The Wong way
Vera Wong rises to another occasion in Vera Wong’s Guide to Snooping (On A Dead Man), by Jesse Q. Sutanto, the second (but hopefully not the last) in the saga of this intensely curious proprietor of a Chinatown tea shop in San Francisco. (The first was Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, reviewed here.)
Although the dead body didn’t land on the floor of her shop this time, he did, in some sense, seek her out. When Vera pays a visit to the police station to see Officer Selena Gray (the woman she hopes will marry her son, Tilly) about a problem of her own, she notices a troubled girl lurking outside the station, pacing back and forth and wringing her hands but unable to bring herself to enter. Vera knows, as a Chinese grandmother, that it is her duty to interrogate, er, offer a sympathetic ear until the young Millie gives up whatever is bothering her, so Vera takes her back to the shop for a sustaining cup of tea. Millie tells Vera that her best friend, Thomas, is missing…but Vera knows there’s a lot Millie is holding back.
That weekend, while cat-sitting at their apartment for Tilly and Selena, Vera discovers a treasure trove of information (she looks at the files in Selena’s briefcase) about a young man who has been fished dead out of Mission Bay, presumably a suicide, and although the man is listed as John Doe, it soon becomes clear that this is Millie’s missing friend. But as events progress, we learn that he had a public face as well, under a different name, as a prominent “influencer” on social media; four other people besides Millie who have possibly suspicious connections to the dead man convince Vera that this was murder, not suicide. Vera, bored since her last adventure as an amateur sleuth, jumps in with both feet to meet, interrogate, and adopt her new list of suspects into the chosen family she acquired the first time around. Despite Selena’s warnings to stay out of her investigation, Vera is determined to be one step ahead of everyone in figuring out this mystery, thus proving she is as intrepid at solving it as she was last time.
I think I liked this book even better than the first, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Vera has no filter, and her misunderstanding of American slang and her slyly manipulative cozening of people to get what she wants—which also usually corresponds to what they need from her—provides a lot of humor. It also lets us get acquainted with the cast of characters much more quickly as Vera grills them mercilessly in her quest to solve the murder. But although she can be a bit much, Vera makes up for it with her caring, which she exhibits in her preparation of vast quantities of food and tea for all and sundry. (Don’t read this when you’re hungry. You will immediately spend a fortune on DoorDash, and then be disappointed that it doesn’t measure up to the cuisine of Vera Wong.)
I was initially a little put off by yet another book with a prominent character who is an Instagram influencer, especially having recently read Sutanto’s previous book You Will Never Be Me, which was a much darker tale about two women obsessed with their online presence as “momfluencers.” But before I decided to put it down, I was drawn further into the story as each subsequent character revealed what they knew and a complicated back story emerged about the actual life of “Thomas” that led to his death.
I loved the moments in the story when each member of the motley crew that Vera assembles has the realization that…
“[L]ife gets much easier when you hand over the reins to Vera.”
Some on Goodreads said they didn’t like it that Sutanto took the story in that more serious direction, but I felt it was the perfect balance—a cozy with substance when it comes to societal issues such as family relationships, loneliness, generational differences and expectations, and also the fatal effects of greed and exploitation. It had a little bit of everything, but for me the Wong way was the right way, ha ha!
And, judging from the closing chapter, we may not have seen the last of Vera…and the next adventure could take in a much wider world than San Francisco’s Chinatown!
Perfect stone fruit
Halfway through my reading of The Mare, my checkout period at the library ran out, and I couldn’t get the e-book back on my Kindle for about a week, so I took a break and read something else. I think reading The Mare may have provoked a subconscious connection to this book, which is also a coming-of-age story with a narrator on the cusp between child and teenager, but at a time when a “teenager” wasn’t what it is today. It is a book I have read before, but not for about 30 years, so the story has its place in my memory but has softened and faded to the point where I could experience it fresh.
The Greengage Summer, written by Rumer Godden in 1958, is the story of a mother with five children who, at the end of her rope one summer, impulsively decides to pack them all up and take them to France—not as a reward, but to show them the battlefields and mass graveyards there in the hope that they will all become less obnoxious and selfish! There is a father, but he is a botanist who travels extensively for his work, leaving his family behind in Southstone, a provincial English village in which they live a thoroughly mundane existence under the watchful if stodgy eye of their Uncle William. They are not a well-to-do family; they wear uniforms to school and the rest of the time mostly hand-me-downs from their next eldest sibling, and their weekly pocket money is counted out in pence, not pounds. The children range widely in age: Joss is 16, Cecil 13, Hester 10, Willmouse (the only boy) is eight, and Vicky is five.
