Knight in Peril / Alice Bienia

 

3.5 out of 5 stars 

Mystery Book Club 2024

From the very first pages, this novel racheted up my anxiety level. Although I have loved travel, I am very definitely a tour traveller. I have zero desire to be all on my own in an unfamiliar place. So Jorja's arrival in Istanbul with no friend waiting to greet her would be a nightmare for me. Realizing that her travel companion and BFF has gone missing adds a whole new layer of angst. I immediately knew that I would need to take frequent breaks while reading this book to soothe my own anxieties.

This is my worst nightmare in fictional form. Searching for a missing woman in a country where I do not know the language and where women's status is definitely second class. A country where the police are not inclined to care about foreigners. Far from friends and family, feeling extreme fear about Gabriella's situation, Jorja demonstrates far more bravery than I think I would. Although I've experienced challenges while outside Canada, nothing this serious has ever happened to me, thank the Goddess! I'll not complain about lost luggage or flight delays ever again.

I am now ready for book club tomorrow night. The author will be attending, so I hope to have some questions formulated for the event. October is evaporating on me and I still have a number of Halloween books to get to. Too bad I couldn't figure out a way to wiggle this book into that game.

Dr Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall / Suzette Mayr

3.25 stars out of 5

Dr. Edith Vane, scholar of English literature, is contentedly ensconced at the University of Inivea. Her dissertation on pioneer housewife memoirist Beulah Crump-Withers is about to be published, and she's on track for tenure, if only she can fill out her AAO properly. She's a little anxious, but a new floral blouse and her therapist's repeated assurance that she is the architect of her own life should fix that. All should be well, really. Except for her broken washing machine, her fickle new girlfriend, her missing friend Coral, her backstabbing fellow professors, a cutthroat new dean—and the fact that the sentient and malevolent Crawley Hall has decided it wants them all out, and the hall and its hellish hares will stop at nothing to get rid of them.

The University of Inivea, huh? Well the author works at the same University that I retired from and they have a lot of parallels. There’s a hall designed in the brutalist style of Crawley Hall and I do remember a sink hole in the parking lot one year. I’ve had coffee in the Jungle (and I remember the coffee in the odd cardboard cups). I’ve dealt with the online ‘portal’ that employees use and filled out the horrible adminospeak forms required. Nineteen of my former coworkers were “refreshed” just last month.

Edith Vane (or is that Vain?) is exactly what conservative provincial politicians think of as an instructor in higher education. She’s a liberal, frumpy, lumpy lesbian who writes inexplicable articles for arcane academic journals and books that no regular person will ever pick up. It turns out that her barista girlfriend can mark essays just as effectively as Edith can. Edith is a frantic neurotic who is desperate to hang onto her university position (or as conservative politicians like to phrase it, “suck from the public teat.”)

Dr. Vane is chronically unprepared and is an uninspiring instructor. Mayr shows us how time crunched academics are, with teaching, researching, writing and dealing with students. In my own experience, the vast majority of my instructors were interesting and organized, so I’m assuming that Edith is a caricature in order to make a point of that.

Very interesting to read a book set in a world that I’m very familiar with

The Innocents / Michael Crummey

4 out of 5 stars

A brother and sister are orphaned in an isolated cove on Newfoundland's northern coastline. Their home is a stretch of rocky shore governed by the feral ocean, by a relentless pendulum of abundance and murderous scarcity. Still children with only the barest notion of the outside world, they have nothing but the family's boat and the little knowledge passed on haphazardly by their mother and father to keep them.

As they fight for their own survival through years of meagre catches and storms and ravaging illness, it is their fierce loyalty to each other that motivates and sustains them. But as seasons pass and they wade deeper into the mystery of their own natures, even that loyalty will be tested.

If you love beautiful language, this is the book for you. Crummey incorporates plenty of unique Newfoundland-isms into the text, but you can figure out what they mean quite easily from the context. I love language and words, so I found this new vocabulary to be quite intoxicating.

And what a story! A boy of 12 and a girl of 10 living in a remote cove of Newfoundland, orphaned and trying to carry on as they did when their parents were alive. The author got the premise of the story from an article in an old Newfoundland newspaper that featured two young people seeing off a clergyman with a gun in response to criticism (the girl was pregnant). In this novel, the children are raised by two people who seemed to barely speak, nor do they know how to read or write, no neighbours or relatives, no radio, no contact with the outside world. They are indeed innocents.

Crummey harkens back to the Genesis story: there are overtones of Cain and Abel in the story of Sennet Best and the brother that he seems to have murdered in order to gain the affections of Sarah, the children’s mother. And then of course Ada and Evered are completely ignorant about virtually everything, including sex. Can you imagine going through those turbulent teenage years with no clue what is happening to you? When Ada’s complete sex education consists of her mother’s warning, “Soon you’ll be getting your monthly visitor.”

The hardship they face and the challenges that they overcome are incredible. But you never know what you can do until you are faced with difficulty and they rise to the challenge. The triumph of the human spirit over ignorance.

