Wreck Bay by Barbara Fradkin

 

While exploring the rugged landscape of Vancouver Island’s Pacific Rim, Amanda Doucette is drawn to a reclusive old artist known only as Luke, who lives off the grid on a remote island. His vivid paintings hint at a traumatic secret from his past that brings to mind her own struggles with PTSD, and she begins to bond with him. 

More at Dundurn Press

Great atmosphere and investment in the ragged natural world of Northwestern Vancouver Island. As many eccentric characters as live in three Pines, but Fradkin’s Amanda Doucette novels take us all across Canada.

The mystery is as complex as I have come to expect from a Fradkin novel. Just when you think you know what’s going on, a new twist arises that you realize has been foreshadowed all along, tucked almost invisibly between the  local scenery and First Nations lore.

There’s a moment where Amanda blurts out something that she would be better keeping quiet about, and it’s unmotivated, or at least unexplained, what changed her tactic of keeping quiet to suddenly blowing her cover. At one point there's a scene that might be seen as white savior-ism, but otherwise the book is respectful of the area’s First Nations people and the natural environment they protect against the double onslaught of tourism and industry.

Themes include PTSD, art as therapy, police handling of mental illness, tourism in wilderness areas, Vietnam era draft dodgers and deserters who set up communes on Vancouver Island and smaller area islands during and after the Summer of Love.

Side note: there's often confusion about what constitutes a trained service dog versus an emotional support dog, so you may be a bit confused by how Amanda's dog acts and interacts. For greater clarity, check out this link from the American Kennel Association or this one pertaining to Canada

 

A bit of local knowledge if you're planning to visit: anybody flying from Vancouver to reach the West shore of Vancouver Island would not book Vancouver to Victoria and then drive. Booking Vancouver to Nanaimo cuts 3+ hours off the drive and uncounted time hanging around waiting rooms in airports. Better still, for not much more money & a LOT faster trip, check for a regional float plane service straight over to Tofino. There are frequent options for much of the year, and private charter flights available as well. 

#VancouverIsland #Tofino #LongBeach #hippies #draftdodger #CrimeFiction #BarbaraFradkin #DundurnPress #mystery #murder #art #artist #survivalist #VietnamWar #emotionalsupportdog #kayaking #hiking #Ahousaht #Nuuchahnulth 

 

See this reviewer's other writings via http://jaynebarnard.ca/

 

Asian Space Opera on a galactic scale

The Red Scholar's Wake 

by Aliette de Bodard

The writing is lyrical. The character in a terrible fix. That much the opening makes clear but if you are not already familiar with this space based, Asian history-based, complex cultural hierarchy on a pirate ship in alliance with other pirate fleets (to use an English-language approximate synonym for ‘banner’) you may feel lost for a page or two.

Fortunately, this author quickly brings the wider, stranger universe down to a more easily contextualized contest of wills. If one  will belongs to a human tinkerer and the other to a mostly projected ship’s avatar, well, that’s just the way things work here.

The ship’s technology is fascinating, shifts of shade and image and motion, yet for all that it is grand and complicated, there are still human scale people and issues for our heroine Xich Si to deal with. She has to make a fast and terrible choice, with lifelong consequences for her only child, and for herself.

What makes this interesting particularly is that the ship is also making a fast and terrible choice, with lifelong consequences for itself.

I was immediately hooked by the complexity of the world and the language, although the shifting forms of address - respect and familiarity and affection  - require some adjustment for readers like me, raised in western cultures where family hierarchies and relationships are immutably defined by the blood, marriage, or adoptive tie.

The fusing of Asian and North American speculative fiction styles and directions/influences/objectives is not always an easy one but here it works. This is space opera in the truest sense of both space and opera: a 3D backdrop encompassing galaxies, on which is staged a libretto roiling with human passion and pain. In the hands of this adept novelist the vast blend includes deep insight into the core of a very human (albeit technologically enhanced) protagonist.

I was entranced from the earliest pages but given my lack of familiarity with Vietnamese culture and history, there are undoubtedly layers and subtleties that I missed. This is a book I would like to come back to with more cultural knowledge to enhance my experience.

Highly recommended. 

 

#Netgalley #Asian #SFF #SpeculativeFiction #SpecFic #SpaceOpera #Pirates #hostage #LGBTQ #RedScholarsWake #AlietteDeBodard

Egypt’s golden couple

Egypt’s golden couple: 

How Akhenaten and Nefertiti Became Gods on Earth

by John and Colleen Darnell

To anyone who watches modern politics in Canada, the prologue of this book is very familiar. Recent prime ministers’ marriages are constantly either upheld as models of solid political and personal commitment or rumoured to be extremely dysfunctional. Either on the verge of falling apart or secretly already separated. Their every public glance or gesture is picked apart by bloggers, newspaper opinion pieces and the Twitterverse. So when you read that Akhenaten is either the perfect father or an incestuous pedophile, either a prophet of monotheism or a totalitarian ruler who cast off all checks to his power, the public parallels are obvious. Akhenaten and his Chief Wife Nefertiti were a celebrity power couple.

