Tag Archives: Mysteries

September 15, 2024 · 8:14 pm

August holiday reading round up: Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit, Fourth Wing, Iron Flame, the Peacock and the Sparrow, The Darkness and one I can’t remember

I took a heap of holiday in August – much of which was taken up with canoeing, camping, splashing, napping and, of course, reading. Dear reader ask me what the book was that I brought on the canoe trip and really loved? I can’t remember! I know I loved it and that my mum recommended it, but it’s been three weeks and I’m back to routines and it’s just vanished. Proof that one should not procrastinate on book reviews.

So onward!

Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit: Do Not Go Gentle

Nadine Sander-Green’s Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit is good, but I wonder if it shouldn’t have been a short story. Following Millicent as she begins her first ‘real’ job working as a reporter at a tiny, independent paper in the Yukon, the story is one of a casual slide into domestic violence. I heard a woman describe it to me that way, she was telling me how she found herself in an abusive relationship – “a casual slide,” she said, like the way you might ease from one conversation topic to another. And for Millicent there is some of that – where one behaviour or one situation makes her wonder, another where she is uncomfortable, another where is afraid – but by that point she feels so alone and so isolated as to not know what else to do but to keep going, and when she does know to leave, does want to leave, she instead leaves and comes back leaves and comes back leaves and comes back as so many women do. Not for want of courage or of awareness, but for Millicent for some confusion of love and a certainty that there is no where else. The geography of the Yukon is its own powerful character – the winter cold snaps off the page – holding this isolation like the best of pathetic fallacy. What and how the conclusion comes to Millicent I’ll leave you to read because it’s a well-imagined and written ending. But throughout the book there are these threads – like Millicent’s relationship with her mother, or the idea of newspapers in a digital news era – that get picked up and seem to be Significant (and maybe they are and I just didn’t do the interpretive work to parse it) but don’t realize into anything. All in a way that made me wonder if the whole thing could have been tighter in a different form. Anyway, you read it and let me know.

Fourth Wing and Iron Flame: Don’t Judge Me For How Much I Loved These Books

If you wanted to find the exact opposite of the Literary Effort of Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit you’d find it in Rebecca Yarros’ Fourth Wing and Iron Flame. Described to me (where?) as a mashup of Harry Potter, Game of Throne and 50 Shades of Grey, the books easily pull you in and suddenly hours later you realize no one has been watching your children and everyone has a sunburn. Truly, there is nothing substantive here. You could probably make an argument that there’s something about who is on the ‘right side’ of history when it comes to war (and whether if you were on the ‘wrong side’ you’d know it or not), something about the authority afforded to those who write that history, something about disability and ability, maybe something about feminist dragons. But what you’re really signing up for is the same promise of anything that just feels good to read/watch: violence, sex, and the little guy triumphing by doing the Right Thing (and the Right Thing is not complicated). They are books you want to read because they take you out of the moment you’re in and remind you of the time decades ago when you read for a few hours at a time without wondering what was happening on your phone. (Not that the only kind of book to do this is… fantasy-romance – just that this one does it particularly well). I will say that having read Iron Flame at a family resort that it’s the kind of book you want to be thoughtful about where you find yourself reading it as you will absolutely blush and wonder just how many synonyms for ‘quivering’ there might be. Turns out: many.

The Peacock and the Sparrow: Stay sharp!

Okay, so we’re on a bit of a trajectory here – from Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit that wanted (and was?) to be Serious and Literary, to the absurd, ridiculous and utterly absorbing Fourth Wing to an extremely complicated and equally delightful mystery in The Peacock and the Sparrow. Author I.S. Berry is a former CIA agent and reviews make much of this because the book certainly feels (to this decidedly Not CIA agent reader) to capture the detail of an overseas CIA agent from the kind of drink, to the way an ‘exotic’ job is to our protagonist Just a Job in the way we are all working Just a Job. Set amid the Arab Spring we follow our washed up agent as he hangs on to his job (and his sense of worth and purpose – not necessarily tied to that job) and then finds himself swept up in making change in ways he never intended or imagined. Sort of inspiring to all who might be wondering just what the point of any of it is (surely we’re all wondering that?) to see in the narrative that impact and change are still possible. If not… quite as anticipated. And a fun mystery in that it’s not about a murder, but instead about a revolution (I didn’t quite get that from the description on the back and so kept waiting for a murder investigation to start, so be warned: not a murder mystery). And fun, too, because the breadcrumbs to sort it out are not impossible to follow and you can with a bit of careful reading keep up with the twisty-turns.

