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 Left Hand of Darkness

The Left Hand of Darkness

By Ursula K. LeGuin

A lone human ambassador is sent to the icebound planet of Winter, a world without sexual prejudice, where the inhabitants’ gender is fluid. His goal is to facilitate Winter’s inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own views and those of the strange, intriguing culture he encounters...

I had a friend growing up, her family always felt weirdly stepford-ish to me, not in the sense that they were this 1950s picture perfect family, but like, they were always together, and going on camping trips and seemed cheerful and upbeat and the children excelled in school and they never seemed, I don't know, sloppy or stupid or mean. The kind of people who would talk about the philosophical meaning of a book at dinner. I have not read it, but the way people describe the Austin family in A Ring of Endless Light (also, incidentally, a book my friend owned) sounds about right. A little smug, and saccharine. I feel like this is the kind of person who would read Left Hand of Darkness and enjoy it. And yes, as far as I know, my friend did read Ursula K. LeGuin (although whether she read this particular one is unknown to me), and there's certainly nothing wrong with being a perfect human being, I'm just saying if you read for pleasure instead of enlightenment, I am not going to recommend this book. Look, I like high-handed literature in its place (I think Ulysses is the finest work ever written in the English language but someone's comment that "I read every single word on every page" felt very reminiscent of my own adventure into it) but this was an awful drag. 

Left Hand takes the bulk of its substance from the anthropologically-tended experience of Genly Ai, an alien envoy to Winter, a planet which is cold all the time. His main contact is Estraven, a prime minister of Karhide, who is summarily exiled for treason in the first chapter. The most, and only, interesting thing about Winter, besides the fact that no one would ever want to vacation there, is that the people are basically sexless most of the time, and then once a month they go into heat, so to speak, and can become male or female for sex. So biologically speaking, they're not he or she*.

I found the idea to be interesting, but the execution of it heavy-handed and simplistic. Ai - unclear if serving as a mouthpiece for LeGuin - suggests that war and rape have been eliminated because of this. I thought that was silly and immediately ridiculous, even before we get to Orgoreyn, where they chemically castrate people. And it also felt sometimes inconsistent too? In the gulag scenes, we find out they chemically prevent people from going into heat, because there may not be someone else in sync, and going through it alone is awful.  But then we find out that Estraven is in kemmering while he and Ai are together on their escape journey, and that it takes approximately 78 days, but also they never have sex.  So are we meant to assume that the Orgoreyn's lied? Estraven basically acts like he's got a hard-on he wants to go away when he's in kemmering, so not...pleasant but also not awful.  

And there's a point at which Estraven is mortally offended by the way Genly Ai gives him some money, but absolutely no indication as to how he would have preferred the transfer take place. In fact, we're told A LOT about how Genly is offending people or misinterpreting them, but then I don't know what else he could have done...? Like, aside from knowing Gethenian politics, i.e., that the Karhide king discards prime ministers like tissue paper, and the Orgoreyn secret police are vying with the Free Trade faction, how is Genly meant to be doing any better than he is? 

What I mean to say is, all the sex and gender and honor stuff just seems like a big red herring: sure, we're supposed to think it's the reason for Genly not understanding these people and why he winds up in prison, but honestly, that doesn't seem to have anything to do with his problem.  Nor is there some huge breach of manners that he made.  It's simply a case of his arrival being used as a tool by various factions of various governments, which could happen anywhere.  

So it feels like we spend time on the political machinations at the expense of the anthropological details, and time on the sex stuff at the expense of actual plot, and get short shrifted on both. Now, maybe I'm coming into this biased from having the benefit of sci-fi/fantasy literature in the last fifty years, but it just didn't feel that fresh or exciting or groundbreaking. The gulag scenes parts felt like a rip off of Solzhenitsyn, the story like a cold, watered down Dune.  

 And I feel like we really lose out on ideas like, how do people dress if sometimes they grow boobs and sometimes not? What if someone has the Gethenian equivalent of PCOS? What if they don't want to just go out and do someone? What, if any, IS Genly's effect on kemmering? What do people's sex organs look like? Can we distinguish the physical from the cultural (maybe this is the whole point, but clearly Karhide and Orgoreyn handle the whole thing differently, and I couldn't tell what was actually physically possible/impossible versus what was simply taboo).  If someone is pregnant (and therefore in kemmering state) do they go around triggering everyone else's kemmering? Because it seems like in the book, kemmering and physical desire are one and the same, so being in a male/female state means being aroused, but then we'd be like, segregating pregnant people, since no one around them would be able to get any work done. So... anyway, I have questions. 