The family takes a long and exhausting train trip down to the Vallée de la Marne, in the Champagne district of France, their destination the Hôtel les Oeillets, a small pension in the countryside. But during the journey, the mother is bitten on the leg by a horsefly, and by the time they arrive she is so ill that she must be hospitalized with blood poisoning. The patronesse, Mademoiselle Zizi, is inclined to cut the children loose (despite their being unsupervised with nowhere to go), but Elliot, an English guest at the hotel, is prevailed upon by the mother to keep an eye on her family until she returns from hospital, so the five move in and start their holiday in France under his casual supervision.
None of them save Cecil speaks any French (Cecil had to learn endless French poems by heart as punishment for poor schoolwork, and it stuck with her), and all of them approach the holiday on their own terms. The book is narrated by Cecil, with insights provided both from her own observations and from the experiences of her siblings. Cecil is sitting squarely at that transition point between child and adult during this summer, while her sister Joss has suddenly crossed over to that place held by beautiful young girls in the first flush of their power as women. The others, known to the family as “the littles,” also go through some changes, as they all encounter their first introduction to an adult world in a different culture, untrammeled by the careful routines of their normal lives.
The name, The Greengage Summer, comes from the fruit orchard that is part of the grounds of the hotel, where greengage plums are ripening on the trees and plopping to the ground, begging to be consumed by the children who laze under their shade in the long afternoons by the river Marne. And like the fruit, the summer is filled for the children with flavor and sweetness that surrounds some hard stones or truths at the core.
There is more to the story—undercurrents, background information, and a mystery in which both the residents and the guests become caught up—but I don’t want to give away too much, because the book is a delight to read and I am happy to have rediscovered it, for myself and for those who read my reviews and might pick it up based on this introduction. In addition to story, there is a specific rhythm and artfulness in the way Godden tells a tale that makes me happily revisit most of her books, and this is one of my top five (out of the 60 she wrote). It’s also a great read to choose for the hot, languid month of August.
The characterizations of everyone involved—the children, the hotel employees, the guests—are wonderful, diverse and memorable, and the mood she creates of this leisurely sun-filled holiday fraught with dark undercurrents is engaging in the best way. It may be that switching over to this book halfway through my reading of The Mare is what gave me a certain dislike for and disappointment in that story, because The Greengage Summer has everything I love in a perfectly realized arc, right down to the last line of the novel.
The Mare (the girl)
Having read Horse, by Geraldine Brooks, a few months back, when someone recommended the book The Mare, by Mary Gaitskill, I was primed to read it, especially because the teenage main character was named Velvet, immediately transporting me back to the joy of reading National Velvet in my childhood. And, similar to that book, this story was about a disadvantaged child whose encounter with horses changes things for her, although the child in this one is a much more extreme example. I didn’t grow up in a financial or social environment that would indicate the need for escape, but I was an introverted, solitary child who longed for the connection with horses in lieu of any relationship with people, so books like this spoke to me, and still do.
Velvet (short for Velveteen) Vargas is the daughter of a single mother, Sylvia, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic. They, along with Velvet’s little brother, Dante, live in Crown Heights (an inner city section of Brooklyn), and it is a limited, hand-to-mouth existence. Sylvia is hard and bad-tempered, shaped by the fearful responsi-bilities she has been forced to take on from a young age, and she is alternately loving, manipulative, and abusive with her children. The effect on Velvet’s sense of self, in particular, is both negative and confusing, and Velvet is a troubled, conflicted child.
Through Velvet’s school, they find out about the Fresh Air Fund; although the actual organization apparently sends children to six-week summer camps so they can have outdoor experiences and take leadership workshops, the program in this book pairs up inner-city children with more well-to-do host families from the country, with whom they spend a couple of weeks’ holiday. Both Dante and Velvet participate, although we never hear any more about Dante’s experience after he is put on a bus at Penn Station that first summer.
Velvet, age 11, is matched with Ginger and Paul, from rural upstate New York. Ginger is a painter, although she has been blocked for a long time; she is also a recovering alcoholic. Paul is a teacher, and met Ginger at an AA meeting. They have been together for some time without having children, and Ginger longs for some kind of connection; they initially sign up to host because Ginger wants to experience what it might be like to adopt an older child. (Paul has a daughter from a former marriage and is lukewarm, at best, about this.)
