Every so often a book comes along whose narrative style just fits so well within your brain grooves that things that normally draw you in don’t seem to matter much anymore. This was very much the case with this book for me. This book, that had spy themes I usually don’t go for and a fairly dislikable protagonist, managed to really engage me on a pretty profound level.
Maybe it’s something to do with isolation, since this is the perfect time for such a thing. Or loneliness, which is universal and separate from politics. This book features not one, but several lonely man, though lonely on different levels. Each one meeting the other seemingly at random and each one’s life is forever changes because of it. It starts off with two men casually reaching for the same book at a bookstore, which is pretty much a near perfect way to meet someone. One of them is drunk, one of them is there for a book reading, their interaction is brief, meaningless and would have been instantly forgotten, had it not continued almost immediately afterwards with one of them being attacked and the other coming to his rescue. Thus a connection is established. Both men are British, both are strangers in Berlin, though to different degrees. One of them is an author desperately trying and failing to write a follow up to his published and fairly well received short story collection. The other has a story to tell, a wild story about being contacted as a ghost writer for an exiled oligarch. Soon the lines between fiction and reality begin to be erased, a pervasive paranoia seeped through from one man to the other, mingled with distrust and a mutual need for company, albeit for different reasons. It turns into an exploitative relationship, but also strangely symbiotic. There’s no question that the protagonist is the one doing the exploiting, appropriating someone’s story for his own gain, and yet, immoral as that may be, it makes for a strangely compelling journey into darkness. There’s a fascinatingly serpentine quality to it all or maybe, more appropriately, a nesting doll motif. Chris Power himself is a British author for whom this book is a sophomore effort after a well received short story collection. It’s a story within a story within a story. It’s clever and oddly magnetic of a construct. And the writing…well, it’s great. The internationally set story displays a terrific ability to convey the place every time, be it the rainy London, bleak graffitied Berlin or tranquil isolation of Sweden. Every location provides a perfect stage for the characters’ development, contributing to or echoing their state of mind, every one is their own way a place of loneliness, not aloneness but a certain disconnect with the world around. It works excellently. There’s plenty of suspense too, but this isn’t exactly a thriller in a traditional way, more of a darkly psychological game for two with danger potentially lurking around the corner. I enjoyed this book very much, it read quickly so I didn’t have to put it down too much, two sittings really and well worth the time. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.
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For those of you who love reading thematically as much as I do, this is the book to read for Christmas while being snowed in. Or at least make sure some snow is involved for optimum enjoyment of this winter wonderland adventure.
Quotable me…If you can’t invent the wheel, make sure to build a really good one. Which is to say…when you chose to use a very, very familiar/old/beaten to death genre premise of city folks relocating to a remote wooded area only to find out something’s seriously off about their new abode, you really gotta do something new and different with it. The author, to her credit, does. It begins with the tree, a giant ancient looking tree in the backyard and quite literally avalanches into a snowy nightmare from there. The Bennetts are as typical of a Manhattan family as you can imagine, they are artistic, free spirited and bestow upon their precocious young children names like Eleanor Queen and Tycho. Which frankly…ok, there’s just no excuse for that, no matter how great of a queen Eleanor of Aquitaine was in your opinion, both times. I mean, it’s an absolutely ridiculous name for a kid to have, Eleanor, sure, that’s lovely, Eleanor Queen…no, just no. Don’t name your kids Sir or Queen or Prince, wait for them to distinguish themselves or marry into it. Seriously. Anyway, that kid of gives you an idea about Bennetts, though, doesn’t it. The family matriarch is a recently retired 41 year old