Joan

Joan

By Katherine Chen

1412. France is mired in a losing war against England. Its people are starving. Its king is in hiding. From this chaos emerges a teenage girl who will turn the tide of battle and lead the French to victory, an unlikely hero whose name will echo across the centuries.

In Katherine J. Chen's hands, the myth and legend of Joan of Arc is transformed into a flesh-and-blood young woman: reckless, steel-willed, and brilliant. This deeply researched novel is a sweeping narrative of her life, from a childhood steeped in both joy and violence to her meteoric rise to fame at the head of the French army, where she navigates both the perils of the battlefield and the equally treacherous politics of the royal court. Many are threatened by a woman who leads, and Joan draws wrath and suspicion from all corners, even as her first taste of fame and glory leave her vulnerable to her own powerful ambition.

This took me forever to read, almost six weeks. I did okay ish in the beginning but then read the afterward where the author said that they just made stuff up and changed the historically accepted facts (like, that Joan didn't actually fight) to suit her narrative and that soured me on it. 

It's also not nearly as exciting a book as you'd think it would be, being that it is based on the wholly unlikely story about a woman peasant who was elevated to the savior of France during the Hundred Years' War.

We spend almost somewhere around a third to a half of the book on various made-up scenes of Joan's youth, centering primarily around her abusive father. The village is attacked and her sister raped. Joan finds herself summarily ejected from her house and fate lands her in the king's lap after she performs miracles like: breaking a man's wrist with one hand, landing every arrow on target, being a virtuoso at every weapon she picks up. It's so weirdly unreal I can't think why Chen chose to go in this direction. Why spend time trying to come up with a back story on how Joan became so strong and self assured and then just make her a Mary Sue? 

In this version, Joan doesn't set foot in a church for her whole youth, but then prays to God for victory. She's better than anyone else in the army despite never having any experience or training. I felt like rolling my eyes every time Joan hits multiple bullseyes, which happens a lot.

The better parts of the book are those when we're offered explanations for Joan's accomplishments and downfall: her grit, and her belief in the rightness of her cause. But we also spend just a few chapters on the crucial battles and none at all after her capture by enemy forces. I mean, we all know what happened, but the framing period feels off too. No pages to spare for her trial?

I originally read this one for the "left-handed character" prompt but I don't believe her handedness was mentioned once in the whole book, and after I re-categorized Convenience Store Woman, thought this would nicely fit the single lady prompt.

24: A Book With A Happily Single Woman Protagonist

 

The Alice Network

The Alice Network

By Kate Quinn

It's 1947. In the chaotic aftermath of World War II, American college girl Charlie St. Clair is pregnant, unmarried, and on the verge of being thrown out of her very proper family. She's also nursing a desperate hope that her beloved cousin Rose, who disappeared in Nazi-occupied France during the war, might still be alive. So when Charlie's parents banish her to Europe to have her "little problem" taken care of, Charlie breaks free and heads to London, determined to find out what happened to the cousin she loves like a sister.

It's 1915. A year into the Great War, Eve Gardiner burns to join the fight against the Germans and unexpectedly gets her chance when she's recruited to work as a spy. Sent into enemy-occupied France, she's trained by the mesmerizing Lili, the "Queen of Spies", who manages a vast network of secret agents right under the enemy's nose.

Thirty years later, haunted by the betrayal that ultimately tore apart the Alice Network, Eve spends her days drunk and secluded in her crumbling London house. Until a young American barges in uttering a name Eve hasn't heard in decades and launches them both on a mission to find the truth...no matter where it leads. 

 I was not expecting this to be so...visceral. I just finished reading Our Woman in Moscow, another one set slightly post-WWII, about lady spies, and that was basically a travelogue compared to The Alice Network. I also wasn't expecting the torture and murder and whatnot even from her earlier book, The Rose Code, which is also a fairly distant view of the wartime.  Not so here.  We know very early on that Eve's had all the bones in both her hands broken, but it's still a shock when you read it.  There's graphic depictions of, well, rape, although the participants might balk at calling it that. We're into a more grown-up version of Code Name: Verity.  We actually spend no time at all on WWII, just switching back and forth between Eve's time as a spy in WWI and Charlie's search in 1947 for her cousin.  And this is by far the weakest part of the book.  

Let me get this out (deep breath): somehow Charlie has an all encompassing need to find her cousin, whom she hasn't seen in six years, nor talked to in three years, and the report on missing persons winds up on Eve's desk. But in an unholy mess of coincidences, it's known that Rose worked at La Lethe, but somehow Eve never sees this, but yet not known that Rose lived in the village which was destroyed by German troops in revenge for suspected espionage.  AND all of this was caused by La Lethe's owner, Rene, whom is responsible for both Eve's hands and Rose's death. How convenient that Eve was the one working on Rose's report! How convenient that Eve never saw Rose's employer! How convenient that someone else knew Rose's employer! How convenient that this other person had all this information on Rose except her home address, which would have told them exactly what happened to her! How convenient that Charlie decides to go digging this all up and finds Eve at her home! How convenient that the one person Eve is willing to kill is the same person they're tracking for Charlie! 

