Tag: book review

A Painted House by John Grisham (Historical Fiction — audio book)

Writing: 5/5 Characters: 5/5 Plot: 4/5
This book is unlike any other book Grisham has written — no courtrooms, not a lot of official justice, and not a thriller — but I found it utterly enthralling. It drew me into a world I knew nothing about and brought it to full sensory life. At least part of this was due to the audio book reader (David Lansbury) who captured the mood perfectly with his tone, pacing, and wide range of voices. Not every book (IMHO) is improved by listening to it — but this one certainly was.

The story is apparently somewhat autobiographical and takes us through one picking season on an Arkansas Delta cotton farm in 1952. Told from the perspective of seven year old Luke Chandler, the clarity of his reflections as he learns about life, morality, and people during this period is priceless. The family hires itinerant help in the form of ten Mexicans and a family of hill people. As with most farmers of the time, they are in debt from one season to the next, on the edge of ruin with every storm, flood, broken truck, or the transitory nature of picking labor. Luke is part of it all — the picking, the worrying, and the witnessing. He becomes the holder of too many secrets, and we feel the potential bursting and sickness he takes on with the keeping.

I’d forgotten how good Grisham’s writing is because I’m not that interested in legal thrillers but I was rapt throughout. His characters are such real people — each struggling in his or her own way with constant questions of both survival and morality. Making do in a rough world with little in the way of legal support — people have to figure out how to handle their own problems. Bittersweet and poignant, the narrative spans the Korean war, the movies of the day, the newness (and rareness) of television sets, flooding and tornados, farming economics, and the tension between the old ways and new possibilities.

Loved it.

Reunion by Elise Juska (Literary Fiction)

June 2021 — Three friends anticipate a Covid postponed college reunion at the Maine campus. Hope — a stay at home mom with an increasingly distant husband — is desperate to return to what she remembers as her happiest time; Adam looks forward to reconnecting but feels guilt at leaving his perpetually sad wife with the twins in the house that she hasn’t left in a very long time; and NYC based single-mom Polly who doesn’t share her friends fond memories, but is persuaded to attend by her reclusive son who wants to visit a nearby friend.

This character-driven novel explores friendships and personal growth against the backdrop of lock down parenting and recovery alongside some pretty intense environmental anxiety. With every relationship comes inevitable clashes and this story covers quite a few. I particularly “enjoyed” the generational clashes — some familiar and some brand new to me as successive generations bear less and less in common with my own. Well written probes into the evolution of friendships
— what connects people with little in common and what decisions can impact the closeness over time. I really liked that the ending for all of our protagonists had a closure that was more about understanding the nature of their issues, thereby clarifying a path towards closure, rather than any kind of quick solution to the problem itself — because there really are no quick solutions to relationship issues…

One kind of funny (to me) quote as Hope thinks about her teenage daughter Izzy: “Meanwhile, Izzy was skeptical of all things where Hope was concerned. Her Spotify list. Her low-carb bread. Her Facebook posts — too frequent, too obviously curated — why was she even on Facebook? Her overuse of exclamation points. Her leather tote. Sometimes Hope secretly wondered if Izzy had become a vegan primarily to get on her nerves.”

Thank you to Harper and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on May 11th, 2024.

Next of Kin by Samantha Jayne Allen

Number three in Allen’s Annie McIntyre / Garrett, Texas series. Nice and complicated, full of atmosphere, and I really like the way Annie is developing. In my review of the last book, I said, “Annie suffers from occasional bouts of self-doubt which I hope she has less often in the future (I like to see characters grow!)” and guess what? She really has grown into the role, and her bouts of self-doubt have largely disappeared. Made me happy!

This deliciously convoluted plot includes long lost relative discoveries on Ancestry.com with a heavy dose of bad guy blood mixed in. Social services, group homes, drug dealing, bank robbers — they pop up in unexpected places and through it all Annie keeps her cool, pursues justice like a tenacious bulldog, and treats us to her ongoing reflections, many of a philosophical and moral nature (my cup of tea). The regular characters — her 85 year grandfather retired sheriff Leroy, his investigative partner of many years Mary Kate, Annie’s newly married cousin Nikki, and increasingly serious boyfriend Wyatt — all get better and more interesting with each book.

