The Echo of Old Books

The Echo of Old Books

By Barbara Davis

Rare-book dealer Ashlyn Greer’s affinity for books extends beyond the intoxicating scent of old paper, ink, and leather. She can feel the echoes of the books’ previous owners—an emotional fingerprint only she can read. When Ashlyn discovers a pair of beautifully bound volumes that appear to have never been published, her gift quickly becomes an obsession. Not only is each inscribed with a startling incrimination, but the authors, Hemi and Belle, tell conflicting sides of a tragic romance.

With no trace of how these mysterious books came into the world, Ashlyn is caught up in a decades-old literary mystery, beckoned by two hearts in ruins, whoever they were, wherever they are. Determined to learn the truth behind the doomed lovers’ tale, she reads on, following a trail of broken promises and seemingly unforgivable betrayals. The more Ashlyn learns about Hemi and Belle, the nearer she comes to bringing closure to their love story—and to the unfinished chapters of her own life.

I have absolutely no idea how this is so highly rated on Goodreads. I don't want to be rude about it, but I found both romances unsatisfying, the mysteries unmysterious and the inclusion of Ashlyn's magical "book-sensing" power to be completely irrelevant and unnecessary. And look, it's not that bad! But an average of 4.26 stars??? Nothing like severe disappointment to ruin the experience for you.

Maybe we'll go in reverse order: Ashlyn, bookseller, who is sad and alone because (we find out in installments) her mother died of cancer instead of getting chemo, her father shot himself a few weeks later, and her cheating ex-boyfriend committed suicide to taunt her, has the ability to touch certain books and "feel" the emotions of the owner. This ability is described in detail in the first chapter, and has no impact on any of the rest of the story. Why is it included you might ask? I have no idea! It would be perfectly reasonable for Ashlyn to be interested in a privately published book with a sad love story even without sensing anguish from its owner. Nothing else in the book smacks of magical realism. It feels so weirdly shoehorned in that I have to imagine it was left over from a separate author idea and Davis just couldn't bear not to use it, no matter how little sense it made.

Then, we have two competing storylines, Ashlyn and Ethan in the present, tracking down the original lovers, and "Belle" and "Hemi" in the past. And of course this is a personal preference issue, but every time I wanted to read "Hemi" as a nickname I wanted to cringe (it's short for Hemingway because he wants to be a writer!). This was only made worse when it was apparent that Belle and Hemi (real names: Marian and Hugh) actually called each other these things in real life and they weren't just nom de plumes.

Marian and Hugh's love is supposed to be one for the ages, one so overpowering it conquered a prior engagement, and kept them bitter and in pain for DECADES after they split. In the book, we find out that they meet at her engagement party to another man, and they're together for about four months when they're 21 and 26, respectivey. Alas, our lovers begin fighting because even after four months, Marian hasn't ended her engagement, and then she finds out Hugh has lied to her about writing a hit piece about how her father shut her mother up in an asylum because she was Jewish, but also crazy, and then slipped a knife to her so she could commit suicide. This information upsets Marian, naturally, but Hugh blames her for not trusting that he wasn't actually going to publish it. Truly, a love to last. 

Also, there's a lot of suicide in this book.

Ethan and Ashlyn's love is less overwrought but correspondingly less interesting as well, so the chapters with them slowly deciding to kiss have all the appeal of a warm bowl of oatmeal. It's good for you, but it's not what you look forward to in the mornings. 

I liked Ashlyn fine until she decides to track down the original people in the book and (1) instead of looking for Belle/Marian, who we are told was super rich and her engagement party was the toast of the town and we know the date of the engagement party and also the identity of her fiance - instead of looking to see if there was a mention of the party in the papers (WHICH THERE WAS, we find out later) instead she tries to track down Hugh/Hemi's boss, a tangential character nicknamed Goldie, because she was a lady who owned a newspaper, despite the fact that knowing who Goldie was would absolutely not give you any more information about who either Belle or Hemi were. THEN (2), she assumes that some dude banging Goldie when she died thirty years later was Hemi. Why? I'm not sure, but I guess the idea was that this guy who was apparently so hung up on Belle that 13 years later he's writing bound books to her, becomes his old boss' lover twenty years later. I mean, it makes sense if you ignore logic and reasonable probability.

Ethan has no personality other than "willing to welcome a strange and nosy woman into his house and life".  Hemi/Hugh is distractingly obnoxious, given that he blames Marian for being upset that he lies multiple times - first about the fact that he was there to investigate her father and second that he was actually investigating her mother's suspicious death. He's also upset that she doesn't trust him more. Why should she, you wonder, but it's okay because in return, he later gets told he missed the first 43 years of his child's life. 

The fact that Marian was pregnant when she left New York was totally expected, so much so that I assumed that to be the case based on absolutely nothing but my sure confidence in this book's use of cliche. How else to stuff more melodrama into this whole affair than for her to discover she is carrying her terrible lover's child, but alas, too late! They are already parted forevermore. Also pretty obvious that Cee-cee, Marian's older sister, somehow swapped the notes so Hugh got the break up one instead of the "Wait for me!" one. The only surprise there was that the little messenger boy, Cee-cee's son and Ethan's father, Dickey, wasn't also involved, given how suspiciously guilty he acted.

The book is fine, it's FINE.  But there's no tension at any point - we know Marian and Hugh separate and we know they don't get back together before 1984.   As mentioned above, none of their separation brought tension or surprise either. In fact, I began to wish Marian and Hugh would separate sooner, since they were so much more annoying when they were together. Ashlyn and Ethan also don't carry any tension or surprise. They seem to get involved with each other more because it's expected of them as two of the primary characters in this book who are single and the same age. Perhaps it's a little surprising that Ashlyn doesn't end up with Marian's kid Zachary, but otherwise, ho hum. 

The only really bizarre thing is that SOMEHOW after 43 YEARS and several missed connections, Hugh decides to show up at Marian's big event the DAY AFTER Ashlyn and Ethan discuss the whole affair with Marian and find out that Zachary is actually Hugh's child. And the two events are completely unrelated. Now that really does take some magical thinking.

4: A Book With Two Or More Books On The Cover Or "Book" In The Title

The Frozen River

The Frozen River

By Ariel Lawhon 

Maine, 1789: When the Kennebec River freezes, entombing a man in the ice, Martha Ballard is summoned to examine the body and determine cause of death. As a midwife and healer, she is privy to much of what goes on behind closed doors in Hallowell. Her diary is a record of every birth and death, crime and debacle that unfolds in the close-knit community. Months earlier, Martha documented the details of an alleged rape committed by two of the town’s most respected gentlemen—one of whom has now been found dead in the ice. But when a local physician undermines her conclusion, declaring the death to be an accident, Martha is forced to investigate the shocking murder on her own.

Over the course of one winter, as the trial nears, and whispers and prejudices mount, Martha doggedly pursues the truth. Her diary soon lands at the center of the scandal, implicating those she loves, and compelling Martha to decide where her own loyalties lie.

So I was reading the book and enjoying it reasonably well as one does, and then I come to the author's note at the end and apparently Martha Ballard is a real person! Whose diary entries were excerpted for the book! And it's based around a real rape case! Except that almost all of the rest of it was manufactured, i.e. bodies and murder plots and the Colonel's nefarious backstory about scalping people during the French and Indian War! All of the "juicy" bits.

I was thinking about why this made me so unsettled, and it reminds me of that terrible book The Ministry of Time where the author exhumed someone who died on the ill-fated Franklin Exhibition in 1846 and then wrote this whole book about him time travelling and having sex in lurid, graphic detail. I suppose in one sense, these people died hundreds of years ago and it's not like their relatives are going to be scandalized. And people write about long-dead famous people all the time - Cleopatra, Empress Sisi. But it feels weird that a "normal" person could be molded into this whole fantasy, especially when these modern books are likely going to be more readily accessible and certainly more popular than their actual true biographies. All of that is to say that I enjoyed the story more when I thought it was a story, and had I known it was a fictionalized version of true events, I would have preferred the author not to add their own spin on things.

And I did enjoy the story when it was a story. The mystery is interesting, given how many people seemed to have motive, both moral and immoral, to kill Burgess. The characters (which again, feels like a weird thing to say given that all of these people appear to be based on actual patients and neighbors and relatives) are all neatly drawn and delineated. The authors note humorously says Lawhon helpfully changed names so there weren't ten "Hannahs" in the book. There's a neat piece where [spoiler!] Martha's matchmaking and assumption about a girl who had a child out of wedlock are neatly turned on their head - something to give our hero feet of clay.

I agree the historical detail and setting is a big part of its charm, and it's a nice change of pace to read about a couple who love each other. Although rape plays a central role in both the current and flashback stories, and it is described (in a courtroom setting), it didn't feel exploitative.

