Then, however, she makes him mad: She kills him off! Well, it had to come sooner or later, because what would happen should he never show up to claim his bride? So she pretends to have received news of his demise, wears mourning for a year or two, and blithely goes about creating a career for herself as a naturalist’s illustrator, drawing pictures of plants and bugs for prominent researchers and publishers.
Then the big surprise, in a blue and green kilt, shows up on her doorstep.
I suppose that romance is a genre in which you are expected to willingly suspend disbelief in a major way, but there was so much potential for holes in this one that I laughed out loud several times as this farce unfolded. It’s not a bad book, and she’s not a bad writer, especially as regards the steamy scenes when they are working up to consummating their hand-fasting. But Maddie’s subsequent frantic search for the letters—Logan’s tool of blackmail—and Logan’s maintenance of his mad-on because she killed him off became increasingly ridiculous, since it was patently obvious that she had fallen for all of his many charms, and he for hers, pretty early on. The book was basically an exercise in drawing out the anticipation for sex between the two.
One funny note that falls under reader serendipity: After I finished this silly story, I picked up a rather dark and convoluted mystery by Ann Cleeves, only to discover that its protagonist was also a naturalist’s illustrator. How weird is that?
A classic based on a classic
I feel like I need some kind of reward for having finished, just as the author deserves an award for having written! I enthusiastically and optimistically started Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver, two days after Christmas, thinking it would be my first read of 2023, but my count is now up to 11 books, and I just finished it. I took two breaks, one motivated by wanting to be able to read on my Kindle in the dark of night in my bed (I bought the hardcover of Demon Copperhead, knowing that I’d want to keep it on my shelf), and the other by realizing that the depressing nature of the story was having such a profound effect on my mood that I needed to read something else for a while! But I was determined to finish, and the wink-out of my Kindle battery mid-sentence day before yesterday sent me, finally, back to the last 13 percent of this tangible book.
It’s not that I didn’t want to read it—it’s an amazing story of a quirky, irrepressible, sad, endearing red-headed boy who nobody wants, and it’s also both a literary masterpiece and a stern indictment of America’s marginalization of the disadvantaged. For all those reasons, it is worth my time and yours. But lordy, is it depressing! Damon Fields (the protagonist’s real name) is a logical (though still incredibly unlucky) product of his surroundings, growing up in the foster care system after his junkie mother leaves him an orphan in a single-wide at a young age. But he is not an anomaly—there are plenty of unfortunates in the culture of Southern Appalachia who contribute to the dour mood. One of the most powerful understandings comes towards the end of the book, when Tommy, one of Demon’s former foster brothers, crafts a philosophy of America that pits the “land” people against the “money” people, and the land people—those who hunt and fish, farm tobacco, and share what they have with their family and anyone else in need, operating outside the monetary system—always lose.
I am somewhat ashamed to say that I have never read David Copperfield, the book on which Kingsolver based this one, although I have a fairly good knowledge of its contents and am in awe of how she translated Dickens’s “impassioned critique of institutional poverty and its damaging effects on children in his society” (Kingsolver, Acknowledgments) into this stunning story of the opioid crisis in Appalachia. But unlike the Jodi Picoult novel about which I blogged last, this book is not preaching about the social crisis but instead is determined to tell the story via the victims and survivors of it in a straightforward, completely realistic manner that guts the reader who is invested in them. Every person in this book (and there are dozens) is vivid, individual, and completely memorable. Even though I broke it up into multiple reading sessions over the course of more than a month, I never once had to think, Um, who is this character again? and backtrack, because every single one of them stood out as a person. I can’t think of a much better compliment you could give to a writer, and Kingsolver deserves it.
But it is the character of Demon who dominates—and sometimes overwhelms. His circumstances are beyond tragic, horrifying when you think of a child having to endure what he does, and yet he is a source of continual hope. It’s not that he’s a falsely optimistic Pollyanna of a character, it’s that he has somehow assimilated a work/life ethic that causes him to put his head down and push through every challenge in his desire to live. And even when he fails—and he does that just as spectacularly—he somehow never gives up on himself. As he loses family, friends, mentors, homes, abilities, he manages to continue focusing on what he does have and what he can use, and keeps hauling himself back to his feet.
One reviewer on Goodreads repeated a quote from a Washington Post book review that said,
“Demon is a voice for the ages—akin to Huck Finn or Holden Caulfield—only even more resilient.”
