What I'm Reading Now

Continuing to read Luckiest Girl Alive, but haven't gotten that much farther.  Have mislaid Rebecca Mead's A Life in Middlemarch (feeling very Bridget Jones now), have read first ten pages of The Paris Architect (chilling right from the beginning), but I picked up The Bookaneer by Matthew Pearl - and while I would really like to get away from reading yet another historical fiction mystery, I have to say it's charming from the outset.  The narrator recalls when, as a 19-year-old, he worked as a waiter on the train and his favorite part of his work was when the book vendor came on the train.  Is it embarrassing to find yet another "book for book lovers only" with a high degree of twee on my reading list? Yes, it is embarrassing and all I can say is that I have known embarrassment before.  

Kitchens of the Great Midwest by J. Ryan Stradal

I'm reading Great Kitchens and I'm really enjoying it.  I found out about it from a co-worker who said she really liked it.

From early in the novel:

Adam held out the pack for Mitch.  "You don't need to be in the kitchen?" Octavia asked, preemptively crossing her arms in front of her chest.

"Dirty little secret," Mitch said.  "Eva has saved my life.  She does everything I can do and people can't tell the difference.  I'm actually writing a book now, I have time to write a book."

"What's it called?"

"Tapas Girls and Bottomless Sangria:  Hot Times in Spanish Kitchens.  You know anyone who can help with a book proposal?"

This book, especially its opening, reminded me so much of Anne Tyler.  I ran through the first 100 pages.  The phrase that comes to mind is "the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie."  These modest, unpretentious people are very funny and sweet.

I read an article about the author, J. Ryan Stradal, and I got the impression that "food culture" wasn't that important to him personally - it was just the setting for the book.  However, talk about food is constant in this book, whether it's venison, lemon bars, heirloom tomatoes, artisanal bread, or lutefisk.  I'm amazed I haven't gone to get something to eat already!

The Rumor by Elin Hilderbrand

I enjoyed The Rumor.  I thought it was slight, however.


This is the first Hilderbrand novel I've read.  She lives on Nantucket Island, and I assume that her novels, like this one, are set there.

Nantucket sounds like a very nice place; I enjoyed imaginatively hobnobbing with its citizens.

This is a book about friendship as much as anything.  Two friends, Madeline and Grace, are at the heart of the novel.  Each of them is in a rocky patch, in very different ways.  Madeline is a novelist, and one who has known real success but who is under contractual obligation to deliver another novel and she's got writer's block.  Her friend Grace seems to have it all:  beautiful house, beautiful garden, two pretty and accomplished teenage daughters.

Grace is someone who came from money and who has refined and artistic tastes.  She loves her garden, and she loves to cook.  Her daughters are somewhat distant, especially the older one, who aspires to a modeling career.  Her husband is a successful real estate agent, and he is gone a lot - he's never far away, since they live on an island, but his hours as an agent mean that he's not around.

Grace does all the work herself on her garden, but she has a landscape designer and he visits the garden almost every day to talk to her about the design.

Grace and her husband, Eddie, pay a publicist to get a paper or magazine to do a spread on her garden, of which she's rightly proud.

Eddie is a realtor, and he's facing pressures in his business.  Business is slow.  He's always been a hard worker, and someone who needs to be available when his clients are available.  He feels that he has to be in the office so that he can be there when clients walk in.  As a result, he's never home during the day, and is often gone in the evening as well.  Of course, weekends are his busy time.

Meanwhile, Grace has developed a crush on her gardener, Benton Coe.  He's been gone for the winter, visiting Morocco, and when he comes back, he brings her first a tea set, and then macarons for the mint tea Grace makes with the tea set.

I felt that the Rumor was slight and fun - superficial in that, in part, it was about surfaces.  For instance, Grace has a potting shed, which is described several times.  It's as if the potting shed is a symbol of a certain kind of middle class aspiration and attainment, a token of "having arrived," and, of course, while Grace is proud of her garden and her potting shed, her lifestyle, which is an act of creativity on her part, is supported by her husband, who is not only struggling to keep his business profitable (and support Grace's lifestyle) but the stress is causing him chronic heartburn.  Grace is a wonderful cook, and Eddie can't eat the beautiful food she prepares because his heartburn is so bad. She creates stylish and delicious meals using the fresh produce from her garden, and she feeds her husband cheese and crackers because that's all he can digest.  Is it obvious that there's a disconnect here?

In her acknowledgements, Hannah mentioned that she had been fighting breast cancer while she was writing this book.  I wonder if that influenced the plot -- or the tone.  I wonder if her other books are a little big lighter, a little bit more whimsical.

I often wonder what are the purposes of the fiction novels I read.  Obviously, one is escape - both in the sense of escaping from one's daily reality and demands and also, in the sense of being allowed to see how the other half live, and where they live, and how and where others unlike ourselves live. Obviously, some books are art, or attempts at art, whether conscious or not -- and, equally obviously, most of the books I read do not fall into this category.  But what about a novel like The Rumor? Some might dismiss it with a wave of the hand, saying, "It's just escapist entertainment."  But why this particular escapist entertainment?  Why not Nancy Thayer, or fantasy or science fiction or crime fiction or any one of another kind of novel by any one of a number of authors.  

What I'm Reading Now

I feel a need to clear my palate, so to speak.  I started reading Jessica Knoll's Luckiest Girl Alive, and I saw right away at least three of the similarities to Gone Girl:  a) the author is a magazine writer; b) the protagonist is a magazine writer; c) the protagonist is concerned with the need to appear perfect and to disguise her true feelings.

I felt I was looking for something else, so I picked up The Rumor by Elin Hilderbrand.  I found the opening pages breezy, light and entertaining.  However, as the plot thickens, it seems a little less light.

I'll continue with it for now.

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

I just finished this book last night, and I still feel strongly moved by it.

Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris.  Her mother is dead.  She loses her sight to illness.  Her father, a locksmith at the Natural History Museum, dotes on her and trains her to use her other senses to compensate for loss of sight.

Marie-Laure grows up in the Natural History Museum, spending time with the curators and becoming an expert on shells among other things.  She finds the world of the Museum, with its scholars and specimens, magical.

Her father makes puzzle boxes for her for her birthdays.  She's very talented at opening them, and will find a treat inside.  Then her father begins to give her Braille books.  One of them is Jules Vernes' Twenty Leagues Under the Sea.  Her father makes a model of her neighborhood, which helps her to learn how to navigate the streets,

Werner Pfennig is an orphan after his father dies in a mining accident, when he and his little sister, Jutta, go to live with Frau Elena in a house with other orphans.  He's traumatized by his father's accident, and dreads and hates the mines.  The mines are where all the boys go when they grow up - when they're fifteen or sixteen. He pulls his sister, Jutta, around in a little wagon amidst the slag and coal heaps.

Werner finds a radio somewhere, and manages to make it work.  Late at night, he and Jutta sit up and listen to a science program for children that is broadcast from France.  Jutta is particularly fascinated, and begins to exhaustively draw pictures of Paris.  Werner begins fixing radios for the neighbors. Finally, a Nazi officer comes to the house looking for him; he wants Werner to fix his radio.  Werner is nervous, but he does fix the radio, and this leads to his being nominated for entrance into a military school.  As frightening as he finds the entrance exam, and as much as his sister profoundly mistrusts this turn of events, he feels compelled to accept any route that will permit him to escape the mines.