Autopsy of a Boring Wife / Marie-Renee Lavoie

4 out of 5 stars

Like a Québécois Bridget Jones’s Diary, Marie-Renée Lavoie’s Autopsy of a Boring Wife tells the hysterically funny and ultimately touching tale of forty-eight-year-old Diane, a woman whose husband leaves her and is having an affair because, he says, she bores him. Diane takes the charge to heart and undertakes an often ribald, highly entertaining journey to restoring trust in herself and others that is at the same time an astute commentary on women and girls, gender differences, and the curious institution of marriage in the twenty-first century. All the details are up for scrutiny in this tender, brisk story of the path to recovery. Autopsy of a Boring Wife is a wonderfully fresh and engaging novel of the pitfalls and missteps of an apparently “boring” life that could be any of ours.

Although I read a fair amount of Canadian literature, I fall short in the category of French Canadian fiction. This was a delightful example of that category and reminds me that I should seek out more such books. The translation was extremely well done. I really only became aware once, when Diane asked her neighbours if they watched American television--that isn’t on the translator, it just reminded me that watching foreign programming is a much bigger deal in Quebec than in the rest of Canada.

Both of my sisters have divorced and I couldn’t believe how much of Diane’s dialog could have been excerpted directly from our phone calls! One of my sisters, like Diane, seemed to believe in the “magic of being married,” that it would somehow bring her husband back. It didn’t, for which we are all very thankful. I never married, so I never had to go the divorce route, but I did have once break-up which caused me to be volcanically angry. Diane restricts herself to destroying the house with a sledgehammer and pushing furniture out the second story windows. I think that would be very satisfying. I’ve always considered going to flea markets to buy cheap crockery to smash when necessary--somehow I’ve never got around to it. Probably because I know that I’d be the one who had to clean up after the event was over.

I’m glad I asked my mother when she was still alive if she was disappointed that I had never married or produced children. She looked at me a long moment, then said, “You’re the happiest one of my children. Don’t change.”

A Kestrel for a Knave / Barry Hines

3.5 stars out of 5

Life is tough and cheerless for Billy Casper, a troubled teenager growing up in the small Yorkshire mining town of Barnsley. Treated as a failure at school, and unhappy at home, Billy discovers a new passion in life when he finds Kes, a kestrel hawk. Billy identifies with her silent strength and she inspires in him the trust and love that nothing else can, discovering through her the passion missing from his life. 

I must confess that this was a somewhat depressing book to read. It’s the December selection for my real-life book club and it reminded me of an earlier selection we read this year, Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx. At first glance, the circumstances of a poor Puerto Rican family in an American ghetto (RF) and a poor family in the North of England (KfaK) might seem to be entirely different. But many of their problems overlap.

Lack of opportunities, poor education, inadequate nutrition, and no role models of successful people for the younger people to emulate. Billy, in Kestrel, has a neglectful mother, an abusive brother, a job before school that is precarious, plus teachers that don’t care about their students, not to mention abusive teachers. He has to share not only a bedroom, but a bed with his drunken, irritable older brother Jud, then get up super early to deliver papers. There’s no money for extras like gym clothes and no energy for non-necessities. Billy doesn’t want to end up working in the mines, but he doesn’t have either the energy or a plan to change his destiny.

But our true interests will shine through--Billy claims a young kestrel from a nest, steals a book on falconry, and proceeds to train himself and the bird. Obviously, in multiple intelligence theory, Billy would have a Naturalistic intelligence. Being stuck in a classroom or forced to participate in sport is never going to be right for him. He had all of my sympathy, as I share his love of nature and particularly birds.

We Need To Talk About Kevin / Lionel Shriver

4 out of 5 stars

Eva never really wanted to be a mother - and certainly not the mother of the unlovable boy who murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker, and a much-adored teacher who tried to befriend him, all two days before his sixteenth birthday. Now, two years later, it is time for her to come to terms with marriage, career, family, parenthood, and Kevin's horrific rampage in a series of startlingly direct correspondences with her estranged husband, Franklin. Uneasy with the sacrifices and social demotion of motherhood from the start, Eva fears that her alarming dislike for her own son may be responsible for driving him so nihilistically off the rails.

Here I am, several days after finishing this book, trying to collect my thoughts about it into a coherent narrative. I’m also intensely aware of writing this missive on Mother’s Day. I vascillated back and forth between 3 and 4 stars, finally settling on 4 because I couldn’t quit thinking about it.

It’s an exploration of the whole nature vs. nurture argument (although surely we all realize by now that its “both and” rather than “either or”). The volume that I read had an essay by the author at the end and I was interested in her perspective:

Though any writer is pleased by admiring reviews in the Wall Street Journal or Publishers Weekly, I’ve been more fascinated by the responses to Kevin...by so-called “ordinary” readers. Not only are many of these amateur reviews surprisingly well written and reflective, but they divided almost straight down the middle into what seem to be reviews of two different books….Mission accomplished.”

I believe that I read somewhere that nature (genetics) loads the gun, but nurture (environment) pulls the trigger. To me, it seems that Kevin shares a genetic tendency with his mother towards being restless and bored. Eva solved it first by traveling and second by childbirth, her son by murder. Both are competitive in their own arenas. With a different mother, Kevin might have turned out differently. Maybe. But we see from Eva’s relationship with Celia that she is capable of being a good mother, given a child who will meet her halfway. Every time you think you know for sure what went wrong, Shriver produces an event like a rabbit out of a hat to show you that it ain’t necessarily so.

