Day 969: Woman with a Secret

~ whatmeread ~ 3 Comments

Cover for Woman with a SecretNicki Clements is a woman with a secret that involves an embarrassing incident with a policeman. So, when she sees him stopping cars along the road on her route to take her son’s forgotten gym bag to school, she turns around and goes another way. Unfortunately, the police are investigating a murder, and her behavior makes her look suspicious.

Nicki knows nothing about the murder, but she does know the victim, Damon Blundy, a controversial columnist. Or at least, she thought she knew him until recently. That is part of the labyrinth of secrets Nicki is keeping.

Detective Simon Waterhouse is back in form, assisted on occasion by his wife ex-CID officer Charlie Zailer. This murder is an odd one, appearing as it does to leave clues for the police, but Simon is just odd enough himself to figure them out.

Sophie Hannah is up to her usual with this novel, presenting us with a complicated crime plotted and carried out by a very twisted individual. All of Hannah’s characters tend to be peculiar, including Waterhouse. We get deeply involved, especially with Nicki, whose painful past is pursuing her even now.

Related Posts

The Dead Lie Down

The Truth-Teller’s Lie

The Wrong Mother

Day 968: Lost Among the Living

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for Lost Among the LivingIt is three years after World War I. Jo Manders is working as a paid companion to her husband’s aunt, Dottie Forsyth, after her husband Alex disappeared during the war. Jo has been in a limbo of grief and practical concerns. Although he is assumed dead, Alex has not been declared dead, so Jo cannot receive a pension. Penniless, she was forced to take the job with Dottie, who is often unpleasant or rude.

Jo has been traveling with Dottie through Europe buying art from newly impoverished nobility. But now they are on their way to Dottie’s home, Wych Elm House, which has been closed for some time. Dottie’s son Martin is returning home from a hospital where he’s been treated since the war, and Dottie has summoned home her husband with the plan of finding Martin a wife.

On the first day at the house, Jo walks into a room and sees a young girl in gray and pearls. It takes her some time to realize she’s seen a ghost—Dottie’s mentally ill daughter Franny who died during the war by falling off the roof. Franny had hallucinations and claimed that a demon dog named Princer protected her. In the village, Jo hears that children claimed to have met Franny and Princer in the woods. On the same day that Franny died, the body of a man was found in the woods, torn to pieces.

As Franny keeps appearing to Jo, sometimes leaving things for her to find, Jo begins to believe that Franny was murdered. She also wonders about one of Dottie’s clients, a  mysterious Colonel Mabry, who seems to know something about Alex.

St. James just keeps getting better and better at her chosen combination of suspense, the supernatural, and romance. In this case, a little of the mystery was lessened because there was only one plausible romantic partner for Jo, but still, this is a very suspenseful, eerie novel.

Related Posts

The Haunting of Maddy Clare

An Inquiry into Love and Death

Silence for the Dead

Day 967: The Danish Girl

~ whatmeread ~ 3 Comments

Cover for The Danish GirlThe Danish Girl is another example of how untrustworthy book blurbs are for conveying the sense and feel of a novel. The blurb talks about “the glitz and glamour of 1920’s Copenhagen, Paris, and Dresden.” Yes, there is a bit of going about to bistros in Paris, but this novel is not about glitz and glamour. It is mostly about the tender relationship between two people, Greta and her husband Einar, who becomes the first man to undergo a sex change operation. Ebershoff lightly based this fictional book on the lives of Lili Elbe and Gerda Wegener, both artists, but he says the details of their lives are wholly invented.

It is Greta who realizes something first. She is a portrait painter with a deadline. When an opera singer can’t make her sitting, Greta asks Einar to put on a stocking so she can use his leg as a model. Later, she has him put on a dress. Einar is a delicate man who is not self-aware. From the time he begins dressing up as Lily, he becomes more and more abstracted from his painting and his former life. Greta sees him drifting vaguely away from Einar, becoming Lily.

I wondered if Ebershoff’s description of Lily’s state of mind really reflected how a transexual person would feel, as Lily seems barely able to remember anything about Einar and vice versa. It almost seemed more like a description of a person with multiple personalities. But I don’t know much about this subject.

This is not a novel of action or plot. It is more about the states of mind of the people involved. It is sympathetic and touching. I didn’t think it would be my subject matter, but I found it affecting.

Related Posts

The 19th Wife

A Place Called Winter

The Other Daughter

 

Day 966: Last Post

~ whatmeread ~ 5 Comments

Cover for Last PostBest Book of the Week!
This last volume of Ford Madox Ford’s modernist work Parade’s End is unique in that its main character, Christopher Tietjens, barely appears, even though the book continues to be about him. It may be my imagination, but it seems as if he has been less of a presence with each book.

This volume is narrated from the point of view of four characters during a single day. Mark Tietjens, Christopher’s older brother, begins and ends it. Mark has been overcome by a stroke and is not speaking. He and his wife, Marie-Léonie, are living in a country cottage with Christopher and Valentine Wannop. They have built Mark a hut with no walls from which he watches and listens to the events of the countryside.

