Category Archives: Reading . . .

****You Will Know Me

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You Will Know Me, gymnast

photo: Steven Rasmussen, creative commons license

By Megan Abbott, narrated by Lauren Fortgang – Publication of this new psychological thriller about a family’s sacrifices in producing an elite gymnast was well-timed to coincide with the Olympics and the public’s quadrennial fixation on little girls’ determination to fly. Told almost entirely from the point of view of American gymnast Devon Knox’s mother Katie, this family’s ties only bind tighter when external events threaten.

Thirteen-year-old Devon is on what seems to be a straight path to athletic accomplishment. Katie and her husband Eric have taken a second mortgage to support her training, the competition fees, the $200 leotards. Coach Teddy Belfour is confident, the booster club of BelStar parents pitches in to make expensive upgrades to the practice gym, Coach T brings on his niece Hailey to help with the younger girls. And Devon’s studious younger brother Drew seems willing to put his childhood on permanent hold so that evenings and weekends can be spent at Devon’s practice sessions, driving her to competitions, and participating in booster club events.

In short, Devon’s gymnastics is their life. As Katie says, “When you have an extraordinary child, you’ll do anything for her.” While nothing in the backstory of any of the current crop of elite gymnasts suggests the pathology that overtakes the Knox family, single-minded commitment, extreme sacrifice, and unshakable determination are par for the course.

Abbott, winner of multiple awards in the mystery/thriller domain, convincingly portrays the emotional temperature of the gym, its sounds and smells, the chalk-dust thickness to the air. When Devon practices, you are with her, you feel the adrenaline rush Katie does, watching. You understand the sacrifices, as well as how the family’s fixation is inhibiting the capacity to make moral choices.

For the Knox family, the extent of those sacrifices and choices becomes clear only after Hailey’s handsome boyfriend Ryan Beck comes on the scene. Ryan stirs a stewpot of emotions among girls trained to hold in their feelings, like diminutive adults, and moms who flirt and snipe like adolescents. His presence, then his absence, tests them all when he’s killed in an unexplained hit-and-run accident.

Abbott has divided the novel into parts, each introduced with a quote from Nadia Comaneci’s Letters to a Young Gymnast. This is the epigram for section IV: “But I sometimes wonder, to this day, if courage is just another word for desperation.”

Narrator Lauren Fortgang has recorded some 150 audiobooks and does an excellent job here, especially with the large number of teen girls. I especially admired her wispy Lacey Weaver, Devon’s teammate, whose voice is so light it seems about to float away, taking poor Lacey with it. She gives brother Drew a lisp that never becomes cartoonish, but immediately distinguishes him from the girls.

A longer version of this review appeared on CrimeFictionLover.com.

***Skeletons in the Attic: A Marketville Mystery

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Crystal Ball

photo: Jeffrey, creative commons license

By Judy Penz Sheluk – Thirty years ago, Abigail Barnstable disappeared, leaving behind her young husband Jimmy and six-year-old daughter Callie. Raised by her doting father, Callie reaches her mid-thirties oblivious to a mountain of family secrets until Jimmy’s death in an industrial accident starts her on a path of discovery. Callie narrates this present-day cozy mystery by Canadian author Sheluk, set in the fictional town of Marketville, an hour north of Toronto.

The first surprise is in her father’s will. Not only does Callie inherit a house in Marketville, he leaves her $100,000 to fix it up. The catch? She has to quit her dead-end job in a bank call center fraud unit and move into the house for a year. Renovation will be a major undertaking, but her father also left her a connection with the building contractor living next door—a handsome single man named Royce, eager to help Callie develop her fix-up plans.

Oh, and while she’s living there, Jimmy wants her to try to find out what happened to her mother. It seems the police at the time suspected foul play—and Jimmy—but nothing was ever proved. The bequest may be his way of asking her to clear his name. Once Callie takes up residence she encounters a series of intriguing puzzles and clues. I enjoyed muddling along with her as she tried to figure out what they mean and who left them. Though occasionally, Sheluk’s dialog is a little stiff, she moves the plot along briskly, keeping Callie’s ingenuity on high alert.

