Dukes Prefer Blondes, by Loretta Chase

TITLE: Dukes Prefer Blondes
AUTHOR: Loretta Chase

COPYRIGHT: 2015
PAGES: 372
PUBLISHER: Avon

SETTING: 1830s England
TYPE: Romance
SERIES: Part of the Dressmakers series (a bit of a spinoff of it).

Biweekly marriage proposals from men who can't see beyond her (admittedly breathtaking) looks are starting to get on Lady Clara Fairfax's nerves. Desperate to be something more than ornamental, she escapes to her favorite charity. When a child is in trouble, she turns to tall, dark, and annoying barrister Oliver Radford.

Though he's unexpectedly found himself in line to inherit a dukedom, Radford's never been part of fashionable society, and the blonde beauty, though not entirely bereft of brains, isn't part of his plans. But Clara overwhelms even his infallible logic, and when wedlock looms, all he can do is try not to lose his head over her . . .

It's an inconvenient marriage by ordinary standards, but these two are far from ordinary. Can the ton's most adored heiress and London's most difficult bachelor fall victim to their own unruly desires?

Loretta Chase has written some of my favourite books (I'm in the "Lord of Scoundrels is the best romance novel ever" camp), but in the last few years, she's become a bit hit or miss for me. I liked the first book in this series, but Chase does seem to have gone on the typical Avon preposterous, historically laughable, punnily-titled books route. I have to be in exactly the right mood to be able to stomach those, and even then, they don't always work for me. This one had elements that I really liked, but a bit too much that I didn't.

Lady Clara Fairfax is a woman dissatisfied with her life. She comes from a rich, aristocratic family and is incredibly beautiful (not to mention well-dressed, as the Noirot sisters have taken her under their wing), so she receives several wedding proposals a week. However, she feels trapped in the life expected for her. She wants to do something meaningful, and she's latched onto the idea of helping one of the girls attending a charity school she patronises. The girl's brother has been lured into a dangerous gang, and Clara is determined to rescue him.

To do that, she appeals to Oliver Radford, a barrister known for prosecuting cases protecting street children. He's an extremely intelligent man, known for not suffering fools gladly and making that obvious to anyone around him. He knows he should ignore Clara's request, but he can't quite ignore her. It's not that she's beautiful enough to make him dizzy, but that she clearly does have a very well-functioning brain.

The one thing I really liked about this book was the relationship between Clara and Oliver. These are two people who see each other very clearly and love what they see. They banter and quarrel, but both give as good as they get. It was actually loads of fun to see them spar. I also loved that Oliver really does get Clara's dissatisfaction with the restricted life of a noblewoman, and supports her in her desire to break out of it. There are a couple of instances where his protective instincts overrule what he knows is right in that respect, but as soon as he can think straight he's willing to admit he was wrong.

The problem was pretty much everything else outside of the romance. And unfortunately, Chase doesn't really do as much with Clara and Oliver as she could (e.g. I enjoyed the idea of the trial, when basically Oliver puts himself on trial before Clara's parents to defend himself against their "charges", the reasons why they don't think he's a good prospect for their daughter. But that is dispensed with in just a couple of pages). That means there is a lot of other stuff. And this stuff goes from pointless and boring to offensive, sometimes all three.

There is a truly tedious and preposterous plot about this guy who's head of a criminal gang who wants to kill Oliver. I'm really not quite sure why he's so obsessed with that idea, particularly as it's a very good way of getting all the police after him, but we're supposed to accept this. So we get a lot of this guy and his young minions plotting to get Oliver and how they're going to use Clara to get at him. None of it made much sense, and there was something about the tone in which this plot is told that felt really distasteful. It's this arch, snarky tone, trying but failing to be funny, because it's clearly showing the ways these people's lives are horrible. I hated every sentence of this plot thread, and unfortunately, this crap takes over the entire last fifth or so of the book. I was very tempted to skim.

There's also a subplot about Oliver's father unexpectedly inheriting a dukedom, and Clara having to help them cope. She's been basically trained to be a duchess, so she's supposedly in her element, organising their household and their new social position. It was boring, and I resented the fact that this had happened at all. The message is that being the wife of a relatively prosperous barrister is not good enough to be a happy ending for a romance heroine, that it's not a happy ending if there isn't a title involved. Sigh.

MY GRADE: A C+.

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Home Fire, by Kamila Shamsie

TITLE: Home Fire
AUTHOR: Kamila Shamsie

COPYRIGHT: 2017
PAGES: 272
PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury

SETTING: Contemporary
TYPE: Fiction
SERIES: None

Isma is free. After years spent raising her twin siblings in the wake of their mother's death, she is finally studying in America, resuming a dream long deferred. But she can't stop worrying about Aneeka, her beautiful, headstrong sister back in London – or their brother, Parvaiz, who's disappeared in pursuit of his own dream: to prove himself to the dark legacy of the jihadist father he never knew.

Then Eamonn enters the sisters' lives. Handsome and privileged, he inhabits a London worlds away from theirs. As the son of a powerful British Muslim politician, Eamonn has his own birthright to live up to – or defy. Is he to be a chance at love? The means of Parvaiz's salvation? Two families' fates are inextricably, devastatingly entwined in this searing novel that asks: what sacrifices will we make in the name of love?

A contemporary reimagining of Sophocles' Antigone, Home Fire is an urgent, fiercely compelling story of loyalties torn apart when love and politics collide – confirming Kamila Shamsie as a master storyteller of our times.

More reading from the Man Booker longlist.

This is a novel with a message. It has points it wants to make. Too often, books for which this is the case end up being diatribes, or they end up being purely novels of ideas, with characters who feel like puppets, only there to make particular points or represent a particular viewpoint.

Home Fire is that rare beast where the message is just as strong as the story and the characters. The message is revealed through characters who feel real and act in ways that are well-motivated and understandable. They are human, people who may want to do the right thing, but often make decisions that are not so great, but for understandable reasons. And through their feelings and actions, the message shines through powerfully.

The book is also a retelling of a classical story, the myth of Antigone. The theme explored in Antigone is basically the conflict between the law of the land and natural law. What happens when our obligations to the state and our obligations to those we love clash? That's the background theme in Home Fire as well, but it's not quite what the book is about. That background theme is used to illustrate what the book is really about: what is it like to be British-Pakistani in today's Britain? We explore this through the eyes of several characters, all of whom bring a different perspective.

Isma is the older sister in the Pasha family. Their father was a jihadi who died on his way to Guantanamo when the children were very young (and this particular plot point made me feel quite old!). Isma and the twins, Aneeka and Parvaiz, grew up with only their mother, who died herself when the twins were still very young. Isma was in university at the time, and had to give up further education to raise her brother and sister. As the book starts, the twins are 19 and Isma feels they're old enough that she can go back to her own life and follow her dreams. She's been accepted to do a Master's degree in a university in the US.

While there, she befriends a young man called Eamonn. Eamonn happens to be the son of a well-known politician in the UK, Karamat Lone, who's also of Pakistani background (the name Eamonn does make sense: his mother is Irish, and the use of a non-Pakistani name for his son fits very well with Karamat's personality). Karamat has just been named Home Secretary (for American readers, this is sort of like being head of Homeland Security in the US, or Minister for the Interior, in the case of several other countries). This leads to Isma being a bit nervous about becoming friends with Eamonn, as there's not just the issue of her father, but that of her brother. You see, not long before Isma left, the family found out that Parvaiz had not travelled to Pakistan to visit family, but had crossed the border from Turkey into Syria to join Islamic State. And the story goes from there.

Isma is 'the good immigrant' (she's not an immigrant, she's British, but you know what I mean). With her it's all about conciliation and following the rules to show she's well-integrated, nothing to fear. When she's interrogated in Heathrow airport for such a long time that she misses her flight to the US, she's annoyed, but she still answers the questions straight, no matter how offensive. Her attitude is very much "Accept the law even when it is unjust.".

Aneeka is very different. She rebels against the injustices her sister accepts,and doesn't hesitate to let that be known. To her, the injustice in the ways she's treated for being a hijab-wearing Muslim is something to be resisted and fought against, even if that makes those around her uncomfortable.

Karamat is the immigrant whose strategy to be accepted and respected is to become more Catholic than the Pope. He renounces his background and, as Home Secretary,  he's tougher on those he sees as betraying Britain than many native-born people would be.

Eamonn, Karamat's son, was probably the least distinct character for me. He's the one who feels like he has integrated fully, and his Pakistani background means very little to him. He's part of Britain's elite, and he feels perfectly comfortable, if somewhat unsatisfied there.