Ginger and Paul live near a horse stable, and it is the incentive of being able to ride horses that most appeals to Velvet about the experience. The book carries its characters through several years, as Velvet transitions from child to teenager while paying sporadic weekend and holiday visits to the couple’s home, and is told through the primary viewpoints of Velvet and Ginger, with a few scattered chapters giving added perspective from Paul and Sylvia.
The surface story is a coming-of-age saga, but the underlying context is the stark contrasts inherent in race and socioeconomic class. The switch between Velvet’s world and Ginger’s holds up the realities of inequality in our country by showcasing minority poverty and its relationship to white liberal guilt and its accompanying savior complex.
My reaction to the first part of the book was positive; it’s written in a rather quirky style that appealed to me because it was so internal. Conversations are had, but they don’t exist as present-tense dialogue; rather, each person is narrating from her sole point of view, and relating the conversations second-hand as she perceives them. It makes for an experience that is simultaneously cerebral and intimate.
The path of the story is choppy; sometimes we get to see the same scene and actions as experienced by Velvet and then again by Ginger, but at others we see things only from the one point of view and then the timeline is continued by the other, as when Velvet narrates her day at the barn and Ginger takes up the story when Velvet returns to the house and Ginger tries to get an account of the day’s events out of a recalcitrant and somewhat inarticulate teenager. Everything about the story is filtered through one or the other psyche (with the exception of the few short chapters related by Paul or Silvia), so there isn’t really a factual feel about it, since both viewpoints are opinion colored by personality and emotion.
Where the book started to break down for me was when Velvet (at home in Brooklyn) started paying attention to boys, and one boy, Dominic, in particular, and her attention is riveted on him to the exclusion of her own family, her host family, and the horses. Although it was probably a natural development in the life of a young girl from this neighborhood and, more widely, that of a pubescent girl from any neighborhood, it was a disappointing distraction from Velvet’s previous one-track focus on her almost mystical relationship with the horses and with one mare in particular.
The mare was a problem horse from whom everyone was warned off, as she was both unpredictable and occasionally vicious, but Velvet felt a kinship with the horse that developed, over the course of several years, into something so compelling that to draw the attention away from that to a helpless crush on an older boy who doesn’t really want her was disappointing. (Some of the best writing in the book is when Velvet is trying to articulate the feelings and internal dialogue between herself and the horses and how those translate into action.)
I also have to say that although I don’t mind stories that are more character- than plot-driven, I truly loathe ones that are open-ended, and when I got to the last page of this book I had a momentary flare of irritation that I had spent so much time persevering to finish reading it. In retrospect I don’t exactly regret it, but I really wish there had been a more definitive story arc with an end as engaging as its beginning.
Malbrey #2
I had no real intention, after finishing Gentlemen and Players, of continuing to read the Malbrey series (or at least not now), but the sequel was available at the library while everything else in which I was interested was wait-listed, and I did kinda want to know what happened next and to whom, so…I checked it out.
I almost quit reading Different Class about 30 percent in because, in the flashback portion of the story, one of the little sociopathic boarding school boys tortures a mouse, and I really don’t need to be reading about that right now.
But…I kept going. And it was for one specific reason, which was that I haven’t recently encountered another author whose use of metaphor and language spoke to me like Joanne Harris’s does.
One example was when a new teacher joins the staff and the protagonist (Classics Master Roy Straitley, still) notes that he’s a “Suit,” and basically falls into line in every respect with Dr. Devine, his mentor on the staff. Straitley remarks that the new teacher is “a bonsai version of himself,” the most vividly literary way ever to say that Dr. Devine has a “mini-me.” I love a literary phrase that also makes me laugh out loud and picture Mike Myers in a bald cap and a white suit.
Another is when Straitley is reflecting about the new school Head, who has turned out to be one of Roy’s troubled students from 20-some years ago, and ruminates, “”He’s the one releasing the ghosts, like a child with a magic lamp that, instead of casting light, releases nothing but darkness…”
Then I hit the 50 percent mark and decided that, after all, literary language could only make up for so much. The animal torturer moved on to multiple and then increasingly more horrifying subjects to satisfy his “condition,” as he calls it, and yeah, it turns out that I’m one of those bleeding hearts who can cheerfully regard the murder of a fellow human being when it furthers the mystery, but draws the line at killing off the dog (or pulling the wings off of flies, for that matter). Basically, the balance shifted and I cared less about literary expression and more about not putting any more nightmarish visions into my long-term memory. So Joanne Harris will have to find another reader, because although this guy will probably get his in the end, I can’t bear to read through all the things he did to deserve it. On to less disturbing material…
Plagued by the penultimate
Have you ever reached the denouement of a book, the place where all the hints and clues and separately insignificant moments are tied up for you so that you have that blinding flash that the author has purposefully manipulated, that one in which you say “aHAH!” and suddenly understand everything that has been happening? You feel so satisfied with that moment of revelation, only to turn the page and realize, after flipping even further, that there are still multiple chapters to go in the book—and maybe you felt impatient and somewhat robbed of your moment at having to keep reading?
