Book Review: The Evening Spider by Emily Arsenault

The Evening Spider

By Emily Arsenault

Published by William Morrow and Sold by HarperCollins, January 2016

Purchased and read on Amazon Kindle

Links: Amazon, B&N, Powell's

Rating: Four Stars (out of five)

I enjoyed Arsenault’s latest more than any of her other books.  I haven’t read her first novel, The Broken Teaglass, but I have read the other three (What Strange Creatures, In Search of the Rose Notes, and Miss Me When I’m Gone).  Obviously, I liked each of the above three enough to read the next, but I can’t say I’ve found her books to be must-reads.  In fact, I probably wouldn’t have read Rose Notes or Miss Me had they not been marked way down, and wouldn’t have bought The Evening Spider when I did had it not been on sale for 99 cents.  On the whole, I’d describe Arsenault’s writing as Domestic Suspense.  Her young(ish), female, main characters are usually solving some mystery that directly effects them and their daily lives.  This is fine, but both Rose Notes and Miss Me suffered from flat plots that (too me) petered out, and the resolution to What Strange Creatures was melodramatic enough that it bothered me (also, I guessed the culprit very early on, which always cuts into my enjoyment of a mystery).  But, like I said above, I really enjoyed The Evening Spider.

The story alternates between the present and 1885.  In the present-day story, young mother Abby suspects that her house is haunted and that the ghost is trying to harm her young daughter.  In 1885, Frances, also a relatively new mother, becomes obsessed with a murder that took place near her Connecticut home.  Both stories are told in the first person; Abby’s is a standard first-person narrative, but Frances’s unfolds as she tells her twin brother the story of how she ended up in a mental hospital.  The latter narrative strategy is highly effective.  I really wanted to know what happened to Frances.  So does Abby, who finds Frances’s journal and becomes convinced that her fate is somehow tied to the earlier woman’s.

The story is told in short chapters alternating between Abby’s perspective and Frances’s narrative with, for a while, sections of Frances’s journal.  Short chapters keep it moving and kept me reading, sometimes to the detriment of my sleep schedule.  Since Abby’s story is all about finding out what happens to Frances, we accompany her on her journey—but we know more than she does, which is sometimes frustrating (in a good way—we’re frustrated for Abby, not with Arsenault).  The stakes for Frances are much higher than those for Abby.  While Abby is unsettled by what’s going on in her house, she’s not actually in personal danger from it, and most of the danger Frances is in comes from her historical circumstances.  That is, Frances can end up in a mental hospital because her husband finds her inconvenient, and we know very well that nothing like that is going to happen to Abby.

My one problem with this book is that it doesn’t always seem to recognize that the stakes for Abby just aren’t as high as the stakes for Frances.  Maybe my problem with that is that I have a hard time buying that supernatural forces are an actual danger to anyone, even in fiction, but it does mean that the conclusion of the present-day story is a little underwhelming.  There’s simply nothing to really resolve, while the nineteenth-century story has a satisfying and logical conclusion.  Overall, I enjoyed the book a lot and would recommend it for fans of historical fiction and mysteries.

Book Review: Gone West by Carola Dunn

Gone West (Daisy Dalrymple Fletcher #20)

By Carola Dunn

Published by Minotaur and Sold by Macmillan, 2012

Purchased and read on Amazon Kindle

Links: Amazon, B&N, Powell's

Rating: Three Stars (out of five)

This is one of my favorite series, and I’m glad there are so many of them.  I found them about a year ago and plowed through (I think) the first 17 in less than three months.  Then I realized that there were only a few more, so I’ve been reading one every few months or so since, to prolong the pleasure.  In other words, I learned my lesson from reading all 20 Phryne Fisher books in less than three months in 2014 (Dear Kerry Greenwood: When will Phryne be gracing the page again?  I miss her.  Sincerely, Lauren).

Like most long-running series, this one is a little uneven.  Some of the mysteries are convincingly high-stakes, with lots of tension.  Others are slower and even a little dull.  Most of them are fairly quiet country house murder mysteries, and Daisy finds herself involved in the murders because of her friendliness and compassion.  Gone West definitely falls into the country house category, and I suspect some readers will find it slow; the murder doesn’t happen until around halfway through.  I don’t think Gone West will ever be one of my favorites in the series, but I enjoyed it and was ultimately quite invested in learning who the murderer was. 

