Books Completed Since April 1

 The Kiss Quotient, Helen Hoang
I read the second book in this trilogy, The Bride Test, first. It made me cry. This one did, too.

Stella Lane is a whiz at her job—she configures algorithms to predict customer purchases, which is perfect for someone with high-functioning autism—but her social skills are low and at thirty her parents are nagging her about getting married. Her sexual experiences so far haven't been sterling because she really has no idea how to react. So she decides to hire a professional escort to teach her the ropes.

Michael Tran is quite good at what he does, but he doesn't do it because he wants to—he has debts he needs to pay off. He figures he'll take on Stella's project; what he doesn't count on is Stella becoming special to him. Nor does socially awkward Stella realize until she meets Michael that maybe she doesn't need "lessons," she just needs someone to understand her.

All of Helen Hoang's books that I've read so far involve neurodivergent people navigating living in a neurotypical world. I've especially enjoyed them since I've always suspected I'm slightly on the spectrum.

I have what looks like the final book in this trilogy, The Heart Principle, to read next month. I'm whipping out the hankies in advance.

 The Road From the Past: Traveling Through History in France, Ina Caro
I loved Caro's Paris to the Past (day trips you could take on the road or railway to French historic sites from Paris) so much that I had to pick up this earlier book I found at the library sale. The watercolor cover of an old French village was so compelling. And indeed, Caro's chronological history of France, told from its first Roman ruins in Orange through the residences of Louis XIV takes us through some picturesque places indeed: castles, fortresses, palaces, aqueducts, monuments, all set among the lovely French countryside where Caro and husband Bob enjoy the food (sometimes—tourist traps seem to undo them) and roll their eyes at the rude tourguides who don't like people who don't speak French.

But it's a lot of French history, so as much as I like history and old buildings, this was rather a slog to get through. If you're a Francophile historian, come here first!

 The Annotated Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster
What I would have done without the school libraries at Stadium Elementary and Hugh B. Bain Junior High? We were over a mile from both the Arlington and the Auburn libraries and Mom didn't drive; the books at Arlington were so old that the most recently published volumes still had cars with running boards. Stadium and Bain gave me wonderful adventures like Miss Pickerill, Johnny Tremain, The Green Poodles, my first Heinlein juveniles, A Wrinkle in Time (thank you, Judy Martini, for recommending it!), and so many more. And it gave me The Phantom Tollbooth, a daft-looking book with scrawly illustrations by cartoonist Jules Feiffer, whose work I saw in the newspaper. I'd never read a book like Tollbooth, with its literal use of idioms, its fantastic wordplay, the ideas of infinity and bravery and other concepts it put into my brain. Milo, the boy who didn't know what to do with himself; Tock, the Watchdog (literally); the braggart Humbug; Chroma, the conductor who directed the colors of the universe; Dr. Dischord and the Terrible Dynn—they all lived now in my head as beloved friends.

What a joy to find this annotated edition and so much information on the illusive Norton Juster, the things that almost made it into the story (a chocolate moose?), and how he edited unceasingly until every word made The Phantom Tollbooth, like Mary Poppins, "practically perfect in every way."

  On Writing, Stephen King
This is King's memoir about growing up almost from the beginning with stories in his head, and having to tell the tales. Between great writing and editing tips—he got some of his best advice writing for the school paper—you get some glimpses of his childhood and his teen years—including the time he almost got expelled for insulting a teacher in a "humor" magazine he printed and brought to school in which he cruelly skewered each of his teachers—and then his meeting Tabitha Spruce, who later became his wife.

Unfortunately, you have to get through his alcohol and drug addiction. That part was very distasteful.

 The Dead Guy Next Door, Lucy Score
This book looked like such fun. And parts of it were fun. But a good comedy should be short and sweet. Four hundred and sixty pages of cute retorts, car chases, weird goings on, and strange characters was about 200 pages too much.

Riley Thorn's goofy mom is psychic, and so is she, but she suppresses and denies her visions of the future. She married a well-known television anchor, then he divorced her and for some reason she has to pay alimony. Broke, she lives in this appallingly awful rooming house with a bunch of elderly people who I guess are supposed to be funny and adorable, but are neither. She has to share a bathroom with a disgusting guy named Dick who flashes her and leaves his dirty underwear out for her to find. One day she has a vision of him being shot. But who's she going to report it to? When she tries to hint about the threat to the police obliquely, she becomes the prime suspect when he is killed. Then a friend asks ex-police detective Nick Santiago to investigate further. Gorgeous and handsome Nick sees sexy and flaky Riley and the attraction is on.

The story just goes on, and on, with witty banter after witty banter, almost sexual encounters, Riley's totally irritating elderly neighbors, her dippy mother...I couldn't wait to finish this one. Will not go on with the series.

  In the Form of a Question, Amy Schneider
In general, I enjoyed this book. I have trans friends and I was especially interested in Amy's narrative of being born in a male body but never feeling as if she belonged there. (I was quite surprised that she was so open with her "dead name," as so many trans people are reluctant to reveal that information, although I can understand why.) That was the best part of this book, also finding out that she was a Daria fan, her interest in tarot, etc. I was less fond of the parts where she talks about open marriages—of course, if it works for the couple, it's fine, it just made me uncomfortable, and that's my problem—and where she talks about using drugs. I don't even like taking prescription drugs, and mind-altering drugs or sedatives/uppers creep me out, so I was happy to leave that chapter behind, too.

And, after awhile, the cutesy little footnotes in every single chapter got on my nerves.

  Weather Girl, Rachel Lynn Solomon
Ari Abrams has loved the weather since she was a child, and she almost has her dream job at Seattle's KSEA television, where she's the "weather girl"  under the aegis of Torrance Hale, her idol and the station's chief meteorologist. "Almost perfect" because Hale isn't giving Ari much direction and also because her feud with station owner—and ex-husband—Seth Hasegawa makes working conditions at KSEA a little rocky—even though it's clear the couple still love each other. After an inebriated December holiday party in which Hale throws one of Hasegawa's awards out a hotel window, Ari and her buddy from the sports department, Russell Barringer, decide to start doing little, anonymous things to bring their bosses' together, and perhaps make them think about having a fresh start.

But it also brings Ari and Russ together in ways they couldn't have imagined, to the point Ari thinks there might be a future between them—if she can keep her "bad days" covered up. For Ari, like her mother, suffers from depression, and believes she's unlovable if she doesn't keep the fact covered up.