 And I liked Charlie to begin with, but I found her less and less appealing as a character as things went on. She's like, oh well, who knows who the father of this child is, since I slept with like, seven different boys, and I'm nineteen, but I think I can raise this kid! After all, I've shown excellent judgment and discernment!  I'm just going to plan to open a cafe with my cousin, whom has disappeared!  And when all that fails, I'll just marry the guy who I met two months ago who has PTSD. Not to mention that anyone who disappeared in France in 1944 and has not turned up within a few years is DEFINITELY DEAD.  Charlie, you're an idiot.

Eve's story was very compelling though.  We spend a lot of time on her sexual relationship with Rene, which was super gross and I tried to skip past it as much as possible.  I wished we'd spent more time with Lili and the other one, but regardless, those sections do a good job of ramping up tension, fear, and keeping the book moving along.  Anytime we get back into 1947 though, we lose steam again.  They move around geographically quite a bit in 1947, but it's mostly just making time until they get to Limoges and find out what happened to Oradour-sur-Glane.

Meanwhile, we're approaching the climax of Eve's story, which (as you could have expected) results in her broken fingers plus prison, and then we take another left turn to menace present-day Rene, who, it appears, was smart enough to get through all of WWI by pandering to the Germans, could apparently sniff out lies better than the secret police, and managed to escape with his life despite the Germans losing the war, and then... despite the fact that he'd been keeping a spy under his nose and had to change his name to avoid revenge for his collaboration with the enemy, he decided to do it again in WWII, using the exact same restaurant name? Truly, a dizzying intellect.  I was NOT prepared for the shoot-out, although the idea that Eve then decides to go around hunting former nazis is enticing. 

29: A Different Book by an Author You Read in 2021 (The Rose Code)

The Mystery of the Yellow Room

The Mystery of the Yellow Room

By Gaston Leroux

Reporter and amateur sleuth Joseph Rouletabille is sent to investigate a criminal case at the Château du Glandier and takes along his friend the lawyer Sainclair, who narrates. Mathilde Stangerson, the 30-something daughter of the castle's owner, Professor Joseph Stangerson, was found near-critically battered in a room adjacent to his laboratory on the castle grounds, with the door still locked from the inside. More attempts are made on Ms Stangerson's life despite Rouletabille and police detective Larsan's protection, and the perpetrator appears to vanish on two occasions when they are closing in on him, echoing Professor Stangerson's research into "matter dissociation".

This is supposedly the original "locked room" mystery, and I was intrigued by the premise, but man, it was a bit of a tough go.  First of all, Leroux is the same guy who wrote The Phantom of the Opera, and this was written in a similarly overwrought style.  I've read older books before, and even ones that were a bit more flowery in their style still managed to engage, but this one just made me want to skim everything.  Second, I kept thinking it would be a short, fast read, but every chapter was agonizing.  Third, the solution to the mystery was kind of silly.  Let's get into nitpicks!

Sooooo, the lady was attacked earlier that day, but (for various reasons) did not want to tell anyone, and managed to go about her business for a couple of hours until bedtime, when she suddenly has a nightmare, trips and falls out of bed, hitting her head on her nightstand, and then becomes insensate and hospitalized? Why didn't she just tell people it was a nightmare? I mean, sure, the bloody handprint, but she could have just said she had no idea how that got there.  

Then we find out that the master detective is actually the attacker and a huge fraud, so, his plan after his wife leaves him and he escapes jail is to... go to France and pretend to be a detective for at least five years, and then wait around for his wife to decide to marry someone else, at which point... he attacks her and then gets himself assigned to the case so he can frame her new lover for the crime? Great long term thinking there!  I did correctly guess the attacker was a previous (and jealous) lover of the lady, but apparently this guy has just been hanging around town for years, literally solving crimes, and he couldn't be bothered to track her down? And if he wasn't hanging around for years solving crimes, how on earth did he join the detective force in time to "investigate" this one?? For that matter, why on earth was he pretending to be a detective in the first place? So he can make a steady living, while also framing people for crimes they didn't commit? Seems kind of petty for a master criminal. 

And meanwhile her new lover is arrested because he's being conned away by an associate of the husband, each time she's attacked - you'd think after the first time he'd wise up and stop letting that happen.  Instead, she's attacked like, three times!  And each time, this guy has no alibi! 