Callie reaches out for help from a number of colorful characters, including two who claim psychic abilities. (One of them—Callie’s long-time friend and operator of the Glass Dolphin antique shop, Arabella Carpenter—features in Sheluk’s previous mystery, Hanged Man’s Noose, also published this year.) Callie’s never quite sure how much she can trust some of her new confidants, and people keep telling her to “be careful.” While you may never believe Callie is in any physical danger, the risk to her emotional health from mucking around in thirty years’ worth of carefully kept family secrets is significant.

The romantic risk is also real, when Royce’s family turns out to have some pretty big skeletons in its closets too. You’re left to speculate how their budding relationship may play out, because at the end of the book, all possibilities are open. If you like a tidy ending with all questions wrapped up neatly and tied with a bow, this isn’t that. Yet, Sheluk has described her principal characters so well, you may feel, as I did, that you can see into this particular crystal ball.

A longer version of this review appeared on CrimeFictionLover.com.

***The Bends

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Woods Hole pier

photo: Andjam 79, creative commons license

By Leah Devlin – This current-day police procedural is the third mystery-thriller in a series that takes place in and around the picturesque village of Woods Hole, located on far southwest Cape Cod. Big water—Nantucket Sound, Cape Cod Bay, Buzzards Bay, the Atlantic—is never far.

The irony that young Detective Bill Bleach, pale as his name suggests, is prone to violent seasickness is not lost on him. Unfortunately, corpses have the same effect on his digestion, and he has to deal with them too.

Devlin effectively conjures up the Woods Hole environment and the preoccupations of several principal characters: Nobel laureates Lindsey Nolan and Sara Kauni, who are inventing a new dive helmet, and marine biologist Jessie McCabe (protagonist of Devlin’s previous book, Ægir’s Curse). Nolan’s adopted daughter, Maggie May, takes the lead in this story. She’s an accomplished diver and a talented student at the nearby Newbury College of Art, as well as a former drug user whom Nolan met in rehab.

When two murders at the College baffle the police, a small group of students is at the top of the list of suspects, Maggie May chief among them. Unfortunately for Detective Bleach, he’s seriously attracted to the chain-smoking, brittle young woman. His partner begins to doubt his objectivity, and Maggie May to doubt his intentions. He desperately wants to clear Maggie May, and protect her too, since it appears to him she may be the killer’s next victim.

Devlin’s characterization of the art college—the faculty politics, the student life, the manipulations and rivalries—struck me as quite believable. Less so was the architectural design of the place, built in the 1970s, with thick interior stone walls. In fact, these walls are so thick they allow a passage down the middle, and slits in the walls (apparently invisible to the users of the various studios and offices) allow every room to be spied upon.

No one knows about this building feature except the architect who designed it, Edward Gripp. As a wealthy benefactor of the college and donor of the campus buildings, Gripp keeps a small office there, which allows him secret access to his “Labyrinth.” He particularly enjoys spying on two married faculty members carrying on a torrid affair.

Devlin’s development of Maggie May as a young woman determined to stay sober, who faithfully attends her NA meetings, and in times of stress turns to the psychological supports they provide, makes her an interesting, unique character. Her roommate and occasional dive-partner Lily is the precious daughter of a fierce mother, determined that her daughter succeed in every endeavor—in other words, one of those delicious characters you love to hate.

While the book could have used a good copy-editing to resolve some grammar and usage problems, Devlin writes in a straightforward, unembellished style. You’ll find a little more plot (physical events) than story (emotional journey) in this novel, but it moves along briskly, with interesting characters, a well-created setting, and a satisfying surprise at the end.

A longer version of this review appeared on CrimeFictionLover.com.

***Médicis Daughter

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The young Margaret of Valois, by François Clouet

The young Margaret of Valois, by François Clouet

By Sophie Perinot – This romantic adventure covers the strife-riven period of French history from 1564 to 1572, near the end of the Valois lineage and the rise of the Bourbons. The central character is Princess Marguerite (Margot), whose father is dead and whose brother Charles is now king of France. Only three years older than she, Charles, like everyone else in the household, is guided and ruled by their mother, Queen Catherine de Médicis (yes, those infamous Médicis of Florence).

Ignored by her mother through most of her childhood, Margot is anxious to join her court and gain her favor. When she finally does arrive at court, around age eleven, she finds it a dangerous stew of plots and jealousies, revenge and murder. An uneasy peace between the country’s Catholic majority, to which the aristocracy belongs, and the Protestant Huguenots threatens to dissolve.