I couldn’t agree more. Another said “This is a book about love and the need for love, the search for love,” and that, too, is true. And the language, both brutal and brilliant—Kingsolver’s way with words is beyond skillful. I won’t say much more about the book, I’ll leave it to you to discover. But it deserves all the accolades.
A certain kind of story
I discovered Jodi Picoult’s books back when I was on the cusp of 40, with her book Mercy (I think). I may have read one of the ones before that, but the descriptions on Goodreads don’t spark any memories. But I have read so many books over the years that sometimes I come to an old one thinking it is new, only to vaguely recognize the story as I get further into it, so I’m not sure. Anyway, after that I made a habit of picking up her books until somewhere around My Sister’s Keeper, in 2004, and after that I lost interest and quit reading them.
It wasn’t because she wasn’t a good writer, and in fact I enjoyed the story in My Sister’s Keeper; but her books increasingly reminded me of my least favorite young adult novels—those the library profession calls “problem novels.” Somehow, even though her characters remained fairly compelling, her books began to seem to me like those preachy tomes written for teens that turned out to be about a condition, or a social concern, rather than a person; as Michael Cart says in his history of teen fiction,
“The problem novel stems from the writer’s social conscience. It gave the frisson of reading about darkness from the comfort of a clean, well lit room.”
Young Adult Literature: From Romance to Realism, p. 35
Rather than telling realistic stories about the teens who experienced certain aspects of life, the books focused on such subjects as drug abuse, abortion, unwed motherhood, and so on, using a formula that approached the feeling of an old-fashioned morality play. Problem novels sought to illustrate the perils inherent in poor life choices, and every time I opened a Picoult novel, it was with the unspoken question: What is the problem/flavor of the month in this one? They became repetitive and increasingly uninteresting to me (although a certain segment of readers continued to eagerly devour every word).
There were a few things that enticed me to once more read a Picoult bestseller: One of the characters is a bee-keeper, which profession has always fascinated me; Picoult co-wrote it with someone rather unexpected, about whom I wanted to know more; and the “What Should I Read Next?” crowd on Facebook pretty much raved unequivocally about Mad Honey, Picoult’s latest hit with Jennifer Finney Boylan.
There were parts of this book that I liked very much. The bee-keeping was, as anticipated, as enthralling as always. The back stories and characters of the two moms were compelling, as was the head-rush of a romance between the two teens, Asher and Lily. The authors wrote both their main and subsidiary characters with conviction and believability. But there was a fatal flaw within the story that really bothered me.
The basic outline is this: Olivia McAfee took her six-year-old son Asher and ran from an abusive husband back to the New Hampshire town where she grew up, inheriting her father’s bee-keeping operation. Asher is now in high school, a star of the hockey team, a good student, and a kind son and friend, having grown up in Olivia’s sole custody.
Ava Campanello fled with her daughter, Lily, from her own marital trials and more, and her employment options with the park service landed her in the same town in New Hampshire just in time for Lily’s senior year, hoping for a fresh start for the both of them.
Asher and Lily are almost immediately drawn to one another, and begin an intense relationship that lasts about four months before Lily ends up dead, having fallen down the stairs in her own home, and Asher is the one who finds her and is discovered weeping and clutching her body—but not calling for an ambulance. After a brief investigation, the police come for Asher and he is charged with first-degree murder.
Thus far, the whole plot worked for me, even the crazy timeline about which some complain, which jumped from before to after “the event” in almost every chapter, and also switched narrators/viewpoints—Olivia to Lily. Then we get to the trial. Olivia’s brother, Jordan, is, serendipitously, a rather famous defense attorney, and immediately comes to the rescue, agreeing to represent Asher pro bono. We go through all the details of a murder case—expert witnesses, character witnesses, the prosecution’s efforts to make the defendant look as guilty as possible by characterizing him as a violent, impulsive liar with both motive and opportunity. Then we get to the defense and Jordan completely falls down on the job.
The question that is never, ever asked by anyone—Asher, his lawyer, his mother or, apparently, the police—is the one that would have been central to the defense in any halfway well written murder mystery. Can you guess what it is? In his Dismas Hardy legal thriller series, author John Lescroart characterizes it as the “SODDIT” defense: Some Other Dude Did It. In Mad Honey, Asher adamantly maintains his innocence: When he walked in the (slightly ajar) front door, Lily was lying at the foot of the stairs, her head bleeding. His uncle/lawyer and his mother believe him, despite his mother’s secret fears that genetics have won out and he is violent like his gas-lighter of a father. The prosecution is insisting that he did do it, based almost solely on circumstantial evidence—some DNA, some texts, a scandal in his past that brands him as a liar. But not one person who believed he didn’t do it (including Asher himself!) spoke up to say, If Asher didn’t kill her, then who did?
