Category: books

Day 801: Wolf Winter

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Cover for Wolf WinterBest Book of the Week!
It is 1717. A few days earlier, Maija and her family arrived at their new home on the side of Blackåsen Mountain in the Lapland area of Sweden. They moved away from Finland because Maija’s husband Paavo, formerly a fisherman, began to see dead men in the water. But here on the mountain he is ineffective and frightened.

Maija’s daughters Fredericka and Dorothea are out with the goats when they find the body of a man. Although the nearby settlers are quick to claim an animal attack, it is clear to Maija that the man, Eriksson, was killed by a person using a lance. She has already felt an unease on the mountain and believes they must find the murderer. Unfortunately for the search, Eriksson seems to have been disliked by all.

Maija’s family has had some experience with the older ways, even though they are forbidden by the church. Fredericka, however, was being instructed in them by her grandmother without her mother’s knowledge. Fredericka finds herself being haunted by Eriksson, who wants her to find his murderer, and tries to seek help in the supernatural from the Lapps.

Another important character is the new priest for the region. He comes to visit the area and tries to help with the investigation. At first, he seems cold and unready for a position in such a wilderness. But he is actually bewildered. He was a court priest and a friend to the king until he was abruptly sent away from court.

When the snow comes early and kills the harvest, Paavo decides to travel to the coast to earn some money. Maija is left to struggle through a particularly harsh winter with the girls. There are wolves on the mountain, and some of the settlers believe the mountain itself is evil. No one has found Eriksson’s killer, but Maija is still looking.

link to NetgalleyThis novel creates an atmospheric, fully realized world that captured me from the first words. Although it is centered around a mystery, it is just as successful as a historical novel, with a touch of the mystical, set in an unusual place and time. You can easily imagine the cold and hardships. This novel is excellent.

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Day 800: The Day She Died

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Cover for The Day She DiedI recently discovered that Catriona McPherson, the author of the Dandy Gilver historical mysteries, also writes much darker contemporary thrillers. A while back I reviewed The Child Garden, which came out in September. The Day She Died was published last year.

The reason I mention The Child Garden is that when I began reading The Day She Died, some of its elements seemed familiar—a lonely cottage in Scotland, a distraught man, a damaged heroine. But this novel is a different story altogether.

Jessie Constable has spotted Gus King several times in town and even met him once, an encounter that thoroughly embarrassed her, but he doesn’t seem to recognize her when she finds him distraught in the grocery store with his young daughter. He has been talking loudly on the phone, and he explains to her that his wife Becky has just informed him she is leaving him and the children.

Jessie decides he shouldn’t be driving, so she offers to drive him home, even though she will have to take a cab back. Once she arrives at his remote cottage on the seaside, though, she finds herself drawn further into his problems. Almost immediately after they get to the cottage, the police arrive to inform Gus that his wife has been found dead in a car accident, an apparent suicide.

Gus begs her to stay, and soon she finds herself living with him and his two small children. Their relationship quickly turns physical. Still, Jessie keeps wondering about little things that don’t make sense. Where is Ros, Becky’s best friend, who looks so much like her? Who is the man who keeps trying to get her attention but can barely speak English?

Chillingly, the book begins with a woman imprisoned in a small space. We don’t know who she is or what the time frame is, but we know that at some point Jessie’s romantic adventure will turn dark.

I figured out some of the mysteries of this novel well in advance but not all of them. Jessie’s story is gripping and the situation much more complex than it seems. This book is a great psychological thriller.

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Day 799: The Sunken Cathedral

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Cover for The Sunken CathedralThe Sunken Cathedral is Kate Walbert’s homage to Claude Debussy’s piano prelude of the same name. In turn, Debussy’s piano prelude was inspired by folk tales of a sunken city off the coast of Brittany. Walbert’s novel, like Debussy’s prelude, is impressionistic in nature. It begins with images of New York City under water after storms caused by global warming.

The novel moves immediately to a few months earlier, when we meet several different characters living in New York. Marie and Simone are two elderly French women who decide to take a course in painting. Marie is the principal character of the novel. When she was a child, her family members were victims of the Holocaust and she was in hiding.

Elizabeth is the mother of a middle school boy. She becomes obsessed with the Who We Are stories the school assigns the families to write. In this section I think Walbert is gently skewering the upper-class parents who are so wrapped up in their children’s school activities. But Elizabeth is unable to do the assignment, seeming to lack a sense of self.

