Day 773: We Need New Names

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Cover for We Need New NamesI wanted to like We Need New Names more than I did. It is about an interesting topic and is vividly written, sometimes with striking images. But like some of the commenters on Goodreads, I agree that it seems to be trying to deal with too many issues at once. Somehow, I did not get as involved as I expected.

Darling is a tween girl running with her friends from Paradise, a slum of tin shacks in Zimbabwe. They spend their time playing games and stealing guavas from a richer neighborhood called Budapest. Darling’s father has been away in South Africa for years, trying to find work, but they haven’t heard from him or received any money. While Darling’s mother is traveling to sell things, Darling stays with her grandmother, Mother of Bones.

Eventually we learn that Darling’s family used to live a middle class life in a brick house, but the government knocked down their neighborhood. So, they came to live in Paradise.

Bulawayo’s tale is focused enough until, after a vote against the corrupt government results in retaliation, things become too dangerous and she is sent to live with her aunt in Detroit. Perhaps the last third of the novel reflects Darling’s confusion as a teenager, but it packs in scenes of typical teenage years conflated with growing awareness of issues back home, the disconnected feelings of immigrants, the war in Afghanistan, some sneers at the U.S., and her own homesickness. At some times it feels as if Bulawayo thinks America should be responsible for the welfare of all nations, which it can’t possibly do.

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Day 772: The Haunting of Maddy Clare

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Cover for The Haunting of Maddy ClareBest Book of the Week!
The Haunting of Maddy Clare has been on my reading list for a while. I’ve finally read it, and my first reaction is to immediately look for another book by Simone St. James. It’s not often I encounter a good ghost story. This one is really good.

It’s just after World War I, and Sarah Piper has been living a safe but impoverished and lonely life in London taking temporary secretarial jobs, when her agency sends her to Alastair Gellis. Gellis has an unusual request. He is a wealthy young man who can afford to turn his interests into employment, and his interest is in ghosts.

Alastair’s regular assistant is away, and he has been summoned to the site of a haunting. Sarah’s job is to assist him in recording evidence of a ghost.

Maddy and Alastair travel to Falmouth House and an interview with Mrs. Clare, an elderly woman. She explains that Maddy came to her doorstep years ago as a child. She had been beaten and was barely dressed and covered with mud. She could hardly speak. The Clares took her in and tried to find her people, with no success. She was obviously of the servant class, so they employed her as a maid. She was with them for several years, always frightened and never leaving the house. Then one day she hanged herself in the barn.

Maddy haunts the barn, and Mrs. Clare wants Alastair to get her to leave. She already tried an exorcism, with terrible results. But Mrs. Clare says that Maddy hated men, which is why she asked Alastair to bring a woman.

Sarah learns she is expected to go into the barn accompanied only by a wire recorder and a camera. She finds the experience terrifying. Although she does not see Maddy, Maddy plants images in her mind and asks Sarah to find someone. What she wants is not clear, but Sarah decides to continue.

Shortly thereafter, Alastair’s partner Matthew Ryder arrives. Although he is badly scarred from the war, Sarah is immediately attracted to him. Matthew, on the other hand, thinks Sarah is too fragile for the work and should be dismissed. In the meantime, Sarah has sensed a threatening presence in the village.

This novel drags you in from its first sentences. It also tells a deliciously creepy yet heart-rending story about why Maddy is haunting the barn. If you like ghost stories and enjoy some romance in  your historical fiction as well, you’ll like this novel.

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Day 771: The Santa Klaus Murder

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Cover for The Santa Klaus MurderIt’s Christmas time at the home of the overbearing Sir Osmond Melbury, and the entire family is gathered together for the holidays at his bidding. Sir Osmond is a mean old man who uses the promise of his fortune—or the threat of disinheritance—to keep his family in line.

Sir Osmond has arranged a visit from Santa Klaus and is disappointed when the Santa suit he ordered doesn’t appear on time. But the store sends out another suit and Sir Osmond presses a guest, Oliver Whitcombe, into putting it on and delivering gifts to the children. While the children are playing with Christmas crackers, Sir Osmond is shot to death in his study and Oliver finds the body.

Colonel Halstock, the investigating constable, establishes that Sir Osmond did not commit suicide. He also finds that Sir Osmond planned to rewrite his will, leaving his property in different proportions to his family and his secretary than originally planned. He did not execute the will, so did the murderer kill him to prevent the change, or did he think the new will was already in effect?

Colonel Halstock is left with a house full of suspects who all seem to be hiding something. At the suggestion of Kenneth Stour, a former suitor of Sir Osmond’s daughter Lady Evershot, he asks several of the guests to write up their accounts of the days leading up to Christmas and the event itself. These accounts form the first chapters of the novel.

link to NetgalleyThis is a complex mystery mostly because of the number of people in the house at the time of the murder and the effort of keeping track of where they all were. It is almost completely dependent on opportunity, as all of the characters have the same basic motive. I had a hard time keeping some of the characters straight, and only a few distinct personalities emerge. Still, the tone of this novel is not as distant as that of some of the other Golden Age mysteries I’ve read lately, and I enjoyed it. It will be available October 6 from Poisoned Pen Press.