A nice love story entwined with Ari's struggle to "be her sunny self" rather than letting her dark side show.

  Whoever Fights Monsters, Robert K. Ressler and Tom Shactman
If you watch Mindhunter on Netflix, Ressler is the person that Bill Tench, played by Holt McCallany, is based on. He was the man who coined "serial killer" as a name for repeat murderers with similar pathologies, and served as an advisor on Silence of the Lambs. In this volume he talks about how behavioral crime analysts form profiles, and some of the serial killers he has encountered, including Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, David Berkowitz, Ed Kemper, etc. While most of these men—serial killers are almost exclusively men—are spur-of-the-moment, disorganized, and unprepossessing, there are also some very cunning ones who view their killings as "games" with the police.

Worth reading for the reality behind television series like Criminal Minds and other psychological-based crime dramas.

  Georgie, All Along, Kate Clayborn
Georgie Mulcahy is suddenly floundering; her high-powered Hollywood boss Nadia has retreated to enjoy the simple life and personal assistant Georgie is out of a job. To collect her thoughts, she goes back to her east coast small-town birthplace to spend some time with her best friend Bel and her husband Harry, who are expecting their first child. Georgie plans to stay at her peripatetic hippie parents' empty house while she gets her life together, only to find town bad boy Levi Fanning housesitting. Georgie and Levi settle into an uneasy truce, and George finds among her childhood things a "friendfic" she and Bel wrote together before going to high school about all the things she planned to do in high school and then in the future. To cheer herself up, Georgie decides to do a few of the things in the fic that she wrote about, and, to her surprise, grumpy Levi, who seems to figure he owes her one after she allows him to stay at her parents' house, volunteers to help her.

Yeah, it's a love story, so it goes where you think. It's a nice story, nothing special, but sweet. Levi's unforgiving father hangs like a big dark cloud over the whole story—I dare you to get through the story without wanting to slap the jerk—and the jokes about Hank (Levi's dog) farting got old fast. But a nice summer read about two old friends, a new one, and facing the future.

  Life in an Old New England Country Village: An Old Sturbridge Village Book, Catherine Fennelly
Found this at a book sale only to discover it was about Old Sturbridge Village. It's from 1969, and the first chapter talks about what it was like to live in New England following the Revolutionary War until shortly before the Civil War, and then the rest of the book enumerates the current buildings and displays at SV and how they fit into life 1776-1840. The Village, which we visited for the first time in 2015, as very much expanded since then, but it was fun to read the inception of Sturbridge and the histories of the first buildings on the site. Totally still worth picking up at a book sale if you're an OSV fan or a fan of early American history.

Books Completed Since March 1

  Sorry for the Dead, Nicola Upson
This eighth in the Josephine Tey mystery series was my first for Women's History month and tells a sad history indeed. Tey (whose real name was Elizabeth MacIntosh) is reimagined in Upson's mysteries as a playwright and later author who also solves mysteries. The book opens in 1948 basically with the conclusion of the story and then flashes back to 1938, where a nasty gossip-columnist type makes insinuations that Tey was involved in a murder in 1915. Then it further flashes back to 1915, when, during the first World War, Tey was sent to a horticultural college where young women are trying to make up for the absence of men on the homefront by becoming more self-sufficient in growing food for the British populace. However, one of the young women Tey is overseeing, a spoiled young rich girl, dies mysteriously in the greenhouse. Although the two women who own the college were cleared, there has always been resentment and hatred toward them because of suspicions they were lovers.

The 1938 portion of the novel takes place at the time the Lillian Hellman play The Children's Hour was raising eyebrows for its discussion of lesbianism, and the bulk of the novel is more a damning social commentary about how "deviant" behaviors were treated in 1915. The women running the college are continually harassed, even though there is no proof of their "behavior" except the accusation from the girl who died. There is a sequence where one of the women is treated shamefully and something horrible done to her personally. It's more a psychological study of hatred of those "different" than a murder mystery until the final few chapters.

Slow-moving but telling throughout, and we learn something of Josephine's early life and how she met her good friend Detective Inspector Archie Penrose.

  Notes from the Underwire, Quinn Cummings
Remember cute little Lucy from The Good-bye Girl? And smart little Annie Cooper on Family? For a while you couldn't go anywhere in media without seeing cute little Quinn Cummings—and then she grew up, gave up acting, became a mom, and decided to write hilarious books.

Think of Erma Bombeck in Hollywood and you've got Cummings' funny journey through the absurdities of her life, including running into a door at her daughter's art class location, her inevitable duels with her smart-as-a-whip child Alice (who at one point asks her mother to get her a cow's heart to dissect), the time she house-sat for a woman and was rewarded with being invited to her birthday party (only to turn out to be the "child-star guest entertainment" at the party), her adventures being a talent agent (including with an actor who didn't seem to want to act), the cat who catches all manner of small creatures and brings them home and the dog who doesn't want to be touched, and more. I laughed aloud through most of this book, except for the one serious chapter called "Dog Days" where she talks about Ursula, a rescue dog.

You also learn a lot about life behind the scenes in crazy Hollywood. Tempted to buy her other two books!

  The Silver Bullets of Annie Oakley, Mercedes Lackey
Well, now I'm disappointed again. First I got exasperated at Lackey's oh-so-obvious parody of Donald Trump in Eye Spy, and then the first of her "Founding of Valdemar" books was so good, and now this, the next in her Elemental Masters series, about Annie Oakley on tour in Europe with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, showed such promise. It opens with a basis in truth: Annie Oakley, then Annie Moses, was farmed out as a servant to a couple who abused and starved her. In Lackey's version, the couple are actually werwolves and the Alpha Male has a sinister future planned for Annie, but with some magical help, she escapes.

Fast forward: Annie and her supportive husband, Frank Butler, are now the big stars of Buffalo Bill's show. In winter quarters in Germany, just before Christmas, Annie meets Frida, who is also a sharpshooter, but with a bow, and her American husband Jack. They are also Elemental Masters who tell Annie she has magic and so does Frank. During the course of the winter Annie and Frank begin learning magic under the tutelage of Frida and Jack, and even hunt with the supernatural Hunters on Christmas Eve. Finally, the wild west show is back on the road, but Annie must receive her final tutelage of being an Air Master to defend herself from the werwolves.