The structure of this novel is unusual, as it presents us with little shards of each characters’s story, frequently interrupted by footnotes. Sometimes the information in the footnote is more important to our understanding than the main text. It took me a while to get interested in this novel, and at times I was irritated by this technique. I would just be getting involved in what was going on when a footnote would appear, sometimes in the middle of a passage, distracting me from the action.

Still, the novel is beautifully written. At times I wondered where it was going even though it was obvious where it would end up. I’m not certain, though, that I understand the purpose of the novel, except maybe to depict the lives of several people before the flood.

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Day 798: Ghostly

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Cover for GhostlyIn honor of the season, I’m slipping in Ghostly, a new collection of ghost stories edited by Audrey Niffenegger. The stories are quite varied, some rather old, some new, some eerie, some funny. I have only read one of them before, “August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains” by Ray Bradbury. This story, strictly speaking, is more science fiction but works well as a ghost story. It is certainly haunting.

My favorite story in this collection is a subtle one by Edith Wharton, “Pomegranate Seed.” Charlotte Ashby has married a widower who was understood to be under his previous wife’s thumb. Charlotte begins to notice that he regularly receives letters addressed in a faint handwriting. These letters distress him and give him headaches. She finally realizes they are from an unexpected source.

I also liked “The Beckoning Fair One” by Oliver Onions. In this story Paul Oleron leases the first floor of an old ruined house and finds it occupied. He becomes obsessed with this occupant, who is jealous of his friend Elsie. The result is murder.

“They” by Rudyard Kipling is a story inspired by the early death of Kipling’s daughter. While taking a random drive in the country, the narrator meets a blind lady with a house full of elusive children. The narrator can see them, but it turns out, not everyone can.

“The July Ghost” by A. S. Byatt, has a similar theme. A distressed young man tells a story at a party about his practical landlady. A silent young boy appears often while he is sitting in the garden. It takes him a while to realize that the boy is the landlady’s dead son, whom she yearns to see but cannot. This sad story was also inspired by the death of a child.

“The Specialist’s Hat” by Kelly Link is a newer story about two young girls who are left home with a babysitter by their neglectful father. Although very young, the babysitter lived in the house quite some time ago.

Several of the stories are humorous, the most successful of which is “Honeysuckle Cottage” by P. G. Wodehouse. James Rodman, author of noir crime stories, is bequeathed money and a house by his aunt, the author of sentimental love stories, provided he stay in the house for six months. Rodman discovers, to his horror, that the house is haunted, not by an individual but by a sickly sentimentality that affects everyone who enters it.

link to NetgalleyAnother funny story is “Laura” by Saki. A dying society woman with a sense of mischief says that she would like to come back as an otter and admits she has let out the chickens her husband is so obsessed with and trampled his favorite flowers. After the funeral, which everyone finds irksome because it interferes with important social engagements, an otter begins breaking into the chicken coop and dragging the chickens through the flower garden.

For the most part, I found these stories entertaining and unusual. Niffenegger has included one of her own as well as illustrations and a short introduction before each story. The stories will certainly add atmosphere to your Halloween.

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Day 797: Dissolution

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Cover for DissolutionIt is shortly after the death of Queen Jane in Henry VIII’s reign. Matthew Shardlake is a lawyer employed by Thomas Cromwell, Henry’s vicar general. Like Cromwell, Shardlake believes in reforming the Catholic church to abolish its abuses.

Cromwell has already dissolved the smaller abbeys and is now ready to start on the large ones. His commissioner Singleton has traveled out to investigate an abbey in southern England, Scarnsea, to find an excuse to dissolve it. Cromwell has received a letter from Singleton’s assistant saying that Singleton was murdered. Cromwell dispatches Shardlake to investigate the murder and find an excuse to close the abbey.

Shardlake has just returned from Sussex, and his disability as a hunchback makes him dread another journey in the winter cold. He takes along his own assistant, Mark Poer, who has recently been demoted for becoming involved with a lady in waiting.

When Shardlake arrives at the abbey, he finds that Singleton was decapitated, possibly with a sword. Sometime the same night that Singleton was murdered in the kitchen, someone sacrificed a chicken on the church altar and stole a holy relic.

Shardlake finds a complex environment with many possible suspects, particularly the five senior monks who have access to the keys. He also finds himself unfortunately attracted to Alice, a serving woman employed in the infirmary, as does his assistant Mark.

This is a complicated mystery not just set in a historical time but close to and involving the important events of the time. Shardlake is an interesting character whose faith in his master Cromwell is disturbed by what he learns in his investigation.

Although I picked up on key clues when they appeared and did guess the murderer of Singleton, a lot more happens in the novel that is harder to figure out. I’ve read good things about this series and think it is certainly worth continuing. This book is the first in the series, for those who are interested.

