Ten Second Reviews

The Best Lies

By Sarah Lyu

Remy's life changes when she meets Elise.  Charismatic Elise, who is determined to right the wrongs of the world, and bring Remy along with her on her quest for justice.  But Elise's history is darker than Remy realizes - and when Remy tries to get away from Elise's plans, the night ends with Elise killing Remy's boyfriend Jack.  But is Elise the aggressor or the victim, or both? This one had some promise.  I thought it was going to be like a real Basic Instinct or Single White Female (note that I haven't actually seen either of these movies, but in today's cultural world, do you even have to, to know what they're about?) but it turned out to just be sad, a tragedy about an abused child who winds up lashing out and then taking a really wild left turn into murder.  Even though the book leads with the shooting, it didn't feel earned by the end.  As ominous and weird as Elise was, the fact that she was actually being beaten bloody by her father meant that whatever else she was, she wasn't a liar, and she wasn't ridiculous for wanting justice/revenge. So the finale where she kills Jack because he threatened to tell people she set a house on fire if she didn't let Remy detach, just feels really out of character.  Not to mention that I cannot for the life of me figure out what any of these people see in Remy.  At several points, I thought the reveal was going to be that Remy was actually the killer, because she was so frigging obsessed with whatever person happened to be cool in her direction most recently. 

Carry On

By Rainbow Rowell

So sue me, I ended up being curious enough from Fangirl to read Rowell's take on Harry Potter fanfic.  In some ways, it's a lot like In Other Lands, another post-HP take on the idea of a child being indoctrinated into a magical school and growing up and making friends (and making out, which is also very important).  Carry On did not thrill me? I mean, you kind of know where everything is going, and who the "Big Bad" is and frankly, things don't happen at all until Baz appears, 150 pages in to a 500 page book.  Because we're meant to think this is the last of a series, there's a lot of describing previous years' adventures, however, because this isn't in fact the last of a series, none of the adventures can be significant at all to this years' adventure, so they're a little bit pointless.  As is the character of Agatha.  I think I sort of get what Rowell was going for, a reversal of the idea that the Chosen One has a Chosen Girlfriend, but Agatha's role seemed limited to being the Debbie Downer of the group - just real unhappy, and ironically enough, existing only to be moved around by the other characters and her life threatened.

In the end, I felt oddly let down by the ending - leaving your magical protagonist powerless and with wings and a devil's tail which have to be made invisible every twelve hours, and permanent magical deadzones seems kind of a downer to me. I don't know if the forthcoming sequel would solve any of those problems, but after reading Carry On, I have little interest in finding out.  It's just not my bag.

The Woman in the Window

The Woman in the Window

By: A.J. Finn

Anna Fox lives alone—a recluse in her New York City home, unable to venture outside. She spends her day drinking wine (maybe too much), watching old movies, recalling happier times . . . and spying on her neighbors.

Then the Russells move into the house across the way: a father, a mother, their teenage son. The perfect family. But when Anna, gazing out her window one night, sees something she shouldn’t, her world begins to crumble—and its shocking secrets are laid bare.

What is real? What is imagined? Who is in danger? Who is in control? In this diabolically gripping thriller, no one—and nothing—is what it seems.

I alluded to this slightly in my last review, but it bears repeating: any mystery in which I can guess most of the major plot points well in advance of the reveals is just not that good.  I mean, I'm definitely not proud of this, but I am like, consistently terrible about figuring out whodunit.

I was also semi-primed I suppose by having read Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine which revolves around [SPOILER] the reveal that Eleanor's mother, with whom Eleanor has weekly conversations, is actually dead, not in jail, but it seemed very obvious very quickly that actual conversations with your separated husband and child just don't go like that.  It was also perfectly clear to me that Grandma Lizzie was suspicious and that Ethan was no good, particularly (in the last case) after Dr. Fox basically accused everyone, and it came out that she was an overly medicated drunk with PTSD, and yet Ethan, a high school aged boy, still wanted to hang out with her. Yeah, right, I'm sure that's what all the cool kids are up to, checking on their looney tunes neighbors and crying gently into their shoulders.  I'm not sure why Grandma Lizzie pinged my radar, maybe I just have a natural suspicion and hatred of supposedly motherly elderly women.  She just set my back up right away, and honestly, I don't know if it was intentional on Finn's part, which is probably a bad sign.

