Review of Daughter of the Forest, by Juliet Marillier

Fairy Tale Variant, Fantasy, Fiction Review, Stand-outs, Starred Review 0

Daughter of the Forest

by Juliet Marillier

Book One of the Sevenwaters Trilogy
TOR Fantasy, New York, 2000 554 pages.
Starred Review

A huge thank-you to my sister Marcy, who gave me this book. I began reading it on the first leg of my trip to ALA Annual Conference 2011, read the first two chapters, and actually somehow left it behind between flights. So as soon as I got home, I ordered a replacement. Now I’ve read the second book as a library copy, but I’ve decided to order both the second and third books to have for my own. I am absolutely sure I will want to reread them again some day.

Daughter of the Forest is incredibly well-written. This is one of those books I love, a fairy tale retelling, but it’s done with a tremendous amount of loving detail, creating an intricate tapestry of a book. The story is told in old Ireland, in the time of the Druids, with Christianity just beginning to come. Sorcha and her six brothers are the children of Lord Colum, the powerful chieftain of Sevenwaters. Sorcha runs a little wild, the youngest of so many brothers. She has a bond with her brother Finbar, so they can speak without words.

Then her father and brothers capture and torture a Briton. Finbar, who is different, not so warlike, takes a bold step to help the Briton escape. The Briton is sheltered in the friar’s house. Can Sorcha, learning skills as a healer, help him survive? Will he be even willing to survive?

But her time helping the Briton is interrupted when her father comes home — with a new wife. This wife has a strange power over him. Sorcha and her brothers are uneasy.

And then the fairy tale I recognize begins. The evil stepmother turns all the brothers into swans. The only way Sorcha can restore them is to knit them all shirts out of nettles. But she must not utter even one sound until the work is done.

I never thought about it before, but there is definitely a novel in that tale! Juliet Marillier brings it to us with rich detail. There are some horrible moments, but you will be completely captivated by Sorcha’s tale. She goes from Ireland to Britain. The Fair Folk get involved. And the romantic hero is one of the most wonderful men I have ever encountered in fiction. He’s so loving, so careful to protect Sorcha.

Here’s a taste of Juliet Marillier’s rich prose, in the first chapter, when Finbar has declared he will not join his father’s military campaigns:

“Why do I remember this so well? Perhaps his displeasure with what we were becoming made Father take the choice he did, and so bring about a series of events more terrible than any of us could have imagined. Certainly, he used our well-being as one of his excuses for bringing her to Sevenwaters. That there was no logic in this was beside the point — he must have known in his heart that Finbar and I were made of strong stuff, already shaped in mind and spirit, if not quite grown, and that expecting us to bend to another will was like trying to alter the course of the tide, or to stop the forest from growing. But he was influenced by forces he was unable to understand. My mother would have recognized them. I often wondered, later, how much she knew of our future. The Sight does not always show what a person wants to see, but maybe she had an idea as she bade her children farewell, what a strange and crooked path their feet would follow.”

A truly magnificent tale.

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Source: This review is based on a book given to me by my sister Marcy.

Musings on Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte

Fiction Review, Old Favorites, Romance, Starred Review 0

Jane Eyre

by Charlotte Bronte

Signet Classic, 1982. 461 pages. First published in 1846.
Starred Review

This is not going to be a standard review. It turns out I already did a review of Jane Eyre back in 2001, when I was first writing Sonderbooks. If you haven’t read Jane Eyre, Dear Reader, stop reading these spoiler-filled musings and go read the book! It’s a classic! You really should read it!

I listed Jane Eyre on my list of about ten favorite books when I was a Freshman in college. I loved it wholeheartedly — the romance, the melodrama, the true love, the clever and conscientious but plain heroine. I’m still a romantic, and I still loved the story, but I found my perspective at 47 quite different than when I first read it around 15.

In the first place, I hadn’t remembered that the book is a thoroughly Christian one. There are multiple obscure Biblical allusions, over and over again. Now, I understood the allusions, but I’m definitely not used to seeing them in a book that’s for the general public. It made me wonder how much readers miss, reading it today. For example, “A frequent interlude of these performances was the enactment of the part of Eutychus by some half dozen of little girls; who, overpowered with sleep, would fall down, if not out of the third loft, yet off the fourth form, and be taken up half dead.” (Eutychus fell asleep when Paul preached a long sermon and fell from the third loft, but was then restored.)