In this book, Daisy visits her friend Sybil, who is a secretary turned ghostwriter for an author of Westerns, at her employer’s remote home in Derbyshire.  Because the author, Humphrey Birtwhistle, can’t seem to recover from a bout of pneumonia, Sybil is afraid someone is slowly poisoning him and asks Daisy to investigate.  When Humphrey dies suddenly, the eccentric relatives and friends who make up his household are all suspects in his murder.  Of course, Daisy’s husband Detective Chief Inspector Alec Fletcher is called in to investigate, and he brings along his trusty subordinates DS Tring and DC Piper.

Overall, the mystery was enjoyable.  I did care who killed Humphrey, and I particularly wanted Sybil and her paramour, a local doctor, to be innocent.  I had my suspicions about the murderer, but it wasn’t obvious, so Dunn gets points from me for a logical but suspenseful progression of events.  The book is a bit slow—it takes an awfully long time for the murder to happen—and a few of the obstacles to solving the crime are rather artificial (a suspect can’t be located, papers take a long time to go through, etc.).  These are not fatal flaws, though.

If this series has a problem, it’s that it’s getting harder and harder to explain why Daisy is always at crime scenes.  I think Dunn is aware of this, as Alec’s superiors have noticed her frequent involvement and complain about it, but metafictional self-awareness only goes so far (not an English major, you say?  Look it up, say I).  In isolation, Gone West does a good job of this—Sybil is an old friend of Daisy’s who has heard about her sleuthing ways—but how many friends of murder victims can one person know?  However, given how much pleasure I get out of these books I’m willing to continue suspending disbelief if it means I get more books. 

Book Review: Princess Elizabeth's Spy by Susan Elia MacNeal

Princess Elizabeth’s Spy (Maggie Hope Mysteries #2)

By Susan Elia MacNeal

Published by Bantam and Sold by Random House, 2012

Purchased and read on Amazon Kindle

Links: Amazon, B&N, Powell's

Rating: Two Stars (out of five)

So, it’s been over two months since I last posted.  They’ve been busy months, dear readers (if I have any).  For in these two months I have started a new job (yay!) and moved into a new house (yay!).  Now that things have settled down a little bit, I’m back to reading quite a bit and hopefully back to blogging regularly.  I won’t preface this with any more personal details and will instead jump right in to the book review.

Princess Elizabeth’s Spy is the second in MacNeal’s Maggie Hope series.  I read the first one a little over a year ago, and at the time I didn’t think I’d read any more of them (more on why below).  But when the second book was marked down a few months ago, I thought “why not?  Maybe it’s better than the first.”  You see, I really wanted to like these books.  They have a spunky heroine who was raised in the US but lives in England, are set during World War Two, and are mysteries.  From the jacket copy, I should like them.  But I have to say, I have found both books unconvincing and, to top it off, the prose ranges between flat and stilted.  This time, I probably won’t read any more in the series, Kindle sale or not.

In Princess Elizabeth’s Spy, Maggie, after failing the physical portions of MI-5 (or possibly SOE) training is sent to Windsor Castle to keep an eye on Princess Elizabeth (yes, the present Queen).  Her cover is that she’s the Princess’s math tutor.  The reason the princess needs a protector is that there are rumors of a plot to kidnap her and therefore to destabilize the English succession, making the German path to Occupation easier.

There are a number of problems with this plot, as you can probably tell even from my brief description.  The biggest one is, of course, the Princess Margaret, who would have been the rightful heir to the throne had anything happened to Elizabeth.  To really destabilize the succession, you’d have to do away with both Princesses, something the book never addresses.  For me, there was also a major verisimilitude issue.  I just didn’t believe that this was something that could have happened without it having out some time in the past seventy years.  I realize that fiction is, well, fiction, but good writing convinces readers that events in the story could have happened.  This is very difficult with fiction that involves major historical figures from the twentieth century or later—it’s hard to find and fictionally plug a hole in the historical record without readers going “huh?”.

My other problem has to do with Maggie herself.  In both the this book and the first one, Mr. Churchill’s Secretary, she turns out to be very wrong in her conclusions about who the culprit is in the murders and/or government plots she’s investigating.  Her wrongness leads to dramatic climaxes, but ultimately she solves the mysteries largely by chance (or someone else solves it and she goes along for the ride).  She’s supposed to be brilliant, but it’s hard to buy that she has extraordinary reasoning skills when her reasoning so often leads her astray.  She can also be really annoying, and readers are just supposed to buy that, for example, a low-level operative can successfully dictate to the head of MI-5 who her handler will be.  I didn’t, and at times I found her “spunk” to be, well, kind of silly, immature, and possibly dangerous.