It is some time after the events of volume 3, but Mark remembers Armistice Day and the days following that brought them to the cottage. The peace of the cottage is about to be disturbed, though, because the vengeance of Christopher’s wife, Sylvia Tietjens, has provoked a number of people to descend upon it.

Sylvia has incited the eccentric tenant of Groby, the Tietjen’s ancestral home, to fell the great tree of Groby, and it has taken part of the house with it. Mrs. de Bray Pape has been egged on by Sylvia to belatedly ask permission from Mark. Accompanied by Christopher’s son, Mark, who keeps trying to draw her away, Mrs. de Bray Pape subjects the older Mark to an inaccurate lecture on history. Since Sylvia has hinted to everyone that Mark is ill from syphilis, they can’t understand why he won’t speak to them.

Subsequent sections of the volume are from the points of view of Marie-Léonie, Valentine, and Sylvia. As the cottage environment descends into chaos with the arrival of more visitors urged on by Sylvia, Sylvia makes a momentous decision.

Although I have not read much about Ford’s life, some of the notes in my annotated edition by Carcanet lead me to believe the novels are at least partially autobiographical, both in the portrayal of the war and in the personal relationships. I have really enjoyed this novel about a man who is completely misunderstood because his name has been blackened by his ex-wife and the wife of a woman whose husband owed him money. Some of the novel deals with the idiocy behind World War I, but it is mainly about the end of an era. Christopher thinks of himself as a man who belongs in the 18th century, and he is a symbol for the destruction of a way of life, with of a kind of outlook that others think must be dragged into modern times. I will be looking for more by Ford.

Related Posts

Some Do Not

No More Parades

A Man Could Stand Up

Day 965: Strange Company

~ whatmeread ~ 2 Comments

Cover for Strange CompanyI read about half of Strange Company but decided not to finish it. It just wasn’t the book for me. I thought it might be interesting because it is about Native Americans during the Civil War.

Roderick “Dhu” Walker is a member of a group of the Cherokee Nation called the Pins, for pins they wear under their lapels. They are traditional Cherokees on the side of the Union who begged the government to protect them from the Confederates under the terms of their treaty. The government did nothing, though, and the Confederacy has forced the Pins to fight on its side.

Before a battle in Missouri, some of the Pins decide not to fight but instead to kill Confederate soldiers during the battle. Dhu kills a couple men but mostly because they get in his way while he’s trying to escape. Later, though, he is captured by the Confederates as a deserter.

As a prisoner, Dhu is teamed up with a Union soldier and forced to fight him at the instigation of Captain Gordon Early. This amusement is only stopped by the intervention of the Colonel. When the Union soldier, Ben Lacey, tells Dhu that Early is off to escort a load of gold from Mexico, Dhu talks Ben into escaping with the idea that, along with some other Cherokees, they’ll intercept the shipment.

The novel moves along fast enough but does little else. There seems to be no idea of characterization. Sentences are short and choppy. Although the writing is grammatical, it is not polished by any means. Any metaphors are clichés. In short, the novel is not very good. If you are interested in reading a Western, you’ll be much better off with one of the “Related Posts” at the bottom of this post.

Disclosure: This eBook was sent to me by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Related Posts

The Son

Appaloosa

The Sisters Brothers

Day 964: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest

~ whatmeread ~ 5 Comments

Cover for The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's NestI did an odd thing here. I saw that the third book of the Millennium Series was out in a graphic novel by Denise Mina, the terrific Scottish mystery writer, so I ordered it without looking for the other two (which I have since bought). So, I am reading and reviewing them out of order.

Thrust like this into the last volume and having not read the original books for several years, I had difficulty at first getting oriented. I especially had some problems with the multitude of characters, not realizing a cast of minor characters appears at the end. I remembered the general plot but not all the subplots. Still, this is not a problem for those who have read the series from the beginning.

Of course, the plot is the finale of the story of Lisbeth Salander, unjustly accused of murder of three people and of attempted murder of her own father, Zala. It is up to Mikael Blomkvist and the staff of Millennium Magazine as well as her other friends to try to help gather the evidence for her trial. In the meantime, the police are searching for her half-brother Niedermann, the scary murderer who can feel no pain.

The art and story line of this graphic novel are really fine, getting a bulky novel right down to its essence. This is the first time I’ve read the graphic novel for a book I’m already familiar with, and it made me contrast the two. I think the one thing a graphic novel loses is all sense of the original’s climactic moments. In particular, I’m thinking of two scenes: the one during the trial when Lisbeth finally speaks and the fight in the factory. The fight boils down several pages of suspenseful writing into a couple of frames. There’s no way to build up suspense similar to that of the novel. Still, my dabbling in this genre has made me feel it is an interesting one as long as I stay away from super heroes, which really bore me.

Related Posts

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The Girl Who Played with Fire

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest

Day 963: The Trouble with Goats and Sheep

~ whatmeread ~ 3 Comments

Cover for The Trouble with Goats and SheepMrs. Creasy has disappeared, and the neighborhood is worried. Ten-year-old Gracie and her best friend Tilly decide that if they find God, he will help them find Mrs. Creasy. The neighbors are concerned because nine years ago, some of them did a horrible thing. People talk to Mrs. Creasy, and they are afraid she has found out.