This story builds and builds with endless description of the clockwork precision of how the Wild West show travels, the beautiful castle and decor of Frida's friends Theo and Sofia (she likes Art Nouveau, which we are told endlessly), the wonderful Christmas market, etc. And there are a few exciting scenes of the Hunters hunting demons on the town streets at night. But there's finally a moment were Annie has to receive her final training and she can't get it, so she gets it in an alternative way. Then she gets kidnapped by the big bad.

The whole climax that the story has been building toward is resolved basically in four pages. What? I expected her to meet this great enemy from her childhood which we've been told is terrifying and has some hold on Annie, and that she would have to fight the enemy off for five or six chapters. There might be some physical or psychological torture involved. Instead she does a basic bit of magic that was taught to her at the beginning of her training and...whap! story over! What happened? Did Lackey get bored and just decide to end it, or reach her page limit and decide she didn't want to get rid of the descriptions, so she got rid of Annie struggling against her enemy instead? I was waiting for a big payoff and instead it was pretty much solved by a finger snap. Really disappointed.

  What Abigail Did That Summer, Ben Aaronovitch
This is technically a re-read because I first read it when I got my first or second COVID vaccine in 2020 as an e-book. But I don't remember e-book plots unless I review them immediately (like the book above); it's like e-book print slides by my eyes. This novella takes place in Aaronovitch's "Rivers of London" universe at the same time as the novel Foxglove Summer. While apprentice wizard Peter Grant is in the country involved in a fey kidnapping, his neighbor Abigail Kamara meets an offbeat kid named Simon who lets her know that teenagers are disappearing in the area of Hampstead Heath and then returning with no memory of where they have been. It's here Abigail gets involved with the foxes Indigo and Sugar Niner (as part of her esoteric powers, she can speak to foxes), who help her with the mystery of the missing teens, which involves Simon's mum (a government type), the crazy Cat Lady on the Heath, and a house under renovation that happens to be a genius loci.

Abigail narrates in a lot of slang which is duly translated, and it's magic from a different perspective than Peter's, which I found interesting, but many people did not. She's a precocious kid with street smarts and a terminally ill brother, gutsy as all hell, and a level head. The problem with the house is intriguing, and I enjoyed this "side visit" to Peter's world.

  Fatal Fried Rice, Vivien Chien
Lana Lee runs Ho-Lee Noodle House, the family business, in Cleveland's Asia Village, and, despite her earlier misgivings, does the job well. But the one thing she's never learned to do well is cook, so, on the sly, she decides to take an adult learning course in cooking Chinese food. The first night goes well, until Lana returns to the school for the grocery list she forgot and finds her cooking instructor, Margo Han, dead on the floor, stabbed in the back. She and the janitor call the police, and find themselves suspected of the crime by Detective Bishop.

Of course Lana, who's already faced murder mysteries in the previous six books in the series, feels she needs to look into the crime, if nothing else to clear herself, so with the help of her best friend and roommate Megan Riley, her childhood friend Kimmy Tran, and even a little assistance from her police officer boyfriend Adam Trudeau, Lana starts discreetly asking questions; in the meantime a fellow classmate, Bridget Hastings, is also interested in the crime. Can Lana get Detective Bishop off her back? And what's with the mysterious photographs sent to Margo Han? Could she have been having an affair with whomever killed her?

Still wondering why Adam has started calling Lana "dollface," which is very noir, and, even worse, "woman." I'm almost starting to hope Ian Feng makes a play for her, because I'm starting to find Adam a little annoying. About average for this series, although the ending felt a little rushed.

 Re-read: The Secret History of Home Economics, Danielle Dreilinger
If I say "home ec" (or as it was called when I was in junior high, "homemaking"), what do you think? Me, it brings back mostly unhappy memories of dull cooking classes when we made "surprise muffins" (with jelly fillings) and disgusting pea-ham-and-cheese casseroles, and sewing classes where we made a pillow with an embroidered cover and an A-line skirt. But in Dreilinger's fascinating study of home economics, what we find are women who used home ec to not only break into scientific fields at a time when a woman was expected to be a wife and baby tender, but to make solid contributions to American life (like devising healthy meals during the "wheatless, meatless days" during World War I and rationing during World War II).

Catharine Beecher is first noted as a prototype for the trailblazing home economists; the spinster sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe and brother of the rock-star-like preacher Henry Ward Beecher, Catharine was as highly educated as her brother and became a teacher, writing the bestselling A Treatise on Domestic Economy, not just how to cook and clean house, but how keeping a good home led to a  successful life. Her two spiritual descendants were white Ellen H. Swallow Richards, an ambitious New England girl who could talk literature, milk cows, and keep house, and—well, talk about the people who get excised from history: I've heard from childhood about Booker T. Washington and his efforts to advance racial equality; I had never heard about his third wife, Margaret Murray Washington, who was the first Black home economist, and all the effort she put into making life better for the African-American woman, despite barriers thrown at her left and right. I found myself inspired by this seemingly indomitable woman.

Sadly, Richards and her comrades never integrated to join forces with Washington and her followers; together they would have been an awesome organization. Others followed in their footsteps: Flora Rose and Martha Van Rensselaer, soulmates from the beginning; Lillian Moller Gilbreth, who graduated college (gasp! and she was even pretty!) with a home ec degree and after her husband's death became a noted industrial advisor; Annie Dewey, whose husband was Melvil Dewey of the Dewey Decimal System; Fabiola Cabeza de Baca Gilbert, who, as the only Spanish-speaking member of the organization was sent to the American southwest; and Mollie and Russell Smart, who enjoyed true professional and domestic equality in their marriage but still persisted in writing "the party line" about women as homemakers. These are only a few of the great people you'll meet in this narrative.

By the way, for God's sake don't think of this as a "woman's book." My husband is currently reading it and is enjoying it as much as I did, and I can almost hear him rolling his eyes at the old-fashioned sentiments quoted by the professionals of the times, like college professors saying women didn't have enough brain power to complete a typical college curriculum, or personnel departments not wanting to hire women because "they had no control of their emotions during their menstrual periods." An absolutely fabulous sociological read!