I, like so many other people, have incorrectly thought of the word “penultimate” as meaning the last, or the greatest, something that is somehow beyond the ultimate when, in fact, the definition of penultimate is, in Brit-speak, “the last but one,” or in American, next to last. It is the part just before the last. And this is what I see as a big flaw in so many books, the most recent one I have read being Gentlemen and Players, by Joanne Harris of Chocolat fame.
I have mentioned several times in various reviews on this blog how much I loathe an epilogue—the wrap-up in which the author apparently grows tired of showing the reader and decides to tell instead, an action I almost always consider an easy out. I wrote about it most notably in my review of Things You Save in a Fire, in which the author wrote a near-perfect ending but then continued past it to wrap up each and every little hangnail, robbing the reader of the feeling of completion in order to give the author the satisfaction of thorough explanation. I concluded that review by saying, “The difference between an author who knows when to quit and one who doesn’t can be as slight as 20 extra pages, but what a difference it makes. After all, isn’t imagination a big part of enjoyment when it comes to the peculiar habit of reading?”
This was also my experience with Gentlemen and Players.
There are two narrators in this book about a posh British boys’ school called St. Oswald’s: the classics professor, Roy Straitley, otherwise known as Quasimodo (his room is in the Bell Tower and, yes, he’s a bit hunched), and a mysterious antagonist who shares a complicated past (and a deceitful present) with the school and whose stated intent from the beginning is to bring the school down by irretrievably tarnishing its reputation. Straitley (for the most part) narrates the action taking place in the present, while the mystery person is concerned with telling about the experience of being raised in close involvement with the school and its professors, students, administrators, and staff, but nonetheless remaining an outsider, never being able to be of the school. It is an exploration of age, gender, class, work ethic, and values—but all of those are subsumed in its identity as a psychological thriller, a cat-and-mouse game.
The prose is literary, as is appropriate for a tale about a school that still values the teaching of Latin (its motto is Audere, agere, auferre—to dare, to strive, to conquer); but we are at the juxtaposition of old and new as dusty classrooms make way for computer labs and crusty eccentrics have to learn how to check their email to get departmental updates.
The mystery part of the plot is undeniably thrilling; but in order to reach it, there is a lot of set-up in the present and a lot of flashback to the past that is occasionally a slog to navigate. I’m not saying it’s not necessary; I’m just not sure the payoff is adequate. I will say that it is quite crafty, and the twists and turns the story takes are worthy of a Patricia Highsmith novel. But after experiencing the major revelations near the end, I could have wished that they had been the finale, rather than the penultimate. Granted that there are sequels and the extension of the story beyond its climax does lead the reader towards those stories; but I’m not sure I believe the let-down from that rather spectacular revelatory climax was justified.
There are three sequels to this book, although I find it hard to image there is that much more material to explore here, and you could easily read this as a stand-alone and be done. I may read the others at some point, to find out. I have vastly enjoyed some of Harris’s other works, including Chocolat and Peaches for Father Francis, Five Quarters of the Orange, and Blackberry Wine.
One purely cosmetic warning about this book: If you decide to read it in Kindle form, as I did, you may find it quite confusing when the narrator switches from one protagonist to the other, because there is no indication of who is speaking, beyond tone and context. In the hardcover and paperback books, symbolism in the graphic form of a White King or a Black Pawn from a chess set at the beginning of each chapter signalled from whom we were hearing. This would have been easy to incorporate on the Kindle version, and that they didn’t was a problem.
HEA with soundtrack
At some point, for some reason, I put The Happy Ever After Playlist, by Abby Jiminez, on my library holds list, and it turned up about a week ago, so I read it. It was good timing, because I was in the mood for something involving but not taxing, if that makes sense.
The culmination is sorta promised to you in the title, but there is a lot (a LOT) of angst and drama between the first page and the last to keep you on your toes. One Goodreads reviewer described this as Justin Bieber fan fiction for adults, which is a little unkind but also somewhat accurate; but there is definitely more to it.