It's nothing that strains your brain, or is meant to say something deep about our cultural institutions (except, perhaps, about the overweening arrogance of certain types of men - to take, to dismiss experience born of decades of work). The mystery of which of Martha's family members may be involved in Burgess' death is not hard to guess correctly, and Martha's victory over the villain is never much in doubt. It's just a good story, well-told. 

 

43: A Book That Includes A Nonverbal Character

A Person of Interest

A Person of Interest
By Susan Choi

Professor Lee, an Asian-born mathematician nearing retirement age, would seem the last person likely to attract the attention of FBI agents. Yet after a popular young colleague becomes the latest victim of a serial bomber, Lee’s detached response and maladroit behavior lead the FBI, the national news media, and even his own neighbors to regard him with damning suspicion.

Amid campus-wide grief over the murder, Lee receives a cryptic letter from a figure out of his past. The letter unearths a lifetime of shortcomings – toward his dead wife, his estranged only daughter, and a long-denied son. Caught between his guilty recollections and the scrutiny of the murder investigation, determined to face his tormentor and exonerate himself, Lee sets off on a journey that will bring him face-to-face with his past – and that might even win him redemption.

Once again, complete ignorance strikes. I had no idea this book was broadly set around the Unabomber, so the references to the newfangled computer geniuses took me aback. I also had no idea that Choi almost won the Pulitzer, and had somehow not connected that she'd written Trust Exercise - a book which has been in my To Be Read list for years, but never attempted due to some reviews hinting at unhappy stylistic flair. If I had known, or remembered that, maybe I would have been better prepared for this. Ostensibly yes, about a mathematics professor who finds himself unfortunately entangled in an FBI investigation into the bombing of his neighboring office, it's much more a character study into someone  alienated from almost everyone in their life. It's not a thriller, it's LITERARY.

The problem you see, is while it's well written, we spend the beginning third of the book wallowing in professor Lee's painful reminiscence of the past, wherein he met and fell in love with his first wife Aileen (who happened to be married to a friend of his, and pregnant to boot), and she separated from her husband and then lost custody of the baby due to some immoral, if not strictly illegal, machinations by her ex-husband.

What should be a quickening pace is instead bogged down again and again by the intermittent forays into the past. And the author's writing style doesn't help. There's page long paragraphs composed of only one or two sentences, meandering but important, and frequently I would be finish a paragraph only to find I had read none of it, and have to return, unhappily, to follow more closely.  I'm sure no author is boo-hooing that their readers have to *gasp* actually focus on reading their books, but again, it makes the reading experience slow, repetitive, and unpleasant, which shouldn't be the case for a book as well written as this one.

If you don't understand what I mean, here's a sample:

But now that she was pregnant, the little dumb show, Gaither's penning of his letters in the kitchen where she would observe him and his cheerful reading of the paltry responses, had come to an end. It was true that she had mostly been in bed, and that Gaither had gotten the mail from the box when he came home from school and heated chicken broth in the kitchen, and washed and dried the bowls afterward. But she could easily see him relocating his correspondence from the kitchen to the lamp table next to their bed, perhaps directing a superfluous inquiry to her prone form: "Aileen, what was the name of those beautiful flowers you planted? I'd like to tell Mother." She could easily see him having added the most recent card from his mother to the tray that he brought her each evening and expressively reading his mother's few words while she struggled to eat. But Gaither had done neither. She knew that for him estrangement from his parents was painful, both for how unwanted a condition it was for himself and for the distress he assumed it caused her. She couldn't disabuse him of this latter notion without insulting him further, but the truth was that his estrangement from his parents did not upset her at all. It was easier for her than she imagined the opposite would have been: their pious embrace of her as a daughter, correspondence duties of her own, treks to their sterile home on Christian holidays. All of it intensifying unimaginably after a child was born. Gaither had once compared her, with what seemed to be uneasy admiration, to Athena sprung unsentimentally from Zeus' thigh, or maybe out of his head: neither of them could exactly remember the story. But Gaither's meaning had been clear, that even as a child Aileen was essentially parentless. Aileen's parents had been learned, mildly crusading, moderately well-off and extremely late-breeding; though when they finally had children, they somehow had six, of which Aileen was the last. Aileen's childhood had taken place in the time after her parents had acquired housekeepers and assumed an emeritus status, so that passionate attachment to that primal relation of parents to child and measuring of all subsequent relations against it were foreign to her. What she had were her siblings, numerous enough that they composed more a loose federation than a snug family. Some she had always shared an easy sympathy with, and others were so much older she'd hardly known them at all. With no one did she have an exceptional bond, as she might have if there had been fewer of them overall.

That is a single paragraph.

The book presents some interesting questions, which I believe are also used in her Trust Exercise book: when we inhabit a character's head, how can we trust what they're telling us?  You see it here, when, at the very end of the book, Aileen's sister tells Lee that his terrible temper is the reason Aileen was scared of him. We see some other characters allude to fights he had about various work issues - granting tenure, etc, but because Lee doesn't think he has a temper, these are all presented as harmless disagreements with colleagues. And there's certainly space for that to be believable, even as we see how little responsibility Lee takes for his other cantankerous activity.

I mean, any man who watches his wife lose her infant child and takes not a single step to prevent it or console her (because he doesn't want to raise another man's child) is certainly trash, and I am glad that he acknowledges in the end, that he is responsible for the destruction of his marriage, not his wife's ex-husband or anybody else, but it does feel unsatisfactory that there's no real follow up from this. Aileen's dead, so there's no resolution there. Their daughter, Esther, appears only at the close, and we don't get any conversation or resolution with her. And while we might assume that Lee has undergone real change, since he accepts and isn't an asshole when Aileen's long lost son appears on his doorstep, again, we get a single introductory conversation and not much more, between the two of them.

While the primary focus is on Lee's relationships and emotional withering, there's also the Unabomber plot in the background! Choi makes the interesting choice to fictionalize a different bomber who (it turns out) knows Lee personally. I suppose it would have to be plotted this way, since otherwise Lee wouldn't become "A Person of Interest" and wouldn't have his life so disrupted that he effects real change - well, except that I do think that this could have been done without actually making him instrumental in catching the bomber, which begins to tread into that thriller territory we've been kept so assiduously away from.  It seemed to me that the great upheaval for Lee was the realization that his former friend, and wife's ex-husband, Gaither, was not the architect of all his sorrows, as he'd been so used to presuming, for the last thirty years or so. And so the idea that the bomber could have been someone else, someone who, again, from Lee's biased perspective, had everything, this idea could have affected Lee without the whole going-to-Idaho-at-the-bomber's-invitation-and-getting-inserted-into-an-FBI-operation-while-a-tangential-civilian.

37: Two Books With The Same Title

Mistress of Rome

Mistress of Rome
By Kate Quinn

Thea, a captive from Judaea, is a clever and determined survivor hiding behind a slave’s docile mask. Purchased as a toy for the spoiled heiress Lepida Pollia, Thea evades her mistress’s spite and hones a secret passion for music. But when Thea wins the love of Rome’s newest and most savage gladiator and dares to dream of a better life, the jealous Lepida tears the lovers apart and casts Thea out.

Rome offers many ways for the resourceful to survive, and Thea remakes herself as a singer for the Eternal ’City’s glittering aristocrats. As she struggles for success and independence, her nightingale voice attracts a dangerous new admirer: the Emperor himself. But the passions of an all-powerful man come with a heavy price, and Thea finds herself fighting for both her soul and her destiny.

Many have tried to destroy the Emperor: a vengeful gladiator, an upright senator, a tormented soldier, a Vestal Virgin. But in the end, the life of Rome’s most powerful man lies in the hands of one woman: the Emperor’s mistress.

Ah, Mistress of Rome: A Series of Unfortunate Events.  It sounds weird coming from someone who just read The Feast of the Goat, but long stretches of Mistress of Rome feel like torture porn. Or tragedy porn or whatever the name is for it when the characters go through one miserable obstacle only to find themselves in front of another, higher, one. Over and over and over.

Part of that comes from two of the worst villains to grace the pages of historical fiction : Lepida Pollida, spoiled senator's daughter who is sex and power mad, and who kicks off her career by separating our lovers and selling Thea to a dockhouse brothel and then later upping the ante by seducing her husband's son and being mean to her epileptic daughter, and Domitian, the emperor, who is introduced as a potential rescuer of Thea only to turn out to be a torturer and abuser of women and slaves, including his own niece, Julia. Domitian, obviously, was a real person, and I sure hope he was as bad as all that because otherwise Quinn has sadly maligned his character here.

Quinn's writing, is, as usual, exemplary, breathless and urgent as she takes us back thousands of years to the Roman Empire. Having just read her most recently based, Briar Club, you can tell that Quinn revels in the historical details available from whatever period she's writing in. Here, being so much more in the distant past, she's not able to bring as much of that in, but there's still a wealth of ground to cover, as the book takes us from 82 ad to 96 ad.

