Rook me

My list of heroines-I-wanna-be grows ever longer — Nancy Drew, Scout Finch, Elizabeth Bennet, Harriet Vane, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Hermione Granger, Thursday Next. And now Mwfanwy  Thomas.

Who is Myfanwy (rhymes with Tiffany) Thomas? Myfanwy herself would like to know. At the beginning of Daniel O’Malley’s clever genre-bender, The Rook, “On Her Majesty’s Supernatural Secret Service,” a young woman wakes up in a London park with no memory of herself. A letter in her pocket, which begins “Dear You” and is signed “Sincerely, Me” tells her that she now inhabits the body of Myfanwy Alice Thomas. A second letter offers her a choice — leave London immediately and assume a new, moneyed identity far, far away, or become Myfanwy Thomas and track down the killers of the real Myfanwy’s memories. The second choice is more dangerous given that the new Myfanwy is surrounded by motionless bodies wearing latex gloves and that unknown enemies are hot on her trail. Move, Myfanwy!

More letters from “Me” provide explanations and instructions as Myfanwy pretends to be her former self, a high-level operative in the Chequy, the secret government agency that guards Britain against supernatural threats. There are more of these than you might imagine, and Myfanwy gets on-the-job training almost immediately when she’s called on to fight a mysterious, enveloping purple fungus. Thank goodness she has some special powers. She’s going to need them as she not only contends with ghosts, ghoulies and grafters, but also a conspiracy within the shadow world of the Chequy.

This might sound a tad complicated, but O’Malley’s narrative is fast-paced and funny, a la Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next novels and the BBC’s Dr. Who-spinoff, Torchwood. There’s some similar deft world-building as well, the villains are dastardly indeed, and there’s more to appealing Mywfany than meets the eye. Fun, fun, fun. Sign me up for the sequel.

Open Book: I read a digital edition of The Rook by Daniel O’Malley (Little, Brown) provided by the publisher through NetGalley. Since it is about to expire, I’ll be buying a copy to keep and reread.

Wild at heart

In her enchanting first novel The Snow Child, Eowyn Ivey reimagines a Russian fairy tale and sets it in her native Alaska. So “once upon a time” is the 1920s wilderness of the Wolverine River, where middle-aged Jack and Mabel have come to reinvent their lives as homesteaders in beautiful but unforgiving solitude.

The couple’s only child was stillborn years ago; they still grieve. Mabel had hoped to be Jack’s helpmate as he carves out a farm, but he leaves her to cabin chores, and she now feels more alone than ever. But one night in the flurry of the year’s first snowfall, they remember their youth and fashion a snow child complete with scarf and mittens. The next day, the little figure is gone, but small footprints lead into the woods, and they begin to catch glimpses of a small blonde girl among the trees.

Is the girl real? Or is she just a dream? Perhaps a bit of both. Gradually, Faina, as they call her,  comes to be a part of their lives, “the child born to them of ice and snow and longing.” But only during the winter, and even then Jack sees her “like a rainbow trout in a stream” flashing her true self. “A wild thing glittering in dark water.”

Over the same months and passing seasons,  Jack and Mabel come to know their nearest neighbors, George and Esther and their three hearty sons, who won’t take no for an answer when it comes to helping out. Young Garrett, who hunts and lays traps, becomes a frequent visitor. He doesn’t see Faina.

Ivey’s story reminds me a bit of Louise Erdrich’s novel Tracks, with its fragile balancing of the realistic with the mythic. Her Alaska is nature red in tooth and claw, and she never shies away from the brutal challenges her homesteaders confront. “Wherever the work stopped, the wilderness was there, older, fiercer, stronger than any man could ever hope to be.”

Mysterious, too, what with its dance of Northern Lights and snowflakes that somehow fail to melt on Faina’s eyelashes.

The Snow Child goes on a bit too long for so fragile a magic. Less would be more. Remember, too, that not all fairy tales end happily-ever-after. And be careful what you wish for.

Open Book: I borrowed a hardcover copy of The Show Child by Eowyn Ivey (Little Brown) from the Orange County Public Library. I promise I’ll return it soon; I know other readers are waiting.