 

Nowadays we have many written records from people close to our leaders and their spouses, and some sort of truth will eventually get into the history books. But for Akhenaten and Nefertiti, truth is elusive. After 3500 years, all that’s left is rumor... and whatever can be reasonably inferred from the public monuments and occasional private artifacts that are left behind. Akhenaton has been called “heretic, false profit, and incestuous tyrant by some, a loving, compassionate, peaceful precursor to Moses and Jesus by others.” Nefertiti is hardly ever seen as anything but the beautiful iconic image that lives in the popular imagination, a voiceless adjunct to her powerful husband.

Seemingly everyone from Freud to modern philosophers has had a crack at the royal relationship and its impact on the society, economics, and development of Egypt. What is known for sure is that they were so hated by the powers that came after - revivals of the priestly cults they had deposed - that their new Royal city was flattened, and his name defaced on monuments across Egypt. It was a deliberate attempt to erase his reign from the official record. 

 

Did he succeed in changing Egypt forever? Does it matter? The fact that we're still talking about him, and her, 3500 years later means their detractors ultimately failed to, in current parlance, cancel them.

Diving into the meat of the book, we're introduced to their milieu via a host of begats and easy-to-imbibe anecdotes about life in ancient Egypt, such as that Egyptian youngsters sucked on their index finger rather than their thumb; the image became a defining aspect of the hieroglyph for child. Amid the speedy recounting of who fathered whom, the book brings to resonant life some Egyptian ceremonials and festivals. There are also vignettes of imagined conversations between early Egyptians, allowing us insight into technical issues such as how to decipher hieroglyphics. If you've ever wondered, they can go left to right or right to left, in vertical columns or horizontal lines. So figuring out where to start is essential. That alone makes the successes of early Egyptologists in translating carved and painted texts even more astonishing.

 

Readers of the Amelia Peabody series, will recognize the names YUYA and TUYA, the husband-and-wife mummies. Their tomb was actually found in 1905, and thus we know more about the parents of the great queen TIYE than we do about her. How did the daughter of a prominent but not royal family marry into the royal household, and become the king’s great wife, and eventually a goddess? 

 

Clearly upward marital mobility is not solely a social media phenomenon.

The book presents some evidence about the background of Nefertiti too. Unlike Tiye, her parents get no prominent tombs or other recording on surviving temple walls. It’s hypothesized that her father was the court official AY and his wife Tiy, identified as “chief nurse of the great king’s wife“ may have been her stepmother. There is some DNA evidence showing that Nefertiti was Akhenaten’s first cousin on both sides of her parentage. It's probable the two knew each other. But their journey from childhood cohabitation in sprawling palace complexes to a revered and reviled power couple remains lost to the desert sands. 

 

The book is eminently readable for anyone interested in armchair archaeology, making the topic accessible without much scholarly detail.

Authors John and Colleen Darnell, credited jointly and separately with several other titles relating to Egyptian history, have an entertaining social media presence that charms some and offends others. 

Follow these Vintage Egyptologists on Instagram 

For more on the book and the authors, see https://us.macmillan.com/tours/john-and-colleen-darnell-egypts-golden-couple/

#Netgalley #Egyptology #VintageEgyptology #Nefertiti #Akhenaten #Egypt #history #marriage #PowerCouple #celebs

 

 

THE WHITE HARE: Cornish mysticism meets post-war pragmatism

THE WHITE HARE is a moving, powerful tale of love, loss, betrayal, treasure, and ultimately joy.

The novel opens on a textured, vivid, atmospheric beach scene. The rich language draws the mind's eye from the macro--literally the birdseye view--down to the micro: sand flies buzzing over the seaweed and the small gray green crab that skittles out of a rock pool. This opening is beautiful and terrible and immersive, and would almost certainly be so even without the body marking time by the withdrawal of the tide, baring its' frail limbs to the rising sun.

The language is often lyrical, never stalling the story’s forward motion, with secrets small and large advancing and receding in a dance worthy of the Grand Dame of 1950s women's suspense. That Mila is reading--or trying to, when the book doesn’t wander off between night and dawn--the famous Cornish novel ‘Jamaica Inn,’ is an overt homage to Dame Daphne DuMaurier as well as to the tangible and mystical mists that seep around Cornish moors and tors.