I really enjoy epistolary novels, so that was a point in its favour for me. I also appreciated how carefully the author doled out the bread crumbs, leading the reader on, gradually revealing the true situation. Or at least what Eva believes the true situation to be. It seems to me that the two camps of readers (That poor woman vs. the woman who ruined her son’s life) show us clearly the stresses of parenting in the modern world. It’s still the mother who is saddled with the expectations for her children, as if the father’s job was over when sperm joined egg. Mothers aren’t allowed to be human or have imperfections. I think that’s what people are referring to when they call this a feminist novel--why is it the mother or why is it only the mother who is deemed at fault? Because all the way through the novel, I found myself asking, “What the hell is wrong with Franklin? Why can he not see any of this?” I also found myself wondering what had drawn Eva and Franklin together to begin with and why they stayed together.

I could write a thesis on this book. It makes me think of so many things, join so many disparate threads together. So although I may not have enjoyed the book in the traditional sense, I can’t quite get it out of my head. The impulse was to sit right back down and read it again. Maybe I will revisit it in the future, who knows? May I say that I am profoundly happy to be single and childless.

Troubles / J.G. Farrell

3.5 out of 5 stars

1919: After surviving the Great War, Major Brendan Archer makes his way to Ireland, hoping to discover whether he is indeed betrothed to Angela Spencer, whose Anglo-Irish family owns the once-aptly-named Majestic Hotel in Kilnalough. But his fiancée is strangely altered and her family's fortunes have suffered a spectacular decline. The hotel's hundreds of rooms are disintegrating on a grand scale; its few remaining guests thrive on rumors and games of whist; herds of cats have taken over the Imperial Bar and the upper stories; bamboo shoots threaten the foundations; and piglets frolic in the squash court. Meanwhile, the Major is captivated by the beautiful and bitter Sarah Devlin. As housekeeping disasters force him from room to room, outside the order of the British Empire also totters: there is unrest in the East, and in Ireland itself the mounting violence of "the troubles."

I wasn’t in a head space to properly appreciate this book. Whenever I would pick it up, I could read along quite happily. However, when I set it down it was always an effort to pick it back up. What can I say, life is complicated right now. I’m in the process of retirement, which takes more energy than I thought it would. We’ve been having mail issues and water issues at my condo complex. I’ve spent time cat-sitting for my cousin and have been away from home (thankfully during most of the water issues). I’m preparing for a trip to France. The washer in my building is out of order and I desperately need to do laundry. And do you know, when you announce that you’re retiring, you suddenly get coffee & lunch dates galore!

So, I’m easily distracted by shiny objects right now, and this book deserves more attention than I was able to give it. It’s a shame that the author died as young as he did, because I have a feeling that he would have produced more & better.

There were so many details that amused me—the colony of cats inhabiting one of the bars (and the abortive attempt to get rid of them later), the plethora of dogs also roaming the hotel premises, the overgrown palm garden room requiring a machete from time to time. Mostly the complete benign neglect with which the Majestic Hotel was just allowed to fall to pieces bit by bit.

The hotel seemed to represent the British Empire—something old, decrepit, and bordering on useless. The Irish weather was gradually tearing it down, just as the IRA was gradually wearing down the British attempts to rule in Ireland. Its owner, Edward Spencer, guards his statue of Queen Victoria, looks down his nose at his Irish neighbours, and fights a losing battle against Irish Republicanism. Major Brendan Archer, who came to the Majestic to sort out a possible engagement to Edward’s daughter, Angela, finds himself trying to temper Spencer’s behaviour and to encourage him to pay more attention to the hotel’s structure. The novel recounts the troubles experienced by the denizens of the Majestic, which mirror the Troubles between England and Ireland—was ever a conflict so misnamed? Troubles sounds minor, but this conflict was anything but.

Everyone has mixed emotions and divided loyalties. There’s no happy solution to anything. There are some amusements along the way, but I found this to be a very sad book, not that there could have been any other conclusion.

Random Family / Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

2.5 stars out of 5

In her extraordinary bestseller, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc immerses readers in the intricacies of the ghetto, revealing the true sagas lurking behind the headlines of gangsta glamour, gold-drenched drug dealers, and street-corner society. Focusing on two romances - Jessica's dizzying infatuation with a hugely successful young heroin dealer, Boy George, and Coco's first love with Jessica's little brother, Cesar - Random Family is the story of young people trying to outrun their destinies. Jessica and Boy George ride the wild adventure between riches and ruin, while Coco and Cesar stick closer to the street, all four caught in a precarious dance between survival and death. Friends get murdered; the DEA and FBI investigate Boy George; Cesar becomes a fugitive; Jessica and Coco endure homelessness, betrayal, the heartbreaking separation of prison, and, throughout it all, the insidious damage of poverty.

Charting the tumultuous cycle of the generations - as girls become mothers, boys become criminals, and hope struggles against deprivation - LeBlanc slips behind the cold statistics and sensationalism and comes back with a riveting, haunting, and true story.

