But are they Gatsby? 2 YA protags comped to classics

Some of the most famous books in English literature are about men who aren’t who they appear to be. 

I'm thinking specifically of Jay Gatsby and BratFarrar, although The Talented Mr. Ripley is better known than Brat because a) he's American and b) the movie. 

Brat - a corruption of 'Bartholomew' or 'Bart' - was the protagonist and title character of British crime queen Josephine Tey's 1949 novel of domestic suspense: either the long-lost heir or the most cunning imposter the English reading public of the time could imagine.  

Brat got a UK airing back in the 1980s but it didn't see a lot of play in North America. (now available on Youtube)

 

Gatsby, well, is there anyone who doesn't know The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald?

John Irving, in his foreword to one of the newer editions of The Great Gatsby, wrote:

Jay Gatsby turned to crime, made his fortune, and tried in vain to escape his past and beat his own fate. The odds were always against him, and he failed and died trying.

The last sentence of the book is its most famous: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." Jay tried mightily to beat on, to fight the current, to rewrite his past but in the end could not overcome it.

 

The two books I’m contemplating today have characters equally compelling but they’re not men. They’re teen boys. Specifically, the lead characters in two young adult books from the past decade: Gary D Schmidt’s ORBITING JUPITER and Lisa McMann’s DEAD TO YOU.

While the adult novels examined the men’s lives and loves against the backdrop of their respective entitled spheres as seen through the eyes of a relative outsider, the YA novels excavate the inner and outer chaos of boys brought up in modern poverty and abuse. Both boys stumble through a world they don’t belong in, a picture-perfect Middle America where everyone goes to church and supports their local high school teams. 

The moral ambiguity is the common element. That, and the yearning for what they can never have. Gatsby wants Daisy. Joseph wants Jupiter. Brat and Ethan want to finally belong: to have a home and a family.

In the Schmidt book, cool-as-nails Joseph, like Jay Gatsby, is seen through the worshipful but wary eyes of foster-brother Jackson. Jackson records, defends, tries to puzzle out Joseph’s inner drive, while the adults around him speak ominously of Joseph’s dangerous past and uncertain future. Eventually Jackson learns Joseph is bending all his will to finding a girl separated from him by her cruel parents (okay, that part’s maybe more overtly Romeo & Juliet than Great Gatsby; but you may recall Daisy’s parents were reported to be similarly unimpressed when their golden girl looked smitten with an impoverished lieutenant from an unknown family). But in both stories the uncaring greed of another, more powerful male threatens all the new stability Joseph is building, and ultimately leads to ruin.

In the McMann book, streetwise Ethan, like Josephine Tey’s iconic wanderer Brat Farrar, returns home after a long absence and is both welcomed and constrained by the family he vanished from all those years before. His younger brother distrusts and resents him. His parents struggle to keep the peace and get his education back on track. He’s only fully accepted by the younger sister who has no memory of him to continually compare his present self against. But years of abusive environments have left their mark, and he can’t relax fully into the idyllic family setting. He’s always waiting for an attack, and soon enough, someone obliges.

 

What makes all these books tragedies is not only that nobody gets what they want, but that their trying leaves such destruction in its wake.

If the thought of dipping into the classics makes you yawn, dip instead into the modern world of YA lit in these two books. You'll leave with a deeper insight into the complex, hopeful, despairing worlds of modern boys. 

 

#Gatsby #JosephineTey #BratFarrar #OrbitingJupiter #DeadToYou #YA #

When Powerful Women take to corporate life: VenCo by Cherie Dimaline

You might expect a speculative feminist novel to end with women entering the board room triumphantly. Always willing to confound expectations, this Governor General's Award author starts her ninth book that way. 

Soon we learn that the whole corporation is organized on feminist principles, with a leadership circle rather than a hierarchy. And then it gets into witchcraft. The mission is to find the seventh witch in a prophesied coven before time runs out. We don’t know yet what catastrophe she and her six compatriots are supposed to avert but the sixth witch is now found and clock is definitely ticking.

For a while this book feels and reads like a well written, gently paced, speculative fiction novel featuring the well and thoroughly covered trope of the teenage heroine hunted by an ancient evil. And yet…

It takes a while for the differences to come to the fore. In the traditional hero's journey, the protagonist is forced out of their comfort zone and pushed to take up the quest. In this feminist re-visioning, the heroine's journey, not only are the older witches is part of a circle that is collaborative rather than hierarchical, but they are mutually respectful. At each stage of the increasingly complex situation, they discuss facts and implications, giving each other space. The female characters don’t play into the familiar master and apprentice dynamics. 