 

 Rooted in postwar Britain’s social and familial turmoil, The White Hare follows Mila, her daughter, and her mother as they reckon with rebuilding their shattered lives in a near-derelict seaside home at White Cove, whose long-habituated ghosts embrace the torments carried in each woman’s inner baggage. Items wander room to room, the child sees deeper than she should, and soon the very roof that shelters them seems almost as menacing as the wild winds and shadowy, ancient hollow ways that course and cut their isolated valley.

The valley's neighbours mutter of curses and avert their eyes, all but a pair of women in a vine-laden cottage who would surely be labeled witches in any other era. And then there is the mysterious handyman, appearing and vanishing like an unquiet spirit.

As matters long buried surge to the surface during a torrential New Years' Eve, will they all live to see the dawn? And will sunlight disinfect the old sins or release yet greater evil upon the women of White Cove?

If Daphne DuMaurier set out to write an early Mary Stewart romantic suspense novel with guidance from Celtic goddesses and saints, the result would be this spellbinding and suspenseful tale whose textured language flows like foam on the tide and illuminates great truths like moonlight through gossamer mists.

Highly Recommended

#Netgalley #TheWhiteHare JaneJohnson #Cornwall #Penzance #Mousehole #novel #family #secrets #seashore #well #legend #spirituality #Ostara #PreChristian #Celtic #murder #relationships #confrontation #truth #power

 

HER DEADLY MISCHIEF by Beverle Graves Myers

In this historical mystery series' 5th novel, set in 1742, the celebrated castrato Tito Amato is back home in Venice, on stage, in full-throated triumph over his rival Emilio, when a much-feted courtesan is stabbed in an opera box and flung down to the floor of the Teatro San Marco. Despite a whole theatre filled with possible witnesses including the city's new chief investigator, the killer eludes suspicion and capture while Tito untangles the threads of the dead Zulietta's conquests, her other relationships, and her childhood in Venice's ancient and rigidly controlled Jewish Ghetto. 

I laughed, I wept, I held my breath.

Tito Amato is musically gifted, sharp-witted, and engagingly human, always well-meaning but sometimes jealous or self-doubting or angrily impulsive. The supporting characters who have been with him since the first book are like my own family by now, and the new ones introduced for this novel are well-drawn, easily distinguishable and memorable long after the book ends. There's a fascinating scene or two in a glass-blowing factory and a solid look at the complex layered society in Baroque Venice.

This is my second time through this book, first time by audiobook, and while the series has always enchanted me, it's an even better experience now that I've learned so much about historical Venice myself for writing 'Timely Taffeta' (in which Maddie Hatter goes undercover in a fashion house famous for its jeweled Carnevale costumes) and can more fully envision every step Tito takes, every mood of the weather or the passersby or the frenetic gaiety of the great Piazza at the height of Carnevale. If I could, I'd commission a video game in which I follow Tito on his investigations through those fabled streets and canals, to the soundtrack of all the incredible music he sings through the series. 

These books are short but exquisite, so it's no hardship for any historical fiction fan to start from the first (Interrupted Aria, set in 1731) and continue on to get the full shape of not only the theatrical era in one of Europe's most fascinating cities but Tito's amazing and sometimes very sad life, his fortune at finding love when he had thought it out of reach, and his compassion for the frailty of humanity including his own.

The Tito Amato Mysteries

by Beverle Graves Myers

https://www.goodreads.com/series/41383-tito-amato

#mystery #histfic #Venice #histmyst #TitoAmato #BeverleGravesMyers #amreading #amlistening #bookreview #Italy #1700s #Baroque #music #opera #aria #castrato #Murano #glassblowers

 

 

“Why are you all dressed up?“ 

 For those of us who love skirts, dresses, all things long and fluttery or clean and sleek, that’s a question that gets asked a lot. This book is chock full of fun facts to quash the impertinent questioner.

Pants are a relatively recent addition to western women’s wardrobes, their 20th century invocation aided by fabric shortages during the world wars. Their adoption was not fast or easy. While Coco Chanel popularized 'beach trousers' in the 1920s, in 1961 Mary Tyler Moore was permitted to show Capri pants only, in only one scene per episode, on the Dick Van Dyke show.

These are only a couple of the many thought-provoking historical tidbits about pants, skirts, fabrics, and all manner of women’s fashion, including laws and customs around the world, that feature in the pages of this fascinating fashion history.

And yet, for all that pants were claimed as serious wear for professional women and especially feminists, the skirt (or dress) remained popular throughout the 20th century, not only on ordinary women but on those who changed the world for women.