I guess that I’m not entirely sure what the author was trying to achieve with this book. There’s no introduction, there’s no conclusion--I don’t enough about her to know her motivations. To be charitable, it would seem that she is trying to show, through the lives of three main people, the ties that bind people into poverty, drugs, and crime.

I have no doubts about how difficult it is to escape poverty. When your parents are uneducated, violent, and poor, who can you look to for an example of how to get out of that situation? During this time, in this place, boys were fathers in their teens, dropped out of school, and could only earn money through drugs and other criminality. Girls are pregnant in their teens, dropped out of school, and can’t provide for themselves and their children on minimum wage jobs. Sexual abuse is common because children get left with people that can’t be trusted. Girls skip from one man to the next because they’ve watched their mothers do the same thing. No one has enough education to properly fill out government forms to obtain benefits or to budget what little money they have. Boys take advantage of their male status to have sex with as many girls as they can talk into it. Girls can’t afford birth control and view having children as a way to bind boys to them.

Add to these problems that being a generous, good person can work against you. How many times did these women feed people who were only “random family”? Someone connected to someone who was part of the family? When girls have children by 2 or 3 different men, all of their relatives somehow become part of the web of family and women like Coco feel badly about denying them food and/or housing. Yet she knows that it’s bad for her own children in the long run.

These people are in a virtually inescapable situation. Their only pleasures are food and sex and they indulge when they get a chance--who wouldn’t? But when all the food is gone and there are more babies on the way, once again their lives worsen.

It was depressing reading because I know that the same things are probably happening to the children and grandchildren of Jessica, George, and Coco. Reading this made me realize how incredibly fortunate I am to have been born into the family that I’m part of, into the communities that I’m part of, and to be a citizen of my country. The fact that the adults around me didn’t lecture me about how to live, they just lived it and let me watch & learn. I learned to work, to live within my means, to value education, to regulate my emotions, all those skills that are necessary to living well.

I’d like to think the author meant this book as more than just downward social comparison, but I wish that she had addressed her purpose directly. What would have made things better? Are there programs that could actually assist people in these life circumstances? Ultimately, without this kind of analysis, I wonder why she wrote it?

Give Me Everything You Have / James Lasdun

3 out of 5 stars

A true story of obsessive love turning to obsessive hate, Give Me Everything You Have chronicles the author's strange and harrowing ordeal at the hands of a former student, a self-styled "verbal terrorist," who began trying, in her words, to "ruin him." Hate mail, online postings, and public accusations of plagiarism and sexual misconduct were her weapons of choice and, as with more conventional terrorist weapons, they proved remarkably difficult to combat.

James Lasdun's account, while terrifying, is told with compassion and humor, and brilliantly succeeds in turning a highly personal story into a profound meditation on subjects as varied as madness, race, Middle East politics, and the meaning of honor and reputation in the Internet age.

I first read this book back in 2013. I had a great deal of sympathy for the author, as I had four creepy men oozing their way around the outskirts of my life at that time and I was struggling to cope with the situation. Fortunately for me, none of them was nearly as persistent or proactive as the woman who troubled Mr. Lasdun.

On re-reading this volume, I was struck by two things. First, that the events in this book took place before we were really familiar with things like public shaming on the internet, revenge porn, and GamerGate and so many other attacks on people’s reputations in cyberspace. It’s taken a long time to get police interested in pursuing physical stalkers and their assistance has extremely mixed results, so I’m unsurprised that this author couldn’t get them effectively interested in his predicament.

Second, I have to point out that I don’t think this book wouldn’t have been deemed worthy of publishing if the author had been female. Women have to put up with this kind of behaviour with very little help from authorities on a regular basis. The reason that this book was “news” was because the victim was male and that character assassination on the internet was a new-ish thing.

I’m pleased to report that all four of the creepy men in my 2013 life are history. I don’t know where a single one of them is and I’m happy that way. Stalking is about power, having the power to make someone else’s life miserable while trying to get them to conform to some fantasy.

For observations on the stalking phenomenon, I would recommend Obsession by John E. Douglas (former FBI agent). For advice on keeping yourself safe, I would advise reading The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence by Gavin De Becker.

Lion / Saroo Brierley

3 out of 5 stars

At only five years old, Saroo Brierley got lost on a train in India. Unable to read or write or recall the name of his hometown or even his own last name, he survived alone for weeks on the rough streets of Calcutta before ultimately being transferred to an agency and adopted by a couple in Australia.
Despite his gratitude, Brierley always wondered about his origins. Eventually, with the advent of Google Earth, he had the opportunity to look for the needle in a haystack he once called home, and pore over satellite images for landmarks he might recognize or mathematical equations that might further narrow down the labyrinthine map of India. One day, after years of searching, he miraculously found what he was looking for and set off to find his family.

The first book of 2019 with my real-life book club. I missed the meeting during which it was discussed, but I see at least two of my book club ladies have rated it on either side of my own rating. It wasn’t a bad story, but it certainly wasn’t the most riveting memoir that I’ve ever read either.