I originally had this on my list (along with White Fang) and that article about how nuts A.J. Finn is came out in the New Yorker, and I was kinda leaning away from it, because a psuedo-Mr. Ripley is not someone I really want to get behind, but then I figured I would rather read this than White Fang.  Joke's on me!

So, the good parts: it did have some good action, although I ended up skimming a bit. Here's the thing, I don't know if I can even be impartial, because when you know how it ends, and the author's just like, circling endlessly, you start to lose interest, because there's no tension there.  You have a limp rope.  So the whole time the Dr. is telling Grandma Lizzie what happened that fateful night, I was like, "Get to the point!" She unspools it over like, two or three chapters.  And the beats in the story are so well-trod, I was like, yes, we've reached the point where no one believes her, but then she's going to find an incontrovertible piece of evidence and somehow wind up in a one-on-one confrontation with the killer.

The only part I needed explained was who Jane Russell actually was, and why she would pretend to be Jane Russell.  Which, sure, okay, a long lost natural mother who just wants to be part of the family, but like, if she was doing so well and was off the drugs, did she like, forget to tell friends she was planning to stake out her son's house for awhile? No one reported her missing?


Haha, I was wondering why the German version on Amazon was rated so much lower than the English language version, and apparently it is because people don't understand that a book advertised as "The Woman in the Window - Was hat sie wirklich gesehen?" may not be 100% in English.  Don't lower the rating just because you don't know German when you see it, ma'am.

Woman is basically Rear Window without Jimmy Stewart, Alfred Hitchcock, and Grace Kelly, which is to say, Rear Window without the parts that made it great.  And while Rear Window has all the non-murdery neighborhood drama to dip into every so often, Woman basically focuses 100% of its attention next door.  It is so dangerous to ape a classic, and in this case, all the comparisons do Woman no favors: it's definitely second rate.

 01: A Book Becoming A Movie In 2019  (See Black Future Month for explanation)

The Dry

The Dry

By Jane Harper

After getting a note demanding his presence, Federal Agent Aaron Falk arrives in his hometown for the first time in decades to attend the funeral of his best friend, Luke. Twenty years ago when Falk was accused of murder, Luke was his alibi. Falk and his father fled under a cloud of suspicion, saved from prosecution only because of Luke’s steadfast claim that the boys had been together at the time of the crime. But now more than one person knows they didn’t tell the truth back then, and Luke is dead.

Amid the worst drought in a century, Falk and the local detective question what really happened to Luke. As Falk reluctantly investigates to see if there’s more to Luke’s death than there seems to be, long-buried mysteries resurface, as do the lies that have haunted them. And Falk will find that small towns have always hidden big secrets.

I hate prompts that require you to evaluate the book before you've read it!  I'm calling this one done, mostly because I could see this as a movie, and whether or not I think it should be a movie, well, I'm not going to ponder that one too deeply.

The conditions for reading it certainly helped me appreciate it: a warm summer day, out on a patio with a glass of rose sangria, waiting for a pizza to be ready for pick up.   You can read almost anything in those conditions and love it.

In this particular case, I very much enjoyed the beginning, felt like the middle was drawn out a bit too long, and was pretty satisfied with the ending.  Unlike the next book for review, I did not guess either answer to the book's two mysteries: What actually happened when Ellie disappeared and was found two days later drowned, and what actually happened twenty years later, when Luke's wife and child are found shot, and Luke dead with a shotgun next to him?