The early sections skip great chunks of years at a time, and those are some of the harder ones to get through- our heroes just keep getting kicked when they're down, and much of the activity is just place setting for the final confrontations that take place in 95-96. By the time our heroes emerge triumphant over the villains, I was mostly just tired and wanted it over with.

Quinn's talent shines when you consider that the whole book hinges on the relationship of a couple who have a few months together fourteen years before most of the action takes place - and the couple is separated most of that time.  We have to both believe in the relationship and care about it, and Quinn manages to do that, for me at least, although Vix, the erstwhile scamp born to Thea, mostly bugs instead of endears. He becomes a primary character later in the series, which doesn't tempt me to read them.

There's a supernatural thread running through the book as well: a soothsayer who is eerily accurate, some characters who escape certain death because of the implied favor of the gods, the mysterious healing powers of gladiator blood. It lets us suspend disbelief on some of the more unlikely plot points Quinn inserts (a gladiator who only loses ONCE in eight years?? somehow everyone keeps winding up at the same places together??).

It's odd to me, that although this and The Feast of the Goat both concern fictionalized re-tellings of famously assassinated dictators (and include invented women characters who were abused by them) they feel very different. Quinn's books are comfortable reads because although some characters do get sacrificed (I won't forget you, Hercules!) she tends to leave readers on a optimistic note: Domitian's death ushered - in real life - almost ninety years of Roman prosperity.  Our core couple, reunited at last, retires to the country. Marcus, the poor beleaguered husband, gets a new wife who likes him. Whereas in The Feast of the Goat, the assassination brings not relief but torture. Thirty years on, citizens have forgotten the horrors of the regime, and reminisce for better days. Quinn doesn't trade in that kind of punchline. But the cynic in me sometimes wishes she would.

06: A Book That Fills Your Favorite Prompt From The 2015 PS Reading Challenge [13: Set In Another Country]

The Briar Club

The Briar Club

By Kate Quinn

Washington, DC, 1950. Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, a down-at-the-heels all-female boardinghouse in the heart of the nation’s capital where secrets hide behind white picket fences. But when the lovely, mysterious widow Grace March moves into the attic room, she draws her oddball collection of neighbors into unlikely friendship: poised English beauty Fliss, whose facade of perfect wife and mother covers gaping inner wounds; policeman’s daughter Nora, who finds herself entangled with a shadowy gangster; frustrated baseball star Beatrice, whose career has come to an end along with the women’s baseball league of WWII; and poisonous, gung-ho Arlene, who has thrown herself into McCarthy’s Red Scare.

Grace’s weekly attic-room dinner parties and window-brewed sun tea become a healing balm on all their lives, but she hides a terrible secret of her own. When a shocking act of violence tears the house apart, the Briar Club women must decide once and for all: who is the true enemy in their midst?

I've had this on my hold list for probably seven or eight months at least, patiently waiting my turn. At this point, Kate Quinn is now one of those authors of whom each new release will be guaranteed a spot on my reading agenda.  Although the blurb didn't exactly grab me - a far cry from her books on WWII spies, codebreakers, and other assorted heroines - it still ended up carrying her trademark: secrets, women, and yes, ultimately, spies.  

It's also stuffed full with a panoply of 50s historical references and side plots. There's almost too much going on, between the birth control pill, gangsters, segregation, the Korean War, modern art, the All American Women's Baseball League, gay rights, and the ever looming spectre of McCarthyism. Not to mention the recipes, for everything from swedish meatballs to honey cake. Quinn does post a lengthy author's note at the end describing some of the real stories behind her fictional ones. The breadth of the historical detail is astonishing at times - there's a scene involving a real dessert called Candle Salad that makes you wonder how Quinn managed to find such an offbeat but perfectly apropos recipe. The only one I wasn't at least a little familiar with was the invasion of Texas, Operation Longhorn, which is both so insane that it's hard to believe it's just a historical footnote now as well as perfectly believable given how nuts everyone else was.

The book is a little bit chunkier than her others: the framing structure involves a murder (or, at least, a dead body) and the police investigation of a Washington D.C. boarding house full of women. Most of it though, is lengthy chapters chronologically preceding and leading up to the murder, each focusing on the key characters and tenants of the house in turn: Pete, the landlord's son, Nora, the secretary and gangster's moll, Bea, the baseball player, Fliss, the English nurse drowning in motherhood, Reka, the former artist who narrowly escaped Germany only to find the American Dream not all it was promised, Claire, the gay pinup girl, and Grace, whose entrance starts the book, and who flits in and out of the others lives in a cross between a fairy godmother and puppet master.

There's certainly some things which, if you're familiar enough with the period (or, ahem, some relevant popular entertainment about the period) come as not-very-surprising surprises and the book itself feels much slower paced than her others, which is to be expected since it takes place over four and a half years. I assume Quinn kept the timeline that way for both historical accuracy as well as to give the relationships time to feel genuine growth, but it does make some things feel like they're being artificially set back, in order to have all the players at the table for the denouement (i.e. Nora reuniting with her boyfriend and Sid's planned escape both get delayed YEARS so they're all at the fatal dinner, plot wise). Those issues aside though, the book doesn't feel very slow, since each chapter concerns a mini crisis of sorts for its respective narrator. It would almost fit the series of interconnected stories prompt. I couldn't not use The Briar Club here though - the blurb literally mentions the unlikely friendships!

It also managed to make me feel somewhat optimistic about how things have trended in the US lately: if we can manage to get through all the shit the 50s pulled, perhaps there's hope for us as well. Overall, it was an enjoyable, if not necessarily demanding, read. I will continue to put my reading trust in Quinn. In fact, I have my eye on one of her older books to fill another prompt.

 

28: A Book That Features An Unlikely Friendship

The Feast of the Goat

The Feast of the Goat

By Mario Vargas Llosa

Haunted all her life by feelings of terror and emptiness, forty-nine-year-old Urania Cabral returns to her native Dominican Republic - and finds herself reliving the events of l961, when the capital was still called Trujillo City and one old man terrorized a nation of three million. Rafael Trujillo, the depraved ailing dictator whom Dominicans call the Goat, controls his inner circle with a combination of violence and blackmail. In Trujillo's gaudy palace, treachery and cowardice have become a way of life. But Trujillo's grasp is slipping. There is a conspiracy against him, and a Machiavellian revolution already underway that will have bloody consequences of its own.

You can tell the book is written by an expert. Despite the heavy (and at times excruciating - the rape of a pre-teen seems mild in comparison to some of the horrors described) material you are kept rapt, pressing on to the inevitable conclusion. The book deals in turn with three storylines: Urania, a woman returning to the country after 35 years, who comes to reckon with the past and her family's involvement with the regime (wholly invented by Vargas Llosa), a collection of collaborationists, traitors and conspirators, waiting to assassinate the dictator (real people fictionalized), and the dictator himself, Trujillo, on what will become the last day of his life (also, obviously real but fictionalized). There's multiple flashbacks in each story-line and, especially in Urania's story-line, the text will switch abruptly between present and past conversations with no noticeable delineation. This is used more heavily in the later chapters, when we have a better understanding of all the players and plots, but it's still not an easy book to read.

Since it's not entirely fictional, there's a need to include certain prominent figures, even though it can complicate and confuse the reader. There's seven conspirators waiting for the car, and more who are waiting in the wings. There's multiple government officials and hangers on. All of these people are known to each other and in some cases are brothers, cousins, uncles and nephews. The sections involving Urania's story are relatively contained in comparison: her, her father, aunt, cousins, and a nurse, all of whom are made up, are the only characters in the present. Although I managed to keep most of the large cast straight, I did struggle, particularly in the last few chapters, at the culmination of the assassination, when the scope of the plan widened and the ripple effects began to be seen.

It's also interesting to note that although the beginning of the book takes each of the three story-lines in turn, around chapter 19, when we leave Urania waiting to be delivered to the belly of the beast, several chapters in a row focus more on the immediate and long term period after the assassination, and Vargas Llosa instead slots in the finale to Urania's story as the very last chapter. It's both out of order and interestingly, Urania's last chapter follows the "Balaguer chapter" which ends, somewhat optimistically, with the removal of the Trujillo family from the country and the pardoning of the living conspirators - they literally walk into Balaguer's open, welcoming arms. Balaguer's chapter is also the last chronological moment before Urania comes back to the country 35 years later, which is the start of the book. As tempting as it might have been to leave it at Balaguer, Vargas Llosa instead returns us back to the scene of one of Trujillo's final, personal, petty crimes (albeit wholly fictional one), and reminds us that no matter the events to follow, the effect of the regime cannot and should be be forgotten - and in the character of Urania, physically unable to forget, as others in the book appear to have done. 