Maybe I'm just bitter that I didn't figure out that Larsan was the criminal.  In my defense, (a) I think it's ridiculous that a master criminal worked his way up through the Paris detective ranks and just did that for years and (b) my copy of the book was on an e-reader, so the "detailed plans" of the various crime scene layouts was just a jumble of lines and labels, and (b, part 2) Rouletabille is so obtuse in his manner of talking that I couldn't figure out what the eff was going on. You could have set that scene to "Yakety Sax" for all I knew.  

There's also a lot of misdirection about the landskeeper, and every other servant is called "Daddy" something (not a joke) so I wasn't even entirely sure who was who, but we'll call that sour grapes and  chalk it up to my not caring enough to read carefully or attentively.  Good for the completist, but otherwise I prefer my other mysteries.

One By One

One by One

By Ruth Ware

 

Getting snowed in at a luxurious, rustic ski chalet high in the French Alps doesn’t sound like the worst problem in the world. Especially when there’s a breathtaking vista, a full-service chef and housekeeper, a cozy fire to keep you warm, and others to keep you company. Unless that company happens to be eight coworkers…each with something to gain, something to lose, and something to hide.

When the cofounder of Snoop, a trendy London-based tech startup, organizes a weeklong trip for the team in the French Alps, it starts out as a corporate retreat like any other: PowerPoint presentations and strategy sessions broken up by mandatory bonding on the slopes. But as soon as one shareholder upends the agenda by pushing a lucrative but contentious buyout offer, tensions simmer and loyalties are tested. The storm brewing inside the chalet is no match for the one outside, however, and a devastating avalanche leaves the group cut off from all access to the outside world. Even worse, one Snooper hadn’t made it back from the slopes when the avalanche hit.

As each hour passes without any sign of rescue, panic mounts, the chalet grows colder, and the group dwindles further…one by one.

I've read a few Ruth Ware books now, and not been incredibly impressed (The Woman in Cabin 10 was okay, although had a weird anti-climax ending, and the last one, The Turn of the Key, I really didn't like the ending just because I thought it boggled all rational thought that a person would go to jail and get the death penalty rather than simply admit the death was an accident caused by a young child) but they're so popular, I can't resist checking them out.  And this one I really had a good time with!

We get two perspectives, Liz, the reluctant minority shareholder, dragged along on a corporate "retreat" that's actually a week-long presentation about whether or not to accept a buyout, and Erin, the ski chalet Girl Friday, who has a secret of her own.  The book moves at a pretty good clip, I think I finished it in about two hours or so, and there really isn't any slow point.  Yes, we find out who the murderer is about two-thirds of the way in, and yes, it's pretty clear who it is even before that, but the last third is basically a cat and mouse game which is thrilling in and of itself.  Ha, I was just going back over reviews for another of Ware's books, In a Dark, Dark Wood, and all the reviews on the first page of Amazon are all about how ridiculous that this woman drinks tea with a murderer - I wonder if the tea drinking scene in One by One is a reaction to that, which would be amusing. 

It was certainly surprising to me how much of the crime(s) were planned - since at lot of it depended on circumstances/opportunities the murderer wouldn't have been able to predict.  I guess if the first go-round wouldn't have worked, they'd have just kept (SPOILER ALERT) carrying around a red jacket and faking their skiing the bunny slopes while hoping to run into their victim on the black trails, while other people are conveniently posted in the ski-lift to witness the faux Eva go by?? Hmmm, that seems... complicated.

Are the characters in One by One more than just two-dimensional? Eh, not really.  I mean, it's a thriller? A lot of people have secrets (although really, just our two main characters are hiding anything particular) and people start dying and there's not a lot of time to take stock and think about your hopes and dreams. I did think the little sections before each chapter about Liz and Erin's "Snoop" followers was dumb though, we get all that information from the narrative itself, we don't really need it there, plus it barely changes throughout the book. 

I will say that it was compulsively readable, and probably my favorite of all Ware's books (though again, not as high a compliment as it might be) and just the kind of thing you want to read when curled up with a warm blanket on a cold winter day. 

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

By V. E. Schwab

 

France, 1714: in a moment of desperation, a young woman makes a Faustian bargain to live forever―and is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets.

Thus begins the extraordinary life of Addie LaRue, and a dazzling adventure that will play out across centuries and continents, across history and art, as a young woman learns how far she will go to leave her mark on the world.

But everything changes when, after nearly 300 years, Addie stumbles across a young man in a hidden bookstore and he remembers her name.

I am not entirely sure what I expected but I am pretty sure it is not what I got.  And I should know better, I actually have read some of Schwab's previous books, but this was both better and less sweet than I expected, and perhaps also more fleeting. I dunno, I spent a lot of the first half of the book just kinda going along with things, and then as soon as we got Henry's backstory, I was immediately anti-Henry.  Bitch, Addie just sweated through three hundred years of theft and homelessness and you out there complaining because one of the hundred available opportunities to you just didn't seem right? And cause you got broke up with you're going to jump off a building? So in the sense that Addie does not end up with Henry, I liked it!  Two thumbs up!