I liked the solution to the current day mystery, as it pretty much made sense and there were some clues, but the mystery of Ellie's disappearance felt like a side trip through irrelevantland. I understand that it added confusion  and tension to the main storyline, but every time we revisited the question, or dealt with Ellie's abusive father and redneck cousin, I got a little bit bored again.  It never rang quite true that the assumption that either Aaron or his father were involved because of a paper with their last name on it, despite their alibis, the ruling of suicide would be so bad as for them to literally pack up and never come back - I don't know, maybe I'm just not giving rural Australia enough credit for being backwards, paranoid, and superstitious.

I'm not going to lie, I was hoping that that the incredible drought (I mean, the novel is called The Dry, after all) was going to have some greater relevance to the story, like, they find new clues about the drowning because the river level is so unnaturally low.  You know how it is, nothing makes you unhappier as a reader than doing plot better than the author.  Not that it would be better, but certainly more dramatic!

Anyway, I enjoyed this enough I would read more by her (and my mother said she's got all of Harper's books, which is a strong recommendation in and of itself - she suggested I would enjoy The Lost Man as it's about a land dispute, which you know gets the old blood going, and sadly enough, she's probably right) and I did like the setting, which makes it at least a little off the well-trodden mystery path. 


04: A Book That Should Be Turned Into A Movie

Ten Second Reviews

Force of Nature

By Jane Harper

Five women hike into the wilderness on an executive camping retreat.  When only four return, investigator Aaron Falk is concerned that the disappearance of the fifth woman - Alice - may have something to do with her connection to him: she was about to hand over documents as a whistleblower which would have taken the company - and several people hiking with her - down.  This was my least favorite of the Jane Harper books, by a long shot.  As she's done in her other books, the narrative has two tracks: one is the timeline following the discovery of the disappearance, the other the events leading up to it.  Only at the end of both do we know what happened.  Here, the action is just super slow.  We know that Alice doesn't disappear until early Sunday morning, so following everybody from Thursday onward feels really sluggish - especially when we find out - SPOILERS! - that ultimately, the accident had nothing more to do with any ulterior motivations then that Alice was kind of a bitch and everybody was really on edge.  Plus, nothing about Beth's (or Bree's?) subsequent hiding of the body made any sense.  You thought your twin killed someone, so you hauled a corpse twenty feet off the path? That's more or less my two main complaints: very slow paced, and the ultimate solution to the mystery disappointed.  But, as ever, these are well written and Harper does a great sense of place.

The Rosie Result

By Graeme Simsion

This, like Force of Nature, was also the third of sorts, and not my favorite of the bunch.  I did like it, generally, on its own though, so in that respect it's not so similar.  It's the continuation of the The Rosie Project and The Rosie Effect, which told more or less the meeting, and eventual coupling up, of the titular Rosie, and narrator Don, who is (by the end of the third, determinedly so) autistic.   The Rosie Result sort of tracks Don and Rosie's son's progress through a new school, and the question about whether he should be tested for autism/is autistic.  It's not as funny as the first installment, not as sad as the second.  It ends, as the others did, on a very hopeful note.  Don and Rosie's relationship is sturdy and I do think it suffers from the focus being on son Hudson, who is sort of a cypher to Don (and to readers) and not as much on Rosie, who is more down to earth and whose interactions with the more literal Don create the best moments in the series. Overall, nice for completists.

I suppose this is my "Australia" reading day - I hadn't even noticed until I started putting the labels on.  These could not be two more different pieces set in Australia - one is a social comedy about current views on health, disabilities, political correctness and parenting, set in and around the suburbs, the other is a murder/crime thriller set in the bush. 

Vicious

Vicious

By V.E. Schwab

Victor and Eli started out as college roommates―brilliant, arrogant, lonely boys who recognized the same sharpness and ambition in each other. In their senior year, a shared research interest in adrenaline, near-death experiences, and seemingly supernatural events reveals an intriguing possibility: that under the right conditions, someone could develop extraordinary abilities. But when their thesis moves from the academic to the experimental, things go horribly wrong.