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Day 770: Captain in Calico

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Cover for Captain in CalicoThe foreword to Captain in Calico, written by George MacDonald Fraser’s daughter, says that it is closely based on the careers of the pirates Captain Jack Rackham and Anne Bonny (Bonney). I would suggest it is more loosely based. With the little I know about the subject, I spotted inaccuracies, and the novel has a completely fabricated ending.

Calico Jack Rackham arrives in the Bahamas full of hope. Although he fell into piracy against his will, he’s kept at it for the past few years, and he and his shipmates have captured a ship full of Spanish silver. But he has heard about a pardon being available, and he hopes to take his pardon so he can marry the girl he left behind, Kate Sampson.

Governor Woodes Rogers isn’t content to simply give his pardon. Jack must betray his shipmates and be captured along with the silver before he gets a pardon. What the governor knows and Jack does not is that his betrayal will be for nothing. Kate Sampson is engaged to be married, to the governor himself.

So, Jack betrays his crew, loses his fortune, and gets his pardon, but he does not get Kate. Afterwards, drunk and angry, he ends up in a duel and is wounded. A voluptuous married woman named Anne Bonney takes him home to heal him and promptly seduces him.

Soon Anne is trying to talk him back into piracy. She has heard the governor is shipping treasure, and she knows the name of the ship. She wants Jack to raise a crew, steal a boat, and stop the ship on the high seas. Jack thinks it’s a risky business, but she talks him into it. In turn, he persuades his friend Major Penner, with whom he had signed on as a privateer, to join him.

George MacDonald Fraser’s novels are marked by more realism and less romanticism than most historical novels, especially from his time. His protagonists are often unsavory types. In this case, Jack starts out by betraying his friends, but I presume we are supposed to be sympathetic with him. I wasn’t. In Fraser’s Flashman novels, in contrast, we are amused by Flashman’s lack of scruples but find his morals abhorrent. Next, Fraser’s novels are usually marked by impeccable research, but this one differs in several respects from the other reading I’ve done on Anne Bonny. For one thing, she ran away to marry Bonny, a poor sailor. In this novel, she was basically sold to Bonney, a rich plantation owner.

link to NetgalleyFinally, this novel falls into a genre that leaves a bad taste in my mouth, wherein a man’s troubles are the fault of a seductive, unprincipled woman. I really don’t like these novels. No matter which sex is leading the other astray, it’s presumed the victims can’t think for themselves. Since a large proportion of the women in American prisons are there for abetting their partners in crime (a statistic I read a while back, so I can’t back it up with a citation), this does seem to happen to women, but in literature it is much more frequently the men who are betrayed. Why do you think that is? (That’s a rhetorical question, but you can answer it if you like.)

So, not one of Fraser’s best, as he frankly admitted. Still, Fraser is a good writer who always manages to keep your attention.

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Day 769: Dandy Gilver and a Bothersome Number of Corpses

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Cover for Dandy GilverDandy Gilver has only the fondest memories of a summer spent with the Lipscotts when she was a girl, especially of the winsome, creative youngest, whom they all called Darling Fleur. Dandy only met Fleur once as an adult and she had changed. She was then a flirty, noisy, but beautiful flapper.

Dandy is surprised to be contacted by Pearl Lipscott, asking her for help with Fleur. Pearl says Fleur has been teaching at a girls’ school and she’s afraid all is not well. She hints at breakdowns in the past and tells Dandy that she and her sister Aurora are not welcome at the school. She wants Dandy and her partner Alec Osborne to go to the school to see if Fleur is all right.

Alec isn’t pleased to be visiting a girls’ school as it limits his own participation in the investigation, but almost as soon as they arrive in Portpatrick, he finds himself another client, an Italian fish and chips shop owner named Joe Aldo. His wife has left with a lover, and he wants to find her and make sure she’s okay.

When Dandy arrives at St. Columba’s, she is mistaken for the replacement for the French teacher, who has left without notice. Dandy goes along, feeling she can learn more from inside the school. But when she sees Fleur, she is shocked. The beautiful, vibrant girl has been replaced by a pale, beige woman. Moreover, when Fleur recognizes Dandy, she flees. Dandy is only able to get her to say that she’s killed four people before she runs away.

The next day the police arrive because a woman’s body was found on the beach and they want someone to see if it is Jean Beauclerc, the French teacher. Fleur volunteers to go but only if Dandy comes with her. At the dreadful sight of the drowned body, Fleur says it is not Miss Beauclerc but then utters the word “five” and runs away again.

Dandy soon realizes Fleur is missing but also that something odd is going on at the school. Even after Dandy is shown up as a fraud by the arrival of the actual French teacher, the headmistress Miss Shank takes her on as an English mistress. In fact, it turns out that Miss Shank was the housekeeper before she took over as headmistress upon the original headmistress’s death, a situation that is odd in itself. The girls seem to spend a lot of time lolling around, with short school hours and little work, while the teachers work feverishly. Five teachers have either died or left the school, and Dandy wonders if these are the five Fleur mentioned.