But mostly I found myself awfully cynical over the romance! Mr. Rochester is just plain mean when he works at making Jane jealous. She could have done much, much better with half a chance of meeting more people! Mostly, I now have a hard time thinking anything at all good about a married almost-40-year-old man who falls in love with a 19-year-old! Right, they’ll have a lot in common! Sure, she’s the only one who’s ever really understood him! I have a much, much harder time believing that than I did when I was a teenager. Rather than find Mr. Rochester romantic, this time I thought him making a fool of himself, and not even being very nice while he was at it.

Mind you, I do like Jane and the way she deals with him as he manipulates her. I don’t blame her for falling in love with him, but if she’d seen more of the world, I hope she would have realized how much better she could have done. (I read a book once that said the reason so many middle-aged men have affairs with much younger women is that those are the only ones stupid enough to fall for the line, “My wife doesn’t understand me.”) This guy was twice her age and besides being married, had had three different mistresses. He doesn’t deserve you, Jane!

What’s more, I found myself wondering if the insane wife was actually insane before she got locked in the attic for years and years. Mr. Rochester explains to Jane that soon after the wedding, he hated his wife, even before she went mad — as if that makes it okay. He tries to portray himself as so compassionate for “keeping” her locked up in the attic with a jailer and pretending she doesn’t exist. I still wonder: How insane was she before she got locked up?

Okay, but Jane completely wins me over in the second half. How incredibly refreshing to see someone decide she would rather die than be a mistress! Yes, she’s truly tempted, horribly tempted. But she follows her principles. Mr. Rochester tells her about his mistresses:

“It was a grovelling fashion of existence: I should never like to return to it. Hiring a mistress is the next worst thing to buying a slave: both are often by nature, and always by position, inferior: and to live familiarly with inferiors is degrading. I now hate the recollection of the time I passed with Celine, Giacinta, and Clara.”

Jane wisely reflects:

“I felt the truth of these words; and I drew from them the certain inference, that if I were so far to forget myself and all the teaching that had ever been instilled into me, as — under any pretext — with any justification — through any temptation — to become the successor of these poor girls, he would one day regard me with the same feeling which now in his mind desecrated their memory. I did not give utterance to this conviction: it was enough to feel it. I impressed it on my heart, that it might remain there to serve me as aid in the time of trial.”

But where Jane fully won my admiration and my heart was after she asked herself who would be hurt by her becoming Mr. Rochester’s mistress. “Who in the world cares for you? or who will be injured by what you do?” Her answer made me cheer:

“I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself. I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man. I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad — as I am now. Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? They have a worth — so I have always believed; and if I cannot believe it now, it is because I am insane — quite insane: with my veins running fire, and my heart beating faster than I can count its throbs. Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I have at this hour to stand by: there I plant my foot.”

You go, Jane!

Now, part of my enthusiasm for Jane was reflecting that if young women today had half the principles of Jane Eyre, and refused to have affairs with married men, how many, many lives would not be torn apart! If more people let principles rein in their passions, I persist in thinking that many less hearts would be broken, including mine.

However, by this time I was loving Jane and rooting for Jane, so no matter how dissimilar our situations, now I saw myself in her. I, too, felt torn away from the one I had thought was the love of my life. Okay, so he left me, and didn’t want me around. Leaving wasn’t my choice — though the decision to stop begging him to come back seemed almost as difficult as Jane’s decision to tear herself away. The fact is, I had never stopped loving him, and when he moved to the other side of the world, I felt like my heart was being torn out of my chest. How could I fault Jane for loving Mr. Rochester when I still love my husband? I could easily understand Jane’s despairing wanderings. I took great comfort in Jane’s realization that was the same as I had come to — that there was nothing she could do to help the man she loved with all her heart. She would have to entrust him to God’s care.

“Worn out with this torture of thought, I rose to my knees. Night was come, and her planets were risen: a safe, still night; too serene for the companionship of fear. We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we feel His presence most when His works are on the grandest scale spread before us: and it is in the unclouded night-sky, where His worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest His infinitude, His omnipotence, His omnipresence. I had risen to my knees to pray for Mr. Rochester. Looking up, I, with tear-dimmed eyes, saw the mighty Milky-way. Remembering what it was — what countless systems there swept space like a soft trace of light — I felt the might and strength of God. Sure was I of His efficiency to save what He had made: convinced I grew that neither earth should perish, nor one of the souls it treasured. I turned my prayer to thanksgiving: the Source of Life was also the Saviour of spirits. Mr. Rochester was safe: he was God’s and by God would he be guarded. I again nestled to the breast of the hill; and ere long, in sleep, forgot sorrow.”

