The Great Brain Is Back by John D. Fitzgerald

I loved the Great Brain books when I was a kid, but I'd never read this one. It was published posthumously in 1995. It's another of my library sale finds.

The books are each a series of short stories about J.D., his older brother Tom, and their family. Tom is the one known as the great brain, and as J.D. points out, he also has a money-loving heart. Every time Tom comes up with another idea to make money, it seems J.D. ends up broke--but never bored.

When I was a kid, I thought Tom's swindling was hilarious. As an adult, I'm a lot less amused. Tom's kind of a jerk. I actually disliked the first story, where Tom orders a bunch of soap to resell and talks J.D. into selling it and paying Tom for the privilege. But the later stories are a lot better. Tom helps figure out the actual events when a Paiute Indian is accused of stealing a rifle, and he engineers the downfall of a man running a dogfighting ring. Best of all, in the last chapter Tom gets his comeuppance from an unexpected source.

The stories are mostly funny, but they're also interesting since they're set in the last year of the 19th century. Fitzgerald wrote the books based on his own childhood memories. The writing is simple but clear, and J.D. is a nice guy even if he is a little too willing to let Tom walk all over him.

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The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti

The Good Thief is a great, shocking adventure that's written like a fairy tale, and is as unsettling as any stories from the brothers Grimm. Hannah Tinti's style is smooth and light, deceptively so: the reader is drawn into her unsettling world and can't stop reading.

Ren is an orphan in Colonial New England. He has, mysteriously, only one hand, as the other has been taken off and the wound stitched carefully. He knows his name by the cloth that was with him when he was pushed through the monks' gate at the monastery, a bit of cloth that had embroidered on it three letters: R E N.

In his twelfth year, a stranger, Benjamin Nab, comes to the monastery looking for his brother, and when he finds Ren, with his one hand, the stranger tells the monks a fantastic story about Indian kidnappings and Ren's doomed mother chopping off his hand to keep him from being taken. The monks send the boy away with Nab, who soon reveals that he is a liar and a grave robber.

The characters and city settings of this fascinating tale are very much, as others have said, in the style of Dickens, as is the moral dilemma of Ren, the good boy who must become a thief to survive.

Ren must also endure many horrors, and meet many wonderful and loathesome characters, from a chimney climbing dwarf to the deaf and loving Mrs. Sand, to the dentists who buy dead people's teeth--what amazing adventures he will have before the satisfying ending.

The Good Thief is a fine and vivid three-hundred page fairy tale that's considered young adult reading--I suppose young people, now used to vampire love and lust, will find grave-robbing light reading. I think it's a great, bloody, robust book for grownups, too.

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The Crowfield Curse by Pat Walsh

This is one of the exceptions I've made when it comes to buying hardbacks. Look at that cover! It's gorgeous. I had to have the book, not just because I'd heard it was good.

And it is good, very much so. It's set in the 14th century in a humble monastery. Fourteen-year-old Will is a servant at the monastery--his family died in a fire over a year ago and he had nowhere else to go--and at the beginning of the book, he discovers a hob caught in an animal trap. He rescues the hob and takes him to one of the monks to get his broken leg set. Meanwhile, a strange visitor and his even stranger servant arrive at the monastery, searching for something. And Will has overheard rumors that an angel died on the monastery grounds a hundred years before.

Pat Walsh describes the winter weather in the book so effectively that I kept feeling cold while I was reading, no matter how warm the room I was in. While parts of the plot (like Will finding the hob coincidentally just before the stranger arrives, Will happening to overhear pertinent information) are a little too coincidental, I didn't notice while I was reading. The plot is fascinating, Will is a likable character with a difficult past and uncertain future, and the setting is wonderful. I liked that the details of the monastery are only shown incidental to Will's own activities. It gave it a more realistic tone and didn't make me think I was reading a book for a history class.

The ending sets up the possibility of a sequel. I hope it's as good as this book, and that it has such a wonderful cover.

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The Year of the Hangman by Gary Blackwood

I absolutely loved Gary Blackwood's Shakespeare Stealer trilogy. It was so brilliant, in fact, that I dug around online until I found a similar book by Blackwood, The Year of the Hangman. It's set during the American Revolution. If anyone could make me interested in this otherwise yawn-inducing, elementary-school-social-studies-ruined-it-for-me slice of history, I figured it would be Blackwood.