And finally, Parvaiz. Parvaiz is the unmoored, a young man desperate for belonging, for a community where he's accepted, for a family. He's naive, and his desperation leads him to believe what he shouldn't have and end up in Raqqa, where all his illusions about what he's joining are quickly destroyed. He wants to come back home. But because of anti-terror laws passed by people like Karamat, he can't. For people like Parvaiz, a single mistake made as a teenager will destroy his life.

Or at least, that is what the narrative is telling us. I struggled with the character of Parvaiz. I don't think I had as much sympathy for him as I was supposed to have. Yes, I understood his motivations and bought that he'd acted out of idealism and naivete. Shamsie's portrayal of the grooming process rang true, and I could believe that even a good young man in Parvaiz's situation would have been vulnerable. His groomers use the void that exists where his father should have been. I also found interesting that they paint a very idealistic picture of what life in the caliphate is, and they do this by using exactly the sorts of arguments a that would appeal to a young man whose previous political activities have been limited to campaigns to save the local library. "Look at all those cuts here, the Tories are destroying the wonderful welfare state that was this country, wouldn't you love to live somewhere where this is done properly?" Of course they wouldn't emphasise the barbarity, the religious oppression, to someone like Parvaiz.

And yet! All that being said, I couldn't quite travel all the way to the idea that his mistake should be forgiven and he should be able to come back, as I suspect I might have been meant to. It's not so much a matter of the fact that he's associated himself with agents who oppose what's supposed to be his own country, betrayed Britain, so to speak, but the fact of the brutality and barbarity of IS. That is just too much. And I kept thinking 'He should have known. At every point when I felt sympathy for him, my brain just went to the accounts of Yazidi women who have been captured by IS and forced to become sex slaves. And my brain would go 'Nope'. Just no.

At the same time, I suspect I sympathised with Karamat more than I was meant to. I think I may have been supposed to consider him an egotistic monster, who only cares about power and doesn't care about who he destroys to get it. I didn't. I thought he was a man who was genuinely trying to get the best outcome for British Muslims, only with a very dogmatic idea of what the best way to accomplish acceptance as an integral part of Britain is. He's taken a particular approach, and thinks it's the one everyone should take. Those are not the actions of a monster, but of an arrogant man. He is trying to do the right things, it's just that his values were not quite the same as mine.

The wonder of Home Fire, though, is that this did not affect my enjoyment of the book one jot. I didn't need to agree with a particular viewpoint to feel the power of the story. Even not agreeing with Aneeka that it was an absolute injustice that her brother should not be able to return home to her, her plight still resonated. Even if my own view was a little bit closer to Karamat's than the narrative assumed, the plot worked. The book made me think and made me feel in ways that very few books achieve, and it felt profoundly satisfying.

Before I close, a quick note on the Antigone connection. I knew when I started that this was supposed to be a retelling of that story, so I had a very good idea of the basics of where the plot was going and what the conflict would be. I read Jean Anhouil's WWII-set version of the story for my French class when I was in secondary school, and that was seared in my mind. I think this might be even better. The motivations felt even more understandable, and the story didn't feel derivative. Shamsie takes the themes and basic setup from the Antigone story, but does not feel beholden to follow them exactly. She eliminates the character of one of Antigone and Ismene's brothers, and thus changes slightly the nature of the crime the other brother has committed and is being punished for. She also creates a father for Isma, Aneeka and Parvaiz whose backstory is key to Home Fire, but has very little relationship to that of OEdipus. And most of all, she does her own thing with the ending, which makes much more sense and is possibly more powerful with the changes Shamsie makes. It's wonderfully done.

This one shoots up straight to the top of my favourites of all the ones I've read from the longlist so far, and I'd be shocked (and delighted) if I like any others as much.

MY GRADE: An A.

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I See You, by Clare Mackintosh

TITLE: I See You
AUTHOR: Clare Mackintosh

COPYRIGHT: 2016
PAGES: 372
PUBLISHER: Sphere

SETTING: Contemporary London
TYPE: Thriller
SERIES: None

Every morning and evening, Zoe Walker takes the same route to the train station, waits at a certain place on the platform, finds her favorite spot in the car, never suspecting that someone is watching her...

It all starts with a classified ad. During her commute home one night, while glancing through her local paper, Zoe sees her own face staring back at her; a grainy photo along with a phone number and a listing for a website called FindTheOne.com.

Other women begin appearing in the same ad, a different one every day, and Zoe realizes they’ve become the victims of increasingly violent crimes—including murder. With the help of a determined cop, she uncovers the ad’s twisted purpose...A discovery that turns her paranoia into full-blown panic. Zoe is sure that someone close to her has set her up as the next target.

And now that man on the train—the one smiling at Zoe from across the car—could be more than just a friendly stranger. He could be someone who has deliberately chosen her and is ready to make his next move...

I See You is Clare's Mackintosh's second book. Her first one, I Let You Go, had excellent reviews. I'm not sure why I started with this one instead, but that might have been a mistake.

Zoe Walker is killing time while on a stalled tube train, reading the free newspaper, when her eye is caught by one of the photographs illustrating an advert for one of those escort/chat line services one often finds in the classifieds. The photo seems to be of Zoe herself. It's grainy and not great quality, but Zoe is convinced, even if her boyfriend and her two grown-up kids tell her it surely must be someone else. It's a mystery. All the advert includes, in addition to the photo, is a phone number (which doesn't work) and the address for a website (which shows nothing but a white page and a box instructing visitors to enter their password.

Zoe becomes obsessed with this, and starts seeking out the advert every day. Every day it has a photo of a different woman, same number, same web address. Creepy, but not quite enough to do anything more. Until Zoe recognises the photo of one of the women elsewhere in the paper, in a story about crime, where the woman is one of the victims. And it's not just her.

The story follows Zoe and Kelly, a police officer with British Transport Police who is the first person in the police Zoe makes contact with. Kelly has been demoted back into uniform after an incidence of police brutality, and she seizes on her initial involment to get a secondment to the team investigating a murder which turns out to be linked.

My main problem with this book was that it required quite a massive amount of suspension of disbelief, and I just couldn't do it. The investigation was fine, with the police taking perfectly sensible steps and being quite logical. Zoe was believably freaked out and suspicious about everything. It was the actual answer to what was going on that I did not believe for a single second. I'm not going to reveal here what it was, so I won't be able to demolish every single completely unbelievable point about it, but trust me, it makes no sense. There's no way that would have worked, no way that the person(s) involved would have been able to do what they're supposed to have done, no way at all.

And to make things even worse, we kind of know what's supposed to be happening (even though we don't know who's responsible and how they've pulled it off) from pretty early on, so that "Nope, don't buy that" response contaminated the entire reading experience. If there had been a great reveal at the end and that was when the reaction had come in, that would have been a problem, but possibly not as bad (actually, that's happened to me a few times with Agatha Christie books I've otherwise liked just fine). But no, I spent all book feeling annoyed.

The dénouement was particularly awful. The villain basically decides to put Zoe through the wringer in a way that created risks for the villain. This is just to torture Zoe, and the reason why the villain is revealed to hate Zoe so much is actually quite offensive. Mackintosh seems to have felt she needed some heart-pounding excitement at the end, and who cares about character believability? Plot is all that matters. And then there's a twist right at the end, which made me groan with its stupidity. Bad, really bad.

I suppose the other thing that didn't help was that I did not like Zoe at all (I may be being unfair to the villain by not buying why this person hates Zoe so much, because she kind of had the same effect on me!). It's not so much the things she does during the book, but the small revelations about the kind of person she is. She seems very small-minded. It's all little details, like a scene where someone shows her how easy it is to access her facebook page (she's basically left it wide open, not having looked at the privacy settings at all). She's freaked out by how easy it is for anyone to see her posts, including this gem "50K a year and they think they've got the right to strike? I'd swap jobs with a train driver any day!" Oh, fuck you, Zoe. Oh, and she accuses the guy who accesses her facebook page of having "hacked her facebook". Idiot. There are several details like this. I despised her.

On the plus side, I did finish the book, and Mackintosh has a writing style that flows well and carried me along fine. But that's all I can say that's positive.

MY GRADE: A C-.

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Ghostwritten, by David Mitchell

TITLE: Ghostwritten
AUTHOR: David Mitchell

COPYRIGHT: 1999
PAGES: 426
PUBLISHER: Vintage

SETTING: Varies
TYPE: Fiction
SERIES: No

A gallery attendant at the Hermitage. A young jazz buff in Tokyo. A crooked British lawyer in Hong Kong. A disc jockey in Manhattan. A physicist in Ireland. An elderly woman running a tea shack in rural China. A cult-controlled terrorist in Okinawa. A musician in London. A transmigrating spirit in Mongolia. What is the common thread of coincidence or destiny that connects the lives of these nine souls in nine far-flung countries, stretching across the globe from east to west? What pattern do their linked fates form through time and space?

