Book Reviews October 2019

Salt Lane by William Shaw.  This is the second mystery of his that I have read, and it focuses on detective Alex Cupidi from the previous book.  It’s another mystery set on the Kent coast, and the land there plays a central role.  It was very well written, and I liked that he continued on with Detective Cupidi, who is still dealing with her teenage daughter, as well, in this book, as her mother and a past lover.  It is suspenseful, and Shaw has a great eye for detail. I recommend.

Bloody Genius by John Sandford.  I can never pass up a new Virgil Flowers mystery:  they are always so well paced and quietly entertaining.  This was a good one.  Instead of getting sent to the outer bits of Minnesota, in this one Virgil is in Minneapolis at the University, trying to solve the mystery around the death of a professor in the library.  Virgil is as methodical and laid-back as ever, and slowly, eventually, puts all the clues together.  It is fun.

Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout.  I loved the first Olive Kitteredge book, and was so happy to discover that Strout was writing another one.  Like the first, it is really a book of short stories based in the fictional town of Crosby, Maine.  Some are directly about Olive, but in many she just makes a brief appearance.  I think Olive is such a brilliantly conceived character.  She is always completely Olive, and always a delight.  In this book, Olive is aging and dealing with the infirmities that come along with.  She’s trying to fix her relationship with her son, and continues on doing her quiet good deeds while never thinking a thought that goes unsaid.  It was delightful and beautifully written, and soon I will read it again.

Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow.  I finally submitted to the buzz and got this book, and it was a much more enjoyable read than I thought it was going to be, based on the subject matter.  Farrow wisely chose to make the book about his pursuit of the Harvey Weinstein story, rather than the story itself.  Of course the story is worthy, but focusing on how he investigated it, the interviews he got, and how he was stymied at almost every turn by NBC was really fascinating.  Not to mention disheartening.  It is a fast, smart, and astonishing read.

Small Wonder by Barbara Kingsolver.  I really enjoy Barbara Kingsolver’s nonfiction voice, and I hadn’t read this collection of essays, so was looking forward to it.  And it was good – and many of the pieces I quite enjoyed – but she wrote a lot of them in response to 9/11, so they are very much from that specific time period.  Her quirkiness can get a bit preachy at times.

 

Book Reviews September 2019

Reasons To Be Cheerful by Nina Stibbe.  I love Nina Stibbe’s books.  She has a quirky, wonderful sense of humor and a great eye for character.  Like her first two, this novel stars the wonderful Lizzie, who is now done with school (and done with her job in the nursing home) and has now found a job working for a horrible English dentist.  Lizzie’s mother is still as loose a cannon as ever, but Lizzie is beginning to spread her wings and move away from her family.  Although the dental work scenes can be hard to read if you are dental work sensitive, Stibbe is just so funny and makes Lizzie even more so.  Lizzie’s desire for a sexual relationship with her somewhat boyfriend, who also might perhaps be her mother’s boyfriend, is so real and poignant.  I enjoyed this throughout.

Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.  I got three of Adichie’s novels after reading an article about her in The New Yorker.  This one was her first and it was a good story.  She immediately draws the reader in and sets the scene well with a young girl, Kambili and her brother, Jaja, two wealthy kids in Nigeria with a controlling and abusive father.  That was actually my problem with the novel:  that an abusive father is kind of an “easy” plot twist.  It’s a cheap thrill in a way.  I do look forward to reading her second novel next.

The Birdwatcher by William Shaw.  I liked this mystery.  It was surprisingly subtle and good.  William South is a police officer in a coastal town in England.  He is an everyday policeman, but gets involved in the solving of a murder, because it was his friend and neighbor who was killed.  The book switches back and forth from the present day case, to the death of Billy’s father in the troubles in Northern Ireland when he was young.  He also befriends the lead detective on the case and her teenage daughter.  The strange landscape is a main character of the book and the whole thing was smart and well done.