Some of the tropes were a little much: insta-love, co-dependency, traditional role-play, unnecessarily complicated situations provoked by hasty assumptions. But there were some winning characters and situations that retrieved it from cliché and, overall, I enjoyed the read.
The female protagonist, Sloan Monroe, is a painter, which caught my interest. She is also stuck firmly in the aftermath of losing her fiancé to a motorcycle accident almost two years ago, and has gradually let go of avocation, family, friends, and all but the most necessary of functions as she allows her grief to bury her in a trench of depression and inactivity. Only her best friend, Kristen, and Kristen’s husband, Josh, refuse to allow her to be solitary; they are constant in bringing over meals, binge-watching TV shows for an evening, and making a point to phone her every day to check in.
Then coincidence (or fate) takes a hand. Sloan is out doing errands when a stray dog runs into the road, forcing her to slam on her brakes, whereupon the dog climbs up her car and drops down through her sun roof. He’s chipped, so Sloan calls the phone number listed for his owner, Jason, but there is never any answer, and after more than a week, the voice mail is full. So although she never planned on having a dog, she decides, with this lack of response from his owner, to take Tucker on, and having him around reshapes her life into a more healthy profile. Now, she has to get out of bed, get dressed, and leave the house in order to walk the dog. This one change leads to others, and soon Sloan is feeling more like herself.
Jason finally gets in touch and wants his dog back, but Sloan is suspicious; why did it take him so long? Is he really a fit pet parent? This provokes a back-and-forth of texts and phone calls revealing that Jason took a break to go walkabout in Australia for two weeks, leaving his dog with someone who turned out to be untrustworthy. As they keep calling and texting, they both realize there is something between them, some spark, and look forward to meeting. But Jason, a musician on the rise, is on the cusp of a big shift in his career, and Sloan doesn’t know whether she will be able to come second to such an all-consuming lifestyle.
I thoroughly enjoyed both this set-up and the early days of the relationship, but there were parts of the book where I wanted to lecture (or slap) one or the other of them for making things so much more difficult than they had to be. Also, the insta-love was exceedingly insta (one week in, they can’t live without each other?), and the misunderstandings between them seemed avoidable if only they would sit down for 15 minutes and have a good heart-to-heart. And finally, the dog, Tucker, needed to be more prominent throughout!
Still, it kept my attention and proved as entertaining and non-taxing as I had wished. I also really liked the musical playlist that Jiminez incorporated as chapter headings, which, if you listen to the songs as you go, enhance the mood of the book. A fun conceit.
(There is a prequel, called The Friend Zone, which is the story of Kristen and Josh.)
Three hours in June?
I just finished Anne Tyler’s book Three Days in June. I picked it up because it kept popping up everywhere on people’s faves lists; I knew I had read Tyler before, but it was so long ago that I didn’t remember what, so I looked at her bibliography and was surprised to find that I had actually read three—The Accidental Tourist, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, and Breathing Lessons. Since these were all written back in the 1980s, it was long before Goodreads was available to keep track of thoughts and ratings and, frankly, I hardly remember any of them. (A LOT of reading has been undertaken since then, at a rate of 50 to 150 books per year for about 35 years.) But I did remember thinking they were good, so I confidently picked up this latest, published this year.
Hmm.
Here’s a synopsis: A socially awkward mother of the bride narrates her experience on the day before, the day of, and the day after her daughter’s wedding. The book follows Gail as she grapples with her feelings about the past, the present and, possibly, a different future.
Well, first of all, although the book is billed as “a novel” right on its cover, it’s 165 pages long, which I believe qualifies it for novella status. The technical definition is in words, not pages, but if you ask Google to convert it to pages, it comes out to “between 70 and 160,” so I guess technically she made it by five pages? Yeah, no. It’s a novella. Which is what I referenced by saying “three hours in June” in my title—actually, I think it took less than that to read it.
Some people raved about this very thing, by saying that Anne Tyler writes what is necessary and no more. I guess you could make that case; on the other hand, another reviewer said “feels like half a novel.” I have to confess I was torn; in terms of length, I wanted more, but not if these characters didn’t become a little more interesting and also less opaque and slightly more warm and fuzzy.
I will say that Anne Tyler is a keen observer of everyday life and writes believable (if not always charismatic) characters. The protagonist, Gail Baines, is 61, and has just lost her job as assistant headmistress of a private girl’s school in Baltimore, primarily because of her lack of “people skills.” The headmistress is urging her to move on with the next chapter of her life by finding something else to do, and Gail (as most of us would at 61) is thinking, “What?! I got the degree! I worked my way up! And also, I’m effing 61!”
