Detection Unlimited and Penhallow by Georgette Heyer

You knew I'd be back to reading Georgette Heyer's mysteries soon. I had a couple of them on my shelves and wanted some comfort reading. Not the best choice, as it happened.

I picked up Detection Unlimited first. It was a slight, mostly fun read, just want I'd expected and no more. It's very much a typical Heyer mystery, although I wouldn't say it's close to her best. It has the usual motley cast of characters, jaunty dialogue, and baffling crime. I did guess the murderer, but not why the murderer did it; in fact, I was overthinking it, and the murderer did it for a very obvious reason. So, kind of disappointing plot-wise, but the characters were worth the read.

Then I picked up Penhallow, and my goodness was that a mistake. I wish someone had warned me. First of all, although it's marketed as a mystery, it's not. We get to witness the murderer doing the deed, and we know why and how. And it doesn't even happen until around page 300 (457 pages in my edition--a very long book). Even though by then I was baffled and annoyed at the wordiness, the grim tone, the relative lack of dialogue (jaunty or otherwise), and the slow pace, I still held out hope that Heyer would pull a twist--that the murderer would turn out to be mistaken, that Penhallow would have turned out to be murdered in some other way. But there is no twist.

The first 300 pages of the book are set-up on how monstrous Penhallow is, Penhallow being the bitchy, controlling head of the Penhallow family, and how much everyone hates him. Then he's murdered, and the remaining 150 pages are about how the family members react, and how surprised they are that they're not actually happier now that he's gone. Whee.

It's a good thing Penhallow wasn't the first Heyer mystery I picked up, because I would have missed out on a lot of her fun books.

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The Vices by Lawrence Douglas

Everything about how this book is being marketed and reviewed suggests a literary murder mystery. Look, people, it's not a murder mystery. If I'd known that, I wouldn't have bought it; but once I bought the damn thing I felt compelled to read it.

Philosophy professor Oliver Vice disappears from the deck of the Queen Mary II during a storm, presumably as a result of the sea and weather, but there is a suggestion that he committed suicide. His friend, the unnamed narrator, discusses Oliver's life in 343 detailed pages, questioning who Oliver really was.

This is supposed to be a darkly, bitterly witty book. The narrator is unreasonably besotted with Oliver, whom he repeatedly describes as being noble in his suffering. It's supposed to be amusing that Oliver's suffering is due entirely to his being so neurotic and self-absorbed that he can barely function normally; and it's also supposed to be amusing that the narrator comes out with lines like "My father may not have been a brain surgeon, but it wasn't for any lack of smarts; when he entered the service at eighteen, he scored a stratospheric 152 on the army's IQ test" (p. 148). But every time the narrator showed himself to be unaware that he was such a buffoon, I cringed--for the author.

There's a hint, around the two-thirds mark of the book, that the narrator may not even be real--that everything we're reading may be false, a fantasy created by Oliver Vice himself. That would certainly explain why the narrator apparently looks very much like Oliver, and it would explain why the narrator is intelligent and yet profoundly stupid. It would certainly explain why the narrator is so obsessed with Oliver. What it would not explain is why the author bothered.

The entire book is about identity--self-identity and the identities that we invent and show others. Not much happens in the book, which is mostly the narrator mulling things over and occasionally having a conversation. I actually do enjoy this sort of book occasionally (that is, when I'm not expecting a murder mystery), but only if the writing blows the top of my head off. The writing here is nice, moving along facilely if not deeply, but the book is far too long and not clever enough to really explore the issues it presents.

It also doesn't know where to end. The story ends on page 339 but doesn't stop until page 343.

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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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Redemption in Indigo by Karen Lord

The cover of Redemption in Indigo is absolutely beautiful, and I love the title. While I was reading it, I felt terribly intelligent--it's the sort of cover and title that tell everyone, "I am reading a weighty work of literature." But the joke was on all those hypothetical people, because while Redemption in Indigo is a work of literature, it's not weighty at all. It's a charming, deceptively simple, fun work of literature.

It's based on a Senegalese folk tale, and it's meant to imitate the spoken word--which works so well that even the author asides became part of the full story. The writing is beautifully clear, the characters fully realized and sympathetic.

The story revolves around Paama, who leaves her buffoonish glutton of a husband to return to her family in the village where she grew up. Her husband follows her and she wearily extricates him from several fixes his greed gets him into. At the same time, the djombi--immortal spirits who interact with humans in different ways--have taken notice of Paama. They decide she's the right person to wield the Chaos Stick, which they've taken away from a djombi who had neglected and abused his power. But the Chaos Stick's former owner is determined to get the stick back.