Even If Your Heart Would Listen by Elise Schiller.  This is an account of the addiction and death of Schiller’s daughter, Giana Natali, from a heroin addiction.  Schiller’s study is mainly about how the existing rehab programs failed her daughter, relying as they do on the format for alcohol addiction.  Most of the many rehab programs Giana went to also emphasized moral failure (re the 12 steps), instead of treating opiate addiction in the ways that are proven to have the best chance:  via inhibitor drugs.  It was a sad and eye-opening read.  Schiller is honest about what she and Giana’s father failed to notice and do, and has gone on to advocate for better options for others.  

Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke.  I got the second book in this series and was about to read it, having heard the author and enjoyed her on NPR, when I realized that there was a first book.  So I got it but did not really enjoy it.  It is about Darren, a Texas Ranger, who is estranged from his wife who wants him to return to law school.  Darren has a love/hate relationship with his job and badge and can’t leave it yet.  He starts to work on a case involving two murders in the backwoods of Texas, that are probably aryan brotherhood related.  For me, the book got off to a very slow and sometimes confusing start.  Halfway through it began to pick up a little, but on the whole, I wasn’t hugely enamored with it.

Book Reviews August 2019

Lady In The Lake by Laura Lippman.  I really enjoy Laura Lippman’s novels, and this was a good one.  It takes place in the sixties, and the main character, Madeline Schwartz, is on the verge of exiting her marriage and housewife life.  She had always wanted to write, so finagles her way onto the staff of a Baltimore newspaper, more or less as a secretary.  She becomes involved in the discovery of a dead body, and pursues the case even though – because the dead woman was black – the police want to write it off as a suicide.  Maddie investigates and annoys people on all sides of the case.  She is interested in the truth, and in setting herself free with it.  It’s a good read.

The Perfect Nanny by Leila Slimani.  I did not like this at all.  It’s a fictionalization of the horrible case in NYC where a nanny killed two young children.  I don’t think Slimani adds anything of interest to the story.  Her nanny lives in France, and slowly unravels, but since you know the outcome from the beginning, it is a painful slog.

Fleishman Is In Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner.  I loved this novel and thought it was brilliant.  First, it is a compelling read, despite the fact that the characters aren’t hugely likeable.  In the first two-thirds of the book, you follow the newly separated Toby, a hepatologist and father of two young children as he navigates his new life as a divorcee.  Toby is angry at his ex, Rachel, and the reader is treated to explanations of all she has done wrong.  Meanwhile, he is also dating with apps and, as the parent with a more flexible work schedule, taking care of his children.  I should add that Toby’s tale is being told by an old college friend, Elizabeth, who is going through a midlife crisis of his own.  Even though Toby is a bit of a jerk, it is still a really compelling read, but when Brodesser-Akner gets to the Rachel section, the structure of the book was so amazingly conceived.  When you read of what Rachel is going through, it totally changes all that you learned from Toby in ways that I think are really specific to women’s experiences.  Elizabeth’s situation adds to this too.  It makes you realize all that women are still up against, and it is done so cleverly.  It really seemed to me to be a modern day Mrs Dalloway, and so poignant when you take into consideration who is doing the telling and why.  I highly recommend.

Last Child In The Woods by Richard Louv.  This is a book about how children today are so much more separated from nature (in the U.S.) than at any time in the past.  He writes of how children used to have a lot of wandering time in nature, and how now – because of development and safety and electronics – this has changed for the worse.  He investigates connections between ADHD and lack of time outdoors, and explores the idea of “nature deficit disorder” in children today.  It was interesting, if a bit long.  It’s already over ten years old, so he doesn’t address climate change issues, which definitely have an impact on his topic.  I was hoping it would be more along the lines of parenting advice, and it really isn’t that kind of book.  He does do a good job at examining the programs people are starting to try to fix the issue, including outdoor classrooms and nature perserves where kids can dig and play, etc.  

The Safest Lies by Megan Miranda.  This is one of Miranda’s many YA novels, and it was good, if a bit overly action-packed.  Kelsey is a high schooler with a mother who is paranoid because of a kidnapping incident in her past.  She has been raised to always expect the worst and to know how to react when it happens.  And the worst keeps happening!  From car accidents to home invasions to spending time in a panic room:  Kelsey experiences all, and most with the help of the boy she is interested in from her math class.  It was a suspenseful read and I’d recommend it to those in the mood for some suspenseful YA fiction.