I didn't really like Luc either though, so I wasn't entirely pleased she was hanging with him either, plus, I know we get glimpses here and there, but they basically spent twenty or thirty years together and it's swept by in about five pages? After spending a hundred pages on sad-sack Henry? Is that because if we spent more time on Addie and Luc's relationship we wouldn't even consider Henry a viable option, or that we would be mad that she's planning on exiting her relationship with Luc with a bang? {although I have to say, she calls herself cleverer than Luc, but she honestly thought that Luc making a deal with Henry and her finding Henry was a "mistake"? That doesn't bode well for her future strategizing}

I mean, it was a little bait-and-switchy, but since I wasn't ever really attached to Henry, I didn't mind the ending.  Addie herself, honestly, I was a little let down by what she ended up doing with her life - maybe there's more we don't know about, but for someone who can't be injured and will live forever, it took her a hundred years just to leave the country? And then it was by force, so I don't even know if that counts.  Where else is she going? I mean, no wonder she's depressed, she's basically been like one of those old people living in an apartment and never going outside for the last twenty years of their life.  Also, and this is just me, but if I made that deal and couldn't tell people my real name, I would immediately pick a different one that I would just use.  People change their names all the time.  Am I attached to mine? Yes.  If I couldn't tell it to anyone, would I consider going by a new one? Absolutely!  

I just - for all that she seems like she's got a routine and everything down by the 2014 sections and is in a groove, like, what is she doing? She lacks purpose.  So she's a "muse" (and I appreciate that we kind of elide over however inspiring she can be if they forget her as soon as they leave the room) but she's so taken up with this idea about leaving a mark of some kind that she seems to have spent no time considering whether her mark would be worthwhile.  I dunno, maybe I just don't understand artists. 

Stylistically, nothing really bothered me.  The chapters were brief enough that it never felt like it dragged - except for Henry's POV sections - although I think a lot of repetition could have been excised without losing anything. Another reviewer called it "hollow" and I guess I kind of agree with that. It's a good story but not one that gripped me or that I'll be returning to.   

Ten Second Reviews

The House with Chicken Legs

By Sophie Anderson

This is like a middle school reader version of Baba Yaga, where she adopts like an eleven year old girl and then shit happens.  I will be very honest: I did not finish this one and only sort of limply flipped through the final pages (Baba never comes back?!).  Among other things, a kid from the Lake District in England tells our heroine Marinka that he is really into " soccer". It brought me in mind of the first Harry Potter book, in which things just got semi-randomly changed for an American audience (because we do not know what a philosopher is, I suppose) and that was twenty-three years ago (sniff) and we've all come a long way since then, and frankly a little cross-cultural contamination is good for the soul anyway.  Let's raise some fricking cosmopolitans.  Anyway, this may be impolite, but I want to shout out to Nine Witch Tales which is actual witch horror for middle school readers, because back in the 60s they didn't care about "mental health" or "not terrifying young readers".

Fatal Inheritance

By Rachel Rhys

This one was certainly nicely atmospheric - and I don't mean it's suspenseful or thrilling, but that it feels nicely of the time and place, i.e., 1948 post-war French Riviera.  I went along for the ride, but I did have some bugaboos: Eve's a doormat until she needs to be otherwise for the sake of the plot, and then she'll quietly subside again.  I never really got a feel for her personality - is she chafing, is she demoralized, is she seizing her opportunity here, what is it?

And the solution to the mystery bugged too.  So her mysterious inheritance is basically unrelated to the "accidents" which keep befalling her, since those are just about the lost Nazi art smugglers who want to get into the house.  And the art is in Guy Lester's house because...? I never made the connection of when and how it got buried behind the wall, and why it needed to be removed conveniently when Eve was still in the house.  Smugglers really demand punctuality and courtesy when removing stolen items, I guess.

But the tagline, "She didn’t have an enemy in the world…until she inherited a fortune." isn't really true: she didn't have an enemy because she inherited a fortune, she sort of just managed to wander into a criminal ring simultaneously with inheriting a fortune.  It's not a very surprising mystery (you know who is mysterious and angry but falling in love with her, and who is mysterious and nice but secretly using her very early on, and the terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad thing that Guy Lester did is clear about halfway into the book, although they save the "revelation" for much later) but it's not a bad piece of fiction, and it's such an interesting setting that the novelty at least, should keep you going until the end.