Yeah. Well. I figured wrong. The book is actually an alternate history, in which George Washington was captured by the British and the revolution fizzled. That ought to be interesting. Unfortunately, the main character is fifteen-year-old Creighton Brown, a British subject sent to the colonies against his will, and he's an unlikable little shit. Since he spends the entire first half of the book being arrogant, whiny, offensive, and rude, I couldn't warm up to him even after he started remembering to thank people for saving his life.

Quite apart from the main character, the story itself feels unfocused. Even after Creighton sees the error of his ways and begins to sympathize with the poor oppressed Americans, he doesn't really have a purpose. He helps Benjamin Franklin with his printing press, he meets Benedict Arnold, he hears rumors of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, but he doesn't have anything much to do. He's repeatedly rescued from peril by other characters. I can only conclude that he's in the story so that he can observe it for us.

The writing is okay, but it's not nearly at the level I expected. There's a lot of telling-not-showing dropped in here and there, especially in the first half of the book. For instance: this passage from page 82, which comes out of nowhere and is apropos of nothing: "Creighton's mother was fond of telling anyone who would listen that she had always been good to her son, but what she called kindness was really indulgence. She had given him everything he wanted and withheld the one thing he really needed--her affection." If this had been Creighton musing on his past in a moment of reflection, I could have swallowed it a little easier, but it's not. Creighton's still in full-on asshole mode at this point. That paragraph is the author telling us something that he couldn't be bothered to show instead.

I'd be remiss also if I didn't point out the whiteness of the book. Slavery is only mentioned in passing, no one in the story keeps slaves, Creighton is afraid of savage Indians but doesn't see any, no one drops even a hint of a racial slur, and there are no characters in the story who aren't white (presumably--no one's skin color is described). It's as though people of color don't really exist in this version of history.

I was disappointed in this one. At least The Shakespeare Stealer and its sequels are worth reading.

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Petronella Saves Nearly Everyone by Dene Low

It's 1903 and Petronella's Uncle Augustus has just accidentally swallowed a large beetle. Apparently as a result, he's taken to eating nothing but insects--and spiders, and slugs, and earthworms. Petronella is concerned for her uncle, and just as worried about how people will react. Eating bugs is simply not done. But during her coming-out party, any scandal Uncle Augustus may have incited is eclipsed by the kidnapping of Generalissimo Alejandro Reyes-Cardoza of Panama and Dame Carruthers. The only clue is a ransom note with a rare butterfly pinned to it.

The story is cute and very slight, with not a whole lot of action and essentially no tension. It's amusing, though, and peopled with eccentric characters. It's also an extremely fast read. Every time I lost interest and was tempted to put the book down and wander off, I would remind myself how fast a read it is. If it wasn't such a chilly day--which means I've spent a few hours wrapped up warmly and drinking tea--I don't know that I would have been interested enough to finish the book.

Still, there's nothing about it that I disliked. Younger kids would probably find it a lot of fun.

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Stone Spring by Stephen Baxter

Stephen Baxter, imho, is the science fiction master of big-and-little, and a master of vivid world-building. His characters are mostly interesting, sometimes fascinating, and his plots are wonderful--'Riding...superstrings to the edge of the Universe!' Cities less than a centimeter tall, in the heart of burned-out suns! Life on Titan!

I'm used to grabbing everything he writes (and he writes quickly, good juicy long books that often turn into a series), so when he came out with Stone Spring, Book 1 of 3 about England's Mesolithic Period (~10,000 B.C.), I immediately ordered it from England, since it's not yet available in the U.S.

I should have saved myself the trouble.

The premise of Stone Spring is simple: global warming is melting the northern ice, which results in tsunamis inundating England's old coastlines. A former slave from Jericho (where, according to the Bible, there was a battle that brought Jericho's walls down), who knows how to build bricks, builds a big wall to keep out floodwaters.

End of story. Big deal

I got to page 200 and quit. The plot was snoringly easy to figure out, and I had 300 pages to go. I didn't like any of the characters, who mostly grunted, stank of fish, and raped or got raped. Let them all drown, I thought. Who cares?

I'm not going to buy Books two and three unless the reviews say that Baxter drops aliens out of the sky or sends a giant comet full of viruses down onto his little group of boring savages. Maybe I'll just find another Killer B in the science fiction section...(so far, I include Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, Baxter and David Brin...)

Or I'll leap to the C's.

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Gary Blackwood's Shakespeare Stealer trilogy

When I was a kid, I hated books set in historical times. They were so obviously history lessons with a story grafted on, and the story was usually pretty corny or unbelievable too.

Not so Gary Blackwood's trilogy about Widge, the orphan who ends up working for William Shakespeare's acting company. This is no history lesson--although the books are so full of interesting details that I probably learned a lot without realizing it--and they are excellent stories.