Later, I again found myself cheering for Jane when she grew busy and happy teaching school. However, I fully believed that she would have dreams, over and over again, about the one she loved — no matter how serene her day to day life, no matter how admirable her accomplishments.

And then I related to her next temptation. I thought Charlotte Bronte was brilliant that this was the next thing Jane faced: Her temptation was to give her life being a really really good Christian. She could devote herself to Christian service, and she would be good at it. But service without heart. St. John’s proposal was a true temptation. But because Jane had known real love, she could not settle for a mockery of marriage. No matter how dressed up it would be in piety, her heart sensed that it would be wrong, that love itself is sacred.

I’m not sure if I’m explaining why I related to this. I guess there’s a side of me that also thinks I can hide my pain in Christian service. Yes, God is enough. Yes, my relationship with God is incredibly comforting me. But if I keep my heart out of it, even that service will be worthless. As it says in I Corinthians 13, “If I give all I possess to feed the poor and deliver my body to the flames, but have not love, I am nothing.”

So, by the end of the book, I’m loving Jane, rooting for Jane, and relating to Jane. I’m still a romantic, so I love the part where Jane asks God for direction, and in answer she can hear Mr. Rochester’s voice across hundreds of miles. By this time, I don’t begrudge Jane her happy ending, no matter how contrived. Honestly, with Mr. Rochester crippled and blinded, the relationship seems a bit more equal. Though I do wish Jane would stop calling him “my master”!

Anyway, 30 years ago when I read Jane Eyre, I thought it a beautiful story of true love persevering despite all obstacles. I think that today I see it as a beautiful story of a young woman with true character and true faith and genuine love and forgiveness in her heart.

And a rousing read, no doubt about it!

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Source: This review is based on my own long-owned paperback copy.

Review of Minding Frankie, by Maeve Binchy

Contemporary, Fiction Review, General, Light Reading, Literary, Starred Review 0

Minding Frankie

by Maeve Binchy

Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2011. 383 pages.
Starred Review

Maeve Binchy’s books always end up keeping me reading until the small hours of the morning. Why, oh why, didn’t I know better than to start reading this book late at night, thinking I could stop after only one chapter? It’s not that the plot is exciting or action-packed, but you definitely get to caring about these people and want to find out what happens to them.

I do love the way she brings characters we’ve already seen in her other books. You don’t by any means have to have read the other books, but you have the sense that these are old friends. Everybody has a story in Maeve Binchy’s books, and in each book she focuses on a set of intertwined lives and the beautiful way they get through.

Minding Frankie is about the birth of a little girl.

Josie and Charles Lynch live in 23 St. Jarlath’s Crescent with their son Noel. They had always hoped Noel would be a priest, and set aside money early on for that purpose. Noel, however, was definitely not interested.

“Not so definite, however, was what he actually would like to do. Noel was vague about this, except to say he might like to run an office. Not work in an office, but run one. He showed no interest in studying office management or bookkeeping or accounting or in any areas where the careers department tried to direct him. He liked art, he said, but he didn’t want to paint. If pushed, he would say that he liked looking at paintings and thinking about them. He was good at drawing; he always had a notebook and a pencil with him and he was often to be found curled up in a corner sketching a face or an animal. This did not, of course, lead to any career path, but Noel had never expected it to. He did his homework at the kitchen table, sighing now and then, but rarely ever excited or enthusiastic. At the parent-teacher meetings Josie and Charles had inquired about this. They wondered, Does anything at school fire him up? Anything at all?”

Later, Noel got an office job instead of continuing his schooling.

“He met his work colleagues but without any great enthusiasm. They would not be his friends and companions any more than his fellow students at the Brothers had become mates. He didn’t want to be alone all the time, but it was often easier….

“He took to coming home later and later. He also took to visiting Casey’s pub on the journey home — a big barn of a place, both comforting and anonymous at the same time. It was familiar because everyone knew his name.”