First off, the story is an amazing one. A four to five year old Indian child, separated from his family, too young to know his own surname or the proper name of his town. Eventually, we even learn that he mispronounced his given name! Judging from this account, it sounds like he didn’t have much vocabulary and he may have had speech difficulties, as he couldn’t seem to make himself understood to the adults in the new world he found himself in. He did come from a very impoverished family, so schooling was unavailable to him, but he was young for school attendance anyway. His family members were so occupied with survival that there was no time to spend educating the younger children.

I’m pretty sure that, at the same age, I wouldn’t have been able to identify the landmarks around my home with the degree of certainty and accuracy that Mr. Brierley did. That’s what makes the story so interesting, is his ability to recognize his home town from Google Earth.

I can see where the movie version of this tale would probably be superior to the book. The author is obviously not a practiced writer, so the writing is very average. There is a great deal of unnecessary detail and quite a bit of repetition.

People who are adoptees would probably have greater interest in this story than I did. I personally would recommend trying the movie before picking up the book.

Bloody Jack / L.A. Meyer

3.5 stars

Life as a ship's boy aboard HMS Dolphin is a dream come true for Jacky Faber. Gone are the days of scavenging for food and fighting for survival on the streets of eighteenth-century London. Instead, Jacky is becoming a skilled and respected sailor as the crew pursues pirates on the high seas.

There's only one problem: Jacky is a girl. And she will have to use every bit of her spirit, wit, and courage to keep the crew from discovering her secret. This could be the adventure of her life--if only she doesn't get caught. . .


 ”It's easier bein' a boy, 'cause when someone needs somethin' done like holdin' a horse, they'll always pick a boy 'cause they think the dumbest boy will be better at it than the brightest girl, which is stupid, but there you are.”

I liked this book a fair bit, but there were a couple of ways in which it disappointed me. As the quote above illustrates, there is a bit of commentary on the role of women during this time period. The basic plot is quite liberating for Jacky—she impersonates a boy and gets herself a job. She’s a sharp enough observer (trained by her time on the streets of London) to figure out how to pull it off without getting caught right away.

However, Jacky spends more time than necessary, in my opinion, bawling and dripping snot. Because apparently that’s what girls do. I don’t know about you, but my mother was the reserved one of my parents. You could make my dad cry fairly easily, but Mom was the Iron Lady. I remember that she gave me hell for crying too much at her mother’s funeral! She believed in crying in private, on your own, not in public for all the neighbours to see.

The writing style, though somehow strangely appropriate for this tale, didn’t really thrill me. Perhaps that’s because I am far older than the intended demographic for this series. I found it a decent book and a relatively quick read, but I sincerely doubt that I’ll be pursuing the series any further.

Looking for Alaska / John Green

3 out of 5 stars

Before: Miles “Pudge” Halter is done with his safe life at home. His whole life has been one big non-event, and his obsession with famous last words has only made him crave “the Great Perhaps” even more (Francois Rabelais, poet). He heads off to the sometimes crazy and anything-but-boring world of Culver Creek Boarding School, and his life becomes the opposite of safe. Because down the hall is Alaska Young. The gorgeous, clever, funny, sexy, self-destructive, screwed up, and utterly fascinating Alaska Young. She is an event unto herself. She pulls Pudge into her world, launches him into the Great Perhaps, and steals his heart. Then. . . .
After: Nothing is ever the same.

This is my first foray into John Green’s writing, undertaken for my real life book club during our year of reading young adult literature. It seemed appropriate to include one of Green’s books, since he is sometimes credited “with ushering in a new golden era for contemporary, realistic, literary teen fiction, following more than a decade of dominance by books about young wizards, sparkly vampires, and dystopia.” (Wikipedia).

Looking for Alaska is his first published novel. One of the things that I did appreciate about it was its male narrator, Miles “Pudge” Halter. A story of a young man, written by a male author, something that we could use more of in the world of YA. One presumes that Green, having been an adolescent boy, would bring his experience to the novel and that seemed to me to be the case. Of course, my only way of judging is from comparison to my long-ago experience of being a teen girl.

I also appreciated the strong character of Alaska Young, the young woman who provides the lynch-pin of Halter’s boarding school life. She is intelligent (coaching the boys in mathematics) and a reader with a large collection of books in her room. But she is also cool, smoking & drinking & presumably sexually active (we readers only see the first two activities). She challenges the boys regularly on matters of female objectification and patriarchy. But she has a boyfriend outside of the boarding school, which makes her off-limits as a potential girlfriend to the boys—nevertheless, they all fall for the beautiful Alaska and hope to be the one to catch her fancy should she break up with Jake.

I liked all those features—so why only 3 stars? Because I felt really emotionally manipulated during my reading. My first few tears were shed in the coffee room at work, and I decided to finish up the book at home rather than cry in the workplace. For my money, Patrick Ness does a much better job at writing a YA book on grief in A Monster Calls. I cried over that one too, but it felt a bit more honest to me somehow.

Mind you, I would never discourage anyone from reading Looking for Alaska. I consider 3 stars to be a pretty good rating and I’m sure that younger readers would rate the novel higher than I do. And it certainly provides the young male viewpoint that is needed to attract young men into the world of reading.