In the first book, The Shakespeare Stealer, Widge is apprenticed to Dr. Bright, who teaches him a form of shorthand he calls charactery. Dr. Bright wants Widge to copy sermons from neighboring churches so that he, Dr. Bright, can pass them off as his own. But then a mysterious man who calls himself Falconer offers Dr. Bright an astounding amount of money for Widge. Widge is dragged from his home in Yorkshire to London, where is told to copy Shakespeare's new play Hamlet. Or else.

It's a rolicking adventure, tightly plotted and fast-paced. The two sequels, Shakespeare's Scribe and Shakespeare's Spy, are just as good. In Shakespeare's Scribe, Widge accompanies Shakespeare's acting troupe as they tour outside of London during the height of the summer plague season. In Shakespeare's Spy, someone is stealing from the company and Widge ends up investigating.

Widge is a thoroughly likable character. He lives by his wits but he isn't snarky or spunky or sly (kind of a nice change from so many YA books). He's kind to people because he likes them; he worries when he thinks he's let someone down. He's also struggling with his own journey in life: who he is, who his parents were, what he wants from his future. While the books are funny and adventurous, they realities of life in Elizabethan times give them extra depth. Some of Widge's friends die; others are forced by circumstances to leave the theater or even the country.

Blackwood is such an assured storyteller that nothing seems contrived or false. He weaves historical details into the stories deftly, and makes us care about even minor characters. The third book's ending is a little drawn out, but I didn't mind since Blackwood was tying up loose ends.

The books are full of action--if I tried to list the subplots to even one book, this review would be twice as long--and extremely readable. It looks like the trilogy is available in one volume, incidentally. I've linked to it below. And I'm now off to see what else Gary Blackwood has written.

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The Blood of Flowers by Anita Amirrezvani

The author of The Blood of Flowers was given an Iranian rug by her father when she was fourteen, and she began imagining what life might have been like for those who made it. The result is a fascinating novel about early 17th century Persia. The book took nine years to write. During that time, the author says in her notes, "I felt like Ali Baba in The Arabian Nights, who utters the magic words 'Open, sesame!' to reveal a cave illuminated by gold and precious gems."

The heroine of the novel is deliberately unnamed to "honor the anonymous artisans of Iran." She is a village girl of fourteen when the story opens, a nimble and creative rug-maker. Her indulgent parents adore her, but when her father suddenly dies, she and her mother are forced to travel to a great city where their only male relative lives, for in this male-dominated society women are possessions, owned and hidden away by men, and women without the protection of men are quickly reduced to begging or prostitution.

The girl's uncle is a wealthy master rug maker who designs rugs for the Shah's court. Soon after his brother's widow and her daughter are taken into his household, he discovers the girl's talent in rug making and design and allows her to learn his secrets.

The world of ancient Persia is beautifully described in this book. I savored the descriptions of the dazzling minarets, the markets where rugs and spices were sold, the lovely clothing worn by women in their secret courtyards.

Because she has no money for a dowry, the girl is forced by her family into a marriage contract still used in modern Iran today, a renewable three-month contract for a fee. Her hopes for a permanent marriage must be given up for money to support her and her mother.

The story of her misfortunes and fortunes is accompanied by lovely, magical tales of old Persia, and is a fascinating and richly detailed novel about an exotic and fascinating world.

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A Cup of Tea by Amy Ephron

A Cup of Tea by Amy Ephron, Ballantine Books, 2005

May This Reviewer suggest peppermint tea? It's supposed to aid in digestion, and this book will make you sick. It made me sick, but I'm rather delicate about appallingly bad grammar and astonishingly inept editing.

I plodded my way through this awful Ballantine book, which is part of HarperCollins (I will never forgive them! I respected them!) for ONE REASON: I was FORCED to read A Cup of Tea for a book club that meets next week.

The best thing about this book was its length: one hundred and forty eight pages was all I could have endured.

Here's a random example of both her writing and of the high-school-level of editing. This is from page 30 and is exactly reproduced:

"Eleanor walked over and bought herself a pretzel. She took a bite, savoring the taste of the salt on the warm dough. Down the street, a young boy hawking newspapers screamed out in an adolescent voice, 'U.S. breaks diplomatic relations with Germany! Uncle Sam supports'-- his voice went up on this--'European allies.' And Eleanor was left to wonder whether he, too, would be sent to war next year. And whether three squares and the regimen wouldn't be good for him or, at least, only as hard as this."

