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.”

 

 

Book Review: The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

 

The Glass Hotel

by Emily St. John Mandel

I truly enjoyed the author’s fourth book, Station Eleven, a story about people surviving and continuing after civilization collapses. Just like that book, there is a beauty to the author’s use of language in Glass Hotel that I find enthralling, drawing me forward through the book.

The story begins with a woman named Vincent falling off a ship at sea. Scenes from Vincent’s memory, and possibly more, play out in quick succession. She is a young teen girl, as she scrawls a phrase on a school window using an acid pen, “Sweep me up.” Time moves about uncertainly in this first chapter. “…it seems I can move between memories like walking from one room to the next—"

With subsequent chapters we move forward and backward in time, based on connections born of meaning rather than a straightforward linear progression and we see things from the perspective of different people.

After the acid pen incident, we get quite a jump in time forward and move into the perspective of Paul, Vincent’s half-brother. I would venture to say he is an unreliable narrator.

Then we hear from Walter, the night manager at the Hotel Caiette. Someone scrawls “Why don’t you swallow broken glass” on a window at the hotel, where both Vincent and Paul are working. Walter decides Paul did it, and Paul takes the blame but I can’t help wondering. Vincent was the one who wrote on a window in acid pen earlier in the story, but the words seem much more in keeping with Paul’s character. Who really did it?

There are fascinating observations of human nature, luminous descriptions of settings and charged descriptions of choices and actions.

I love how the author immerses us in the perspective of each character so that we believe what we are hearing but then when we hear about a situation later from another character, we can find that things are not so black and white.

“But does a person have to be either admirable or awful? Does life have to be so binary? Two things can be true at the same time, he told himself.” Is it just Paul justifying himself or is it true? Can it be both?

I love the subtle suspense that draws me through the book, from the beginning when we wonder if Vincent is dead or not, and whether Paul is unstable and murderous, to when we read of Jonathan Alkaitis - a successful businessman but then comes the line “Nothing about him, in other words, suggested that he would die in prison.”

It turns out Jonathan has created a Ponzi scheme. He takes people in, right and left, including Vincent. Even in their relationship there is a strange layer of illusion. They are not married but he insists she wear a ring and introduces her as his wife. Ghosts and hallucinations swirl in the peripheral vision as the story progresses.

As with Station Eleven, the author gives the reader beautiful pieces of a puzzle, drawing the reader on with tantalizing glimpses of foreshadowing, that eventually come together to form a complex portrait of people who are neither evil nor innocent.

I highly recommend this book.

Book Review: Reel of Fortune by Jana DeLeon

 

Reel of Fortune
by Jana deLeon

Okay, I admit it, I never got around to reading what I intended to for this week. The book I reported on last week was so entertaining and enjoyable that I read another one from our library’s Overdrive catalog. There are times that we are all feeling the strain this year and it is good to just have something light to read. So, this week, I decided to share a little bit more about why I have enjoyed the books in this series so much.

This one is actually earlier in the series than the one I read last week, but not enough changes to make it difficult keeping track when you go backward. Fortune’s still dating Carter, still hanging out with Gertie and Ida Belle, but in this one, most people in Sinful, Louisiana don’t yet know that she is a former CIA agent. The information is going to get around fast though and she wants to tell the people she has become closest to before they find out from another source. They take it much better than she anticipated, and with that out of the way, she is ready to have some fun.

“I had no idea what Ida Belle and Gertie had in mind for today, but no matter what, their plans usually required running shoes and a gun.”

Turns out it’s a fishing rodeo. After the event, an entrant that few people actually seem to like turns up dead of cyanide poisoning. Some people are questioned, including Fortune’s new friend Ally. Ally is a little bit high strung and Fortune is worried about her going to jail so she takes the extreme measure of kicking the mirror off her boyfriend’s police vehicle in order to be taken into custody with Ally.

Along come Ida Belle, Gertie, and Ally’s boss, Francine, with dinner for the evening, a deck of cards, and of course Gertie has to include some dynamite.

The next morning both ladies are sprung by a lawyer Fortune knew in her days with the CIA and Carter tells them to stay out of trouble.

What do they do? Settle Ally in at Fortune’s house for some sleep then promptly go sky diving with Gertie. Of course, Gertie gets it wrong and jumps early, ending up right in the middle of a church function. That’s just the beginning of the hijinks too.

That is what I love about these books. The characters are funny and interesting, as are the situations. The dialogue is well constructed too. There couldn’t be a more perfect book for light-hearted mayhem and distraction. I highly recommend.

Book Review: Cajun Fried Felony by Jana DeLeon

 

Cajun Fried Felony

by Jana DeLeon

 

Fortune Redding is a former CIA agent. After a leak at the agency, she was hidden in Sinful, Louisiana for her own safety. Something happened while she was there hiding out though. She made friends, for the first time in a long time, and found people who cared about her. Once the sticky situation that had put Fortune in hiding was taken care of, she found she didn’t want to leave. So she came clean with the people she had become friends with and started a whole new life, as a PI.

This one is Janet Evanovich meets Steel Magnolias. Fortune’s friends, Ida Belle and Gertie, former military spies during Vietnam, remind me very much of the strong personalities in that classic movie. Fortune hires them to comprise a team for her new private investigation business. This is a few books into the series and Fortune is well settled into Sinful. She’s now dating Deputy Carter.

The story starts with the annual Turkey Run. Fortune assumes that’s a race for charity, but it’s a little more literal than that. When things get out of control, the body of Venus Thibodeaux, a young woman who had supposedly left town, is unearthed. Everything points toward Whiskey, the owner of the local bar, and he hires Fortune to find the truth.

Filled with colorful characters and zany happenings, this book is a hoot, and a perfect antidote to reality right now, with just enough seriousness to keep it from being utter fluff.

Fortune sums up the feel of the book, “Murder is always a big deal. But in the big scheme of things, we’re still as close to a slice of Mayberry as we’re getting. I mean, if you wave a magic wand and make Mayberry the strangest place on earth.”