A writer of pyrotechnic virtuosity and profound compassion, a mind to which nothing human is alien, David Mitchell spins genres, cultures, and ideas like gossamer threads around and through these nine linked stories. Many forces bind these lives, but at root all involve the same universal longing for connection and transcendence, an axis of commonality that leads in two directions—to creation and to destruction. In the end, as lives converge with a fearful symmetry, Ghostwritten comes full circle, to a point at which a familiar idea—that whether the planet is vast or small is merely a matter of perspective—strikes home with the force of a new revelation. It marks the debut of a writer of astonishing gifts.

This is David Mitchell's first book, and you can clearly see here things that will come up again in the future. Just like The Bone Clocks (which I haven't reviewed yet, but absolutely adored) and Cloud Atlas, this is something in between a collection of short stories and a single plot thread novel. We move around the world, jumping from head to head and place to place. There's a fugitive terrorist in the more distant Japanese islands, a jazz-obsessed high-school graduate in Japan, a bent lawyer in Hong Kong, an old woman living at the foot of the Holy Mountain in China, a gallery attendant in St. Petersburg. Each section is not just a different story, but a different style and voice, what I've seen called literary ventriloquism. Mitchell is fantastic at that.

In one of the sections, there's a non-corporeal being who can jump from person to person, and is desperately trying to find the origin of a story that is one of the only memories it has from its very beginning, hoping this can help it figure out its own origins. This was reminiscent (more than that, actually, it's probably the genesis of the idea) of some of the metaphysical mumbo-jumbo in The Bone Clocks, only much better. In The Bone Clocks the metaphysical stuff was, I thought, the least successful element in an otherwise excellent book. In Ghostwritten, however, this section turned out to be one of my favourites, and truly moving.

Other sections are less successful, like the shock-jock DJ taking calls from a very strange being. Now that was proper mumbo-jumbo, and I'm afraid it ended the book in a bit of an anticlimactic note. In general, it felt like the earlier sections were much stronger than the later ones, much more interesting to read and more thought-provoking.

I read this with part of my mind always thinking about what themes linked the different sections together. There are links between the stories. They start out with simply small references in each story about what happened in the previous one (an event is mentioned, a character is seen having dinner in the background), but they become more numerous as we go along, and start going beyond simple references to more thematic echoes. I'm not sure if there's a single overarching theme. I've thought, and thought, but honestly, I don't know. Does it matter? Not really for the first sections, but understanding the thread might have helped me enjoy the last few ones a bit more.

Still, Mitchell is always worth reading. He's a great storyteller, and I love the way he ranges across the world and focus in on characters so very different from each other.

MY GRADE: A B.

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Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid

TITLE: Exit West
AUTHOR: Mohsin Hamid

COPYRIGHT: 2017
PAGES: 231
PUBLISHER: Riverhead

SETTING: Around the present, various locations
TYPE: Fiction
SERIES: None

In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet—sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair, and are soon cloistered in a premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors—doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price. As the violence escalates, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice. Leaving their homeland and their old lives behind, they find a door and step through. . . .

Exit West follows these remarkable characters as they emerge into an alien and uncertain future, struggling to hold on to each other, to their past, to the very sense of who they are. Profoundly intimate and powerfully inventive, it tells an unforgettable story of love, loyalty, and courage that is both completely of our time and for all time.

My Man Booker reading has started out slowly, with a couple of books I expected to like but found disappointing. Possibly because of that, they were both a bit of a slog. Exit West blew them out of the water, and it was a completely different experience. I listened to the audiobook of this one, and once I started, I had to force myself to stop (I still could only make it last for a couple of days). It's that good.

Nadia and Saeed meet in a city about to fall prey to a fierce civil war. What normally would have been a slow, steadily developing relationship is turbocharged by the danger when the war heats up and all normality disappears. And then rumours start about doors that are appearing and connecting their city to distant places.

This is a book about the refugee experience, but it's focused on a very particular part of it. It's not so much about being a stranger in a strange land, or about the miseries of trying to get into a safer country that doesn't want you to come in, as would be more obvious, but about how leaving their birthplace can change people, some more than others, and how that can lead to people growing apart. There are very few books about the refugee/immigrant experience (I do know the difference, it's just that this element applies to both) that I identify with, where I recognise elements of my own experience, but this is one of the few.

I felt the device of the doors was key in allowing Hamid to concentrate on and explore these particular aspects. I was a bit vague earlier, but these are basically magic doors. They suddenly appear, with no warning, and by walking through them, you find yourself in a different location. I must admit I was a bit leery about the idea when I heard about the book (it might have been what kept me from reading it until now), but but they work beautifully. The doors are not important. They're not the point. We don't find out why they suddenly started appearing, we don't really explore how they work. They just are. And they function as a way of telling the refugee story without focusing on the journey. Assuming refugees can get to developed countries by magic allows Hamid to concentrate on the leaving and the arriving and how that affects the relationship between our two protagonists.

Seeing Nadia and Saeed grow apart (this is not really a spoiler, as it's quite obvious) was strangely satisfying. They are very different people, once out of the structures that made being together feel more natural. Saeed is conservative and devout. He feels nostalgia for his old country, and wants to stick to his own ("his own" being people of his same religion and from the same country). Nadia is a lot more adventurous, and wants to explore the new things her new environment has brought into her life. For her, leaving the old country has been a liberation, not a loss. Growing apart is not a trauma for either of them, even if both feel resistant to do it. It's a happy ending, because it allows them both happiness. They're happier apart than they ever would have been together.

And by the way, I was not surprised to have Nadia be the one flourishing in a new, completely different world. At the risk of generalising, this might be a male/female migrant thing, because I've seen that again and again. When you leave a patriarchal country, you're much more likely to miss home (or elements of home) if you were amongst the privileged, the group with more freedoms.

Beyond the characters, I was particularly impressed with how well the writing style worked. The tone is almost fairy-tale narrative, which might be why the magical doors, in turn, are not at all an issue. So much writing advice is about showing, not telling, but telling can work just fine, in the right hands. I recognised and understood Saeed and Nadia just the same. And the omniscient narrator, introducing bits and pieces of foreshadowing, worked beautifully to increase the tension.

And to me, the way the audiobook was produced helped the tone come to life. The narration is by the author himself. He's clearly not a professional narrator, but his unpolished voice and his solemn and earnest tone are just right for the story. It helps that we've got that omniscient narrator and very little dialogue, because he didn't need to do voices of different characters, which is where the non-professional would probably stumble worst.

The other thing that struck me while reading this was that there were so many echoes of stuff going on in the world today, beyond the obvious one of this being a story about refugees. The image of the empty mansions in Kensington being colonised by migrants who needed them put me in mind of some of the discussions after the Grenfell Tower disaster. The takeover of empty nearby mansions by survivors never actually happened, as far as I'm aware, but it gave me pleasure to see it here. I also saw echoes in Saeed and Nadia of the theory that (at least in the UK) the faultline that really matters these days is not the one that separates right and left, but the 'Somewheres' and the 'Anywheres'. Saeed has many of the characteristics of the 'Somewhere', while Nadia is very much an 'Anywhere', and that, as much as anything, illustrates why they don't really suit each other, once they're able to be the persons they want to be.

I could go on and on about this one, heading off in tangent after tangent. It's a fantastic book, and one that would probably make for a really good book club discussion. It's at the top of my favourites of the longlist so far (it's only the third I read, of course, but still), and it will probably stay in that area even once I've read them all.

MY GRADE: An A-.

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Days Without End, by Sebastian Barry

TITLE: Days Without End
AUTHOR: Sebastian Barry

COPYRIGHT: 2016
PAGES: 259
PUBLISHER: Viking

SETTING: Mid 19th century US
TYPE: Fiction
SERIES: No

From the two-time Man Booker Prize finalist Sebastian Barry, “a master storyteller” (Wall Street Journal), comes a powerful new novel of duty and family set against the American Indian and Civil Wars.

Thomas McNulty, aged barely seventeen and having fled the Great Famine in Ireland, signs up for the U.S. Army in the 1850s. With his brother in arms, John Cole, Thomas goes on to fight in the Indian Wars—against the Sioux and the Yurok—and, ultimately, the Civil War. Orphans of terrible hardships themselves, the men find these days to be vivid and alive, despite the horrors they see and are complicit in.

Moving from the plains of Wyoming to Tennessee, Sebastian Barry’s latest work is a masterpiece of atmosphere and language. An intensely poignant story of two men and the makeshift family they create with a young Sioux girl, Winona, Days Without End is a fresh and haunting portrait of the most fateful years in American history and is a novel never to be forgotten.

