I appreciate that over the course of all the books in the Alphabet Series, Kinsey Millhone manages to advance in one way or another. What I appreciate less is the mundane details of Kinsey's life. I actually spent two pages reading about what was happening to her car in a car wash. At that point I considered packing it in on this series. So what if I received X for free in exchange for a review, is that worth my time reading about what someone had for lunch? And how many soft rag mechanisms are inside the car wash? But, on the mystery side, this one played out fairly well.
Kinsey is called when a man turns up dead with Kinsey's number in his pocket. The guy is homeless and an alcoholic so Kinsey tracks down his homeless friends and tries to figure out the man's identity. The homeless friends are less than helpful, but she does get just enough information to start unraveling the thread. What unravels is a distant kinship to the man through her father's side of the family, a side not covered in the prior books.
In what seems to be an unrelated story, a private eye of unscrupulous practices also turns up dead. The two tales grow slowly together as we are given back story through the point of view of the dead detective.
What was unexpected was the extended commentary on homelessness presented in the book. It was well balanced and looked at the issue from a lot of angles. I appreciated Grafton's choice to not make the issue cut and dry and the attention to nuance was well done.
A few of Kinsey's love interests pop up to provide some continuity color. All in all, the mystery was one of the better of the series, but the over-described banality of everyday life got a little exasperating in this edition.
3/5 Stars.
I first heard of this book from an NPR story (you can read NPR's review here) while I was driving during my morning commute. I think the part of the review that caught my ear was "one of those deceptively spare tales . . . that punch well above their weight." I am a huge fan of short fiction and I appreciate those stories that can do more in 25 pages than some novels do in 500. Short fiction, I've come to understand, is not "easier" to write because the page requirement is less; it's actually far more difficult. A writer must do more in less time, evoke feelings and emotions in the reader that often take hundreds of pages, but do it in 20, 15, or 10. A writer that can do that should be commended. And Graham Swift is a writer that can do that.
Mothering Sunday takes place on March 30th, 1924. A holiday in which service staff across the English countryside are given the day off to spend with their mothers. Jane Fairchild, maid to the Niven family, however, does not have a mother. Abandoned as a child, she has no family to visit on Mothering Sunday. At first she intends to spend the day with a book from the Niven library - a character trait that is teased out and expanded upon over the course of the book.
Her plans are changed however, when she gets a call from Paul Sheringham, the only surviving son of a neighboring gentry family with whom Jane has been having an affair for some years. Paul is engaged to be married to Emma Hobday within a couple of weeks, and Jane knows this is likely to be their last tryst.
Over the course of Mothering Sunday's sparse pages, Jane's character is lovingly teased out as we see the world through her eyes. We know only what she knows. We feel only what she feels. It's a remarkably limited, but also necessary point of view. As Jane wanders Paul's home after he has left her in his bed, we see the changing society reflected back through Jane's thoughts. The war is over - a generation of young men have been buried in France or Belgium, never to return home. And the life of those in service and those they serve, is changing (have you seen Downton Abbey?).
The story slowly reveals Jane's future as an accomplished novelist in her own right - a path she was set upon maybe even before the events of that Mothering Sunday, but certainly a path that was clearer once the dust had cleared from the day.
At times evocative and luxurious, reading Mothering Sunday felt like a sprint and a marathon all at once.
4.5/5 Stars.
I went to law school so the words "Epic Courtroom Battle" were sure to catch my eye. And since I went to law school I am aware that there is such a thing as the Southern Poverty Law Center. And I live in America and am aware that lynching was a terrible crime against people of color, mostly in the American South, during the civil rights movement and before. So the most shocking thing in reading this book, was the fact that the lynching in question, the lynching that launched the epic courtroom battle mentioned, happened in Mobile, Alabama in 1981.
Yep, 1981. I was actually alive that year and while I don't remember it at all, it's shocking and heartbreaking and maddening that a lynching happened in America in my lifetime. Michael Donald was 19 years old when he had the misfortune of walking down the street in Alabama by himself at night, where he was approached by Tiger Knowles and Henry Hayes. He was beaten, choked, and had his throat slashed before he was thrown in the trunk of a car, driven to Mobile, and hung from a tree.
That Knowles and Hayes were KKK members shouldn't be surprising. And that Mobile authorities did little to investigate and solve the crime shouldn't be surprising either. Leamer's tale takes us up through the end of Knowles and Hayes' criminal trials. Trials which would not have happened without Michael Figures and other members of the federal Department of Justice. Then Morris Dees, chief trial attorney of the Southern Poverty Law Center, gets wind of the case and knows he is going to use the lynching to bring down the United Klans of America (UKA) and its leader Robert Shelton.
Dees, it seems, knows racists from experience. Growing up in Alabama, Dees attended U of A and worked on George Wallace's gubernatorial campaign in college. Although Dees would graduate from law school, he focused his work on a mail order publishing business he started with a partner in college. After both finding they were unfulfilled with the business world, Dees and Fuller sell off their company and go their separate ways. Dees goes on to found the SPLC and Fuller begins Habitat for Humanity.