Walter Bishop is the neighborhood outcast. The neighbors have wanted to drive Walter out of the neighborhood since they decided he did something wrong. As the novel alternates between following Gracie and the other neighbors, we finally learn what happened nine years before.

link to NetgalleyAlthough I was interested enough in this novel to finish it, I had some problems with it. The first was with the portions that Gracie narrates in first person. Some of these sections do not sound like a ten-year-old. Although at times the two girls are convincingly naive, sometimes Gracie shows a sense of irony that a ten-year-old wouldn’t have. I have taught college level, and trust me, even most college freshmen don’t understand irony. There is an interesting discussion of the problems of using child narrators in this issue of Tea or Books? I also found it unlikely that Gracie, who comes from a family that is not at all religious, would suddenly decide that God is the answer.

I felt at times that I was being clubbed over the head with the novel’s message and at other times manipulated, as the characters’ secrets are revealed. I like the idea behind this novel, about what happens when a man is persecuted because he is a little odd, but I had some problems with its execution. So, this one is a maybe for me.

Related Posts

The Death of Bees

Swamplandia!

We Need New Names

Day 962: The Red Queen

~ whatmeread ~ 2 Comments

Cover for The Red QueenThe Red Queen is a novel split in two. The first half is a narrative written by the ghost of an actual 18th century Korean princess, Lady Hyegyŏng. The second half follows a modern British academic, Dr. Barbara Halliwell.

“Lady Hong” relates her difficult life as the girl chosen at the age of nine to be the bride of Crown Prince Sado. This role is already a perilous one, and she and her parents are terrified. It is made more terrifying, though, by the fraught relations between Prince Sado and his demanding father King Yŏngjo.

When it slowly becomes apparent that Prince Sado is mentally disturbed and somewhat dangerous, his wife’s life becomes even more one of stress and fear. The princess’s story eventually builds to the climax of her husband’s horrible death.

The Crown Princess’s story is interrupted occasionally by the comments of her ghost, who provides an acrid note informed by writings of thinkers like Voltaire and Freud. Obviously, this ghost has been doing a little reading since she died. I found these interjections odd, but they did little to disturb the flow of what was a fascinating story.

Then I got to Barbara’s half of the book. Barbara has received the princess’s memoirs anonymously and takes them along with her on a trip to an academic conference in South Korea. The ghost makes clear that she sees Barbara as a host whose purpose is to extend her legacy. Barbara is fascinated by the memoir and goes to visit some of the settings of the princess’s life, but she is also engaging in an affair with a famous Dutch sociologist who is the keynote speaker for the conference.

Here is where I thought the narrative broke down. Despite the occasional presence of the ghost and some similarities of taste and experience between Barbara and the ghost, I felt that there was only a flimsy connection between the two halves of the novel. And I wasn’t really interested in Barbara and her fascination with Jan Van Jost.

Additionally, the second half is narrated by some sort of pixie-like guardian angels who have no apparent role. What’s wrong with third-person limited? She’s writing in that anyway with an occasional lapse into second person plural. This seems like a pointless device that becomes even more wink-wink when Drabble introduces herself as a minor character. So, with a little sleight-of-hand, the novel becomes postmodern, but it does not contain any of the cleverness of technique and approach of other postmodern novels I’ve read. This novel is introduced as a tragicomedy, but I didn’t find it comic. Whimsical, perhaps, ironic, certainly.

Related Posts

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

Empress of the Night

The Orphan Master’s Son

Day 961: Rush Oh!

~ whatmeread ~ 4 Comments

Cover for Rush Oh!Best Book of the Week!
Perhaps I am harping on this subject, but yet again a distinctive authorial voice has made for an outstanding novel. In this case, the voice is that of Mary Davidson, the 18-year-old daughter of a whaler in 1908, Eden, Australia. Mary is relating the events of the year from a distance of 30 years later.

At that time, some of the whaling in Australia was done from shore, the whalers rowing out to chase the whales. In this activity, the whalers of Eden were assisted by, amazingly, a group of killer whales, who behaved more or less like really rough sheepdogs, herding and battering the other whales. In the novel, the leader of the killer whales, Tom, summons the whalers when whales are in the bay by smacking his tail loudly, and the whalers at times attempt to call the killer whales by smacking their oars.

The story begins with the arrival of a young man hoping for a seat in one of the boats. He is John Beck, reputed to be an ex-Methodist minister. Beck very soon seems to be courting Mary, although he is inconsistent in his attentions. Also, there are some indications that he has not been strictly truthful about his past.

Mary’s father George is short on men and had a very bad whaling season the year before, when they caught not a single whale. Although George “Fearless” Davidson (an actual historical person) is highly esteemed in the region, the financial situation is dire, and he must accept this totally inexperienced man onto his second boat.

The novel is peppered with rampaging whaling scenes and descriptions of the whaling life. It is written in a sprightly, witty, and engaging tone that reflects the personality of naive young Mary. Although it documents a disappearing way of life, it is wonderfully entertaining, and I loved every minute of it.

Related Posts

The Rathbones

Galore

History of the Rain