I think Vargas Llosa does an incredible job of setting us in the time and place, and in differentiating between the various narrators, which is something that can be hard for authors to do. Here, it's immediately apparent when Urania or Trujillo is narrating, although some of the assassins are not as easily distinguishable from each other. Although we know what happens to Trujillo (he was in fact, assassinated in May 1961) you anticipate the moment as a reader with some relief of anxiety and joy. After so much detail about the degradation and horrors that Trujillo presided over, you want Trujillo to be done, you want the assassins to succeed, and you know (as someone with access to Wikipedia) that they do. I don't know whether Vargas Llosa assumes knowledge of the outcome on the reader's part. Surely, as it become more and more distant past - it's already been 23 years since the book was first published - fewer and fewer readers can be expected to be familiar with what happens next. Certainly I didn't know, and didn't "spoil" myself. This section was the hardest for me to read, perhaps because it was so immediate, perhaps because it seemed so unjust for an action which should have been celebrated (and in fact was, if only they could have lived long enough to see it).  History is written by the victors.

In the end, I am left with only two questions, both of which come from Urania's fictional story-line, and which therefore the author has even more deliberately decided not to address overtly: Who hid the memo (if, in fact it was deliberately hidden) from Trujillo about Urania's departure? One reviewer attributes the memo's disappearance to Balaguer as a nod that no action of Balaguer is ever unconsidered, and states that it is a demonstration of Vargas Llosa's appreciation for him as a politician, by showing Balaguer's compassion in that (completely fictional) moment. That's a compelling argument. I did think that Balaguer, of all the characters, was probably the hardest to write about, given his outsized importance to the country later, and the fact that, at the time the book was written, he was still living and still actively involved in politics, despite his age and health. It is hard to judge the legacy of a living person.

My second question was about the ostracization of Cabral in the first place. Was it just a loyalty test, as Trujillo seems to allude to in one chapter, or was it designed with ulterior motives in mind? I also think it's interesting that Vargas Llosa so clearly lays out the torture and consequences for those in opposition to the regime in the later chapters. It adds more layers to Cabral's decision to pimp his daughter out, in his effort to appease the Generalissimo. There are real, and not imagined, consequences for angering that type of person.  In this case, the choice was fatal not only due to Trujillo's inability to perform and further angering him, but also being ultimately pointless given his assassination weeks later. But would there be a devil on the shoulder to say that, in the absence of that foresight, Cabral's choice was unreasonable? When you live in hell, what salve to conscience can you afford? "In this country, in one way or another, everyone had been, was, or would be part of the regime. 'The worst thing that can happen to a Dominican is to be intelligent or competent,' he had once heard Agustín Cabral say ...and the words had been etched in his mind: 'Because sooner or later Trujillo will call upon him to serve the regime, or his person, and when he calls, one is not permitted to say no.' Egghead was proof of this truth....As Estrella Sadhalá always said, the Goat had taken from people the sacred attribute given to them by God: their free will."

 It is possibly the best book I never want to read again.

 

21: A Book Where A Main Character Is A Policitician

 

She Who Became the Sun

She Who Became the Sun

By Shelley Parker-Chan

In a famine-stricken village on a dusty yellow plain, two children are given two fates. A boy, greatness. A girl, nothingness...

In 1345, China lies under harsh Mongol rule. For the starving peasants of the Central Plains, greatness is something found only in stories. When the Zhu family's eighth-born son, Zhu Chongba, is given a fate of greatness, everyone is mystified as to how it will come to pass. The fate of nothingness received by the family's clever and capable second daughter, on the other hand, is only as expected.

When a bandit attack orphans the two children, though, it is Zhu Chongba who succumbs to despair and dies. Desperate to escape her own fated death, the girl uses her brother's identity to enter a monastery as a young male novice. There, propelled by her burning desire to survive, Zhu learns she is capable of doing whatever it takes, no matter how callous, to stay hidden from her fate. After her sanctuary is destroyed for supporting the rebellion against Mongol rule, Zhu takes the chance to claim another future altogether: her brother's abandoned greatness.

I got into this one! I heard it recommended before I heard it was actually a twisted history of a real person, the Hongwu Emperor of 1300s China, who founded the Ming Dynasty. So I was originally interested as an original fiction tale, rather than a fictionalized version of a real person.  I'm not sure which is harder, but it works on both levels.  There's almost a Michener/McCullough/Rutherfurd feel to it.  That's not a knock; their books give a very personal spin on history.  She has a fairly broad scope.  We're given a fair number of narrative viewpoints - Zhu herself, Ma, the thief, Esen, Ouyang - although the focus is primarily on Zhu's rise from peasant through the Red Turbans, and secondarily on Ouyang's revenge on the Mongols, and the bulk of the book takes place over two years while the Mongols and the Red Turbans fight for ascendancy over central China. I did wish, at points, for Zhu to be even more prominent in the storyline, rather than switching back and forth, although there's usually always a reason for it (although the thief's purpose as narrator seems specious  - it feels like Zhu could have taken that on herself. The only major exception I can think of is the thief's narration of the ghost meal plot, and if Parker-Chan didn't want to tip us off too early as to Zhu's plan.  But I will continue to say what I've always felt, which is that while a good surprise can make a book great, misdirection of the readers can feel like a cliched ploy- unless it's the point of the book, like Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. When you know what's happening early on, like here (Parker-Chan intentionally hints what Zhu will do!) it just seems cheap to try to hold back the reveal further. I think that's one of the reasons I was so unmoved by Gideon the Ninth, it just felt like the author held back so much in order to make the plot points pop, which felt underhanded and manipulative.)

Zhu as a character wholly succeeds for me, although I wish we had more formative years with her. Ouyang I didn't want to like, partly because he was positioned in opposition to Zhu, and maybe also partly because I think Zhu made a good point about him thinking that being castrated had anything to do with being less of a man (although to be fair to him, everyone else certainly thinks that, so I assume it would be hard for him not to do so likewise). I kind of agree with Zhu on this one: to survive is the key.

There's a lot in the book about fate: escaping it, turning towards it, helping someone realize their own, and it's interesting how Parker-Chan has added an additional magical element, by ghosts and this idea that the Mandate of Heaven is actual fire that can be seen.  I'll be waiting to see if the new elements make any material difference in the storyline versus Zhu Yuanzhang's documented life. 

What else can I say? It's lengthy but compelling.  Parker-Chan does a good job keeping characters distinguishable and memorable, even with the Chinese naming conventions (at least we don't get into Russian naming conventions which are pretty much: anything goes and god be with you), so even though we substantially broaden our cast of characters after the first section, the average reader shouldn't get lost. Pacing is good. Oh, right -!

This is just Part One.  Of how many, I don't know, maybe two? Three? I mean, we spend most of the book on just two years and Zhu Yuanzhang lived until he was almost 70, so, in theory I guess, like it could be the first of twenty. I don't know if the next will focus much, or at all on Ouyang, who finished up the first part of his REVENGE, and is now gunning for the whole Mongol court, and I know Chen will pop back up at some point (thanks, Wikipedia!), but it seems like Zhu is pretty comfortably in charge of the Red Turbans, the prime minister and young lama are dead, and now all she has to do is unite central China.  Easy!  Especially when a stray eunuch is targeting your biggest enemies preemptively.  Parker-Chan's website says it's a duology, although no name or information is available about part 2, so we'll see.  Honestly, it does mostly stand on it's own, although it feels also a bit unfinished at the end.  Things wrap up rapidly and we don't see much fallout, aside from Ma's objections to the death of the young Mandater.  

[Sidebar: I did find the tone of the section on the child's death a little weird.  It just felt...like it was supposed to mean more than it did? I mean, was anyone really surprised that Zhu killed the kid? We know how the story ends, and while yeah, it's possible for misadventure to befall people of many ages for many reasons, did anyone, except Ma, think this child was going to be leaving the situation alive? It's almost more interesting to me that Parker-Chan had Ma object so strenuously to it, although it is in keeping with her character.  But you'd think Ma would have become slightly more pragmatic at some point, having seen her father killed in battle, her fiance executed for a traitor, and her husband lose his arm in a duel. Or is Parker-Chan's point that after a very short time in Zhu's life, she's gone from agonizing over killing a monk to a child's death not even meriting a debate. If so, she weirdly missed the mark, maybe the conversation should have been with Xu Du instead.]

Anyway, I like rooting for people who seem smart, and who figure out solutions to their problems that I can't guess, so I'm all in on Zhu's side.  Which is great, because it sounds like she's going to found a preeminent dynasty. Let's see what she does next!  And we'll gently ignore the pun in the title She Who Became the Sun because I feel dumb I only just noticed it, and also it's too on the nose for words. 