“The heroines of the civil rights movement—Rosa Parks, ruby bridges, 2/3 of the Little Rock Nine, the bloody Sunday marchers in their church clothes—took a stand in skirts. Frida Kahlo and Georgia O’Keeffe revolutionized modern art in skirts. Marie Curie won two Nobel prizes in a skirt. When NASA put a man on the moon, “the computer wore a skirt,“ in the words of one of those computers, mathematician Catherine G Johnson.”

As the decades of the 20th century marched on, women’s dress called back to earlier eras, especially the classical and neoclassical. Having just read the detailed explication of early chiton pleating in 'Skirts', I immediately recognized the style's roots when I encountered it this week in the new fantasy epic series, 'Rings of Power,' on Prime (one costume's a lovely indigo hue, too, which probably wouldn't have survived long in in its full vividness while being scrubbed on stones with whatever harsh soap was used in that relatively primitive rural village. Faded indigo only looks good in jeans).

 

The discussion of evolution in women's sports clothing was all the more interesting considering tennis great Serena Williams' recent contretemps over her court wear at Wimbledon. Here's a great early-1900s description from American women’s tennis. Violet Sutton complained, “It’s a wonder we could move at all. Do you want to know what we wore? A long undershirt, pair of drawers, two petticoats, white linen corset cover, duck shirt, shirt waist, long white silk stockings, and a floppy hat. We were soaking wet when we finished a match.“ That all began to change as French women followed American and British women into more sporting activities, and their fashion houses followed suit. Soon women's sporting and leisure attire sprouted a wider range of colours, fabrics, and styles, although skirts have stuck for sports like tennis despite the occasional introduction of bloomers and divided skirts and even (for amateurs) shorts.

Anecdotes skip between the recurring Taxi or 'wrap' dress for working women and the strapless prom gown as the ultimate debutante play wear that any suburban interwar teenager could aspire to.

A strength of this book is the ways it links changes in fashion to changes in wider society, not simply whether there was a war on and fabric needed rationing but where women spent their days, and their evenings. Office wear, sports wear, afternoon wear, and evenings from casual nights out to the Met Gala all get their due. 

 

Despite many references to English aristocracy and French fashion houses, the book maintains its distinctly American lens. While the anecdotes are entertaining and the famous names drop with aplomb, there are a lot of both. It’s a book you won’t want to rush but rather dip into for a chapter or two, to whirl yourself away from modern fashion to the fashions in your youth, your grandmother's, even your great-great grandmother's.

Fair warning: you will yearn for illustrations of all the fabulous gowns worn to fabulous parties. I ended up searching online to see for myself the iconic evening wear of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and other great women of the 20th century. It's fashionista heaven.

Skirts: Fashioning Modern Femininity in the Twentieth Century 

by Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell 

 Publisher ‏ : ‎ St. Martin's Press (September 6, 2022)

Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1250275792
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1250275790  
 
 
 #NetGalley #Skirts #Fashion #20thCentury #clothing #gowns #tennis #LOTR #SerenaWilliams #RingsOfPower #Indigo #chiton #sportingwear #StMartinsPress 

 

 _____________________________________________________

 

Reviewed by Jayne Barnard, author of the Maddie Hatter Adventures, whose parasol-dueling fashion reporter tangles with industrial spies in Gilded Age New York City during "Gilded Gauge"

https://books2read.com/gildedgauge

   

A Lady's Guide to Fortune Hunting by Sophie Irwin

Some Regency romances start off by establishing the scene, gently acquainting you with the main characters around a pianoforte, and then introduce the main story problem once you have settled in with your teacup and a biscuit. Not so Lady's Guide. Within the first few paragraphs the problem facing our heroine is as thoroughly in our face as it is in hers. And yes, there's effective scene-setting, including the pianoforte. It is a quick and effective hook rendered in decisive, character laden language that feels appropriate to the era.

 

Having cut my teeth on Georgette Heyer's groundbreaking Regency romances, I am not an easy mark for modern clones. But this book, which in some ways seems an homage to that august author’s classic tale of a managing elder sister and beautiful younger, has held my attention and defied a direct comparison. There's also a nod to that most famous of all Regencies, Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice, in the family with five dowerless daughters at risk of losing the only home they've ever known.

The main characters are consistent, their dialogue witty, and the situation comedy more than entertaining enough to allow the relationships to develop in an authentic manner almost in the background. By the halfway point I was compelled to keep reading even though, as usual with romance , the outcome was already clear. My commitment was rewarded by a most satisfactory new complication that involved deep games both social and monetary.