It also happens to be the day before her daughter’s wedding, and her ex-husband (who was invited to stay with their daughter, Debbie) lands on Gail’s doorstep because he comes accompanied by a cat he is fostering, and Debbie’s fiancé is wildly allergic. The job situation, the wedding (with some unforeseen complications on top of the natural sense of loss felt by a parent whose child is marrying), and the reunion with her ex all cause Gail to reflect on what brought her here, as we progress from the day before the wedding through the big day and on to the aftermath, with a few passages of flashback to explain some of the current situation.
And…that’s it.
The story does have a pleasing natural arc to it, but some of the resolutions are both messy and unexpected, given the circumstances, and I was left feeling a bit flat. If you have never read Anne Tyler, I’d take a trip back to the ’80s and check out some of her more complex (and more masterful) works rather than hanging your opinion on this one.
Digging Finlay
I just finished the newest offering from Elle Cosimano in the Finlay Donovan series, and it definitely lived up to its predecessors and gave me a good time during the three days I took to read it. I have reviewed all the other books in the series on this blog; if you read the review of the first one, it will tell you all you need to know to pull you into this tale of the single mom/romance author who gets mistaken for a contract killer.
The books are, in order: Finlay Donovan is Killing It, Finlay Donovan Knocks ’em Dead, Finlay Donovan Jumps the Gun, Finlay Donovan Rolls the Dice, and this latest, Finlay Donovan Digs Her Own Grave. (There is also a book 3.5, a novella of 107 pages that reveals some of the back story of nanny Vero Ruiz, called Veronica Ruiz Breaks the Bank. That’s the only one I haven’t read…yet.)
As with the others in the series, not a lot of time has passed since the events of the previous book, but this time Finlay and her nanny/business manager Vero don’t actually create trouble for themselves, but are helped into the thick of it by Finlay’s elderly neighbor, Mrs. Haggerty. Margaret Haggerty has featured in all the other books, mostly as the busybody across the street who keeps a pair of binoculars next to her front window and writes down all the transgressions and suspicious behavior of the people in her neighborhood. (She’s the one who revealed to Finlay that her husband was stepping out on her with his real estate agent, Theresa.) But this time it is Mrs. Haggerty who is under suspicion—a dead body has been found buried under her backyard rose garden, and she’s the prime suspect. The police can find no connection between her and the victim, so she is cleared, but since her house is an active crime scene, she insists on moving in with Finlay, Vero, and the kids until the yellow tape comes down and the heating and electricity are restored.
Finlay, who has just finished a book and has a little breathing room before needing to get on with her next, had been looking forward to some calmer down time, hopefully including some fraternization with hot cop Nick, while Vero is negotiating her reinvigorated relationship with childhood pal and current love interest Javi. Neither of them is overjoyed to welcome Mrs. Haggerty into their home, but when her grandson drops her off and disappears, they haven’t much choice.
Then things take a turn that pulls them into the investigation, when Finlay’s cheating ex-husband, Steven, becomes a suspect! There is a small part of Finlay that wouldn’t mind Steven getting his comeuppance…but he is the father of her children, and ultimately she doesn’t believe he’s a murderer. But how to prove his innocence?
After re-reading the other four books before jumping into the new one, I have to say that I appreciated the slightly less fraught tone of this story. There were still twists and turns and surprises, but it was neither as convoluted nor as frantic, with a little more time to develop characters, and that was a needed development. The cast list was pared down (the last book had several criminals, a half dozen extra cops, multiple murder victims, and enough incidental characters that I kept thinking as I read, “Who is this guy again?”) We didn’t just get to know more about Mrs. Haggerty, but we also deepened our acquaintance with Cam, the teenage computer hacker; we saw Finlay and Nick get to know one another better; and I also loved the vignettes of the children, Delia and Zach, as they navigated being bullied at school and conquering potty training, respectively. There were quite a few laugh-out-loud moments, some genuine suspense, and some big surprises, but it felt like we settled down into a better understanding of the principals, which makes me anticipate the next book with greater pleasure.
If you’re looking for a cross between mystery and French farce, with a dose of middle class angst and some fancy crooks, you will want to try this series for yourself.
Cozy with nuance
I don’t remember who recommended this book to me; maybe I just read a review of it somewhere, or it popped up in my Kindle best buys or something. But probably someone told me about it because the main character is a librarian. (When you yourself are a librarian, people do that.)