ballerina, mother of two, but really three, for all the uses her artistic bum of a spouse artistically named Shaw) has. For years she’s been the breadwinner, while he dabbled in various arts from music to mixology and helped with the kids. Now they’ve inexplicably decided it’s his turn to shine, despite the notable scarcity of previous successes, so the decision is mad, mainly for his sake, but also for the novelty of getting out of the 600 sq. ft. apartment, to old rambling place in upstate New York is acquired and, without any means of support outside of rapidly decreasing savings and almost no collective experience living outside of a major metropolis, The Bennetts are off to try the country life and let Shaw realize his latent artistic potential. Guess how well that’s going to work out for them? Despite the sarcasm contents of this review, the book is actually neither terrible nor stupid. It is a credible entry into the realm of literary scares, it’s atmospheric, claustrophobic and disturbing in all the right ways. And only ever so slightly overwritten. The main/significant characters are female, the message is potently feminist, girlpower shines all the way through the snow. The kids, however oddly named, are really well realized as characters, almost more so than adults at times, and all too clever beyond their years. All in all, pretty good. Smarter adult characters or more original of a premise might have pushed it right into the great territory. Nicely creepy story well told. For fans of literary slow burning scares. Warning…might induce chionophobia. That’s fear of snow, had to look it up, yes, a real thing. Learn something new every day. I’m a huge fan of DC/Vertigo but on the Vertigo side of things. Traditional superhero comics don’t do much for me and it takes a while to get into the movies too. I checked this book out because just to find out how many women of action I would know/recognize/be interested in. Turns out quite a few, thanks to the movies, the latest DC ones have been doing a far superior job with female casting than the male one. In fact, female superheroes movies have been far superior.
At any rate, this is a fairly basic overview, it provides a few page entry for each character and one or two pages of art. It also features short bios of the women behind the scenes, writers, letterers, creators, editors, etc. It turns out that DC is very female friendly, like awesomely so, and has been for decades, hiring and promoting women who in turn created and promoted all sorts of stories of female empowerment and expanding representation to not only more women of action, but also more women of various minorities, etc. So kudos to DC. The book though…well, it’s kind of like a coffee table book. The writing’s very basic, very all age appropriate, very generic and presents as very self promotional. In fact if someone ever says something about DC’s scarcity of female representation, DC can wallop them with this book as a counteraction. But the main thing with coffee table books is usually the art, right? And the art here really, really underwhelmed. Most of the character art had a very similar style to it, some of the traditional superhero variety and entirely too many of a weirdly teeny boppy cartoony sort of thing that really didn’t do sing for me at all. Actually, I was surprised to find out how many different artists (all female or queer, of course) were featured, because the art was so indistinct. And sure, it’s DC, they must have a certain look and style they go for, so some sort of uniformity must be expected, but if these are the best female artists working today, I am not impressed. I shall have to do further research to find some I like. So overall, it was ok, a perfectly decent, inoffensive, generic and wildly self congratulatory promo. It read very quickly, maybe 115 minutes or so and the comic geek in me delighted at a few things here and there. Go DC, represent, girl power and all that. And thanks to the lasso of truth, this review is 100% authentic. This was something of an experimental read for me. I enjoy a good bio, but remain unsold on a lot of modern poetry, so I was interested in checking out how the combination of the two would work for me. And it was, in fact, interesting. The author seems singularly suited to the task of creating a Beethoven biography in verse, not just as a fan and a poet, but also as a musician from a multigenerational musician family I would imagine it makes her someone who understands music (classical and otherwise) and rhythm (poetic and otherwise) on a pretty profound level.
