The Next Dark Age

Book 56

I have heard the author’s name several times through Project Linus, so I decided to try her out through the Christmas Reading Challenge.

On an old estate in rural Pennsylvania, two ladies have built a quilters’ retreat.  I understood it to be something like summer camp, so of course it is empty at Christmas.  The elder partner Sylvia, the owner of the estate, is a bit of a humbug this year.  The junior partner, Sarah, doesn’t want to go home, so she pulls all of the old holiday stuff out of the attic.  Much of the story is told in Sylvia’s flashbacks to the holidays of her youth, and later, to the days before she left her home.

There is a lovely theme about how traditions are made and passed down through the years.  It also points out that some traditions are accidents.  Or even spiteful.

My absolute favorite part is when Sylvia is about eight years old.  Her mother, long ill, probably doesn’t have much time left, but insists on carrying on the family tradition of making apple strudel for every friend, partner and neighbor for the holiday.  She doesn’t know much about The Great Depression.  Doesn’t know that while their family will make out ok, they don’t have much to spare and the flour and sugar that she sees is just about all there is.  She finds out as she is delivering the strudel to the neighbors.

After expressing her displeasure over the comforting lies she has been told, she insists that it is all the more reason for their family to do more for their neighbors.  So as worn out and ill as she is already, she spends her Christmas Eve sorting through all of the clothes and shoes in her closet to give away.  Downstairs in the kitchen, the men are all grumbly about what she has given away.  Pouting because there is no sugar left for their Christmas cookies.  Sylvia’s aunt replies simply that she has some eggs she can trade.  Nice.

Other parts of the story have a heavier hand that starts to weigh down the narrative.   “Relationships must be mended”, I get it.   But this story does what I think the great ones do with a holiday-theme in a series: create a narrative that introduces the newbies to the people and places while offering a Christmas lens to the true fans – giving them a piece of their favorite characters that they have never seen before.  Well done.

Book 55

I could tell by the “other recommendations” list on GoodReads that I was going to like this book.  I already had it on my shelf, then it was picked for my book club.  Post-war Barcelona, a boy chooses a tome from the Cemetery of Forgotten Books that turns out to be a ridiculously rare novel by a local author that died mysteriously a decade before.  He won’t sell the book, which is good because some dude is trying to burn every last copy.

Boy loves book.  Boy obsesses over author and lots of other stuff.  Mysteries to be solved, secrets to be kept (or not).  It has the coming-of-age thing, including several illustrations of the ways that we judge people.  And there is a theme surrounding the idea that we as readers take from books what we bring to them.

The language is lovely, an even greater feat since this is a translation.

My only beef is the mysteries aren’t that mysterious.  The first bombshell was a laughable cliché, so I don’t even feel guilty is spoiling it: Julian’s one true love, Penelope, was also his half-sister.  And that is why even the people that weren’t totally insane kept them apart without explaining why.

You know when the solve is so easy that you hope it is a decoy?  Yeah.  This was, in my opinion, an unnecessary plot twist.  The fact that (SPOILERS) Penelope’s old man locked her in a bedroom and wouldn’t let her out because she was pregnant needs no further drama, or even explanation in that time and place.

The other mystery, the identity of the mysterious disfigured man in black, was also easily guessed.  But it added something to the plot and the story of how he became a mysterious disfigured man in black is pretty interesting.

The baddie seemed in the beginning a bit too much like Inspector Javert to be taken seriously.  The difference, though, was that Javert seemed to believe in his heart that he was doing right by God and Country or whatever.  Fumero really seems insane, driven by jealousy and a desire for revenge.  He becomes increasingly frightening, which makes for a better story.

I imagine I will be reading everything else this guy has written.

Book 54

The second book in the Aurora Teagarden series is my least favorite from Harris so far.

It starts out pretty well – Roe inherits the estate of a friend from the Real Murders club. An old lady named Jane who died of natural causes.  Roe hadn’t thought they were that close.  Interesting.

She heads out to her new house and found someone has broken in to it.  Nothing appears to have been stolen, but the place is a mess as though someone has been searching for something.  Fast forward and Roe finds a skull.  Hm.  Miss Jane had a secret.  And expects Roe to find it.

Fast forward some more and the rest of the body is discovered.

Real Murders had a long and interesting list of suspects, and a sense of danger that this one lacks.  I can’t say that I guessed whodunnit, but I wasn’t really all that interested.  The last few chapters seem rushed and the climax of the story is utterly ridiculous (and not very climactic).  In fact, I’d say the most intense moment in the entire book is when Roe’s fabulous mother (described as a Lauren Bacall type, but I see as played by a younger Shirley MacClaine) drags her to the bathroom at a dinner party for a confrontation over the skull.  Which Roe hid in her mother’s linen closet.  Seriously.

I am inclined to drop this series and move on to Harris’ other one, but I already checked out the next book from the library.  So I will hope for better things.

Book 53

I don’t know why I thought it would be cool to read a book about how gawdawful it was to live in the Dust Bowl in the 1930’s, but there it is.

Egan writes about a whole bunch of families in several different towns in the southern Plains of the United States, beginning with their settlement several decades earlier.

Confession:  I hadn’t realized how very much of this tragedy was man-made.  Apparently, the price of wheat skyrocketed and people moved in and plowed every last acre of grassland such that when the drought came, all of the top soil blew away.  Except it was much uglier than that.

“Dust Pneumonia” was added to my vocabulary.  Gross.

There is a lot about Roosevelt, and politics in general.  Obviously, a lot about the nature of rural poverty.  The narrative pulls together really well.  I must say that it started to lose me near the end.  There is only so much starving and choking on dirt (people and farm animals) and waiting until next season that one can stand.   But overall it is a readable history on a chapter of American history I hadn’t known much about.  Glad I read it.

Book 52

Small town librarian is a member of a little club of weird people that like to study true crime.  Famous murders to be exact.  One night she arrives for a meeting and finds another member bludgeoned to death in and arranged just like one of those real murders.

So that’s cool.

There are no supernatural anythings and the cops don’t suck.  I was irritated by the whole mousy-librarian-who-never-dates-but-suddenly-has-two-totally-eligible-men-chasing-her bit.  But the body count is decent and the end is rather frightening and I hadn’t even guessed the whodunnit.  That was rather odd since this was an earlier novel.  Early enough that I had to keep reminding myself that there were no cell phones.

If I am going to do a serious Christmas Challenge, I am going to have to put these down.  But I am having so much fun.