Fried Chicken Castañeda, by Suzanne Stauffer, is a first book for this author, who was also a librarian for 20 years in New York City and Los Angeles, and then got her Ph.D. at UCLA in 2004 (I missed her by a year!) and went on to teach at the School of Information Studies at Louisiana State University. She is also a historian of libraries (you can see a list of her published papers on Wikipedia.
But the protagonist of her book, Prudence Bates, is bored with her career at Cleveland Public Library, and decides to go on hiatus to try something new. It’s early 1929, and Prudence has thus far led an extraordinarily limited life. Her father died a few years back, and her life choices have been truncated by the desire to spare her mother solitude. She wanted to go away to college, but instead attended one close to home so as not to leave her mother alone. She wanted to be an anthropologist who travels for research, but instead chose library science because she could get a local job to be there for her mom. But now her mother and Prudence’s nice enough but, yes, rather boring boyfriend are both pressuring her to settle down, and she’s so tired of fending them off that she almost succumbs.
Her boss at the library senses her ennui in the nick of time, and proposes that she attend a library program about young women couriers for the Fred Harvey Southwestern Indian Detours, who lead tours from the Santa Fe Railroad depots in the West to explore Native American art and culture. The stated goal by the library director was for her to emulate the presentation by developing similar programming for the library, but Prudence is so entranced by the life these nomadic tour guides describe that she packs her bags and heads out to New Mexico to train for a courier job. She has the college degree they require but not the familiarity with the terrain, so she stops off for a week on her way to the interview in the small town of Las Vegas, New Mexico, to begin to get acquainted with life in this corner of the world that is so different from her native Cleveland.
This book reminded me, for some reason, of the Molly Murphy mysteries by Rhys Bowen. They are not superficially too similar; but both protagonists are young, optimistic, and somewhat cheeky, and they both travel far outside their childhood norms to experience a different kind of life. The story also made me think of Dead to Me, by Mary McCoy, yet another librarian author (this one works at Los Angeles Public Library), because it’s set in a particular part of the past that yields extra interest; that book takes place during Hollywood’s Golden Age, while this one navigates the perils of Prohibition.
Stauffer has done her historical research, with the result that the background is filled with details about Pullman train travel, the fashions of the day, and the specific environment in the small New Mexico town Prudence chooses to explore. But what I liked best is that she didn’t shy away from permeating her narrative with the huge cultural divide of that era between the well-off white folk traveling on the trains and the Indian cultures these people are “touring” from a position that could be described as both superficial and patronizing. She is not at all heavy-handed, but does manage to insert reactions and observations designed to highlight such themes as racism, wealth inequality, and cultural diversity as her heroine gets to know the people who actually live and work in the towns through which she will be leading her tours, employed by the railroad and by the Harvey company.
The mysteries in this book are not quite as compelling (probably because there is so much character development and scene-setting to accomplish), but they are mixed up with a bit of romantic tension between Prudence and Jerry Begay, a Navajo man she meets on the train, that lend an extra spark.
the Castañeda Hotel in Las Vegas in 1926.
It’s not a book I would rave about and recommend to everyone I know; but it was certainly one of the better cozy/historical mysteries I have read, good for a couple of afternoons of entertainment. I would willingly pick up a sequel to find out more about the career of the gutsy Prudence as she pursues her dream. I hope she writes one!
New series from Connelly
I am a steady reader of mysteries. I’m not a fanatic, and I prefer fantasy and science fiction, but it’s my number one category in terms of number of books read, probably because when I find a writer whose detective and style I like, I stick with them until I have read the entire series (and mystery writers are generally pretty prolific). I enjoy different kinds of mysteries: cozies, historical, thrillers, police procedurals. When I first heard the title of that last category, I thought “procedural” made it sound dull, but the truth is that, in skillful hands, all the minute details of how a case is built and a murder is solved can be fascinating to the reader, as well as to the detective.
With Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Detective Stilwell as its lead character, Michael Connelly is starting a new series featuring someone other than Harry Bosch, Renée Ballard, or the Lincoln Lawyer. While he could still be termed loosely within the “Bosch Universe,” which is based in Los Angeles, Detective Stilwell, or “Stil,” as his friends and colleagues call him, is off the beaten path; he is the detective presiding over the police substation on Santa Catalina Island, 22 miles off the coast of Southern California. He has two subordinates and an office manager who work directly under him, and liaises with a coroner’s department and with the Harbor Master (who is also his girlfriend).