  A Sunlit Weapon, Jacqueline Winspear
In the newest Maisie Dobbs mystery, Jo Hardy, an ATA (women's air transport) who found a black American flyer tied up in a barn and is afraid the man will be blamed for the death of his white companion who disappeared is advised to consult with Maisie for his sake.

Happily married to American agent Mark Scott for a year, Maisie still runs her investigative agency as well as cares for her adopted daughter Anna, who lives near her grandparents in Kent. But the case with the black American soldier, who worked with the white flyer on a nearby Kent farm, coincides with Anna having troubles at school due to the color of her skin. Maisie soon becomes concerned for the soldier as well, knowing the conditions under which black Americans live. When she finds a message in the barn that looks like code, Mark is suddenly drawn into the mystery.

This newest Dobbs is a satisfying mixture of World War II domestic troubles, the usual complicated Maisie mystery, and several subjects that have been covered in one of the Maggie Hope mysteries, including the bigotry of the time, Eleanor Roosevelt's travels, and female air transport pilots.

 The Royal Diaries: Victoria, May Blossom of Britannia, Anna Kirwan
In real life, Queen Victoria was an avid diarist who began writing journals at the age of thirteen; in this fictionalized diary, we see Victoria at ages ten through twelve, writing in a diary that is essentially an old account book of cows in the royal herd. From babyhood, Victoria has had no privacy—her mother sleeps with her, she is surrounded by servants—and the diary is the only place she can record her private thoughts, including the hatred she has for Sir John Conroy, who seems to have a hold on her widowed mother, the former wife of the deceased Duke of Kent, son of King George III.

The story has us see the frustration of young Victoria as she is put through a tiresome plan of education called "the Kensington System" to prepare her for possibly becoming the monarch someday, and how she misses her half-sister Feodora, who moved to Germany following her wedding, and of the pleasures of being a princess that are tempered much by rules, regulations, and her education. She can't even go barefoot or play with other children as she likes, and must put up with Toire, Sir John's stoolpigeon daughter, as her only playmate.

The story is very ambling as it attempts to tell of the strict education of a princess, even though some shocking things are revealed to her (her uncle's illegitimate children, Conroy's possible physical abuse of Victoria's mother). Enjoyable but not unforgettable.

Books Completed Since February 1

  Paper Son, S.J. Rozan

Lydia Chin is stunned when her mother calls her to help a family member, and to bring her partner Bill Smith, whom Mrs. Chin hates, along. She's more astonished to discover she has family in the Mississippi Delta. Because the U.S. government once set restrictions on Chinese immigrants, her great-grandfather's brother had come over as a "paper son," with fake papers saying he was another man's son so he could gain entry, and he ended up founding a grocery store in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Now a descendant of this brother, Jefferson Tam, has been arrested for killing his father. Anyone, Lydia's mother believes, who is related to her husband's family, cannot be guilty. Therefore, Lydia (and Bill) must head to Clarksdale to clear his name and find the real culprit.

 

Bill, who's from the South, fares much better than streetwise Lydia when they arrive. She's surprised to find that there are (or were at one time) many Chinese grocery stores in Mississippi because they were the only ones who would serve black customers. As the investigation deepens, Lydia discovers that what's going on is all about family...including some long-held secrets.

Besides being a great mystery in an unusual place for our protagonists, there's a lot to think about concerning racism in the past that still affects people today and how a single choice in the past can set up tragedy in the future. Plus it's great to see Lydia, with her urban upbringing, trying to understand what makes a small Mississippi town tick.

 

  The Happy Hollisters and the Cuckoo Clock Mystery, Jerry West

In entry 24 in the series, Joey Brill the brat actually does something wrong that has a good result: his throwing rocks at the windows of the Trading Post damages some imported cuckoo clocks, leading the children (Pete, age 12, Pam, 10, seven-year-old Ricky, and Holly, age 6, plus 4-year-old Sue) and their parents on a trip to the Black Forest of Germany, following the rhyme on a piece of paper they find in one of the broken clocks. It turns out a priceless golden cuckoo clock vanished from a German museum, and the verse just may lead them to it!

 

It's funny reading these now seeing how casually Mr. and Mrs. Hollister can just pick up tickets and take the kids off to Europe. The neighbors are always happy to take care of the Hollister pets, and Mr. Hollister can always count on his assistants at the store to keep everything running smoothly. And once again it's kind of part mystery, part Rick Steves tour of the Black Forest, though not so intense as the books about Denmark and the other about the Netherlands.

 

Stuff that makes you know this was written in the past: Pete gets really excited because the car Mr. Hollister rents is a Mercedes-Benz! Now those cars are all over the road.

 

The question never answered: Did anyone punish Joey for the cuckoo clock damage? Really, that kid belongs in reform school or in therapy.

 

  Death With a Double Edge, Anne Perry

This is Perry's fourth book in her series about Daniel Pitt, son of Special Branch head Sir Thomas Pitt and his wife Charlotte, who were the protagonists of Perry's first mystery series, and so far the best, possibly because both elder Pitts are involved. It begins slowly, when Daniel is called to identify a body he believes, due to the coat the person was wearing, is his fellow solicitor, Toby Kitteridge. To his relief, but also to his consternation, the body is instead that of Jonah Drake, one of the elder partners at fforde-Croft and Gibson, and he has been savaged by someone wielding a large knife or sword. Daniel and Kitteridge, as well as their superior Marcus fforde-Croft, begin investigating as they know it will reflect badly on their law office, and soon they are fairly sure the murder has something to do with one of Drake's prior cases, one that was still unsolved although Drake was able to get the court to acquit the accused, Evan Faber, the son of famed shipbuilder Erasmus Faber, the latter who's using his special skill to demand favors from the government.

As I said, starts off slowly and then the plot speeds up as more deaths occur and Daniel, Kitteridge, and even Pitt and Charlotte attempt to put clues together. The last eight or nine chapters pull into high gear as we get a glimpse into the crime and what the criminals are willing to do to keep their secrets hidden. While I had a feeling an introduced character was significant to the story, I had no idea of the plot twist that would make this character be more significant than it appeared at first!

Miriam fforde-Croft, who has been Daniel's sleuthing companion in the previous three books, is in Europe studying for a medical degree which she cannot get in England (the Dutch being more enlightened in women's education in 1911), and only appears near the end, but Daniel's work with Kitteridge, and in a small part with Roman Blackwell and his mother, and especially with his own parents more than makes up for her absence. If you read the series, and have read the Charlotte/Pitt books (mention is made to several of the books, chiefly to the first, The Cater Street Hangman), you will surely love this one.