Ten years later, Victor breaks out of prison, determined to catch up to his old friend (now foe), aided by a young girl whose reserved nature obscures a stunning ability. Meanwhile, Eli is on a mission to eradicate every other super-powered person that he can find―aside from his sidekick, an enigmatic woman with an unbreakable will. Armed with terrible power on both sides, driven by the memory of betrayal and loss, the archnemeses have set a course for revenge―but who will be left alive at the end?

About a third of the way into the book, I told my fiance that I wasn't sure how much I liked it, as it was "unpleasant".  That's the problem with anti-hero books sometimes - there's nobody in the book that you want to spend time with, or see succeed, so any storyline is going to fall a little flat in the face of your "don't-even-care" -ism.  What happened in Vicious, to make me enjoy it, is that in then later parts of the book, Victor becomes less monstrous and more sympathetic (possibly because we just spend less time inside his head in the second half) and you start rooting for his side to win, if only because Sydney and Mitch are basically innocents in all this (the least bloody hands of the characters, shall we say) and because everyone can agree that a killer who is a religious hypocrite is, like, just the worst.

I don't know that the structure of the book - flipping back and forth from the present to various points in time of the different characters' stories - was necessary, or added anything to the book.  I think the struggle is that you want to create some tension between the "pre-EO" transformation, and the current revenge rampage events, but the problem is that, while necessary to show the relationship between Victor and Eli, the "pre-EO" events are not all that exciting.  It's a lot of Victor being weirdly obsessed with Eli, and, as I mentioned before, it's a fairly unpleasant viewpoint to inhabit.

It's only as we focus more on the final showdown between Eli and Victor that things ramp up, and the book becomes more engrossing.  I will say that although I did enjoy the ultimate resolution and how things worked out, I found it kind of silly that, on the eve of their great battle, both Victor and Eli decide to fill the hours by...tracking down a completely new EO with an unknown skill and looking to recruit or kill him, respectively.  Like, how you do decide that shortly before you face your nemesis is a good time to go hunt and kill some other rando?  Like, "Oh, I've got a few hours to kill.  Let me decompress and prepare by going to a bar and killing someone else." Or conversely, "I have a few hours to kill.  Let me track this rando down and hope that he'll miraculously (a) be useful to me and (b) want something desperately that only I can provide, so as to convince him to join me."

The whole thing felt very deus ex machina, and kind of unnecessary, like, why introduce this new guy at the eleventh hour? But ignoring that (and the original deus ex that involved the two sisters somehow hooking up on opposite sides with Victor and Eli to begin with) it's still fun to watch all the pieces come together - and the small hoodwinking of you as you discover in the final pages what Victor's plan really was, all along.

I was originally thinking I would read the sequel but the reviews have dissuaded me - this stands perfectly well on its own, and no sense in gilding the lily. 


18: A Book About Someone With A Superpower

Ten Second Reviews

As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride

By Cary Elwes and Jay Layden

Essentially Cary Elwes' behind-the-scenes look at his role and interactions in The Princess Bride, and, although it certainly has the benefit of a built-in, forgiving audience, it also manages to tread the same fine line of the movie, that is: it's sweet without being sappy, funny without being mean, and gentle without being weak.  It gives you the same "This world may be populated with fundamentally good people after all" feeling that The Great British Bake-Off does.  It makes you nostalgic, and definitely in the mood to re-watch the movie.  Even though it's not "juicy", there's plenty to make you feel like you were there during filming, and you do get a sense of the various personalities on set.  A lovely, nostalgic, easy read.