Meanwhile, Noel’s parents aren’t sure what to do with the money they had saved to train Noel for the priesthood. And then Charles Lynch is told they don’t want him at his job any longer.

Into this home comes a woman from America, Charles Lynch’s niece Emily. Emily’s father moved to America years ago, and never kept in touch with his family. The family isn’t sure what to expect, but Emily is the sort of person who changes people’s lives by getting to know who they truly are.

She helps Charles and Josie realize what they really want to do is build a statue to St. Jarlath. And she helps Noel realize that he’s an alcoholic and needs help.

But then Noel gets a life-changing phone call. A woman he knew once and spent a drinking weekend with wants him to visit her in the hospital. She tells him she’s pregnant, and he’s the father. And she’s about to die of cancer.

So the book is about Noel trying to get his life together and be a father. The social worker assigned to his case doesn’t think he can do it. But thanks to Emily, there is a community of people around St. Jarlath’s Crescent who care and who help him with minding the little girl, Frankie.

That description doesn’t sound like a book that would keep me up reading through the night. But Maeve Binchy’s books are about Community. The characters are quirky, and some are powerfully flawed, but as we watch them working together, helping each other, working out problems, making mistakes, being wonderfully kind, we get hooked into their stories.

Another uplifting and life-affirming book by Maeve Binchy. I highly recommend getting to know the wonderful people who live in her books.

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of A Red Herring Without Mustard, by Alan Bradley

Fiction Review, Historical, Mystery, Starred Review 0

A Red Herring Without Mustard

by Alan Bradley

Delacorte Press, New York, 2011. 399 pages.
Starred Review

Hooray! Flavia de Luce is back in this, her third mystery and adventure. She bikes around the family’s estate and nearby village in England on a bicycle named Gladys, and manages to find all sorts of trouble. The book begins with Flavia accidentally burning the tent of a Gypsy who tells her fortune. The next morning, Flavia discovers the Gypsy has been bludgeoned, and Flavia summons help — but not before she gets a good look at the evidence.

Flavia’s old friend, Inspector Hewitt, comes to the scene, and this will give you the flavor of why you shouldn’t trifle with eleven-year-old Flavia:

“‘You’ve got goose bumps,’ he said, looking at me attentively. ‘Best go sit in the car.’

“He had already reached the far side of the bridge before he turned back. ‘There’s a blanket in the boot,’ he said, and then vanished in the shadows.

“I felt my temper rising. Here was this man — a man in an ordinary business suit, without so much as a badge on his shoulder — dismissing me from the scene of a crime that I had come to think of as my own. After all, hadn’t I been the first to discover it?

“Had Marie Curie been dismissed after discovering polonium? Or radium? Had someone told her to run along?

“It simply wasn’t fair.

“A crime scene, of course, wasn’t exactly an atom-shattering discovery, but the Inspector might at least have said ‘Thank you.’ After all, hadn’t the attack upon the Gypsy taken place within the grounds of Buckshaw, my ancestral home? Hadn’t her life likely been saved by my horseback expedition into the night to summon help?

“Surely I was entitled to at least a nod. But no —

“‘Go and sit in the car,’ Inspector Hewitt had said, and now — as I realized with a sinking feeling that the law doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘gratitude’ — I felt my fingers curling slowly into involuntary fists.

“Even though he had been on the scene for no more than a few moments, I knew that a wall had already gone up between the Inspector and myself. If the man was expecting cooperation from Flavia de Luce, he would bloody well have to work for it.”

In this adventure, another murder follows, and past secrets surface. Flavia still is obsessed with chemicals and poisons, and in this book she actually finds a friend near her own age.

The best thing about Flavia de Luce is that I am confident that the Inspector’s worst fears will come true: She will not be able to stay out of further trouble. I hear that the next book is coming out this Fall!

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of The Franchise Affair, by Josephine Tey

Fiction Review, Mystery, Starred Review 0

The Franchise Affair

by Josephine Tey

Scribner Paperback Fiction (Simon & Schuster), 1998. First published in 1949. 300 pages.
Starred Review

After discovering Josephine Tey’s mysteries with her classic The Daughter of Time, I’ve been reading all the other Josephine Tey books I can find. If you like cozy mysteries, these remind me of Agatha Christie’s, but seem more unpredictable, much less uniform.