 

  Re-read: Murder Must Advertise, Dorothy L. Sayers

It was only a step from extracting a quotation from this book to wanting to re-read it. The television production, starring Ian Carmichael, which showed on Masterpiece Theater back when I was in college, was my first exposure to Sayers and Lord Peter Wimsey. I bought the book—not just the book, but the whole series of books, having been besotted at once, and this one is still my favorite.

An advertising copywriter at Pym's Publicity, an ad agency, is killed in a supposed accidental fall down a staircase in the office. A suspicious letter having shown up in the man's desk leads Mr. Pym to find someone who can do a discreet investigation. Enter Lord Peter, posing as wide-eyed, polite but nosy Mr. Death Bredon (Peter's two middle names) who soon comes to believe the death was no accident. He also found out the copywriter was hanging out with a group of Bright Young Things, the wild British youth of the years between the wars, who were into thrills, fast cars, alcohol and lots of drugs, and soon insinuates himself in that crowd. At the same time, Wimsey's brother-in-law, Chief Inspector Parker of Scotland Yard, is trying desperately to figure out where all the dope is coming from.

 

Sayers, who worked for an advertising agency for nine years, not only creates a topping mystery, but nicely skewers the advertising business as she does so, creating a collection of memorable characters at Pym's, including "Miss Meteyard of Somerville," who appears to be an avatar of Sayers herself.

You don't need to have read the earlier books in the series, but they're all excellent as well (well, Five Red Herrings is a tad dull) and you'll find out more about Peter's family (including his delightful mother the Dowager Duchess), his impeccable manservant Bunter (who seems to be on holiday in this volume), and his other adventures. (Oh, and if you've only seen the Ian Carmichael TV version, do read the book—characters had to be concatenated for television, and scenes excised, so there are more situations, and a climactic cricket game that finally puts Wimsey on to the murderer.)

  Spying on the South, Tony Horwitz

Having read Horwitz's A Voyage Long and Strange and having a copy of Blue Latitudes and Confederates in the Attic, I was tempted to buy this book when I saw it at Costco just after Horwitz's sudden death a few days after it was published. If you're like me, when you hear the name "Frederick Law Olmstead," you think of his wonderful landscaping milestones in North American history: Central Park and Prospect Park in New York City, Mount Royal Park in Montreal, the "Emerald Necklace" of parks in Boston, and Biltmore Estates in Asheville, North Carolina, just to name a few. But before Olmstead became a full time designer of parks, he was a correspondent for the then-new "New-York Times." As the factors that led to the U.S. Civil War grew and became uglier, Olmstead, under the pen name "Yeoman," made two tours of the South in the 1850s. he wished, he indicated in his first piece for the "Times," to publish a a series that was as close to unprejudiced as possible about the Southern side of the fast-emerging conflict, and intended to interview, rationally, slave owners. After all, slavery had been a common human practice since time immemorial. Were the stories of the brutality of its practice being exaggerated? But once he made the actual trips, he not only found out things were worse than Northern readers imagined, but that he couldn't keep his feelings out of the way slaves were treated in the supposedly "civilized" places he visited.

Horwitz retraces Olmstead's path on his second trip in 1853-1854 from Baltimore around the edge of the slave states all the way down to Texas, with side trips to Lexington, Nashville, New Orleans, and even to Mexico, and reports on the working-class people he meets along the route: barge workers in Ohio, old plantations, Cajuns, African-American churches, "mudders" who race trucks, landmarks like the Alamo, and finally on a mule-back trail ride with a muleskinner who does his best to make Horwitz give up.

In general I enjoyed this book because of the different people he met, but as someone who's lived in Georgia since 1984, I find it a bit hard to believe that it was so difficult for him to meet normal people on his route. Or did he and just not include them in his book because the people who had boat races and ate alligator meat and believed weird theories were just more interesting to write about? I've met everyone down here from good ol' boy elderly men who think women only work for "pin money" to groups who do their damnest to help everyone, and it seems the majority of people he talked to were offbeat and ate weird food.

By the way, I was amused that I picked this up to read after enjoying Rozan's Paper Son. He did actually go down to Mississippi and found out about the Chinese stores in small Mississippi towns.

 

  Anything for a Laugh, Bennett Cerf

When Cerf published two collections of jokes and tall tales, he thought that was that, and it was why, in the introduction to this second collection (with a third collection coming out soon), he declared that the third "will be the last books of this sort that will bear my name for a long time to come."

 

Oh, Bennett, had you only known in 1946 what you realized in the 1970s! For I wore out my paperback copy of Laugh Day until it literally fell apart, and bought The Sound of Laughter, and many other older Cerf collections up until this very day, and never got over my amusement for them. Naturally, this book was published a few generations ago, and a lot of the familiar celebrity names in 1946, which I know but anyone born after, say 1980, probably have never heard of, and so these stories won't be as funny. Several more rely on humor we try to eschew today. But I have to say I enjoyed Anything for a Laugh just as much as I enjoyed Laugh Day as a teen (even if I didn't know who the heck Toots Shor was back then), and I'll probably keep collecting Cerf humor collections until they or I are no more. Here's to you, Bennett!

 

  The Mitford Murders, Jessica Fellowes

I picked this up the day poor James had to go to Urgent Care with his infected foot (and shipped off to the hospital a day later), and didn't resume reading it until February was a few days old. It's the story of Louisa Cannon, who lives in a poor part of London with her mother, a washerwoman, and her sponging layabout uncle, who taught her how to pickpocket and now, that she's outgrown her childish figure, seems to want to sell her body as well. She escapes by literally fleeing his clutches off a train, helped by a friendly police detective Guy Sullivan, and gets back heading to a job interview as a nanny's assistant for the Mitford family. Sullivan has been brought to Hastings by a death on the train; the very obvious murder of Florence Nightingale Shore, goddaughter of the nurse hero of the Crimea and a nurse herself. When Nancy Mitford, almost of age, and eldest of the children that Louisa will be tending, discovers that Louisa was on the same train as Shore, her curiosity leads her to encourage Louisa to "help her" look into the crime. Headstrong Nancy gets her way, and soon they are embroiled in the crime far more than they should be.

