Re-reads
I got frustrated by the length of time I was having to wait for new library books and decided to do some rereading this week, since older books are easily obtainable. I chose the first book, The Good Sister by Sally Hepworth, because I had just reread Eleanor Oliphant and their protagonists share some things in common.
Although I remembered the story pretty well, there are always things that you don’t pick up on the first time through. One of the ones I enjoyed this time was protagonist Fern’s description of her mode of dress. She starts out by saying she is a librarian, and at 28 years old she is much younger than the average librarian (apparently the average is 45!). She comments that many librarians tend to be stodgy dressers, but Fern likes to express herself, so her typical outfit is a rainbow T-shirt topping a long, swirly skirt in some bright color (that day’s was sunshine yellow) with a pair of rainbow- and glitter-covered “trainers” (Brit for sneakers or tennis shoes) to match. She tops off all of this by putting her long strawberry blonde hair into two braids and then rolling them up above each ear for a Princess Leia look-alike effect, although she asserts that she is not copying that style; it is merely a handy way to keep her hair out of her face while working.
As a person who went to library school at 48, I was definitely up in that core demographic, but I did share some characteristics with Fern. I liked wearing colorful, full, knee-length skirts (flowered, striped) with matching solid-color leggings, black boots, and a T-shirt or sweater on top, depending on the season, and although I never did the Princess Leia ‘do, I did wholeheartedly embrace braiding during my 11-year career as a teen librarian.
I enjoyed this book as much this time around—it definitely held up. The characters are either delightfully quirky or deliciously sinister, and the action and narrative are nicely balanced to hold your interest. If you would like to read my initial full review, you can find it here.
The second book I picked up was one I hadn’t read since 2015 when it first came out, and I didn’t remember a lot about the story. It’s The Reversal, by Michael Connelly, and it was the book where he shook things up in several ways: Mickey Haller (the Lincoln Lawyer) crosses the aisle to become a prosecutor for one case; he partners up with his (first) ex-wife, Maggie McPherson, an assistant district attorney for Los Angeles; and instead of his usual investigator, he hires his half-brother, LAPD detective Harry Bosch, to help put a child-killer behind bars for the second time.
I looked forward to reading it again because I liked that all my favorite characters were in one place. But in the end, I didn’t find this to be one of his better stories. I did enjoy having Haller, Bosch, and McPherson all working together on a case that Mickey was prosecuting, but there was a bit too much courtroom (without enough drama). The man they are prosecuting has spent 24 years in jail for the crime and everyone is still convinced he is guilty. But some new DNA evidence proves compelling enough for the courts to grant him a retrial, and in the meantime he’s out in the world while the trio tries to find enough evidence to put him back in prison.
I felt like not enough happened “in the field” in this book, and I also didn’t enjoy the guy in the role of defense attorney; he was whiny and not sufficiently developed in comparison to his opponents. There is also a huge foreshadowing element with the murderer that never comes to fruition, which was both disappointing and annoying, and the ending is both rushed and anticlimactic, after a big build-up. I actually dropped my rating on this one from four stars to three after rereading it. I’m still a loyal Connelly fan, but in certain books he seems off his game, and this was one for me.
Two of my “new” (to me) books just came in and got transferred to my Kindle, so there will be fresher reviews coming soon.
I’m fine
That’s everyone’s socially acceptable response when someone asks “How are you?”, right? But how often is it actually true?
My initial reaction to the first third of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, by Gail Honeyman (despite some clues in the opening pages that would have led me elsewhere had I been paying sufficient attention), was that it reminded me of The Rosie Project, by Graeme Simsion. Socially awkward protagonist with no friends, wedded to routine, on whom a random suggestion acts as a catalyst to start changing things up, check. Protagonist meets someone completely outside their wheelhouse and makes an unexpected connection, check. But that’s not quite how this book ended up going. The two books share a sense of humor, and their protagonists share the quality of being literal and inept at human relations as they attempt to navigate their way through life. But the reasons behind their similar states are different, as are the resolutions.