 

Of course there's a Big Bad - possibly the last of a centuries-old clan of witch-hunters with mesmeric powers. He's able to spy on the witches through their dreams, and knows when the seventh witch is in their sights.

This author has a firm grasp of language: Its texture, shapes, and flow, like a braided stream, cross and re-cross, forming a tale that is partly well paced contemporary paranormal fantasy, and partly the indigenous underpinnings we have come to expect in a Dimaline novel. Beyond that, the characters bring into harsh light the long-standing western capitalist and religious war on women, from the Reformation-era witch burnings to Salem and beyond in America. Themes of dispossession and identity and belonging breathe from these pages. 

 

Astute readers might note that the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone, although human figures forming VenCo's leadership circle, are also archetypes and therefore not fully fleshed out humans with personal histories brought to the fore.

On a purely craft of writing level, I appreciate the ebb and flow of tension. Things get tense and then potentially dangerous, and then things get calmer again and then things get really relaxed and friendly and then Bingo! A quick reminder of danger. It’s all interesting, and the fluidity of the tension is an added piece of my enjoyment.

 

Thanks to #NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity

 

 VenCo by Cherie Dimaline

 

ISBN: 9780063054899
ISBN 10: 0063054892
Imprint: William Morrow
On Sale: February 7, 2023

 

#Indigenous #Witchcraft #Persecution #Salem #Fantasy #Action #Adventure #MagicalRealism #Horror #FairyTales  #FolkTales #Legends #Mythology #OwnVoices #reviewer #bookreview

Gigi Pandian's THE RAVEN THIEF

The Raven Thief

A Secret Staircase Mystery (Book 2)

Written by Gigi Pandian

Narrated by Soneela Nankani

What a fascinating concept for a crime novel: an author whose first book (about possibly shape-shifting into a raven to murder his wife) is accused of breaking into his ex-wife's basement to steal the typewriter he wrote it on. You might wonder whether he's superstitious or just wreaking petty vengeance on his newly ex wife for gutting his Poe-inspired old writing office and remodeling it into a much more fun space. Eventually you'll find out more about the typewriter, the author, the novel, and the book's title. But first....

There's a LOT of description of the remodeled space, and a great many complex setting details from both this remodel and the one where our protagonist lives: secret bookcase doors and rocking-horse door unlocking mechanisms, false-bottomed trunks etc. In print it would be easy enough to flip back over the descriptors to get them clear in your mind, but with audio it's harder to keep track of which knickknack hides or opens or unlocks or lights up what structural element. A sketch map would help. Maybe there will be one in the print version (this review is based on an audiobook ARC via #NetGalley).

There's also a fair bit of discussion in early chapters about past events and the overarching series mystery, which means a lot of references to characters who might have featured earlier in the series. Readers have a lot of names to remember and no way to tell how many of them will be important to the current story. So a cast list would help, especially if it was divided into 'current book' and 'series characters'. Or start with the first in the series, Under Lock & Skeleton Key (although, to be honest, that one spends the first 45 minutes or so of the audiobook largely in setup for Tempest's family home and her recent past that, frankly, sounds a lot more exciting than the early events of that book).

Once you get past all that, there is gradual progress on one of the crimes, and a lot of meandering about Tempest's past that may or may not impact her future. It all robs the story of momentum and although the author set up many Easter Eggs referencing classic crime fiction, they weren't enough to keep me caring who had been done wrong by whom, much less why.

The narrator's voice is pleasant to listen to, with enough emotional infection to enhance the text without overwhelming it. There's not a lot of difference between the protagonist's dialogue and the other characters' words, but enough to tell you it's a different character speaking. The text doesn't give the narrator a lot of emotional subtext to amply, sadly, but if what you enjoy about audiobooks is a human voice murmuring in the background while you're doing other things, this one will work as well as any other.

#Netgalley #RavenThief #SecretStaircase #trapdoor #cosymystery

WW2's Scanty Yule in The Mitford Secret

 The Mitford Secret

written by Jessica Fellowes

Narrated by Rachel Atkins

If you enjoyed previous books in this series, you'll likely welcome the 6th & final installment of this mystery series that takes place during WW2, when former nurserymaid Louisa attends a family Christmas at Chatsworth, acclaimed country seat of the Dukes of Devonshire. 