Jordan should have been all over that—questioning the police and detectives to see whether they had considered any alternate person and scenario, having his investigator look into others who might have been suspicious, checking neighbors and traffic cams to determine whether anyone else visited the house that day, but…crickets. No mention of an alternative theory of who the murderer could be. That’s pretty much when the story lost me, and should have been when Asher, fighting for the rest of his life, or his mother, with her greater adult wisdom, sat up and said Jordan! WTF?
It didn’t totally ruin the rest for me—I still liked the characters (particularly Lily), the story, and the twists, small and large, and might recommend it based on those things. (And you should know that, despite all the surface details cataloged in this review, I have kept all the big secrets of the book.) But that one omission, paired with the way the book ends, made me realize that perhaps my initial conclusion—that Picoult is too focused on the social concerns she wants to highlight to truly immerse herself in the meat of the story—was not off base. I won’t say I’ll never read another from the Picoult oeuvre, but it will take something extraordinary to convince me.
Unreliable narrator(s)
Typically, a third-person narrative offers (at best) a picture of objective reality, or at least a world-view that is easily identified as biased in a particular way. But a first-person narrator has no obligation to offer the facts of a recognizable history—that person is free to substitute his or her own perceptions and interpretations, given without third-party corroboration to demonstrate them as accurate. Personal bias is included in those perceptions, but is not recognized by the narrator, who treats his own view as if it is “the truth,” and the reader must then decide whether to believe it.
In Alice Feeney’s book Rock Paper Scissors, we have three personal narratives—those of Adam and Amelia Wright, a married couple who are (supposedly at least) both attempting to put their floundering marriage right with the help of a weekend “away,” and also that of a third person who comes along later in the story. The narrative jumps back and forth between Adam and Amelia for the first half or so of the book before broadening to include this third person, and we are serially treated to each character’s view of “the facts” about the other person, the relationship, and their individual and shared back history.
This is a nice set-up for what is supposed to be a rather dark tale of suspense. In a good suspense novel, the protagonists become aware of danger only gradually, with a subtle build influenced by the setting and mood, and with conflict present in every scene. The characters must start out in a state of slight uneasiness that builds to confusion, upset, and perhaps terror. And a good suspense book, of course, builds in a series of reveals or surprises up until the final one, keeping the reader uncertain about the outcome. The whole thing is about what may happen, about anticipation.
The tricky balance to this kind of book—and where Rock Paper Scissors lost me—is the reader’s identification with one or more of the narrators. In a suspense novel, the narrators are by definition unreliable, because that’s how the story arrives at its twists. But just because they are unreliable, does it follow that they must also be unlikeable? Adam Wright is a pompous, self-involved screenwriter with little regard for anything outside the boundaries of his ambition. Amelia Wright, apart from her work at the Battersea Dog Shelter, is equally narcissistic, expecting more from Adam than he is willing or able to give and therefore living in a constant state of disappointment with her life and her marriage. The idea that a weekend alone together in picturesque Scotland, in a converted chapel on the shores of a loch, could fix what’s wrong with these two is laughable. But that’s the scene when the story opens, as the two drive Amelia’s ancient car through a blinding snowstorm trying to reach their destination before they run out of gas or the snow strands them miles from civilization.
From the first page, each is cataloging the negligence, insensitivity, and mean little tricks of the other. By the end of the first couple of chapters I already heartily disliked the both of them, and almost put the book down at the point where they reach their destination, because it seemed like things would just continue to disintegrate. Curiosity about the back story that landed them here kept me going, but I should have listened to my first intuition and stopped reading.
It wasn’t just that Adam and Amelia were so dislikeable; the writing, too, and the pacing of the story were subtly off. The situation at their weekend retreat is purposely amped up to the point where I kept saying “Oh, c’mon!” at regular intervals. There were too many hints from both sides that each knew something that would fatefully impact the other, but the portents seemed too extreme and too abrupt to happen during a weekend in the country; also, the revelations didn’t unfold until so late in the book that I honestly think the author forgot she had inserted some of them, because they just never jelled, provoking an anticlimactic feeling about the entire story. And while the big twists were definitely momentous, given to whom they were happening, I just didn’t care.