Margot falls in love with the handsome young Duc de Guise, but her family is determined she have a royal marriage. She is little more than a pawn on the political chessboard of Europe, but if she refuses to play, it could cost her her life and that of the Duc. The outbreak of war with the Huguenots tosses the fate of her family and her love into the air, and it lands in a most unexpected place. By the time her family finally finds her a suitable and willing marriage partner, it’s clear that political considerations, not love, are uppermost. Age nineteen, and with a reviled husband, she displays considerable (and rather suddenly acquired) political acumen.

Marguerite de Valois is a historical character well known in France for an eventful, sometimes scandalous life, much of which takes place after this book’s conclusion. Margot matures during novel, but none of the other characters much change, despite additional years, challenges, and demands on them. They remain rather two-dimensional in Perinot’s treatment, and I would especially like to have seen more probing of the character of Queen Catherine, for example.

Authors of historical fiction often must go beyond surface events and motives to explore their characters’ actions. Hilary Mantel’s award-winning novels—turned into memorable theatricals—about Thomas Cromwell are a perfect example, as is this treatment of Catherine of Aragon. Occasionally Perinot’s dialog seems too modern, but despite these quibbles (and a few startling grammatical errors—where was the editor?), it is an exciting read about a period I knew too little of. Margot was the subject of a famous novel by Alexandre Dumas, pere, on which a 1994 French movie (La Reine Margot) was based.

The reader would have been well served if the book included a family tree of the Valois clan and their cousins who appear in this story, a list of the principal characters (having three main characters named Henri didn’t make it easy to follow, though Perinot handled this reasonably well), and perhaps a map.

****The Kennedy Connection

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Kennedy half-dollar

photo: Eric Golub, creative commons license

By R.G. Belsky – Author Belsky was most recently managing editor of news for NBCNews.com and is a former managing editor for the New York Daily News, among other journalistic posts. He has ample experience to write authoritatively about his main character and first-person narrator, Gil Malloy, a down-on-his luck Daily News reporter, and about the book’s Manhattan setting. The Kennedy Connection is the first in the Gil Malloy series and takes place in 2013, as the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination approaches.

When we meet Malloy, he’s been disgraced after a serious breach of journalistic ethics. Though he kept his job, he’s assigned to the newsroom dregs, while he watches another young reporter, Carrie Bratten, acquire the mantle of up-and-comer that he once wore. Frustrated with his second-class citizenship, he’s a little too quick to latch onto a story he thinks will redeem him.

Meanwhile, his former agent asks him to help her get publicity for a new book. The hook? The author claims to be Lee Harvey Oswald, Jr., illegitimate son of Kennedy’s assassin. Oswald, Jr.,  believes the book will clear his father’s name.

And a police buddy asks him to investigate the death of a young ex-gang member from the South Bronx, Victor Reyes. Reyes was shot 15 years earlier, left a paraplegic, and finally died when the bullet lodged in his spine worked loose and traveled to his heart. The unknown malefactor who shot him is now a murderer. Malloy’s friend is killed by a drunk driver before the reporter can do more than conduct a few initial interviews with family and cops on that case. Now one is a serious drunk and another’s a deputy police commissioner.

These distractions are soon cut short when a series of murders begins, each with a Kennedy half-dollar left at the scene. These deaths seem too much of a coincidence, taking into account the revelations of the new book by Oswald, Jr., especially when someone sends Malloy a letter promising more mayhem. In the envelope, a Kennedy half-dollar.

Malloy is teamed up with Bratten to cover this high-profile story and again riding high in his journalistic world. Author Belsky does a good job making Malloy a likeable character who could use a little more personal insight. The other newsroom characters are also well drawn, and there’s some engaging banter.

Just like Jake Epping in Stephen King’s 11/22/63, the character of Oswald, Jr., is trying to rewrite the history of JFK’s assassination and, like Jake, ends up having second thoughts about meddling with the past. Efforts to deconstruct what Malloy calls “the greatest murder mystery in history” have a substantial literary pedigree, from King’s work to Don DeLillo’s Libra, to James Ellroy’s American Tabloid, to Tim Baker’s Fever City. Belsky has made an engaging contribution to this lineage.