A few small elements marred my overall enjoyment.  Since when is it necessary for every elder brother to have a sad or tragic past event repeatedly dragged up when it's not truly needed to explain a later choice? (I know, I know: since Season 1 of Bridgerton hit the streaming services). At another point, when the reader is already quite sure what’s going to happen, the author feels the need to foreshadow it with an unusually heavy hand. The early thorough grounding in setting became slightly spongy in later scenes, and some threads that early on promised a fair bit of drama in their conclusion were rather quickly and tamely wrapped up.

 

But these are small flaws indeed in what was an otherwise most enjoyable read, with balls aplenty, scheming matrons, sweet side romances, and a primary relationship with snap and crackle of the non-steamy variety, its dialogue more enjoyably witty than sappy.  If you like your heroines to give as good as they get, and your heroes slightly flawed, this is a great way to spend a weekend.

Recommended.

Thanks to #Netgalley for the ARC

#Regency #romance #ballgown #fashion #London #Almacks #JaneAusten #GeorgetteHeyer #LadysGuide #FortuneHunting #siblings #review #bookstagram #bookreview

TOMORROW And Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zelvin

This novel has the potential to be the gamer-geek's literary LOTR.

Speaking as both a gamer and a writer, with kin and friends deeply embedded in the gaming industry, I found this novel an amazing read on multiple levels of complexity. Like the best video games, in fact, it can be read (played) through several difference lenses/levels of difficulty.  There's the children of immigrants thread that winds through the whole, the Unfair Games' autobiographically-tinged rags to riches origin story, and the mixture of twenty-something relationships - friends, romances, sexual, even violent - plus Sam's physical disability story being subsumed by the character Ichigo while Sadie's psychological fragility is its own precarious quest mirrored into 'Both Sides', their next original game. Social tropes abound without being allowed to become preachy or take over from the unfolding quest for the perfect game.

My review is not in the least objective as I loved, deeply loved, this novel far beyond my ability to comment on the quality of writing or character development . Honestly, after the first tentative dip into Chapter One, every time I opened a new chapter I was quickly drawn into the spell, no matter how many days had passed since my last session. I'll likely come back to it several more times and find other elements to comment on in more detail.

If you enjoyed Erin Morgenstern's 'Starless Sea' and played the hell out of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, you'll find elements here to pull you into Sam and Sadie's world, with Marx as the helpful, if sometimes annoying, Navi character.

Also

(from Macbeth, spoken by Macbeth)

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more.

I'm very grateful for the e-ARC from Netgalley

#gamers #gaming #fiction #friendship #Netgalley #Harvard #tech #GameDevelopment #disability #immigrant #VisibleMinority #Tomorrowx3

 

 

The Liquor Vicar by Vince R. Ditrich

It's every eccentric dreamer & small-town store owner & jaded RCMP officer you've ever met, all crushed into one zany story by an ex-rocker who lives on Vancouver Island himself. He knows whereof he writes.

The first thing that hits you about this book is that it’s not a cozy. As if it could be with a title like this. But it goes in hard and fast and definitely off the twist. And that’s just the prologue. 

 

Chapter 1 is just as weird in a different way, introducing our protagonist, our antihero, Tony Vicar who is at that very moment gyrating his way right out of a job as an Elvis-impersonating wedding DJ. Then we meet Tony‘s new boss, and have a really enjoyable few pages inside Tony‘s head while he mentally corrects all the malapropisms his new boss utters. But at the end of it, he has a new job in a back-bush hamlet on Vancouver Island. 

 

Even if we still don’t find much sympathetic about Tony or any of the other characters, there is a hint that he cares not to make life worse for himself or anybody else, no matter how much he despises them. And he despises pretty much everybody. There is no softness, very little political correctness, just jaded dystopian review of his neighbours and society and the whole universe. 

 

The only thing that makes Tony truly outraged is unwitting massacre of the English language; The only thing he loves is music, preferably from 40 years ago. But he has these Robin Hood moments where he just goes off to help out someone vulnerable. 

 

I was definitely intrigued enough to keep turning the pages as Tony settles in to his new life, and the front seat of his new boss's massive, ancient muscle car.

I admit to being a bit generous with the stars on this one, in that I really enjoy the voice of Jacky O. That’s not her real name but she says herself that nobody can spell it and very few can extract what it's supposed to sound like from the Irish Gaelic spelling. And her descriptions of other characters tell as much about her as about them, for example, “This guy. Kind, generous, and surprisingly sensitive, but with the social graces of a bag of mud hitting the sidewalk from a great height.“

There are some funny minor truths here too. 

 

“Those passengers were surveilling him, stalking him. Driving around his house to get a look-e-loo. He’d never heard of such a thing in this country, where most celebrities still mowed their own lawns.”