The Lie Tree / Frances Hardinge

4.25 stars out of 5

Faith Sunderly leads a double life. To most people, she is reliable, dull, trustworthy - a proper young lady who knows her place as inferior to men. But inside, Faith is full of questions and curiosity, and she cannot resist mysteries: an unattended envelope, an unlocked door. She knows secrets no one suspects her of knowing. She knows that her family moved to the close-knit island of Vane because her famous scientist father was fleeing a reputation-destroying scandal. And she knows, when her father is discovered dead shortly thereafter, that he was murdered.

In pursuit of justice and revenge, Faith hunts through her father's possessions and discovers a strange tree. The tree bears fruit only when she whispers a lie to it. The fruit of the tree, when eaten, delivers a hidden truth. The tree might hold the key to her father's murder - or it may lure the murderer directly to Faith herself.

The May selection for my real-life book club. The verdict? We liked it a lot. As one member said, it started out kind of depressing with all of the women seemingly held back and held down by a repressive society and the men in their lives. But as the story progressed, I realized that just like weeds, the women of the tale were strong enough to find their way to some control by growing up through the cracks!

There’s a fair amount of darkness and duplicity in the work. I guess with a title like The Lie Tree that is unavoidable. Faith Sunderly demonstrates that peculiarity of human nature—she cares much more about the opinion of her odious, abusive father than for her mother who she despises as “less than.” And in doing so, she despises herself for being that ultimate “less than,” a girl. She believes in her father’s uprightness until she discovers his special possession, the Lie Tree. A plant which feeds on lies and the more people who believe them, the better the plant grows.

When her father is killed (and her family is due to be disinherited because he is believed to be a suicide), Faith takes matters into her own hands—she tells the tree what it wants to hear and it grows much more luxuriantly that it ever did under her father’s care.

I loved the book for Faith’s realization of her worthiness and intelligence and the resilience of all the women to resist the patriarchal control in their society. I’m looking forward to reading more by Frances Hardinge.

Tell the Wolves I'm Home / Carol Rifka Brunt

4 out of 5 stars

1987. There's only one person who has ever truly understood fourteen-year-old June Elbus, and that's her uncle, the renowned painter Finn Weiss. Shy at school and distant from her older sister, June can only be herself in Finn's company; he is her godfather, confidant, and best friend. So when he dies, far too young, of a mysterious illness her mother can barely speak about, June's world is turned upside down. But Finn's death brings a surprise acquaintance into June's life - someone who will help her to heal, and to question what she thinks she knows about Finn, her family, and even her own heart.

At Finn's funeral, June notices a strange man lingering just beyond the crowd. A few days later, she receives a package in the mail. Inside is a beautiful teapot she recognizes from Finn's apartment, and a note from Toby, the stranger, asking for an opportunity to meet. As the two begin to spend time together, June realizes she's not the only one who misses Finn, and if she can bring herself to trust this unexpected friend, he just might be the one she needs the most.

My real-life book club is indulging in a year of reading young adult literature, and this is our March selection. I am also using it to fulfill the “book about grief” selection for my 2018 PopSugar Challenge and the entry for B in my Female Authors A to Z challenge.

The main character, June, spends the course of the book figuring out the nature of love and grief in life. She realizes that we say “love” but that it can represent a variety of different emotions—between parents and children, between siblings, for good friends, even for favourite foods, as well as romantic connection. She learns about her mother’s estrangement from her brother, June’s beloved Uncle Finn. She navigates the yawning distance developing between her sister Greta and herself. She processes the loss of Finn and finds a new connection with his partner Toby.

What a great portrayal of life in all its messiness! If you’ve lived through some family rifts or somehow found yourself further away from a sibling that you ever believed possible, you will find something to hang onto in this novel. The relationships were realistic, not melodramatic or overdone. Although the grief was palpable in places, it didn’t send me rushing to a tissue box, like Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls.

I am constantly amazed at how much really good writing there is out there in the Young Adult genre—if you enjoy YA, add this one to your reading pile.

The House on Mango Street / Sandra Cisneros

4 out of 5 stars

Sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous, The House on Mango Street tells the story of Esperanza Cordero, whose neighborhood is one of harsh realities and harsh beauty. Esperanza doesn't want to belong--not to her rundown neighborhood, and not to the low expectations the world has for her. Esperanza's story is that of a young girl coming into her power, and inventing for herself what she will become.

 I started reading The House on Mango Street without really researching anything about it. I could really tell that the author is also a poet—the beauty of the language and the descriptions was stunning. If you are looking for something plot-driven, this is not your book. But if you are willing to savour each chapter/vignette for what it is, you will enjoy this artistic little volume.

Each chapter is like a perfectly cut and polished gemstone, offering the reader a peek into the Chicago of the 1950s and 1960s. What I really related to was the naiveté of Esperanza—at her age, I was similarly clueless about the allure of boys (or what one would actually do with a boy that parents were always worrying about). Despite that lack of knowledge, I struggled against societal expectations, just as Esperanza did. I too watched my mother struggle to express her artistic self, while trying to juggle life as a mother and a wife and I learned the same lesson: support yourself so that you can do the things you need to do in life.