Also, I thought the epilogue was idiotic.
I always struggle with whether to write a negative review, especially when it is a book that has been enjoyed and acclaimed by many. This one receives a preponderance of four stars on Goodreads, probably due to the fact that the “twists” are powerful. But the writing was clunky and full of clichés, the pacing alternated between maddeningly slow and overly dramatic for about 50 percent of the book, and the characters seemed flat and boring to me. The worst part was the many ominous hints that never panned out.
So the question for you is, when you are reading a psychological novel of suspense, is it more important to you that the writing, characters, and plot be of a certain quality, or that the author is able to pull off one or more true surprises? I obviously came down on the side of the former, but perhaps most people who are reading suspense appreciate the latter enough to be forgiving about the rest? I am personally feeling a bit disgruntled with Alice Feeney at the moment, because I wish I hadn’t invested the time and attention on her story.
And finally, I just want to say that everyone knows how to win or lose at rock-paper-scissors, so the idea of using it as a decider with someone you know so well that you can predict their response is, well, dumb.
Books about/with books, writers
I picked up a bargain e-book last week, a “relationship fiction” novel by author Susan Mallery. I hadn’t read Mallery before, but she’s quite popular, apparently. Most of her books seem to edge over the line into romance, but some are more story- or character-driven. She has quite a few short series and some stand-alones, one of which I chose from the BookBub E-book Deals that arrive in my inbox each day, because I was drawn in by the title: Boardwalk Bookshop. I am a sucker for any book that includes bookstores, libraries, readers, and writers in its title or content, so it was inevitable.
Although supposedly about a bookshop, the store in question is actually one large space divided up into three separate retail establishments (bookstore, bakery, and gift shop) shared by three women who wanted shops on the beachfront but neither needed the larger space nor could afford the price tag on their own. Despite not knowing one another, they impulsively team up to lease the place, installing their three enterprises side by side, each operating independently with their own employees and cash registers but benefitting greatly from the cross traffic of the other two businesses.
Mikki, the gift store owner, is a recently divorced 39-year-old who has two almost-grown children and a comfortable co-parenting arrangement with her ex-husband. Although they have been apart for three years, Mikki has not really moved on; right after the divorce she went on three separate but equally disastrous dates with various partners and gave up. A planned solo trip to Europe has suddenly awakened her to the fact that she could live another 40 or 50 years and doesn’t want to do so alone, but she’s not sure she has it in her to put herself forward again as a single, datable woman, with all the trial-and-error that involves.
Ashley, the baker, is swoonily in love with her live-in boyfriend Seth, who seems like the perfect man and mate except for one large flaw that, when it manifests, throws Ashley for a loop and has her doubting him, herself, and what will ultimately become of their relationship.
Bree, the book purveyor, raised by indifferent, self-involved author parents, met a man equally as brilliant as they were but who seemed to promise what they never gave her—love and a sense of belonging. Instead, he betrayed her rather spectacularly and then died, leaving her a young widow whose walls don’t come down for anyone—even Ashley’s persistently interested brother, Harding (who is also a writer).
The three women, initially bonded over their joint enterprise, slowly become friends and weigh in on each other’s options for romance, personal growth, and more. There is a dynamic, well-fleshed-out cast of secondary characters to interact with them, and the Los Angeles seaside setting is well utilized.
I liked this book, with some reservations: I thought both the narrative and the language could have been more nuanced. I found each of the women in turn to be dithery about her choices and actions. The three kept circling around to the same indecisiveness again and again, and while this may be how real life goes, in a novel it became repetitive and a little irritating. But the growth and change ultimately exhibited by each of them, while uneven, did move along to satisfying conclusions for all, and I mostly enjoyed the reading experience. I could be persuaded to try some other Mallery titles, probably when I am looking for a light, fast read as a palate cleanser between more serious novels.
The second book-oriented story I read this week was The Woman in the Library, by Sulari Gentill, and it was a cat of a different color! I don’t remember where I came across this—it might have been on the readers’ Facebook group—but I’m so glad I picked it up, although others were not so happy with it. This is one of those books that (on Goodreads) either gets a five-star exclamation of “Yes!” from its reader, or a one-star “too weird for me.” I fell into the former group, with a few reservations—but mostly I was enthralled.
