Author: whatmeread

Review 2666: Classics Club Spin Result! ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore

~ whatmeread ~ 4 Comments

I have to admit I picked this play for my Classics Club list because knowledge of the plot was a major clue in the first Midsomer book, The Killings at Badger’s Drift. A clue that I missed.

John Ford was a playwright in the Jacobean and Caroline eras. Really nothing is known about him, and although I took a graduate course in drama that started with Christopher Marlowe and included Jonson, Kidd, Webster, and Tourneur, he was never mentioned. He was a famous playwright during the reign of Charles I, and his plays usually deal with the tension between passion and the laws of society. ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore is his best-known play, and despite its subject matter, it is regarded as a classic of English literature.

And this is truly a gruesome play, with few redeeming characters. The drama is around a situation that evolves immediately in Act I. Arabella is a beauty of Parma who is courted by several noblemen. But it is Giovanni, her own brother, who wins her, and their relationship is consummated at the end of Act I. Spicy stuff!

Arabella is being courted by Soranto, but he has his own drama. He once seduced Hippolyta with promises of marriage if her husband died. Her husband now lost and believed to be dead, her reputation is ruined for nothing, because Soranto has dropped her. When she confronts him, he calls her a few bad names. She wants her revenge, and Vasquez, Soranto’s Iago-like servant, pretends to be sympathetic only to learn her plans.

As could be expected but apparently isn’t, Arabella finds herself in a situation where she has to get married. She reluctantly agrees to marry Soranto.

Interestingly, we seem to be expected to sympathize with Arabella and Giovanni. Certainly, there aren’t any other nicer characters. The Cardinal favors a Roman nobleman after he murders a man, and the Priest, who has been Giovanni’s confidante, runs away when things get dicey. Arabella’s governess apparently sees nothing wrong in her having an affair with her brother.

No one goes unpunished, but the fate of the women is much more gruesome than that of the men.

I thought the play was surprisingly readable and went very quickly. It doesn’t have beautiful speeches like Shakespeare, but it is partially in verse. I am sure its audiences found it very exciting.

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Review 2665: Dean Street December! The Coldstone

~ whatmeread ~ 3 Comments

Here’s an old-fashioned mystery/suspense novel that has everything—an ancient secret, rumors of buried treasure, a curse, a possible ghost, and a romance. What more could you want?

When Anthony Colstone unexpectedly inherits Stonegate, he is asked to promise never to move or disturb a ring of standing stones (well, just two of them) in one of his fields. But offered no explanation, Anthony refuses to promise, and of course this request makes him curious about the stones.

One of the first things he does when he arrives is to go look at the stones, about which everyone in the village is suspiciously close-mouthed. He has to plunge through a hedge to see them, and while he is there, he notices a stranger staring at him with a hostile expression.

Anthony is referred for information to his benefactor’s elderly daughters, Miss Agatha and Miss Arabel, but they simply hint at dreadful things and refer him to Susan Bowyer, at more than one hundred, the oldest resident of the village. He doesn’t learn much from her, but he meets her great-granddaughter, Susan, down from London for a visit, and is much struck. We like both Susans immediately but know the younger one has some kind of relationship with the strange man Anthony saw in the field.

Anthony’s first night in the house is disturbed by a feeling that someone else besides the servants is in the house, too. He goes down to the library and is knocked over the head but not before he sees what appears to be the portrait of one of his female ancestors moving her arm. We learn that he saw Susan, and her gasp prevented two housebreakers from breaking his leg.

Anthony awakens in a different room with his head in a woman’s lap, but when he regains consciousness, she runs away. He knows it was Susan, though, because he has noticed her resemblance to the portrait. From her, he learns of a secret passageway between Susan Bowyer’s house and his. He also hears confusing rumors of fire and devils under the altar stone of the standing stones.

What is going on? Certainly, a man named Garry has copied a key to the house and is breaking in. But isn’t the secret hidden out in the field?