Left Hand was just not my bag. Send it to the Austins, I'm sure they'll love it. 

*I found fault with the book's default use of the pronoun "he" since it clearly implied masculine characters where supposedly there were none, but according to later sources, LeGuin did this at the time to avoid confusion, and has since looked into other alternatives. I wished she'd just stuck with "them" or "ze" or whatever, since it would have highlighted this feature, but hindsight is 20/20 and for a book written in 1969, I suppose even "he" was revolutionary. 

37: A Book about Gender Identity

Year of the Reaper

Year of the Reaper

By Makiia Lucier

The past never forgets . . .

Before an ambush by enemy soldiers, Lord Cassia was an engineer's apprentice on a mission entrusted by the king. But when plague sweeps over the land, leaving countless dead and devastating the kingdom, even Cas' title cannot save him from a rotting prison cell and a merciless sickness.

Three years later, Cas wants only to return to his home in the mountains and forget past horrors. But home is not what here members. His castle has become a refuge for the royal court. And they have brought their enemies with them.

When an assassin targets those closest to the queen, Cas is drawn into a search for a killer...one that leads him to form an unexpected bond with a brilliant young historian named Lena. Cas and Lena soon realize that who is behind the attacks is far less important than why. They must look to the past, following the trail of a terrible secret--one that could threaten the kingdom's newfound peace and plunge it back into war.

I really enjoyed this one! I think it's like a light YA, in the sense that it involves young adults, and isn't suuuuper heavy on complex plotting, but there's certainly some flexibility there, and definitely some dark moments, when we find out what happened to the sick woman (spoiler alert!).  

It reminded me in many ways of The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold, which, aside from the protagonist sharing a similar nickname (Cas/Caz) along with the ability to see ghosts, recent release from an unjust imprisonment and a badly scarred back, also has a similar castle politicking/adjacent to royalty vibe with the same kind of medieval fantasy flavor. I mean, the plots are totally different, so it's weird that the protagonists have so many surface similarities, but I love Curse of Chalion, so the similar parts were welcome, and the differences were entertaining. 

There definitely could have been more world building.  We enter into a situation with two warring countries trying to make peace with a political alliance, and beset by a vicious plague.  Cas' backstory involves three years behind enemy lines, and the storyline involves a huge political marriage, but we never spend any time in the next country, or know what they think about, you know, the marriage, or the baby, or the plague, or the fragile detente.  Who IS ruling the country next door? It was never clear to me.  [And how on earth are they going to gloss over the ol' switcharoo when the next ambassador comes a'calling? A question alluded to, but never answered].  So although the story felt satisfying in many ways, it also felt weirdly like it was the second in a duology, or maybe that there was supposed to be another book after this one, perhaps exploring whatever Cas' brother is off to. 

The mystery of what is going on with the attacks is not that hard to figure out - the real question was always going to be be "why is the former queen so pissed off" but I guess when you abandon someone to die and then then marry their fiance and have a kid and then it turns out that the person you abandoned not only didn't die, but was spirited away to be tortured under the guise of medical experimentation, then that all makes sense. But seriously, there are at least three prominent people who survive the plague just in this book, you'd think people would want to see the person dead and buried, especially if one is the QUEEN.  Don't just drop her off at the nearest trauma ward and assume she's going to kick the bucket.  And what if someone recognizes her?  I mean, if nothing else, Cas' brother deserves to be banished for going along with such a stupid plan.  

I was reading a thing the other day about how boys/men don't have "toxic friendships" the way that female characters do.  They're limited in the way their relationships are expressed.  And initially I was going to applaud how fraternal and lovely the brothers' relationship was (and it is), but it's also interesting that the author of that article felt really right, that it seems like in books with male protagonists, you usually wind up with these ride-or-die friendships or no friends. It would be interesting to see a book about toxic male friends.  Not that I, necessarily want to read a book about toxic male friends, but I think it would be good to have one.  The one I can think of about toxic female friends was The Best Lies, and that one drove me crazy.  

 

15: A Book by a Pacific Islander Author

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

Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village

Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village

By Maureen Johnson and Jay Cooper

A weekend roaming narrow old lanes, touring the faded glories of a country manor, and quaffing pints in the pub. How charming. That is, unless you have the misfortune of finding yourself in an English Murder Village, where danger lurks around each picturesque cobblestone corner and every sip of tea may be your last. If you insist on your travels, do yourself a favor and bring a copy of this little book. It may just keep you alive. 