There are lots of books out there (fiction and nonfiction) about various kinds of mental health issues. Not many of them, however, address the situation of loneliness as either a cause or an outcome. Eleanor believes that she is completely self-sufficient—after all, her physical needs are being met, and in all her years in the foster care system she didn’t get a chance to indulge any emotional needs, or even recognize that she had any. But when she has two chance encounters that change her focus, these events and the people connected with them worm their way into her formerly solitary existence and begin to show her that she had very little idea what a full life could be like.
Eleanor is, in many ways, profoundly broken, and her metamorphosis depends on courage that she wouldn’t have found without making some human connections, but it is not a romantic book, for which I was grateful. This is a book about Eleanor, and Gail Honeyman doesn’t fall into the trap of leading her out of her unhappiness by making her fall in love—in fact, quite the contrary. Her story is told in a tender, sweet, and humorous way that isn’t manipulative and never descends into mawkishness, that pulls both Eleanor and the reader out of melancholy into hopefulness. I was impressed that this was the author’s debut novel: The language, the characters, and the world in which she places them are smart and engaging, and she writes with confidence.
I have encountered only a few books that, the minute I turned the last page, I wanted to go back and re-read to see what I missed or to re-experience the emotions brought forth by the story. This was one of them.
Note: This was a re-read for me—I originally read this in 2018 and had the impulse to revisit it. The above was my review from 2018. Nothing materially changed from the reread, except that I found the book, if anything, more emotionally moving. If you enjoyed this book as I did, you might also like to read The Good Sister, by Sally Hepworth.
Saving the library
My next book on the library holds list was The Last Chance Library, by Freya Sampson, and I’m happy to report that I am now two for two (two good reads in a row) for 2026.
This was Sampson’s debut novel, and it might be my favorite. I hate to be predictable, but I do love a book about books. I don’t, however, always love books about libraries and librarians, for the simple reason that the authors don’t do their research to understand what role is filled by degreed librarians as opposed to assistants, circulation staff, shelvers, etc. But Freya Sampson is among the few who get it absolutely right. She acknowledges the need for a degree in order to be a librarian, she describes the duties of her main character, June, a library assistant, perfectly and consistently, and no one ever calls June “the librarian.” She hasn’t had the requisite schooling to be acknowledged as a librarian, and the lines in this book are always clear. That may sound elitist to those who are not librarians, but as someone who worked hard for two years to get my masters degree in order to be one, it’s so demoralizing when anyone who has a job at the library is assumed to possess the same abilities. It would be like going to your lawyer’s office and believing that everyone working there must be a lawyer, or that the people who staff the reception desk at your doctor’s office are qualified to diagnose.
Anyway…with that out of the way, let me say that this was a delightful book, although not as lighthearted as some of hers. Sampson has a gift for characterization that makes the plot situations believable and engrossing. You like (or dislike) these people, you get to know them pretty thoroughly, and you therefore invest in their circumstances. Despite the fact that the characters may fall into standard categories—curmudgeonly old lady, nosy neighbor, old friend turned love interest, etc.—Sampson fleshes them out so that you don’t mind the use of a common trope.
In this case, the protagonist, June, has been a library assistant at a rundown stand-alone library in a small town since she started there part-time as a teenager. She is now 28 years old, and seems frozen in place; her mother, who was the librarian for most of June’s life, died of cancer eight years ago, and since then June’s life has turned into a predictable round of work, frozen lasagna or takeout, and reading. She gave up all thought of college when her mother got sick, staying home to nurse her, and now she lives in the house in which she grew up, and has changed nothing since her mother passed. She has no friends and relies on library patrons for any form of human contact, but retreats into her silent solitude whenever she isn’t shelving books or helping seniors log into their email accounts on the library computers. In a word, she’s stuck.