This is the story of Thomas MucNulty and his beloved "handsome John Cole". Tom was born in a middle class family in Ireland, but the Great Famine left him on his own as a very young boy and desperate enough to stow away onto a ship going to the US. When we meet him, he's been making his own way for a while, and has just teamed up with another young boy, John Cole. For a few years they live the high life as dancing girls in a saloon, but once beards start to grow and voices drop, that's not quite the job for them any longer. Without many choices, they join the army, and off they go to kill some Indians.

I really struggled with this one, right from the beginning. Well, actually, not quite right from the beginning, because I loved the bit at the start where Tom and John are dancing in the saloon. But once they join the army and the horrors began to unfold... the senseless killings of Indians, the grime and disease and hardship... I struggled. The horrors were too horrific, and the almost numb way in which they were being narrated, kind of from a distance, even though it was Tom telling us in the first person and he'd been right in the middle of things, kind of made them worse. There was something about the lack of judgment that got into me and made me not want to read any more. It was weird, because I didn't really care about any of the characters beyond Tom and John, and still the ugliness (both in the circumstances and in the spirit of the men around them) got to me.

So I deleted the book from my kindle once I got to about the 1/3 mark. And then I read the summary above again, and the bit about "An intensely poignant story of two men and the makeshift family they create with a young Sioux girl" made me reconsider. I downloaded it again, and kept going.

I soon got to the point about the makeshift family, and that was good. The language worked, and I loved this quite fresh view of life in mid-19th century US, as well as the tender sentiment narrated without a jot of sentimentality. But then we got back to the war. The enemy changed from Indians to "Rebs", but the oppressive, overwhelming ugliness and my difficulty actually caring was the same. I read another third, over several days, forcing myself to pick up the book and having to use all my will not to skim, but after that, I gave up.

It's interesting, because the language is one of the elements that seems to be most appreciated by readers who loved this book, but it was a big reason why I gave up. The writing is quite idiosyncratic, not quite stream of consciousness, but almost, with seemingly lackadaisical punctuation and words and expressions that are carefully chosen to fit the character who's using them. It's effective in telling us about Tom and showing us what it's like to be in his head, so I guess Barry accomplished what he set out to do. It just pushed me away, though, stopped me from being able to get near these characters and stopped me from wanting to read. So for me, it didn't work at all.

I'm really disappointed, because this was one I'd heard nothing but raves about. I really expected to love it, not to be defeated by it.

MY GRADE: A DNF.

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Stand-In Wife, by Karina Bliss

TITLE: Stand-In Wife
AUTHOR: Karina Bliss

COPYRIGHT: 2011
PAGES: 288
PUBLISHER: Harlequin Superromance

SETTING: Contemporary New Zealand
TYPE: Romance
SERIES: Follows Here Comes the Groom

Playing with dynamite, a girl could get burned...

What does he know about love and marriage? And exactly how did he, Ross Coltrane—a special forces elite soldier and demolitions expert—end up playing middleman to his kid brother and the estranged wife? And most important, why is he suddenly noticing how beautiful his sister-in-law is? He's never thought about his brother's wife... that way... before.

Then he figures it out and everything makes sense. This tantalizing woman is the other twin! The identical sisters have pulled a swap and duped everyone around them. Furious much? Oh, yeah. Poised to bring down their plan, Ross hesitates. Something about Vivienne Jansen's courage and zest for life gets to him. Except, he's not a man who has feelings. Everyone calls him the Iceman. He doesn't know how to be anything else...

Viv Jansen has always felt claustrophobic about being a twin. While her sister Meredith was always comfortable dressing and looking the same and sharing friends, Viv wanted to be more individual and stand out. She changed her hair and dress style as soon as she could, and for the last few years she has been living in New York.

Merry's marriage has broken up recently, and when Viv arrives back in New Zealand after her sister's urgent call, it's to find Merry in a bit of a pickle. She was at a job interview in another city when she broke a leg, and Viv gets there just in time to help her hide that from her estranged husband. Merry, you see, fears that the possibility of her moving away might provoke him into challenging her custody of their children.

Living so far away from home has helped Viv become more comfortable with who she is. So much so, in fact, that she's gone back to her natural hair. This means that when she goes to pick up Merry's kids and runs into Merry's brother-in-law Ross, he thinks Viv's Merry. Viv doesn't correct him because of... well... reasons, and as they're forced to interact after further tragedy, Ross starts to find himself strangely attracted to his strangely different sister-in-law.

I had a bit of a problem with this one in that the reasons why Viv decides, on the spur of the moment, to pretend she's Merry, are pretty silly. The threat of a custody fight never rang true, and after the accident that happened next, I didn't buy that anyone with two braincells to rub together would think doing a twin swap in those circumstances made any sense. It's a situation where the upside of getting away with the swap is pretty tiny, and the potential downside huge. I tried to overlook this and go onto the rest of the story, but part of me kept coming back to it and going "you bloody idiot!".The thing is, Bliss tried to sell it as a sensible/necessary thing to do, which made things worse. If it had been portrayed as Viv doing something obviously stupid and then feeling caught, then this might have worked a bit better, but that's not the plot we got. Ross does catch on relatively quickly, but by then, the damage was done.

There were some well-done elements there, especially the relationship between the twins. It's a relationship that has been built around labels: Viv is the wild one, while Merry is the good, reliable one. And now good, reliable Merry has screwed up, and Viv feels she must take on the characteristics that are supposed to be her sister's, which feels weird.

I also liked the portrayal of Meredith's troubled marriage, particularly the way Viv and Ross used it to explore what makes a relationship work, through their conversations about their respective siblings struggling one. Other than that, however, the romance was a bit of a dud. There wasn't a lot of chemistry there, and I found it hard to really care.

MY GRADE: A pretty meh book. C+.

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A Place of Execution, by Val McDermid

TITLE: A Place of Execution
AUTHOR: Val McDermid

COPYRIGHT: 1999
PAGES: 480
PUBLISHER: St. Martin's

SETTING: 1960s and 1990s Derbyshire
TYPE: Mystery
SERIES: None

Winter 1963: two children have disappeared off the streets of Manchester; the murderous careers of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady have begun. On a freezlng day in December, another child goes missing: thirteen-year-old Alison Carter vanishes from her town, an insular community that distrusts the outside world. For the young George Bennett, a newly promoted inspector, it is the beginning of his most difficult and harrowing case: a murder with no body, an investigation with more dead ends and closed faces than he'd have found in the anonymity of the inner city, and an outcome which reverberates through the years.

Decades later he finally tells his story to journalist Catherine Heathcote, but just when the book is poised for publication, Bennett unaccountably tries to pull the plug. He has new information which he refuses to divulge, new information that threatens the very foundations of his existence. Catherine is forced to re-investigate the past, with results that turn the world upside down.

A Greek tragedy in modern England, Val McDermid's A Place of Execution is a taut psychological thriller that explores, exposes and explodes the border between reality and illusion in a multi-layered narrative that turns expectations on their head and reminds us that what we know is what we do not know.

McDermid is one of the best-known mystery writers in the UK, but even though she's someone I really enjoy as a commentator and broadcaster (I'm always interested when she's on Radio 4, particularly when she's one of the participants in the wonderful Round Britain Quiz, where's she's awesome!), I'd never read one of her books. Until now. My book club decided to read A Place of Execution, which is one of her few stand-alone books.

On a cold, dark evening in December 1963, police in Buxton, Derbyshire receive a desperate call from a woman in the small village of Scardale. Her 13-year-old daughter left the house a few hours earlier to walk her dog, and hasn't returned. The mother has knocked on all the doors in the village but no one has seen her, and she's very concerned.

Detective Inspector George Bennett, newly promoted and one of very few university graduates in the Buxton police force, is sent over with his sergeant. All the organised search turns up is the dog young Alison Carter took with her on her walk -its muzzle taped shut with Elastoplast. It seems clear nothing good could have happened to Alison.

35 years later, journalist Catherine Heathcote has managed to get George Bennett to speak to her, the first time he'll tell the story of what ended up being a bit of a cause célebre. Everything's going great, until out of the blue, George writes her a letter demanding the book is cancelled. There's new information that means it should not be published, only he doesn't say what.

Despite what felt like a slightly saggy middle, I really enjoyed this book. It's an interesting mystery, with plenty of turns I didn't expect, and even when I guessed certain things (not bragging here -there are a couple of elements that are not difficult to guess), that didn't hamper my enjoyment.