A longer version of this review appeared on CrimeFictionLover.com.

****Blood of the Tiger

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photo: Damian Moore, creative commons license

photo: Damian Moore, creative commons license

By J.A. Mills – Tigers are many people’s joy and woe. Beautiful, intelligent apex predators, their numbers in the wild have diminished to a few thousand, and the forces threatening them seem irredeemably entrenched. This book lays out in stunning, infuriating detail the shortcomings and compromises in international policies toward tigers by both governmental and non-governmental organizations, even presumed good guys like the World Wildlife Fund.

Mills’s arguments are well supported by many other organizations and investigations. The nub of the problem is this:

  • Wildlife protection efforts focus on illegal trade, ignoring the legal Asian “tiger farms”
  • “Tiger farms” provide a totally inappropriate environment (group cages) for solitary animals like tigers, and animals raised in them cannot survive, if released into the wild
  • Proponents say tiger farms reduce pressure for poaching wild tigers, which is completely false
  • The availability of tiger products from farmed animals builds demand for these products, increasing the incentive for poaching
  • It is vastly cheaper to poach a tiger (about $10) than to raise it on a farm ($10 per day in food alone)
  • Consumers view products from farmed tigers as inferior to those from wild-killed ones.

Here is what becomes of farmed tigers in China. They are hunted in fake “big game” shoots, their pelts are made into rugs and clothing, their meat is eaten (yes), their carcasses are deboned and the bones steeped in vats of wine, then sold as “tiger wine.”

All this happens behind the smoke screen of “domestic” versus “international” trade, of China’s 1993 ban on tiger bone products, and fake compliance with international wildlife protection regimes.

While Mills’s book gets these points across effectively, it is not very inspiring reading, as it details one failed attempt after another by international organizations and high-level conferences to “save the tiger” in the face of false cooperation by, primarily, Chinese government officials to do whatever they please.

Luxury tiger goods are big business in Asia. What’s true for tiger-derived products is also true for bear paws, bear bile, rhino horn, and elephant ivory. Indiscriminate killing of the latter two species puts them on the path to extinction as well. Some Chinese investors openly say they are stockpiling these animal parts for the time when the animals are extinct and the “value” of their collections will skyrocket.

We in the United States are part of the problem. Inconsistent policies across states allow private individuals to keep wild animals, and there are more tigers in U.S. back yards than in the wild.  Often the conditions they are maintained in are filthy, too small, and in every respect wholly inadequate. You may recall the notorious and tragic episodes that have resulted in Jackson Township, N.J., and Zanesville, Ohio.

I am a regular supporter of Panthera, an organization dedicated to saving the big cats in the wild. Unfortunately, even their promotional material skirts a fundamental problem, by emphasizing the fight against “illegal trade,” when China’s tiger farms are perfectly legal. Mills supports her text with ample footnotes and a short section on “what you can do,”  including strengthening state laws about private tiger ownership in the United States. Her website provides more ideas.

****The Heavenly Table

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Heavenly TableBy Donald Ray Pollock — In the early 20th century, the three Jewett brothers are under the thumb of their crazily religious, impoverished failure of a father. He’s working them practically to death in the swampy field they’re clearing near the Georgia-Alabama border. The wealthy landowner has promised that if they meet some impossible deadline, he will give them 10 laying hens. If so, maybe they will finally have something to eat. What the reader knows is he has no intention of keeping that promise.

A couple of states north, in southern Ohio, live the elderly farmer Ellsworth Fiddler and his wife Eula, also struggling. The previous year, Ells gave all the savings Eula had scraped together over the decades to a flim-flam man who stole the family’s pride and hope along with their cash.

The title of this literary crime novel reveals its theme. Early on, Pearl Jewett encounters a mysterious hobo with a long grizzled beard who tells him about the heavenly table. There, a man’s hungers will be satisfied, but only those who have suffered in life can sit there. God gives men the chance to suffer by bringing them troubles. Thereafter, Pearl actively pursues misery for himself and his boys, to ensure their place there.

When Pearl dies, the three boys fall into a life of crime, stealing guns and robbing stores and banks on their way north to Canada. They soon become wanted men, with a heavy price on their heads. They need to lie low for a while, which brings them to a brief sojourn on the farm of Ellsworth and Eula Fiddler near the small town of Meade.