This novel turns out to be lots of fun, and it doesn’t fall into the cliché of having Anthony doubt Susan when he realizes she knows Garry.

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Review 2664: The Bus on Thursday

~ whatmeread ~ 6 Comments

Well, this is certainly a strange book. It has been billed as a horror novel, but I think that’s misleading.

Eleanor Millet begins her story, which is related as blog entries, in a bad place. She is recovering from breast cancer after a mastectomy. She has lost her boyfriend and her job and has had to return to live with her mother. She is angry and outspoken and pretty darn funny, but we notice right away that she has poor taste in friends and men.

Her description of the path her cancer diagnosis took grabbed me right away, because last year I was called back (which in itself is fairly terrifying) for first an ultrasound mammogram and then two, count ’em, two biopsies. Luckily, I was okay, but Eleanor was not.

Now Eleanor can perhaps turn her life around. She gets her dream job—a teaching position in a very small town in the Snowy Mountains. But already she seems to be behaving a little off-kilter.

Eleanor is urgently needed because the previous teacher, Miss Barker, has disappeared without a trace. The school staff are Eleanor and Glenda, the school secretary, and the school holds all of the town elementary and middle school students up to age 14, with one boy, Ryan, who seems suspiciously older. Glenda behaves as if Eleanor has committed a crime by taking Miss Barker’s place, and Eleanor’s home used to be Miss Barker’s and has a lot of locks on the doors.

Things start out strange, with people treating Eleanor in an oddly hostile way, and two people telling her that her cancer was her own fault. The local minister tells her she had cancer because she is possessed by a demon.

This is all very strange, but Eleanor’s reactions are over the top, and she almost immediately begins drinking too much, having an inappropriate relationship with one of her students’ guardians, and behaving inappropriately with her students. She starts having bizarre dreams and soon we’re wondering about her reliability as narrator, even her sanity.

I am a critic of book blurbs, and the one on the back of my book seems particularly misleading, speaking of a “portrait of recovery and self-discovery.” Things are a lot darker than that.

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Review 2663: The Hours Before Dawn

~ whatmeread ~ 11 Comments

Boy, if you like a good thriller, this Celia Fremlin is terrific! I wonder why I never heard of her before. Since the summer before last, I had been trying to find a reasonably priced copy of her Uncle Paul. In May, another blogger told me she had found one, so I looked again and ended up with a set of three novels. One more to go!

Louise is exhausted. She has a young baby, Michael, who won’t sleep through the night and two girls, ages six and eight. In with the times, her husband, Mark, isn’t much help and even complains about the baby and the untidy house. Louise also has some objectionable neighbors. Mrs. Philips, who shares a wall, complains every day about the noise her children make. Mrs. Hooper has a talent for roping Louise into things she doesn’t want to do, like taking care of her baby, Christine. Mrs. Morgan is always condoling with her and criticizing the others, but Louise knows she does the same with the others.

Louise and Mark have decided to rent a room on their top floor, but Louise is surprised when Mis Brandon shows up to take it. She looks too prosperous and respectable to need to rent someone’s room, and there is something intense about her. But she teaches school at a local primary and is too respectable for Louise to turn away.

Louise begins to have strange dreams, but there are also some odd events that occur, and Louise is so tired, she thinks she may be imagining things. Tony Hooper, a young boy, tells her Miss Brandon is a spy, because he saw her going through Mark’s desk as well as his own mother’s. Then one night Louise takes Michael out for a walk so as not to disturb Mrs. Philips and falls asleep on a park bench. When she awakens, Michael and his pram are gone. She goes to the police and incoherently tells them her story only to find Michael and his pram at home, the baby asleep in his bed.

Now she feels she is branded not just a poor housewife but a lunatic. Mark is angry with her because he thinks she is jealous of Miss Brandon on his behalf. But Louise is determined to investigate her lodger.