The book shines in two areas: the atmosphere and the characterisation. 1960s Scardale is fantastic, a tiny village living in almost feudal times. It would have been easy for the portrayal of the taciturn, distrusful villagers, a combination of three families intermarrying for decades, to veer into the comic or the gothic, but McDermid steers clear of all that. These are strong-minded, independent people, used to making do with just themselves and coming together as a community. Don't make me wrong, there are some comic aspects here (I spend a fair bit of time in Buxton with my work, and it really tickled me to see how the Scardale villagers would speak about it. One would think the quiet, quaint little town was some sort of corrupt fleshpot, from the way they'd go on!), but McDermid does not make fun of them.

What felt really interesting and different, as well, was how McDermid portrays the police. It's an almost idealistic portrayal, and the wholesome characterisation of George Bennett and his Detective Sergeant, Tommy Clough (decent, honest men who truly care about finding Alison and works themselves to the bone to get justice for her) provides a much needed contrast to some of the more horrific revelations in the plot. At the same time, it's made clear that there are some institutional ways in which the police are very far from perfect (and some of the final revelations make it clear that part of the reason why certain things happened the way they did in the 60s was precisely because of the police's institutional attitudes -is that cryptic enough?).

I found very few negatives here. The main one, which I alluded to above, is that the middle section does go on a bit. Because of what's going on about then, there is a lot of repetition and going over the evidence again and again, and again. Part of the problem might have been that I was listening to the audiobook, so whereas if I'd been reading I could have sort of skimmed over the familiar ground if necessary, I was having to listen to every single detail. Still, that's not a big problem. Things liven up a fair bit soon enough, and I didn't mind the lull much at all.

MY GRADE: A strong B+.

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Daughter of the Empire, by Raymond E. Feist & Janny Wurts

TITLE: Daughter of the Empire
AUTHOR: Raymond E. Feist & Janny Wurts

COPYRIGHT: 1987
PAGES: 421
PUBLISHER: Spectra

SETTING: Fantasy world
TYPE: Fantasy
SERIES: Starts the Empire trilogy

Magic and murder engulf the realm of Kelewan. Fierce warlords ignite a bitter blood feud to enslave the empire of Tsuranuanni. While in the opulent Imperial courts, assassins and spy-master plot cunning and devious intrigues against the rightful heir. Now Mara, a young, untested Ruling lady, is called upon to lead her people in a heroic struggle for survival. But first she must rally an army of rebel warriors, form a pact with the alien cho-ja, and marry the son of a hated enemy. Only then can Mara face her most dangerous foe of all--in his own impregnable stronghold. An epic tale of adventure and intrigue. Daughter of the Empire is fantasy of the highest order by two of the most talented writers in the field today.

Things have been kind of stressful lately, so I've been doing a fair bit of rereading. Lots of Nora Roberts and Jayne Ann Krentz, which have always been my go-to comfort reads, but there's a new kid on the block! You wouldn't think a book with loads of political intrigue in a high fantasy setting could be a comfort read, but Katherine Addison's wonderful The Goblin Emperor manages it. I loved it just as much as the first time (yep, the A+ was well-earned), and the last page left me wanting to read more of something like it.

So I yet again went looking for read-alikes. I wasn't particularly successful the first time round, but but lo and behold, this time I found a thread on reddit with quite a few seemingly well-considered responses! The Empire trilogy was one of the recs, and it sounded like it might be exactly what I was looking for.

Mara is within seconds of taking vows and entering a religious order forever, when news arrives of the death of her father and brother. Mara is the only one in the family left, and without pausing for breath she has to take over as Ruling Lady of the House of Acoma.

It's a dangerous time. Her father and brother died as a result of treachery from an enemy House, and it was quite the massacre. The Acoma House has been left in a terribly weakened state, and keeping it alive will take a cool head, ruthless nerve, and creative thinking about how tradition can be bent without fully breaking it. Fortunately, Mara has all that, and has been lucky in her advisors.

I found this to be quite a mixed bag, unfortunately, starting well but then incorporating more and more elements that didn't work for me at all. I did like the political intrigue and seeing how Mara thought outside the box and turned impossible situations into triumphs. The authors are successful in not revealing all of her plans, even though we're in her POV, without making it feel fake. They would introduce some hints about Mara's ultimate aims, but keep the details hidden, and that succeeded at raising the intrigue quite well.

I also liked the setting, which felt sort of Japanese to me (although now that I finished it I've seen it mentioned that the authors took some inspiration from Korean traditions), with a complex structure of traditions.

Unfortunately, that was about it for what I liked. There were too many elements that I thought weren't good at all. For starters, I wasn't a great fan of the writing. I always find it hard to describe what it is about a particular style of writing that doesn't work for me, but I'll give it a shot. The best way I can describe it is that it felt dated. It's strange, because I happily read 19th century novels without feeling the writing is dated, but that's the word that comes to mind for this book. It's kind of bombastic and self-important, and it gets only more so as the book goes on.

My next problem is one that is purely a matter of personal taste, but what can I say, it was a problem for me. At one point in the book Mara enters a marriage which turns abusive extremely quickly. It's obvious throughout that Mara is playing some sort of long game, and it's not really a spoiler that she's successful in it, but I hated it anyway. Up until then we'd had a heroine who'd taken to power like a duck to water and had been awesome at the machinations required. And then suddenly she's in a situation where she's subservient to a brute and all the agency she has for a very long section is through suggestion and manipulation. It annoyed me. I wasn't sold on the idea that taking this huge risk (and there was a huge element of chance involved in the right outcome coming about in the end) was necessary. I kept wanting to go back to the Ruling Lady all through that section.

And that issue I mentioned about not being convinced that taking that risk was necessary was something that kept coming up. There are an awful lot of instances when Mara makes plans that seem unnecessarily risky and that depend on a large number of things happening just so... people reacting in exactly the way predicted, timing working out perfectly, that sort of thing. They all do work out, but the uncertainty inherent in that planning made Mara look reckless, rather than bold and machiavellian.

Finally, and actually, probably most importantly, I was very disturbed by some of the attitudes displayed by both Mara and the narrative. There's Teani, Mara's husband's concubine, who's this horrid Evil Other Woman, irrational and hysterical, and whose portrayal is one of the most slut-shamey I've read in a while. There's the attitude to slaves and other 'unimportant' and 'dispensable' people. So the raiders killed the herder when they stole the cattle, but it was only a slave boy, so it's unimportant, not an issue. The slaves carrying Mara's litter happen to be in the room when something is casually mentioned that Mara wants kept a secret. They'll all have to be put to death. Mara is completely unaffected by her husband raping and beating the household's maids, which is referred to with no judgment as him having his "sport". These are all really minor, throwaway points. Mara doesn't think the lives of these people are important, and the narrative completely supports that. It's not just the writing that is dated.

And that is the main reason why this is not a good readalike for The Goblin Emperor. Mara lacks human decency in comparison to the hero of that book, the quite similarly-named Maia. I was happy to see her triumph at the start of the book, but by the end of it, I only wanted her to win because everyone else was worse. I don't think I'll be continuing with this series.

MY GRADE: A D.

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Playing With Fire, by Tess Gerritsen

TITLE: Playing With Fire
AUTHOR: Tess Gerritsen

COPYRIGHT: 2015
PAGES: 250
PUBLISHER: Ballantine

SETTING: Contemporary US and Italy, and 1940s Italy
TYPE: Mystery
SERIES: None

In a shadowy antiques shop in Rome, violinist Julia Ansdell happens upon a curious piece of music—the Incendio waltz—and is immediately entranced by its unusual composition. Full of passion, torment, and chilling beauty, and seemingly unknown to the world, the waltz, its mournful minor key, its feverish arpeggios, appear to dance with a strange life of their own. Julia is determined to master the complex work and make its melody heard.

Back home in Boston, from the moment Julia’s bow moves across the strings, drawing the waltz’s fiery notes into the air, something strange is stirred—and Julia’s world comes under threat. The music has a terrifying and inexplicable effect on her young daughter, who seems violently transformed. Convinced that the hypnotic strains of Incendio are weaving a malevolent spell, Julia sets out to discover the man and the meaning behind the score.

Her quest beckons Julia to the ancient city of Venice, where she uncovers a dark, decades-old secret involving a dangerously powerful family that will stop at nothing to keep Julia from bringing the truth to light.

I'm addicted to Gerritsen's Rizzoli and Isles series. I haven't read her earlier single titles yet (I'm saving them for a rainy day, and yes, I know that doesn't make sense), but if they're as good as this one, I'm in for a treat.

Violinist Julia Ansell has just finished a tour in Italy and is happily puttering around antique shops in Rome when she happens upon a piece of music she has never come across. It's a hand-written score, a waltz called the Incendio, and it sounds complex and wonderful when she reads it. It's expensive, since it's, the shop-owner tells her, one of a kind, but she knows she has to have it.