The Franchise Affair is a mystery completely different from any other I’ve ever read. The crime is not a perplexing murder this time. No, a woman and her elderly mother have been accused of a crime. Marion, the woman, asks country lawyer Robert Blair for help when Scotland Yard shows up at her house. They have a sixteen-year-old girl with them who claims that Marion and her mother abducted the girl and kept her locked up in their house for two weeks, treating her like a slave and abusing her. Marion has never seen the girl before in her life, but the girl has descriptions she couldn’t have come up with if she hadn’t been in the house — could she?

The case is unusual and definitely intriguing. If Robert believes Marion, how can he find out what really happened? How did the girl come up with such plausible testimony? And where was she really for those two weeks?

Josephine Tey presents the case beautifully and even throws in a bit of romance. An ingenious and delightful mystery. If you’re in the mood for a good old-fashioned cozy that yet isn’t quite like any other, I highly recommend The Franchise Affair.

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of I, Librarian: Rex Libris, Volume I, by James Turner

Adventure, Fiction Review, Graphic Novel, Science Fiction 0

I, Librarian
Rex Libris, Volume 1

by James Turner

SLG Publishing, 2007.

I apologize to my readers, but I do have a soft spot for Super-Hero Librarians. And that’s what Rex Libris is all about!

This is a graphic novel of the adventures of the amazing Rex Libris, who travels through the galaxies if someone doesn’t return a book. It’s incredibly silly, but quite clever, and definitely diverting fun.

The caption at the beginning will give you the idea:

“Welcome, adventurous reader, to the first issue of Rex Libris, Public Librarian. Here you will find, for the first time in print ever, the tumultuous tales of the public library system and its unending battle against the forces of evil. This struggle is not just confined to our terrestrial sphere but extends out into the farthest reaches of the cosmos… and beyond! The librarian has faced patrons so terrible, so horrific, that they cannot be described here without the risk of driving readers mad. But enough prattle and preamble! Settle back with a cup of coffee and a donut (or other pastry if you prefer), and prepare to enter the secret world of…

REX LIBRIS.”

The other librarians at the Middleton Public Library are quite interesting, too. I love it when Circe explains to her co-worker:

“Oh, we all mellow with age, dear.

“I’m over 2000 years old. My trouble-making days are long behind me. Wreaking havoc and seducing adventuring heroes is for young people. These days I like to curl up with a good book and a hot cup of tea.”

Meanwhile, Rex is taking on space beings in an effort to get back a copy of Principia Mathematica.

Like I said, it’s all very silly, but we librarians need to be aware of how we are portrayed in literature, don’t we?

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of The Sheen on the Silk, by Anne Perry

Fiction Review, Historical, Mystery, Starred Review 0

The Sheen on the Silk

by Anne Perry

Ballantine Books, New York, 2010. 518 pages.
Starred Review

I have enjoyed Anne Perry’s Christmas mysteries, and have been meaning to read more of her work. However, I wasn’t sure if I should tackle her different series at the beginning, or just dive in with her latest. So when I saw she’d written a stand-alone novel set in ancient Byzantium, I decided this would be a good time to start. I knew she is good with historical fiction, and I was not disappointed.

The book is set in thirteenth-century Constantinople. Anna Zarides has come to the city disguised as a eunuch with the goal of clearing her twin brother’s name. He has been charged with the murder of a political figure and exiled to Jerusalem.

Anna stays in Constantinople for years and gets embroiled in the politics and intrigue. The whole city expects Rome and Venice to attack Constantinople as part of the next Crusade — unless the city can compromise their religious convictions and convince Rome they are all one church.

Anna gets a patron early on in the powerful Zoe Chrysaphes, whose heart is set on vengeance. She was there when Constantinople was first overthrown and is determined to get revenge on the families of the people responsible. But Zoe also seems to be embroiled in the attack which Anna’s brother was exiled for.

Anne Perry shows us Anna solving the mystery, but also gets us involved in the currents and cross-currents of the plans to attack Constantinople — or divert the attack. We also get caught up in the story of Venetian Guiliano Dandolo, whose ancestor led the earlier attack on Venice, but whose mother was Byzantine. Anna makes friends with him, yet all the while she’s holding on to the secret that she is a woman. If her masquerade is discovered, especially after she’s served as physician to the Emperor, she could be executed.

