Ten Second Reviews

Friday the Rabbi Slept Late

By Harry Kemelman

Rabbi Small takes over a congregation in a modern suburb of Boston which doesn't quite know what to make of the scholarly young rabbi.  When a dead woman is discovered in his car, the rabbi is caught between temple politics and a murder mystery.

This was more of a character study than a murder mystery - the solution comes out of nowhere in the last ten pages, and we spend more time with various congregants debating whether or not Rabbi Smalls'  solution with the broken down borrowed car is fair than we do going through clues.  It's kind of a cozy, where no one is threatened, and the wrong person is arrested and everyone is basically nice to each other.  Not bad if you're in the mood for it.  Also, and this is not relevant to the review, it seems like Harry is a weirdly uncommon name for an author.  I know it's a nickname, but I feel like there's lots of Jacks out there, not that many Harrys.  Food for thought!

Descendant of the Crane

By Joan He

Princess Hesina of Yan's father is murdered and she's thrust into power, suddenly the queen of an unstable kingdom. Determined to find her father's killer, Hesina enlists the aid of a soothsayer—a treasonous act, punishable by death, because in Yan, magic was outlawed centuries ago. Hesina doesn't know who to trust as she gets to the heart of the mystery surrounding her father's death, and the political machinations which are forcing Yan into war.

I actually read this before Behind the Throne but they share a lot of similarities - unhappy maternal relationships, murdered fathers and a quest for justice, a princess taking power unexpectedly, (spoiler!) family members secretly betraying them, bodyguard/detectives who keep them from getting killed and help solve the mystery, asian-inspired settings, imminent war with neighbor, you get the picture.  But both were disappointments, and I don't know if I would have liked Behind the Throne more if I'd read it first, since, in addition to the larger issues I had with it, it also felt kinda derivative.

I was into Descendant of the Crane initially, but it falls into the same trap as Behind the Throne:  too many people, too much confusion and plots, obvious villain (at least in this case, the villain was only obvious to the reader, not the main character, so her lack of action makes more sense) and by the mid-way point I just didn't care about anyone.  This did have a weird fucking subplot about magic and immortal people and her father and mother having lived for aeons (how they transitioned power without anyone noticing this was the same fucking person all the time, and also why they only just now decided to have and adopt a bunch of kids is totally unexplained, by the way) which is when I kinda felt like the whole thing jumped the shark for me.  I was enjoying the imminent war with neighboring country plot in Descendant of the Crane, but there's too much going on, and even the parts I liked didn't make up for all of the bloated parts about her weird dad and her adopted brother taking over. I'd be interested in finding out what happens, but I don't think I'm going to read any more books in the series.

A Morbid Taste For Bones

A Morbid Taste For Bones

By Ellis Peters

A Welsh Benedictine monk living at Shrewsbury Abbey in western England, Brother Cadfael spends much of his time tending the herbs and vegetables in the garden—but now there’s a more pressing matter. Cadfael is to serve as translator for a group of monks heading to the town of Gwytherin in Wales. The team’s goal is to collect the holy remains of Saint Winifred, which Prior Robert hopes will boost the abbey’s reputation, as well as his own. But when the monks arrive in Gwytherin, the town is divided over the request.

When the leading opponent to disturbing the grave is found shot dead with a mysterious arrow, some believe Saint Winifred herself delivered the deadly blow. Brother Cadfael knows an earthly hand did the deed, but his plan to root out a murderer may dig up more than he can handle.

I don't know if this exactly qualifies as "set in a monastery, convent, abbey, etc" but it's got a lot of Benedictine monks, so we'll call it good.  Between this and Bitter Greens anyway, I think I did enough religious reading.  The mystery isn't incredibly mysterious, but I was intrigued by the cover-up (there's no way a Benedictine monk murders a man in an effort to take a saint's bones and it's NOT a huge deal without a massive cover-up, and how on earth do you cover it up in medieval Wales - that's what made me doubt the identity of the murderer so long).

My mother loves Brother Cadfael books, and this was an easy selection for me to make. It's just plain bad luck I read it in the middle of a couple of heavy hitters, and it suffers from comparison. There's nothing wrong with it, per se, just that there really isn't very much to it.  Cadfael and crew go up to Wales to dig up a saint's bones, there's some local opposition, the local opposition dies, two separate inappropriate romances are going on, temporarily adding action and confusing the matter, and eventually Cadfael realizes that one of the monks is particularly vainglorious and wants to make a famous name for himself, so they stage a saintervention and then kinda accidentally wind up having to kill him, and switch his body for the saints in the reliquary to hide it. It does sound like other books in the series get much further into Cadfael's backstory, which was more interesting than the plot or the characters in Morbid Taste.

