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