The Darkness

Which takes us to our final (remembered) book of vacation Ragnar Jónasson’s The Darkness (which don’t google because even when you try “The Darkness book” will still just take you to Heart of Darkness because the internet is broken – you have to try The Darkness Iceland book). It’s such a weird little book. Our protagonist, Helen, is strange and sad and this reader wondered if she wasn’t always on the brink of some kind of…. something bad. Her panic about retirement – the loneliness, the purposelessness, the claustrophobia of solitude – helps the reader see how much of her narration is untrustworthy. Her sense of isolation from her colleagues we (eventually) understand as self-narrated and self-fulfilled; so, too, her guardedness from those efforts to connect with her. With the backstory of her childhood interwoven we start to see her caution as explainable (and deeply sympathetic) and to see her as a rich and full character. Making the conclusion of the book – and here we have an actual murder mystery! – all the more powerful. I finished it while out with S. and put it down with a “huh.” Just like… rare to get a book (and a murder mystery for that matter) that offers an actually surprising – and satisfying? – ending.

And that one I can’t remember…

I read another one. I can picture it – green on the cover. I returned it like a snap from the library but because the library (only) remembers the last 300 books I borrowed it’s not in the history anymore (seriously – we have a Picture Book Problem in my house) and so it will be forever in that did I read that? void. If you saw me in early August and I was talking about a book I loved maybe you could remind me…

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September 5, 2019 · 3:23 pm

Louise Penny: Masculinity FTW

I did a lot of reading this summer. The bulk of that reading was Louise Penny novels, and so rather than write one post after the other about Inspector Gamache and descriptions of Quebecois cheese, I’m writing this one post, and it’s fine, because the novels are all the same: a pleasant romp through a picturesque Quebec countryside with characters that make you hope for a better world, even while murder abounds and threats of Darkness loom. I also read a lot of recipe books – many featuring the Instant Pot – of which I will not bore you.

I read The Murder Stone, A Great Reckoning and Glass Houses. My mum rightly pointed out that I’ve done myself a disservice in reading out of order, but let’s be clear that I’m not likely to ever go back and read the others, so finding out that one of the detectives has a drug problem after he’s been to NA and gotten married to Gamache’s daughter hardly ruins the thread for future reading.

So right. If you’ve not encountered Louise Penny here’s the thrust: her novels win heaps of awards. People love them. There are organized bus tours to the town where Penny lives so that people can visit the cafe featured in the novel. They’re incredibly enjoyable while you’re reading them, something entirely comforting like so many wool sweaters and mugs of tea. Inspector Gamache has cult followings who want to know where he ‘actually’ lives (my beliefs about Gilbert Blythe notwithstanding, fictional characters only live in the mind).

So what’s the deal? My guess is that people (and me while I’m reading them) like the security of a man who is kind and who exemplifies the tropes of a gentlemen-masculinity that are all laughable in reality. We want to believe that men can be kind, brave and stand up for principles and values amid a world of corruption, greed, lust and those other sins. Despite All the Evidence to the contrary, and more importantly, despite the reality that no one ever needed men to be the bastions of honour in the first place, Gamache is an irresistible character because of these qualities. We swoon at the idea of a kind and noble man who occupies a place of power because there are so few examples in reality.

I’m not advancing a novel argument here. I’m sure anyone reading the books would come to the same conclusion. That it’s as much the attraction to Gamache and his pastoral perfect life as it is the mystery around the murder that keeps us reading. We want to be close to a life of comfortable chairs, exquisite food (though the descriptions of food are something distracting – like I have to get up and make bread and cheese before I can keep reading) and totalizing romance because such a place and such people are all but impossible to find in the world we occupy. Utter wish fulfillment.

So it’s something of a rude awakening to come back to 2019 and recall the moment we are in. The responsibilities of being flawed after spending so many hours with the flawless is taxing. It almost makes me want to read non-fiction. Almost.

 

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July 10, 2011 · 1:26 am

Cottage Week: 4/5

                         I spent the last week at a cottage in Northern Ontario doing four things: sleeping, eating, swimming and reading. I suppose I should say five, as I also drank my share of wine. I relaxed. I luxuriated. I was eaten by horse flies. I felt – and was – totally privileged. I made my way through five summer reads, and four were pretty well fantastic. One was… not.