The book comprises four distinct intervals of Beethoven’s life from cradle to grave and an actual (poetry free) bio too, so if the poems don’t give you much of an idea of the events, the supplemental information will, but the goal here seems to be the marriage of the two, with the poems providing the emotions and the biographical material facts, dates, etc. The poems aren’t just biographical, they are also very personal, retracing Padel’s steps as she visits all the significant places of Beethoven’s life. It seems not a very happy life at that, the man had constant financial and romantic difficulties, deemed too ugly by some women (really? are the portraits we have too flattering? because he seems ok looking), too lowborn, etc. There was all that sibling animosity. And that weird obsessive relationship with his nephew. And that temper. And, of course, of course, his ever decreasing ability to hear, infinitely more devastating for a musician…and yet, and yet, despite all that, somehow he managed to bring so much light and beauty into the world. It’s really astonishing the way he was able to rise above the daily tribulations and create such magic. So as far as experiments go, it was a perfectly decent one. It didn’t really change my opinion of modern poetry, I still want it to rhyme, pedestrian as it may seem to the real fans. In this form, it reminds me of elegantly turned out sentences with some rhythm to them, almost like some stylized novel. It was possible for me to appreciate some of the beauty of the language, which I’m going to take as a win. And the supplemental bio was most informational, so now whenever I’ll listen to Beethoven, it’ll be with informed ears. For how quick, original and educational this was, it a worthy read. A quietly methodical, meticulously observed and strikingly rendered indictment of the class system in India, this was by no means an easy read. Thing is, I’m not even quite sure how I ended up with it, because all I remember reading about it was something something India, something something immigration, which isn’t even all the way accurate.
But who am I to turn down a book once acquired, especially one so generously lauded and praised by a variety of respectable sources, especially one that looks that promised to be a suitable entry for my international reading…so to India then. A place I’d never ever want to visit any way outside of armchair traveling and even at such a remove…it’s (charitably) unpalatable. An impression this book has all but set in stone. It’s billed as a novel, but reads as a collection of tangentially interconnected at best short stories. Long shot stories at that. Five of them. The first two have to do with people who has left India for the West and come back to visit, highlighting culture clashes and social differences, so it seems like that would be a theme, but then it pivots to the slums, which in India are never far (in fact, tragically nearby) from the posh manicured abodes of the well to do. And that’s where the going gets really tough. The third story absolutely whams you. If you’re an animal lover, it’s almost too brutal of a read, this tale of a beaten down by life man who tries to give himself another chance at success by raising and training a bear cub. Mind you, this isn’t a world where people are all that nice to each other, in fact the protagonist of that story is very abusive to his wife, so just imagine how someone like that would be towards an animal. The fourth chapter/story revisits a maid from the second one and is by far the most complete and engaging of the collection as it follows her from the impoverish girlhood in a destitute village to an ambitious entrepreneurial young woman juggling jobs in the city, determined to give her children the chances/education she never got. It all ends in a stream of consciousness punctuation free short that mainly makes you glad the entire novel didn’t that style. The rest to the novel is actually quite exquisite style wise. The narrative is stunning, no matter what ugliness it takes on, it offers the kind of vividness and dimensionality you’re likely to find in the finest works of literature. It’s a powerhouse, really, and so emotionally affecting and affective, it can be positively emotionally exhausting. Or maybe it’s just India. It’s easy enough complaining about the economic disparity in the first world to forget about what it’s like in the developing nations. The kind of poverty that millions upon millions of people live there is almost beyond imagining, it seems like an anachronism, something that was left behind ages ago. The levels of privation when it comes to the most basic things, food, education, plumbing, electricity, literacy…it’s staggering. And this poverty is nearly impossible to leave behind, for those who try there’s the constant economic drain of enormous needy families and then, between supporting the parents and siblings left behind and trying to provide for kids inevitably produced despite the circumstances, elevating one’s position in the world takes the kind of determination, will and opportunities seldom available, summoned or provided. Which is why the maid’s tale is the most interesting one, at least from the social anthropologist’s perspective. So on purely didactic level this certainly works. And the writing’s terrific, so you get the literary satisfaction. Narratively, it leaves something to be desired, because the author doesn’t seem to enjoy wrapping things up neatly, the stories have ambiguous (or just WTF as the first story) endings that seemingly invite the readers to imagine their outcomes. There’s much left unexplained (the maids’ rivalry), things unraveled and not raveled back up, etc. It isn’t all nicely laid out and presented to the audience, but then again a book like that probably wouldn’t, nothing about it is easy reading. But if you can brave the bleakness and heaviness of it all, it’s certainly deserves a consideration. If only as a reminder of the bleak and heavy world at large. If only as an exercise in compassion. A difficult book to recommend, but it does what great books ought to, instructs us in the ways of the world, and thus it’s well worth a read. Back to Featherbank. And thereabouts. Small town, creepy woods, so creepy they are colloquially referred to as The Shadows. Something tragic occurred there twenty five years ago. It left one kid dead, one in prison for murder, one mysteriously vanished and one with profound psychological scars. So much so that he hightailed it out of there as soon as he hit eighteen and never came back. Until now, until his dying mother made the visit no longer possible to postpone and the place no longer possible to ignore.
