Merry Christmas (book review in the works)

 

I’m afraid the holiday season has eaten away at my time so I’m not nearly done with The Master of Hounds by Joseph Gary Crance to review it. I am enjoying it very much. The Ernst family clan is still living and coon hunting in Painted Post, and young Mattie is a college student now. There’s a wedding at the beginning of the book, and new foes to face. I’ll leave you with author Tarren Young’s guest review of the first book, and I promise to give my review of the fourth in this series next week.

https://storymusing.blogspot.com/2018/02/the-last-coon-hunter-by-joe-crance.html

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

 

The Ten Thousand Doors of January 

by Alix E. Harrow

I’m not even sure where to start with this book — it’s so big and full of story.

I suppose we should start with January, so named by her mother for the god Janus, who looks both forward and backward.

“You don’t know a thing about me; you can’t see me sitting at this yellow-wood desk, the salt-sweet breeze riffling these pages like a reader looking for her bookmark.”

When the story opens, she seems like a normal little girl, though out of place in this time period and circumstance.

“I wondered if Africans counted as colored in London, and then I wondered if I did, and felt a little shiver of longing. To be part of some larger flock, to not be stared at, to know my place precisely. Being “a perfectly unique specimen” is lonely, it turns out.”

January lives in a manor house with a rich man for a guardian while her father searches the world for artifacts for him. It’s a bit sad, but there is so much more to the story, and as it unfolds, we are taking on a very rich and full journey.

“When I was seven, I found a Door . . . at some level there is always a doorway. A dividing point between here and there, us and them, mundane and magical. It is at the moments when the doors open, when things flow between the worlds, that stories happen.”

There may not be ten thousand doors in this story, but there are a great many. There are also a great many misperceptions and the author is masterful in painting rich pictures that do not give us more information than we need to know at that point in the plot. The writing is beautiful in the pictures it presents and the words chosen.

January has a governess, Miss Wilda who is a bit stodgy, and a friend from the local grocer’s, Samuel Zappia, though she isn’t supposed to spend time associating with him. He still manages to slip her stories to read. He also presents her with her best friend, a puppy she names Sinbad. This dog is just a dog in this novel, but also all of the best things a dog can be, a best friend and protector.

January finds a book in a chest, which she presumes was left there for her by her guardian, which sets her on a journey as it tells the story of Miss Adelaide Lee Larson and her explorations through Doors.

“I wanted to run away and keep running until I was out of this sad, ugly fairy tale. There’s only one way to run away from your own story, and that’s to sneak into someone else’s. I unwedged the leather-bound book from beneath my mattress and breathed in the ink-and-adventure smell of it.”

As I said, there are many Doors in this story, and just as you think you have a handle on what is happening, you step through a new one into something that builds a new story onto the one you are reading.

“…there are these places—sort of thinned-out places, hard to see unless you’re doing a certain kind of looking—where you can go to somewhere else. All kinds of somewhere elses, some of them packed full of magic. And they always leak, so all you have to do is follow the stories.”

A fantastical journey I hope you will take.  

Book Review: Say Cheese and Murder: A Lemington Cheese Company Mystery by Michelle Pointis Burns

 

Say Cheese and Murder

A Lemington Cheese Company Mystery

by Michelle Pointis Burns

 

Mystery reviews can be some of the toughest to write because I don’t want to give away too much information. Also, I have to be completely honest here - I’ve read this book before. The author is a member of my local author’s group. However, I can honestly say I thoroughly enjoyed re-reading this cozy mystery. It is pure fun.

I love a good mystery. Set it in a British manor house on New Year’s Eve and it harkens back to some of my favorite books by Marjorie Allingham and Agatha Christie.

Tensions are high. Add in an ice storm that traps all the partygoers there for the night, and you can feel something is going to go wrong.

Obviously, it does, in a big way. Someone is murdered during the night.

Cassandra Haywood wakes up the next morning with a mystery on her hands. She’s a regular, modern day, working girl, handling business matters in her Aunt’s cheese company. Effectively told from the limited viewpoint of Cassandra, we can only know what she knows, but she doesn’t sit on her hands. The scene where she overhears that she is a suspect is at once humorous and full of great sensory details.  