Book Reviews July 2019

Big Sky by Kate Atkinson.  Kate Atkinson is one of my all-time favorite authors, and I was very excited to hear that after a few novels’ hiatus, she was returning to write about the detective Jackson Brodie.  She is such a skilled author that reading her books is a treat – you can relax, knowing that you are in excellent hands, and enjoy the mystery as it unfolds.  Jackson has moved to be closer to his ex, Julia, and his son, Nathan, and as per usual, crimes seem to find him.  He is hired by a woman who thinks she is being followed, plus he witnesses a young hitchhiker picked up by a suspicious older man and his wheels start a-turning.  It is a fast, fun, and suspenseful read.  

Crow Planet:  Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness by Lyanda Lynn Haupt.  I first read this a few years ago when it came out and loved it.  I got it out to loan to Sean because I thought he might like it, but then I took it back because I wanted to read it again.  I did and it was just as good as the first time.  Haupt is very knowledgeable about birds, and it is a book about seeing crows in the urbs and suburbs, but it is also about living on this planet amongst birds and animals, the changes to our planet, and life in general.  I don’t always agree with Haupt, but her writing is intelligent and thought-provoking and I highly recommend.

He Said, She Said by Erin Kelly.  This was an excellent train read, except that I got so involved in it I kept almost missing my train stops.  Laura and Kit are a new couple back in the nineties when they go to watch an eclipse in Cornwall and end up stumbling upon a rape in progress.  They help the woman and, as witnesses, later testify in the trial of the rapist.  The book goes back and forth between the events of the past and the current time, in which they are living undercover so that the woman who was being raped can’t find them.  It goes back and forth from Laura’s story to Kit’s, both of whom are keeping secrets from each other.  It is well planned and a really good read.

The Darkness and The Island by Ragnar Jonasson.  I read two Icelandic mysteries by Jonasson featuring a detective named Hulda Hermansdottir.  They were both good, light reads – light not in subject matter but in depth.  They read quickly and don’t have much variety of detail.  In the first, Hulda is on the job, when she is told by her boss that she is being forced to retire.  She has two weeks left to work and is told to pick a cold case to work on.  She does, and starts finding out information about an immigrant whose death was declared a suicide, but who Hulda expects was murdered.  Hulda has many past traumas which are brought to light as she works on the case.  It has an ending which keeps the reader hanging.  Then I read the second book in the series (there are only two books so far), but it begins chronologically many years before the events of the first book.  It’s similar to the first:  an okay mystery with interesting scenery, but nothing spectacular.  A young woman was killed ten years ago and a group of her friends get together to reminisce, when things go awry.

The Last House Guest by Megan Miranda.  This was a really fun read and I recommend it.  It takes place in a fictional town in Maine; Avery is a townie who has a career as a property manager for rentals owned by a wealthy family who summers there.  The time swings back between a year ago, when Avery’s best friend, Sadie, was found dead, to now, when Avery begins to find out things about Sadie’s death which she finds perplexing.  It’s a good mystery and very well written.  Miranda is great with detail and she does a very satisfying wrap-up at the end.

The Perfect Stranger by Megan Miranda.  I liked The Last House Guest so much that I moved straight on to another of her books (she has many!  Yay!), and liked this one even more.  Leah is a journalist, who has become a teacher and randomly moved to Western Pennsylvania with an old friend who was relocating there.  The friend, Emmy, has a night job, and it takes awhile for Leah to realize that she hasn’t seen her in a few days.  She is finally concerned enough to contact the police, and when she does so, the police, after investigating, don’t quite believe this person exists.  Leah then sets out to both find her friend and figure out what has happened.  It is so well done and well written and was an excellent read.