Many other colorful characters weave in and out of the brothers’ lives, including Jasper Cone, the Meade “sanitarian,” whose job is to assess the functioning of the town’s hundreds of outhouses; Sugar, a black man whom the trio encounters and torments; Pollard, owner of the Blind Owl bar and a sadistic killer; and Lieutenant Bovard at the nearby army camp who dreams of dying in glory in France.

Reviewers of Pollock’s previous books, Knockemstiff and The Devil All the Time, compared him to William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor for his gothic southernness and unsettling storylines. This book reminds me of Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree, deemed a comic masterpiece. The Heavenly Table has its brief comic moments, though it’s mostly the darkest of Southern Noir.

Living in squalor, uneducated, making bad decisions, drinking too much, and succumbing to violence, few of the characters have any hope for redemption in this life or of reaching “the heavenly table” in the next. But as Jason Sheehan said for NPR, by the end of the book, it turns “a smart and complicated corner, asking (without ever really asking) who are the bad men and who are the good? And just how much blame for badness can be laid at the feet of those who know nothing and fear everything, who have no recourse to change but that it be met with furious violence?”

To read this book, you’ll need a strong stomach and may want a hot shower afterward, but you’ll never forget Pollock’s compelling characters and powerful writing.

A longer version of this review appeared on CrimeFictionLover.com.

****Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War

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Mayflower

“Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor,” by William Halsall, 1882. Pilgrim Hall Museum, Plymouth, Mass.

By Nathaniel Philbrick, narrated by George Guidall. Some 35 million Americans today are to some degree descendants of the Pilgrims who came to America aboard the Mayflower in 1620. Although the November sea voyage entailed hardships enough for the approximately 102 passengers and 30 crew members, these difficulties were nothing compared to what they encountered when they decided to go ashore in the relatively unpromising ground that became Plymouth Colony. This is their compelling story.

The Pilgrims’ greatest fear was the Natives, but their biggest foes turned out to be harsh climate and lack of food, which contributed to high rates of death from disease. Despite their early anxieties, the Mayflower Pilgrims developed a good and mutually beneficial relationship with the powerful Pokanoket chief Massasoit and some other tribes. Philbrick provides keen insight into what each leader was thinking when they made the choices they did.

Before long, other, less devout settlers arrived and mingled with the Pilgrims. In 1630, seventeen ships delivered approximately a thousand English men, women, and children to the vicinity of Boston, and soon the Massachusetts colony grew to include modern New Hampshire, Maine, Connecticut, and the more religiously tolerant Rhode Island. Several of my ancestors arrived with prominent Puritans in 1634, settling in Boston, Salem, and New Haven. I wanted to read this book to find out more about what their lives were like.

This rapid influx created an almost unquenchable demand for Indian lands, and the settlers made the lives of Natives increasingly difficult. The children and grandchildren of the Pilgrims cared little for the aid their forefathers had received from the Natives. You can feel the rising tension and frustrations. In 1675, Massasoit’s grandson Philip had enough. He launched what became known as King Philip’s war—a bloody, three-year conflict, in which Colonial towns and Native camps were burned, and the area economy devastated.

In the sixty or so years covered by this book, a number of remarkable personalities emerge—among them Miles Standish, Josiah Winslow, Massasoit, William Bradford, Roger Williams, and America’s first Indian fighter, Benjamin Church. Philbrick’s descriptions of these men and their personalities makes them come alive on the page and lets you understand their motivations. The military leader Benjamin Church is a good example. Unlike some of his colleagues, Church’s first thought was not wholesale slaughter of the Native population, but rather he tried “to bring him around” to the Colonists’ way of thinking. This approach, Philbrick believes, became a precursor for the Founding Fathers a century later, as Church “shows us how the nightmare of wilderness warfare might one day give rise to a society that promises liberty and justice for all.”

If you are one of the 35 million noted above, you may find this book especially fascinating, as Philbrick recounts surprisingly detailed personal histories of a great many Mayflower passengers.

Guidall is a frequent narrator of thrillers and many other types of books. He does a fine, job here with a straight narration.