Peters does that thing where the main character is the "moral" character, as clearly opposed to one or another adjacent character, and sets it up so that a newly introduced character, whose side we are also supposed to be on, bonds with the main character about how buffoonishly venal the "bad guy" is. I'm explaining it horribly, but trying to describe what it is about that trope that rubs me the wrong way so much.  I don't know, it just sets off a mean-girls vibe that winds up making me like the hero less and the villain more. Also, I had no love for the side romances in the story, to be perfectly frank, I kinda wished they would all break up.  I mean, this monk has been there a week and lets an accused murderer flee the scene and you're going to put him up in a cushy "jail" and then let him flee the scene too?  Because true love? That sounds like poor decision making.  But of course all these romantic sentimental decisions turn out to be the "right" thing to do.  BALDERDASH.  Let me just have  a nice murder without this treacly bullshit. A real taste for bones, as it were. 



50: A Book Set In An Abbey, Cloister, Monastery, Vicarage, Or Convent

Jesus Land

Jesus Land, by Julia Scheeres

Journalist Scheeres offers a frank and compelling portrait of growing up as a white girl with two adopted black brothers in 1970s rural Indiana, and of her later stay with one of them at a Christian reform school in the Dominican Republic. The book takes its title from a homemade sign that Scheeres and the brother closest to her in age and temperament, David, spot one day on a road in the Hoosier countryside, proclaiming, "This here is: JESUS LAND." And while religion is omnipresent both at their school and in the home of their devout parents, the two rarely find themselves the beneficiaries of anything resembling Christian love.

I read this while on spring break, which wasn't a bad way to do it, boiling in the tropical heat of Mexico, reading about the tropical heat of the Dominican Republic. After finishing it, the woman who lent it to me asked if I could believe that places like the religious camp detailed in the book really existed, and about that, I didn't have a moment of doubt. Crazy religious camps are one of the more believable things in the memoir, which is perhaps why I it didn't affect me overmuch. The entire first half of Jesus Land takes place in somewhat rural Indiana, where the racism is as direct as it is pervasive. Scheeres' parents adopted two black boys in order to prove the strength of their faith, rather than from any real desire to love or help some unwanted kids. Scheeres' descriptions of the reluctance of anyone in the family to step out and shield the two children from the racism of outsiders attempts to condemn as well as atone for her own admitted unwillingness to stick her neck out. That section, as she relates the way in which she turned away from her brother David in order not to provoke violence on herself as well, seemed almost too pat. I don't doubt it, but it seemed too much like a public penance, done more out of a sense of martyrdom than real feeling. It could have just come across that way because Scheeres was constrained by the point of view from her seventeen year old self. The parts of the Indiana section which don't relate directly to David are the weak points of Jesus Land. Scheeres' behavior as a teen kind of boggles the mind, not in a holy cow! way, but more of a too-dumb-to-be-true way. There's a note at the beginning that says that while all the events happened, the timeline has been compressed in order to make the story more coherent and cohesive. Perhaps my dislike of these parts come from this compression, but whatever the origin, my distaste for just about every person in the book, including Scheeres, made reading the book more of a chore than it should rightly be.

The events of the book are unbelievable, but the events in the first half (most of them) are unbelievable in a Homer Simpson kind of way, whereas the events of the second half are unbelievable in an oh-the-humanity kind of way, which I suspect is more of what the author was going for. In my opinion, the second half of the book, set in the Dominican Republic after Scheeres chooses reform camp rather than juvie, could (and should) have been the entire book itself. It is a much stronger story than the Indiana half, and doesn't contain the melodramatic idiocy that the first half does. There is more tension, more at stake, in this section, and it makes Scheeres sympathetic, without absolving her. This section also allows us to really get invested in her relationship with David, which is crucial to your enjoyment of the memoir. David, as seen through Scheeres' eyes, is the only innocent here, the one who keeps the dream of family alive despite the evidence of his own eyes. In the end of the book, it's revealed that ***SPOILER****SPOILER****SPOILER*** David dies, and that much of the material for the book was taken from his journals. In that light, the book makes more sense, and is more moving. As a memorial to David, it works well, a sort of marble angel in written form. It would be a compelling story either way, but since David was the only person about whom I gave a damn, his death gives more meaning to the act of writing. Without that conclusion, it would have been too distant from him, it would have become more about Scheeres growing up and growing wiser.

The religion in the book is, of course, appalling, disgusting, etc. etc. The manifestation of faith in many circumstances illustrates the depth of hypocrisy and possibilities for abuse. Organized religion (as opposed to disorganized? In the Venn diagram of life, can it really be called a religion if it's not organized? And no, the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is not a religion) has been responsible for a lot of terrible things. Missionaries (and the reasoning behind them) have been responsible for a lot of terrible things. That these thigs happen says more about the believers than the religion itself. One of the mistakes of the book lies in the point-of-view. The restrictions of a adolescent girl's mind prohibits very thoughtful insight about this facet of the events. Scheeres' own opinion about religion is not discussed, and in a way, it's not relevant - religious fervor comes in many flavors and often has more to do with power than religion - but to leave it (and other discussions about belief) out entirely, when the book is called Jesus Land, is a miscalculation. All in all, a good book, good beach reading, and it sticks in your mind, even though I have no desire to read it again. I've read more powerful memoirs, but as a memorial, it works.