More murder, she read

Reading Elmore Leonard’s new novel Raylan, I can no longer separate the title character from Timothy Olyphant, who plays Raylan Givens on  TV’s Justified on TV. Of course, the FX series is based on a couple of earlier Leonard tales about the laconic U.S. marshal, and lean, blue-jeaned Olyphant has made the part his own. Leonard must think so, too — that’s the TV Raylan on the cover.

Although the book shares some outrageous characters and twisted plot lines with the series, it’s not a duplicate. Rather, it’s a complement as Leonard surehandedly tracks Givens juggling three cases in Harlan County, Ky. — human organ trafficking, mining schemes,  gambling and bank robbery –and coming up against three formidable females: a transplant nurse, a coal-company exec, and a risk-taker of a college student.

Leonard is such a pro at this kind of down’n'dirty, droll storytelling, and Raylan such a cool guy. Can’t take my eyes off him, in print or on screen.

Every now and then in the early morning, I’ll see one of the local crew teams out on a nearby lake. They make rowing look so easy as they skim across the water, and I’m duly mesmerized. I had much the same feeling reading the first chapter of Deborah Crombie’s No Mark Upon Her, in which a Met detective with dreams of the Olympics takes her shell out in the Thames in the early dusk. “She was moving now, listening to the whoosh and thunk as the oars went in, followed by an instant of absolute silence as they came out of the water and the boat plunged forward like a living thing. It was perfect rhythm, this, it was music. The boat was singing, and she was a part of it, lifting from the water like a bird.”

The next day the cry goes up for a missing rower, and Scotland Yard’s Duncan Kincaid, returning from holiday, is rerouted to Henley to investigate. His wife, DI Gemma James, returns to London with their two sons and their foster daughter, Charlotte, but eventually she, too, will be involved in the case with its controversial ties to police politics and sexual abuse.

It’s a layered, complicated tale that also involves members of the prestigious Leander Club, an Iraq war veteran with post-traumatic stress, Duncan and Gemma’s balancing act of work and home, Charlotte’s 3rd birthday party themed to Alice in Wonderland, and two memorable search-and-rescue dogs. Yes, the kids and the dogs threaten to upstage proceedings, but Crombie steers all to a pulse-pounding ending.

Kids and dogs also figure in Sara Paretsky’s Breakdown, the 15th in the excellent V.I. Warshawski series. Vic finds trouble as she tries to keep a group of young teens out of trouble. The girls are paying homage to their favorite vampire stories in a Chicago cemetery when a man is staked in the heart nearby. Coincidence? Maybe not. One girl is the daughter of a Senate candidate, another the granddaughter of a Jewish immigrant philanthropist, and both families have drawn the vitriolic ire of right-wing newscaster Wade Lawlor. The dead man is a shady private detective who may have been working for Lawlor.

Trying to keep the girls out of the glaring media spotlight, Vic finds connections among the “vampire killing,” her wealthy best friend Ashden’s bipolar behavior, and a state mental hospital with a wing for the criminally insane. It’s a terrific book to read during an election year, touching on hot-button issues like immigration and negative campaigning.

I think those may be about the only two topics not included in Elizabeth George’s Believing the Lie, the newest outing for Scotland Yard’s aristocratic Thomas Lynley and his proletarian partner Barbara Havers. Tabloid journalism, drug addiction, gay marriage, infertilty, surrogacy, adoption, adultery, internet predators, pedophilia, alcoholism, dysfunctional families, buried secrets. George’s kitchen-sink-and-more plot is a tangled web, indeed.

As Lynley looks into an accidental drowning in the Lake District with the help of forensic scientist Simon St. James and his photographer wife Deborah, Havers mines the family history of the wealthy Faircloughs and gets her hair cut and colored. The latter digression will be appreciated by series’ fans up on the series characters’ personal lives. And it’s actually Deborah’s continuing quest to have a baby that dovetails with a major plot point concerning the beautiful wife of a Fairclough scion. Even though George delivers a boat-load of red herrings, shame on you if you can’t see where the story’s headed.