22: A Book with a Character on the Ace Spectrum

Double Trouble in Bugland

Double Trouble in Bugland

By William Kotzwinkle

Going forth from their little flat at 221B Flea Street, Inspector Mantis, accompanied by his trusted colleague Doctor Hopper, solve antennae-bending mysteries featuring unforgettable bugs such as the relentless spring-cleaner Mrs. Inchworm, the bespectacled Professor Booklouse, the fearless Captain Flatfootfly, and the endearing Miss Allegra Warblefly.

I'd read the first Trouble in Bugland, and liked it very much - it's an insect take off on Sherlock Holmes - and finally ginned up the funds and willingness to buy this sequel, which isn't quite as good, although it is charmingly, "profusely illustrated".  All the mysteries depend on some natural factoid of the bug world, such as the vampire moth's vampiric tendencies, or the parasitic habits of a nectar stealer.  

Perhaps my memories are ever rose-colored, but it seemed to me that the stories in this book were longer, and more fluffed out than the initial set. We have only four mysteries, which are, indeed, "profusely illustrated" (I think the illustrations must take up a quarter to a half of the book) and it seems like there isn't much in the way of detection, in most of them.  Mantis finds a clue, which he takes to another expert (and again, he depends on so many other experts - on moths, parasites, etc - in this one) and then they immediately know what has happened, and then track down the culprit.  There's a lot of padding in each story to fluff them out - one of them has them sitting in a bar, waiting for the informer to get back to them, solving a series of mini-mysteries for the local police captain, which would be fine, except that it feels like filler.  

Be that as it may, it's still a delightfully weird charming Holmesian take-off.  If you've ever wanted to read more bug mysteries, here you are!  I mean, it is weird, in the sense that bugs are living in "Bugland" eating fudge and popcorn and carpets and performing in theaters and getting kicked out of places for being stink-bugs.  But it's also a very soothing bedtime reading.  It feels cozy.

34: A Book Set in Victorian Times

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)

Our Woman in Moscow

 Our Woman in Moscow

By Beatriz Williams

In the autumn of 1948, Iris Digby vanishes from her London home with her American diplomat husband and their two children. The world is shocked by the family’s sensational disappearance. Were they eliminated by the Soviet intelligence service? Or have the Digbys defected to Moscow with a trove of the West’s most vital secrets?

Four years later, Ruth Macallister receives a postcard from the twin sister she hasn’t seen since their catastrophic parting in Rome in the summer of 1940, as war engulfed the continent and Iris fell desperately in love with an enigmatic United States Embassy official named Sasha Digby. Within days, Ruth is on her way to Moscow, posing as the wife of counterintelligence agent Sumner Fox in a precarious plot to extract the Digbys from behind the Iron Curtain.

But the complex truth behind Iris’s marriage defies Ruth’s understanding, and as the sisters race toward safety, a dogged Soviet KGB officer forces them to make a heartbreaking choice between two irreconcilable loyalties.

I liked this, especially coming as it did when I was halfway through Left Hand of Darkness and the part where LeGuin muses that maybe with the removal of hormones we wouldn't have war or rape, and I'm rolling my eyes so hard. Sure, because both of those things are about sex and not power in any way... right.

So, Woman! I definitely have critiques, and there were a lot things that were either huge deus exs or me really not paying attention to the plot (and I'm pretty sure I followed the plot), but for a lightweight espionage thriller, it succeeds.  

First off, I would have ordered the book around completely differently.  We start at the end of the "extraction" and then go back in time, skipping from Ruth in '52, Iris in '40-'48, and Lyudmila in '52, getting in backstory and so on, but for real, the book is called Our Woman in Moscow and Lyudmila's first chapter concerns an agent passing information about Russian double agents back to the US/UK. It's not a stretch.  It's Iris!  Let's not be coy here.  I would have started with Sumner tracking down Ruth to extract Iris, up to the point that Ruth meets up with him again in Italy (or reorganized that whole section), then gone and spent the middle section with Iris, and actually spent time with her being a spy, and her fear when the other two (Philby and Maclean or whomever) showed up, and then backtracked to the extraction operation, so we really felt the stakes in the last section.  Here, it builds and loses steam in certain areas; and we skip over hugely important turning points (i.e., what the heck happened with Philip? Why did Sasha think he'd killed Philip but he clearly had not? I mean, were the Russians keeping that from Sasha, and if so, why? But also Iris apparently spent a bunch of time with him in the hospital, so where was Sasha for all this? And why was Iris in danger when Burgess and Maclean defected? Except that she managed to be safe for another year after they defected.  I just... did not follow that part.  You need to make it clear for stupid people!).

And there's a lot of semi-artificial stake-raising in the extraction chapters (Lyudmila knows the mole is the Digby family, but is foiled by her boss! Iris has to have a caesarean instead but it's all part of the plan! Lydumila's boss searches the apartment but finds nothing! Orlovsky's daughter is on vacation but then she spills everything! Everything is ruined! No, everything is proceeding!) and then we come to the biggest failure, in my opinion: the insertion of Lyudmila's daughter Marina as a vital plot point. First of all, if we're trying to achieve what weird coincidences turn fate (which I think ___ may have been going for, based on the afterword) I think we need to dwell a little bit more on than by Iris and Ruth after the rescue when they discover who Marina is. Second, it's fairly far fetched that this 15 year old, just happened to be good friends with the Digby/Dubinins, whose mother just happened  to be leading the counter-extraction, stole a motorcycle and drove to Riga and shot a guard (yeah, let that sink in) and it turns out to be the one person (the ONE) person whom Lyudmila wouldn't betray in an instant. 

And I don't think it needed to be there!  Let general paranoia and incompetence carry the day (as it did many times in the actual truth)! Let the stakes be the betrayal and choice of Sasha between his family leaving and the Communist party! Let's actually see the spouses confront each other on their covert activities and make Sasha face the prospect of going back to Russia having allowed his family to escape versus leaving the only happy life he's had.  

This makes it sound like I didn't enjoy the book.  Don't get me wrong: I did enjoy it! I just really wanted it to be ever so slightly different. 

I'm not even going to get into how everyone keeps harping on how Iris would never betray someone, only to turn right around and betray her husband (in several different ways). 

The Thirteenth Tale

 The Thirteenth Tale

By Diane Setterfield

Reclusive author Vida Winter, famous for her collection of twelve enchanting stories, has spent the past six decades penning a series of alternate lives for herself. Now old and ailing, she is ready to reveal the truth about her extraordinary existence and the violent and tragic past she has kept secret for so long. Calling on Margaret Lea, a young biographer troubled by her own painful history, Vida disinters the life she meant to bury for good. Margaret is mesmerized by the author's tale of gothic strangeness—featuring the beautiful and willful Isabelle, the feral twins Adeline and Emmeline, a ghost, a governess, a topiary garden and a devastating fire. Together, Margaret and Vida confront the ghosts that have haunted them while becoming, finally, transformed by the truth themselves.

I hated all of the characters, but I enjoyed the plot!  As was probably to be expected, since this whole thing was steeped in gothic overtones, and involved terrible family members and secret babies and incest and murder children.  I mean, I say all that, and I'm like, "Heck, yeah! I love murder children!" but I spent most of the book so over everyone's antics and trying to figure out how Vida Winter was lying, since she definitely was, and it was annoyingly distracting.  Also, I hated Aurelius.  So you were abandoned as a baby! So your ancestral home burnt down in a terrible fire! So the woman you believed to be your mother denied your existence! Get over it!  

 

Not to mention the narrator's obsession with her conjoined twin, which she dealt with like her parents (mother, really) murdered her in front of Margaret Lea and spat on the grave. Hey, maybe it's okay for your parents not to have told you at age 5 about a really traumatic thing that happened to them when you were barely born.  It's not such a personal betrayal that you then need to spend twenty years investigating twins to make up for it.  Everybody decided to be THE MOST DRAMATIC that they could be, and it drove me crazy.  But not like, proactively dramatic.  More like, laying across the divan, with your hand across your forehead, saying, "What is to become of us now?!"

The whole twin thing was so overweening, in fact, that I do blame it for not realizing that there were three kids involved in the main storyline. Alright, that's not really true, I picked up on some hints, but thought it was a blonde boy, haha, who didn't look like the "emerald-eyed, red-haired" twins. I'm not sure why I thought he was blonde, but you know, that's on me.  By the end of the book, I did begrudgingly think that it was very cleverly done, a-ha, now all those parts of the story make sense again, but I'm still not going to re-read any of it. 