Count of Monte Cristo

The Count of Monte Cristo

By Alexandre Dumas

Set against the turbulent years of the Napoleonic era, Alexandre Dumas's thrilling adventure story is one of the most widely read romantic novels of all time. In it the dashing young hero, Edmond Dantès, is betrayed by his enemies and thrown into a secret dungeon in the Chateau d'If — doomed to spend his life in a dank prison cell. The story of his long, intolerable years in captivity, his miraculous escape, and his carefully wrought revenge creates a dramatic tale of mystery and intrigue and paints a vision of France — a dazzling, dueling, exuberant France — that has become immortal.

This was the only book on the list that I've read before, because the prompt explicitly required it.  Although I have other, shorter, favorite books, I'd happened to have recently re-read those when the list came out, and I knew I'd have two weeks traveling that I could spend on a nice thick doorstopper.  I've read Count a few times already, and I was really looking forward to re-reading it.  Well, this time, I got five chapters in and had to put it away.  Even though I knew what was coming, and it wasn't a surprise in any way, for some reason the destruction of all of Edmond's hopes on his wedding day just really upset me.  I had to switch to Sherlock Holmes for a few days before I had the strength to continue.

I know this sounds incredibly snotty, but I do get new things out of it every time I re-read it.  Partly because it's so fucking long, there's probably like whole pages I've skipped and never noticed.  Last time I remember thinking that we spent a lot of time going over Benedetto's storyline, which I barely noticed this time around.  This reading had me way focused on the Count's bizarre belief that God was guiding him (because God loves REVENGE too? Actually it probably does) and this whole thing he had about people "deserving" happiness, depending on whether they had suffered a lot.  Also, my perennial gripe about how long we spend on Albert and Franz and the Rome saga, which I ALWAYS find boring and out of place, as a very long meander through a (frankly uninteresting) side character's perspective.  Come on, we have REVENGE waiting!

I also ended up re-watching the 2002 movie version, which does a yeoman's job compressing a thousand page book into a comprehensible two and a half hour movie, and ends up squashing the Haydee, Mercedes, and Albert stories, so Haydee disappears, Albert becomes the Count's biological son and Mercedes reunites with the Count, with all three sailing off into the sunset.  A dramatic departure, but on the extras the director is like, "I stand by that.  It's the only way the story even makes sense" and I kind of get where he's coming from.  As nice as it is to see the wicked punished, and as necessary as it may be for the Count to realize that the innocent by proximity, have also been punished in his mad schemes, it feels oddly unsatisfying for Mercedes (by all accounts a real stand up woman) to end her days poor and living off whatever money her son makes as a soldier (and what kind of future would the son of a now infamous traitor have in the army anyway?).  And the last scene we have with Mercedes we leave on a weird, uncertain note, basically - she won't accept help, so who knows how she'll live!

Maybe I'm softening in my old age.  Although maybe not, because I definitely forgot how Danglars' story ended and when I got to it, I was like, "This is it?! He keeps $50,000 livres and goes on his merry way?? This is bull#$%!" For real though, what the fuck.  Danglars basically engineered the whole damn thing, and he has no conscience, so appealing to one is a wasted effort.  I think the Count just ran out of steam there.  To be fair, Villefort's madness would leave a real bad taste in your mouth, but again, nothing that happened to these people was anything other than the result of their own evils, all brought home to roost. Yes, they could have lived undamaged lives if not for the Count, but simply because you are not caught being bad does not make you a good person.

 I also was paying much closer attention to the lesbian storyline this time around because last time I was kind of like, "Huh, that's kind of gay" and this time, I was like, "I'm pretty sure Dumas knew what the fuck he was doing with those two women."  If not, then, I mean, he's really good at writing lesbians accidentally.  

I read this while sailing around Greenland, which was great, because I had both plenty of time, and also (as a book I'd previously read) not so much invested in it that I wasn't able to do other things on the ship.  Honestly, I said I always get new things out of it each time I read it, but I keep re-reading it because I get the same things out of it too: entertainment, drama, REVENGE, guilt, sorrow, love, and epic-ness.  Whatever else Dumas may have been, he was a hell of a story-teller. 


07: A Re-read Of A Favorite Book

Bitter Greens

Bitter Greens
by Kate Forsyth

French novelist Charlotte-Rose de la Force has been banished from the court of Versailles by the Sun King, Louis XIV, after a series of scandalous love affairs. At the convent, she is comforted by an old nun, Sœur Seraphina, who tells her the tale of a young girl who, a hundred years earlier, is sold by her parents for a handful of bitter greens...

After Margherita's father steals parsley from the walled garden of the courtesan Selena Leonelli, he is threatened with having both hands cut off, unless he and his wife relinquish their precious little girl. Selena is the famous red-haired muse of the artist Tiziano, first painted by him in 1512 and still inspiring him at the time of his death. She is at the center of Renaissance life in Venice, a world of beauty and danger, seduction and betrayal, love and superstition.