Once back home, Julia sets out to play her new piece of music and is shocked by the results. Not only does the piece consume her and set her into a sort of hypnotic state, it seems to possess her young daughter, as well. Faced with a daughter who seems to become a violent killer when she hears those particular notes, Julia is determined to find out what's wrong. But when her initial approaches to neurologists and psychologists result in disbelief and questioning of her own sanity, Julia realises she must find out more about the piece of music and its creator.

Interspersed with the modern-day story of Julia and her daughter, we get the story of the musician who created the piece. It's the early 40s and Lorenzo lives in Venice, part of a Jewish community where most people consider themselves to be fully integrated and Italian, so surely they have nothing to fear?

This was just great. It's creepy and mysterious and the thriller element really worked. I did have a few issues at the start of the book, where I had some doubts about whether the use of the Holocaust storyline felt appropriate, but this was a book that really won me over. The 1940s thread ended up being extremely moving. The depiction of the situation, where Italian Jews felt so well-integrated that they refused to believe that all those things that were rumoured could possibly be true, felt real. Surely it couldn't happen here, surely not these days? I kept wanting to shout at them to "Go, go! Leave!", while understanding completely why they wouldn't.

And the present-day storyline was really well-done as well. I don't want to say a lot, as not knowing quite what to expect is one of the best aspects of it, but I will say that the resolution was what really made it. It's a resolution that could conceivably feel like a cop-out, like the author had painted herself into a corner and was taking the easy way out, but it doesn't feel like that at all. It feels right. And by being what it is, not what we might have thought it would be (sorry to be so cryptic!) it feels somehow more respectful of the WWII sections.

MY GRADE: A strong B+.

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Swing Time, by Zadie Smith

TITLE: Swing Time
AUTHOR: Zadie Smith

COPYRIGHT: 2016
PAGES: 453
PUBLISHER: Hamish Hamilton

SETTING: Contemporary UK and West Africa
TYPE: Fiction
SERIES: None

An ambitious, exuberant new novel moving from North West London to West Africa, from the multi-award-winning author of White Teeth and On Beauty

Two brown girls dream of being dancers—but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It's a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early twenties, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten, either.

Tracey makes it to the chorus line but struggles with adult life, while her friend leaves the old neighborhood behind, traveling the world as an assistant to a famous singer, Aimee, observing close up how the one percent live.

But when Aimee develops grand philanthropic ambitions, the story moves from London to West Africa, where diaspora tourists travel back in time to find their roots, young men risk their lives to escape into a different future, the women dance just like Tracey—the same twists, the same shakes—and the origins of a profound inequality are not a matter of distant history, but a present dance to the music of time.

I get ridiculously excited about the announcement of the Man Booker longlist. I love the speculation beforehand (and I've picked up quite a few books from those discussions), and I love that so many bloggers I follow read the books. As I have for the last few years, I'll be attempting to read as many as I can from the longlist and all of the books on the shortlist. Liz McC and Sunita are going to be reading quite a few as well, which will make it even better. They've both got off the starting blocks a lot more quickly than I have, so do check out the reviews already on their blogs.

Me, I thought I'd start with one that looked to be a quick, accessible read. Swing Time was actually already in my TBR, and sounded like it'd be fun. Turns out I found it more challenging than I expected. The challenge was not on the technical side, but in caring enough to continue reading.

There are two main threads that we follow throughout the book. The first one is the relationship between our unnamed narrator and her childhood friend Tracey. The two girls met when very small, as the only two mixed-raced girls in a neighbourhood dance class, and then in school. Tracey was always a natural dancer, while our narrator was fascinated by the dancing and its history and ideas, but less of a dancer herself.

The second thread is the narrator's job as personal assistant to Aimee, a huge international pop star (think, I don't know, Madonna, maybe?). Aimee has decided she wants to start a school in a West African country and, as part of her staff, our narrator is one of the several people taking care of all the details.

There are a lot of interesting ideas and little bits and pieces here, but I felt the book never really gelled. It felt disjointed, and there wasn't a through-line that pulled the whole thing together. Part of the problem, I felt, was that I never quite got what linked the two main threads together, beyond our narrator.

And she was probably the biggest problem with the book. Our unnamed narrator never really comes alive. She seems to float around absorbing stuff from those around her and simply reacting. She doesn't know what she wants, where she wants to go, who she wants to be. Even her most decisive moments are simply rebelling, just not wanting to do what her mother wants. This is particularly frustrating, because Smith has a way of capturing her secondary characters (or not even secondary, even those who are only present in the margins and show up for a single scene... tertiary characters, maybe?) with a deft couple of lines and making the reader recognise them. But our narrator... no idea who she is, unfortunately.  And yes, the fact that she's an unnamed narrator suggests there's a fair bit of intentionality in her being a non-entity, but I felt the book could have been a lot more interesting with someone with more personality narrating it.

The other issue I had was that the Aimee storyline gradually took over the Tracey one, and I was much more interested in the latter. That felt a lot fresher and potentially more interesting, but Tracy disappears from the story in the same way as she disappears from our narrator's life (so yes, it does make sense). And the Aimee storyline made me terribly cross. In part, that is probably just me. I despise celebrity culture and take pains to avoid anything celebrity-related in my life, so some of that crossness was because it felt I was being forced to spend time with the sort of celebrity-obsessed people I run a mile from in real life. Yes, the point of a lot of that was to ridicule aspects of that celebrity culture, but the thing is, Smith doesn't really do anything new or interesting with her satire. It's pretty obvious targets and these targets are mocked in obvious ways.

Lots and lots of moaning above, and it sounds like I hated the book. I didn't. There were nuggets there that I did like. I liked the sort of abstract bits and pieces about dancing. I also liked the character of our narrator's mother and their complex relationship, which were both very well done. And the writing was often beautiful. There was enough there that I would read more by Zadie Smith, despite this one not being a particularly successful first try.

MY GRADE: A C+.

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Card parties and Marx

TITLE: Cards on the Table
AUTHOR: Agatha Christie

A very imprudent man called Mr. Sheitana decides to tempt fate and organise a unique dinner party. He invites 4 "detectives", all of them well known to Agatha Christie readers: there's Superintendent Battle of Scotland Yard; there's a Secret Service man, Colonel Race, there's Ariadne Oliver, the detective novelist, and there's none other than the inimitable Hercule Poirot. They join 4 other guests, all of whom Mr. Sheitana believes have got away with murder.

Whatever he intended to accomplish, what Mr Sheitana gets is more than he expected. While they're all playing bridge after dinner, one of his guests kills him. Which of the 4 did it, and which of the 4 detectives will be able to discover whodunnit?

It's a neat little mystery, super ingenious, albeit probably best enjoyed by someone with an understanding of bridge, since the game actually plays a bigger part than you might expect. That being said, I know nothing about the game and still had fun. The characters are interesting, both the suspects and the detectives. A big part of the fun is in seeing each detective do their own thing and their different approaches.

A good one.

MY GRADE: A B.

TITLE: The Marx Sisters
AUTHOR: Barry Maitland

The Marx Sisters is the first in a long-running series called Brock and Kolla. Brock is Scotland Yard Chief Inspector David Brock, an experienced officer. Kolla is the much younger Kathy Kolla, a much more inexperienced officer. This first case is set in a little forgotten enclave in the middle of central London, an area where longtime Eastern European immigrants live in the old houses they moved into decades earlier, in between the shiny office blocks.

The Marx Sisters of the title are some of those residents. Their last names are not Marx, but they're all great-grandchildren of the man himself. And then one dies. Was it a personal thing (she wasn't the nicest person in the world), or is there more going on? A developer trying to get their hands on the property? Someone after the Marx manuscripts rumoured to be hidden in the house?

This one wasn't great. I liked the sense of place, but that was about it. The plot could have been interesting, but the twists became a bit too much, tried to be too clever and this made the characters just not ring true. Also, I was bothered by the casual sexism and even misogyny in the characterisation. Wives are nagging shrews, our female detective is a bit of an impulsive airhead, our older male detective is irresistible to even women much younger than him. Bah. I'm not planning to read further in this series.

MY GRADE: A C.

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The Night Of The Mi'raj, by Zoë Ferraris

TITLE: The Night Of The Mi'raj (aka Finding Nouf in the US)
AUTHOR: Zoë Ferraris

COPYRIGHT: 2008
PAGES: 357
PUBLISHER: Little, Brown

SETTING: Contemporary Saudi Arabia
TYPE: Mystery
SERIES: First in a series

In a blazing hot desert in Saudi Arabia, a search party is dispatched to find a missing young woman. Thus begins a novel that offers rare insight into the inner workings of a country in which women must wear the abaya in public or risk denunciation by the religious police; where ancient beliefs, taboos, and customs frequently clash with a fast-moving, technology-driven modern world.