I’ll leave it there.  I already mentioned the lack of panache in the prose, and I don’t feel a need to hammer the point home.  I’ll just say that a good mystery makes the reader believe that something real is at stake and that it’s the sleuth’s job to find it out and make things right, and this book did not do that for me, hence the two star rating.

Book Review: The Fortune Hunter by Daisy Goodwin

The Fortune Hunter

By Daisy Goodwin

Published by St Martin’s and Distributed by Macmillan, 2014

Purchased and read on Amazon Kindle

Links: Amazon, B&N, Powell's

Rating: Four Stars (out of five)

This is one of those books that sat on my Kindle wishlist for quite awhile.  I read and enjoyed (except for the ending!) Goodwin’s previous novel, The American Heiress, and I’d been looking forward to reading The Fortune Hunter, Goodwin's 2014 tale of royalty and romance in Victorian England.  There are, however, a lot of books in the world, so it’s no wonder that it sometimes takes months (over a year, in this case) to get to a book I want to read.  At any rate, I enjoyed this one and I’m glad I finally got to it, thanks in part to a pretty nice discount a couple of months back.

The Fortune Hunter tells the story of a rather odd love triangle between young heiress Charlotte Baird, dashing cavalry captain Bay Middleton, and Empress Elisabeth (Sisi) of Austria-Hungary.  At the beginning of the novel, Charlotte meets Bay and becomes almost immediately infatuated.  The two are both invited to a house party thrown by the family of Charlotte’s sister-in-law to be, Augusta Crewe.  Meanwhile, Sisi arrives to hunt in England and stays at an estate neighboring the Crewes’.  Though she is a superb horsewoman, her host recommends Bay as a pilot to guide her through the hunt.  Their relationship does not, shall we say, remain strictly professional.  However, Charlotte loves Bay and he seems to have feelings for her.  Also, she’s extremely wealthy and her fortune naturally attracts many suitors.  As Bay struggles to choose between Charlotte and Sisi, Charlotte muses over whether he loves her or her fortune.

All of these people were real, and other reviewers have pointed out that Goodwin takes considerable liberty with history.  If I were well-versed in Sisi’s life or in this era of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it would probably bug me.  Since I’m not, I didn’t care.  The Fortune Hunter is a good story with compelling characters.  I particularly enjoyed the parts dealing with Charlotte’s passion for photography; in addition to adding dimension to Charlotte’s character, this hobby allows Goodwin to spin metaphors about image versus reality, etc.  All three characters are caught between their own desires, their understanding of what their partners/suitors want from and for them, and public perceptions, which matter a great deal in Victorian Europe.  The stakes in this love triangle are high for all three characters, which keeps it from getting tedious, at least for me (I have a low tolerance for love triangles).

The one character I was never sure of was Bay.  While this book’s ending didn’t inspire my, er, disapproval, as did the end of The American Heiress, it never quite explained what was, for me, the core question of the book: Does Bay really love Charlotte?  While I wonder whether we’re not meant to be sure of Bay, we spend enough time in his head that I would have preferred some more solid characterization.  We can be pretty certain of Sisi’s feelings and Charlotte’s, but our titular hero remains something of an enigma.  Generally, though, The Fortune Hunter is a well-written, enjoyable historical romance(ish).  I enjoyed it, and I look forward to seeing what Goodwin comes up with next.

Special Feature: Inspector Lewis: The Academic Body Count, Season 3 Part 2

The Oxford University of ITV/PBS's Inspector Lewis is a dangerous world for academics, and in this series I bring you the lowdown on who in the academic community is most likely to kill be or be killed.  This post gives the details for episodes 4-5 of US Season Three.  Here’s a link to all previous posts in the series (in reverse order).

Ah, Season 3, we hardly knew you!  It’s only two episodes shorter than Season 2, but the difference feels much greater for some reason.  These two episodes bring us five murders.  One victim is an undergrad, one is a faculty member (of sorts), and three are unaffiliated with the university.  There are no university-affiliated murderers here, but the events of both episodes have everything to do with the victims and/or murderer’s college days.  This theme of the past coming back to haunt you is very prevalent here and episode 3.5, in particular, is very creepy in that regard.