The beautifully woven saga in this book will draw you in to a world far removed from our own. Anne Perry makes you feel you understand it, in all its complexity. You’ll root for Anna to clear her brother’s name, and even more, for Constantinople to be saved.

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Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of The Postmistress, by Sarah Blake

Fiction Review, Historical, Starred Review 0

The Postmistress

by Sarah Blake

Amy Einhorn Books (Penguin), New York, 2010. 326 pages.
Starred Review

I had the library book of The Postmistress actually sitting on my bedside table with my bookmark right in the middle when I saw a line at ALA Annual Conference where the publisher was giving away copies of the book for you to have the author sign. I was enjoying the book very much, so I eagerly got in line and got her signature.

This is a story of World War II and lives that intertwined in England and in America.

Frankie Bard, an American radio reporter in London during the war introduces the story:

“There were years after it happened, after I’d returned from the town and come back here to the busy blank of the city, when some comment would be tossed off about the Second World War and how it had gone — some idiotic remark about clarity and purpose — and I’d resist the urge to stub out my cigarette and bring the dinner party to a satisfying halt. But these days so many wars are being carried on in full view of all of us, and there is so much talk of pattern and intent (as if a war can be conducted like music), well, last night I couldn’t help myself.

” ‘What would you think of a postmistress who chose not to deliver the mail?’ I asked.

” ‘Don’t tell me any more,’ a woman from the far end of the table cried in delight, shining and laughing between the candles. ‘I’m hooked already.’

“I watched the question take hold. Mail, actual letters written by hand, being pocketed undelivered. What a lark! Anything might happen….

“Never mind, I thought. I am old. And tired of the terrible clarity of the young. And all of you are young these days.

“Long ago, I believed that, given a choice, people would turn to good as they would to the light. I believed that reporting — honest, unflinching pictures of the truth — could be a beacon to lead us to demand that wrongs be righted, injustices punished, and the weak and the innocent cared for. I must have believed, when I started out, that the shoulder of public opinion could be put up against the door of public indifference and would, when given the proper direction, shove it wide with the power of wanting to stand on the side of the angels.

“But I have covered far too many wars — reporting how they were seeded, nourished, and let sprout — to believe in angels anymore, or, for that matter, in a single beam of truth to shine into the dark. Every story — love or war — is a story about looking left when we should have been looking right.

“Or so it seems to me.”

The Postmistress is a story of a postmistress who is new to a small New England town in 1940. It tells what happens that results in a fine upstanding conscientious woman not delivering a letter.

It’s also the story of the other people of the town: a young doctor and his wife, a man who watches for German submarines landing off the coast, and what people in the town think of the war “over there.” It’s the story of a war correspondent writing stories for the radio that catch people’s imaginations back home. And it’s the story of why Frankie Bard came to visit that little town.

This story is richly textured and intriguing. It gives you a taste of what it must have been like in London during the Blitz. But mostly, it tells you the story of fallible humans trying to do what’s right in extraordinary times, humans who each have their own stories, but whose stories become intertwined.

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a signed copy I got at ALA Annual Conference.

Review of The Man in the Queue, by Josephine Tey

Audiobooks, Fiction Review, Mystery, Starred Review 0

The Man in the Queue

by Josephine Tey
Read by Stephen Thorne

Chivers Audio Books, 2000. First published in 1929. Complete and Unabridged. 6 cassettes.
Starred Review

After listening to Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time, I’m on a Josephine Tey binge. It turns out that this one, The Man in the Queue, was the first one she wrote, while The Daughter of Time was the last.

The Man in the Queue, naturally enough, is not about a historical mystery like Daughter of Time. However, it’s a good classic whodunit. The detective, Alan Grant of Scotland Yard, is the same one who solves the mystery in the later book. Already we see his “flare,” his sense of people, knowing who’s telling the truth.

The mystery is intriguing. There’s a large queue to get into one of the last nights of a play in London. When the queue starts moving, and gets up to the front of the line, a man falls over on his face, and it turns out that he is dead, stabbed in the back.

The man has no identification on him, but he has a revolver in his pocket. No one comes forward to identify him. So Grant must not only figure out who killed him; he must also figure out who the man is and why he was in the queue with a revolver in his pocket. No one in the queue with him noticed anything, not even if someone had left the queue. They all claim to have never seen the dead man before in their lives.