Many of the eternally fascinating Mitford family are in attendance: the parents and several of the daughters that The Times journalist Ben Macintyre famously described as "Diana the Fascist, Jessica the Communist, Unity the Hitler-lover; Nancy the Novelist; Deborah the Duchess and Pamela the unobtrusive poultry connoisseur".^[2]  Unity's already brain-damaged but still an ardent Hitler supporter. Diana's in prison for her Fascist activities (probably also, in the minds of Britain's War Service, to serve as a potential check on her husband Oswald Mosley's more seditious speeches and writings). Nancy's at odds with her husband, who hasn't bothered to communicate with her in quite some time, and Debo's philandering husband, Andrew Cavendish, is off on war duty somewhere, as is his older brother, the current heir to the dukedom. The Mitford parents are emotionally withdrawn from the family and each other. It's hardly the recipe for a successful house party even before the arrival of the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire adds a formal chill to every meal.

And then there's the wild woman who turns up on a stormy night claiming to be a psychic medium, leading them through the unheated ancestral pile to a cupboard containing a bloodstained maid's cap.

There are house party games, rationing-constrained festive meals, shopping for small gifts in the village, and the handsome Air Force officer from the nearby base, ingratiating himself with the Chatsworth party. He's inordinately nice to disabled Unity even while unhappily married Nancy eyes his obvious sex appeal and vies for his attention. Soon Louisa figures out the medium is a former employee of the great house, determined to discover the truth behind the long-ago disappearance of her best friend on staff: the maid who once wore that cap. 

Oh yes, and then there's a murder that some of the family seem determined to believe was natural causes.

 "Debo" may be the putative hostess for this decidedly non-festive house party, but she's not yet the duchess nor even in line for the title (her husband's older brother isn't killed until quite late in the war). Indeed, one of the more fascinating parts of the book to me was watching her nascent steps toward becoming the woman now widely counted as saving Chatsworth by turning it into a productive, thriving estate and tourist attraction with a dedicated, largely local staff. The duke, it must be said, seems to have followed in the footsteps of his ancestors in the matters of horse-racing, spending lavishly, and continuous infidelities, all proclivities that play into the mystery of the missing maid.

Here, for those interested, are links about Debo

Basic biographical details   https://www.historyonthenet.com/deborah-mitford-the-duchess

The books she wrote  https://www.librarything.com/author/devonshireduchessof

The tiaras she wore  https://royalwatcherblog.com/2016/09/24/the-tiaras-of-debo-duchess-of-devonshire/

I enjoy this era of history both in fiction and in non-fiction. And aristocrats behaving badly is a rich vein of misdeeds that many biographers and almost as many crime writers successfully mine.

Sadly, I didn't find this one particularly convincing, in part because SPOILER! RUN YOUR CURSOR OVER TO SEE nobody would have made much fuss of a duke siring a bastard child, much less cover it up for decades. There are endless anecdotes in circulation still about the infidelities of pre-birth control aristocrats, and well understood protocols for how the children ought to be provided for. WW

When the central reason for a historical crime doesn't hold up to scrutiny, none of the subsequent coverup holds up either.

Also, other characters are inconsistent, in one scene being very helpful to Louisa beyond the scope of any relationship or job requirement (even the police inspector) and then, for no apparent reason, suddenly getting angry and refusing further cooperation with her. Also too many of these noble and individually famous people simply spilled their innermost thoughts and secrets to the former nursemaid with the weakest of motives other than allowing the author to provide the reader with context and clues in the most expeditious manner possible. As a lifelong reader of British mystery I found it lazy plotting. The writing doesn't enchant me either. We're told too often what Louisa (or another character) is feeling, rather than seeing her react to situations, so it all comes off as quite emotionally flat no matter how exciting the situation should be. The plot is driving the characters like so many bumper cars rather than events arising more organically from the characters' interactions and discoveries.

The audiobook narrator added nothing to the tale's enjoyment either. Louisa's accent meandered quite a bit from chapter to chapter, and every scene involving Lousia's wide-eyed daughter, regardless of which characters were speaking, was steeped in sentimental cooing tones that brought to mind movie-house Victorian spinsters in chintz-covered parlours. That said, the text didn't give her much help, as many chapters simply meandered to a stop without providing any compelling emotional subtext to pull us forward. (see 'quite emotionally flat' above')

The Mitford Secret is out in audiobook as of January 17, 2023

I'm giving it 3 stars out of 5 for Debo, and for the convincing backdrop of an impoverished great house brought even lower by wartime rationing.

Thanks #NetGalley for the audiobook ARC

#MitfordMystery #MitfordSecret #WW2 #HistoricalCrime #OswaldMosley #DianaMitfordMosley #NancyMitford #Chatsworth #DuchessOfDevonshire #audiobook #WorldWar2

Like jewels and adventure in high society? Check out The Maddie Hatter Adventures:

Deadly Diamond

Gilded Gauge

Timely Taffeta

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