Season 3 brings us a total of thirteen victims (two episodes have three victims instead of the usual two).  Of those, one is an undergrad, three are faculty, one is an administrator, and one is staff.  The remaining seven (just over 50%) are unaffiliated with the university.  Of the six murders (episode 3.5 has two), only one, a staff member, is university-affiliated.  I have to say, season three suggests that the university is a pretty dangerous place, but not because of those who work and go to school there!  You’re much more likely to be killed by someone outside the university than someone within it, and employees are in a lot more danger than students this season.  Also, I’m curious to rewatch seasons 5-7, because I remember thinking that there were quite a few grad students murdered on this show, and to this point not a single one has met his or her end at the hands of one of Oxford’s many deranged killers.  Maybe it’s just that grad school feels so deadly that one assumes that on a show like this, it must be.  Hmmm…  Anyway, Season Three suggests that while it’s probably safe to go to school at Oxford, you might want to think twice about working there, and watch out for your old college friends.

If you haven’t seen the season, here’s the Amazon link.  It’s included with Prime if you have it.

Details for Episodes 3.4-3.5 below the cut.  Contains spoilers.

Book Review: The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

The Nightingale

By Kristin Hannah

Published by St. Martin's and distributed by Macmillan

Purchased and read on Amazon Kindle

Links: Amazon, B&N, Powell's

Rating: Three Stars (out of five)

I have Thoughts on this book or, perhaps more relevant, Feelings. I finished it a while ago (before Life After Life) and haven’t posted yet because I wanted to make sure I was expressing my Thoughts in a fair and level-headed way.  To be honest, I rolled my eyes a lot when I was reading this, and I simply don’t get the acclaim.  Obviously, many people loved The Nightingale; it has 4.8 stars on Amazon and 4.53 stars on Goodreads.  I, however, felt like the story had tons of potential, but most that potential went unrealized.

If you’re reading this blog, you’ve probably seen mention of this book elsewhere (it’s everywhere).  Maybe you’ve even read it.  You probably don’t need me to summarize it, in any case, but I’ll do so briefly anyway.  The Nightingale tells the story of two sisters, Vianne and Isabelle, living in France during World War II.  Vianne’s husband is away at war and, after a brief and disappointing love affair, Isabelle runs away to join the French Resistance.  As the Nazis take over France (the book is set in the Occupied Zone), Vianne must figure out how to make a life for herself and her daughter in an occupied town and an occupied house, while Isabelle risks her life to save, among others, downed pilots.  Vianne and Isabelle’s relationship has never been easy, and war reinforces both their differences and their bonds.

The positive reviews tell us that this book transcends romance and is instead a deep and complicated story about the bond between sisters.  The few negative reviews out there tend to focus on the romantic elements and to claim they took over the story.  Here’s what I think: the book wants to be a deep and complicated story about sisterhood and how blood is thicker than water, etc.  There is a romance plot involving Isabelle, and that’s fine.  I don’t think a romance plot, or even a focus on romance, inherently makes the plot “unserious.”  I do think that the relationship between the sisters is underdeveloped.  We’re told that they don’t get along with each other or with their father because of events that happened in the backstory, but frankly, I found the degree of animosity, and the degree of indifference their father exhibits, to be way out of proportion with what we’re told (not shown).  The major themes of the book rely on buy-in to the backstory, and I wasn’t convinced.

I was also really, really irked by the ending of the World War II story.  There’s a parallel but not particularly developed present-ish story involving one of the sisters travelling back to France for the first time since shortly after the war’s end.  I won’t say which, because the story’s effectiveness relies on your not knowing for sure.  The very end of the book involves that plot, and it was fine, I guess, except insofar as it depends on the other ending.  That ending does in fact transform a story of heroism into a romance plot and, had I not already been a bit eye-rolly and annoyed, would have ruined the book for me.  As I said, I’m fine with romance plots.  You can say deep and interesting things while telling a love story (see also: Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, and a million other books I can’t think of right now because I’m thinking about this annoying and overrated one).  But to do that, you have to integrate the love story into the rest of the plot, or make the love story the focus of the plot and use it to say the other things (love can transcend class boundaries; you have to stay true to your own moral center in order to have a successful relationship; women need greater economic opportunities, etc.—all of those came from the two examples above).  In The Nightingale, it felt to me like Hannah told a story of sisterhood and survival in wartime, and then insisted that what really mattered in the end was… True Love, embodied in a relationship we never really saw.