If you’re looking for a new series, I suggest The Anatomist’s Apprentice by Tessa Harris, which introduces Sir Thomas Silkstone, a young Philadelphia surgeon who comes to London in 1774 to learn more anatomy. He is asked by Lady Lydia Farrell to study the decomposing body of her brother, Sir Edward Crick, who died under mysterious circumstances, and so begins his career as a pioneering forensic detective.

If you’re not put off by the gooey and gory details of Kathy Reichs’ novels and the TV show Bones, and you’ve already gloried in Ariana Franklin’s historicals, you’ll be entertained by Silverstone’s sharp dissection of corpses and detection of clues.

Open Book: I read review copies of Elmore Leonard’s Raylan (Morrow) and Crombie’s No Mark Upon Her (Morrow), an advance reading copy of Harris’ The Anatomist’s Apprentice (Kensington), and borrowed copies of Paretsky’s Breakdown (Penguin Group) and George’s Believing the Lie (Penguin Group) from the wonderful Orange County Library.

Up with Downton: more reading

Friends of the blog know I am a “Downton Abbey” fan, addicted to the upstairs-downstairs lives being chronicled on PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre. Last night’s episode was especially entrancing with the return of the viper Vera and the wounding of Matthew and William in France. And didn’t you love dowager Lady Violet doing battle with the vicar?

I’ve seen a number of proposed “Downton Abbey” reading lists for those wanting to know more of the Edwardians and World War I. Mostly they round up the usual suspects in literary fiction, memoir and poetry, which is well and good to a point. Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory is one of my favorite books, and yes, you really should read Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Robert Lowell’s Goodbye To All That, Vera Brittain’s elegiac Testament of Youth. Be aware, though, they are more downers than “Downton.”

They are not the books I went in search of to satisfy my craving for sudsy family sagas. I am still getting to know the Crawleys. The Swanns, the Grevilles, the Straffords, the Spragues and the Days are all old friends, and thanks to R.E. Delderfield, Philip Rock, Ursula Zilinksy and Elswyth Thane, I know their family trees better than my own. (They also are handily printed at the novels’ beginnings).

Right now, I’m basking in Zilinsky’s The Long Afternoon, delighting again in the details of life at Altondale Park a century ago: “Draperies and portieres and clutter made unending work, especially when combined with sooty coal fires, but housemaids cost less to keep than a hunting dog, and the rumblings of William Morris, who preached natural wood, light-colored walls, and simplicity, would not reach Yorkshire for some years to come, and when they did, would be ignored.”

After I finish with the changing fortunes of aristocratic Toby, his German cousin Felix, and their friend David, the vicar’s son, I plan to move on to Rock’s The Passing Bells and reacquainting myself with the Grevilles, American cousin Martin and housemaid Ivy Thaxton. Since it’s the first book in a trilogy, I’ll be hard pressed to stop with one book.

And then there are Delderfield’s doorstops in his God is an Englishman trilogy. The Edwardian/ World War I story of Adam Swann’s heirs is the third, Theirs Was the Kingdom. And there are seven volumes in Thane’s Williamsburg series, although The Light Heart, following Phoebe Sprague and Oliver Campion from 1902 to 1917, may well be my favorite.

Unfortunately, many of these books are out-of-print, but you can find copies in libraries and used bookstores. Lucky me has them all, as well as Alison McLeay’s The Summer House, Rumer Godden’s China Court, and Kate Morton’s more recent The House at Riverton.

The many new books I have to read are just going to have to wait. Look for me in an English country house. I hope you’ll stay for tea.

Gypsy curse?

I was going to wait and save this book as part of a mystery round-up, but then I realized it would be a crime to wait. It’s not that often anymore that I sit down with a book and read it start-to-finish, reluctant to break for meals or other distractions. Thankfully, I finished Stef Penney’s The Invisible Ones before Downton Abbey started Sunday evening.

The novel’s set in 1980s England, where private investigator Ray Lovell wakes up in a hospital partly paralysed and fuzzy about the car crash that landed him there. He’s having trouble discerning between memories and dreams — nightmares, really — and so thinks farther back to when Leon Wood hired him to find his missing daughter, Rose, who married into a Gypsy family seven years ago and then disappeared.