This book is the ultimate in meta, and the jump between reality and fiction is what kept me reading. The real-life set-up is that an Australian author of mysteries, Hannah Tigone, is writing a novel set in Boston, but she can’t travel from Sydney to do any on-site research due to Covid quarantine restrictions. Enter email pen pal Leo Johnson. Leo is initially introduced as an author trying to get his book published and reaching out to Ms. Tigone, a writer he admires, for suggestions or, preferably, actual assistance with finding an agent. But then Leo moves on to suggest that since he lives in Boston, he can easily assist with on-the-ground research, acting as a beta reader to give her information about locations and also vetting her language, since American slang differs markedly from Australian and it’s easy to slip up (calling a sweater a jumper, for instance) if you’re not paying attention.
After Leo’s initial email, the book moves into Hannah’s writing of her mystery. Her protagonist is Australian Winifred “Freddie” Kincaid, working on her own novel, living in Boston courtesy of the Marriott Scholarship, a writer’s grant that comes with a brownstone in Carrington Square. In the opening, Freddie has gone to the Boston Public Library for the day, planning to work on her book in its famous Reading Room, but is distracted by the three other people sitting at her table. She idly jots down notes on each of them as possible characters—she calls them Handsome Man, Heroic Chin, and Freud Girl—but then all four, along with the rest of the library users, are startled by a terrified scream coming from somewhere nearby. The library is locked down while security searches for the woman who cried out, and the four begin to chat about their immediate circumstance and a little about themselves; when they are released, they decide to go together to get something to eat, and this is the beginning of a four-way friendship.
It becomes harder as you go on to remember that Freddie is not the true protagonist, nor are these others real people—all are a part of Hannah’s story—but at the end of each chapter, the reader is yanked back to that reality by Leo’s comments on the last chapter Hannah has sent to him. Leo becomes increasingly invested in the contents of Hannah’s book, and…but that would be telling, and I have revealed enough. There are two stories here (or are there three?) and their juxtaposition and relation to one another kept me reading to finish this book in 48 hours.
The reservations I mentioned: The pacing wavers here and there, and sometimes the characters are a little flat—not well enough fleshed out. Also, insta-love rears its weary head. But these things didn’t bother me because they are, after all, part of a first draft of a manuscript! Remembering that as you go along makes everything completely believable, because Hannah still has the opportunity to come back and fix or change any of the details.
Hoping you pick this one up and are as delighted by it as I was, rather than falling into the group who considered it “weird.” The truth is, it IS weird and that’s what I liked!
Over the top is okay!
The latest installment of Elle Cosimano’s Finlay Donovan series dropped on January 31st, and I started reading it a few days later when I discovered it on my Kindle (I had prepaid for the e-book dump and then forgotten all about it).
Finlay Donovan Jumps the Gun carries on fairly precisely where the last book left off: Finlay and her sidekick, nanny/ accountant Vero, are indebted to Feliks Zhirov (the local Russian mob boss) for saving them from an embarrassing and dangerous situation, and he (of course) wants something in return. There’s a person called “EasyClean” who is operating online as a paid assassin; Feliks wants to know this person’s identity, and believes that Finlay can deliver that to him. Being impatient (as mob bosses often are, don’t you know), he gives her a two-week deadline, which doesn’t make her one-week time limit with her agent for the final manuscript of her latest novel any easier to achieve, especially since the contents of the book are so close to the circumstances of her personal life that she has run head-on into writer’s block trying to resolve them.
Meanwhile, Vero has a deadline of her own—she’s delinquent on a gambling debt with a loan shark out of Atlantic City, and his enforcers are hot on her heels. What’s the solution? Finlay and Vero decide it’s to enroll in a one-week civilian police academy training. After all, they have come to believe that EasyClean may actually be a cop, so where better to figure it all out than from in amongst ’em? And where else could they be sure that pesky flunkies for the mob won’t be able to touch them? Finlay hands over the kids to Steven for a week, and the two move into the police academy dormitory to see what they can see. And, since it’s Finlay Donovan, chaos immediately ensues. Did I mention that Finlay’s crush, Detective Nick, is running the thing? and that both of his slightly suspicious partners and Finlay’s police officer sister are in attendance? And that the supposedly well-guarded barriers to the facility turn out to be as porous as swiss cheese when it comes to characters, suspicious or otherwise, making their way to the window of Finlay’s room?