This is the best book so far — tighter plot, better balance of “novel” and “mystery,” and a well-developed (and continuously developing) set of characters.

A couple of quotes:

“He let information sit before speculating, enough time to regulate his own emotions, square them off, and keep them sealed.”

“Though I knew myself to be a believer in redemption, it was hard to overlook the universe’s uneven distribution of such favors.”

Thank you to Minotaur Books and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on April 23rd, 2024.

The Mystery Writer by Sulari Gentill (Mystery)

Theodosia Benton abandons law school and her Australian home to focus on her unfinished novel, moving in with her brother in Lawrence, Kansas. A meeting with a successful author leads to mentorship, a free flow of ideas, and maybe something more … until he shows up dead one day, brutally murdered. Weird things keep happening and none of them are very good for our heroine, her brother Gus, and his investigator friend, Mac. Every time the author had a chance to go down the obvious path she instead takes evasive action and veers off onto a path I would never expect. Between the action and the backstories of her (very) relatable characters, we are treated to a twisted, entertaining, self-referential mystery blending writing techniques, reader psychology, conspiracy sites, preppers, and Tasmanian hippies (yes, you read that right). The situation does sometimes veer into regions of (to me) unrealistic evil corporate overlord action, but all of the other characters are believable and interesting — I particularly liked all the writerly discussions which focussed more on how to engage with a reader rather than dry (to the non writer) techniques. Be warned: a bit of a creepy feeling pervades the whole book, and I did feel that Theo should have figured some things out a little sooner than she did, but then I was in a comfy, stress-free space, so perhaps I wouldn’t have figured out very much more had I been in her position 🙂

Thank you to Poisoned Pen Press and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on March 19th, 2024.

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (Speculative Fiction)

Writing: 4.5 / 5 Characters: 5/5 Plot: 4/5

A surprisingly fun ride about the use of time travel to bring historical figures forward in time as part of a (very) complicated plot to ward off a severely climate damaged future. Our narrator (who I now realize is never given a name) is a civil servant who is offered an exciting new job as a “bridge” to one of these “expats from history.” A bridge’s function is to help the refugees from time accommodate to the present.

Our narrator is paired with Graham Gore — a Royal Navy officer and polar explorer from the early 19th century who is brought to the present just before his death as part of the ill fated 1845 Franklin expedition to discover the Northwest Passage. (This is a real historical person and his character and experiences are faithfully drawn from historical records — look him up!). Four other “expats” include the unpleasant Lieutenant Thomas Cardingham from 1645; the lesbian Margaret Kemble from 1665 rescued from the Plague; a woman from Robespierre era Paris (1793); and the closeted homosexual Captain Arthur Reginald-Smythe extracted from the Battle of the Somme in 1916 (he wasn’t going to make it).

The plot is crazy, the characters are well-drawn and time-appropriate. I loved the interactions among all the possible permutations of expats and bridges with what felt like very real reactions and learning curves — most taking to technological advances more easily than the great shifts in social mores and expectations. I found the depth and believability of these interactions and the personal reflections fascinating. Plenty of insight (which I always love) and a great new phrase for me: “ethically sparse” to explain how our narrator felt about certain policies and decisions made by her corporate overlords in the Ministry.

Bradley is an excellent writer — her phrasing and comic overlays are top notch. I found the plot confusing at times — but it feels like this was somewhat intentional as the events were certainly confusing to the people living through them, and we are sharing their experience. Our narrator is part Cambodian, and another bridge is Black. Add to this our historical lesbian and homosexual characters, and there is plenty of opportunity for some pithy and insightful identity issues as well. She even managed to work a theremin (weird musical instrument — look it up) into the plot as well. Impressive!

Some fun Quotes (sorry there are so many but I couldn’t pick):

“I finally had a savings account that looked like it might withstand a life emergency rather than crumple at a dentistry bill.”

“All the emotions I normally watched her puree into professionalism were churning on her face.”

“This was one of my first lessons in how you make the future: moment by moment, you seal the doors of possibility behind you.”

“When Graham got online, as he did not call it, and learned to peck at the keyboard with the elegance and speed of a badly burned amphibian …”

“But my mother never described herself as a refugee. It was a narrative imposition, along with ‘stateless’ and ‘survivor’.”