This is a terrific little thriller that builds suspense throughout and ends with a bang. I’m really enjoying these books.

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Review 2662: The Killing Stones

~ whatmeread ~ 1 Comment

Ann Cleeves retired the Jimmy Perez series a while back, so I was delighted to hear she had brought him back. He has moved from the Shetland Islands to the Orkneys—with a milder climate and more pastoral scenery—and lives with his partner and boss, Willow, and their three-year-old son, James. Oh, and it’s the Christmas season. What better time for a mystery than Christmas?

Willow is away from their home on the mainland island when Jimmy gets an urgent call to Westray Island. His good friend Archie Stout, whom he was raised with, is missing. Archie’s wife Vaila says he was on his way to meet pals at the pub but never got there, a concern with Jimmy as there was a big storm that night. Jimmy finds Archie at an old archaeological dig, where his head has been mashed by one of the Westray story stones—two Neolithic stones with Viking inscriptions that Archie’s father helped discover and interpret. Unfortunately, because of the storm, evidence is thin.

Willow takes Jimmy off the lead because he’s too close to the victim and leads the case herself, even though she is on maternity leave and a few weeks out from having their baby. Jimmy returns home to follow up leads on the mainland. They find that Archie was upset because, since his father Magnus’s death, he has found his notebooks showing that Magnus, a self-educated farmer, did most of the work on the Westray stones even though Tony Johnson, a professor who visited occasionally, had taken all the credit, a discovery which launched Tony’s career. Tony and his wife were on the island the day of the murder. But there are other leads, including Archie’s possible affair with his wife’s ex-friend Rosalie Gruman.

Jimmy, following up on the mainland with anyone who had been on Westray the night Archie was killed, has been trying to talk to George Riley, a schoolteacher. But before he can meet him, George is also found dead, killed with the second stone. Jimmy finds out that George was writing a children’s book about the discovery of the stones that alleges Johnson stole Magnus Stout’s work.

If I have any criticism of this book, which moves right along and is certainly perplexing, it’s that Cleeves provides almost no information that could lead readers to the killer until the very end. However, she does a great job at misdirection. I’m not really sure what I think of Willow, who does a lot of the investigating in this one. She appeared in several previous books, but I still don’t have much sense of her.

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Get Set for the Pontoppidan Review-Along!

~ whatmeread ~ 3 Comments

In November, maybe you saw FictionFan’s announcement of the Henrik Pontoppidan Review-Along, and maybe you didn’t, but it’s not too late to plunge in! Although the impetus has mostly been hers, we are co-hosting the review-along to take place beginning in January and ending March 16, 2026.

The novel we picked is A Fortunate Man, which is also published as Lucky Per. It’s a real doorstopper, though, and also may not be easily available, so if you want to participate, any work of Pontopiddan’s will do. FictionFan has listed in her announcement the works that are available. You can see my review of The White Bear here, and it is novella length for those who don’t want to read as much.

We hope you’ll pop in and read with us! Pontoppidan was an important Danish writer, a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and before I found The White Bear I had never heard of him. Maybe our review-along will acquaint a few more people with him.

Slip either of us a comment to get going!

Review 2661: Dean Street December! Charlotte Fairlie

~ whatmeread ~ 9 Comments

When Charlotte Fairlie was a girl her relationship with her widowed father was close. Then he met someone, and she seemed to be nice, but as soon as they were married, she became jealous of Charlotte. In the end, he sent Charlotte to his brother, and she never saw him again. (Oddly, she reflects later that it was the only thing he could do, but I think not.)

Now Charlotte has achieved her goal since she was in school. She has been appointed head of St. Elizabeth’s, her old school. She is young for such a position but has been wearing a stodgy hat to board meetings to disguise that fact. The only thorn in her side is Miss Pinkerton, who thinks she should have had the position and is a real troublemaker.