When the war comes, Marie-Laure flees Paris with her father to Brittany, where they live with her father's uncle, a shell-shocked veteran of the First World War.  Meanwhile, Werner is miserable at his military school.

The book opens with the bombing of Saint-Malo, the medieval walled city on the coast of Brittany where Marie-Laure lives with her great-uncle and his servant, the redoubtable Madame Manec.

The narrative skips forward and backward in time, and the story is told through short chapters.  I think the short chapters give a reader a sense of time passing quickly, and also allows the reader to focus not only on the plot but the wonderful pictures the author creates.

Werner's experiences in the war reminded me of the film of Gunter Grass' novel The Tin Drum.  Marie-Laure's childhood in Paris reminded me of The Invention of Hugo Cabret by David Selznick.

I absolutely adored the first 100 pages with their jewel box quality:  the fascinating exhibits at the museum, the wonderful puzzle boxes, the streets of Paris and the Jardin des Plantes.  After the invasion, things become much less magical and much more frightening.  I found that my sense of dread was profound, so much so that I found it hard to return to the book after page 100.

A friend who read this book said that the ending fizzled out.  Perhaps it did, but I didn't see it that way.  I thought that the brevity with which the end events were described were a reminder of the absurdity, brutality and randomness of violence in war.  There was another example of this from earlier in the book that has stayed with me:  Werner's friend forces men he meets on their travels to take off their boots and let him try them on.  He's a big man and he's looking for boots that fit.  When he finds boots that fit him, he just takes them, even though he knows a man without boots will die from exposure. The war was over for the man forced to give up his boots.

This man, who behaved in a way that certainly preserved himself, really loved Werner, I think, and certainly tried to protect him.  He also showed great tenderness to Werner's nephew in the monologue.

I think the epilogue permits us to see that Werner is not forgotten, and that the intensity with which he is missed is a reflection of his exceptional quality.  I think it's meant to be both a comfort and a balancing of the brutality and anonymity of war.

I think I read something about Anthony Doerr, or an interview with him, in which he said that he wanted to show that people are good. I'm not sure exactly what he meant, but perhaps he meant that people have the capacity for goodness even though they steal other people's boots.  It's a romantic notion, and a comforting one.

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Pleasantville by Attica Locke

This is the first book I've read by Attica Locke, and I really enjoyed it.  It's the story of a lawyer, Jay Porter, who's at a low ebb in his life when he becomes caught up in a series of events, including a murder, a criminal trial, some political dirty- and double-dealing, for which he's quite unprepared.  As the novel opens, he is gripped with grief for his dead wife and struggling to care for his two children.

It all starts with a break-in at his office in an old Victorian house.  He calls the police, and they come, look over the house, fill out a report, and leave.  Then he goes upstairs and finds an intruder who laughs at him before escaping out an upstairs window.  Downstairs, he begins to clean up the broken glass only to realize that the front window was broken from inside, not outside.  He then finds a business card with his address written on the back.  The front of the business card shows the name of a lawyer at Cole Oil. a local polluter whom he had successfully sued in a class action suit but which has failed to pay any part of the settlement amount.

He's disturbed and confused by all of this, but his grief-induced numbness is something he's feeling more strongly than fear or anger.

Shortly thereafter, an African-American girl is reported missing, and she was last seen in Pleasantville, an attractive middle-class African-American neighborhood in Houston.  This affects Jay greatly because he knows many people in Pleasantville and because this is the third such disappearance in several years, and his wife, as she lay dying, was particularly affected by the trauma of the parents of one of the other victims.

Much to his surprise, he finds himself involved in the disappearance/murder case, and eventually, manages to resolve the class action suit.

This book is wonderfully plotted, and very exciting. I enjoy accounts of courtroom tactics, and there's some of that here in the presentation of the criminal case he defends.

What makes this novel different from an ordinary police procedural is that Porter defends his client without solving the case, and, more importantly, the urban setting and the sharply drawn characters. Sometimes Porter tells you who these people - who he's mostly known for years - are, but mostly, their character is revealed through their actions, which is much more interesting.

If you like Scott Turow, or if you liked John Grisham's Sycamore Row, you'll probably enjoy Pleasantville.

Attica Locke is also the author of Black Water Rising, also featuring Jay Porter, and Cutting Season. And she's also a writer and co-producer for the TV show Empire.

A Blind Goddess by James R. Benn

Army investigator Billy Boyle is asked by an old friend to investigate the murder of a local policeman in World War II era Britain.

This is the second-to-latest novel in a series of novels about Army investigator Billy Boyle.

Like A Fine Summer's Day, A Blind Goddess is a historical fiction mystery.  A Fine Summer's Day was an "origin story," and explained the backstory of the protagonist. It's a great place to jump into a long and long-established series.

A Blind Goddess is not an origin story, but because one of the characters in this story is a childhood friend of Billy's, there's a lot of discussion of his teenage years in Boston when he met this friend. So, if you haven't read the rest of the series, you won't feel that you missed something important and you should not feel compelled to read the novels in order before you can read this one.

Billy is granted leave, but before he can leave, he's asked for help by an old friend.  His friend, Tree, works in an African-American anti-Tank unit.  His gunner has been arrested for the murder of a local policeman because the dead man had warned the accused, "Angry" Smith, from dating his sister.  The dead man's body was dumped in a local cemetery, on the grave of his father.

Billy feels the pull of old loyalties and can't walk away from this request.

What I found very interesting was the setting, and the discussion of racism and segregation in the military during World War II.

The books in the series are:

Billy Boyle

The First Wave

Blood Alone

Evil for Evil

Rag and Bone

A Mortal Terror

Death's Door

A Blind Goddess

The Rest Is Silence

Suspect by Robert Crais

Scott James is a Los Angeles police officer.  One night, he and his partner stop, on the way to dinner, just to listen to the silence in a commercial district.  All of a sudden, a Bentley pulls into the intersection in front of them, and is immediately hit by a truck.  A fire fight ensues, and Scott's partner, Stephanie, is killed.  A Gran Torino appears, and the gunmen pile in and escape.

Scott is wounded in several places, and has to have multiple surgeries, screws and plates to be put back together.  He's eligible for medical pension, but he's not really considered fit for duty, and he doesn't want to go back to being a patrol cop, but he can't face retirement, either.  He wants to find Stephanie's killers.  Then he hears that there's a position open in the K-9 unit, one in which police officers work with dogs.  He lobbies hard to be transferred to the K-9 unit.

The day that new officers are assigned their dogs, he meets a dog named Maggie.  Maggie is a military dog, a German Shepherd trained to sniff explosives and IEDs, who served three tours of duty in Afghanistan.  Maggie's handler, Pete, was killed in a suicide bombing/sniper ambush, and she suffers from PTSD.

Scott admires her loyalty:  Maggie never left her handler, even when she was shot by the sniper. She's had several surgeries, too.  Scott and Maggie bond almost instantly.