Oh, and on another page, Eleanor (who was very hungry, being poor) was offered a tea cake and the author had her taking "a ravenous bite." How can--am I being picky?--how can one bite be "ravenous?" Maybe two or three bites--let me think:

If I were "ravenous," and were offered a teacake, I suspect I would eat it all at once--just chuck it in and swallow.

But how can a single bite--

I digress.

The plot, which is the only competent component of this "novel," is lifted from a short story that was written, presumably much more cleverly, by Katherine Mansfield back in the twenties.

And here's the plot: a rich woman has just bought on a whim a lovely box and a letter opener. She walks out of the antique shop and sees a lovely, thin woman wearing a gray sweater. She asks the woman, who looks cold, if she's all right, and the woman says, "Could I have money for a cup of tea?" The rich woman impulsively and unwisely takes the poor woman home in her chauffeured car, and the poor woman is immediately attracted to the rich woman's fiance. Oh, dear.

For the reader’s amusement, I'll offer one more gagworthy sample of her prose, which clanks in my head so much that I'm surprised I can write a straight sentence. Here's the rich woman talking about war with her father:

"'Will you think I'm terrible,' asked Rosemary petulantly, 'if I tell you that I'm sick of Archduke Ferdinand?'

"Her father chided her softly. 'Are you going to tell me that you're sick of the Archduchess Sophia, too?' he asked. He was teasing but trying to elicit a more human response, for although history would forget this, the Archduchess was killed alongside her husband and whatever Rosemary's mood, she had always been a defender of women.

"'No,' she answered soberly, 'but their legacy lives after them. I don't want to hear about Bismarck or how they feel in France.'"

Enough--sorry. (And is it so obvious that the author did some Wiki research before penning this prose and didn't want to waste a single juicy tidbit?)

I just did my own Wiki research and found out that Amy Ephron is one of the famous Ephron screenwriters—she worked on A Little Princess, Born on the Fourth of July, and Out of Africa.

I'm stunned. I don't know what to say. That's heavy hitting--Out of Africa. A Little Princess.

No wonder she got in with HarperCollins.

Just go make yourself some tea. Put about six Oreos on a little plate, and eat them ravenously, bite by bite.

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Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

A wench in 1840s America was a "colored woman of any age; a negress or mulatress, especially one in service." Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez is the powerful story of four wenches, all of them slaves and mistresses of their southern white masters.

It's inevitable that Wench will be compared to the currently popular book club favorite, The Help by Kathryn Stockett, about black maids in Mississippi during the '60s civil rights era: The Help and Wench, although their stories take place about 100 years apart, are both vivid accounts of critical times in the lives of African Americans.

Having carefully read and enjoyed both books, I thought Wench was the more skillfully written of the two, perhaps because at times Stockett, I felt, pushed her plot a bit to make a point, making some scenes rather unbelievable.

Perkins-Valdez chose as her setting a real place, Tawawa House, an Ohio resort that catered to white men who brought their slave mistresses for summer retreats. That Ohio was a free state made the location compelling for the novel's location, and even more compelling was the talk of abolition, and the talk of war...

The book centers on four vividly realized characters: Lizzie, Reenie, and Sweet, who have been summer friends for many years; and Mawu, a new arrival who is strong and brave and wanting to run away.

The book jacket says "...they are bearing witness to the end of an era." This book is important reading, and it's as haunting as Gone with the Wind, Roots, and--yes, The Help.

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Skunk Cat received this book from the publisher for review.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

The Help pulled me in after chapter one, and I kept reading till almost midnight the first day...

The book takes place in the early sixties, at the beginning of the civil rights movement in Jackson, Mississippi, where black maids work for less than minimum wage and aren't allowed to use the family bathrooms.

The author focuses on three memorable women: Minnie, a wonderful cook, often gets fired for "being sassy" to her employers; Aibillen, another maid, is raising her seventeenth white child; and Skeeter is a recent college graduate and Junior League member whose mother is bent on her marrying well.

When the three women take on a clandestine and dangerous project, it changes all their lives.

The author, Kathryn Stockett, a Jackson native who grew up with a maid in her family, has a good ear for the voices of her characters, two of whom speak in the dialect of the time. She is particularly clever at pacing and dialogue, and her plot is beautifully planned and executed. Some of the plot points feel a bit contrived or pushed, and at times a little unbelievable, but the story is powerful and the characters fascinating.

This is a winner for book clubs. It's shocking and funny and hard to put down.

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Moloka'i by Alan Brennert

From the first leg lesion in 1891 to kidney failure in 1970, Moloka'i offers the reader a morbidly fascinating if plodding account of a single wretched life spent in a leprosy colony.