The only trouble with my Josephine Tey binge is that these audiobooks always make me feel like I’ve gotten to my destination much too quickly, and I want to sit for awhile in the car and hear more.

The book is not politically correct — the main suspect is called “The Dago” for most of the book. But it’s fun to have discovered a classic mystery author of the same style as Agatha Christie, but whose books are all new to me.

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Fiction/man_in_the_queue.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of Baking Cakes in Kigali, by Gaile Parkin

Cross Cultural, Fiction Review, General, Literary, Starred Review 0

Baking Cakes in Kigali

by Gaile Parkin

Atlantic Books, London, 2009. 361 pages.
Starred Review

This enjoyable yet surprisingly deep book reminded me of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, by Alexander McCall Smith. Both books are set in Africa, though this one in war-torn Rwanda instead of peaceful Botswana. But in both books, the main character’s profession lets her get to know people from a wide variety of backgrounds and help solve their problems and bring people together. Precious Ramotswe is a detective, but the protagonist of this book, Angel Tungaraza, bakes cakes.

We learn quickly that baking cakes in Kigali is a much more artistic endeavor than baking cakes in America:

“In the same way that a bucket of water reduces a cooking fire to ashes — a few splutters of shocked disbelief, a hiss of anger, and then a chill all the more penetrating for having so abruptly supplanted intense heat — in just that way, the photograph that she now surveyed extinguished all her excitement.

“‘Exactly like this?’ she asked her guest, trying to keep any hint of regret or condemnation out of her voice.

“‘Exactly like that,’ came the reply, and the damp chill of disappointment seeped into her heart….

“‘As you know, Angel,’ the ambassador’s wife was saying, ‘it’s traditional to celebrate a silver wedding anniversary with a cake just like the original wedding cake. Amos and I feel it’s so important to follow our traditions, especially when we’re away from home.’

“‘That is true, Mrs Ambassador,’ agreed Angel, who was herself away from home. But as she examined the photograph, she was doubtful of the couple’s claim to the traditions that they had embraced when choosing this cake twenty-five years ago. It was not like any traditional wedding cake she had seen in her home town of Bukoba in the west of Tanzania or in Dar es Salaam in the east. No, this cake was traditional to Wazungu, white people. It was completely white: white with white patterns decorating the white. Small white flowers with white leaves encircled the outer edges of the upper surface, and three white pillars on top of the cake held aloft another white cake that was a smaller replica of the one below. It was, quite simply, the most unattractive cake that she had ever seen. Of course, Mr and Mrs Wanyika had married at a time when the style of Wazungu was still thought to be fashionable — prestigious, even. But by now, in the year 2000, surely everybody had come to recognize that Wazungu were not the authorities on style and taste that they were once thought to be? Perhaps if she showed Mrs Wanyika the pictures of the wedding cakes that she had made for other people, she would be able to convince her of the beauty that colours could bring to a cake.”

Angel and her husband are from Tanzania. They lost both their adult children to AIDS, and now must take care of their five grandchildren.

“It’s only that we won’t be able to provide for these children as well as we did for our first children. But we must try by all means to give them a good life. That’s why we decided to leave Tanzania and come here to Rwanda. There’s aid money for the university and they’re paying Pius so much more as a Special Consultant than he was getting at the university in Dar. Okay, Rwanda has suffered a terrible thing. Terrible, Mrs Ambassador; bad, bad, bad. Many of hearts here are filled with pain. Many of the eyes here have seen terrible things. Terrible! But many of those same hearts are now brave enough to hope, and many of those same eyes have begun to look towards the future instead of the past. Life is going on, everyday. And for us the pluses of coming here are many more than the minuses. And my cake business is doing well because there are almost no shops here that sell cakes. A cake business doesn’t do well in a place where people have nothing to celebrate.”

Although Angel herself is dealing with some heavy losses, and so are the people around her, she is able to touch people’s lives — from convincing a mother to give her daughter a better name than Goodenough to providing family for a couple getting married who have lost all of their own families. This is an uplifting book and provides enjoyable and interesting reading.

One fun note: I was watching the DVD series of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, which is filmed in Africa, and the first episode happened to have someone selling cakes. I noticed happily that those cakes were indeed far fancier and more colorful than cakes I’d see in America. So apparently I’ve learned something true about baking cakes in Kigali.

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Fiction/baking_cakes_in_kigali.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.