One annoying little tic is the author intrusions. We’re going along happily falling for all the rhetorical flourishes, seeing exactly what we're intended to see and thinking what we are supposed to think about all the characters, and then the author intrudes to underline it for us. Whether the author himself or an editor somewhere along the way decided that it had to be underlined for the slow readers, I don’t know. But it is obvious and off-putting when it happens.

Despite that last comment, I am definitely up for another dip into the world of this author, just as soon as I can get my hands on their next book.

#Dundurn #VancouverIsland #ComedyOfErrors #music #love #friendship #smalltownlife

DARE NOT TELL by Elain Aucoin Schroller

The novel is named for the poem by Henry Lawson, “The things we dare not tell,“ and includes verses from that poem at each section.

Although the story is billed as concerning events in World War I, it opens in 1939 London. Immediately we learned that Joe's  brother Robbie had been missing, presumed killed,  for the past 22 years. Then we follow Joe and his wife Sophie, a war nurse, back to their World War I meet, and onward again to 1939.  Joe and Sophie spend part of the summer in France, and slowly realize that the shadow of war is looming over the border from Germany again.

Sophie and Joe are overall good, responsible, ethical people. Their wartime and later relationships develop in a way that feels recognizably real. This is solid women's fiction from a historical perspective. The details of Parisian wartime life are seamlessly woven in (although there's a lot of roast chicken eaten). Their travels through France and meeting with other WW1 veterans at the War Memorial are engaging, although the secondary characters aren't developed. Joe's troubles with nightmares and other symptoms of Post-Combat Stress Disorder are convincing.

The second half of the book is almost a different story than the first. If the first half is good women's fiction, the second is mediocre spy story. Journal entries from an unnamed point of view character are introduced out of nowhere. These were 'as you know, Bob' descriptions of the narrator's actions instead of credible journal entries that reveal the character and motivations of their writer. I found them an unnecessary distraction from, rather than an augmentation to, the unfolding intrigue plot. The tension would have been greater if Joe and Sophie, along with the readers, had been left guessing for longer about the source of the suspicious events..

Don't judge this author's whole future body of work on this one review. The writing is sound and there's deft handling of the main characters. The structural issues of the second half are not uncommon with debut authors, and should have been pointed out by editors, as should the relative flatness of the secondary characters. I would look at this author's next book before crossing them off my reading list


**********SPOILER ALERT***********

Last Dance on the Starlight Pier

Last Dance on the Starlight Pier

By Sarah Bird

One of those rare books where the prologue shapes the reader's entire experience through to the final page.
 
Set largely in gaudy, glammed-up Galveston in the years following the great crash of 1929, the tale bounces between the shocking 1932 prologue and the summer of ‘29 when Evie Grace’s life first takes a turn away from vaudeville and deep poverty toward nursing school and respectability.
 
From there we follow her winding path forward and backward in time, up and down the social scale, from luxury hotel suites to dusty homeless camps. Flashbacks from her early life flesh out her current situation and preoccupations, and her brushes with the mobsters who run America's lucrative Prohibition-era liquor trade compete for sheer nail-biting tension with repeat encounters with her mother, Mamie, whose high-drama selfishness makes Joan Crawford look more like Mary Poppins than Mommy Dearest.
 
This book is a much bigger, more absorbing story than I was expecting, with ever-deepening knowledge of the Depression's economy, society, and politics as well as a blistering condemnation of the treatment of women in general and of anyone suspected of 'sexual deviancy' which had an elastic definition that could be stretched to fit almost any situation and used to bludgeon anyone with less power. 

The writing is sound, the Depression backdrop is laid in with sure and convincing strokes, and tough-as-nails Evie is easy to root for. So easy, in fact, I stayed up well past bedtime to follow her unfolding journey, rooting for her to find acceptance and happiness and the family life she yearns for.
 
 
Highly Recommended for anyone with an interest in American history, women's history, and love that doesn't fit the mainstream mold.

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 #womensfiction #StarlightPier #Depression #Galveston #DanceMarathon #Prohibition #politics #corruption #LastDance #LGBTQ #mobsters #nursing #Netgalley

Mrs. Claus and the Evil Elves

  

Mrs Claus and the Evil Elves 

By Liz Ireland 

3rd in the Mrs. Claus mystery series, this book is a delightful escape into a world of candy canes, reindeer, elves, and Christmassy crime. Tired of living a lie, April Claus invites her best pal up to Santaland for a holiday. Innocent Claire is at first unbelieving, then baffled, then enjoying the opportunities to shop and bake with the elder Mrs. Meanwhile, Santa’s preoccupied with a looming reindeer strike and some elves are embracing modern electronic toys at an alarming rate. 

When Santaland is hit by sabotage and other chicanery, terrorizing everyone from the mayor to the usually slow-moving snowmen, April dives into investigating with her customary zeal to protect the place—and the man—she’s come to love even more than her old life in Oregon. 