Locked away in a tower, Margherita sings in the hope that someone will hear her. One day, a young man does.

There are a lot of shitty men in this book.  Don't get me wrong, some of the women are cruel, too.  But about two thirds of the way through the book, I was just like, over men.  In particular, Louis XIV, the so-called Sun King, who sounds like a real ass. And let's not forget the Italian man who lined up thirty-nine men to rape Selena's mother.  But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Bitter Greens is told in three tales: in the French court of the late 1600s, Charlotte-Rose de la Force, the real author behind our most familiar Rapunzel tale, Margherita, an Italian girl in the late 1580s, who is the basis for Rapunzel, and Selena Leonelli, born in the late 1400s, who becomes both the model for Titian and the witch to imprison our Rapunzel.   The book begins with Charlotte-Rose's incarceration at a convent (as opposed to exile in England, which was a fate worse than death, apparently) and frames the Margherita story, which frames the Selena story. 

This was beautifully written - each section is satisfying and meaty, and the heroines (for even Selena is the heroine of her own story) are all, as much as possible, active participants in their own lives. But it's also kind of long, and there's a lot of unpleasant stuff that happens - even to the real life character, Charlotte Rose, like every time we go flashback, she's undergoing some new humiliation.  Seriously, TWO men whose families kidnap them to avoid them marrying her? That's impressive.

It's still a good book, but I definitely did not understand why anyone would even want to be at the French court, it sounds like a complete hellhole, full of drama and backstabbing and people who hate you and constantly trying to stay on the good side of a terrible king. I've read another (fiction) book that revolved around the witchcraft and sorcery scandal and purge of King Louis' court - The Oracle Glass by Judith Merkle. The tone of that felt kind of the same, and I was kind of like, why would anyone subject themselves to that?  Was non-court life so much worse?  I do think that some of the lengthy Charlotte-Rose parts could have been excised without much impact though, since it's a lot of humiliations and degradations one after the other, and more time spent on the things she enjoyed - the salon, and frankly, we don't even get to meet her husband.  That might have made it feel a little less unbalanced.  I also didn't get the sense that Charlotte-Rose thought much of god except that (in her darker times) that he'd forgotten her, so some of the drama about converting to Catholicism felt low-stakes.  Overall, there are happy endings, three of them, just as a fairy tale should have, but it can get kind of depressing first. 

I still enjoyed this, and thought it was a very well written, interesting book about a real person and a well-done integration of fantasy into history; and I'm already putting another of her books on my to-be-read list: a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, set in Nazi Germany. 

And speaking of which, I saw Miracle of the White Stallions, and it was perfect - cheesy, with a distracting American accent for the hero, and German accents for everyone else, particularly the villains, and plenty of shot of horse dancing.  Two thumbs up!


 22: A book with a title that contains "salty," "sweet," "bitter," or "spicy"
1.08

Grave Mercy

Grave Mercy, by Robin LaFevers

Escaping from the brutality of an arranged marriage, seventeen year-old Ismae finds sanctuary at the convent of St. Mortain, where the sisters still serve the gods of old.  Here she learns that the god of Death himself has blessed her with dangerous gifts - and a  violent destiny.  If she chooses to stay at the convent, she will be trained as an assassin and serve as handmaiden to Death.  To claim her new life, she must be willing to take the lives of others.

Ismae's most important assignment takes her straight into the high court of Brittany, where she must pose as mistress to the darkly mysterious Gavriel Duval, who has fallen under a cloud of suspicion.  Once there, she finds herself woefully underprepared - not only for the deadly games of love and intrigue, but for the impossible choices she must make.  For how can she deliver Death's vengeance upon a target who, against her will, has stolen her heart?

So Grave Mercy has gotten quite a few good reviews, and I guess I am a little hard pressed to say why. It's fine, don't get me wrong, but it's not a miracle of writing, and there are quite a few things I really didn't enjoy about it.  It begins with Ismae's very short-lived marriage (which, since I'm pretty sure she never gets divorced, means she's still married throughout the book.  Which: odd).  Soon enough, her new husband discovers that she has some serious scar/birthmark issues going on, and decides that she needs to be burned at the stake - I get that the birthmark means that the god of Death is her father, but why that is such a huge problem is not really ever explained.  So the local herbwitch smuggles her out to the convent where she can accept her destiny as La Femme Nikita, 1485-style, or marry some random guy.  Hmm, tough decision.