The Extremely Inconvenient Adventures of Bronte Mettlestone

By Jaclyn Moriarty

Ten year-old Bronte receives the news that her mostly absent adventurous parents have been killed by pirates - and that their Last Will and Testament requires her (under pain of her town collapsing) to visit her father's ten aunts and deliver gifts to them.  But as she visits orange orchards, dragon hospitals, cruise ships, water sprites and musical kingdoms, she begins to realize there's more going on that she originally suspected. This one was delightfully plotted - although the generous hints throughout the book mean that you'll probably guess what's happening long before we get to the reveal (except one where I was completely surprised - happily so) there are so many strings and sub-plots that it's never boring.  Plus, in addition to the book-long narrative, each aunt is like a mini-adventure, including a crime puzzle, an avalanche, tidying up for depressed people, fleeing pirates, saving babies, and learning magic.  It's a real confection of a book, as Bronte's instructions include many restaurant recommendations along with travel tips, and the master spell reads like a recipe.  There's some darker points as well, which, although it makes sense there would be, given that the book is about events set in motion by the murder of her parents, does feel a little off sometimes, given the upbeat and candy-colored attitude the rest of the book has.  Given the large cast of characters, it also doesn't get confusing or crowded, and it's a pleasant and ultimately feel-good way to spend an afternoon. 

A Gentleman in Moscow

A Gentleman in Moscow

By Amor Towles

In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him entry into a much larger world of emotional discovery.

Allow me to briefly rave: I think this was one of the most engrossing and well-written books I've read all year. I read the whole thing in a day and felt immensely satisfied.  [I will admit, that with a few days' distance, it feels less monumental, more ordinary.  I do think though, that it's a book that would hold up well to re-reading.  There's so much detail and digressions that someone who really wanted to savor every single line would be in hog heaven.]

As always, the books I enjoy get short shrift in these reviews - how many ways can you say: "plot, yes, characters, yes, writing, yes, good, good, good, checks all boxes"?  To paraphrase another great (Russian) author: "Good books are all alike; every bad book is bad in its own way."  So while I can nitpick and critique endlessly on other books, what is there to say here to won't be repetitive?

Well, nothing is perfect: here are some nitpicks to soothe your heart:

I was originally put off by the very poor map at the beginning but not to worry: you don't need a map of Moscow because everything takes place inside one building. Why there is a map of Moscow in this book, I don't know, what we need is a floorplan. Except not really, because most of the action takes place in a few rooms.  But (here we wind back into plaudits again, my apologies) the genius of Towles is that we don't feel cramped by the setting.  As readers, we're taken along with Rostov on his emotional journey, from his lovely suite on the lower floors to the abandoned servants quarters up on six when get gets sentenced, and the tightening of his life, until we reach the nadir in 1926, when he decides to join the staff, and the world opens up again (figuratively - I mean, he's still stuck in the hotel).

I do think though that you can clearly tell the book wasn't written by a Russian - there's a lot of humor in it that isn't pure black. It's a much gentler book than I think would be written by a Russian.  It is certainly possible that Mr. Solzhenitsyn's style has overriden my averages, but it feels impossible that Gentleman in Moscow and Cancer Ward take place at the same time (although Gentleman covers a much longer period of time) and while it's definitely interesting getting a feel for the changing (and the unchanging) political forces in the USSR, Gentleman seems like a dream compared to Cancer Ward's reality. 

In fact, while I appreciate the polite eliding over of the bad times, when Moscow was first under siege and then under conditions of extreme hardship throughout the rest of the war and after, and the horrible political and social ravages of Article 58, as not in keeping with the tone of the book, it is kind of a cop-out. As William Golding said in The Princess Bride: "What with one thing and another, five years passed." Skip the boring parts! Or in this case, the parts of extreme deprivation and hardship, fear, repression, and tyranny.  Is it fair to say that Towles needed to include these when telling a story about one man in one hotel? Maybe, maybe not.  After all, Jane Austen manages to avoid the Napoleonic Wars, and she wrote 6+ books set in that time period.

This book is practically cozy.  Rostov is the ultimate gentleman/hero: polite, mannered, cultured, deftly managing relationships with waiters, OGPU (KGB) officers, actresses, American spies, and children.  There are set-backs yes, (and it almost feels like Towles feels bad that his novel is not more depressing, as he puts a couple of "what happened to them after this" misfortunes of ancillary characters into footnotes) but ultimately, you feel good at the end - the right people succeed, the bad people are punished, and there is a bright and shining hope and optimism.