There is no way to do justice to the story with a simple plot summary. The book's strength is its warmth. Even the bad guys have understandable motivations--and in the end, no one's really bad. Paama learns some bitter lessons during her adventures, but throughout everything she remains a strong, kind, dutiful woman.

When I finished the book, I set it down smiling. Then I burst into tears. I don't think I've ever reacted to a book quite like that before. I'm now passing my copy around to everyone I know, saying, "Read this. You'll be a better person afterwards."

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Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok

I picked up Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok at the library and enjoyed very much this carefully crafted short novel about a Chinese girl who must work after school in a sweatshop beside her mother to help bring in money.

Jean Kwok knows her subject, having been such a factory worker herself as a young immigrant in New York City. The author, who went on to attend Harvard and Columbia, has told the story of Kimberly and her mother so poignantly and quietly that I found myself blinking back tears more than once.

At the opening of Girl in Translation, Kimberly is eleven and newly arrived in the city with her widowed mother. Aunt Paula, whose husband owns a sewing factory, has paid for her sister and niece's journey to the West and is happy to exploit the naive newcomers in the sweatshop. She finds them a tenement apartment that has no heat but does have cockroaches and mice, and she takes most of their paycheck for herself. The mother, who is being illegally paid by the piece instead of by the hour, is forced to bring Kimberly to the shop after school each day to help finish more pieces for income.

The public school the girl attends by day is mystifying and sometimes brutal. Her teacher is incompetent and prejudiced, and New York accents are hardly decipherable by a girl whose only English is from textbooks, but Kimberly is brilliant and her aptitude for science and mathematics eventually comes to the attention of the principal.

This is not deep writing, although it is well written and satisfying. The characters are well developed, understandable and likable. How Kimberly manages to triumph over incredible odds--she realizes that she must save her mother and herself using her gift for scholarship--makes for a touching and satisfying story.

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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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Weetzie Bat by Francesca Lia Block

(First, I must thank Kate, who left on top of her printer a pretty paperback book, with a green-and-pink cover, a book so thin that I took it out to the garden and read it in one hour.)

Weetzie Bat, by Francesca Lia Block, is a brief, luminous fairy tale about love and happiness in Hollywood.

Weetzie Bat is a beach girl, "...skinny...with a bleach blonde flat-top....sugar-frosted eye shadow...." She first has friends, then lovers, then a family, but the author touches on biography only for continuity; instead, she chooses, by bombarding the reader with an array of magical images, to draw the reader into the shimmering Technicolor world that Weetzie inhabits: "...tomahawks and plastic palm tree wallets...a fountain that turned tropical soda-pop colors...tunes on a music box with a little dancing monkey on top...."

The cottage in which Weetzie dwells, with children and puppies and friends, was given to her by a genie who emerged from a gold bottle, and the three wishes seem inevitable and natural in the dream that is Weetzie's life: "There were roses and lemon trees in the garden, and two bedrooms inside the house--one painted rose, the other aqua. The house was filled with plaster Jesus statues, glass butterfly ashtrays, paintings of clowns, and many kinds of coasters."

Block's characters are simple and loving. They worry about the evils in the world, which sometimes drives them to distraction and almost drives them away from the Eden they have made with each other, but somehow love heals everything well enough for a while, even if not enough for "happily ever after."

This amazing book, which feels like a poem, makes the reader's own surroundings, at least for the moment, surreal and beautiful, gifts from a genie's bottle.

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Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

I'm in three book clubs in our village of 1500 people, and two of the three are reading Cutting for Stone.

Lucky me, I found the trade paperback for 50 cents in our library sale room, and had a weekend free to read its 658 pages.

The author also wrote My Own Country in 1996, his nonfiction account of the arrival of AIDS in rural east Tennessee (specifically, the Johnson City area) in the 1980s. As an internal medicine physician, Verghese knows his stuff, and sometimes his knowing so well what can go wrong with the human body made for somewhat queasy reading.

My Own Country, published almost 20 years before Cutting for Stone, is vividly written and at times riveting, but his first novel is incredible, brilliant.

The novel's plot is as intricate as it is mesmerizing: a nun with issues has an affair in Ethiopia with a physician with issues and dies giving birth to conjoined twins who are almost murdered…

Well. The plot alone could win a prize for cleverness, but Verghese, as deftly as the surgeons in his operating theaters sew up their patients, artfully describes the exotic and dangerous world of mid-sixties South Africa, as well as developing a variety of difficult and fascinating characters and carrying them along a fascinating story arc.

Marion, the mirror twin of Shiva and the protagonist of the novel, grows up in the hospital in which he was born and cut away from his brother; his life, surrounded as it is by the milieu of medicine, is always seen within the psychic connection to his twin.