Maggie's not really fit for duty, either.  But everybody at the K-9 unit loves her, and they feel sorry for Scott.  They bend the rules so that Scott can have some time to work on Maggie's PTSD.

At the same time, the cops assigned to unravel the shooting and find Stephanie's killers have retired, and the new cops bring Scott in to give his statement again and give him a little bit of a summary of the case to date.  Before long, Scott's using Maggie's exceptional sniffing abilities to do a little extra-curricular investigation of his own.

I loved this novel.  It opens with a prologue that describes the ambush in Afghanistan from Maggie's point of view.  Maggie gets some more story-telling time later in the novel.  For me, Crais really created suspense equal to that I'd experience at a movie.  I found the rising action at the end of the novel really exciting, and found the happy ending that much more satisfying as a result.  I would heartily recommend this novel to any reader of thrillers and especially to thriller readers who are also animal lovers.

Robert Crais is known for the Elvis Cole/Joe Pike series but this is a stand-alone novel.

Interestingly, Crais worked as a television screenwriter on many popular TV series:  Hill Street Blues, Cagney & Lacey, Quincy, Miami Vice and L.A. Law.  Several of the novels I've read that were written by screenwriters seemed to me to be very proficient in giving a) lots of plot, b) hooking you right away, c) keeping the story moving.  The novels I have in mind are The Rosie Project and The Heist, Fool's Gold and I'm sure there have been others I can't think of now.  To me, Suspect felt different.  The exposition and characterization wasn't quite as detailed as it might have been in the hands of another novelist, but it seemed to me to have a certain satisfying depth.  I really enjoyed it as much or more as The Secret Place.  \

According to a friend of mine, if you enjoyed Suspect, you might also enjoy The Search by Nora Roberts.  Another book you might enjoy is Kill Switch by James Rollins.

Crais' follow-up novel, The Promise, is a continuation of the Elvis Cole/Joe Pike series.  But fans of Scott and Maggie -- Maggie, especially -- will be delighted to know that star in the story, too.

What I'm Reading Now

I've just finished A Blind Goddess, by James R. Benn, which I really enjoyed.  The afterword stated that many of the things that happened in the novel happened in real life.  I think I probably enjoyed it as much as I did because it talked about issues other than the mystery (ies) at hand.

I've already started Suspect by Robert Crais.  I've read about two chapters.  The prologue has an interesting portrait of canine psychology which I think dog lovers will enjoy.

Still haven't finished My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead, of which I've read only two chapters, but I know I'll enjoy finishing it.

A Fine Summer's Day by Charles Todd

This is the 20th novel (or 21st?) in a historical fiction mystery series set in nineteen-twenties Britain.
The protagonist is Scotland Yard Inspector Ian Rutledge, who proposes on the same very lovely summer day that the heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire is assassinated, an event which sets World War I in motion.

For fans of this series, this story is a kind of "origin story" and allows us to see the Inspector before he served in WWI.

I've never read anything by Charles Todd before.  Charles Todd is a mother-son writing team who live in Delaware and North Carolina, respectively.

I found that the novel immediately drew me in, and I hardly noticed the first 200 pages flying by.  I did something I used to do all the time but rarely do any more:  I read the last chapter to see how it ended.  I'm sorry now that I did that.  The last 100 pages seemed to me to drag, and I suppose knowing how it ended robbed those last 100 pages of any suspense.

The authors supplied plenty of information about the events that began the first World War, and I found that interesting because I'd forgotten what I learned in school.

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

I've just finished The Girl on the Train and I'm a little bit stunned.  I really enjoyed the beginning of the book.  Rachel's thoughts are so cleverly arranged that you feel as though you're looking in at her through a crack in the door.  Slowly you realize how desperate she is and you feel increasing anxiety - her anxiety - that something bad, something very bad, has happened and that she is somehow involved.  Rachel's attempts to buck herself up reminded me so much of myself that I began to identify with her, and I found myself feeling anxious, guilty and shamed.

As I write this, I'm recovering from my shock and feeling that this is a classically and cleverly designed plot and novel.  Perhaps someone more widely read than myself will point out that the turning points of the plot would, if abstracted, be highly similar to several other hugely popular thrillers.  It's a great structure.  And it's hugely suspenseful, drawing you in from the very first and seeming to accelerate.

I have to say that what makes the book for me is the atmosphere of Rachel's character.  Rachel changes a lot throughout the course of the novel, although she remains a little lost.  (Perhaps the ending is wrapped up a little too quickly, a little too easily to be quite believable.)  Rachel's quite the liar - it'll make you cringe - but she's quite honest with herself.

9/27/15

As I look back on the book, I find myself thinking that is has a classic, Hitchcockian quality:  things seem normal, if bleak, and as the layers of the plot are revealed, you learn that things are really shockingly different from what you imagined.  Things that appeared to be normal are not normal.

I love the idea that the plot springs from an ordinary, everyday activity .. looking in the windows of homes from the train.  I think the very surprises of the plot, hugely entertaining as they are, leave me somehow unsatisfied.

I find myself thinking of The Secret Place by Tana French.  In French's novel, she captures the ephemera of human experience:  the feeling that you have about a person as they walk toward you or by you, those flitters of judgment and assessment that are perhaps unworthy and are quickly forgotten.  Like James, she captures the thoughts and communications and the underlying reality that are never spoken but which, when shared, are still part of the situation.  I've wondered if she invites comparison with James in this respect. I've also wondered if her work as an actor has influenced her sensitivity to perception.

 I think that psychological perception was very much part of what I admired in The Secret Place, and perhaps that's part of what I'm missing in Girl on the Train.  Girl on the Train is 336 pages and The Secret Place is 480 pages. Shorter is often better, and the readers in my book group would prefer shorter.  Many readers prefer plot over characterization, and I prefer characterization over plot.

Having said that, Girl on the Train is entirely successful, in my view, in achieving its aims.  If you like suspense, I'd highly recommend it.

Last One Home by Debbie Macomber

I dreaded reading this book.  I thought the beginning was a little dull and a little stilted.  But long before I reached the end of the book, I felt as though I'd had the experience that makes Debbie Macomber the focus of such devoted fandom.

Cassie is a woman who's left a dangerously abusive marriage.  With the help of a women's shelter, she's gained skills as a hair stylist and has moved back to Washington state from Florida.

While she was married, her husband controlled her actions and movements, and she was not able to attend either the funeral of her father, or that of her mother (who died after she left her husband, but before she had any money to travel back to Washington).

Now she's working on building her clientele as a hairdresser, caring for her daughter, and volunteering to help other abused women.  She becomes involved with Habitat for Humanity, and she soon has the opportunity to use "sweat equity" to get a real house for herself and her daughter.

She has not seen either of her two sisters since she married her husband.  At the time she married, she was only eighteen, pregnant, and both her parents and both her sisters opposed her marriage.

A wrinkle develops when her Habitat for Humanity supervisor takes one look at her and decides that her long fingernails probably mean that she isn't a very good worker.  Another develops when her sister, who lives several hours away, offers Cassie furniture from their parents' home.  The furniture is in storage, and the sister only wants to pay for another month.  Cassie is desperate to have the furniture, not just because she has no furniture and no money to buy any, but because it's a link to the past and the family that she lost when she married her husband.