The missing woman is Nouf Shrawi, one of several sheltered teenaged daughters of a powerful local family. Hired to track her and her potential abductor is Nayir, a solitary, pious desert guide of dubious origin, and a friend of the family. As Nayir uncovers clues that only serve to deepen the mystery behind Nouf's disappearance, he teams up with Katya, a liberated Saudi woman who is engaged to one of Nouf's brothers.

As they move closer to the truth, the pair's detective work unveils layers of secrets. In a land of prayers, purity, and patriarchy, the dreams of mere mortals often go unrealized, and the consequences of misbehavior for both men and women are disastrous

This is a mystery set in Jeddah, in Saudi Arabia. It's written by a Western author who lived in the country for a while with her Saudi husband, but the characters themselves are Saudi.

The plot concerns the disappearance of a 16-year-old girl, Nouf, the child of a wealthy family. A lorry and a camel have disappeared at the same time, so whether she left of her own accord or was taken, she seems to have disappeared into the desert. The family want to find her without any scandal, as she was about to get married and they'd rather like that to go ahead, so rather than going to the police, they ask Nayif for help.

Nayif is a friend of the family, and a man who knows a lot about the desert, as he often works as a guide. The hope is that this will allow him to track Nouf, but it's not that easy to find her. Nayif is forced to accept the help of Katya, Nouf's brother's fiancée, who works at the forensic department, and together they work to find out the truth. Nouf's body is soon discovered, but the investigation doesn't end there. Nayir feels the obligation to uncover what happens, even if some in Nouf's family are not on board with his continuing enquiries.

I really liked this. The mystery itself is fine and the plotting ok, but where the book was really good was with the characters and setting. Nayif is a quite conservative and devout man, which really wasn't what I was expecting, for some reason. He's a bit of an outsider, being of Palestinian origin, and this is something he's made to feel often. Katya was more expected, a modern, educated woman who is determined to have a career, but is struggling somewhat with the strictures placed on her by her society. Where the book shines is in the interactions between these two. Neither is particularly comfortable with the other at first, but it turns out there is great chemistry between them. I don't mean necessarily in a sexual sense (although that's not completely absent), but in the sense of two people who click with each other. It's understated here, but it's clear that this is a relationship that will continue in further books, and I really want to read more.

The setting is also great. Societal mores and expectations (and laws) determine how the investigation progresses and how the characters are able to relate to each other. I have no idea how accurate it all is obviously, but I enjoyed reading it. And maybe because the author is not Saudi herself, she makes a point of subtly highlighting the little details that a Saudi author might take for granted and not think worth a mention, like the fact that people keep oven gloves in their car's glove compartments, as car door handles can get so hot that you'll get proper burns if you touch them with your hands.

MY GRADE: A solid B.

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Final Girls, by Riley Sager

TITLE: Final Girls
AUTHOR: Riley Sager

COPYRIGHT: 2017
PAGES: 342
PUBLISHER: Dutton

SETTING: Contemporary US
TYPE: Thriller
SERIES: None

Ten years ago, college student Quincy Carpenter went on vacation with five friends and came back alone, the only survivor of a horror movie–scale massacre. In an instant, she became a member of a club no one wants to belong to—a group of similar survivors known in the press as the Final Girls. Lisa, who lost nine sorority sisters to a college dropout's knife; Sam, who went up against the Sack Man during her shift at the Nightlight Inn; and now Quincy, who ran bleeding through the woods to escape Pine Cottage and the man she refers to only as Him. The three girls are all attempting to put their nightmares behind them, and, with that, one another. Despite the media's attempts, they never meet.

Now, Quincy is doing well—maybe even great, thanks to her Xanax prescription. She has a caring almost-fiancé, Jeff; a popular baking blog; a beautiful apartment; and a therapeutic presence in Coop, the police officer who saved her life all those years ago. Her memory won’t even allow her to recall the events of that night; the past is in the past.

That is, until Lisa, the first Final Girl, is found dead in her bathtub, wrists slit, and Sam, the second, appears on Quincy's doorstep. Blowing through Quincy's life like a whirlwind, Sam seems intent on making Quincy relive the past, with increasingly dire consequences, all of which makes Quincy question why Sam is really seeking her out. And when new details about Lisa's death come to light, Quincy's life becomes a race against time as she tries to unravel Sam's truths from her lies, evade the police and hungry reporters, and, most crucially, remember what really happened at Pine Cottage, before what was started ten years ago is finished.

I sort of fell for the hype with this one. But then, I really liked the premise. The thought has crossed my mind more than once after watching a horror movie: what would it be like to have to live having gone through that? This is what Final Girls is about. The title refers to the horror movie trope of the single survivor of some sort of horrendous massacre, usually a young woman.

Our protagonist, Quincy Carpenter, was one such final girl, after all her friends were killed while at a drunken party weekend in a remote cottage in the forest. In the eyes of the press, she joined two others: Sam, who survived a massacre in a motel, and Lisa, who lived through a killing spree in a sorority house (to continue with our horror movie tropes!). The press would like nothing better than to have all 3 women get together, but although Quincy and Lisa have spoken on the phone, that has never happened.

Some years later, Quincy feels like she's doing well. She runs a popular baking blog and leads a quiet life with her boyfriend, a public defender. Yes, she still can't remember most of what happened in Pine Cottage, and she needs antidepressants to get through the day, not to mention her intermittent fits of kleptomania, but considering what she went through, that's understandable.

And then Quincy receives news that Lisa has killed herself, not long after sending Quincy an email saying she needs to speak to her. And that is quickly followed by Sam showing up at Quincy's apartment, where she proceeds to immediately upend Quincy's life.

This didn't work at all. The plot, which was the main draw for me, ended up being nothing more than an intriguing setup. The way it was developed felt clunky and unbelievable. The author sprinkled red herrings all over, which I guess were effective, in that I did fall for them, but they felt manipulative and artificial, rather than organic. It all ends up being too convoluted to be remotely believable, and I just couldn't buy the ending.

The characters were even weaker. Quincy is incredibly meh, a sort of vacuum where a personality should be, and her relationship with Sam just annoyed me, because it felt so forced and fake. Sam is incredibly clichéd, the bad girl who shows up and immediately starts getting the good girl to misbehave and do really stupid stuff and take pointless risks. I didn't believe any of it for a minute.

So yeah, my main problem with this one was that I was just not able to suspend my disbelief, so I spent the entire book going "Oh, seriously!" and "No, no, no!". Not great.

MY GRADE: A C-. And I'm probably being a bit generous.

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The Queen of Blood, by Sarah Beth Durst

TITLE: The Queen of Blood
AUTHOR: Sarah Beth Durst

COPYRIGHT: 2016
PAGES: 368
PUBLISHER: Harper Voyager

SETTING: Kingdom of Aratay
TYPE: Fantasy
SERIES: First in the Queens of Renthia series

Everything has a spirit: the willow tree with leaves that kiss the pond, the stream that feeds the river, the wind that exhales fresh snow...

But the spirits that reside within this land want to rid it of all humans. One woman stands between these malevolent spirits and the end of humankind: the queen. She alone has the magical power to prevent the spirits from destroying every man, woman, and child. But queens are still only human, and no matter how strong or good they are, the threat of danger always looms.

Because the queen’s position is so precarious, young women are specially chosen to train as her heirs. Daleina, a seemingly quiet academy student, simply wants to right the wrongs that have befallen the land. Meanwhile, the disgraced champion Ven has spent his exile secretly fighting against the growing number of spirit attacks. When Daleina and Ven join forces, they embark on a treacherous quest to find the source of the spirits’ restlessness—a journey that will force them to stand against both enemies and friends to save their land... before it’s bathed in blood.

This is the sort of book that, if you only read the back cover, might seem like pretty generic YA fantasy. It's anything but! A huge thank you to Carrie S at Smart Bitches Trashy Books for the excellent review, otherwise I never would have picked it up.

The Queen of Blood is set in a world where humans live in a sort of armed truce with the spirits that reside in every bit of nature. There are spirits in the wood, in the ice, in the fire, in the earth, in the air and in the water, and every single one of them wishes to push the humans out of what they feel is their world. The only thing holding them back from killing humans and driving them out is the human Queen, who is able to control them, to a certain extent, and mostly keep them from attacking.

In such a world, it's crucial to have someone ready to take over as soon as the Queen dies, someone with enough power to be able to control the spirits. The way it works is that the Queen's Champions select Candidates (usually from Academies devoted to training any girls with power -and it's only girls, not boys, who have power) and train them to be able to pass the tests that allow them to become Heirs.