It feels odd to think of it this way, and it's definitely a spoiler, but it really belongs up there with some of the other great prison-break novels of our time: Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, The Count of Monte Cristo (which I am so excited to read for the challenge later!).  This bears more resemblance to the Shawshank Redemption, in terms of the characters, motivations, lifestyles, and tone.  Rostov is not in for vengeance in the end.  Maybe because he knows how lucky he is to be merely imprisoned.  I never guessed it (I'm bad at mysteries) so one of the most poignant moments was when Rostov admitted to his dead friend's "widow" that the revolutionary poem that saved his life was written by his proletariat friend.  The subterfuge intended originally to save his friend from retribution ended up saving his own life.  Maybe it's saccharine, but maybe it's also important to have these moments in art, so that in life we can live up to the examples they lead.

40: Your Favorite Prompt From A Past Popsugar Reading Challenge
    (2017) 35: A Book Set In A Hotel

Behind the Throne

Behind the Throne

By K.B. Wagers

Hail Bristol has made a name for herself as one of the most fearsome gunrunners in the galaxy. But she can't escape her past forever: twenty years ago, she was a runaway princess of the Indranan Empire. Now, her mother's people have finally come to bring her home.

But when Hail is dragged back to her Indrana to take her rightful place as the only remaining heir, she finds that trading her ship for a palace is her most dangerous move yet.

I.e. Hail is summoned to come back home as the prodigal heir after her sisters have been killed and her mother has space madness.  Once she gets back though, it's very clear that whoever killed her sisters wants to kill her too. Blah blah blah, evil cousin who has been "helping out" in Hail's absence set all this up to take control.  One aborted coup later, Hail is crowned empress.

This was somewhat less "in space" than originally anticipated - although it feels very much like a space sci-fi book, our main character, Hail, spends all but the first few chapters on her home planet. It started out interesting enough, a good hook of former-outlaw-turned-missing-princess, set in an Indian subcontinent-inspired world, but the follow through is lacking. 

First: there is a confusing number of players and names thrown at you, most of them appearing, or discussed, only briefly, so remembering and keeping track of the various people (and even whether they are loyal or disloyal) was difficult.  We spend the most time with two sarcastic but incredibly skilled "Trackers" cum bodyguards named Emmory and Zin, who are also indistinguishable from each other.  

Second: the plot, such as it is, is pretty much the obvious person, and everyone seems to acknowledge this fairly early on, yet the plotters still manage to stage a (short lived) coup.  I mean, Hail hates Ganda (with no explanation aside from, essentially, what an asshole she was twenty years ago) and it turns out Ganda is definitely plotting for the throne, and no one is even watching her! Let's think about, I don't know, keeping tabs on the people you know are scheming behind your back.  And also, Emmory/Zin's decision not to tell Hail that another bodyguard, Nal is almost definitely a traitor too, until Hail gets mad and fires her for some other reason? Like, maybe Hail knowing who she can or cannot trust (and who might be used to plant misinformation for the other side) would be a pretty useful and important thing to know.  But instead we get Hail conjuring up the leader of the resistance (who is conveniently not trying to kill her) in a matter of minutes and having a heart to heart about how she's coping with her sister's death.  Is this how the Indranan government is normally run?  If so, I'm somewhat sympathetic to Ganda.  This seems both unskilled and incredibly messy. 

Third: I just did not care very much about any of the characters or what happened to them.  Hail's sisters and niece are murdered before the book begins, and we come back to find her mother being poisoned, and honestly, I assume (and Hail tells us) that she loved her family, but there's very little connection that we get to see as readers: no flashbacks, no mementos, just a distance that, frankly, twenty years of never contacting your family would realistically give you.  But it creates a problem because that sense of defending a home isn't there: all these people are barely acquaintances, we don't revisit any childhood spots, Hail could have been running a long con and had the same emotional attachment to the outcome. 