The novel is about reconciliation and healing and this is a frequent theme in women's fiction.  I can't help thinking that lack of reconciliation is an issue in the lives of many, and that that is the explanation for its lasting popularity as a theme.

A Walk To Remember by Nicholas Sparks

A Walk to Remember is account of a man in his fifties remembering his first love.

He's a high schooler as his story opens.  An average student, he likes to hang out with his friends.

Jamie Sullivan is the Baptist minsiter's daughter, a young woman who isn't popular with the other students.  To them, she seems so serious, and is always walking around with her Bible.

Jamie runs for student council president, and he wins.  One of his duties as student council president is to help decorate for the school dance, clean up afterward, and attend.  He needs a date.  He starts calling all the girls he knows, and soon finds that everyone already has a date to the dance.  He calls Jamie Sullivan and she agrees.

This sets in motion a series of events that make up the novel.

It's a wonderfully easy and quick read.  It's well written and very entertaining.  It is very sentimental, and the characterization is not as sharply drawn as that in The Secret Place.  The publication date on my book was 1999, so this isn't a new book.

I'll Be Seeing You by Suzanne Hayes and Loretta Nyhan

This is an epistolary novel, and it's very likely to appeal to folks who are also fans of The Postmistress by Sarah Blake and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

Two women become pen pals because their husbands are overseas, serving in the Army and the Navy in World War II.

Glory is 24 and has only been married a few years.  She has a toddler and she's pregnant.  She lives in New England.

Rita is Italian, lives in Des Moines, and she's a little over 40.  Her husband is a professor and a biology researcher, and he volunteered even though, because of his age, he was too old to be drafted. Her son also volunteered and he's a sailor in the Pacific.  She's originally from Chicago.

The two women share their anxieties, frustration and loneliness.  Through letters, they grow close.

Under Rita's tutelage, Glory becomes a great gardener.  They comfort each other as they navigate tough family issues.

The story covers 1942 to 1945, and it's very eventful.  It's a heartwarming story of female friendship, and I enjoyed it.

And, the friends exchange recipes.  The first one is for beer bread (never heard of it before, but yes, you make it with beer).

The Secret Place by Tana French

I really loved this novel, and I highly recommend it.

Holly Mackey is a teenager, a boarder at St. Kilda's, a tony girl's prep school in Dublin.  Her dad is a detective on the Dublin Murder Squad, and his name is Frank Mackey.  (Readers of Tana French's other mystery novels will remember him; her other novels are In The Woods, The Likeness, Faithful Place, and Broken Harbor.)

The novel's story begins when she brings a photo to the police, and specifically, to Detective Stephen Moran.  The photo came from a bulletin board in the top floor hallway of St. Kilda's called The Secret Place.  It's a place where the students can share secrets, anonymously.

A year earlier, a student from the neighboring school for boys, St. Colm's, had been found murdered on the grounds of St. Kilda's.  All the students of both schools were interviewed, but the  police investigation has come to a dead end.

Now, someone has placed a photo of the dead boy on the Secret Place bulletin board, with letters cut out from newspaper or magazine, in the style of a ransom note, which spell out, "I know who killed him."

Detective Stephen Moran's career has also stalled.  He got a break early in his career, permitting him to become the youngest detective in the Cold Cases unit, but he's now been spinning his wheels there for several years; he wants to work for the Murder Squad, but sees no opportunity to get himself noticed.  Then Holly brings him the photo of the murdered boy she's taken down from the Secret Place.

Moran know that there's is one detective on the Murder Squad who doesn't have a partner because her partner recently retired,   He knows that this is his one big chance.  If he can get himself assigned to this case, and he can solve the crime, there's a strong chance he might get promoted to the Murder Squad.  If he can't solve the case, his time in the Cold Cases area will probably stretch out until his retirement.

There's just one more snag.  The detective who worked the case earlier, Conway, is a woman, who's tough, smart, combative and hugely unpopular.  Can he solve the case?  Can he get along with Conway long enough to do so?

This novel is really about teenage girls, and what's unique about this stage of mental and social development.  It's also about the tense relationship between Conway and Moran, and the mind games that they employ as they attempt to winkle the truth out of the teenage girls they're interviewing.

What makes this novel so wonderful are the sharply drawn characters.  This was also true of Faithful Place, the other novel by French that I've read.  And the dialogue.  French has a wonderful talent for capturing dialogue.  French carefully unfolds the details of the plot, Conway and Moran's relationship, and the girls' relationships.

It's a long book, with chapters that alternate telling the story of the girls, and telling the story of how Moran skillfully navigates distrustful Conway, the interrogations, and finally, Frank Mackey.  I tried to read the book in three days, and the first 200 pages just flew by, but I found I just couldn't do it. Expect to spend a week, and give this wonderful book the time it deserves.

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12/7/2018

The "Dublin Murder Squad" novels:
 this

1. In the woods

2. The likeness

3. Faithful Place

4. Broken Harbor

5. The secret place

6. The trespasser

Her latest novel, The Witch Elm (a standalone), came out in October.

The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

In the historical fiction novel The Nightingale, a French woman named Vianne Mauriac faces the start of the Second World War with great fear. First, her husband is drafted by the French army. After France falls and is partitioned, a German officer is "billeted" at her family home, meaning that he comes to live with her. Then her sister, who is just 19, leaves to join the Resistance. Vianne manages to survive in a world where civil order increasingly breaks down, food is harder and harder to get, and the oppressive practices of the occupying German forces become more dangerous for civilians.

This book is, in some ways, a departure for Hannah, who's written women's fiction in the past. However, at its heart, The Nightingale is about loss and forgiveness, and about the healing of families torn apart by loss and bereavement.

This book was an easy and very entertaining book to read, even though it's 448 pages.  The sentences are short.  Although the opening of the book, the exposition, initially moves along at a seemingly slow pace, it soons picks up and becomes a very dramatic and suspenseful novel, full of close and too-close calls.  The combination of the suspense of the novel, the heroic subject matter, and the short sentences make it a perfect book group book.

One review I read opined that Hannah does not quite have the style for a subject matter this serious (https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/kristin-hannah/the-nightingale-hannah).  I too, felt a lack when the relationships of the two sisters to the men they loved were explored.  The language and the content seemed similar to that of a romance novel.  But, this issue could be viewed the other way: that by presenting these men-women relationships in a very familiar way, Hannah succeeded in making history accessible to many more readers.

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Circling the Sun by Paula McClain

McClain is the author of The Paris Wife, a fictionalized biography of Hadley Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway's first wife.  This book was hugely popular, especially with book groups.  It combined history, bohemian/artistic achievement and glamor, and marriage drama.  I'm not sure what to call what I'm calling "marriage drama."  

Something I read opined that with its publication, McClain succeeded in creating a new genre.  Another example would be Melanie Benjamin's The Aviator's Wife, which was also a very popular book group book. Circling the Sun is McClain's follow-up, and it's a fictionalized biography of Beryl Markham, pioneering female pilot from Kenya. I never read The Paris Wife, but I read more than half of The Aviator's Wife and I think Circling the Sun much more entertaining.