She is also almost debilitatingly shy, so nothing seems likely to change—until outside circumstances interrupt her cycle. The local council has signified that they will be considering closing up to six libraries in her town, Chalcot, and five other adjacent townships, due to budget cuts, and replacing them with a once-a-week visit from a bookmobile. The regular patrons of the library are immediately up in arms and ready to do whatever is necessary to save their library, but June is told by her boss that as an employee she is forbidden from participating in any of these activities. June unhappily acquiesces, but a chance comment from someone new in her life causes her to think of ways she can subvert this order and help keep her beloved library open.
There is a nice incipient romance in this book but, as with Sampson’s other books, it isn’t the dominating theme; that is more nuanced, and brings insight to various aspects of the human condition and the best ways in which we interact when important issues are on the line. I really enjoyed this and read it in two days. Sampson’s books couldn’t be considered “literature,” but they are certainly good stories that provoke both feelings and reactions. I will continue to read them.
The Proving Ground
I picked up the latest from Michael Connelly with a teensy bit of trepidation, because I haven’t really enjoyed the last three novels he has put out into the world, whether about Bosch, Ballard, or the new guy Stillwell. They felt forced, they felt a little stale, they felt like his heart wasn’t really in it when he wrote them. But I adore the Lincoln Lawyer, so I got this one from the library and embarked on it as my first read of 2026.
Although the title references the area in front of the jury’s box where the lawyer stands to make his opening and closing arguments, it was also prophetic for me, because with this novel I felt like Connelly proved he could still write a compelling book involving one of his regular characters. But if you are expecting the self-same iteration of Mickey Haller that we have seen in past novels, you might be disappointed.
Mickey had an epiphany that led him out of criminal defense and into civil court practice, this being his first case to actually go to trial. And it’s a big one: A mother is suing a billion-dollar Artificial Intelligence company because the boyfriend of her teenage daughter, under the influence of the company’s chatbot they claim was designed as a companion for teenagers, shot and killed the girl when she broke up with him, after the chatbot told him he should “get rid of her.” So although both gun control and murder are issues, they are not the center of this lawsuit, which is focused on the bigger picture of who should be held responsible. The premise is that the chatbot had faulty input and insufficient guardrails in place, especially when it was ostensibly designed to deal with impressionable young teens who haven’t, themselves, developed a moral compass; tragedy was the result.
I like that Connelly is addressing a current and urgent area of concern by showcasing this courtroom battle that isn’t just about guilt or innocence but about accountability. In so many aspects of our culture now, technology seems to be outpacing ethics in alarming ways, and Connelly has poured extra fuel on the battle over gun control in the United States by taking it to another level. A gun was, once again, too readily available to a teenager (his father kept the gun in the house), and his fantasies of revenge on a girl who “hurt him” (she was alarmed by his internet-driven attitudes and broke up with him) flowered into violence with support from a machine created to interact like a human
support system.
The court persona of Mickey Haller is still front and center: He manages to insert some of his trademark theatrics, although the civil court judge is quicker to reign him in than was normal in criminal court; but underlying the flamboyant drama is dogged research, a constantly evolving strategy, and then ultimately his willingness to gamble everything in the courtroom to get that lynchpin response from a witness that will make his case.
There is a fair amount of both legal-speak and technical discussions about artificial intelligence that might deter some readers. But despite some of those intricacies, this is still courtroom drama, with everything that can ensue—witness intimidation, manipulation of voir dire, attempted bribery, and plenty of dirty tricks from a corporation desperate to be held blameless and to retain control of one of its most lucrative products. Civil court is something of a misnomer here.
There is participation in preparation for the case from another character in the Connelly oeuvre not recently heard from, which was fun. There is also a personal, events-driven aspect to this book, when ex-wife Maggie’s house burns in the Eaton Fire and she moves in with him while waiting on insurance and trying to decide what to do next. Since Mickey made the move from criminal to civil court he has fewer direct clashes with Maggie “McFierce,” now the Los Angeles District Attorney, and obviously hopes that they can reconcile permanently—but that’s left for another day. Some Goodreads reviewers took issue with Connelly setting this at the time of a particular landmark event, since it dates the narrative, but as a Los Angeles resident I liked the local context he always provides.
Although I wasn’t completely in love with the way the book ended, for me this was a satisfying return to Michael Connelly showing what he can do when he’s on his game.