Brought to life with dozens of Gorey-esque drawings by illustrator Jay Cooper and peppered with allusions to classic crime series and unmistakably British murder lore, Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village gives you the tools you need to avoid the same fate, should you find yourself in a suspiciously cozy English village (or simply dream of going). Good luck! And whatever you do, avoid the vicar.

I can vouchsafe that this can be read in one sitting because I did, in fact, read it all in one sitting, while I was improbably stuck without phone or kindle with a sleeping baby on top of me.  The only book within grabbing distance* was Your Guide and serendipitously, I managed to finish the whole thing without waking the baby.  

It's one of those books that I've always found a bit gimmicky, you know, one hit wonders that are charming enough to pass the time, but are more for gifting, reading once, and then putting to the side and forgetting.  That being said, it was still delightful.  I'm probably a core audience member for it, since I got really into Midsommer Murders during the first year of the pandemic** and (as you may know) am very much into country house murder books by Agatha Christie***. And if you like Midsommer Murders and enjoy the idea that these little villages are constantly beplauged by murders, you will enjoy Your Guide. It covers all the bases, the village fete ("A nice way to spend a summer's day and thin out the local population"), people who leave messages ("All messages in a Murder Village are bad news. It means someone Knows Something. Don't leave messages. Don't hang around people who do."), the Folly ("It's a small, fake temple at the far side of the pond, perfect for picnics, trysts, and casual strangulations"), the farmer ("Constantly fielding offers from city folk who want to turn the farmland into a shopping center and fielding tthose same city folk who want to turn the farmland into a shopping center.") and of course, the vicar ("When you see the vicar, run.").

There's cute in-jokes about (ironically) the same trope that Connie Willis mentions in To Say Nothing of the Dog, i.e., that the butler did it for the first fifty books and then he became the most obvious suspect, so they had to use other people. And a couple of quizzes which test your knowledge and ultimately teach the greatest lesson of all: that sometimes, [SPOILER] in order to avoid being murdered, you must become the murderer.  True wisdom.

*Untrue, I had three books within grabbing distance, because I was still in my own house, after all, but How the Word is Passed isn't exactly light reading to pass the time while a ticking time bomb is waiting to go off on your stomach at any time, and the other book was soft cover and hard to hold without using both hands.

**I still enjoy them, but lack the time to watch them, what with the aforementioned baby and all.

***Mrs. Marple is probably closer to the Your Guide vibe, but I hate Mrs. Marple.  I know I've talked about this before****, and I know I should try again as an adult, but man, it's annoying to feel like half of Christie's oeuvre is unavailable to me because of that old bat.

****Maybe I haven't talked about this before! I loathe Mrs. Marple, her allusions to things like "Oh, it reminds me of the vicar and the bookblack boy" and then you find out the vicar stole the bootblack boy's money and the bootblack boy stood up in the middle of service and denounced him and the vicar went off and became a pirate out of shame, and so that's how you know that the real killer was the cook, because the cook was also doing it out of revenge, are so obnoxious as a reader, since we DON'T KNOW ANY OF THESE PEOPLE OR SITUATIONS and it feels like a cheat to keep the clues away from the reader to avoid spoiling the mystery too soon, and also Mrs. Marple acts so self-effacing, but she's just as self-satisfied as Poirot.  Call a spade a spade, at least Poirot acknowledges his own non-humility. 

*****This doesn't have any corresponding note above, so you shouldn't even be here but I also wanted to point out that Maureen Johnson is the author of the Truly Devious series, so I'm now a real fan of hers, and Jay Cooper's illustrations have a fun, Edward Gorey-esque tone to them which greatly enhances the book.

24: A Book You Can Read in One Sitting

These Witches Don't Burn

These Witches Don't Burn

By Isabel Sterling

Hannah's a witch, but not the kind you're thinking of. She's the real deal, an Elemental with the power to control fire, earth, water, and air. But even though she lives in Salem, Massachusetts, her magic is a secret she has to keep to herself. If she's ever caught using it in front of a Reg (read: non-witch), she could lose it. For good. So, Hannah spends most of her time avoiding her ex-girlfriend (and fellow Elemental Witch) Veronica, hanging out with her best friend, and working at the Fly by Night Cauldron selling candles and crystals to tourists, goths, and local Wiccans.

But dealing with her ex is the least of Hannah's concerns when a terrifying blood ritual interrupts the end-of-school-year bonfire. Evidence of dark magic begins to appear all over Salem, and Hannah's sure it's the work of a deadly Blood Witch. The issue is, her coven is less than convinced, forcing Hannah to team up with the last person she wants to see: Veronica.