Beryl Markham was English; her father was a racehorse trainer. She suffered an early trauma: when she was very small, her mother moved back to England with her older brother.

In McClain's novel, Markham becomes close to a nearby African tribe, and makes friends with an African boy who becomes her lifelong friend and her partner in her horse training business.  As a child she was a tomboy; she loved to run.  One day, her joy in running led to her being attacked by a lion.

As she reached adulthood, her father became overwhelmed by debts exacerbated by currency fluctuations.  He sold up and moved to Capetown.  Losing the farm was hard for her. Her father offered to take her to Cape Town but strongly suggested she get married instead.  This set in motion a long list of events, including her getting her horse-training license at the tender age of 18, the first woman of any age to do so.

She mingled with the Happy Valley set in Nairobi, the folks who figured in The White Mischief story.  In fact, when the Prince of Wales famously visited Nairobi, she was there with her husband, Mansfield Markham.

I found this novel entertaining, lively, eventful and easy to read.  Many of the chapters were short.  I felt that McClain chose as her subject someone who was a pioneer and someone with an eventful and interesting life. 

However, as I suspected, McClain seems to have bowdlerized her subject.  This bothers me, and I can't quite put my finger on why.  After all, it's an entertainment; it's not history nor does McClain present it as history.  I guess I think that McClain presents Markham as having fewer lovers and more friends than her Wikipedia entry would suggest (I have no independent knowledge of the facts of Markham's life), and I believe that McClain did that to make Markham seem a more admirable character.  To me, that implies that succeeding in a man's world (by which I mean the world of horse racing) and writing West with the Night (a book which Hemingway seems to have greatly admired) are not sufficient to make her an admirable woman.

On the other hand, I admire McClain for having written The Paris Wife which interested so many people.  It's not just that you can't argue with success; it's that ( assume many readers were introduced to characters, places and ideas they would not have otherwise encountered.  And, if all a successful book club is, is an excuse to bring people together, that itself is an achievement and a worthy one.

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Reading now: Circling the Sun by Paula McClain and The Secret Place by Tana French

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I'm about a third of the way into reading Circling the Sun and I'm almost finished with The Secret Place - perhaps 100 more pages.  I'd recommend both books.

Circling the Sun is a fictional biography of Beryl Markham, who wrote West with the Night, a well-regarded book I haven't read.  Perhaps I will now.

And, a friend gave me Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch.  I read "The Prelude," and I hope I will find time to read the rest of the book.  I'm reminded that Rebecca Mead already wrote about Eliot as the chronicler of resignation and acceptance when she wrote a piece for The New Yorker about the fact that a quote commonly ascribed to Eliot, about starting over, was never uttered by her.

I also started James R. Benn's The Blind Goddess.  This is part of the Billy Benn historical murder mystery series.  I didn't know what to expect, and this book is not the latest book in the series or the first one.  But I felt that, while a reader who had read the other books might enjoy a whole host of associations that I could not, I really felt that it was very engaging from the first pages.  I haven't gotten very far at all; perhaps as far as page 20.

Presenting Pauline: a memoir by Pauline Fraser "as told to" Louise Brass

A war bride who worked in comedy revues and nightclubs before and during the war, as a child, teenager and young adult, and who also worked in Hollywood recounts her memories and her brushes with greatness.

When Pauline was a child, Margaret Thatcher's father owned a grocery down the road from her grandmother's house and she played with Margaret.  As a teenager, she went to school with Judy Garland.  As a film stand-in, she had tea with Glynis Johns.  She had a flirtation with British espionage during the war, before her mother put a stop to it.  She worked in a pantomime produced by a member of the Astor family.

Here's my favorite passage in the book, from pp. 106-107:

One summer evening in 1940, when the war was heating up, my mother and I were home alone, and she was cooking in the kitchen, when Prime Minister Winston Churchill spoke on the radio.  His famous speech was being broadcasted about how we would all fight with anything and everything in our power to stop the aggressors, if they dared to invade our homeland.

His voice came across the airwaves in his heavy, guttural, determined "growl" that had become so familiar to the British people:  "..We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be.  We shall fight on the beaches.  We shall fight on the landing grounds.  We shall fight in the field and in the streets.  We shall fight in the hills.  We shall never surrender!"\

My mother stopped what she was doing, looked at me doubtfully and said, sarcastically, "Oh yer .. oh fine."

But I was really flustered by the possibility.

"What will we do if the Germans invade England?  What are we going to do?" I asked her. "Supposing the Germans do land and they march down Charing Cross Road, and come up here and knock on the door?"

She went to the kitchen counter and pulled out a drawer and took out two sharp knives.  "I've got two knives here, one for you and one for me," she said.  "If they come through that door we get as many as we can."

I felt relieved knowing what I was supposed to do.  I felt better knowing there was a plan, even if it could have ended in a blood bath.  The plan that I was to knife as many Nazis as I can, and get it over with quickly.  Luckily, I didn't have to do that.

The Wives of Los Alamos by Tarashea Nesbit

This is fiction, but just barely.  It's a somewhat impressionistic group portrait of the women married to scientists at Los Alamos, New Mexico.  This is the lab where the atomic bomb was developed.

J. Francis Oppenheimer makes an appearance here, viewed through wifely eyes.  Much of this novel is concerned with domestic life and the difficulty of making a life in a new place, far from friends and family, while loved ones are serving in the armed forces, often overseas, and while letters are censored, family visits are forbidden, and security concerns govern everything. The wives were often not told where they were going when they set off for New Mexico; while some wives may have known what "the husbands" were working on, it was never discussed (at least not in the pages of this novel).

I am reading this for my book group and I predict it will not be popular with the group.  One member has already said that it doesn't have any plot.  Of course it does.  Victories in Europe and defeats in the Pacific are the rising action; the climax is the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The denounement is packing up and going "home," and realizing the Los Alamos has become home and will be missed.  I didn't really enjoy it very much, but I'm sure that that may be in part because I was compelled to read it for my book group. Compulsion sometimes takes the joy out of things that would otherwise be enjoyable, as any of the Los Alamos wives could very easily point out.

The author writes in her acknowledgment that the idea grew out of a comment from an audience member when she presented some research on Los Alamos and the commenter wanted to know about the lives of the wives.  Many of the wives had bachelor's or even advanced degrees in math and the sciences, but they mostly accepted the mores of their day and accepted their "careers" as wives and mothers.  Nesbit portrays the wives as mildly disliking the few women scientists there, who because of their status, got bathtubs.

I thought of the showers there when I was washing off poison ivy oil today.  Water was not reliable; sometimes women would open the tap to get water for coffee and brown muck would come out. They were advised to take something I think may have been called the "Good Citizen Shower," when, to conserve water, they were advised to soap up before getting into the shower - only to find themselves covered with cold, sticky soap when no water came out of the shower head.

The Things We Save by Joanne Zienty

This novel is a self-published debut novel, and it is also the winner of the 2014 Soon-To-Be-Famous Illinois Author Project.