Molly
I just finished reading Nita Prose’s first two books about Molly the Maid (The Maid and The Mystery Guest) and had planned to read the third, but three other books abruptly became available from my holds list at Los Angeles Public Library, so I’ll be putting that off for a while…or maybe forever?
(I actually thought I had already read these books, but had confused them with The Housemaid series by Freida McFadden. I much preferred these to those.)
I initially felt positive about the Molly books because I do appreciate and enjoy stories about neurodivergent people; two of my favorites have been Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, by Gail Honeyman, and The Good Sister, by Sally Hepworth. I also liked the Rosie books (actually about genetics professor Don Tillman) by Graeme Simpsion. But I had a few more problems with these books than I had with any of those, and that diminished my enjoyment somewhat.
Most of that was not to do with the character herself, but with how the author wrote other people’s reactions to her, which were both ignorant and cruel. In the other books I mentioned, it was fairly obvious to everyone around these people that they were fundamentally different in their perception of the world, but in the Molly books many of the characters simply treated her as an object to mock and bully rather than understanding that something more was going on, and although I’m sure that may sadly be the case in real life, it felt both too pointed and too oblivious here, and I don’t think that viewpoint added to the story. It came across as if the author felt the need to be heavy-handed in order to ensure that we “got it,” but she had already made her point with her detailing of Molly’s functional attitudes and abilities, so it just became wearying and kind of ugly, and most of the other characters were too stereotypical to be genuinely effective as a foil for Molly.
I find myself overlooking the mystery aspect to these books in my fixation with the characterizations, which is ironic considering that that is how they are presented, genre-wise; I did enjoy the puzzles themselves, which presented good levels of frustration and vindication as they proceeded.
I sort of wish I had written this review in that five minutes after I finished the first book rather than waiting to react to the entire series, because my response was much more about the positive than the negative at that point. I can’t refuse to see the deficits, but I enjoyed the book more in that moment than in retrospect, which is too bad.
Although I found many of the same flaws in the second book, it did have something interesting going for it, in that we got to find out more about Molly as a child, and the history of her grandmother that brought both of them to where they ended up. I liked the flashbacks to the past that explained what was going on in the present, and in some ways preferred the second book because of the greater depth of development. But it couldn’t compete with the initial reaction to Molly that was elicited in the first encounter, so I’d have to say I liked The Maid the best of the two. Perhaps I will read the third at some point and see what has changed.
Short but jam-packed
As I have mentioned here before, I am generally not a reader of short stories. The last time I blogged about a couple of them that I picked up for my Kindle, I commented that in the future I would resist temptation even if they were written by authors I admire (those two were by Alice Hoffman and Margaret Atwood, so the star power was bright) because I found the brief format unsatisfying, no matter who wrote them. But I didn’t keep that resolution, and this time I’m glad I didn’t, although, alongside the satisfaction they gave me, I still feel a little frustration for the attenuated content.
First I was offered one by John Scalzi, who is one of my latest favorite science fiction authors and, when I saw it was about time travel (a particular fascination of mine), I couldn’t say no. Then one popped up by Alix Harrow, who has written three books since 2019 all of which enthralled me when I read them. This one had a knight in the title, so I assumed it was fairy tale-ish and therefore likely to please me, but it turned out to be something I like even better—a dystopian story.
Why, then, did these impress me so much? In trying to dissect that, the first thing that occurred to me was their immediate impact. In less than a page I knew that I couldn’t stop reading. Part of this is due to something novelists and readers have discussed for years (or millennia or eons): the first line.
When I think of a famous first line, the one that most immediately comes to me is “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” That’s the opener for Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier, and if you ask readers on a Facebook page dedicated to books, it’s one that is often quoted. Others that crop up frequently are “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife” (Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen), and “Call me Ishmael” (Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick), “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” (Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy), or “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” (A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens). These are all from classics, but there are many others nearly as famous that source from books that are popular, perhaps well known, but not considered in that pantheon, such as “I write this sitting in the kitchen sink” (Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle), or “When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle, everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen” (The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett) or “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold” (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by Hunter S. Thompson).