He’s been on Catalina for a year; he was exiled there from the L.A. Homicide desk after he crossed horns with another detective and was deemed at fault in their dispute. His duties now consist mostly of dealing with petty thefts and drunk-and-disorderly cases that proliferate on the weekends when the tourists come to the island to let off a little steam. While he was initially somewhat bitter about his demotion and didn’t appreciate being shunted to this backwater, he has come to love the island and seems to feel that he’d like to stay there, at least for a good long while. But when a shrouded, weighted-down body washes up into the bay, Stilwell refreshes his skills at solving a murder, despite resistance from both his boss and his old nemesis at LAPD Homicide, who is assigned the case.
About halfway through this book, I became increasingly irritated by several things. First, although it’s fine that the guy has been nicknamed “Stil” from Stillwell, it would seem normal and necessary to know the detective’s actual first name, but that hasn’t been revealed. Are we going to have to wait to meet his mother (if he still has one—we also know nothing about his family situation or past associations) to find out his given name?
Second, while there is a wealth of detail about what differentiates a ketch from a regular sailboat (I couldn’t care less), or what color hair dye the victim used for the streak in her hair (“Nightshade” purple), we have absolutely no physical description of the main character. The only hint is that when he feels he may need to overpower a guy in his custody, he notes that he is taller than the 5-foot-eight-inch perp by at least four inches, and outweighs him by 25 pounds. So we know that he is about six feet tall, and has more meat on his bones than this slender, wiry criminal Connelly does bother to describe. But we don’t know how old he is, whether he is dark- or light-skinned, color of eyes, color of hair, whether he has a big nose or his ears stick out—not one measly iota of physical description is vouchsafed by the author.
Some people might see this as an advantage and, based on experience from other book series that have later been turned into movies or television, I can understand that viewpoint. People were outraged when Tom Cruise was cast as the protagonist in the first Jack Reacher movie, and quite vocal with their approval when the makers of the television series picked the taller, blonder, and more muscular Alan Ritchie, who conforms quite closely to the description of Reacher in the novels. And the reverse can also happen: I have been watching Will Trent on TV since the series began, and that led me to try one of Karin Slaughter’s books, since I enjoyed the TV series so much; but I simply couldn’t get past the fact that on TV, Will is short, compactly built, and Latino, while in the books he is tall, blond, and blue-eyed. I was really looking forward to exploring the stories in depth after seeing the show, but I stopped after book #1. Since Connelly’s other books have been optioned for movies or TV, perhaps he is thinking ahead to casting.
There is a difference, however, between giving a few details and giving absolutely none. For instance, knowing the approximate age of the character and how long he has been on the job will clue you in to how much experience he has and whether he’s plausible as an authority, but we don’t know if Stilwell is 28 or 50. Except for the exceedingly indirect clue I mentioned above (which would have been easy to miss), we don’t know any physical details. These are the idiosyncracies that help readers begin to build a picture of the character in their minds. In a lone-policeman or lone-detective type mystery series, it’s crucial that readers be able to identify with the lead character, who is the sole arbiter of each story. If that person is essentially faceless, it’s hard to care.
The third thing that bothered me—and this one may end up being the most significant—is that from the get-go Detective Stilwell comes off as Harry Bosch “lite.” Everyone who has read the Bosch books knows that Harry is a renegade, a person who, without fail, puts his own values and integrity first and therefore eventually runs afoul of almost every boss and many of his co-workers, who are either motivated by politics or tend to be lax about the work, seeing it as a job rather than as a calling. So when Stilwell turns out to have been sent to Catalina because he has burned down relationships at LAPD Central, that sounds too similar to Harry’s many reassignments to the wilds of the San Fernando Valley or the dead end of the cold-case bureau. It inevitably follows that he will have a problem with his fellow officers who are not as punctilious as he is about dogged follow-up, and that he will break rules and cross lines to get at the information he needs. Classic Bosch, which isn’t a problem for that character but is a problem (for me, at least) when Connelly claims to be launching a brand-new protagonist who bears all the characteristics of the old one except that he is presumably not near retirement age! It made the story seem stale from the outset.
As for the two mysteries in this book, they had their moments, but in light of the characters who seemed either stereotyped or kind of blah, it was hard to invest. I will try another when he writes it, but I’m afraid this “fresh start” isn’t different enough to pry people away from their Bosch worship and keep them reading Connelly. We will see.
The Book Adept 