In short, this is yet another frenetic flourish of Cosimano’s pen in pursuit of the author/single mom/accidental hit woman, and carries the franchise along nicely. I had been under the impression, for some reason, that this series would be a trilogy, but that’s not the case—this one ended on yet another cliff hanger, ensuring there are more books to come. (If all of this description has intrigued you, read the series in order from the beginning or you will be lost.)
I’m a little torn on my rating for this book. I gave the first one five stars, and the second one got four; I’m tending towards four stars on this one as well. Although it had moments that were totally brilliant (the opening scene with toddler Zach comes to mind), it also had some repetitive stuff (the continued misunderstandings about poor Javi); and the restriction of the scene-setting to the police academy means we miss out on some of the fun interactions with unsuspecting civilians that were so important to the first two books. But I did enjoy the thought processes behind figuring out EasyClean, and Cosimano is an expert at writing the hapless, accidental escalation into total mayhem that feels like Lucy Ricardo has landed in the middle of a murder mystery! I will definitely look forward to the next installment in Finlay’s overwrought journey, particularly the resolution of so many relationships: Will she finally put Steven firmly in his place? Will they ever get Vero out of debt and able to show her face again? Will Finlay be able to have a relationship with Nick without revealing all her (mostly inadvertent) criminal activities? Will Georgia find a girlfriend? Will Zach complete potty training? For these and many other crucial details, we once again await you, Elle Cosimano!
Hiatus, nostalgia, TV
I haven’t published anything here for a while because I started reading Demon Copperhead, the new book from fave author Barbara Kingsolver, and it has been taking forever. I am enjoying the voice of the protagonist and the high quality of her descriptive writing and somewhat quirky scene-setting, but the combination of the length of the book and the depressing quality of the narrative finally got to me at about 83 percent, and I set it aside to take a quick refreshment break.
I re-read two books by Jenny Colgan—Meet Me at the Cupcake Café, and The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris—for their winning combination of positivity, romance, and recipes, and enjoyed them both. My plan was to go back to Kingsolver today, but instead I found myself picking up Dying Fall, the latest Bill Slider mystery by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles, which has been in my pile for months. I will get back to Demon Copperhead at some point, but the mood isn’t yet right.
Meanwhile, Netflix made me happy this weekend, having come out with season one of Lockwood & Co., adapted, partially written, and directed by Joe Cornish, and based on the young adult paranormal mystery series by author Jonathan Stroud. This has been a favorite series of mine since I read book #1 with my middle school book club and eagerly perused all the rest as they emerged from his brain onto the page (there are five books and a short story in it).
The series is set in a parallel world where Britain has been ruled for 50 years by “the Problem”—evil ghosts that roam freely, but can only be dealt with by children and teenagers young enough to be in touch with their perceptive gifts. Adults can be harmed by them but can’t see or even sense them, while the youth still see, hear, and sense their presence and fight them by discovering their “source” (the place or object to which they are attached) and either securing or destroying it.
The mythology seems to have evolved at least partially from faerie, vampire, and werewolf lore: The main weapons are iron chains, silver containers, running water, salt bombs, lavender, and longswords! The ghost-hunting teens are most of them employees operating under the supervision of corporate, adult-run agencies, but Lockwood & Co. is independent of adult supervision. It’s a startup existing on the fringes, run by two teenage boys—Anthony Lockwood, the putative boss and mastermind, skilled sword fighter and ingenious planner, and George Karim, the brainy researcher who provides background for their cases from the city’s archives. The two have advertised for and just recently acquired a girl colleague, Lucy Carlyle, who is new to London and technically unlicensed, but more psychically gifted than anyone they have ever met. This renegade trio is determined not just to operate on their own but to outdo the agency blokes in all their endeavors, so they take risks no adult at the corporations (or at DEPRAC, the Department of Psychical Research and Control) would sanction, in order to gain both notoriety and clients.
Cornish and his colleagues have nicely captured both the flavor of the overwrought atmosphere of beleaguered London and the perilous camaraderie of the principal characters—Lockwood, George, and Lucy—in their series. Season one covers the events from books #1 (The Screaming Staircase) and #2 (The Whispering Skull), so one assumes there will be at least one and perhaps two more seasons, if viewers make it popular enough for renewal. I certainly hope they do! But in case that doesn’t happen (or even if it does), the books are out there, and well worth your attention (and I don’t just mean middle-schoolers!).
The Book Adept 