I found Verghese's use of language and his vivid descriptions of Ethiopia to be as compelling as his story arc, with stylish and sophisticated writing and tight, careful plotting. Sometimes the pacing felt uneven to me: early, critical chapters contain several tantalizing, frustrating point-of-view shifts at crisis points that are reviewed from various perspectives in minute detail over the course of a day; in later chapters, there are sudden, startling leaps of years from one page to the next. But this seems a trivial criticism when considering the amazing depth of Verghese's character development, his skillfully detailed understanding of surgery and internal medicine.

This is a book I closed with a sigh--I was tired, sort of grossed out, even overwhelmed. I was, in fact, a tiny bit relieved the journey with Marion--Ethiopian surgeon, son of a nun, Siamese twin--was over.

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.

Noah's Compass by Anne Tyler

I’d forgotten how much I liked Anne Tyler. Having just savored Noah’s Compass, her latest, I can’t wait to get back to the library to see what I’ve missed from this prolific novelist whose writing is clever and witty and sometimes heartbreakingly poignant.

In Noah’s Compass, Tyler’s 18th novel, the premise is deceptively simple:

Liam, a man in late middle age, loses his job, which he never liked much anyway.

He moves into a small apartment, and is rather pleased with his new ascetic life, a slowing-down life with less money and less clutter:

“What reason would he have to move again? No new prospects were likely for him. He had accomplished all the conventional tasks -- grown up, found work, gotten married, had children -- and now he was winding down. This is it, he thought. The very end of the line. . . . He was going to be one of those men who die alone among stacks of yellowed newspapers and the dried-out rinds of sandwiches moldering on plates."

After the movers leave, he arranges his furniture, puts away his dishes, and goes to sleep.

He wakes up in the hospital, his head bandaged and his hand bitten. He has no memory of the intruder who broke into his home and bashed his skull.

Gently, Tyler opens up Liam’s life to the reader, and it’s clear he is a clueless man who doesn’t know how to engage with people. His daughters find him irritating and baffling. His ex-wife has given up on him long ago.

But his trauma has startled him awake and hurled him—and with him, his family—into a late-mid-life crisis.

Noah's Compass is a gently written account of a life, and by the end of Liam’s story, I've grown to care about this hapless man, I wish him well, and I'm sad to say goodbye.

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Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

I liked Audrey Niffenegger's writing style so much that I went right to the library after finishing Her Fearful Symmetry and got The Time Traveler's Wife, her first book.

Symmetry is a ghost story, but first it's literary fiction at its best--a tour de force, I think--but I'm uncertain, really what a tour de force exactly is, although I imagine a fine conductor leading a fine orchestra playing a very creative, nimble work, and that's how I see Niffenegger's writing: nimble, clever (always clever, as are her interesting characters), and creative.

First, she did her homework, seeking out the advice and support of the staff at London's Victorian Highgate Cemetery, and then becoming a tour guide in order to immerse herself in the overgrown, mossy graveyard in which her story takes place.

She developed characters who were uniquely interesting and conflicted and all very likable. She set up a fascinating and surprising plot.

This ghost story has everything--an old Victorian house that backs onto Highgate's west end, mirror twins (they exactly mirror each other, so that one twin's organs are on her right side instead of the left) who inherit a flat in the house, a crossword puzzle maker who also is crippled by his compulsions, and an ingenious ghost...

Her Fearful Symmetry can be read in a day or so, and it will haunt you.

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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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The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

Maybe I was too cranky and crabby, too full of Halloween Tootsie Roll Pops and raspberry Twizzlers, to begin reading a story about the end of the world and what it's like to live in a cult and be a reluctant beekeeper, but I must honestly report that when I had finished the 420 pages of Margaret Atwood's latest, The Year of the Flood, I felt even crabbier.

The critics all love this book, so I am alone, probably, but I wanted to open a vein when Toby, the rape victim who got rescued by the God's Gardeners cult, decorated her cubicle with a room divider made from plastic twist ties.

At least she didn't have to eat any more hamburgers made out of dead people, being now among vegetarians.

I'm not being fair, because my issues get in the way: For example, when I watched "The Bourne Supremacy" and the hero was being bludgeoned with a gun handle, I kept thinking what a cute apartment he had and what a shame his designer blinds were getting blood-spattered.

In Atwood's bleak new world, there are corrupt police forces, gene-spliced life forms like sheep with human hair, pigs with human brain tissue, and, finally, an engineered virus that pretty much takes out the human population. Atwood switches perspectives from Toby the Beekeeper to Ren the exotic trapeze dancer, who's locked inside a sex club.

The Year of the Flood is creative, beautifully written, and grim. Maybe that's the truth about our human future--no cute houses, ever again.

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