I enjoyed the previous book, Mrs. Claus and the Halloween Homicide. This one’s even better. The author has a way with visual imagery that elicits giggles and sometimes guffaws. The Christmas-theme trappings are delightful. The elves are characters familiar from any small-town (!) mystery: shop owners and bakers, manufacturers and officious public servants. The plot glides along like a well-steered sleigh from first crime to final confrontation, making it easy to relax into the charm and zaniness while trying to spot the clues and smell the red herrings amid the candy canes. 

Highly recommended. 

 #Netgalley #MrsClausMystery #Elves #Christmas #Mystery #cosy #CrimeFiction #reindeer #NorthPole #Santa 

 

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Last Call at the Nightingale

Good Jazz Age atmosphere, a lively and believable heroine, and a dead body outside the Nightingale club make this book easy to fall into. The writing is competent, the characters well sketched from the start, and trouble unfolds around dance-loving Vivian faster than her cranky neighbour can think up her next complaint.

Questions pile up about people Vivian likes as well as those she can’t stand. The dead man lurks, tainting Vivian’s desire to return to the Nightingale even though she’s sure of her welcome by the friendly bartender, Danny, and fascinated by the enigmatic owner, Hux. Then there's the debonair mystery man who showed up right around the time of the murder and seems willing to buy Viv's between-dance drinks forever. And a flapper socialite's frustrated boyfriend. And Viv's equally frustrated sister, who stays home, works hard, and can't understand how Viv can risk police raids and poisoning by bootleg booze just to go dancing night after night.

The narrator doesn’t give a lot of inflection early on, and you have to listen carefully to the words to know which character is talking. But after a few chapters she settles into the voices, especially Vivian’s, and lets the story unfold through emotion as well as the words.

There are a few jarring switches in Vivian’s audacity/bravery that threw me off a bit, but overall this is a competent, well-crafted, and absorbing Jazz Age mystery.

 

#Netgalley #mystery #JazzAge #BlindPig #Speakeasy

The Shadow of Memory

RELEASE DAY!!!!

The Shadow of Memory

by Connie Berry

4th in series

The title is foreboding, and the setting in part reflects that, with a Victorian sanatorium for the insane as a backdrop. The rest, however, is English cosy crime of a high order. There's the female amateur detective, Kate, an American with the obligatory professional police love interest. Many of the sprawling cast know almost everyone else, and the long ago crime stretches its tangled roots through not only the immediate village but out to several surrounding towns. All it needs is a bit more emphasis on police procedure to be a fitting entry in a Midsomer Murder episode.

The author has some sneaky humour in there, as the sanatorium's former name was Netherfield Hall. Yes, like that famous Jane Austen line, “Netherfield Hall is let at last.” Another nod is to cosy mystery royalty via the name of Brightwell, as in the famous author of the Mrs. Jeffries mysteries.

Although the (first) body is found early, there is a bit of meandering around and chatting to people before essential questions get asked and the detecting begins to gather momentum. Since the person who holds most of the early clues is actually Kate's roommate, the delay in getting down to brass tacks is quite noticeable although neatly papered over with mild British drama around the engagement of Kate to widowed policeman Tom over the objections of his mother.

That said, our amateur sleuth, an antiquarian dealer, is competent, intelligent, and apparently lacking any deep psychological traumas which is a nice change from many modern sleuths. Moreover, she is almost always thinking about the investigation and analyzing what she has learned about her unfolding collection of mysteries.

I use the word "collection" advisedly. Not only is there mystery around what happened to a family 50 years ago, in a strangely modernist house we will all find familiar from various Poirot TV episodes, but there’s also mystery around a possibly forged antiquity, and over who in the current generation could possibly have enough at stake in these decades-old crimes to go after a bunch of seniors who were teenagers at the time and didn’t think they knew anything of import about any of it. Thrown in are some sidelights on the incestuous nature of modern corporate and developer finances, and on how some family money and connections persist across generations.

The only real drawback I found is the sprawling cast: so many minor characters are coming and going in this mystery that they start to pile up and blur by the midpoint. There are Netherfield's board members and their forebears and current families, the original teen sleuths from the 1960s, their descendants/inlaws and survivors, other police and art experts, waitresses, care home attendants, and an old man whose only purpose is to offer a single pointer. Added to the series characters (this is the 4th) the sheer quantity of names gets a bit much to recall. It could have been streamlined by having fewer named characters offer more information each, or some info coming from sources other than fleeting conversations with characters who never appear again.

Overall, the book is an absorbing read, as winding as any hike through the history and hills of an English countryside, where each twist of the trail promises new revelations, rain may fall, and there's a cosy pub with a crackling fire at the end of it all.