Here’s the thing: I really, really wanted to like this book, and maybe that’s the problem. [Side note: this post has been brought to you by the adverb “really.”]  I like stories about complicated relationships between sisters, and I’ve been fascinated by the French Resistance since about, oh, fifth grade.  That this book had both of those things made it a “must read” for me, especially given all the acclaim.  I had nothing but goodwill going in, and my expectations were high.  They were not met not because the book turned out to be a romance (it really isn’t) but because the characters were completely underdeveloped and therefore nothing they did was convincing.  And the French Resistance felt less like a focus of the story than a backdrop for… something else, though I’m not sure what, which might be the problem.

This has already been a very long, ranty post, so I’m going to wrap it up.  I’ll say this, though: My academic work focused quite a bit on books that were wildly popular in their own time and are either reviled or unknown today.  A lot of these works were Sentimental novels, focused on manipulating our feelings.  People loved them, not least because they provided an outlet for feelings that were inappropriate to express in real life.  I keep trying to fit The Nightingale into that framework.  I haven’t yet figured out how, but if I do, I might revisit this work.  I have major respect for “my” Sentimental novelists, and I might like The Nightingale a little bit better if I can make academic sense of it, as it were.

Book Review: Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

Life After Life 
By Kate Atkinson

Published by Reagan Arthur Books and distributed by Hachette, 2013

Purchased and read on Amazon Kindle

Links: Amazon, B&N, Powell's

Rating: Four Stars (out of five)

The first Kate Atkinson novel I ever read was Human Croquet (1997).  I checked it out from the library at my undergrad with no idea what it was going to be about (it was a hardcover with a plain red cover; my undergrad took off the dust jackets) because I liked the title.  I loved the book and sought out more Atkinson.  I haven’t yet read A God in Ruins (the companion volume to Life After Life) or Started Early, Took My Dog (the last Jackson Brody), but I’ve read all her others, with Emotionally Weird (2000) as my favorite.

I mention this because readers primarily familiar with Atkinson’s Jackson Brody novels might find Life after Life to be a departure for Atkinson, while to me it seems like a return to her previous topics and style.  Life After Life tells the story of Ursula Todd, who is born on a snowy night in 1910.  She dies at birth, but the novel immediately takes us to a different version of the story in which Ursula survives… for awhile.  Essentially, we get different versions of Ursula’s life, spanning the years from 1910 to 1967 with a particular focus on the various ways in which Ursula might live out World War II.  In one version, she marries a German man and mingles with Eva Braun; in another, she’s an air raid warden in London.  There are others, too, and in the various versions of her life Ursula lives anywhere from a few minutes to fifty-seven years.

Both Human Croquet and Emotionally Weird explore the possibilities for different outcomes based on minor differences in events, and Life After Life follows this pattern.  Unlike the previous two novels, however, it does so overtly.  Also, Ursula’s repeated rebirths are part of the events of the story.  That is, she sometimes makes decisions based on a feeling that she’s lived this particular life before, and at a couple of points she sees a psychiatrist for episodes of what she calls déjà vu.  We’re definitely supposed to believe that Ursula is reborn; it’s not just an academic exercise of telling the same story over and over with different endings.

For the most part, I really enjoyed this book.  I always enjoy Atkinson’s writing; she has a love of language that’s constantly evident in the way she uses words and, in Life after Life, in her characters’ love of poetry (after sex, for example, Ursula quotes Donne, prompting her paramour’s puzzlement; he has a more prosaic perception of the act and prompts a meditation by Ursula on a certain four-letter word).  Once Ursula manages to reach adulthood and once the birth story mostly goes away, Life after Life is well-paced, and I kept wondering how the next version of the story would allow her to survive her adventures (or not).  However, it took me forever to get into this book.  I kept picking it up and putting it down, largely because it gets kind of repetitive, especially at the beginning.  Yes, okay, Ursula was born in a snowstorm—we get it.

But perhaps the most compelling them in Life After Life has less to do with accidents of individual stories and individual choices than with the accidents that propel history.  At one point late in the novel, middle-aged Ursula says to her history-professor nephew, “But if Hitler had been killed, before he became Chancellor, it would have stopped all this conflict between the Arabs and the Israelis, wouldn’t it?”  The possibility of a world without Hitler is one Ursula pursues—we see her pursuing it the novel’s opening chapter, in fact—but she only has the opportunity to pursue it, and only knows she should pursue it, because she has lived the war years multiple times.  In the same conversation, she quotes her friend Klara, who in one version of Ursula’s life tells her “Hindsight’s a wonderful thing…  If we all had it there would be no history to write about.”  Ursula has a lot of hindsight… or is it foresight?  In any case, Life After Life provides a compelling glimpse into how history affects individual lives and a compelling meditation on how individuals might affect history.