‘Stop hand-wringing,’ said Simellia, still smiling, though increasingly looking as if the smile was being operated by winches inside her skill. ‘God, Ministry bias training has a lot to answer for,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to drop a piano on your head but believe it or not, I already know I’m Black. You don’t have to roll over and show me your belly about it.’

“It was another dank toothache of a day, barely qualifying in its chromatic dullness for ‘grey‘.”

“Quentin treated me with an impatient familiarity, as if we were both were leaving streaks on one another.”

“We settled back, if ‘settle’ is the right word for the stiff, wary way we offset one another’s weight on the cushions.”

“That night, I slept with unpleasant lightness, my brain balanced on unconsciousness like an insect’s foot on the meniscus of a pond. I didn’t so much wake up as give up on sleep.”

“We separated and spent the fading day bobbing shyly around one another like clots in a lava lamp.”

“I launched into a preplanned speech about class mobility and domestic labor, touching on the minimum wage, the size of an average household, and women in the workforce. I took a full five minutes of talking and by the end I’d moved into the same tremulous liquid register I used to use for pleading with my parents for a curfew extension.”

Thank you to Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on May 7th, 2024.

System Collapse by Martha Wells (Science Fiction)

This is the seventh book in the MurderBot series and the first that I have read, rather than listened to. While the book is every bit as good as the others, I do recommend the audio versions. Kevin R. Free (the reader) does such a perfect job as the “voice” of MurderBot — it really adds to the experience. Luckily, after listening to him for the first six, I can hear his voice as I read anyway.

MurderBot is not quite itself as a result of his memory splintering and his frequent reboots after the disastrous events (alien contamination writ large and gooey) of the last book — Network Effect. Nevertheless, he has a big part to play when a separatist group is found on the planet (having removed themselves before the contamination took hold of some of the settlers) and the Barish-Estranza corporation has come to “offer” all settlers an employment contract (read opportunity for slave labor) off planet. What could go wrong?

I love the bot-humor — ART (the supremely intelligent and capable bot pilot with a fierce attachment to his “humans” and MurderBot’s “friend”) is deliciously sarcastic. I love MurderBot’s continually evolving understanding of himself — the weird part organic / mostly inorganic construct designed to kill. Funny, good action, well-paced, and full of constantly applicable ethical dilemmas such as arise when naivete meets evil. I love the new (to me and I think to the world) portmanteau term “argucussion” from argument + discussion. I think we all have a few of those.

Thank you to Tordotcom and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on November 14th, 2023.

Locked in Pursuit by Ashley Weaver

Writing: 3/5 Characters: 4/5 Plot: 3.5/5

A perfect airplane read! Number four in the Electra McDonnell series in which a (former) safe cracking thief turns her skills to help the British government in the person of the (handsome, naturally) Major Ramsey in London around 1941. Some nice twists and connections to historical events. I like all the characters — they are interesting and well drawn. In addition to the case in hand, each book makes some progress on Electra’s backstory (father murdered and mother accused of the crime before Electra was born) while the Electra and stoic Manjor Ramsey romance continues at a steady parboil.

Thank you to Minotaur Books and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on May 14th, 2024.

The Summer Book Club by Susan Mallery

This upbeat piece of women’s fiction starts with Laurel (one of the three main female characters in the book) getting called into school because her daughter has been telling the school that all men are terrible. Laurel realizes that her daughter has, in fact, not a single good male role model in her life so she sets out to make a male friend in order to show her daughter that some men are actually not terrible! Female lead #2 is Laurel’s best friend Paris whose husband left her ten years ago due to her uncontrollable rage. With years of therapy and learning anger management technique, Paris still worries she could flip out at any moment. Lastly, fem-hero #3 is Cassie — kicked out of the family home in Bar Harbor and told to get herself a life. It’s no surprise that by the end of the novel, everyone is doing great — that’s why we read these books!

Here is why I continue to read Susan Mallery novels, as opposed to many of the other women’s fiction selections. Yes, I have to suspend a lot of disbelief because in real life they just don’t make men like the ones these three manage to snag (except for my husband, of course!), but reading a Mallery book is kind of like reading an entertaining how-to manual for parenting and other relationships (including with yourself). Great advice, articulately doled out, and without having to resort to stupidity and game playing.