I very much craved a Cold Comfort Farm Flora who could have shown up, put all of these ridiculous doom-and-gloom ("That twin jest ain't right") matters to rights and sent everyone on their way.  I had high hopes for Hester, in fact, and her section was when I started making better progress in the book, but of course she had to buy into some weird twin-eugenics ideas and end up succumbing to the general atmosphere.  I think that's partly why I liked Mexican Gothic so much: yes, everybody was off their rockers, but they were being poisoned by fungi!  It made sense!  They were Yellow Wallpapering because the actual wallpaper was killing them!  I mean, maybe that's the case here, there is a wealth of description about how terrible the house is, and it's moldy and falling in, so maybe there's bad mushrooms to blame here too. 

But in the end, do we even really need poisonous mushrooms?  Since it turns out there's one stupid twin, and one violent twin, and one girl who was pretending she didn't exist (for reasons that are still unclear - just tell the lawyer that Charlie had a baby, it's not like Charlie is going to gainsay you) and everything is perfectly in character from thence on.  And I suppose the twins' eccentricities can be explained because incest, and Charlie and Isabelle's eccentricities can be explained by oh, wait, nevermind, I guess we do need poisonous mushrooms after all because otherwise I guess it's just a freaky family of sadists and the stoic servants who enable them. 

For all that it has mysteries, in the end, I wondered whether or not this really was a "book about a secret" but I suppose Vida Winter's true identity has been a secret (twice over), not to mention the fact that she kind of murdered the wrong twin, and then kept the other one holed up in her house for sixty years. So, yeah, okay it works.

 25: A Book about a Secret

Tell the Wolves I'm Home

Tell the Wolves I'm Home

By Carol Rifka Brunt

1987. The only person who has ever truly understood fourteen-year-old June Elbus is her uncle, the renowned painter Finn Weiss. Shy at school and distant from her older sister, June can be herself only in Finn’s company; he is her godfather, confidant, and best friend. So when he dies, far too young, of a mysterious illness her mother can barely speak about, June’s world is turned upside down.
 
But Finn’s death brings a surprise acquaintance into June’s life. At the funeral, June notices a strange man lingering just beyond the crowd. A few days later, she receives a package in the mail containing a beautiful teapot she recognizes from Finn’s apartment, and a note from Toby, the stranger, asking for an opportunity to meet. As the two begin to spend time together, June realizes she’s not the only one who misses Finn, and that this unexpected friend just might be the one she needs the most.

So I was super pumped about this when I started, I was a few chapters in and immediately hooked.  And then... I started to hate it.  The main character, June, is supposed to be 14-15, but feels more like 11-12, she has no social or emotional maturity, is deeply and weirdly in love with her uncle Finn who is dying of AIDS (and even weirder, we find out at the end of the book that Finn's partner, Toby told Finn that he (i.e., Finn) would make her fall in love with him, like that's a normal thing to say about an uncle-niece relationship) and is really off-putting to everyone around her. 

This infatuation/all-encompassing love she has for her uncle was really what made me reluctant to keep going. If she were actually dating him (which it sounds like she wanted to do[?!]), she'd be a plethora of possessive red flags.  She's mad other people aren't as upset as she is by his death, she doesn't want to share her time with him at all, she gets mad that other people know things about him that she doesn't know (like his partner! who lived with him for years!), she's totally undone by the idea that some of the things she thought were Finn's (like a jar of guitar picks) actually turn out to be his partner's, etc., etc. Like dangerous levels of obsession here. And after Finn's death, she does the exact same thing to his partner, Toby.  Like, at one point she steals her passport so she can take Toby on a trip to England, like that's a totally normal thing for a 14 year old to suggest to this adult man who was living with her uncle, whom she has known (and known of) for probably two whole months, if that (Finn died February 5th, and the book wraps up around the end of tax season). 

I forced myself to keep going, and started to get back into around the 3/4 mark, where she starts to see her various lies beginning to unwind, and she actually has a conversation with her sister, Greta (instead of assuming the worst about her). I felt worse for the people around her than I did her.  She sounded like a petulant, ignorant child, always thinking in these totally black and white terms, like her mother is horrible for what she did to her brother, Finn (even though we find out Finn stayed longer in England because he met Toby, thus eliminating the chance for them to work as artists together), and how if people don't do things just exactly the way she has it in her mind, they must HATE HER, because SHE'S SO WEIRD. If this is meant to be a picture of someone with a social disorder, kudos.  Because like I said, I cannot imagine a 14 year old, even in 1987, who thinks it's reasonable to be a caregiver for her uncle's lover, and that said caregiving would involve a trip overseas. 

Around the 3/4 mark, as I've said, the action starts to pick up, and we spend less time mooning about how wonderful Finn and June's relationship was (despite the fact that she *GASP* never knew that Finn couldn't drive, how dare she not know that???) and how deeply she's grasping onto Toby, and there's actual action, regarding the painting she and Greta have been defacing, regarding Greta's habit of getting drunk and lying down in the woods, and Toby's illness. I did tear up a little when she rescues him from Bellevue Hospital, but I don't know if the ending saves the rest of the book. I could definitely have used less in the middle, when we spend all this time hearing about how wonderful her uncle was and how only he understood her, truly, (even though she apparently knew very little about him or his life), and how every single thing that Finn ever touched was precious, precious to her!  She does remind me a lot of Gollum, actually.  Obsessive, unpleasant to be around, always assuming the worst of people, pretends, 'oh, woe is me' even though she's pretty much 100% self interested herself.  

I know I chose this for the 1980s, and the AIDS crisis looms large, but aside from that, it just didn't feel super 80s to me.  The Sun Down Motel felt more 80s for all that the time period didn't even matter as much in that book.  

 

13: A Book Set in the 1980s

Kindred

Kindred

By Octavia Butler

Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana's life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.

Woof, this one was heavy.  I had some vague idea that Butler's biggest series was about vampires (unclear how I came by that impression since I literally shelved her books when I was sixteen and worked at a bookstore) and then I kept seeing this one pop up, and thought it might be new, and what actually happened is that this was published in 1970, and is about a time-traveling black woman, and Octavia Butler died in 2006 and her last book was a vampire novel (but couldn't have been the vampire novel I was thinking of), but bears absolutely no resemblance to what I thought she wrote.  Anyway, this is to say that I had some vague impressions about what this was, but I was really not prepared for this to hit this hard.  

I did find myself comparing it to Connie Willis' Doomsday Book, mostly in the sense that an under-prepared young woman finds herself stranded in an unexpectedly dangerous time period, although obviously Kindred's Dana is at more risk than Kevran was - except, of course, of dying from the bubonic plague.  Also, that time period was not specifically dangerous to her, i.e., being a black woman on a plantation was a little more targeted than a white lady traveling through medieval England.  But both books build tension and horror really well, and in Kindred, even though we open with Dana in the hospital with Kevin, and sans arm, I still found myself cheating ahead, trying to make sure that she didn't face too much awfulness.  

So basically, Dana gets called out of time (and place) unexpectedly, discovering that she's being called to the side of Rufus Weylin, a young white boy/man in times of his personal danger.  She's returned to the 1900s when she feels in life-threatening danger herself.  While she may be in the 1800s for hours or months at a time, little time passes back in 1976.  Her trips back occur in quick succession in the 1900s, although years pass between calls in the 1800s.  Her 1976 husband, a white man named Kevin, is pretty fast to accept this once she disappears and reappears in front of him, soaking wet/banged up/etc.  We soon find out that Rufus is Dana's ancestor, and she needs to preserve his life at least long enough for him to continue her family line.  This is complicated, obviously, because she's a black woman and everyone who sees her basically sees "uppity should-be slave".  For all of my lengthy explanation, it's a surprisingly straightforward plot in many ways: the core of the book is the character development and emotional beats.  

Dana does feel some  - affection, at least at first, which then turns into dependence (if only because he is her way out, both to her own life as well as from the worst of slavery in the past) for Rufus.  Her influence on him wanes, as we see him becoming his worst impulses despite an early and positive relationship with Dana.  How much can one fight against a society which says: "You can take" that which you would otherwise not be given?

We also have the interesting side-story of Dana's marriage with Kevin, which takes a (not literal) beating as well.  Although he does accept this is happening, he doesn't understand her position, her feeling of responsibility and care towards Rufus. It becomes somewhat moot, as Kevin gets separated from her and stranded in the past for, oh, you know, like ten or fifteen years, until she can call him back again. I think it was meant to give Kevin the ability to empathize with Dana from having experienced it himself, which feels very intentional - although a white man in the 1970s may have some sympathy for the black experience, it would have been far more unusual for him to be empathetic. Or perhaps that's my own bias towards the past. The Civil Rights movement would have been a recent memory for Kevin and Dana, even if Black Lives Matter would not be born for another fifty years; but Kevin has a benevolent ignorance of Dana's reality.  Although he certainly loves her, and is very worried for her (he comes up with some very practical ideas about how she can protect herself if she gets called back, haha) he has no trauma of his own, before going back. 