I don't think it's bad, per se, I just struggled to stay interested and finish it.  It took me weeks to finish and I had to renew my loan twice.  I hope the next one is good - I have two more to finish before I can get to another light read, and I'm cranky about it.

20: A Book Set In Space

Montague Island Mysteries and Other Logic Puzzles

Montague Island Mysteries and Other Logic Puzzles

By R. Wayne Schmittberger

Solve logic puzzles AND play sleuth at the same time! This thoroughly unique book—written by the former editor of Games magazine—offers the immersive pleasure of a novel as it follows a group of friends who meet regularly to play murder-mystery games at the island home of a wealthy couple. As you go about completing the puzzles, you’ll learn more about the guests, the house, and the island . . . and uncover a secret about the mansion itself. Maps of the island throughout enhance the atmosphere and draw solvers deeper into the story.

So although I was somewhat incorrect in my original understanding of what this was, I still had a really good time solving the puzzles.  I originally though that this was a story-based book with puzzles to solve, which would require the solving of an earlier puzzle in order to arrive at the correct solution for later puzzles, and this isn't set up that way at all.  It does have a loose "story" (seven guests are invited to the island and solve puzzles, but every so often there's an allusion to some secret reason the guests were invited, which is resolved in the final puzzle) but none of the puzzles require information or answers from any of the other puzzles.

What I appreciated about this book was the variety of logic puzzles (some had maps, some were based on tournaments, some were very traditional, and I just skipped the ones that asked about card hands, since I don't have time for that) and the care the author took to keep the puzzles as little confusing as possible.  What I mean by that is, names weren't similar and didn't start with the same letter, clues and important categories weren't overly long or unnecessarily numerical or anything like that.  For example, there weren't any puzzles that required you to figure out if events took place in 1912, 1931, 1971, 1928 or 1952.  Maybe it's small news, but the online logic problem site I've been going to (puzzle baron, if you're curious) seems way too invested in small puzzles which are incredibly confusing for keeping the categories straight.

I liked that we followed the same group of people the whole way, although it took me a bit to get used to the "one of these people is lying" puzzles.  I would do a few puzzles a week, and with some pauses, it took me about two months to finish.  It felt substantial.   I also really appreciated the solution key in the back, along with the explanations, they helped me when I couldn't figure out what some of the early puzzles were.  I checked it sort of religiously, although I suppose that wasn't quite necessary, since the correct answers didn't impact any later puzzles.  In fact, if there would be one change for the next book, I'd love if one or more of the puzzles had hints which relied on previous puzzles.

It's not a normal book, and I'm not at all sure that I was really following the prompt, since this is more like a book of crosswords than it is a typical book, but it's one of my most enjoyed of this project, and I am already anxiously waiting on the sequel!

39: A Book Revolving Around A Puzzle Or A Game

The Woman Who Smashed Codes

The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies

By Jason Fagone

In 1916, a young Quaker schoolteacher and poetry scholar named Elizebeth Smith was hired by an eccentric tycoon to find the secret message he believed were embedded in Shakespeare's plays.  She moved to the tycoon's lavish estate outside of Chicago expecting to spend her days poring through old books.  But the rich man's close ties to the U.S. government, and the urgencies of war, quickly transformed Elizebeth's mission. She soon learned to apply her skills to an exciting new venture: codebreaking - the solving of secret message without knowledge of the key.  Working alongside her on the estate was William Friedman, a Jewish scientist who would become her husband and lifelong codebreaking partner.  Elizebeth and William were in many ways the Adam and Eve of the National Security Agency, the U.S. institution that monitors and intercepts foreign communications to glean intelligence.