Conviction by Denise Mina.  I love all of Denise Mina’s books, but this one is definitely one of her best.  It was such a good read and a good idea.  The main character is Anna, who begins her day looking forward to listening to a podcast once her kids are off to school.  When she does so, she realizes that the true crime podcast features someone that she used to know.  When her current life situation is upended unexpectedly, she decides on a whim to figure out what really happened to her old friend.  She keeps referring to episodes of the podcast, which are printed out, and then ends up starting a podcast of her own, while now totally mixed up in the mystery featured in the original podcast.  It is really suspenseful and such a good read.  I highly recommend!

Book Reviews June 2019

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender.  This book started as one thing, and then at some point became a completely different kind of book!  Completely!  I was so surprised!  I did not see it coming.  The narrator, Rose, is a young girl growing up in California with her parents and brother.  Her mother is a little lost and her father a little clueless.  One day her mother bakes her a lemon cake and Rose can taste all her mother’s angst in the cake.   From that point on, she has to be very careful of what she eats, because she can taste the mood of the cook in the food.  Okay, so it’s quirky, and a little bland, and I was getting annoyed that the narrator was a kid, when all of a sudden, Rose learns something about her brother, which is NOT what you would expect.  And the book completely changes.  I will not say more than that.  I’m not sure Bender pulls it off, and I didn’t love the book, but kudos to her for trying!

Mirror, Shoulder, Signal by Dorthe Nors.  This was a beautiful book and I found it heartbreaking and original.  Sonja is a 40 year-old woman living in Copenhagen and learning to drive for the first time.  She is also at a crossroads in her life, having grown up in the countryside and become a successful translator of mystery novels.  Her interactions with her driving instructors, and learning how to drive become a symbol of all that she is confronting now with what her life has become.  She has a good friend with whom she no longer has much in common, and a sister who does not want much to do with her.  It is a fast read and smart and lovely.

Unfuck Your Habitat by Rachel Hoffman.  This is a Marie Kondo-esque book about not living in squalor.  She makes some good points and has good strategies about how to unclutter your physical surroundings, but it is more a book geared to a young twenty-something (very slobby) audience.

The Idiot by Elif Batuman.  I really enjoy Batuman’s pieces in the New Yorker, so decided to read her first novel.  At first I was a little put off because the narrator, Selin, is a first-year student at Harvard and in love with her first love, Ivan, and Batuman gets it so right, that it is rather painful to read.  It was bad enough to experience that the first time – one really does not want to dwell.  So at first I was a bit grumpy with the book, but Selin – although often infuriating in her inaction – is cerebral and charming and awkward and ultimately very likeable.  She very much tries to live what she learns in her college courses and tries to make sense of her feelings for and interactions with Ivan, ultimately following him to Hungary in the summer where she teaches English in small villages.  It’s a good novel and I felt tender toward it.

Bad Blood by John Carreyrou.  This is the story of Elizabeth Holmes and her company, Theranos, which was supposed to change the whole blood testing world, but ultimately ended up a scam.  Carreyrou is the journalist who broke the story in the Wall Street Journal, and it was a fascinating read.  It’s an interesting story and he gets so many great sources, and the whole time I was reading it I just didn’t understand how/why she pulled it off for so long.  So manly people could see that her technology didn’t work, yet she retained a board of political superstars.  Anyway, I recommend the book, and listening to the podcast, “The Dropout” afterwards.

All Grown Up by Jami Attenberg.  I didn’t love this book.  It is all about one woman, Andrea, the narrator, but each chapter is sort of set up like a stand-alone short story, so you end up getting repeated bits of information that I found confusing.  At first I thought each chapter had a different, yet obviously similar, narrator.  So it took me awhile to work out the form.  Andrea is a 40 year-old single woman living in New York and conflicted about relationships.  She had a turbulent childhood, and a difficult relationship with her mother, yet is very upset when her mother moves to New Hampshire to help out her brother and his wife, who have a dying child.  It is witty and well-written, but ultimately unsatisfying.

Book Reviews May 2019

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie.  This is the first in a three-volume science fiction series, and I immediately understood while reading it why it has won so many awards.  It is told from the point of view of a ship, which sounds quite odd, but makes sense in the context of the book.  The narrator is actually part of the consciousness of a ship, and is on the lam after realizing and witnessing some damaging information about the leader/s of her world.  The writing is excellent:  Leckie immediately draws you into the world (galaxy really), having you make sense of things by the narrator’s account of the past and present.  It is hard to explain, but I very much recommend.