In the end, Dana escapes, and Kevin escapes, and we're left with the memories.  The idea of "What do we owe each other?" is one that winds its way through the book, on all sides. It's a somewhat simple book, in idea and execution, but one that has stuck with me for much longer than it took to read.

46 - A Book about Someone Leading a Double-Life

A Girl of the Limberlost

A Girl of the Limberlost

By Gene Stratton-Porter

Set amid Indiana's vast Limberlost Swamp around 1909, this treasured children's classic mixes astute observations on nature with the struggles of growing up in the early 20th century. A smart, ambitious girl, Elnora lives in the dwindling wetland with her mother and pays for school by collecting local moth specimens to sell to naturalists. Harassed by her mother and scorned by her peers, Elnora Comstock finds solace in natural beauty along with friendship, independence, and romance.

Well, if you're looking for the spiritual kin of L.M. Montgomery, you've found her.  This had a lot of the same hallmarks many of Montgomery's books do (not necessarily the Anne of Green Gables series, but a lot of her others): fiercely proud, independent women, some of them disappointed in love and taking it out on other people, friendly farm neighbors, rich benefactors, "mean" city people who actually love the country person's bold and simple way of life and speaking, etc., etc. I was reminded, reading this, about a recent article that reframed our country's political divide not as one between conservative and liberal, but between rural and urban, and called out all of this literature and media which gave rise to the myth of the rural pure and urban suspect.  This book would certainly add to that myth (although I doubt it's widely read enough to actually affect most voters).

We start out with Elnora walking the three miles to the high school in town, only to find out she needs books and tuition (and probably something other than calico and heavy boots if she doesn't want to stick out like a sore thumb).  Her mother, who is an ENORMOUS BITCH, by the way, knew all of this, but wanted Elnora to be defeated by the experience and give up.  Instead, Elnora sells some bugs and this farm couple help her out, since both their own daughters died in infancy.  We end up following Elnora as she (and her farm "family") charms the local girls and succeeds wildly in school, befriends a young, demanding boy whose alcoholic father dies conveniently timed so that the farm neighbors can adopt him, deals with her awful mother, who is a huge asshole until she finds out her husband died while cheating on her and suddenly about-turns into a caring woman and no one holds a grudge for the last twenty years of abuse, and then a recovering rich boy/Chicago lawyer comes to the swamp for health purposes and calls her "unspoiled" which we all know is code for "going to leave my fiance for you". 

So, yes, maybe I sound dismissive, but I really loved (and love) my LM Montgomery books, and even if this feels like a version of one of her books with about 1000% more bugs and 75% more wooden characters, I found it very readable. It does skip around in time, improbably, and is sort of vignette-y (although we spend a good chunk of time on Elnora's first week at school and her romance with Phillip), and as I mentioned, the characters don't really "develop" with the sole exception of Edith, Phillip's erstwhile fiance, who (somewhat understandably) throws a fit at their engagement party when he abruptly leaves so he can catch a moth for Elnora, and then compounds her sins by going down to the Limberlost and implying Phillip is hers for the taking anytime, so you know she's going to get her comeuppance by the end of the book, and she does, not only giving up on Phillip, but actually being gracious to Elnora and giving her an elusive moth, which is how you know Elnora's innate good character and moral values have finally subdued every possible person she's ever met. 

Well, and NOW I find out that apparently this is a sequel of sorts to Freckles, which goes a long way to explaining who the hell HE is, and why we're never given any information about what his connection is to the moths, the swamp, or Eleanora, aside from leaving her all these valuable pieces. This becomes more pertinent at the end of the book, when Elnora goes to stay with Freckles and his family when she's waiting for Phillip to make up his mind about whether he's really interested in marrying her.  This also sort of explains the mentioned-but-never-really-resolved storyline of the band of criminals who use the swamp for their midnight expeditions (and spy on Elnora through the window, DAMN that creepy mess was just sort of glossed over!) and how the Bird Woman, Swamp Angel, and Freckles all know each other.

Overall, the plot feels a bit thin, and the characters are not much thicker, with the sole exception of Elnora's mother who does a complete 180, but if you're looking for books about moths, you've come to the right place.  Ironically, it was published just as the Limberlost was drained, although it has since been reclaimed for wetlands. 

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.

The Night Tiger

The Night Tiger

By  Yangsze Choo

Quick-witted, ambitious Ji Lin is stuck as an apprentice dressmaker in 1930s Mayalsia, moonlighting as a dancehall girl to help pay off her mother's Mahjong debts. But when one of her dance partners accidentally leaves behind a gruesome souvenir, Ji Lin may finally get the adventure she has been longing for.

Eleven-year-old houseboy Ren is also on a mission, racing to fulfill his former master's dying wish: that Ren find the man's finger, lost years ago in an accident, and bury it with his body. Ren has 49 days to do so, or his master's soul will wander the earth forever.

As the days tick relentlessly by, a series of unexplained deaths racks the district, along with whispers of men who turn into tigers. Ji Lin and Ren's increasingly dangerous paths crisscross through lush plantations, hospital storage rooms, and ghostly dreamscapes.

Ooo, another good one, I'm on a roll!  Eminently readable, although definitely not for everyone.  It's very hard to describe, since the tone of the book is not quite magical realism (as many people have pointed to) but more - the interaction of normal life with the mysticism found in dreams.  Everyday Living with Ghosts, so to speak.   We switch off narration from two main characters, Ren, an 11 year old trying to find a finger, Ji Lin , a young woman working for a dressmaker and in a dancehall, who found the finger, much to her disgust, and one secondary character, William Acton, a British doctor with ~secrets~ (mostly about how he's banging a bunch of women).  

I was sucked in very quickly, the book is pretty atmospheric, so if you like it to start, that's pretty much how it continues.  Both the main characters were fun to read about, though I preferred Ji Lin.  That may be a cop out though, since I mostly just wanted good things to happen to her, and for most of the first part of the book, she seemed to be at risk for "bad things happening" than Ren.  

My biggest beef is that it seemed there was a lot of "suggestive" spiritual/fantastical things, like the weretiger, but they were basically dropped.  The mystery had an entirely human explanation, and although the dreams were intriguing, most of it didn't really connect to things in the normal world (like how each of the five had "something slightly wrong" with them - was this ever really addressed? or the dream sequences, the way that Ren's brother seemed to have another agenda going on, but it never really panned out).  

I know some people were weirded out by the step-brother romance thing - it was telegraphed early enough and obviously enough that I was prepared for it, so it didn't upset me in the sense of coming out of nowhere, and I was really rooting for those crazy kids, but I will say that once it was out in the open and her brother was basically like, "I'm going to try to seduce you," that was a little creepy to me.  Like the vibe at the end of that movie, The Graduate, where they run off so happily, but then we stay on them and you can see the smiles just sort of gradually disappear.  Why can't Ji Lin have nice things!

I would however, be more than happy to read about Ji Lin and Ren's continuing adventures in Singapore! I feel like they would make a wacky and entertaining detective team.  One of the most disappointing things was how little time they spent together in this book - although it wouldn't really make sense for them to join forces (this isn't a comic book, after all), I really would have loved to see them interact more, if only because each got very little support from other people in their lives, and it was nice to see their connection.    Man, I could have strangled William for shooting Ren though, that was messed up. Even if it was an accident.  

I'd like to re-read this again, this time with more of an eye towards the non-mystery parts of the story.  I mean, one of the strengths of the book is that even though I was incredibly curious about how it was going to be resolved, the writing really sucked me into the mood and atmosphere, instead of feeling like it was just slowing the plot down (although at roughly 1/3rd of the way in, I was like, "How can this plot fill the rest of the book?" and I'm still not sure how it took so long to wrap up, but I never minded the ride).  Which is good, because that increases the re-readability. I guess what I'm saying is, it felt very immersive and dreamy, which I hope was the intention of the author, almost like being there, and I enjoyed the trip very much.

The Rules of Civility

The Rules of Civility 

By Amor Towles

On the last night of 1937, twenty-five-year-old Katey Kontent is in a second-rate Greenwich Village jazz bar when Tinker Grey, a handsome banker, happens to sit down at the neighboring table. This chance encounter and its startling consequences propel Katey on a year-long journey into the upper echelons of New York society—where she will have little to rely upon other than a bracing wit and her own brand of cool nerve.

With its sparkling depiction of New York's social strata, its intricate imagery and themes, and its immensely appealing characters, Rules of Civility won the hearts of readers and critics alike.

As much as I liked A Gentleman in Moscow (and I liked it very much; I bought the book and if you know anything about me that will tell you enough) I really resisted reading Rules for some time.  It sounded feckless and Fitzgerald-y, and I've never read The Great Gatsby, nor do I intend to, as I've had enough navel-gazing of men from authors who have never considered women for a lifetime. But after the last string of failures, I figured I needed to cleanse my palate, and this was a good choice.  