I cite all these because they have the unique ability to cue you to a lot of what’s coming in one simple phrase. You immediately want to know: What or where is Manderley? who is the dreamer? Why did they leave Manderley in the first place? You want to argue that perhaps the last thing a single man with a good fortune might either want or need is a wife to spend it! If you have any Bible knowledge, you get all the deep connections to the name “Ishmael.” You instantly begin debating whether that statement about families and happiness or lack of same is true—you think about your own, and then you want to know why the author has embraced this premise. If you know that A Tale of Two Cities is about the French Revolution, then it must have been a bad time, but then wonder how being in the middle of a war could also possibly be the best. You ponder why someone would write while sitting in a sink; you immediately perceive that this person might be out of the ordinary and therefore worth cultivating. You want to know why Mary had to go live with her uncle, and what it was that made her disagreeable—was it that, or something else? You think about someone driving across Interstate 40 in a drugged state and are presuming you probably know what will happen next, but you don’t…so you keep reading.
Alix Harrow’s story, “The Knight and the Butcherbird,” begins:
Once upon a time,
a knight came riding into the holler.”
It is immediately arresting, because it’s like that game where you see a group of pictures and are asked the question, “what one thing is not like the others?” The “Once upon a time” and the “knight” immediately set you up for the expectation of fairy tale; but there are few areas in the world where someone would call a small, v-shaped, riverine type of valley a “hollow,” and when that gets transmuted to “holler” you know you are in southern Appalachia, most likely in West Virginia. So, what is a knight (presumably wearing armor to distinguish him as such) doing riding into Appalachia? The disconnect drags you in and glues your eyes to the page.
In the next paragraph you find out it’s been 300+ years since “the apocalypse,” that the knight is expected (people are standing around waiting for him), and that the protagonist is a misfit in her community (“I stood among them like a tumor at a birthday party: silent, uninvited. Likely fatal.”)
In the third, you get a picture drawn of the knight—specifically his armor, sewn of fine black steel-corded tire treads, the rusty state of his pauldrons, and the fact that he was “crazy old, maybe even fifty.” He is a Knight of the Enclaves, “tall, raised on multivitamins and clean meat.”
This is all on the first page, and tells us that: something terrible has happened to the world; there are survivors in a backward corner of it who are in need of assistance; and from “somewhere else” there is a person characterized as a knight who has come to help them with their problem. I could immediately, viscerally picture the poor, raggedy, sickly people (the ones raised without the vitamins or untainted protein) standing around at the mouth of their small valley home, waiting patiently for a hero to arrive; and I could also perceive the colossal impact of the knight’s presence.
Wouldn’t you want to keep reading?
John Scalzi’s story “3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years” doesn’t start with quite such an arresting contradiction, but for a science fiction fan and time travel junkie, it still dragged me in:
The time machine is, in itself, not much to look at.
The remainder of the paragraph goes on to describe its physical appearance, concluding with “At the far end is a portal. One takes the client away. The other brings them back.” With this it is established that time travel has become a business (thus the clients), and that the narrator is probably the operator of the machine (confirmed in the next paragraph). The next page and a half describes in extremely simple terms what happens in the chamber when someone takes a trip and comments that, once the client has returned, “Where they go after that, like where they go when they walk through the first portal, is not specifically my concern. I am here to run the time machine.” The client, however, “has aged three days, or nine months, or twenty-seven years. They have been through a time machine, after all. This is how the time machine works.” Then, however, the operator, who sounds like he is describing the daily duties of a fairground carousel operator, comments that this is the theoretical process, but that is almost never what actually happens. “Theory is almost never practice.”
Could you put it down after that leading sentence? I couldn’t.