Claire Sokol is the child of first-generation Polish-American immigrants.  Her father is a WWII veteran and a steel worker on the South Side of Chicago.   Her family is a typical baby boom family until tragedy hits her family, leading to a slow unraveling of family ties and a series of traumatic events that rip the family apart and led Claire first to turn her back on her family and to develop a self-protective coldness, fear of intimacy and inability to commit.  Her situation is one that many of us feel; unable to process our childhood losses and to forgive our parents, we turn our concern to our adult lives, aware or unaware of the way those issues shape us and our actions going forward.

I just finished it on Monday, and I really enjoyed it.  I can't quite separate my feelings about the virtues of the novel from my admiration for the author, or the clever way that she used numerous pop culture references to give the reader a sense of "you are there."

There Was A Little Girl by Ed McBain

Matthew Hope is an attorney from Chicago now living in Florida.  Late one night he visits a bar to meet someone; when he walks out the front door of the bar to see if the person's he's waiting to meet is coming, he's shot, twice.

The shooting deprives Hope's brain of oxygen for several minutes, and after surgery he ramains unresponsive.  His private investigator, a man named Warren Chambers, and his partner, Toots Riley, immediately start an investigation to find out who shot Hope, working in tandem with a police detective who's a friend of Hope's.  Their goal is to retrace Hope's steps in the days leading up to the shooting, believing that they will find a motive for the shooting, and that a motive will lead them to the shooter.

Hope had recently had a tough criminal case and had chosen to focus on civil law for a while.  He'd been  working on a real estate deal.  A circus owner who regularly winters in Florida, had recognized that much of his profit is from his midway operation, and had decided that he'd like to buy a large parcel of land in town to use to set up the circus over the winter.

But there's a hitch:  the owner of the parcel is nearly bankrupt and his property is heavily mortgaged. His creditor is expected to litigate the debt, and this would delay or prevent sale of the property to Hope's client.

Meanwhile, Hope investigates the freedom the circus owner may or may not have to make the deal, and meets a remarkable woman.  She is a striking young woman with red hair who, though only about 22, has a thriving business as a wigmaker.  Having inherited her mother's half share of the business when her mother died three years earlier, she is now half owner of the circus.  When Hope talks to her, she insists that her mother's suicide was a murder.

It seems to me that the novel has three parts, each with a different mood that gradually turns darker.  I was sincerely surprised by the turn of the plot in the last third of the novel.

The young woman who owns half the circus, her mother and father, and her friends from her time in the circus (which includes the couple who own the parcel the circus owner wishes to acquire) are a colorful cast of characters.

This novel was published in 1994.  Ed McBain was a pen name of the author Evan Hunter, a prolific novelist who died in 2005.

I don't know why I picked up this novel which I've owned for about a year.  It's coincidence that it's also set in Florida.

Cuba Straits by Randy Wayne White

In Cuba Straits, Doc Ford gets involved with the desperate business of an old acquaintance, General Rivera.  Cuba is not exactly wide open, but Rivera has been making money smuggling ballplayers and cultural artifacts from Cuba into the U.S.  Both activities are illegal, but in baseball-mad Cuba going to the "show" on the mainland is a highly regarded activity.  The theft of cultural and historical artifacts, perhaps not so much.

Ford's old friend, Tomlinson, naturally gets involved and ends up as a baby sitter for a very colorful Cuban baseball player.

Ford knows that Rivera has left out a lot in his account of the trouble that he's in, and he strongly suspects he should not get involved.  After Tomlison sets sails for Cuba, Ford feels he's obligated to go but he decides to turn back -- until he rescues two girls, 11 and 13, from a horrible shipwreck

It's not enough for Ford to save the girls from their piece of raft and the sharks that would like to feast on them; after he hears their story and perceives that they are in danger he feels responsible for their welfare and this development drives the rest of the plot.

Once Ford arrives in Cuba, the action  intensifies in pace and interest.  This was the point at which I became hooked and couldn't wait to find out what would happen next.  It's approximately at this point that a serial killer is introduced and this serial killer reminds me a little of the serial killer in True Detective.  I believe it's a sin to waste a really good idea; you should use it over and over because if it's been good once it will be again at least one more time (and maybe more).

This book has a wonderful cover.  And this author has written a lot of books in this series, featuring marine biologist and ex-CIA guy Marion "Doc" Ford.  I believe this is the 22nd book.  (White has recently started a second series featuring Hannah Smith, expert fishing guide and amateur detective, and I'm happy to report that she makes an appearance here.)

I read a review in which the reviewer seemed to see this book as speculative fiction, a vision (or a version?) of what will happen in Cuba in the near future.  Cuba is close enough to us that I think it is of natural interest to many.  The closeness of Cuba to Key West means that Cuba's history is part of Key West's history, as well.  When I saw the Buena Vista Social Club in the theater, the audience loved it so much that they applauded at the end.

Photographs of Cuba I've seen have shown beautiful colonial architecture and wonderful cars from the 1950's with their sensual and organic shapes.

Cuba is alluring.

For all these reasons I decided to take a chance on this novel.

I've noticed that some readers are reluctant to take a chance on jumping into a series well past the beginning.  They suspect, I think, that they will have missed something important (or, perhaps, they enjoy the serial, the repeated visits with known characters).

I was prepared to have that experience, but I think White handled it well.  (Although as I write this, I find myself wondering:  if White had not told us anything about Ford relationship with his old buddy and dear friend Tomlinson, would we not have been able to infer long history and great loyalty? Perhaps - and it might have been more interesting.  I can't help noticing, however, that some readers like to have all the loose ends wrapped up and to have everything explained.)  As the novel progresses, Tomlinson and Ford act in tandem even though they are in different places and are not communicating - not only do they have a deep loyalty to each other but almost a sixth sense about the other.

What does this book have?  Boats!  Two, and one of them is called No Mas, which I think is a good name.   (No explosions, however, but I am not disappointed.)  Also, guns.  If you like guns, there are at least three here .. no, four, if you count the beretta.  Lots of cool technology on Ford's boat, like an anti-radar cover.  How cool is that?

There's a scene where Tomlinson (if I remember correctly) meets a man in a bar who feels him out and then shows him photographs of Castro taken by his father back in the fifties and sixties.  Sometime recently I saw a news report about Cuba in which I thought the reporter said that Cubans remember the fifties and sixties vividly, and that certainly is conveyed in this scene.

Doc Ford is a marine biologist and so there's quite a bit about turtles.  There's quite a lot about Florida, which was mostly lost on me as I'm not a Florida person.  But I love Carl Hiassen, and he, White and Ed McBain share a love of Florida's flora, fauna and geography which I'm sure  readers enjoy and which I respect.

For me, the pace and narrative of the book really picked up after Doc and Tomlinson arrive in Cuba.

I've just heard that the U.S. and Cuba are going to establish a ferry which will permit you to take your car to Cuba.  Where does the line form?  Do they take dogs, too?

After I'm Gone by Laura Lippman

Felix Brewer is a successful bookmaker until he's convicted by the Feds.  Unable to face imprisonment, he leaves his wife, three daughters and a mistress behind.

When his girlfriend, Julie Saxony, disappears ten years later, it's widely assumed that  she's left town to join him.