Aside from the fact that I'd really never heard of the "infamous Mitford sisters" (except knowing the title of the book Nancy later wrote, Love in a Cold Climate—they were an eccentric bunch as children as well as adults: Deborah married the Duke of Devonshire, one became a communist, another was so enamored of Hitler that she shot herself (unsuccessfully) when Britain declared war on Germany, and a fourth married British Fascist Oswald Mosely), I enjoyed this 1920s-set tale written by Fellowes, who also wrote for Downton Abbey. It has the feel of a book written at the time without the casual racism and the worst of the classism, one of those stories where the background is as enjoyable as the story. I guessed the identity of the murder right off from what I thought was a very obvious clue, but Fellowes provided so many red herrings that I doubted my guess for much of the book. Louisa and Guy are both enjoyable characters, and while Nancy gets the lion's share of the attention in this volume, Fellowes tries to distinguish each younger sister as well. The three (so far) sequels focus on Louisa and the next three eldest daughters as they "enter society."

The one thing that bothered me is that this is based on a real murder case and Fellowes uses the actual names of the people involved in the case (not just the victim but her friends). Her choice of the murderer, then, was a little bit uncomfortable, since the actual case was never solved.

 

 Re-read: Stillmeadow and Sugarbridge, Gladys Taber and Barbara Webster

This fourth collection of Taber's Stillmeadow books forms a change of pace from chapters comprised from her magazine articles along with new, bridging narrative; instead these are letters exchanged between Gladys and her friend Barbara, also an author and the wife of Stillmeadow book illustrator Edward Shenton, during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Gladys has Stillmeadow, her 17th century Connecticut farmhouse in which she and her best friend garden, cook, and raise cocker spaniels along with the occasional Irish setter and a cat or two. Barbara and Ed live in Chester county, Pennsylvania, in an 18th century farmhouse, Sugarbridge, with a Great Dane named Duke and Barbara's horse, Chief. Gladys and Barbara are kindred spirits who, in their correspondence, address their various household happenings along with the events of the world (Gladys already worried about the affect nuclear bombs will have on the world) and the beauty of their respective countrysides. Gladys chats about the wise farmer next door, George, who has helped her and Jill so many times; Barbara reports on the elderly couple who live nearby who occasionally bring her treasures and how she wishes she could do something just as nice for them. Through both women's eyes we see the blooming spring, the busy summer, the contemplative autumn, and the frigid but festive winter, the funny actions of Gladys' spaniels, and the offbeat personality of Barbara's Dane. Beautifully written, with a sweet coda by Ed Shenton.

 

Sugarbridge was for sale in 2014; here are some photos of the house. I notice it is located on "Shenton Road"!

 

  Re-read: The Happiness Project, Gretchen Rubin

I read a lot of reviews of this book that started with "Huh! What has she got to be unhappy about? She has a great husband with a good job, two cute kids, a nice apartment in Manhattan, no money worries!" Indeed, Rubin comments about this herself. On a bus one morning, she wondered if she was "wasting" her life. "But too often I sniped at my husband or the cable guy...I lost my temper easily, I suffered bouts of melancholy, insecurity, listlessness...I had everything I could possibly want—yet I was failing to appreciate it... [M]y life wasn't going to change unless I made it change."

This book is the story of her year's project to make herself happier. This included rejecting impossible goals (like "I can be happy if..." followed by some magical target), setting goals she could reach, trying to improve her mood by being nice and/or helpful to others, looking deeply into herself to figure out what was making her unhappy, and realizing she had to change; she could not change anyone else. She set basic commandments, listed her own personal "secrets of adulthood," and each month concentrated on something she wanted to improve: health, relationships, spending, parenting values, etc.

But, you say, what if I don't want to improve some of the things she did? Well, that's fine. Each project should be tailored to you. One of her commandments is "Be Gretchen." The person reading the book has to be themself. You have to realize what you want to improve...in a year, or maybe only in six months, or perhaps you'll take more than a year. It must fit you. And if something doesn't work, you didn't fail. It just didn't work. There's no wrong way to do it.

Helpful even if it's just to get some prompts into how to look into yourself.

 

  Creating Sherlock Holmes, Charlotte Montague

This is one of those gift books that you frequently see on the remainder table, but it had vintage photos in it, and it wasn't expensive, so I couldn't resist. I have at least one of these for Sherlock Holmes, but this one is the story of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (filled out, of course, with summaries of all the Holmes stories). Usually the books are about Holmes with brief biographical data on Conan Doyle, so this was a novelty. It talks about his family, his other books, his service during the Boer War, his relationships with both his first wife Louise and his second wife Jean, his involvement with real crimes, and his involvement with spiritualism. In addition, the legacy of Holmes is considered, from adaptations of the stories for film and later television.

 

  The Four Tendencies, Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin didn't train as a psychologist; she was a law student who went as far as passing the bar and clerking for Sandra Day O'Connor before she realized what she really wanted to do was write. She had a good life, but noted that she was still often unhappy, which spurred her first book on self-improvement, The Happiness Project. Along the way, she noted that people could be classified as having four different tendencies: Upholder, Obliger (the one most people are), Questioners, and Rebels. She discussed them in her book about habits, Better Than Before, but this is a "deep dive" into the four tendencies. Each chapter addresses what defines the particular tendency, how this tendency will react when asked or told to do activities, and how to deal with reluctance, especially with Questioners and Rebels, including with children, and how a person with one tendency, who can't understand those with other tendencies, can learn to accept that others may not be able to think, act, or react like they do.

I still haven't figured out what I am, although I'm assured by my husband that I am an Obliger (one with Rebel tendencies; and apparently Obligers are so overwhelmed by their obliging nature that they regularly have obliger rebellion anyway). I ask a lot of questions, and doing so often delays what decisions I make, which is why I waffle about this. But all the tendencies make sense, and I can see where friends and family fit in.