So in the convent she finds out that she is immune to poison, and I am already sensing that the Mary Sue is strong with this one.  It's a feeling that lasts much longer than it should, considering.  She meets some other novitiates, trains up, and goes out on her first assignment, and let me tell you, this girl thinks she is hot shit.  I don't know what kind of brainwashing they do at the convent, but there is way too much of "Kill first, ask questions later" for Ismae to be as confident as she is.  She's on her first assignment!  Which she almost screws up.  I don't care how much you train, when you go out into the real world and are expected to produce results for the first time, you get nervous.  And I think it's flaw in the character that she's not nervous - it makes her seem stupid, for not being nervous, and it makes her harder to relate to. 

The second place I got tripped up at is when she gets sent out with this Gavriel Duval guy on assignment.  Why this chick gets sent out with him is beyond me.  She has gone on a total of two (2) assignments, both of which she very narrowly avoided botching, and, as we discover later, she is both unprepared for real world scenarios, and totally susceptible to deeply wounded backstories.  It would make sense if (PLOT SPOILERS UP AHEAD) as we discover later, Crunard's master plan involves somehow using a novitiate assassin as some sort of  scape goat.  But he's not, as far as I can tell.  Why the abbess didn't insist on sending someone with a) more experience and b) more loyalty to the convent, I just don't know.  I understand that Crunard was the bad guy, and he was using the abbess as well, but it's kind of like, either she totally trusts Crunard, which, since we're told to suspect anyone else, I don't know why he would be above suspicion, or she doesn't, in which case, she needs to tell Ismae to watch out for everyone.  By not uniting against Crunard, the only thing the convent accomplished is alienating Ismae, who, although probably not their star pupil, still represents a significant amount of time and energy spent molding her into this ninja assassin. 

Do not even get me started on the poisons and the weapons.

Plus, I could not figure out if this convent is supposed to be well-known, secret, or what?  Like, I am so sure that the court of Brittany just allows these ladies to train young women as killers. VERY PLAUSIBLE.  And yet, everyone seems to know what the convent of St. Mortain means.  So, I guess, that like, no one is concerned that there's a gaggle of assassins running around? And no one thinks it would be a good idea to maybe...send them off to kill a bunch of people in France?  I guess I'm just confused about this whole target thing, which may end up being better explained in later books: if the god is picking targets, why is he so focused on like, state politics?  I understand that apparently a free Brittany = continued worship, but (1) that doesn't even sound like it's right, since the new duchess of Brittany totally says that Mortain is a saint, not a god, implying that the leader of Brittany doesn't support the old gods as is anyhow, and (2) I would think that just knowing that there's a pack of wild young ladies avenging wrongs in the name of Mortain would be enough to make people leery of not doing their best to stay on his good side. And if he's not picking targets, then why the visions and the marque and all that? It just feels very thin.

Okay, and before I try to temper this review with why the book is "fine", I want to get one more thing out of my system: lack of humor.  I mean, this book needs some levity, and it doesn't even have to be like, Ismae cracking out wicked bad puns after she kills someone, a la James Bond.  I just mean, like, banter, or something a little bit to relieve the unending tension. 

Okay: things I liked: I enjoyed the idea that there was a closeness between the three new novitiates, although honestly, it was more of a tell than a show.  Because the book necessarily skips quite a bit of training time, I feel like the scenes in which Annith, Ismae, and Sybella really bond get left by the wayside.  I mean, we see Ismae talk Sybella off the ledge (figuratively and literally) and then the next thing we know, Sybella's been off on a month's long assignment, and while I did get a sense that the three were close, I felt that part could have been stronger.  (So it's a back handed compliment, so what?) 

I also liked how the book ended - given that there are, as I said, three new novitiates, and this is a planned trilogy, I don't think I'm reaching too far to say that each book will center on one of them.  The next one is Sybella, I believe.  So Grave Mercy did a good job of wrapping up Ismae's story line and getting her to a place of, if not absolute resolution, at least temporary resting so that we can look in on the other girls and see how they're doing.  I am intrigued by the other two ladies, and while it's never a good idea to want to know more about a secondary character than the primary one, it does at least bode well for follow-up books.

So it's a fairly standard book, not offensive, but the focus on the relationship between Gavriel and Ismae to the detriment of world-building is both a strength and a weakness: strength in the sense that there are many questions and avenues for the next two books, weak in the sense that you just get a sense of absurdity  and implausibility about some of it. And in a world where fourteen year old girls get sent to assassin training school in medieval France, you need to ensure you keep as much plausibility as you can or else the whole thing is a three ring circus.

Code Name: Verity

Codename: Verity, by Elizabeth Wein 

Oct. 11th, 1943—A British spy plane crashes in Nazi-occupied France. Its pilot and passenger are best friends. One of the girls has a chance at survival. The other has lost the game before it's barely begun.

When “Verity” is arrested by the Gestapo, she's sure she doesn’t stand a chance. As a secret agent captured in enemy territory, she’s living a spy’s worst nightmare. Her Nazi interrogators give her a simple choice: reveal her mission or face a grisly execution.