When her decomposed body is found in a local park, it's obvious that she hasn't left to join her lover. The police work the case, but are unable to close it.

A retired detective, bereft by the loss of his wife to cancer, goes to work as an independent contractor for Baltimore's police department, working cold cases.  He chooses his own hours and chooses his own cases.

One day he opens the Julie Saxony file, and the picture he sees there, of a beautiful blonde woman with breatakingly beautiful blue eyes, makes him choose her for his next cold case investigation.

I really enjoyed this book.  It was certainly suspenseful - it's a murder mystery, after all - but what was really interesting about this novel was Lippman's exploration of the lives, burdens and conflicts of the wife, daughters and mistress left behind.

Her characters are well delineated and they behave in unpredictable ways that seem fresh and original,

This is the rare suspense novel with fully developed characters struggling with real lives.  This is not a Tess Monaghan novel, but she makes an appearance at the end of the story.

I talked to a friend of mine about whether or not this novel was enjoyed by her mystery book group. She said the folks in her mystery book group liked the novel well enough, but that they thought it was not a mystery.  I said,  "How can they say that?  There's a body and there's a detective."  She said, "Well, they said that what the novel was really about was the lives of the women left behind." That's true:  that is what this novel is really about.  It is a very suspenseful novel, however, and I think many mystery readers will still enjoy it,

The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton

Petronella Oortman's father has died, leaving their family broke.  Her mother thinks that marrying Petronella to a rich man will save Petronella from poverty and assure her future.  She writes to all of her contacts, and a man from Amsterdam responds.

He comes to visit Petronella in her small town, and she plays the lute for him.  They marry, he departs, and she leaves some time later to join him in Amsterdam.

She's surprised and disappointed that he's not there to meet her.  She meets instead his sister and his two servants.  She feels unwelcome.

He finally returns home, but he seems never to have any time for her.  He surprises her one day with a very large cabinet, a miniature replica of his house on the Golden Bend in Amsterdam.

She's disappointed by the gift but she eventually resolves to furnish it by writing to a miniaturist advertised in Smit's List, the local list of merchants.  Soon, the miniaturist begins to send her miniatures she has not requested, and she is mystified and fearful about what they may mean.

At the same time, tensions between her husband and his sister seem to rise, and they also make her feel uneasy.

This book has a number of surprises and a supernatural element.  Because it's set in 17th century Amsterdam, I expected "Girl with a Pearl Earring," and that is not this book.

On the back of my copy of The Miniaturist, there is a blurb from the UK newspaper Observer review: "A fabulously gripping read that will appeal to fans of Girl with a Pearl Earring and The Goldfinch, but Burton is a genuinely new voice with her visceral take on sex, race and class."  Sex, race and class are central to this novel.  It won't surprise you, I'm sure, that I didn't expect that focus on sex, race and class in a novel set in the 17th century.  While that focus reflects the concerns of our own time, I found myself feeling that the novel's voice was authentic rather than a vehicle for exploring the issues of our time.

I found Jessie Burton's writing style surprising:  she regularly used words with which I was not familiar and her prose was often more poetic than concrete.  This did not affect (I don't think, anyway) my ability to understand the story (and there was a lot of plot in this book).

It appears to me that she did a great deal of research; I know little of 17th century Dutch society, or how it may have differed from city to country, etc.  I was under the impression that Vermeer and his family were hidden Catholics and that their Catholicism was an open secret that was tolerated by their neighbors.

I mention this because the neighbors in this novel are not tolerant, and I was surprised.

This novel's conflict is between the private and the public sphere.  At the beginning of the novel, I thought, "This is Rebecca," the novel by Daphne du Maurier.  But, by the end of the novel, I felt that the plot was very different from that novel and that a great deal of focus was on private actions and private values being in conflict with the larger world.

Above all, it was a very suspenseful novel.  I have the feeling that a lot of people will enjoy the suspense, and some people will feel that not all questions have been tidily answered by the end of the novel.

Me Before You by JoJo Moyes

I was drawn to this book because I'd liked another book by JoJo Moyes, One Plus One, and because I'd seen that it was chosen by a couple of book clubs.  I found that somewhat remarkable, because Me Before You had been portayed in such a way that I thought it was a romance (and certainly there is a romance in the story).

I enjoyed it very much.

Lou is a waitress in her mid-'20's.  She loves her job, but is shattered one day when her boss tells her that he's closing the cafe where she works.  She lives in a small town where job opportunities are limited, and what follows is a series of depressing and unproductive visits to the local employment center.

Reluctantly, she accepts a position as a caregiver to a quadriplegic man.

Her first surprise occurs when she discovers that the man she is to care for, Will Traynor, is only about ten years older than herself.  She also learns quickly that he is  bitter, sarcastic, unfriendly and withdrawn.  She wants to quit the job but is persuaded by her sister, Treena, to stay because Treena's leaving home to return to school and their family will then depend on Lou's income.

Lou perseveres and begins to be able to relate to her charge, and then intensely shocking complicatinos in her work arise.  At the same time, her father loses his job, her boyfriend becomes threatened by her relationship with Will, and Will finally forces her to confront a traumatic episode from her past.

The book's ending is satisfying but it did surprise me.  I now understand this book's popularity with book clubs because I can see that the issues raised here make this a perfect book for a book group: there's plenty to discuss!

Here, as in One Plus One, Moyes reminds us of the class differences of the characters.  She also has quite a bit to say about how society treats the disabled, described recently as the largest, and mostly invisible, minority.

I think part of what I enjoyed the most about the book was the character of Lou.  She's young and naive, but sweet, energetic and passionate. Her family seemed like a family out of a 1950s situation comedy.  Her mother and father, despite their limitations, are steadfastly warm and loyal to their daughters.  This book reminded me of the film "Getting It Right," about a young hairdresser coming of age and finding love.  The sweetness of the story made it feel like a guilty pleasure.

On Saturday morning I went to the library.  I think I probably hadn't been in there since I was at school--quite possibly out of fear that they would remember the Judy Blume I had lost in Year 7, and that clammy, official hand would reach out as I passed through the building's Victorian pillared doors, demanding L3,853 in fines.

Mr. Churchill's Secretary by Susan Elia MacNeal

This is an historical fiction mystery, with spy intrigue thrown in - another genre blender.  The title refers to Miss Maggie Hope, a young American woman, just a year out of college, who goes to work at the famous War Rooms, working for Winston Churchill at the start of the Second World War.

I read this book with a book group, and everybody loved it.  I enjoyed it, too.  There's something for everyone .. murder mystery, spy intrigue, false identities, romance, coming of age, family secrets, characters based on historical personages (something I like) - no wonder it's such a crowd pleaser.

Something I admire about this book, which I think contributes greatly to its success, it that the plotting and storytelling is truly suspenseful.

The Drop by Dennis Lehane

This is the second Dennis Lehane book I've read; I first became interested in him when Mystic River came out and he did a radio interview in which he talked about his experiences working in the child welfare system.

But everyone's a grown-up in this book.  I really did enjoy it, although I found the violence surprising and somewhat unsettling, as I did when I read A Drink Before the War (although not as much).