#Netgalley #RandomHouse #cosymystery #TraditionalMystery #art #ArtHistory #ArtForgery #InsaneAsylum #TeenSleuths #1960s #castofthousands #EnglishVillage #ConnieBerry #EmilyBrightwell #NetherfieldHall #Poirot

Three Reasons for a DNF

 As regular visitors know, I mainly review from traditional publishers. But today I'm turning over the page to a reviewer who only handles independent authors. Pamela Willson of The Picky Bookworm has some thoughts to share on what makes her not want to finish a book.

 

 3 Reasons for a DNF

Not finishing a book, for me, is like getting to the tootsie inside a tootsie pop, then throwing it away. Doesn’t seem the point. I also feel guilty when I don’t finish a book. Until a while back, when a librarian told me something that has stuck with me:.

Life is too short to read a book you’re not completely interested in.

Once she told me that, I felt so much better about letting go of the guilt, and only sticking with those books I absolutely love.  Here are 3 reasons why I’ll quit.

Reason to DNF #1: Obvious lack of research

When it’s obvious the author has done little to no research about the topic in the book, I get bored and frustrated REALLY quickly. One book I started a couple years ago was supposedly set during the time after Jesus’ ascension, but it felt like either the author wasn’t a Christian and was just making stuff up, or just didn’t care. Either way, I made it through about 25 pages before I gave up.

When it’s obvious, however, that an author has researched well, and is approaching the subject matter in a sensitive and thought-provoking way, I am all about that. Two examples of this would be:

HIDDEN MAGIC by Elana McDougall: I absolutely adore Elena. Her books created some really diverse characters in a fantasy setting, and her story telling is amazing. I In this book, there’s an abusive situation. She had obviously done her research, because not only did the character give examples, but it was handled sensitively enough that a reader could see their own life, and maybe find the strength to leave a dangerous situation. I really applaud Elana for her handling of this subject.

THE GOOD SISTER by Sally Hepworth: I don’t know Sally personally, like I do Elana, but I absolutely loved this book! One of the characters is autistic, and while it’s never stated outright that this is the case, Sally provides enough examples of behaviors or mannerisms, that it would be easy for someone who isn’t autistic to understand what’s going on. What I really like is that through her fiction, I learned more about what being autistic means, and if I’m ever in a situation where an autistic person gets overwhelmed, I can recognize it and use tools from Sally’s story to help.

Reason to DNF #2: Lack of Emotional response

I want to care about the characters. I want them to feel real, and I want to either root for them to win, or root for them to die. I don’t like feeling mediocre about a book. A good example where I really cared was Meg in Fear and Fury. I loved her. She was snarky and rude, but despite her negative quirks, I rooted for her during the whole book. I will typically give myself about 30% of a book, to allow for evolution of a character, or for me to start caring, before I will give up. If I don’t care by then, chances are I won’t ever.

THE 13^th ZODIAC by Lacey Krauch: Lacey has worked really hard to make sure her readers are carried on a wave of emotion throughout her entire series. Whether we are rooting for the good guys, or wishing the bad down an elevator shaft, her books are a roller coaster of emotion. I love that.

DESTINY & OTHER DILEMMAS by Caroline Fleur: Caroline created Brooke, a mom whose son has food allergies. Brooke is such an amazingly relatable character that I rooted for her happiness, no matter what she was going through.

BETWEEN THE BIRCHES by Katie Roberson: I proofread Katie’s book, and DM’d her at one point to tell her that I had to back up 5 pages, because I forgot what I was doing. She created such an immersive story. I laughed, I cried, and I cheered. 

 I could probably list about 100 books here that gave me all the feels, but I’ll stick with these.

Reason to DNF #3: Really, REALLY bad editing

I’m a book editor and proofreader, and most times I can overlook small issues. I’ve read books in the past that had good premises, but whoever edited them just did a godawful job. One book, true story, used “bought” instead of “brought” throughout the whole book. Props for consistency, but minus a million points for not realizing it was the wrong word.  While I finished the first book, I couldn’t bring myself to read any of the others in the series.

It’s not all bad news

Before you get upset about not having the money for a professional editor, let me tell you something. Editors who also review books can TELL when you’ve done your best. We KNOW that not many people have the budget for expensive services. That’s why we can overlook many issues.

We can also tell when someone has thrown together and published their first draft.

Authors work hard on their stories. I get that. I’m friends with many authors on Twitter and love reading about their journeys. I want indie authors to keep writing. The world needs your stories. I hope you can take these words and use them as encouragement to make your story the best it can be. I promise, that people like me will always be around to shout about them from the rooftops.

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