***Between You and Me

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Mary Norris, punctuationBy Mary Norris – This book—part history of language, part grammarians’ bible, part punctilious punctuation-snob puncturer—by a veteran New Yorker copy editor attempts to explain why writers in English, particularly those whose work appears in The New Yorker, make the choices they do. Form, not content, is her subject. While that publication is notoriously picky about copy matters, Norris’s anecdote-rich text suggests how much elasticity actually exists within its seemingly constricting rules.

Particularly entertaining are the early sections that include a review of her checkered, pre-New Yorker work experience. (You can’t really call a stint as a milk-truck driver and costume shop clerk a career for a person who did graduate work in English.)

Norris took her title from the common grammar mistake people make in using “I” when “me” is required. I yell at the radio when I hear the awful “between you and I” or “He invited Tom and I . . .” I suspect Norris does too.

Several chapters cover the ongoing punctuation wars. No surprise, as the subtitle of the book is Confessions of a Comma Queen. In the comma skirmish, I find I fight on the side of “playing by ear,” dropping in a comma where I sense a pause. And in hyphen disputes, her emphasis on clarity of meaning seems a useful approach. Thus the hyphen in milk-truck driver above.

Some of the text on verbs got away from me and her suggestion for how to tell whether a sentence needs “who” or “whom” (for the straggling soldiers in that lost battle), her system was overly complex or not explained clearly. I’ll stick with mine.

pencils

photo: Vladimer Shioshvili, creative commons license

The very best chapter was devoted to Norris’s love of pencils. Extra-soft No.1 pencils, in fact. The kind of pencil that has also kindled a love of pencil sharpeners. (I’ve served time in innumerable meeting rooms over the years and can tell you that The Ford Foundation’s black pencils, embossed with its name, and the round ones of the L’Enfant Plaza Hotel in Washington, D.C., which come in easter egg pastels, are the best. Whenever I attended meetings there, I stocked up.)

Reading anyone’s description of something they are both passionate and deeply knowledgeable about—making wine, say, or 1950s automobiles—is always interesting, and you learn as much about the person as about their particular interest. I don’t ever have to read about pencils again, but I’m glad I did.

****Our Souls at Night

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Our Souls at Night

photo: Mitchell Diatz, creative commons license

By Kent Haruf – My book club selected this short novel, 192 pages, a gentle story about aging and that difficult transition between when parents think they know what’s best for their children (and usually tell them so) and children come to think they know what’s best for their parents (and do tell them so).

Addie, a widow, and Louis, a widower, are neighbors in small-town Holt, Colorado, in the eastern, high plains portion of the state. In the book’s first chapter, Addie pays a call on Louis and proposes that he visit her at night, lie in bed with her, and have a companionable conversation. Sex isn’t exactly off the agenda, but it’s not at the top and rather beside the point. This unusual arrangement begins, and before long the whole town knows about it. Soon thereafter word spreads to Addie and Louis’s far-flung and scandalized children, who want it to stop.

The conversations between Addie and Louis are low-key and unsentimental. They talk about their marriages and the deaths of their spouses, about their children, about many things. Author Haruf’s unadorned writing style (not even decorated with quotation marks) gives their interactions a deceptive simplicity. For example In speaking about Addie’s son Gene, who is losing his store and has to start a new career, Louis asks:

What is it he wants to do?

He’s always been in sales of some kind.

That doesn’t seem to fit him, as I remember him.

No. He’s not the salesman type. I think he’s afraid now. He won’t say so.

But this could be a chance for him to break out. Break the pattern. Like his mother has. Like you’ve done.

He won’t, though. He’s got his life all screwed down tight.

Both of them find in their late-night conversations a closeness, a connection they never achieved with their spouses. Addie asks, “Who does ever get what they want? It doesn’t seem to happen to many of us if any at all.” Except these lucky two, who at least know what they want. Says Louis, “I just want to live simply and pay attention to what’s happening each day. And come sleep with you at night.”

This restrained style works perfectly well in a novel about the places and people that are Haruf’s subjects, in this book and his others. It is a lean diet, stripped of fat and garnish. Yet the meat of Our Souls, the struggle against pettiness and small-mindedness, is worthy of consumption.

People seem to like this book. All seven copies in the Mercer County Library System were out, so I had to snag the large-print version. I’ve since learned this was Haruf’s last book, the sixth in a series set in Holt, finished a few days before he died in 2014.