But for all its grit, this novel has a great happy ending payoff that includes a dog.  What more could you ask for?  Good writing, deft characterization, suspense, happy ending and a dog!

This is an easy, quick read.  I think it took me three to four hours.  It has something for everyone: suspense, a heist, a mystery, a romance and a dog!  Oh, and it starts over Christmas!  If you like suspense in an urban setting, and you don't mind a happy ending, I would definitely recommend this novel.  

Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital

I've just begun this Pulitzer Prize-wining nonfiction account of Memorial Hospital in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

It's already easy to see that the health professionals inside the hospital went from feeling confident about their ability to ride out the storm to being frightened and stressed by the heat and other factors due to the loss of electricity for several days.

It seems that there are some obvious policy recommendations.  Hospital generators need to be reliable for at least four days rather than hours.  Hospitals need to designate on-site decision makers, and need to prepare them for making major administrative decisions if they are not hospital administrators.  Perhaps hospital administrators should be required to remain on-site during hurricanes and other storms than can remove electricity, and should be required to try to get to the hospital if the electricity goes out.

White Princess by Philippa Gregory

I read this title for a book group, and I didn't expect to like it since I know quite a bit already about Tudor history and thought I would not enjoy a fictionalized account, especially one with elements of the supernatural.

However, I was very pleasantly surprised.  I found the story interesting.  As some reviewer of The White Queen said, Gregory makes The War of the Roses/Tudor history interesting despite the fact that we know how it ends.

I was a little disconcerted by the point of view of Elizabeth of York:  her view of Richard III as a tragically lost lover and her view of Perkin Warbeck, which really surprised me (she views Perkin Warbeck as being, possibly, her brother Richard, the Duke of York (presumed lost/murdered in the Tower of London).  For one thing, I had not thought that there was any uncertainty about whether Richard, Duke of York had perished in the Tower.  I do remember reading somewhere, with some incredulity, that there is some thought that Richard III had an illegitimate son who succeeded in escaping notice.

Gregory's characterization of Margaret of Beaufort as an old battle ax may not be far off the mark although it does not quite answer the question I've always had, which is, how did Margaret Beaufort think that she could put her son on the throne given that the Beauforts were expressly excluded from the succession by an act of parliament.  Perhaps the answer is simply "that was then, this is now."

Her portrait of Henry VII as a man obsessed with keeping his crown perhaps explains the "bloody" nature of the Tudors.

I was a little disappointed by the ending, which seemed to me to trail off without conclusion.  However, it occurred to me that no ending is perhaps needed when you know that another chapter in the saga will appear in a year's time.

Given that this story is the basis for Games of Thrones and many other books, I perhaps should not be so surprised that Gregory has been able to mine it for much more drama.

Miss Dimple Rallies to the Cause by Mignon Ballard

Just finished this novel.  I liked it.  It's not necessarily the sort of thing I would be most interested in reading given my own inclinations (I read it for a book group), but I think it's very well done.   It's a historical mystery.

The year is 1943, and Miss Dimple is a middle-aged (oh, well, perhaps a little bit past) first-grade teacher in a small town in Alabama.  She has taught first-grade, and lived in Phoebe Chadwick's boarding house, for decades.

The children are given time off of school to pick cotton because so many of the men who worked as farm laborers are in the military.  Miss Dimple and the other teachers go along to supervise.  At the end of the day, a horrible event occurs.  As a teacher goes to a creekside to retrive some wandering children, she glimpses a skelton which has been exposed by receding flood waters.

Miss Dimple is haunted by a feeling that things are not quite right.  And many folks in this close-knit town are in some kind of distress:  Buddy Oglesby is trying to recover from another job loss and find his place in the world; Charlie Carr, her sister Delia, and her best friend Annie are all troubled by their beaus' absence as they serve in the military; Phoebe Chadwick seems to be being blackmailed; and there's something "not quite right" about the new football coach.

All is revealed, but not before a bond rally and local pageant is held, and not before at least one lovelorn lass gets engaged, and not before there is a second death and a shooting.  And not before a whole lot of visiting and going to dinner at each other's houses, and much baking and gifting of said baking.

That's a lot of action for one little town.

Although Miss Dimple is probably not familiar with the term, she is a feminist.  Although has no children of her own, she loves her students.  She is a member of a close community, knows everyone, and participates in all the community's events.

Some of the strains of small town life are present and some are absent.

But the portrait of a community's response to the war effort, the home front, from collecting grease to ration stamps and margarine and going without butter, all feel pretty accurate.

        "Dimple Kilpatrick seldom worried.  It did no good to dwell on conditions one could not      change, but if there was something she could do to improve a situation, she believed in doing what her father had referred to as "stepping up to the plate."

      When the other teachers left for school af ter the midday meal that day, Miss Dimle gathered up her leather handbag decorated with colorful yarn flowers, along with her umbrella, just in case she spied litter along the way, and left them in Phoebe's front parlor.  According to the porcelain clock on the mantel, she had more than enough time to get back to school before the first bell rang.

     And then she made her way down the long hallway, knocked on Phoebe Chadwick's bedroom door, and "stepped up to the plate."

This book is part of a series.  The first title is Miss Dimple Disappears, the second is Miss Dimple Rallies to the Cause, the third is Miss Dimple Suspects, and the last is Miss Dimple Picks a Peck of Trouble.

The Heist by Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg

I'm reading The Heist, and it's my first Janet Evanovich novel.  I've been told that the novels that she write in collaboration with others are not as good as those in the series "starring" Stephanie Plum.  Of course, I haven't read any of those so I can't make any comparison.

I can say that The Heist, like the Rosie Project, feels like "reading" a movie.  So many of the ideas are very cinematic, from decked out yachts to massive explosions caused by rocket launchers.

I found myself wondering if Goldberg came up with the plot, the setting, the pacing and Evanovich came up with the jokes.  I wonder because the jokes tend to be very woman-centric.  Even so, some of them just don't feel quite right, like the one in which the protagonist, Kate O'Hara, lists wearing a push-up bra to her sister's wedding as a deception about which she feels guilty.  I thought and thought about that one; it definitely did not immediately ring true that wearing a garment of clothing, no matter which garment of clothing, could be thought of as a deception,  Maybe Lee Goldberg wrote that joke.

I read this book for a book group and some of the Evanovich fans present said that they preferred the Plum series.

I find myself wondering about books written by screenwriters.  To me, one of the virtues of this book is its quick pace.  I didn't feel that I had to wade through a lot of exposition to get to the action.  In fact, the episode of the exploding yacht takes place in the first half of the book (which surprised me).
On the other hand, Kate and Nick or whatever their names are, are stock characters.  I do feel like I'm reading an episode of "The Mentalist," or "White Collar," or  any one of a number of other shows that feature sexy con men teaming up with strait-laced FBI agents, whether male or female.

This book is entertaining:  funny and fast-paced and a lot like TV.  It's hard to care about the characters, because they aren't very well-developed (although Kate's ex-military dad is an interesting and entertaining character, and his ability to help her in her work is exciting).  It seems to me that this is a great book to read on a plane, a train, a bus or when you're sick - i,e., when you want to be entertained and you don't want to work so hard.