And so Paul Adams returns to town he has so gladly left behind years ago and just like that memories come back too. And more than that, threats, dangers, other dark secret things lurking in the shadows. Featuring all the classic presets of a good King story (appropriately enough since Paul and his friend are such fans of his as kids), this starts off spookily enough with all sorts of supernatural ambiance, but then steadily veers off into thriller territory. Personally I kinda wanted it to go with the scary, but having read North’s previous book, knew to expect differently. Weirdly enough, though I definitely read and enjoyed The Whisper Man and not that long ago, I managed to forget it quite thoroughly. Nothing about The Whispers rang a bell to me, not the recurring location, not the recurring detective, totally had to look all of that up in the official book descriptions just now. I literally just remembered liking the book. Meaning this one probably won’t stick to the walls of the memory palace either, but then again it doesn’t have to. It sufficed perfectly for the duration. North does a very good job in a genre that’s too popular and ubiquitous to exercise proper quality control, so his work stands out. The man writes genuinely thrilling thrillers. They are fun to read, exciting and, possibly best of all, unpredictable. Did I find the ending somewhat bathetic? Sure, yeah. But did it take away from the overall enjoyment of the novel? No, not really. I definitely had lot of fun with this one. Recommended. Every so often a book comes along and takes you away on an adventure. And I mean it doesn’t just tell you it’s going to do it or tell you all about it, it transports you. This is exactly what Mick Kitson accomplished with Featherweight, a novel that, despite its title, possesses a considerable gravity. Not to mention charm. Excitement. Pure joy of readership. Things like that.
And granted, I expected good things of Kitson. Sal, his previous novel, was an excellent tale of wilderness survival featuring a remarkably credible child protagonist. But it was a fairly straight forward and simple story comparing to this one. This is a grand adventure of a much larger scale. It, once again, features an excellent female protagonist, though this time she is slightly older. Without further ado, meet Annie. Sold at just nine years of age by her destitute family to an aging out bareknuckle boxer named Bill Perry (a terrifically generous spirit who adores both The Queen and booze in seemingly equal measures), Annie’s got her life all figured out, between learning to fight and helping her adoptive father operate his pub, she’s tough enough and smart enough to take on all sorts of challenges. But then one day she steps into the ring to box a handsome young man who on principle won’t hit back and just like that new possibilities present themselves. Romantic ones, financial ones. There might be a promising future somewhere in there but there are just way too many obstacles to contend with, from a local highway bandit to Bill’s profligate ways to new laws and old ways and fiendish fops with too much money and so on. One just has to put their fists up and not back down. If Stallone was a young woman (ok, that’s admittedly really difficult to imagine) and grey sweats were jerkins and 1970s city of brotherly something was Victorian England…all you’d need is a rousing theme song and you’d be in business. Similar souls, maybe but this is much more elaborate of a story. And excellent in every way. It works superbly on a historical fiction level, doing a splendid job of bringing the time and place to life, it gets the boxing right, viscerally audibly punchingly so. But most of all, it wins you over with its terrific cast of characters. You gotta love these characters and their relationships, especially the surprisingly warm and loving father/daughter one between Annie and Bill. And yes, there’s romance too, a love at first punch, if you will, between Annie and a young man too good looking to box and too smart to let a good thing get away. All in all, excellent. A grand gutsy spirited adventure. A sprawling brawling bodacious tale. A pugilistic picaresque to be passionate about. Loved it. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley. I’m not a fan of serials, but knew I was going to continue with this one as soon as I finished book one. Yeah, it took some time to warm up to Thora and I’m not even going to try to make Icelandic joke out of it, she’s something of a stick in a mud at times, but she gets in the most darkly fascinating adventures. And the exotic quality of the locale can’t be beat. In fact, it becomes something of a character in and of itself, providing excellent and aptly eerie atmosphere.