Ray doesn’t like missing girl cases (the reason will eventually be revealed), but he’s half-Romany and familiar with the travelers’ culture, although he grew up in “bricks.” The Jankos are a traditional, nomadic  family, living in caravans parked at sites across the English countryside.

J.J. Smith, who narrates alternating chapters, is a 14-year-old member of the small Janko clan, the youngest except for his 6-year-old cousin, Christo, disabled by a mysterious inherited disease and son of the runaway Rose and husband Ivo.

As Ray discovers and J.J. reveals, the Jankos are a historically unlucky bunch at life and love. That they also have dark secrets, even from one another, is no surprise.

I guessed most of the plot twists early on, but that’s what I do. Having a good idea of what was going to happen didn’t stop me from the pleasures of Penney’s atmospheric, myth-tinged narrative. Her writing reminds me a bit of Tana French, who has blurbed the book in glowing terms. She also warns that “you will not get anything else done till you finish the last page of this book.”

My sentiments exactly.

Open Book: I won an ARC of Stef Penney’s The Invisible Ones (Putnam) in a publisher-sponsored contest for Shelf Awareness readers. I count myself lucky indeed, and now I’m going to find a copy of Penney’s first novel, The Tenderness of Wolves.

Behind the scenes

The title characters of folksinger-songwriter Suzzy Roche’s appealing first novel, Wayward Saints, are a mother and a daughter who haven’t seen each other in years.

Mary Saint left small-town Swallow as a teenager, escaping from her abusive father and gaining fame and fortune as the lead singer of the alt-rock band Sliced Ham. But that was 20 years ago, and in the last decade, Mary’s life has dwindled. Following the accidental death of her lover and bass player, a a stint in rehab, and the break-up of the band, Mary retreated to San Francisco, where she’s working in a coffee bar thanks to her roommate, a self-professed “chocolate tranny” named Thaddeus.

Mary’s mother, Jean Saint, lives quietly in Swallow, dutifully visiting her stroke-disabled husband in a nearby nusing home. She tends to think of her daughter in the abstract, although she cherishes the letters Mary has written to her over the years, the exception being the strange missive sent from rehab. Now, however, she has to confront the reality of her 36-year-old daughter, who is unexpectedly coming back to Swallow to give a concert at the high school she hated.

Roche reveals all this in a series of scenes that move between past and present and among the perspectives of Mary, Jean and a handful of other quirky characters. Despite Roche’s nice way with words, the narrative feels ragged and moves unevenly. I wanted more of Mary, Thaddeus and her music, less of Jean and her frenemies, and could have totally done without the immature high-school teacher who arranges the concert and his Nashville buddy. The book is underwritten in parts, overwritten in others, but it still kept me reading.

It also sent me to iTunes to enjoy once again the music of the Roches, and where I also discovered Suzzy Roche’s song ”Wayward Saints.”  She sings compassionately of “fallen angels,” and the lyrics nicely complement her novel of life-bruised characters seeking to connect with one another.

Natalie Wexler’s  diverting The Mother Daughter Show is another backstage story, with the spotlight on three mothers — Amanda, Susan and Barb — whose daughters are classmates at an elite D.C. prep school. Tradition demands that the moms put on a musical revue for and about the graduating seniors, and thus the stage is set for all sorts of complications as the women juggle personal and professional problems.

Wexler obviously knows what she’s writing about, and the relationships — between the women as friends, the mothers-and-daughters, the teenagers seeking independence – ring true, although events are predictable. I kept thinking the book would make a good Lifetime TV movie, but I also wondered if I hadn’t already seen it.

Open Book: I read an ARC of Wayward Saints by Suzzy Roche (Hyperion Voice) that I received as part of a web promotion. A publicist sent me a review copy of Natalie Wexler’s The Mother Daughter Show (FUZE).

Days and nights at the Circus

I caught the elephant walk on the local news last night; yes, the circus is back in town. As much as I enjoy the animals and the acrobats, I’m too busy to head to the arena. Besides, I’m being vastly entertained by events at the Circus, which John le Carre fans know is his name for the British Secret Service, or MI5.