All the big themes have a place here - love, honor, justice, friendship, and betrayal. The love of refined manor life, and cheese, as well as strong writing skills shine through in this debut novel.

With character names like the vile Baron Von Pickle and a butler named Fartworthy, who is conversely not quite what you would expect from a butler, there is definitely humor here, both overt and less in your face.

As every good mystery demands, this one is brought to a very satisfying conclusion. Cassandra is no shrinking violet and her confrontation with the murderer is well thought out and will have you cheering her on.

I can honestly recommend this book.

 

Description from Amazon

“Happy New Year . . . or is it?

Cassandra Haywood hopes her aunt, Lady Lemington, the CEO of Lemington Cheese Company, will behave tonight. With the help of a large household staff, they are hosting an elegant holiday gala for friends, local merchants, and rival cheese company owners. Scarves and secrets swirl around Cassandra as the clock counts down.

When an unexpected ice storm traps guests and staff within the modern English estate, someone dies in the great halls of the house that cheese built. After Cassandra realizes she has become the head detective’s number one suspect, she must overcome self-doubt to discover the truth and clear her name.

The first book in the Lemington Cheese Company Mystery series serves up intrigue, red-herrings, and humor, alongside several kinds of cheese. This culinary, cozy mystery introduces readers to Cassandra Haywood. She loves scarves, has a knack for business, and unexpectedly adds "amateur sleuth" to her resume following a possible crime at the manor.”

The Author: Michelle Pointis Burns juggles mothering her ten children, homeschooling (the oldest five have now graduated college), living her Catholic faith, and writing. She loves to research topics of all kinds, read British authors (especially Jane Austen and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle), quote movies in regular conversation, and drink hot chocolate from elegant teacups. When asked how she manages it all, she has been known to reply, “Prayer, caffeine, and a sense of humor.”

Michelle has been a devoted member of the NY Chemung Valley Mothers of Twins Club (she has two sets of twins), and the Corning Area Writers’ Group. Born and raised in Queens, NY, Michelle currently lives in Upstate New York on a working goat and sheep farm with her husband and more than half of her children. Say Cheese and Murder is her first novel.

www.michellepointisburns.com

Book Review: Winter Hours by Mary Oliver

 

Winter Hours

by Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver passed away in early 2019 but she left us a wealth of writing. One of my all-time favorite poems is her Wild Geese. You can listen to her read it herself here —
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lv_4xmh_WtE

This collection covers a little bit of poetry, some essays, and even a little biography, though she tended not to put herself at the center of her writing.

“…don’t look for a portrait that is chronological, or talks much about my professional life, or opens to public view the important and proper secrets of the heart. Consider what is written rather as parts of a conversation, or a long and slowly arriving letter…”

Nature was her inspiration and her focus, but she also writes about the writing itself.

“The poem in which the reader does not feel himself or herself a participant is a lecture, listened to from an uncomfortable chair, in a stuffy room, inside a building.”

And the writers who have interested her. There are fascinating essays here about Poe, Frost, Hopkins, and Whitman. She speaks of Poe’s stories as “full of the hardware of the nightmare” while stories by Kafka and James “take place in an uncomfortably familiar” world. “They are, horribly and unmistakably, descriptions of life as we know it, or could easily know it.”

There is also an essay about how she built a little house, mostly by herself, and mostly from materials she recycled from the town dump.

“Here I found everything I needed, including nails from half-full boxes spilled into the sand. All I lacked – only because I lacked the patience to wait until it came along – was one of the ridge beams; this I bought at the local lumber company and paid cash for; thus the entire house cost me $3.58.

Quirky? Perhaps. Fascinating and meditative, definitely.

“I am one of those who has no trouble imagining the sentient lives of trees, of their leaves in some fashion communicating or of the massy trunks and heavy branches knowing it is I who have come, as I always come, each morning, to walk beneath them, glad to be alive and glad to be there.”

A wonderful book to while away the “winter hours.”