In order:

Raymond Chandler’s, The Big Sleep

It’s five books ago now, and so my memory of the novel is already fading (see why this blog had to come into being?), but I do remember enjoying The Big Sleep because I liked the detective – Marlowe – principally because of his self-reflexive uncertainty about his decisions and actions. I can’t say I was particularly fond of the representation of women in the novel, but (if my reading in the mystery category so far is to be any indication) perhaps women in mystery novels are destined to be somewhat flighty and ridiculous (or in the case of Miss Marple, utterly without sexual discrimination so as to be mistaken for a man). The mystery Marolwe must solve is particularly engrossing because it doesn’t begin as the mystery we think he’s meant to solve, and so the crime unfolds gradually, along with the clues, in an intricate and engrossing weave. Yeah, I wrote that sentence.

Jacqueline Kelly’s The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate

One of the opening sequences in The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate involves Calpurnia (our twelve-something protagonist) writing a letter to the editor of the Texas paper to complain that the weather report in the paper (this being 1899, weather reports arrive by newspaper) gives the temperature in the sun, and not, as she might like, in the shade. She tells the editor that the temperature in the shade would be more accurate to most of the citizen’s experience of the outdoors, and that the lower number might boost town moral. The newspaper, alert to a good suggestion, changes their reporting to give both the temperature in the sun and in the shade.

I describe this sequence in detail because I think it aptly captures the tremendous strength of Kelly’s novel in using plot events to unfold and develop character, setting and theme. Calpurnia’s character steadily “evolves” (as we might hope from the title) but not in any melodramatic Bella sense of her pensive stares or deliberate conversations about her own changes, but rather through subtle interactions and actions. The time and place of the novel is, too, richly described and felt, though not through any cumbersome description, but through the interaction between place and character.

Not to mention the book does a masterful job of concluding without “settling” everything, while still allowing the reader a sense of content and closure.

Oh! And Calpurnia is just a fantastic character.

Kim Echlin’s The Disappeared

It feels like something of a disservice to Echlin’s novel to lump it in here among five other books, because the novel is exceptional in every way. It’s epigraph reads “tell others,” and the whole novel urges readers to take seriously (for N.) their collective responsibility to read/hear the stories of others and to act whenever and wherever injustice is done. Far from heavy handed in this moral, the novel beautifully (really, really, I try not to overuse this word so that in the rare instances – like right now – that it applies it might have weight…) exposes the changes wrought by love and the sacrifices one might be willing to make. It struggles to make clear to the reader how much bigger a person can be than their physical bodies, how far their reach, how tremendous their power. I found it affecting, troubling and for those reasons, rewarding. I urge you to read this one, and not because I feel impelled to “tell others,” but because this is one of the books that shakes you. Shakes!


Jonathan Stroud’s The Amulet of Samarkaud

I had a slow start with The Bartimaeus Trilogy (of which The Amulet is book one), no doubt because I read it directly on the heels of The Disappeared and felt (rightly or wrongly) that it was too silly, to weightless to be read. Happily I kept reading and allowed The Amulet to be what it is: an engaging, whimsical, (but not frivolous!) exploration of magicians in a modern/fantasy world. I say, “not frivolous,” because the book makes some tentative gestures toward considering how the obligations we owe to one another shape relationships – how every relationship might better be considered in terms of debts owed, paid, and pending. But that said, it’s really something of a romp of magic, spells and incantations. I won’t compare it to other magical stories that cannot be named, but some might.

Mohsin Hamid Moth Smoke

Too bad the holiday had to end with Moth Smoke, a book that ought to be good, but falls flat. A playful use of multiple narrative voices is intended – I think – to let the mystery that structures the plot play out with attention to how narrative biases shape interpretations, but the uniformity in the “different” narrative voices made these attempts to offer unique perspectives on the same event read as a failure in a creative writing class assignment. Which is not to say the whole book was terrible – just it’s organizing principle… The apparent protagonist does experience changes – made less compelling by their attribution to drug use and not to a fundamental shift in character, and the attention to the inequities produced and underpinning class stratification was refreshing.

So there. 4/5 on the summer reads = a pretty great cottage week.

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