Strangers Tend To Tell Me Things by Amy Dickinson.  This is a memoir about returning to live full-time in a rural town in New York state by Amy Dickinson, who is the Amy of the advice column, “Ask Amy”, and a regular participant on NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me.  She left the town when she went away to college, and then lived in Chicago and DC, but as the single mother of a daughter would return to her hometown in the summers.  When her daughter is grown, she returns in part to help take care of her ailing mother.  The book is about her past and her life growing up in the town, but also about finding a second chance at love there and marrying a high school friend.  She’s an entertaining writer, and I enjoyed the book, although I didn’t particularly find her to be a kindred spirit.  I’m still laughing at a line she wrote about going on a blind date with a (rather mean) guy who had very tiny hands, and all she could think of was those hands washing an apricot in a stream.  Ha!

Something In The Water by Catherine Steadman.  This was a fun British thriller written by an actress who had a role in one of the seasons of Downton Abbey.  It’s a fast and hard to put down read, although once you are finished, I’ll admit, not everything quite adds up.  However, it begins wonderfully and the suspense is high.  Basically Erin and Mark are on their honeymoon in Bora Bora when they find a bag in the ocean filled with money and diamonds and a gun.  At first their intent is to do the right thing, but down on their financial luck, they consider keeping their find and start to plan how they could get away with it.  The criminal owners of the bag are soon on their trail.  It is fun!

Late In The Day by Tessa Hadley.  This is a rather melancholy novel about what happens to two intertwined London couples and their families when one spouse dies.  Zachary was the glue that held them all together, so when Christine, Lydia, and Alex are left behind, there is a certain amount of unraveling.  Christine is the main character, an artist who worked closely with Zachary and his art gallery.  She and Alex invite Lydia to live with them while she is grieving.  There are stories of the past woven into the present, and you hear about how the four met and what has happened in their lives over the past twenty years.  It was a nice, calm, read, but my problem with it is that I basically disliked all four main characters, plus their two daughters.  All bothered me for different reasons.

Book Reviews April 2019

How To Live With Kids: A Room-By-Room Guide by Gabrielle Stanley Blair.  This book had been on my nightstand for a while.  It’s the kind of book that is fun to dip into now and then and get inspiration.  However, I was tired of it taking up space in my “to read” pile, so finished it to move it along.  It is basically a book about home décor, the best part of it being the pictures of various options.  What she does well is a sort of “Marie Kondo” approach of making sure that you consider how each space in your home can best work for you with the least amount of clutter.

The Nix by Nathan Hill.  This was the longest-residing book on my kindle, and as I was in an orderly mode, its time was up.  It is a very long read, and while reading the first half of it I was a little grumpy; however, the second half won me over.  The first half was primarily the narrator’s childhood reminiscences, and I find I’m a little resistant to so much of that.  I think the book would have been better had those parts been edited out.  But I do see why the book made it to so many top ten lists of 2017.  The narrator is Samuel Andresen-Anderson, an English professor who is not very motivated by his job or life.  He spends most of his off hours playing a video game, until one day when his mother, who left Sam and his father when he was 11-ish, is in the news for throwing a rock at a Trump-like politician.  Samuel has a publisher – for a novel that has long been in the works – and this guy gets him to go visit his mother to try to write a book about her actions.  As mentioned above, the book goes into too much detail about Samuel’s childhood; it also goes into his mother’s considerably more interesting past, and why she abandoned Samuel.  There’s also a very funny and well-written storyline that involves the star player of the video game he plays, who goes by the moniker Pwnage, and is addicted to gaming.  The writing is often very funny, and when everything starts coming together in the second half, I really liked it.  

99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret by Craig Brown.  Ugh.  I HATED this.  It is a biography, more or less, about Princess Margaret, but it becomes more about how impossible a biography is, especially a biography of a royal figure, who is so much façade to begin with.  I could easily get on board with such a metanarrative – and with 99 sections both very short and long; however, I just found Brown tiresome and annoying.  He does gimmicks where he pretends Margaret married Picasso, and there is a section or two where this topic is treated as fact.  Sometimes he did do interesting studies, such as presenting all the different viewpoints/opinions of an event.  But I found the majority of his ideas puerile and it was all I could do to make myself finish reading the book.  Don’t so torture yourselves.