In The Woman Who Smashed Codes, Jason Fagone chronicles the life of this extraordinary woman who played an integral role in our nation's history - from the Great War to the Cold War. He traces Elizebeth's developing career through World War I, Prohibition, and the struggle against fascism.  She helped catch gangsters and smugglers, exposed a Nazi ring in South America, and fought a clandestine battle of wits against Hitler's Reich, cracking multiple versions of the Enigma machine used by German operatives to conceal their communications.  And through it all, she served as muse to her husband, a master of puzzles, who astonished friends and foes alike. Inside an army vault in Washington, he worked furiously to break Purple, the Japanese version of Enigma - and succeeded, at terrible cost to his personal life.

This one was a gift to me from my mother, who sometimes gets me non-fiction books that I am less than wholly interested in, but this was a pleasant enough read.  It's a biography of Elizebeth Friedman, who was apparently instrumental in early American code-breaking.  I do sometimes struggle with non-fiction because in life, unlike in a story, you have to tell an interesting story from the things that actually happened - which can be sometimes very boring, and frequently changes are made of things that were pieced together through myriad small incremental details, which doesn't always make the most exciting narrative: "We're about to enter early married life - now let's describe the ten background characters who you need to know in order to understand what happened next - but they'll never be mentioned again!"  It's understandably hard to keep the balance between the actual facts and a good story in nonfiction, so I'm somewhat sympathetic when I inevitably don't feel the same "high" from a nonfiction as I do a good fiction book.  For example, I really enjoyed Show Me a Hero and Personal History, but was a little let down by Killers of the Flower Moon and The Radium Girls, both of which are boosted by built-in dramatic storylines involving death and cover-ups.  And Ben Macintyre's books, Operation Mincemeat and Double Cross, were both okay, but honestly I barely remember them.  I just don't generally find myself mulling over a good nonfiction book or wanting to re-read it afterwards, and I don't think TWWSC will defy the odds. Sidenote: it's interesting to me the similarities with A Personal History - both women quietly getting things done while their husbands suffered nervous breakdowns, although Graham's work came after and as a direct result of her husband's deterioration, while Elizebeth is just quietly getting shit done 24-7. 

So the good things: it's a well-told story, manages to keep your attention throughout, and doesn't feel too long.  If anything, it feels oddly incomplete, which is maybe not a total surprise when talking about a codebreaker whose work was highly classified until relatively recently.  But although we hear about Elizebeth's affinity for codes, only one or two types is broken down and explained to us as readers, and some of the leaps in deduction (figuring out what codephrase or book is being used for a code in another language) are so little touched on that they seem practically miraculous.  Maybe they were, maybe they weren't, but I can't help but wonder if the author left it out because he thought it would be too boring or difficult to understand to the lay reader, or if he himself didn't know how she did it - after all, her materials wouldn't necessarily have a step by step manual for her thoughts.  I think it would have made a good appendix - to walk us through a (short) puzzle and see exactly how some of these mysteries were cracked.

The other problem with telling Elizebeth's story is that, frankly, although she did an important and thorough job as codebreaker during the second world war, there were no threats or danger lurking if she failed, no personal stakes, aside from the ones she sets herself.  She gets in, is very competent, and then gracefully exits when the war is done.  The decisions about when to crack down on the South American spies was made over her head and by a separate department.  I'm certainly not going to fault Fagone for not having better facts, but it is true that it is just always going to be hard to write a gripping story about someone who went to work in an office everyday and then came home, even though (or maybe especially because) their office consists of a lot of detail oriented paperwork.  It's also sort of difficult because both big "breakthrough" moments for Elizebeth and William in the war - cracking Enigma and Purple, respectively, fall flat, as Enigma was cracked simultaneously by Bletchley Park, and Purple's decoding does nothing to prevent Pearl Harbor, because of government red tape.

Fagone's style is.... definitely something.  There's a strong modern feminist bent, and a few interjections of swearing, so you do get a little more personal than most biographies, but that adds to its charm, not detracts.  Hss pu hss, h nvvk zahya mvy zvtlvul thrpun h kpcl puav jyfwahuhsfzpz!

29 - A Book With "Love" In The Title (or sub-title, I cheated a bit on this)