As she intricately weaves her confession, Verity uncovers her past, how she became friends with the pilot Maddie, and why she left Maddie in the wrecked fuselage of their plane. On each new scrap of paper, Verity battles for her life, confronting her views on courage and failure and her desperate hope to make it home. But will trading her secrets be enough to save her from the enemy? 

Happy New Year!  I've decided to celebrate a day off in the middle of the week by reading about young female spies getting tortured in World War II.  I think I've talked before about the overabundance of WWII kid's fic out there, but Codename Verity is a worthy addition to any collection.  My mother, bless her heart, read it before giving it to me with her recommendation, but I wasn't feeling it the last time I picked it up, several months ago.  It was one of those things where I'd heard too much about the book, and had gotten the impression that there was some "twist" to it, and I was taking everything with such grains of salt I couldn't concentrate on the story.

Which is: a plane with two travelers is shot and crashes, but not before one passenger parachutes out: Verity, an English (Scottish) spy, meant to join up with the French Resistance on a secret mission,  gets discovered not more than a week after she lands, captured and unable to talk her way out of it without the necessary faked papers, which were accidentally switched with that of her pilot and best friend, Maddie Brodatt. The first half of the book is the story of the two girls' (I keep saying girls, even though they're clearly old enough to have excelled at their respective dirty jobs) mutual history to the fatal crash-landing.

This is where I got tripped up: the idea that this Verity character would be writing the truth for the Germans was so implausible, that I was really strung out thinking - was this a lie? Was this?  In fact, I was pretty sure throughout most of that first section, that Verity was not Queenie, but Maddie herself, pretending to be the other girl for some unknown reason.  Lest you be led astray as I was, let me reassure you: Maddie is Maddie and Verity is Queenie (aka Julie).  I was also ticked off by the leniency with which Verity was (apparently) given to write her story: she goes off on a lot of tangents, most of which serve no purpose other than (as we discover later) as coded messages to the Resistance.  Given that Verity could not have reasonably expected the papers to make it back to the Resistance (at least, not with any real confidence, especially in the beginning), it seems odd that she would have (and could have) written her papers with two such disparate audiences in mind.  I suppose she was hopeful on the off chance they could get smuggled out, but then why did the Germans permit it?  Very odd.

Because I didn't see much point in anything Verity wrote, I was therefore less impressed at her repression of more relevant facts relating to the secret mission.  Since she clearly had to have known more than just what was in the record, it's hard for me to say that she did a great job not telling any of that.  Well, obviously, she was tortured.  But they kept her alive for weeks, ostensibly for the purpose of this written record of key information, and they don't even attempt to get the basis for her mission in France?  Not that it would have mattered in the long run, since she would have lied about it, but it hurts the story, I think, for the reader not to be convinced along with the Germans, of a cover story.  Most of what Verity writes is true, but useless (and the parts that aren't true I found pointless - lies about it being a Beaufort plane, not a Lysander one - eh?).  I was expecting relevant lies.

What is impressive is how well Ms. Wein manages to convey the friendship between Maddie and Verity, even though they aren't together for most of the book: they meet, train up in separate locations, then spend a few missions traveling together before their final fateful trek to France, whereupon they are immediately separated. However, they share a boundless love for each other, which comes across clearly in each narration in the book.  Maddie's final sacrifice is heart-breaking, and I will confess, I did start crying, though the book continues for so much longer that I was quite dry-eyed by the last page.  It is refreshing that this is not just another one of those teen love-triangle books, of which there are far too many (girl falls in love with boy, but they cannot be together due to: a dystopian society/sudden onset lycanthropy/he's actually 300 years older than her and that's super creepy, stop acting like it's not).

I think a reader would benefit from multiple readings: Verity's narration, in particular, contains multitudes, which I could not begin to unpick today.  It also contains quite a lot of mechanical talk about airplanes, especially at first.  It's like the whale chapters in Moby Dick - you just have to get through them, but lordy are they ever a drag.  The author is a pilot herself, and it does show.  Stylistically, I think it would also benefit from not underlining certain sentences about the Gestapo headquarters - you'll see what I mean.  It does make things jump out at you (as it's intended to), but given that we're treated to a run-down of it all later anyway, I think it would be doing more of a service to readers to make them go back to find it themselves. 

I thought it was a good book, a worthwhile book, but the feeling of being manipulated was not worth the pay-off of finding out what Verity was lying about.  Perhaps when I'm feeling less raw about it, I'll return to it.  Because that's the thing: this book does kick you in the stomach.  I'm still reeling from it.  It's not a very comfortable read, but I do sort of feel like finding an online discussion of it, sort of like joining a support group: CNV Survivors, we'll get t-shirts made.