 

  Mrs. Mohr Goes Missing, Maryla Szymiczkowa

This book has taken me nearly forever to read; I've had it about a year and finally left it in the bathroom so that during bouts of "unavoidable delay," as Frank Gilbreth would have called it, I would continue reading it. In 1893, in Cracow, Poland, Zofia Turbotynska leads a good—but in truth a little dull—life as the upper-class wife of a professor at the university. In looking for something to do, she decides to involve herself in a charity event for the almswomen of Helcel House, which appears to be a combination women's almshouse (poorhouse) and what we would call a retirement or nursing home for the more well-born, run by an order of Catholic sisters. As luck has it, Zofia's arrival coincides with one of the almswomen having disappeared—and a few days later Zofia is there again where the woman's body is found hidden behind some boxes in the attic. Because her death was suspicious, she is autopsied, and it turns out inoffensive Mrs. Mohr was poisoned, and Helcel House's cook is blamed. But then a second murder, much different from the first, occurs.

To me the big problem with this story is that the writers chose to compose the text in the style it would have been written in in 1893. I've read 19th century books and some of them have been easier than others. And, indeed, the old-fashioned writing really fits the situation; Zofia is a very old-fashioned woman despite her sleuthing, and the style does help capture 19th century Cracow society and several specific situations, like the night at the opera, the celebration of All Souls Day at the Cracow cemetery, and also the all-out massive funeral for the famous artist, for which nearly the entire city turns out. But you must be prepared to wade through Victorian verbiage to get to the meat of the mystery. Plus Zofia herself really isn't that likeable. She's pushy, nosy, and autocratic at times, and I do feel sorry for that second maid she keeps trying to engage; none of them are ever good enough.

Still, the mystery is convoluted enough; I certainly would not have guessed the identity of the killer or why that person committed the crime. If you like historical mysteries with a 19th century literary flavor, this could be the one for you.

 

  Egg Drop Dead, Vivien Chien

Despite her early protests, Lana Lee has begun to enjoy managing the family business, the Ho-Lee Noodle House at Cleveland's Asia Village, a mall full of flourishing Asian businesses. Her romance with police detective Adam Trudeau is doing well, and she's taken her next step in expanding the business: catering. Her first catering job is for Donna Feng, whose husband's murder Lana helped solve in the first book of the series.

 

Wouldn't you know it? Donna's governess, Alice Tam, is found drowned in the swimming pool after the party—not long after Donna screamed at her for not watching her twin daughters carefully enough. Donna asks Lana specifically if she can figure out what happened, since the police think she's the prime suspect. Plus guess who shows up at the Ho-Lee Noodle House one day: Warren Matthews, the guy who broke Lana's heart several years ago. So yet again she's propelled into solving a mystery with the help of her roommate/best friend Megan and even the reluctant approval of Adam—who reminds her not to put herself in danger, and she needs to find out why Warren's suddenly trying to get back into her life.

Turns out a lot of Donna's friends were not, and Lana's going to have to work to figure out this mess. We're given a whole lot of suspects and red herrings.

I like reading these stories because Lana isn't your usual whitebread protagonist. I love reading about her blended family and the personalities at Asia Village. This one left me irritated on several fronts, though. Firstly, since your usual cozy mystery needs a dramatic climax, usually the protagonist, Lana in this case, has to go somewhere she knows she shouldn't to solve the mystery. And boy, does she do it in this one. It makes her seem stupid. Second, when on earth did Adam start calling her "babydoll"? All of a sudden he sounds like Sam Spade. If I were Lana I'd smack him one every time he did it. And finally, Chien introduces a character she created for a writing class into the story to help Lana. I really, really wish I liked this character more, but I don't. The person speaks and acts in a cliched manner; I'm glad they are not the protagonist of this series. So I didn't enjoy this one as much as I have the previous entries.

However, the epilogue, where Lana finally meets with Warren—oh, yes, I liked that a lot!

 

  My Friends, The Huskies, Robert Dovers

I found this at a book sale and tugged it out to read at the first onset of warm weather; it takes place during Dovers' year of participation with a French expedition (Dovers himself is Australian) surveying emperor penguins in the Antarctic. Even if you didn't see that it was an old book, and published in 1957, you certainly wouldn't mistake it for a modern book, which would be full of soul-searching, and paeans to the beauty of nature, and of the sagacity and souls of the dogs. Instead, this is the day-to-day grimness of living in tents and huts in an inhospitable climate (even in summer) with teams of dogs who are closer in temperament to wolves reacting with each other than domesticated canines. In fact, if you've read The Call of the Wild, you'll get an idea of the personalities of these dogs: deeply competitive, always fighting, with a battle for dominance between lead dog Bjorn and his "lieutenant" Fram that eventually comes to a head. Both dogs and men live a tough life of privations as they suffer through blizzards, must transport from one survey site to another using the dogs and sledges as well as tractor-footed "weasels" over treacherous ice with crevasses and cracks that cause the weasels to tilt sideways and almost swallows dogs and sleds whole, fear being lost on the featureless icy "plains," and deal with numbing cold.

Throughout the book it's the dogs that hold our attention: strong but not very clever Bjorn, the loyal Fram who suddenly gets a taste of leadership and likes it, the sloppy and bumbling Aspirin, the clever and strong Helen (an instigator in savage fights) but is disinterested in caring for her puppies, young Roald who turns from bumbling puppy to ambitious puller, the grizzled veteran Boss for whom the year will bring about great change in his life, Yakka and her puppy, Maru the penguin-slaughterer, and the inseparable Tiki and Milk. These are true arctic working dogs, not cuddly pets, and violence between them is frequent and vividly described. This book is not for the fainthearted or for those who wish to believe all animals are the anthropomorphized Disney type who love one another and are cute and cuddly. A fascinating read about midcentury scientific exploration and the personalities of working dogs.

 

  Re-read: Stillmeadow Daybook, Gladys Taber

While I'd read other non-animal stories like The Good Master, Johnny Tremain, and the Danny Dunn and Miss Pickerel books in elementary school, my reading in those years was mostly about animals: Black Beauty, Lassie Come-Home, Lad: A Dog and the other Terhunes, Beautiful Joe, the Silver Chief books, etc. So it was to my delight that I found another "dog book" in my junior high library: Especially Dogs, Especially at Stillmeadow. I knew nothing of Stillmeadow, or of Gladys Taber, who wrote for magazines my mother didn't buy. Her columns always included her dogs and cats, but were mostly about her home, her cooking, the garden she and her best friend "Jill" tended so careful, her thoughts about life and the future. Cooking and domestic pursuits bored me, and, as I tell people, the Italian gene for gardening completely passed me over; about all Taber and I had in common was writing and a love of dogs and cats. As a kid without a dog who dearly wanted one, but was stuck with allergies instead, reading about them was a small solace. Entranced by Taber's tale of "Timmie," her graduation gift, a spirited Irish setter who even won over her dog-adverse father, her other Irish setters Maeve and Holly, and the cocker spaniels she and Jill raised, including Star, Sister, Rip, and Honey, this was one of my favorite withdrawals.