The novels that make up the Karla trilogy — Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Honourable Schoolboy; Smiley’s People — are among my favorite books, and every few years I reread them all, immersing myself in bespectacled George Smiley’s bleak world of scalp-hunters and lamplighters, Sarratt and the Nursery, London Central and the American cousins.

In Tinker, Tailor, Smiley hunts for the mole planted by Russian spymaster Karla in the heart of the 1970s Circus. The mole’s unmasking leaves the Circus in tatters in Schoolboy, and Smiley sends philandering journalist Jerry Westerby back to Hong Kong. Then, in Smiley’s People, word is out that Karla’s in search of “a legend for a girl.” Time for the Circus to get its act together and bring Karla over.

My latest rereading was prompted by the new film version of Tinker, Tailor, which I liked very much, an excellent distillation of the book although not as suspenseful as the 1979 miniseries with Alec Guinness as Smiley. Who is the mole? “There are three of them and Alleline” among the suspects, and  the miniseries allows for more backstory. Gary Oldham (and his glasses) makes for a wonderful Smiley, and the rest of the cast, including Ciaran Hinds, Colin Firth, John Hurt, Mark Strong and Toby Jones, are all well-suited to their roles.

Still, I have quibbles. It doesn’t make much difference that Boris appears in Budapest rather than Hong Kong, but why is Jerry Westerby the night duty officer instead of Sam Collins? What’s the point of Peter Guillam having a boyfriend instead of a girlfriend? And why does everything look so dull and brown when the script is actually as slick and sharp as steel knife?

Oh, apples and oranges. I like them both, or rather all three: book, mini-series and new movie. And all three Karla novels, too. Smiley’s People also was a good miniseries. I’d like to see the same Tinker film team take a crack at that story. Meanwhile, I’m in Hong Kong with Jerry and then on to Switzerland with George. Don’t tell Karla we’re coming.

Open Book: I have multiple copies of all of le Carre’s books, but I lent my paperback of The Honourable Schoolboy to a friend several years ago, who then lost it on a trip to Hong Kong.  Or so he said. I bought the digital editon for the Nook tablet.

Reboot

“She was cyborg, and she would never go to the ball.”

Laugh if you want. I admit to a chuckle upon reading that sentence early on in Cinder, Marissa Meyer’s first novel, a YA SF reboot (sorry, couldn’t resist) of the familiar fairy tale. It’s an inventive adventure, but most of the humor is inadvertent. Meyers immerses readers in the future dystopia of New Beijing, whose teeming population is threatened both by the mind-bending residents of the moon, knows as Lunars, and by a dreadful deadly plague.

So, Cinder has more to worry about than going to the ball and dancing with handsome Prince Kai. And it’s not just because her wicked stepmother won’t pay for a party dress for her, like those being fashioned for her stepsisters Pearl and Peony. Nor is it just because Kai doesn’t realize that the pretty, if grease-stained, teen-age mechanic repairing his android has a steel-plated foot and other non-human parts and wiring.

Cinder is cyborg, which means she has no human rights and is thus vulnerable to being drafted as a guinea pig for palace researchers testing for a new plague vaccine. Once drafted, the “volunteers” are never seen again, much like the human plague sufferers who are quarantined and warehoused.

The exception is Kai’s father, the emperor, who is dying in isolated splendor in the palace. Beware evil Lunar Queen Levana, who comes bearing the gift of a possible antidote. She wants to marry Prince Kai in exchange for the secret. Pity her niece Selene didn’t survive girlhood or she could have rightfully assumed the Lunar throne and set free her enslaved people. Now Levana plans on conquering Earth, starting with New Beijing.

Don’t worry. I’m not giving away anything that Meyer doesn’t within the book’s first 50 pages. And the mash-up plot isn’t Cinder’s strong suit, anyway. That would be the world-building, which is just fantastic, from the crowded market streets of New Beijing, with omnipresent net-screens blaring the latest headlines, to the cold palace labs where doctors use holograms to decipher the exact cyborg make-up and biometric engineering of second-class citizens. Then there are the sophisticated androids, although Cinder’s assistant Iko is a little too girly R2D2 for me.