Gentle Reader, allow me to spare you a day of bleak reading by summarizing the plot:

Little Rachel is a simple child of Hawaii, and her mother and father dote on her, but when she gets a rose-colored sore on her leg she gets shipped off to the Hawaiian leprosy colony in Moloka'i, where she is reared by nervous Catholic nuns who tend to throw up after changing bandages.

Rachel gets to live a long, long life, which means the book has almost 400 pages.

Maybe it didn't help that we're housebound right now--the roads are slick with ice, we only have two hotdogs and ten boxes of diet hot chocolate and one can of tomato soup left in the pantry, because we're wearily dieting this month--but this book made me so depressed that when Kate came down (still in her pajamas at two in the afternoon) to get some hot tea I confessed I felt (illogically) like a member of the Donner Party, and her eyes grew big and she jumped back! And I said, "Oh, I only mean I have cabin fever and I hate winter and there's nothing to eat," and she said, nervously I thought, "Well, there's the cat," and pointed out old Vincent, eating kibble from his little dish...

"I loathe leprosy symptoms! I hate winter!" I said, and thought how I should put on my (ripped) Russian coat and walk out into the ten-degree bleak afternoon, but Rachel and her lesions would just follow me. I can't shake her loose.

I promised a sort-of plot, so here it is, a Cliff's Notes version: Rachel goes to the infamous leper colony in 1891 and remains there until in the early 1950s the sulfa treatment that ultimately contains and weakens what is now known as Hansen's Disease cures her enough to leave at last. She's met and married a nice man who has leprosy of the eye, poor Godforsaken fellow, and they've had a child who got (naturally) taken away from them the day she was born.

Rachel sees the following innovations come to their colony over the years: moving pictures, aeroplanes, gramophones, electricity. She gets to experience World War I, the Depression, Pearl Harbor, the invention of the Hula dance, a great tsunami, and the eventual arrest of her disease via sulfa drugs.

She gets sprung from the island when she's cured in chapter 958, rides in an aeroplane, and finds her daughter.

The End.

Please: spare yourself.

I'm sorry if this review is poorly written. Brennert's dull, lifeless prose style is still clanging in my head.

I'm now going downstairs to make more hot chocolate and get a nice murder mystery to read.

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Sabre, the Horse from the Sea by Kathleen Herald

I'm at 20,500 words on my NaNoWriMo novel, just barely ahead of where I should be. Therefore, I offer you a review of another book that I've read many times.

My copy of Kathleen Herald's Sabre, the Horse from the Sea was published in 1963 (reprinted from its original 1947 publication date) by Acorn Books, an imprint of Macmillan, although I'm pretty sure Acorn Books is no more. Five seconds on Google did not enlighten me. Fifteen seconds on Google, though, taught me--to my shock and delight--that Kathleen Herald is the same writer as K.M. Peyton, whose book Who, Sir? Me, Sir? is also one of my favorite horse stories ever.

In fact, I'm so shocked and delighted that I don't know if I can do justice to this review without devolving into fangirl squee and rushing off to see how many of Herald/Peyton's books are still in print so I can order them. Sabre is long out of print, unfortunately, but used copies are available.

Sabre is set in Britain during WWII. Twelve-year-old Liza Greenway is sent from London to live with her aunt and uncle in the country, but she's miserable there. Then she finds a gray Thoroughbred stallion wandering along the edge of the ocean; she captures him and takes him to a local farm until the owners can be found.

Except that Liza wants to keep the horse for herself. As the months pass and the owners don't show, Liza starts to think of the horse as hers. She names him Sabre and teaches herself to ride, and when the owners do finally show up, Liza misleads them into thinking the horse ran off ages ago.

That's just the set-up. The plot takes many surprising twists and is a completely satisfying story just on that level. What I love, though, is the way Liza grows from a sullen, unhappy twelve-year-old to a quietly happy, more open teenager over the course of the book. The change is subtle, elegantly written, and believable. Liza feels like a real person; the other characters all feel like real people too. Best of all, the horse Sabre (and later the filly Scimitar) behave like real horses.

The writing is spare, understated, and very British. It's not a book about WWII--that's just the backdrop--but it taught me more about life in Britain during the war than any other book I've read or any movie I've ever seen. And the race at the end of the first part of the book was a huge influence on my writing when I was a kid. It taught me all I know about action verbs. That Herald/Peyton wrote this book when she was eighteen floors me--I hadn't known that until today. No wonder I love what few of her later books I've been able to find.