We are also allowed a look into the world of immigrant Mexican families of that time—the strictness of the fathers, the dilapidated housing, the restraint on expectations. The importance of family. The reliance on community.

Esperanza gets her name for a reason—there is Hope that a true artistic life can be achieved. And if this book is any indication, Sandra Cisneros has certainly met those expectations.

The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu / Joshua Hammer

4 out of 5 stars

To save precious centuries-old Arabic texts from Al Qaeda, a band of librarians in Timbuktu pulls off a brazen heist worthy of Ocean’s Eleven.

In the 1980s, a young adventurer and collector for a government library, Abdel Kader Haidara, journeyed across the Sahara Desert and along the Niger River, tracking down and salvaging tens of thousands of ancient Islamic and secular manuscripts that had fallen into obscurity. The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu tells the incredible story of how Haidara, a mild-mannered archivist and historian from the legendary city of Timbuktu, later became one of the world’s greatest and most brazen smugglers.

In 2012, thousands of Al Qaeda militants from northwest Africa seized control of most of Mali, including Timbuktu. They imposed Sharia law, chopped off the hands of accused thieves, stoned to death unmarried couples, and threatened to destroy the great manuscripts. As the militants tightened their control over Timbuktu, Haidara organized a dangerous operation to sneak all 350,000 volumes out of the city to the safety of southern Mali.

I was fascinated by this account of the libraries/archives of irreplaceable old manuscripts in Arabic and other languages of North Africa and the Middle East. The first chapters introduce us to the main players in the manuscript biz, as they try to find & trade for these delicate, rare documents and set up local archives to store them.

I think many people forget how sophisticated the Arab world was, back when Europe was languishing in the Dark Ages. They were responsible for maintaining scientific knowledge, mathematics, medicine, and philosophy, while Europeans were being held back by a repressive Church. The Renaissance began when Europeans re-discovered the books that had been preserved by the Arabs.

I don’t know about you, but I remember being taught the history of civilization in grade school. I think it must have been about Grade 5 or 6 that we learned about the Mesopotamia being the Cradle of Civilization and being part of the Fertile Crescent. And still, Western governments & researchers seem to be surprised to discover that non-European people had complex civilizations complete with books & universities. I was glad to see the people of North Africa hanging on to their patrimony and keeping these manuscript collections in their own countries, as they have the expertise to read and interpret them. Too often this kind of collection gets whisked off to some Western repository where it attracts limited interest and travel costs prevent African scholars from accessing them.

Reading about the history & variety of extremists in the area certainly gives one pause. So many of the names of the major players were familiar to anyone who follows the news, especially the kidnap victims. I was interested to fill in the details on why these events happened and what else was going on behind the scenes. I still don’t really comprehend the level of hostility of groups like Al Qaeda and the Taliban to art, culture, and literature, but I understand that they have a potentially mistaken idea of what early Islam was like (just as many fundamentalist Christians seem to have a skewed view of what early Christians were like). It seems like most fundamentalists have the same view of the world, i.e. that it is just a temporary waiting room before the real deal, the hereafter. What a limiting way to look at the world!

As a library worker who has dabbled in archival and museum collection description, I have to say that I was sincerely jealous of the people who got to work with the marvelous collections described in this volume. I would give my eye teeth to be involved in the cataloguing & digitization of such a significant resource!

The Library at Mount Char / Scott Hawkins

4 out of 5 stars

Carolyn's not so different from the other people around her. She likes guacamole and cigarettes and steak. She knows how to use a phone. Clothes are a bit tricky, but everyone says nice things about her outfit with the Christmas sweater over the gold bicycle shorts.  After all, she was a normal American herself once.  

That was a long time ago, of course. Before her parents died. Before she and the others were taken in by the man they called Father.  In the years since then, Carolyn hasn't had a chance to get out much. Instead, she and her adopted siblings have been raised according to Father's ancient customs. They've studied the books in his Library and learned some of the secrets of his power. And sometimes, they've wondered if their cruel tutor might secretly be God. 

Now, Father is missing—perhaps even dead—and the Library that holds his secrets stands unguarded. And with it, control over all of creation.  As Carolyn gathers the tools she needs for the battle to come, fierce competitors for this prize align against her, all of them with powers that far exceed her own.  But Carolyn has accounted for this.  And Carolyn has a plan.

The only trouble is that in the war to make a new God, she's forgotten to protect the things that make her human.

4 dark and twisty stars.

I spent the first couple of chapters of this book wondering WTF? What is going on here? Who are these people? Are they really people? Then things started to weave together for me—if not exactly making sense, I could start to see a pattern developing and it intrigued me. By the end, I was enjoying the hell out of it.

I’m a pretty devoted fantasy reader and I chose this book for my real-life book club as a horror choice. I had to sit and think about that once I was finished. Was this horror? I had to go look up some definitions of the horror genre, but I’ve come to the conclusion that it does indeed slot into that classification. It has supernatural elements. It is surreal and sometimes gruesome. It is unsettling. I guess that I associate horror with being scared and because I wasn’t hiding under my bedcovers, this felt more like dark fantasy to me.