Dees evolution into a crusader against the UKA was a gradual process and by the time the civil trial starts, he's been trying and winning civil rights cases for some time. He definitely marches to his own drummer and does things his own way, but Dees had a singular purpose in this case, and that was to bring down the UKA in such a way that could be used in the future against other violent hate groups.
The best parts of the book, to me, were the background information regarding the civil rights movement and the campaigns of George Wallace. The courtroom battle fell a little short of "epic" to me, but Leamer is not an attorney himself and since most of the defendants were representing themselves, I doubt they produced many quotable arguments.
I picked up this book as my non-fiction selection for Black History Month. I may not have finished it in February, but I'm glad I read it.
4/5 Stars.
What a delicious feeling it is to start a new series and thoroughly enjoy the first book. I recently took a long car trip and The Last Kingdom was my companion for ten hours of riveting driving through southern Illinois. The series begins with Otrid (I listened to this so be prepared for some completely inaccurate spellings) in Northumbria. He marches to war at 10 years old with his father and sees his father and most of the Northumbrian army slaughtered by the invading Danes. He's taken captive by a Dane named Ragnar and grows up learning to fight.
As the Danes move to take Mercia and East Agnlia, Ostrid is introduced to real battle and becomes torn between his love for Ragnar and the Danish way of life, and to his fealty to his homeland of England. When the Danes move to take Wessex, the last kingdom free from Danish rule, they are met by an unlikely English champion in the pious King Alfred.
The book is just really really well done and I have to give special props to the voice narrator for his inflections and changes between accents. Listening to this was really delightful. Cornwell was lucky in that not many source documents exist from this period of time to draw his facts from so he had a lot of room to invent and imagine, but he still kept everything in the realm of reality.
I was sad that I couldn't immediately start the next book in the series. I can't wait for it to show back up off my hold list at the library.
4/5 Stars.
I'm kind of all over the place with this one. By the end, I can say that I enjoyed the book. But the beginning was confusing, and the middle was kind of boring. This one started out with feeling a lot like American Gods, but in London. Certain sects of differing gods being worshipped in an underground community of magical and magic-ed creatures and humans. A special police unit devoted to sorting out the good guys from the bad.
The story begins with Billy Harrow, a scientist working at the Darwin Center. A research and museum facility in London whose main attraction is a giant squid preserved in formalin and appearing at the center of a specimen room. When the squid is stolen, Billy becomes involved in the London underground world of cults and magic. He's completely unprepared, and his disorientation is a bit disorienting for the reader as well. That I listened to this one on audio book was probably not helpful. If you're thinking about picking it up, I'd recommend reading rather than listening.
Two thugs for hire, Gus and Subby go around tormenting all kinds of mystical folk at the direction of "The Tattoo" a arch villain reduced to, yes, the tattoo on the back of some poor sod forced to an eternity of facing backwards while the Tattoo orders his minions about. Turns out that the squid is a revered god for a Kraken-ist cult and the theft of such a large specimen signals and impending apocalypse. So the magical world is scrambling to figure out who took the squid so they can prevent such and end.
The way the story is laid out is well done except again for the middle parts which felt repetitive and fell flat. Because I listened to it on audio, I thought I had caught a word in one section that became a suspicion of a certain character through the entire book and therefore ruined the final "who done it" aspect for me, even if the the word I had thought I heard in the beginning was just a part of my own imagination. But see, that's part of the problem with the book is that there was so much extra stuff in it that I drifted off in several parts because the facts just exceeded my curiosity, even about a world that was being created whole cloth out of the myths and alleyways of London.
3/5 Stars.
It's February and for Black History Month, I wanted to read something from an African American author and also something about Black History. The Book of Harlan is written by Bernice McFadden, an award winning African American author of nine critically acclaimed novels. The average Goodreads score on this book was 4.1 which is pretty fantastic.
So let's start with what's working in this book. McFadden's prose is well done and the first 1/4 of the book detailing Harlan's parents, Sam and Emma Elliott, who meet in Macon, Georgia and then after becoming pregnant with Harlan (much to the displeasure of Emma's preacher father), move around the country looking for the right fit, while the grandparents bring up Harlan. Finally, in Harlan's fourth year, Sam and Emma return to Macon for Harlan, having found their niche in 1920s Harlem. The pacing and the writing in this section of the book was the best part about the entire book. Even the parts that followed about Harlan's childhood and early adulthood in Harlem, playing in jazz bands and travelling the country was well done. And then, well then stuff started to get weird.