A couple of funny bits — the three women have a summer book club focused on Romance novels and the three men join in for one, pretty hysterical, discussion. And Mallery manages to make a thrift store shopping experience actually exciting to me (and trust me when I tell you that I dislike shopping for anything that doesn’t come with turning pages).

I read this while trying hard not to read about the horrible things happening in the world and found it very calming and reassuring. Even if it is fiction, it reminds me that not everybody is out there chanting horrible and ill informed slogans.

Thank you to Canary Street Press and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on February 13th, 2024.

The Underground Library by Jennifer Ryan

I thoroughly enjoyed this fictionalized history of the underground library at Bethnal Green tube station in London during WWII. The story follows three women during the early stages of WWII (~1940). Near the beginning of the London Blitz, the German bombs destroyed the large and beautiful Bethnal Green Library, necessitating its relocation underground.

Juliet Lansdown has just taken the role of Assistant Librarian, a role usually reserved for men (who were of course in short supply). Jewish Sofie Baumann has managed to obtain a visa to leave Berlin for London as a household servant — also in short supply and one of the few ways Jews could still get out of Germany and go to the relatively safe shores of England. Katie Upwood, a library assistant, finds out she is pregnant shortly after hearing that her beau is missing in action, presumed dead. Together these women, and the growing community taking to the tube station for nightly shelter, form a support system for the predominantly female cast of The Underground Library.

Jennifer Ryan always gives her characters a happily-ever-after which made it easier for me to read of a harrowing time without too much additional stress which I greatly appreciate. I loved the attention to historically accurate details of the age — the big hotels fixing up their cellars for dancing, the women in internment camps on the Isle of Man teaching each other skills, the treatment of unwed mothers, deserters, efforts at Jewish reunification, and the fact that universities, rather than close, started opening up to women while the men were away — Margaret Thatcher got her 1943 Chemistry degree from Oxford! I also always love Ryan’s characters and the way they work to make the best of whatever situation they find themselves in — usually through some wonderful friendships. All learning to take whatever joy is available to them and cherish it.

Ryan does differentiate where her fiction veers off from fact in the afterward, and she covered (almost) all of the points that I had noticed being off while reading. However, one thing that does slightly irritate me is that in addition to making a woman the heroine of making the library happen, she also makes the male head librarian someone who tries very hard to get in the way of it being a success, except when Juliet flatters him and basically offers to give him all the credit. In fact (according to wikipedia) it was a male librarian and his male assistant who worked hard to get the library moved underground and kept it going! I don’t mind her making the characters female, but I think it’s sad to make the male character a “bad guy” when he wasn’t (I don’t see the need to empower women at the expense of men). It could be that Ryan has more information than I do, but I wasn’t able to to find it.

If the story sounds familiar, that may be because this is the second book to fictionalize this WWII underground library this year. The Little Wartime Library by Kate Thompson covers the later years of the war and was also very enjoyable. For those interested in the real story, here is a somewhat personal accounting: https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Bethnal-Green-Tube-Disaster/. I’ve embedded a couple of photos in this post.

Thank you to Ballantine Books and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on March 12th, 2023.

Christa Comes Out of Her Shell by Abbi Waxman (Romantic Comedy)

A nerdy marine biologist (specializing in bubble raft snails!) has moved as far from her Los Angeles home as possible — to a fictional island called Violetta in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Having survived a childhood in the limelight (in both positive and really, really, negative ways), she is happy to be alone, unbothered, and having a blast with the marine life she loves. Unfortunately, she is called back into the heart of the family when her father — a media star from decades ago — reappears after a twenty-five year, presumed-dead hiatus in Alaska. What follows is a modern “romp” through greedy agents, journalists, and media outlets all wanting the “real” story. They don’t actually want the “real” story, of course — they want the highly marketable, “let’s make a ton of money” story starring all of the smiling faces. Lots of marine biology factoids and a reignited (with a metaphorical blow torch) love interest in the form of a (very) handsome childhood family friend, and you have all the makings of a typical Waxman romcom. I will say this particular book had more rom than com for my taste, and while the writing was very good, it did not have the insightful turns of phrase that I remember loving in Nina Hill and the others BUT, I read it in two sittings and enjoyed it thoroughly.