I’m not going to go into any more detail here on either story; I will just say that there is an exception to every rule, and I’m glad I made these exceptions to my “no short stories” one. They are special cases because they do absolutely everything that a good novel does: They each have a clearly worked-out premise; they are both amazing at both world- and character-building in the space of a few short sentences or paragraphs; there is a set-up, a conflict, and a resolution; and, best of all, they made me think about issues I had never considered, despite being a long-time reader of fairy tales, dystopian/post-apocalyptic fiction, and time travel theories. I finished both of them two days ago, and they keep on wandering through my mind, inspiring more questions. And yes, one of these is to ask the authors “Why not write the BOOK?”—but many more of them are diverting inquiries into the nature of time, anomalies, and serendipity, or thoughts about the eventual evolution or dissolution of humankind, depending on the paths taken (or not).
Thank you, John Scalzi and Alix Harrow. Keep writing.
Culture war
In Hazel Says No, by debut novelist Jessica Berber Gross, we explore the intricacies of the MeToo movement and the consequences of cancel culture in a small town in Maine. This author is being hailed by many as a new voice in feminist contemporary fiction, but for me it was an interesting exercise that didn’t quite make the transition to a leap-off-the-page story. There were fascinating nuances that explored areas I think no one considers, and for that I appreciated it, but the story dragged out far beyond the original dilemma and became less impactful as it did so.
The basic premise also had me wondering, Would this really happen at this moment in time?
The Greenberg-Blums, a Jewish family from Brooklyn, move to a small town in Maine after the father, Gus, receives an attractive job offer from a college there. His daughter, Hazel, is 18 and will start her senior year in high school in the fall, and his son, Wolf, is going into middle school. They move at the beginning of summer, and the kids spend most of it at the public pool, where Hazel encounters the high school principal, Richard White, there to supervise his daughter, Gracie, a future classmate of Wolf’s. He strikes up a conversation with her after noticing that she is reading a variety of fairly high-level literary novels while basking on her lounge chair, and suggests that perhaps Hazel should consider initiating a reading or writing club when she starts school in the fall. Their encounters are friendly but strictly surface, confined to a casual greeting or comments about reading and classes.
On the first day of school, a voice over the P.A. system calls Hazel Blum to the principal’s office. When she arrives, the principal chats with her for a few minutes, then sits down beside her, puts his hand on her knee, and informs her that each year he chooses one student with whom he will have sex during the year, and this year he has chosen Hazel. Her mind whirling with all the responses to this unbelievable statement, Hazel finally blurts out “NO!” and runs out of his office.
The rest of the story involves what happens when Hazel tells her parents, they confide in the college dean (a feminist studies scholar), and from there the news becomes public.
The first thing that hit me about this set-up was, Who in their right mind, in the aftermath of the immense blow-up of MeToo in the media, would actually do this? Smith not only propositions Hazel, but also explains that he has done this repeatedly in the past; although he has apparently gotten away with it up until now, does he really think that, after the profound cultural shift that came about as a result of the “outing” of sexual predators in powerful positions, his behavior could continue to go unremarked? Or that, once acknowledged, there would be no repercussions? Part of the MeToo phenomenon was the public scrutiny and accountability it promoted, paired with support for the survivors of sexual harassment and violence. For that reason, I was unable to overcome my disbelief that anyone would so blithely and transparently risk exposure by trying this on.
The parts of the book that I did like were how everything played out to conclusions that were not always expected. For instance, it explored the insular nature of a small town unable and unwilling to believe this accusation of a beloved public figure and how, for some, it provided an outlet for bigotry as they not only slut-shamed Hazel but also targeted her family because they were outsiders. It took into account the effects on Hazel and her family, but it also explored the consequences of being the wife and young daughter of the sexual predator. And, as Hazel’s story goes wide, we were also privy to how a story like this is taken up by the media in ways that go far beyond the initial scandal to perhaps exploit the situation to enhance their own agendas.