This novel doesn’t give Thora a lot of time to rest, taking up some months after the first one ended and just in time, since she already spent all of her money of an SUV and a camping trailer. When an opportunity to visit a client who owns and operates a luxury retreat arises, Thora goes for it, it practically sounds relaxing…organic food, massages, etc. But of course, of course, things get murderously complicated almost immediately and soon her client stands accused of murder while the past all around the seemingly quiet area suddenly decides to unbury itself in a very disturbing ways. Which is pretty much what you’d expect with a novel whose prologue reads like a scene from a certain Japanese/later American scary franchise. Stick in a mud or not, you gotta give it to Thora, she is diligent, stubborn, smart, she is exactly the sort of person her client is fortunate to have on his side as she sets off to uncover the long buried local secrets, covered up Nazi connections, murders, etc. With her perennially good natured visiting new boyfriend as a sidekick, Thora makes quite a detective…for a lawyer or otherwise. She’s also about to become a grandma at the freakishly young age of 36 or 37, due to some interesting multigenerational reproductive choices. It’s a lot to juggle and she’s doing a great, circus worthy, job of it. Much as with the previous novel, the author’s flirtations with the supernatural genres come through, this time in some ghostly child’s cries. That’s always fun. Maybe one day these mysteries will take that even further. For now though, they offer plenty. No matter how the protagonist strikes you, you gotta admire the intricate plotting, the clever twists and turns and the sheer excellence of just how unpredictable and exciting of a narrative the author spins. It’s all the things you’d want in a dark psychological thriller and it’s genuinely thrilling to boot. Very enjoyable, very entertaining, very good. Recommended. I’m all about standalones, but it seems the author prefers serializations. And so I’ve had to make do with a first in series, which technically at the time of its creation is a standalone. Being a fan of Scandinavian Noir and the author, this was pretty much as good as expected. Plus pretty seasonal with Iceland being Christmas appropriate on an almost year around basis.
And Thóra Guðmundsdóttir is a proud Icelander. But, having studied abroad, and in general having had a proper first world education, she is multicultural and trilingual. And a lawyer. And a single mom. And two years single. But it is her language skills specifically that get her an unusual job when a family of a wealthy international historical scholar, who was studying in Iceland and got found dead and mutilated, hires her to double check the police findings and conduct an investigation of her own, assisted by a man who works for them. A conveniently handsome man, too. But that’s another story. Not exactly along her professional lines of conduct, but the money’s good and Thora needs it, life’s expensive, especially now that her ex is out of the picture. And so she sets off to investigate the murder, only to find out that the more she looks the more progressively darker and stranger the case gets. Turns out the young man was obsessed with witches and their historical prosecutions and his personal interests and preferences were appropriately macabre. Not the most natural thing for a straight laced stick in the mud like Thora to wrap her brain around, but she acquires herself admirably in the end. But she really kind of is a straight laced stick in the mud, at least until you get to know her, though to be fair her charms aren’t obvious. She’s very serious, so much so that occasional jokes come as a surprise every single time. She managed to have one of her kids very young, so now at 36 she juggles a sixteen year old and a six year old and does a pretty good job of it, busy as she is. It doesn’t do much for her love life, but who needs dating apps, when dashing coworkers are sealed and delivered right to her. There’s a very practical matter of factness to Thora that initially seems to flatten her, but in reality it’s just her Scandinavian persona and once you get used to it, you’ll find her a perfectly decent if not effusively charismatic protagonist. The real star of the show is the plot, though. Not the murder thing itself, that was actually kind of lamentably obvious and predictable, though not overwhelmingly so. No, where the plot really excels is in the backstory of the victim and all of his dark interests. The author’s obviously done a fair amount of research, comparing the historic