A new girl starts at the school, Tessa MacRyne. She is an unusual child, self-possessed but homesick for her island home in Western Scotland. Charlotte catches her running away one day and learns that a letter from her mother has informed her that her parents are divorcing and her mother has returned to her parents in the U. S. Tessa feels she must return home to comfort her father. Charlotte’s handling of the situation earns her Tessa’s affection and an invitation to the island of Targ during summer break.

A friendship begins between Charlotte and Lawrence Swayne, the headmaster of the boys’ school. Unexpectedly, her proposes marriage to her, thinking they would make a great partnership.

I found this novel to be deeply touching and involving. I generally think of Stevenson’s books as very light romance, but I felt this book was a little deeper.

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Review 2660: Little Boy Lost

~ whatmeread ~ 8 Comments

When World War II broke out in France, Hilary Wainwright left his pregnant wife Lisa in Paris to rejoin his regiment, thinking that the British would be fighting in France. He only saw his son, John, once, shortly after he was born. Later, he heard that Lisa, who was working with the resistance, was dead. He had no idea what happened to the baby, but he once received a visit from Pierre Verdier, the fiancé of Lisa’s best friend, Jeanne. He reported that Lisa had given the baby to Jeanne shortly before she was arrested, but that now Jeanne was dead, and he did not know what happened to the baby.

The war is over, and Pierre returns. He tells Hilary he wants to look for John for him. Hilary is now ambivalent about finding his son. When Lisa was killed, he envisioned getting comfort from raising his son, but it has been five years. Now he’s more worried about how to tell whether any boy they find is really his.

Pierre eventually traces a boy who might be John to a Catholic orphanage in Northern France. Hilary goes to Paris to meet the people Pierre traced. He has always loved France, but post-war, the country is in dire straits. Hilary travels to the northern town to try to determine whether the boy, called Jean, is his.

Frankly, I disliked Hilary pretty much all the way through this novel. The Afterword says that it takes Hilary until the last few pages to know his own mind, but in fact, he uses every excuse to try to disassociate himself from responsibility. When he thinks he would be betraying Lisa if he accidentally took home the wrong boy, for example, it seems clear from what is said about her that she would have taken Jean as soon as she saw his plight.

Small spoiler—when it seemed Hilary was going to use his lust for an obvious slut to break his promises, I was really disgusted.

That being said, I still enjoyed reading this novel, which is touching and insightful into human weakness. It also provides a post-war view of France that is bleak and that I hadn’t read of before.

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Review 2659: Study for Obedience

~ whatmeread ~ 12 Comments

The unnamed narrator moves to another country, one she describes as a northern country of her family’s ancestors, to live with and be housekeeper to her recently divorced brother. She has been raised, she says, to curb her natural inclinations and be obedient. Certainly, her relationship with her brother looks more and more disturbing as the book progresses. For example, a point that comes out early on, she bathes and dresses her brother, who is not an invalid. Later, we learn that he insists she watch TV with both the sound and the subtitles off.

But how trustworthy a narrator is she? Her whole existence seems colored by a twisted view of life. For example, early on, she says that when she quit her job, her coworkers were so pleased to get rid of her that they gave her a big party. Well, isn’t that a tradition for a long-serving employee?

Her attitude is entirely negative—taking everything on herself. Despite being fluent in several languages, she is unable to learn the language of her new home. Almost immediately after her arrival, her brother departs for an unexplained reason, so she finds herself cut off, unable to make herself understood, with only a three-legged dog for company. She begins to sense that she’s being blamed for a series of agricultural disasters, as if she’s a witch. Since her Jewish ancestors were forced to leave this area during the war, she reads a lot into this.

Actually, she reads a lot into everything, tortuously examining every glance, every event. The book doesn’t really have a plot; it’s more about her exhaustive examinations of everything. If it hadn’t been so short, I would have quit reading it, because as another StoryGraph reader said, I felt like I was being psychologically tortured.

There is a turn to the book, but it just becomes more perverse. I read it for my Booker Project.

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