Joe has been to see the body and says it is not his wife. A witness saw his wife with a man on a cliff the night she disappeared. So, Dandy and Alec are left with three missing women, a mention of five murders, and some kind of wrong-doing at the school.

The Dandy Gilver series set in post-World War I Scotland is always fun. The dialogue is lively, and Dandy is always ready to leave her dull husband and farm to detect with Alec. In this case I thought it takes Dandy and Alec far too long to figure out what Fleur’s comment means, but there is still plenty I didn’t figure out.

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Day 768: The Asylum

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Cover for The AsylumJohan Theorin takes a step away from the island of Öland, the setting of his previous novels, to present this even darker thriller. Its main character is Jan Hauger, a young man whose version of events isn’t always to be trusted.

Jan is  a child care worker who takes a job at a preschool attached to a mental asylum. The preschool is for the children of the inmates, to allow the children to see their parents regularly. Although Jon cares about the welfare of the children, it is clear early on that he has other reasons for being there.

One thing we soon find out about Jan is that as a young man he kept a little boy captive for several hours. We don’t learn why for some time.

Jan has an interest in getting into the asylum, for he believes a woman he once knew as a girl is inside. He has been captivated by thoughts of her for years. Soon, he finds there are ways into the asylum from the preschool.

The asylum has some famous inmates, the most renowned of whom is the serial killer Ivan Rössell. When Jan accepts an unauthorized but seemingly harmless task of secretly delivering mail into the asylum so that the guards can distribute it to the inmates, he finds that Rössell gets the bulk of this mail. But Jan also sees a way to get a message to his friend.

As Jan’s story emerges in three different time streams, we begin to feel his judgment may be impaired. There is something dangerous going on that he is unaware of. As usual, Theorin’s book is atmospheric and compelling.

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Day 767: Still Alice

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Cover for Still AliceBest Book of the Week!
Still Alice is the sometimes harrowing but always compassionate story of a woman diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. Alice Howland regards her life as nearly perfect. At 50 years old, she is a tenured cognitive psychology professor at Harvard who speaks regularly at conferences. Her husband is an important research scientist also at Harvard. She has three adult children. Her only regret is a feeling of loss of the closeness she once had with her husband John. She feels his lab is more important than she is.

Alice begins noticing small little lapses. She occasionally forgets a word or loses something. She puts this down to natural aging until one day when she is on her way home from a run and suddenly gets lost. She is only confused for a few minutes but is disturbed by the incident. After she forgets to go to one of her conferences, she visits a doctor and eventually gets her diagnosis.

What makes this novel unusual is that we see Alice’s deterioration from her own point of view. She understands what is happening to her until she doesn’t. In her case, the progress of the disease is terrifyingly swift. She is diagnosed in the fall, but by the spring she is receiving the only poor teaching evaluations she has ever gotten from her students. We see her loss of pride as her ability to lead her life erodes.

As an older woman, I found some of the tests she undergoes alarming, particularly one where she’s shown a picture of an object and can’t think of its name. I knew what object they were describing, and I also couldn’t think of the name for about a minute. It was a hammock. When we are older, we all have incidents like this, but I think they raise the dread of this disease sometimes. Luckily, I don’t have the gene associated with Alzheimers (although that doesn’t guarantee that I won’t get it), and I haven’t ever had any major episodes like Genova describes.

Genova’s novel makes a strong point about the lack of support for Alzheimer’s patients. She shows how Alice, because she loses language first, is unable to explain that she can still understand what’s going on, at least at times, but people behave as if she cannot.

This novel is excellent. Once you sit down with it, you won’t want to get back up until you finish it.

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Day 766: Miss Bunting

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Cover for Miss BuntingMiss Bunting, an elderly governess, has left her usual home at Marling Hall to live with young Anne Fielding in Hallbury. Anne’s health is considered too delicate for her to live with her parents in Barchester, so Miss Bunting has agreed to take her on, with an eye to improving her health, her poise, and her education.

Miss Bunting is an old-school type of governess, a force in herself, whose presence makes others sit up straight. Still, she is fond of her pupils, too many of whom are being killed in World War II.

Jane Gresham has been having a particularly tough war. Her husband Francis is on an island in the Pacific, and he hasn’t been heard of for three years. She has been living with her father, Admiral Palliser, and doing her best to raise her eight-year-old son Frankie.

Robin Dale, son of the rector Dr. Dale, is feeling a bit adrift. He lost his foot in combat. Although his old school has asked him to return to a job as master, he feels he must keep his elderly father company. So, he’s been running a small school for boys preparing for public school.

Jane does a favor for the admiral, going to view housing for Mr. Adams and his daughter. Mr. Adams is a wealthy factory owner looking for a place for the summer, and the admiral is on his board.

This novel is about a disappearing way of life for the British upper class, as personified by Miss Bunting. Class is an important issue in the novel, as the upper levels of Hallbury society are taken aback when Mr. Adams and Heather breach their ranks. Thirkell tells this story with liveliness and wit. Although her tone is sometimes one of asperity, none of her characters are bad, or even ill-meaning, people. Thirkell shows their foibles while still making you like them very much. I’m happy to be rediscovering these novels.

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