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Day 796: Slade House

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Cover for Slade HouseBest Book of the Week!
I haven’t read any ghost stories lately, so David Mitchell’s Slade House will have to do for a first nod to Halloween. Fans of Mitchell know to expect something unusual from his work, and Slade House is no exception. This novel features a series of characters over five decades all about to set foot in the mysterious Slade House.

Nathan Bishop, a nerdy teenager perhaps on the autism spectrum, is on his way with his mother down Slade Alley looking for Slade House. In the alley they meet a workman and ask him directions. He has never heard of it. They find the small iron gate leading into the gardens, and the workman is the last person ever to see them.

Nathan has taken a little of his mother’s Valium, so he thinks the drug is affecting his vision when the scenery in the Slade House garden fades. But something more sinister is happening while his mother is in the house attending a concert.

It’s difficult to say much more about this novel without revealing too much. Suffice it to say that people are in peril and the suspense builds accordingly. The book is divided into six sections, beginning in 1979, with each one set nine years further on. Each time a person is drawn into the house, never to be seen again.

link to NetgalleyReaders of Mitchell will pay attention in the last section when the name Marinus is mentioned, for they know that a few of the same characters appear in his books, sort of. Let us say that characters with the same names appear in his books. Slade House continues the complex story of horologists that came to the fore in The Bone Clocks.

As usual with Mitchell’s books, Slade House reflects exciting writing, a complex back story, a large creep factor, and a battle between good and evil. What more could you want?

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Day 795: Pitcairn’s Island

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Cover for Pitcairn's IslandThis final novel in the Bounty Trilogy tells what happened to the mutineers from Mutiny on the Bounty. As explained in the introduction, the fate of the mutineers was not known until Pitcairn’s Island was rediscovered by an American ship in 1808. Although the mutineers arrived 18 years before, only one survived, surrounded by the wives and progeny of himself and others.

As the authors explain, the only information available about the fate of the mutineers was directly or indirectly from Alexander Smith, but those sources failed to agree and many accounts were improbable. So Nordhoff and Hall presented what they thought was the most likely version of events.

The mutineers and their companions arrive at Pitcairn’s Island in 1790. They have already tried to settle twice in Tahiti and once in the Friendly Islands (Tonga) but had to leave for fear of discovery or because of hostile natives. With the nine mutineers are six native men and twelve native women. Although all of the islanders get along well at the beginning while they are busy building their homes and planting their crops, the seeds of failure are already there, in the quality of some of the mutineers.

The first problems are caused by John Williams. He already has a woman named Fasto, but he lusts for Hutia, the wife of one of the native men, Tararu. When disputes over the woman reach the heights of disruption, Fletcher Christian allows Hutia to pick her husband. She picks John Williams, thus introducing the first tension between whites and native men.

But Christian’s biggest mistake is his egalitarian impulse to grant each man a vote on the future of their community. Although he wants to extend this vote to the native men, the whites do not agree, and it is this plus the votes extended to the less scrupulous whites that cause the problems. Eventually, some of the lowest of the men begin treating the native men as their slaves. The final break between whites and natives comes after a vote about ownership of the land, for the whites want to own the land and reduce the natives to servants.

Although most of the novel is peaceful, taking place in a tropical paradise, the worms in the apple are a few of the white men. A palpable tension brews throughout the novel.

If I have a criticism, it is that the final portion of the novel, presented as Alexander Smith’s story to the mate of the Topaz in 1808, goes on for a bit too long past the fate of the islanders into Smith’s discovery of God and the Bible. Other than that, the novel is gripping and a fine conclusion to the trilogy.

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Day 794: Classic Club Spin #10! Selected Poems of Robert Frost

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Cover for Selected PoemsMy book for Classics Club Spin #10 is Selected Poems of Robert Frost. I have to confess to not having quite succeeded in finishing my selection this time, but more than 300 pages of poetry is a lot of poetry to read. I got about halfway through the book.

Poetry is just not my thing, I guess. I did enjoy many of the poems in this book, but they were the same ones I’ve enjoyed before, so it was like visiting old friends—“Mowing,” “Mending Wall,” “After Apple-Picking,” “The Road Not Taken,” “Acquainted with the Night,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Most of these, I notice, are devoted to observations about nature or are about rural work.

I do not so much enjoy what Robert Graves refers to in the introduction as his “poignant country dramas,” like “The Death of the Hired Man.” They seem more like prose to me, which is ironic, since I am generally more comfortable with prose. But they are not what I come to Frost for. I come to him for things like this:

My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.

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