While the pair attempt to smoke out the Blood Witch at a house party, Hannah meets Morgan, a cute new ballerina in town. But trying to date amid a supernatural crisis is easier said than done, and Hannah will have to test the limits of her power if she's going to save her coven and get the girl, especially when the attacks on Salem's witches become deadlier by the day. With everything she loves on the line, Hannah must confront this murderous villain before her coven--and any chance she has with the new girl--is destroyed.

I thought this would be more of a fun "real witches in Salem" and "getting over ex-girlfriend who you also have to work with" but this wasn't that much fun.   The description is the most fun part.  The story itself is a weird plot-driven teen "mystery", banging along hitting various cliches without really being satisfying at any point. 

To begin with, the whole break-up between Veronica and Hannah is never really described. Apparently the author wrote a separate short story that gets into it, but in These Witches, it basically drives most of the emotion of the first part of the book and we don't even know what happened.  No clue why blood witches are so bad (except that one hurt Hannah in revenge for something Veronica did), no clue why Veronica thinks Hannah broke up with her, while Hannah thinks Veronica initiated it, no clue why Veronica thinks they're going to get back together. 

And there's a bunch of incidents, which look really suspicious, but they all happen to be done by all different people, just a coincidence, nothing to worry about!  That goth kid kills the raccoon, Nolan throws the brick, Morgan wrote the glyphs and Barton is a witch hunter.  It feels like the author is trying so hard to misdirect people that they included all this stuff which actually just makes the fact that they're all supposedly unrelated even more glaring and weirdly unrealistic.  And it doesn't work, either, the witch hunter is obvious. 

PLUS, we're told that witches who reveal themselves to Regs are excommunicated and potentially executed, and YET, Veronica and Hannah are both out there spraying magic around like it's going out of style: put this fire out, put that fire out, increase this fire, use an honesty charm, escape from a submerged car. I'm sorry, I know teenagers are idiots, but surely if they were told (and legitimately believed) they could be killed for doing this stuff, I have to believe they'd be more circumspect.  It all just feels... cardboard-y, like someone's putting on a play of what this book should be, but there's a lack of structure behind it.  It's flimsy.  Anyway, it's totally readable, but I definitely started losing interest by the THIRD time Veronica insisted they they were getting back together (even though she was also banging someone else?) and Hannah bailed on Morgan for the FIFTH time, and insisted there was a blood witch around.  And as you can see, my irritation with the book only grew as I looked back on it.  

16: A Book About Witches

The Sun Down Motel

The Sun Down Motel

By Simone St. James

Upstate New York, 1982. Viv Delaney wants to move to New York City, and to help pay for it she takes a job as the night clerk at the Sun Down Motel in Fell, New York. But something isnʼt right at the motel, something haunting and scary.

Upstate New York, 2017. Carly Kirk has never been able to let go of the story of her aunt Viv, who mysteriously disappeared from the Sun Down before she was born. She decides to move to Fell and visit the motel, where she quickly learns that nothing has changed since 1982. And she soon finds herself ensnared in the same mysteries that claimed her aunt.

This was one I was excited by, and I liked it a lot even though I don't generally get into ghost stories. There's ghosts in the book, but they're fairly matter of fact, mostly there to point fingers at murderers and rain righteousness down. It's a bit like The dollhouse Murders in that sense, and can you believe one of my teachers read that in class? I have to go read that again. 

Anyway, after her mother dies of cancer, Carly decides to go investigate the Sun Down Motel in Fell, New York, where her aunt disappeared thirty five years ago.  Her aunt, Viv, tells her story in alternating chapters. As it turns out, Viv's encounters at the Sun Down progress from ghosts to serial killers.

 

What I liked about this book is that both Carly and Viv are smart enough to take precautions - although Viv narrowly escapes a bad hitchhike upon her arrival in Fall, she quickly learns the ins and outs of identifying and avoiding predators.  And Carly is the 21st century, smart phone using kind of girl, who has grown up with the "stranger danger" idea.  But the author still manages to put them in real danger without making them stupid (at least, not until the finale which feels so good you don't mind how unrealistic it is). 

I also really liked the setting - small town, sure, but also the 1980s aspects of it were fun to dig into.  We get a lot of purple eyeshadow and funky haircuts, and while I would never want to live through the 80s, like Stranger Things, it's got a good nostalgic kick to it, and feels somewhat fresh.

48: A Book with Two POVs