That is the future that Deleina is determined should be hers. When she was a child, spirits attacked her village. Deleina was able to protect her family with her powers, and they were the only survivors. This has made her determined to develop her abilities enough to, if not become Queen, be able to better protect those around her. She's probably one of the students with least raw power in her Academy, but she's hard-working and conscientious and very, very determined.

And I'll leave the plot description at that, just the basic setup, because one of the things I loved most about this book was that I had no idea where it was going to go next. There were plenty of times when my jaw just dropped. I only realise how much a lot of what I read is a bit predictable and how much I crave being surprised when I read books like this.

One of the surprises was how feminist and subversive of bad fantasy tropes this book is. Part of me was expecting demonising (or at least negative portrayal) of other women: Daleina's fellow students at the Academy, the Queen, all clear rivals to our protagonists... and what does it say about our world that enough books have done this that I was expecting it (even if kind of dreading it)? Durst surprised me, and I loved what she did here. The students forge a strong sisterhood. They are rivals and they understand this, but they are invested in making it a fair, healthy competition, and that doesn't preclude friendship. My favourite was what Durst did with Merecot (sp? I listened to the audiobook), who's the strongest student in terms of control over the spirits, and who is extremely ambitious and ruthless about it. She's prickly and can be mean, but even she is not portrayed as bad. She and Daleina forge a real friendship, even if one with a fair bit of conflict. And the Queen! We know almost from the start that something is wrong there, and that the destruction of villages such as Daleina's is down to the Queen's actions (or inactions). Surely she is a villain? Nope. Again, she's a very flawed person, but even she is not portrayed as a villain. I loved it.

Another surprise: the relationship between Daleina and Ven, the Champion who takes her on as his candidate and trains her to become an Heir. I sort of assumed there was going to be some sort of romance there between them, but there wasn't! Which was great, because the book worked so much better because of that. There is romance, and each of them has their own relationships, but their relationship was one that felt so much fresher and new because of the lack of the romance.

Daleina herself is surprising as well. She seems a bit tentative at first, and she is probably the least ambitious of the candidates, but she is absolutely not tentative when it comes to doing what is best for her country. Durst goes places with this that I wasn't expecting, and I loved it.

I also loved that the world is really original. There's a real darkness here (things can get really bloody!), and Durst doesn't guarantee that even nice characters survive. There's also an interesting environmental message here: what happens when humanity seeks to impose its will over nature rather than work with it? It's made clear that the reason spirits can be controlled by humans is that they need humans as much as humans need the spirits. Each are essential to keeping the world in balance, so the power to influence and control the spirits has evolved to ensure that. Most women with power use it to control, but Daleina is not powerful enough for that. She coaxes the spirits, uses her limited power to distract them from destructiveness and push them towards an expression of their own power and impulses that helps humans (to grow, to build, rather than to kill and destroy). This is one of the elements I hope to see explored in future books.

MY GRADE: An A-. Highly recommended

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Come Sundown, by Nora Roberts

TITLE: Come Sundown
AUTHOR: Nora Roberts

COPYRIGHT: 2017
PAGES: 480
PUBLISHER: St. Martin's

SETTING: Contemporary US
TYPE: Romantic Suspense
SERIES: None

The Bodine ranch and resort in western Montana is a family business, an idyllic spot for vacationers. A little over thirty thousand acres and home to four generations, it’s kept running by Bodine Longbow with the help of a large staff, including new hire Callen Skinner. There was another member of the family once: Bodine’s aunt, Alice, who ran off before Bodine was born. She never returned, and the Longbows don’t talk about her much. The younger ones, who never met her, quietly presume she’s dead. But she isn’t. She is not far away, part of a new family, one she never chose?and her mind has been shattered...

When a bartender leaves the resort late one night, and Bo and Cal discover her battered body in the snow, it’s the first sign that danger lurks in the mountains that surround them. The police suspect Cal, but Bo finds herself trusting him-and turning to him as another woman is murdered and the Longbows are stunned by Alice’s sudden reappearance. The twisted story she has to tell about the past?and the threat that follows in her wake?will test the bonds of this strong family, and thrust Bodine into a darkness she could never have imagined.

In Come Sundown, we travel to Montana, where the Bodine-Longbow family run a successful ranch/resort. Bodine Longbow, the daughter of the family, is our heroine. She's confident and competent, the sort of woman who doesn't suffer fools gladly. As the book starts, Callen Skinner has just returned to the area and has taken a job at the ranch. Callen grew up there with a father who was a gambling addict and who lost pretty much all of the family's lands. He was best friends with Chase, Bodine's older brother, and she had a bit of a crush on him, but one that never turned into anything. Now that Cal is back after a successful career in Hollywood as a horse wrangler working in films, both are grown, single, and attracted to each other.

As they court, things around them start getting very worrying. A young woman working as a bartender in the resort is found murdered, and soon the same thing happens with a young college student returning home. Someone is killing young women, and one of the deputies is convinced it's Cal.

Interspersed with the present-day story, we get the story of Alice, Bodine's mother's sister. Alice is the family black sheep, as she left in a dramatic huff almost 25 years earlier (on the day of her sister's wedding, no less), and after sending a few postcards for a couple of years, disappeared off the face of the Earth. Her mother still grieves for her absence, but her sister and grandmother are still pretty angry at her.

We soon find out that Alice did not disappear of her own volition. After a couple of years she decided to come home, only she ran into the wrong guy as she hitchhiked closer to home. The man who took her was one of those American survivalist / fundamentalist types, and he decided to take her for his 'wife'. For almost 25 years, Alice has been basically his slave, trapped, beaten, constantly raped and forced to bear her captor's children. And then she escapes.

I have very mixed feelings about this one. I mostly enjoyed it as I was reading it, but now that I've finished and think back about it, I don't think it was very good at all. I like the setting and the family and the writing, and I particularly liked seeing Alice come back to life. However, there were too many elements that could have been a lot better.

The romance was very meh, and that's a problem when the book is supposed to be a romance novel. I never warmed up to Bodine or to Callen. They felt a bit shallow, possibly because neither of them experienced any sort of growth during the book, beyond Callen sort of coming to terms with his mother's love for his gambling-addict father (not that this seems to affect him much at all now). Both Bo and Cal are perfectly fine from the start, two happy people who simply become happier by getting together. That's a great thing to aspire to, but I'm afraid it didn't make for a particularly interesting romance, as there was absolutely no conflict between them. There's no reason why they wouldn't be together, and mostly (other than a couple of scenes where they sort of fight after one or the other flies off the handle for no reason at all, other than plot) they just start dating and it works perfectly fine. There was nothing objectionable there, but nothing that drew me in, either.

I also had some issues with the Alice storyline. I did love it once she came home, but in the first sections there are a lot of scenes showing her in captivity. Those scenes really were harrowing, particularly the ones early on, when Alice's mind is still not beaten down by the abuse. To be honest, they felt unnecessarily graphic to me, and they didn't really go well with the rest of the book.

And then there was the suspense subplot. Exactly the same thing happened to me in the previous romantic suspense release by this author, in that as soon as I met a particular character, long before they'd done anything remotely suspicious, I knew pretty much everything. I'm not sure if it's that it was really telegraphed, or that I'm a bit too familiar with Nora Robert's oeuvre, but there was zero suspense for me. I was picking up every clue, and therefore the moment when the person's identity was revealed, which was clearly written to be a shock to the reader, was flat as a pancake.

I really don't know what's going on with Roberts. Lately her trilogies have gone terrible, her standalone romantic suspense books are hit or miss, but the In Death books are still fantastic. Weird.

MY GRADE: I'd give it a B-, and I'm being pretty generous here.

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My reading in two graphs

I just installed a new version of Office and have been playing with pivot tables to familiarise myself with how they work here. I've been tracking my reading for many, many years, so that was the obvious file to play with. Probably of interest only to me, but here are a couple of graphs that tell such a clear story of how my reading has changed over the years:

I'm going off romance (click here to enlarge)

My reading used to be 80% romance, but it's been gradually going down, and is now hovering around a third. Probably a combination of reasons: a) I have changed; b) the genre has changed; and c) I've got better at finding out about non-romance books that appeal to me.

Ebook and audiobooks have taken over (click here to enlarge)

To save you a click, grey is print, orange is ebooks, blue is audiobooks. I did start reading some ebooks back in 2004, but I didn't track format back then. Still, it was very few (not that many were available, anyway, at least not to me in Uruguay), so the number would have been tiny.

These days, I only read print if I absolutely cannot get the book in e or audio. I listen to lots of audio, but the reason audiobooks have gone slightly down since the peak in 2013 is that I keep finding more and more wonderful podcasts, so that takes up a fair bit of my listening time.

None of this was a surprise, but it was fun to be able to see the trends so clearly.

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