So about the midpoint of the book, when, in 1940, Harlan goes to Paris to play the jazz clubs there, unkowningly having fathered twin sons in Brooklyn, the suspense of the book started to ratchet up. When Harlan and his bandmate Lizard are picked up after curfew during the Nazi occupation of Paris, they are swept off to Buchenwald. Here I thought the book was going to settle in, and really delve into what it meant to be a black American in a German concentration camp. So I was completely surprised when this only took up a little more than two chapters. Much of this section of the book was Lizard's back story, which came a little too late as we'd already been introduced to Lizard for several chapters and well, then like many characters in this book, we never see him again. And although what happens to Lizard is terrible, he's in a concentration camp, you can probably figure it out, and it's supposed to be incredibly damaging to Harlan, there's something that is missing in the elements to give it a great emotional weight.
When Harlan returns to his parent's home, he's completely broken and suffering from PTSD for several years, until he isn't and all of a sudden is out womanizing again. He moves to New Jersey with his parents, plays in some clubs, then all of a sudden his parents are killed in a car accident and he's once again devastated. He takes a job in Brooklyn as a superintendant of a building. Great, I thought, he's going to end up meeting his children finally, since the book spent a significant portion of time on the mother of his children and her family, but no. Instead of his children, Harlan finds Ilse Koch, the notorious wife of a Nazi administrator of Buchenwald who took sadistic pleasure in torturing prisoners in her husband's camp. Ilse Koch has taken refuge in the United States, disguised as recluse Andrew Mailer. (Except Ilse Koch in reality was tried twice for war crimes in Germany and committed suicide in prison in 1967 at the age of 60).
Harlan, upon finding Ilse, strangles her to death and then turns himself into the police. Conveniently, the police detective who takes his statement has a wife who was also a prisoner at Buchenwald so he takes Harlan out the back door and sets him free, giving him all the money in his wallet and telling Harlan to make a new life somewhere. Harland decides to go to Macon, and then the book ends. YES! It ends there!
So about what kind of fell flat for me: the book takes on too much. There are too many characters who show up to ground the story into factual time and place, but their factual stories get distorted by the narrative into untrue endings (Ilse Koch).
There are also too many characters who are included, described in detail, only to be never seen again. The fact that we never know what happens to Harlan's twin sons was kind of a big gaping hole in the narrative. Yes, okay Harlan never met them, so if you take the story from only Harlan's perspective, then he didn't know what happened to them either, BUT in that vein, he never knew they existed in the first place, and he certainly didn't know anything about the family of the woman he slept with to make those children in the first place, but we had loads of details about those individuals in the story. It's almost as if they ceased to exist after the interesting portions of their own narratives were used up.
The dialogue at times worked against the story. McFadden can get into a good rhythm of prose wherein the story flows well and the plot is driven forward. When dialogue is used for this purpose it has less effect and comes out awkwardly.
Lastly, the scope of time taken on in this book was too great. Less time was spent on really interesting or complicated issues than were probably warranted given their weight and importance in the life of the characters.
Basically I thought the first half of the book was pretty good and the book would have rated higher if the second half would have included mostly Buchenwald with a bit of the later life wrapped up at the end. The murder of Ilse Koch in the final chapters seemed an effort to create a dazzling ending where one wasn't really needed. This is a man who survived four years in a concentration camp, that struggle, and the changes it made in him, and how it redefines how we look at victims of the Holocaust should have been enough. That it wasn't is somehow telling on how this book fell short.
2/5 Stars.
Cutting for Stone has been on my to-read shelf for such a long time. It's a book that came highly rated from a friend of mine who I casually stalk as to what she is reading. If she likes it, it goes on my to-read shelf. And I was not disappointed. I don't give out a five-star rating casually. I would say this wasn't quite as good as The Goldfinch (you can read that review here), but four stars just wouldn't be enough for this engrossing tale of two twin brothers, Marion and Shiva, growing up in Ethiopia during turbulent times.Marion and Shiva are the children of a love affair between an English doctor and an Indian nun, working together at Mission hospital in Ethiopia. Their mother dies in childbirth and they are adopted by another physician at the hospital after their father's hasty departure. The characters in this book are so richly drawn, flawed, human. Marion and Shiva grow up on the doorsteps of the surgery and patient rooms at the hospital. It's inevitable both would pursue medical professions. A teenage rift unspools resulting in Marion's departure to the United States to complete his medical training. I admired the depths explored into various subjects, Ethiopian politics, surgery, Christian evangelism, the state of American medicine and safety-net hospitals. There were so many background facts that informed just who Marion and Shiva were as themselves and to each other. Beautifully written and painstakingly laid out, this book was a real pleasure. The audio version was wonderfully narrated as well.
5/5 Stars.
I appreciate that over the course of all the books in the Alphabet Series, Kinsey Millhone manages to advance in one way or another. What I appreciate less is the mundane details of Kinsey's life. I actually spent two pages reading about what was happening to her car in a car wash. At that point I considered packing it in on this series. So what if I received X for free in exchange for a review, is that worth my time reading about what someone had for lunch? And how many soft rag mechanisms are inside the car wash? But, on the mystery side, this one played out fairly well.