It’s been decades since I read The Epic of Gilgamesh, but I thought about it when reading about David, who reminded me a bit of Enkidu, the Wildman. I have to say that all the resurrections and being children of a god made me think of the New Testament too and its stories about Jesus. The lions, Dresden and Naga, brought C.S. Lewis’ Aslan to mind as well, so there were just threads pulling all over the place to all these other works.

What made me laugh, after I was done, was reading the author’s biographical note and seeing that he’s very involved in dog rescue, including owning a “pack” of foster dogs. One of the more disturbing events in the book is a scene where Steve and the two lions must fight off an unending stream of supernaturally determined dogs!

I love it when an author doesn’t get all explainy and lets you sort things out for yourself. I also love it when details that seem like throw-away items early in the book become suddenly significant when the chips are down.

A very impressive debut novel and I shall be very interested to see what this author produces next.

The Clockwork Scarab / Colleen Gleason

4 out of 5 stars

Evaline Stoker and Mina Holmes never meant to get into the family business. But when you’re the sister of Bram and the niece of Sherlock, vampire hunting and mystery solving are in your blood. And when two society girls go missing, there’s no one more qualified to investigate.

Now fierce Evaline and logical Mina must resolve their rivalry, navigate the advances of not just one but three mysterious gentlemen, and solve murder with only one clue: a strange Egyptian scarab. The stakes are high. If Stoker and Holmes don’t unravel why the belles of London society are in such danger, they’ll become the next victims.


Something a little different for my real-life book club—a steampunk novel.  A perfect, light little book for reading during the heat of August, when who really wants to exert themselves too much?

It’s a young adult novel, but it’s charm is dependent on the reader having some familiarity with Sherlock Holmes and Bram Stoker.  The stars of this show are Mina Holmes (Sherlock’s niece) and Evalina Stoker (Bram’s much younger sister).  Each of them are talented in their own rights, Mina as a thinker and reasoner like her uncle, Evalina as a vampire hunter.  Brains and brawn, in other words.

When the two young women are forced to work together, their innate independence stands in their way to begin with.  But resistance is futile, and they find themselves relying on each other more & more.  Of course, there are love interests introduced for each one—a law man and a rapscallion, just to emphasize their tempermental differences!  Since neither woman expected to find a suitable romance, they are surprised & confused by this state of affairs.

While this book will never achieve the durability or popularity of the original Conan Doyle or Stoker creations, it is cute and fun, and I will probably read at least one more book in the series.

Romeo and/or Juliet / Ryan North

2.5 stars out of 5

Shakespeare’s plays weren’t meant to be read. They were meant…to be played.

What if Romeo never met Juliet? What if Juliet got really buff instead of moping around all day? What if they teamed up to take over Verona with robot suits? This choose-your-own-path version of Romeo and Juliet—packed with fun puzzles, secrets, and quadrillions of possible storylines—lets you decide where the plot goes every time you read. You might play as Romeo, or as Juliet, or as both of them at the same time.

This was a fun idea and I really wanted to love it. It reminded me of many of the books that I bought from Scholastic Books during grades 6 and 7, puzzle books, mystery books, that a child could go through multiple times and still find new treats by taking different turns.

I don’t know how many times I started through this choose-your-own-adventure book, trying to actually follow the Bard’s version of the story, only to get distracted by goofy story lines that I just couldn’t pass by. Unfortunately, goofy was the general standard of the various branchings and the writing was a great disappointment. Less silliness and more depth would have been welcome.

I still don’t know if it was even possible to get to the traditional ending of the play. I lost interest in trying after about a dozen attempts.

A Monster Calls / Patrick Ness

5 out of 5 stars

The monster showed up after midnight. As they do.

But it isn’t the monster Conor’s been expecting. He’s been expecting the one from his nightmare, the one he’s had nearly every night since his mother started her treatments, the one with the darkness and the wind and the screaming…

This monster is something different, though. Something ancient, something wild. And it wants the most dangerous thing of all from Conor.

It wants the truth.


 “The monster showed up just after midnight. As they do.”

That’s when our worries plague us—in the middle of the night when there’s nothing we can do except stew about them. Your nightmare is now interrupted by real-life worries that are worse. Deal with it!

I’ve lived through a similar situation. I was at my father’s side when he died, after three weeks of lingering in hospital after a car accident. I went through all the stages of grief, repeatedly. Denial, bargaining, anger, depression, acceptance. I had the advantage of a couple of decades of experience more than Conor, but the emotions are the same.

I can’t even remember who I was talking to on the phone, days before Dad died, when I said, “Why can’t this poor man die? What’s holding him here?” Because his life was never going to be the same. He would never be physically or emotionally whole again. His life would simply have been a frustrating struggle and he didn’t deal well with frustration. All in all, it was a relief when he made the decision to let go. I was grateful that he was able to leave, but I have missed him every day since then.

I shed a lot of tears towards the end of this book. I think it would be an excellent offering to any young person who has lost a parent or whose parent is on the brink of death. It’s okay to be angry. It’s okay to be sad. It’s okay to be relieved when that parent is released from pain. Whatever you feel, it’s okay.

Apologies to my real-life book club for choosing yet another “cancer book.”