Cinder is the first of four planned volumes of “The Lunar Chronicles,” so, of course, it ends with some cliff-hanging. Hope my nails last until the sequel. Or I maybe I’ll just get some fancy fake ones.

Open Book: I picked up an advance readers edition of Marissa Meyer’s Cinder (Feiwel and Friends/Macmillan) at SIBA last fall. It’s just one of several new YA books I’ve been reading. Definitely the best cover.

Fun with Flavia

I can’t decide what is my favorite part of Alan Bradley’s I Am Half-Sick of Shadows, the new mystery featuring 11-year-old amateur sleuth Flavia de Luce.

Is it when curious Flavia discovers the body in the middle of the night while prowling through Buckshaw, the dilapidated English estate where she lives with her father, the Colonel, and her irksome older sisters, Ophelia (Feely) and Daphne (Daffy)? Or is it right before this when the villagers gathered at Buckshaw to watch scenes from Shakespeare performed by a visiting film crew realize they’re snowed in by a Christmas Eve blizzard?

Possibly it’s when Flavia takes it upon herself to sneak back to the scene of the crime and investigate at her leisure, discovering important clues. Or maybe it’s when her plan to catch Father Christmas in the act goes awry on the snowy roof of Buckshaw when confronted by a killer. Or it could be when the fireworks Flavia has concocted in her laboratory finally detonate.

Oh, it’s all such fun. I’ve enjoyed precocious Flavia’s detecting adventures ever since Bradley introduced her in The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, also set in post-WWII England. Think Agatha Christie meets Nancy Drew and Encylopedia Brown. The other two Flavia books — A Red Herring Without Mustard and The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag – are also entertaining, but I think this new one is my favorite.

Maybe it’s the relationship among the three sisters. Or maybe it’s because readers find out more about the Colonel and  his late wife Harriet. Maybe it’s the witty writing, the amusing characters, the neat plotting. Or all the literary references. . .

Really, the only thing I truly dislike is having to wait another year for a new Flavia book.

Open Book: I borrowed a hardcover copy of Alan Bradley’s I Am Half-Sick of Shadows (Random House Publishing Group) from the Edisto Beach Public Library and read it the next-to-last-afternoon of the year.

 

 

Freeze warning

During the sweltering dog days of summer I wrote about some of my favorite cold-weather books in hopes all the snow and ice would make me forget the heat. Now I have another to add to that list, 1222, by Anne Holt, a best-selling Norwegian crime novelist.

Yes, baby, it’s cold outside, so I recommend you read this shivery, locked-in-with-a-killer tale next to a blazing fire and with a hot toddy at hand.

 A train derailment in northern Norway — 1222 feet above sea level — finds the 200 passengers seeking shelter in a nearby resort hotel, vacant except for the staff. The old lodge is well-stocked with fuel and food, which is a good thing seeing as how the fiercest blizzard in years is raging outside. Doctors who were on board tend to the wounded, including frosty Hanne Wilhelmson, a former police detective who is partially paralysed from a bullet in her spine. Hanne, anti-social to the extreme, reluctantly accepts help once her wheelchair is retrieved from the train wreck, and she proves to be an astute, albeit prickly, narrator.

She doesn’t think much of her fellow passengers, although she is intrigued by those she considers outsiders like herself, including a teenage boy traveling alone, a doctor undeterred by his dwarfish appearance, and the hotel’s brisk manager. Like everyone else, she wonders as to the identity of the travelers in the private railway car who are now ensconced in solitary splendor high in the hotel with a private, armed staff. But a more looming worry is the intensity of the storm, which is burying the hotel in snow to the point that windows shatter and an entranceway collapses.

Then there is a murder. A popular priest is found shot in the drifts right outside the door. Hanne can’t help but be drawn into the investigation, and when another murder soon follows, she  thinks of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None.

It’s an apt comparison, as is Christie’s The Mousetrap and Murder on the Orient Express, with the storm trapping victims, suspects and detectives in a confined space. Brrrr. . . .  If there’s such a thing as cozy Nordic noir, it’s 1222. 

Open Book: I read a digital advance of Anne Holt’s 1222 (Scribner) via NetGalley.