On a separate note, there is a scene in the book that was reminiscent of something that happened to me when I was a professor of library science teaching Young Adult Literature. The father, Gus, is an American Studies professor who teaches a class that considers the historical evolution of the family on television, as a microcosm of the larger culture. In his first class lecture he begins with Leave It to Beaver, the picture of 1950s traditionalism, then transitions through a few other sitcoms to All in the Family, with Archie Bunker’s misogyny and racism battling against his daughter and son-in-law’s wider sensibilities. After this, he moves to The Cosby Show as an example of the shift in the way black people are portrayed on television, featuring a family in which the father is a doctor, the mother a lawyer, and the children are benefiting from a lifestyle not previously seen on TV as part of the black experience. But although the show was a legitimate historical landmark, the minute he mentions the show in his class, certain of his students are outraged that he would dare to represent Bill Cosby in any way except as the outed serial predator we all later discovered him to be. Dr. Blum attempts to explain that the show, which aired from 1984 to 1992, could be looked at separately from the later discoveries about its star, but his students are unwilling to consider Cosby in any context, and several of them promptly start a petition to “Fire Gus Blum” that goes college-wide and then begins to attract attention that threatens his position.
In my YA Lit class, several students took issue with the fact that the first few weeks’ reading list consisted of books by and about white people. They demanded that I feature books by and about people of color, people of different socioeconomic status, and so on. I explained that since the first few weeks were dedicated to the history of young adult literature, which began to be considered a separate segment of fiction early in the 20th century, the assignments were consistent with the books that were being published at the time, which were written for white teens and did not begin to include people of color or LGBTQ+ as characters or talk about real-life issues until the 1960s.
I did however (like the father/professor in Hazel Says No) take a good, hard look at my syllabus and came to the conclusion that while i stood by my decision to represent those historically significant books, I could have done a better job with diversity when it came to updating my selections for the rest of the quarter, so I revised the choices by adding or substituting more inclusive works, both as regards authors and characters/stories. I also allowed the students themselves to suggest and select alternative books to read, if they found one that spoke to them. But, as happened in this novel, a certain small number absolutely refused to give up their first conclusions about me as an old white woman who was, at best, tone-deaf, and at worst, discriminatory and offensive. They felt free to gossip about me with each other, complain about me to my supervisor, and malign me in written comments that affected my livelihood.
The incident in this book that was reminiscent of my own experience of feeling canceled made me consider so many issues that are confronting our culture, and wonder how they will ultimately be resolved. On the political front right now, the current regime is intent on hurting people: They are whitewashing the past by removing historical websites about slavery, refusing to provide healthcare to women and others who don’t strictly conform to their restrictive view of humanity, and considering everyone not exactly made in their image to be “other” and open to attack. But there is also the faction who refuse, for example, to read the book The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because of its lack of “political correctness,” despite historical context, or the fact that the main character rises above his culture with an epiphany that causes him to choose empathy over “doing the right thing.” (See my review, here.) These are the people who refused to vote for a candidate who represented 90 percent of their views because they disagreed with the other 10 percent, despite the fact that their refusal would plunge us into fascism. My hope for us is that we can manage to keep dialogue open, and calm the extreme pendulum swings so that both reason and empathy may prevail.
At any rate, Hazel Says No is definitely a conversation-starter (with others or in the privacy of your own mind!).
Through-story
I ran out of time and out of steam before completing Jane Smiley’s Horse Heaven this week, and didn’t make it to the finish line. To tell the truth, I lost impetus before the library due date arrived, and switched to another book.
It’s not that I disliked Horse Heaven; in fact, the stories, characters, and language are actually quite wonderful. But that’s what it seems like—not a novel, but a series of short stories, strung together because they are all about the same subject—horses and all the people who surround them (owners, trainers, jockeys, etc.) in the racing business. And while I love horses and stories about them, I have never been a short story person. Short stories are, to me, like all the worst parts of starting to read a new book, with none of the payoff of getting to enjoy it once I’m invested.
As I kept going, the anecdotes and vignettes were beginning to add up, and I had hopes they would eventually converge into something, but it was taking a long time. I liked the picture she was painting, but a “through story” never developed, so the book didn’t drag me along in the way a novel would, making me want to know what would happen next.
