{"id":8104,"date":"2019-08-05T08:04:33","date_gmt":"2019-08-05T12:04:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=8104"},"modified":"2019-08-05T08:04:33","modified_gmt":"2019-08-05T12:04:33","slug":"blood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=8104","title":{"rendered":"*****Blood"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Maggie Gee —<\/strong> Far from the ordinary crime story, literary author Maggie Gee\u2019s Blood<\/em> is a comic excursion into the rough-and-tumble mind of narrator Monica Ludd. She\u2019s 38, over six feet tall, outspoken and awkward, far from tiny with, as she is fond of pointing out, an enormous bosom. When Monica squeezes you into the rollercoaster seat beside her on page one, you\u2019re in for a wild ride. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Monica claims to be a respectable citizen of East Kent.\nDoubtful. Much of the story plays out near the seacoast there and on the\npeninsula of Thanet. The little community, the seashore, the shops\u2014come to life\nnicely. Even such a remote area has its dose of violence, terrorism, and, well,\nblood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Monica has a job. She\u2019s the deputy head in a school, loathes\nher new boss, and takes no pains to hide it. She thinks he\u2019d like to be rid of\nher, and who could blame him?, but he rarely stands up to her. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Monica has a family. She calls them \u201cartistes of awfulness.\u201d\nShe landed in the middle of a congeries of three boys and three girls, all\ngrown up now. Ma\u2019s in a care home, forgetting everything or choosing not to\nremember, it\u2019s hard to say which. It\u2019s Dad who drives the family disaster\ntrain. He\u2019s a dentist who has sex with his patients in the chair. He\u2019s a serial\nphilanderer whose current girlfriend is two decades younger than Monica. When\nhis children were young, he beat them. He mocks them yet. His bullying drove\nhis youngest son Fred into the Army, and the siblings blame him for Fred\u2019s\ndeath. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The final insult\u2014and the inciting incident of the\nnovel\u2014occurs when the siblings organize an elaborate party in Fred\u2019s memory,\nand Dad doesn\u2019t show up. Monica is so angry, she says she\u2019s going to kill him.\nAlas, a lot of people hear this threat, and the next morning when Monica finds\nDad\u2019s brutally beaten, blood-soaked body, even her siblings think she\u2019s a\nmurderer. That attack launches her impulsive and lengthy campaign of lies and\nmisdirection. There\u2019s truth in the old saying, blood is thicker than water, and\nyou see it here. Her siblings\u2019 loyalty to her through this whole saga says\nvolumes about the sides of Monica that she tries to hide with her bluster.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Monica, Gee has created an unforgettable character. Not\nonly large, but larger than life. Profane and resourceful. She speaks her mind,\nloudly (rarely a good thing). And she is a genius at self-justification. All of\nwhich I found highly entertaining, even on the not-infrequent occasions that I\nwas embarrassed for her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From a crime fiction point of view, Blood<\/em> is refreshingly unconventional and a reminder that violence and retribution, jealousy and fear, have been important literary themes forever. Literary novelist Maggie Gee, OBE, is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was its first female chair. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Photo: Guzm\u00e1n Lozano, creative commons license<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Maggie Gee — Far from the ordinary crime story, literary author Maggie Gee\u2019s Blood is a comic excursion into the rough-and-tumble mind of narrator Monica Ludd. She\u2019s 38, over six feet tall, outspoken and awkward, far from tiny with, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2562,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"*****Blood - a comic crime novel about a family gone terribly wrong with a narrator who makes one bad decision after another. Loved it!","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[440,272,52,40,21,126],"tags":[1614,424,1613],"class_list":["post-8104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-adventure","category-comedy","category-crime","category-fiction","category-narrator","category-reading-2","tag-blood","tag-family-drama","tag-maggie-gee"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/vweisfeld.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/Converted_file_113499d0.jpg?fit=640%2C427&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s2NkiT-blood","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8104"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8105,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8104\/revisions\/8105"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}