Savage News by Jessica Yellin.  I follow Jessica Yellin on Instagram, and really like her stories, in which she presents the news of the day.  Her thing is to do “news not noise,” filtering out all the stories of the day in Washington that are really just noise.  I recommend her.  Anyway, Savage News is her first fiction, and it is a fun, light read.  She wanted to write a news novel that was a comedy and I’d say her book is a success.  The narrator, Natalie Savage, is a broadcaster trying to make it as a serious journalist in the world of television news.  She wants to report the facts, and her bosses want her to get her hair straightened, and report on the gossip and rumors rather than what might really be going on behind all the bluster.  She tries to please her bosses enough to not get fired, while following a real story about a disappearance of the first lady and all its political implications.  It’s a quick and fun read.

Hold Sway by Sally Ball.  I read one of my best – and oldest! -- friend’s new book of poetry this month and it was a treat.  Hold Sway is Sally’s third poetry book and it is a rich collection.  There’s so much in it to stop and think about, and when I finished it I found myself immediately returning to the first poem to start all over again.  It did not come as a surprise to me that Sally’s poetry is smart and reflective, but there was so much humor, both wry and otherwise in the book!  There are a pair of dog poems, both called “Can You Hear My Dog?” which – having a new young reader in my household, reminded me of the do you like my hat sequences from Go Dog Go.  There’s also a line about a hiking trip, in which the food carried is “lentils, lentils, lentils, quinoa!, lentils” which cracked me up.  And a poem about a Shakespeare sonnet we had to memorize in 10^th grade that ends with the BeeGees!  It is all done, too, in a thought-provoking, original, and lyrical manner.  I think my favorite is a poem called “Breaker,” in which the narrator shuts down, emotionally, like a circuit breaker powering off, switch by clicking switch.  Her topics range from being in Paris during a terrorist attack, to seeing a heron fly up and away, and listening to her daughter sing jubilantly in the car.  There’s also the wonderful poem, “Hold”, about the disturbing state of our planet and its changes in climate.  Hold Sway is an impressive book of poems that will stay with you long past your initial reading of them.

The Hollow of the Hand by PJ Harvey and Seamus Murphy.  PJ Harvey is my favorite musician of all time, and I was pleased to receive her first book of poetry as a gift.  The book is half poems, half pictures taken by the photographer, Seamus Murphy, when they were traveling in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Washington DC.  Each location has its own section in the book of poetry followed by photography.  Her poetry reads a lot like her song lyrics, which is not to denigrate either.  As I read though, I could hear her singing the words (and some of the phrases from the Washington DC section in particular appear in her album, The Hope Six Demolition Project.)  As you can imagine from the locales to which they travel, the subject matter is bleak.  Harvey is good at painting a scene in few words and closing with an image that is poignant and food for thought. 

Good Riddance by Elinor Lipman.  I adore Elinor Lipman’s books and this one does not disappoint.  Her books tend to stay on the surface, in a what-you-see-is-what-you-get manner, but she is really funny and she has a knack for setting up humorous situations.  Here, Daphne is a young woman whose marriage has ended and mother recently died.  She found out that her husband had only married her to get his trust fund money, so she is bitter about that.  Then when her mother dies, she bequeaths to Daphne a yearbook filled with notes about what all the graduates went on to be and do.  Daphne decides she doesn’t want this and puts it in the recycling bin in her Manhattan apartment building.  However, a woman down the hall finds it and decides to make a podcast out of the information.  In trying to stop her from doing so, Daphne discovers a secret her mother had been keeping.  Meanwhile too, her widowed father has moved from NH to Manhattan and is enjoying his retired life as a professional dog walker.  Daphne also starts dating an actor who lives next door.  She frequently travels to NH regarding the information from the yearbook, and it is all an amusing farce.