Rules is a genteel, civil (ha!) piece of writing about a determined young woman and a momentous year in her life, which unfolds to her in ways both unexpected and mysterious (at least until the last chapter).  It is, like Gentleman, unhurried, and delights in savoring the details.  Although it feels ridiculous to say this, it felt very much like a love letter to New York.  Yuck, and now that I've gotten that bit of trite-ness out of my system, perhaps we can move forward.  

Katey (Katya/Kate/Katherine/Kathy/etc) Kon-tent is a young woman of Russian heritage who grew up in Brighton Beach and has a quiet, reading-inclined philosophical bent.  Although the novel is framed by an art exhibit, almost thirty years later, the book really opens on New Year's Eve 1937, and runs through 1938 as Kate's life changes, beginning with a chance meeting that first night.  

Although the book itself savors, as I said, the details of the late 1930s, and spends quite a lot of time just living in each moment, the final chapter/epilogue pulls it together, as Kate (and therefore the reader) realizes that the choices made in 1938, while bittersweet in some ways, as they are not without pain, and carry with them the closing of other possibilities and doors, are not to be regretted, as long as you have made them with clear eyes and hearts, truthfully to yourself. It's exactly the kind of morality tale I need right now, as my own accumulation of youthful choices has found me in a very particular place and way that seems to lead to only a single path now. While it is a comfortable and enjoyable life, I am only human, and I wonder at what might not have been, if I'd been less cautious, less fixed in my goals, more susceptible to flattery, more open to people.  But that is not the person I am, and I like the person I am quite a bit, and reading the end of Rules, it reminded me that even though we may be wistful about the road not taken, that the possibilities of other roads were available in the first place is a wonderful thing; and there will always be (as Cheryl Strayed also said) some regret for not being able to live both choices, and sometimes to be content you must be simply bound to find the choice you regret the least.   

There's certainly some literary sleight of hand going on as well, not only in the (seemingly, but I'm no expert) well-researched period details, but also in repeated themes - the idea of names and nicknames come up quite a bit.  Kate muses multiple times about shedding old names and she herself basically accepts any variation on her name that others call her.  It was hard even to find a place where she refers to herself by her chosen name.  

The book itself is also pretty short, doesn't wear out its welcome. It's cut into four sections by season (winter, spring, summer, fall) and framed by her encounters with what turns out to be the man who got away, and first love of her life, Tinker Grey, aforementioned chance meetee.  Although we get a variety of clues telling us how perfect they are for each other (both overt and subtle), fate (and choice) operates to draw them apart at various points just as they seem to be on the verge of coming together.  Kate's friend, Eve, who is injured in a car wreck while Tinker is driving, asserts an early wedge into their potential relationship, and the discovery that Tinker is actually doing his ersatz godmother in order to live the rich life finishes the job. The realization that Tinker is not wealthy as he appeared to her to be but is in fact a self-made man, more like her than not, seems to shake her just as much, if not more, than his arrangement with the other woman, although to Kate's credit, the first realization results in her recognizing her own prejudices and assumptions.

There's certainly themes in Rules about choosing to be true to yourself rather than being, as various characters say, under someone else's thumb.  Eve refuses marriage and flees to LA, Tinker breaks up with his madam and ends up a blue-collar worker, while his brother burns the vestiges of their tainted money and enlists in the army.  Kate's various beaus also enlist in the army according to their own consciences at various points, her friend Fran tells her she's going to be married and have five kids and sagging tits, but she's delighted anyway because that's what she wants.  And Kate moves up in the world, financially and socially, although her real wishes are more opaque than these others.  Perhaps it is enough that she is, at the end of the book, thirty years later, content and satisfied.  

Anyway, did I like the book? Yes, it was well written and engaging and not mean-spirited or raucous.  It's more contemplative, although not without wit.  For all that it captures a wild year and we spend almost every chapter in a new setting, it's somewhat slower paced. Comparing it to Towles' other work, it's less charming and comedic than Gentleman, although both deal with the idea of a life and making the choice to live with integrity.  For all that Rules is about a young woman in her prime and Gentleman about a man who is already old when the book begins (spiritually if not physically) Rules seems more wistful and ephemeral, various people eking out all the happiness and gaiety now while they can, though that could just be me reading it as someone who knows what is coming for all the gay young things with the advent of the 1940s.  Of course, Gentleman avoids this feeling by eliding over certain realities of Russian life after the war, some more literary sleight of hand.  

We all have to live with ourselves, but it's hard not to be grateful, like Katya is, to have had the choices at all.

 

Ten Second Reviews

Romancing the Duke

By Tessa Dare

As the daughter of a famed author, Isolde Ophelia Goodnight grew up on tales of brave knights and fair maidens. She never doubted romance would be in her future, too. The storybooks offered endless possibilities.

And as she grew older, Izzy crossed them off. One by one by one.

• Ugly duckling turned swan?
• Abducted by handsome highwayman?
• Rescued from drudgery by charming prince?

No, no, and . . . Heh.

Now Izzy's given up yearning for romance. She'll settle for a roof over her head. What fairy tales are left over for an impoverished twenty-six year-old woman who's never even been kissed?

This one.

 

This one grew on me, as I don't really like "zany" romances, and this one started out that way, with a bedraggled destitute lady camping out at an abandoned castle with a blind duke with some type of wolf -dog mix and a ferret.  Oh, yes, very likely (don't you know that realism is required in all romance novels?).  I was getting close to DNFing, but since I'd actually used up a legitimate hold for it, I figured I should at least finish, and it got better as it went on.  Companions showed up, things settled down some, though the tone was still very much "Disney-fied historical romance", but by the end of it, I wasn't mad.  Was it really my jam? Absolutely not, I will not be re-reading it.  But it did feel "mostly harmless".   Basically, a bunch of kooky people find each other, decide that friendship is more important than proving sanity, catch a lucky break because one of the sanity-hearing officers likes some books the woman's father published, and they all live happily ever after. 

 

 

 

The Further Observations of Lady Whistledown

By Suzanne Enoch, Karen Hawkins, Mia Ryan, and Julia Quinn

 

Lady Whistledown Tells All!

When the scandalous actions of his beautiful fiancée are recorded in Lady Whistledown's column, a concerned groom-to-be rushes back to London to win his lady's heart once and forever, in Suzanne Enoch's enchanting romantic gem.

Karen Hawkins captivates with an enduring story of a handsome rogue whose lifelong friendship — and his heart — are tested when the lovely lady in question sets her cap for someone else.

A dazzling and delightful tale by Mia Ryan has a young woman cast out of her home by an insufferable yet charming marquis — who intends to take possession not only of the house ... but its former occupant as well!

Society is abuzz when the Season's most promising debutante is jilted by her intended — only to be swept away by the deceitful rogue's dashing older brother — in New York Times bestseller Julia Quinn's witty, charming, and heartfelt tale.

 

Did I check this out because Bridgerton is all the rage, and The Viscount Who Loved Me is totally unavailable at the library? Yes, there are 14 people for each of the 21 copies my library has, meaning that if I checked it out, I could expect it in mmm, perhaps seven months, and even that is a workaround, because they aren't stocking the second book solo, it's only available in a set of the first three in the series.  I like Bridgerton okay, certainly not as much as some people (and not as much as my mother, who appears to be using it as a method of mood-stabilizers during COVID) but the second's plotline was the only one that appealed to me to read.  Anyway, so this was a distant second choice!

Although all the stories are interlinked (and take place at the same activities, set in London from about January 26th to February 15th, 1814, serendipitously), with the different authors, there's some definite changes in quality from story to story.  For example, Quinn's is obviously the best (due to both her authorly experience and it being her characters, so I would have assumed it), then Enoch, Hawkins, and finally Ryan is a -very- distant fourth.  I think I skipped most of that one, it was so scattershot and nonsensical.  Some of them would have been more satisfying as stand-alone novels - I think Quinn's in particular could have withstood longer treatment, and Hawkins had a great premise, but the character seemed to realize they loved each other in a very all-of-a-sudden! way that felt rushed and necessary for Moving the Story Along reasons than a natural pace.  And although it felt clever at first, by the fourth time we've revisited the same two "group" scenes from various characters' perspectives - one at the theater and one with several characters falling over in a snowbank while ice-skating, it mostly felt tedious.  Overall, not a terrible waste of an afternoon, but not really all that exciting either.  

What I really need is a good author who is NOT ON HOLD FOR SEVEN MONTHS.  Unfortunately, I found like, two that I like consistently, and I read all theirs and now it's even harder to get books because of the Bridgerton phenomenon, so I'm reduced to trawling recommendation lists and reading the zany ones or my second choices. God forbid I actually have to buy my romance novels as opposed to getting them free a the library or second hand at a used booksale behind my mother's back and then smuggled home illicitly.