prosecutions of witches of the Continental Europe and Iceland, it’s all absolutely fascinating and profoundly disturbing. She’s dabbled in supernatural before, ghost and such, and is obviously very comfortable in that territory and though it may not be the actual genre here, the elements are shining through like…I don’t know, ectoplasm at a séance? This is, of course, a suspense thriller and a murder mystery first and foremost, but for me it was more along the lines of a really good witches story with a dead body. It works on either level and it’s very dark on every level. Plus the entire thing is infinitely improved by the location, isolated, stark and seemingly readymade for something just like this. A memorable and creepy armchair trip to Iceland and a very auspicious and enticing series first, even for a standalone reader such as myself. Recommended. I was delighted to be the first person to rate and review this book. Actually, kind of surprised to be, it’s a thriller from a proper publisher, in fact a reworking of an earlier shorter work and it’s really good, with a nice cover even. I didn’t even expect it to be this good, hoped it would be, but you know how it is with trying new authors and thriller genre is way overpopulated now and all that. Plus it featured a trans protagonist and oftentimes such things can steal focus, but here it was actually done right. Which is to say it was an aspect of the narrative and an aspect of the protagonist, but not the entire thing nor even the main thing.
Because no one should be defined by any single thing about them, even if it’s an unusual or less conventional of a feature. So yes, David is a trans man, he left his small Rhode Island town as a woman and came back transitioned, a fact that some of the locals are dealing with easier than others. For the local sheriff who used to date David before, it’s all kinds of difficult. For David’s grandma Maggie it’s an on and off process, like most things, since her mind began to unravel. But her best lifelong friends, David’s aunts as he calls them, it’s totally fine, they are as accepting as can be. In fact, they are as golden as golden girls can be. Until one of them is found dead. Possibly murdered. David would have come back anyway, having gotten fired from his teaching position on discrimination basis, but it’s the urgent call from his grandma that speeds up the process. Now he’s back as a caretaker and finds himself embroiled further and further in the investigation. And then the body count goes up. And winter surrounds the small peninsular insular community, like the grey waters of Narragansett bay. It’s a proper New England mystery in that way. It’s a proper mystery is many ways, actually. There’s lots going on, plenty of players, variously entangled, both in past and present. In fact, some of the novel’s best stories are set in the past and recorded by David, whose historical based vocation makes him in a way a perfect detective to solve these crimes. And while the plot is excellently elaborate, what really sang for me were the characters, specifically the older ladies. David’s nice, Billy’s nice, but nice only goes so far. The ladies were fun, smart, tough, surprisingly able for their advanced years and very good at taking care of their own. No quiet retirement for them, they’ve been operating a local salvaging service for decades. Each of them a very different personality, but together they were the four musketeers of Narragansett bay…until they weren’t. So I very much enjoyed them as characters, especially Connie. Mystery wise, the novel presented an excellent number of the prerequisite plot turns and twists, right up until a gutpuncher in the very end. There are even slight supernatural aspects to it or maybe ghosts are just too inextricable from the fabric of old New England. Tone wise it varied, overall it’s fairly dramatic, it got pretty heavy at times, but then there were all these humorous times, mostly courtesy of Maggie’s dementia addled brain and there was even some romance thrown in. Something for everyone. And a great atmospheric location to frame it all. It almost would have been/might have been cozy what with the small town and grandmotherly characters, but it was definitely (fortunately) too dark for that. Plus technically not all ladies of a certain age are grandmotherly. Some are positively piratical in their bones. At any rate, I really enjoyed this book, from the story to the storytelling. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley. |
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December 2023
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