While “through-story” isn’t a concept commonly used in readers’ advisory when we talk about appeals, maybe it should be. Without it, a compelling quality of story—momentum—is missing, and without momentum some readers have trouble getting to the end of a book. Even those of us who revel in language, character development, and world-building can have trouble with a book essentially lacking a plot—that ordered sequence of events that includes exposition, conflict, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. While a plot may exist in Horse Heaven, its presence is so diffuse as to be indiscernible (at least to me).
After reading it for at least an hour a day for about a week, I received an email notice from the library that my book would be due in three days. I felt sure I was getting close to the end, or at least the three-quarter mark, and could beat my deadline, but when I checked the page count on my Kindle I discovered that I was at page 267 out of 543! At that point I decided to go read something (shorter) with a beginning, middle, and end that is all of a piece. I’ll come back to Horse Heaven someday when I’m in a different mood.
Harking back
After I finished the latest Vera Wong, I decided to reread yet another of Rumer Godden’s books. I recently described the plot of In This House of Brede to my cousin, and it made me want to experience it again for myself after so long. It was kind of a masterpiece of its day, although it’s a weird book for an atheist/agnostic like me to enjoy so much, considering that it’s about the life of a cloistered nun and her abbey; but I have a soft spot for it because it was my introduction to her writing.
I remembered finding it on my parents’ bookshelves, which is equally strange, because as fundamentalists, they didn’t even consider Catholics to be Christian. But I finally figured it out: My parents loved to read but weren’t good about going to the library and also didn’t frequent the bookstore. My mom did, however, have a subscription (de rigueur back in the 1960s and ’70s) to Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. During the long, sometimes boring summers of my youth (I was an only child in a neighborhood with no other kids my age), I would lie on the floor of my dad’s study and devour all the stories contained therein, and that was how I happened upon this book. (I was amazed, in later years, to pick up and read the uncut versions of some of those books and realize all that I had missed!)
The book begins with the protagonist’s life-changing decision to give up her exceedingly busy and successful life to try to become a cloistered Benedictine nun. Philippa Talbot is 42, a widow who has made a great success in a government position in finance in the days after World War II when she would have been the only woman in the room who was not taking dictation. The story begins with her leaving her job on her last day—handing out her treasured possessions to some of the people who worked for her, entrusting her cat to her beloved housekeeper of many years, and getting on a train, with one small carry-on bag, to travel to the 120-year-old abbey in Sussex in the south of England. Should she successfully stick out her years there as a postulant and a novice, receive her preliminary clothing, and take her final orders, she would become a permanent fixture for life at Brede Abbey.
The humanity of each of the characters strikes you from the first page. The interaction between Mrs. Talbot and the young secretary from the typing pool; her detour, once she gets off the train, to the nearest pub for a last whiskey (or three) and a farewell cigarette; and her admission through the door into the enclosure, surrounded by the entire community (90-some nuns) in their wimples and habits, is vivid and engaging.
The story remains so throughout. It is a neat balance; it depicts life within the walls of the abbey—the structure of ceremony and ritual, the customs, the traditions, the pageantry—but it also focuses in on each of the characters, describing the tests, the deprivations, the stumbling blocks, and also the joys as they struggle to live with purpose, outside of the mundane world of competition and financial success. The nuns and other characters are beautifully drawn, both individually and in their complex interactions with one another. The back stories are not dictated in a straightforward way, but are instead dropped here and there between the recounting of the current day-to-day life of the cloister, giving the entire book a freshness and cohesion despite the rapid switches in time and perspective.
It is an earnest look at the examined life of a community formed by diverse personalities who share a world view, but it is also a gorgeous, colorful kaleidoscope in its descriptions of the minute details of living in this world with its sights, sounds, thoughts, and feelings. The sacred and the mundane are present in equal measure, as are Godden’s luminous observations of the natural world and the beauty to be found in a cherry tree against the sky, a soaring lark, a stone statue, or the transcendent face of a soloist whose voice rises to the rafters in devotion.
It may not sound like your cup of tea, but you never know; it certainly gave me a few totally absorbed afternoons, and this was for the third time!
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!
The Book Adept 