 

While recalling the book and the author fondly, I didn't think of either of them again until I was married and visiting Mystic Seaport with my husband and my mother. The gift shop had reprint copies of Stillmeadow Daybook and Still Cove Journal; in a split instance, the memories flooded back: the setters, the spaniels, the farmhouse..."Oh," I exclaimed joyfully when I saw them (to hubby and Mom's confusion), "Stillmeadow books!" As an adult I was able to appreciate Gladys' quiet country living and not only purchased the reprints snatched up and held to my chest like treasure, but scoured the internet for more. It has been a love affair ever since. And so here on my Gladys Taber re-read I have come back to the Daybook.

 

Once again her volume covers one year, but this time she begins in April, as the blossoms arrive at Stillmeadow. "Early morning is like pink pearl now that April's here. The first lilacs are budding over the white picket fence in the Quiet Garden; crocus, daffodils, white and purple grape hyacinths repeat the magic of spring." And so we plunge again into housekeeping in a colonial home, the romping cocker spaniels as well as one young Irish setter named Holly, cooking special dishes, hosting special friends like Faith Baldwin and "Western star" Smiley Burnette (more people now recall him from Petticoat Junction), who built Taber a giant outdoor barbecue, the flower-filled beautiful "Quiet Garden," her recollections of her childrens' growing up and the joy of them visiting as adults, the birds at the bird feeders, the joys of each passing season and month (lilacs in May, hay wagons in September, brilliant autumn leaves in October, stiff chill and snow forming a backdrop to Christmas, and more. In this age of mindfulness and "hygge" reminders, Taber's books are a powerful reminder to just look at ordinary things for beauty, at simple things for joy, and her prose is always a delight to read, with its references to literature and her commentary on the problems of the day (this book was from 1955, so references to the atomic bomb and racial intolerance pop up often). It is always worth visiting Stillmeadow.

Books Completed Since October 1

  Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come, Jessica Pan

I had to pick this up: Jess and I sounded a lot alike. We crossed streets to avoid talking to people. Ducked out of noisy parties early. Thought going to any big gathering where there was drinking and noise as energy draining. Found socializing exhausting.

 

I was lucky; I found science fiction conventions. I normally don't chat to strangers, but will there, because I know there is acceptance there. But Jess' close friends had all left for new lives or other careers. Yes, she had her partner Sam, but she still had no close other friends. So she tried living the life of an extrovert to help her find some new ones.

 

Jessica Pan's writing is humorous and I chuckled several times in her adventures. I thought I was pretty shy, but her introversion was almost debilitating. I applaud several of the thing she did to overcome this, including doing a presentation for The Moth, doing stand-up comedy, joining an improv group, and going on a vacation not knowing the destination. But some of the other therapies she was given just appalled me, the worst being to talk to strangers and, instead of making small talk, ask them "Deep Questions" like "Are you lonely?" or "What's the worst thing you've ever done?" I find this rude and invasive. Do the psychologists of the world not respect anyone's privacy any longer? Not to mention that a couple of things that people told her during this therapy would have been prime targets for blackmail! I do understand that this was to elevate conversation between mere chitchat about sports or the weather, but I thought it was seriously invasive and creepy. I sure wouldn't have responded to Jessica! Neither would I have hung around Budapest not consulting a guidebook (apparently she wasn't allowed to????) and asking "Deep Questions"—get the guidebook, go someplace you're interested in, then start chatting to people there!

 

An okay examination of changing personal behaviors if you can get around the "Deep Talk" invasion of privacy business (plus I found the magic mushroom chapter a little creepy, too).

 

  Murder on Union Square, Victoria Thompson

One final obstacle remains in the process for Sarah Brandt Malloy and Frank Malloy to adopt Catherine, the little girl Sarah rescued from abuse: her mother was married at the time she died, so her husband, even though he is not Catherine's biological father, is still her legal guardian. But, their attorney tells them, if the man, actor Parnell Vaughn, signs over Catherine to them, they may adopt her. But when the Malloys visit Vaughn, his grasping fiancee says he'll only sign if he's paid a thousand dollars. This too is illegal, but Frank and Sarah love Catherine too much to say no. But the next day when Frank takes the papers to Vaughn, he finds him dead, and his fiancee screams that Frank killed him. Frank's arrested. Due to the inheritance he received, he can just pay the courts off to "forget" the case, but Frank and Sarah, and their co-workers Gino and Maeve, would prefer that he clear his name, especially for the sake of Catherine and Frank's son Brian. So the four of them work the Palladium Theater, finding out much more about actors—and their foibles, superstitions, personal habits, and performances at the drop of a hat—than they ever wanted to. Frank's and Sarah's mothers also lend a hand in this mystery that raises quite a few eyebrows in the plot along the way.

There are so many suspects in this one and so many motivations that much of the story is taken up with the four leads' interviews with the suspects, and for a while things seem to go around in circles. This is very realistic from an investigative point of view—both police and private detectives must hash and rehash clues to arrive at the truth—but sometimes the repetition gets a little dull. So you'll have to stick with the characters a bit while they reach the inevitable.

Plus we get a reappearance of Serafina, the fortuneteller who appeared in a previous book; one of the actresses, Verena, helps with the case with some coaxing from Gino (to Maeve's annoyance), Maeve gets the workmen at the new clinic whipped into shape, and she also comes up with a great cover name while pretending to be a reporter: Mazie Dobbins. I laughed aloud when I read that.

Enjoyable, but you have to get through the long investigation.

 

  A History of Children's Books in 100 Books, Roderick Cave and Sara Ayad

I have the book A History of Books in 100 Books and thought this would make a good companion volume to it. It is, although it was published in England and is very British-centric. It opens, as you might expect, with a chapter about the first books designated for children, which weren't published until the late 17th century, and then wanders afield through folklore from Aesop to Africa, to nonsense tales, animal stories, instructive and religious stories, babies' books, volumes that tell of other cultures, women writers, fairy tales and fantasy places, tales of exploration and colonialism, history books, and more. Notable American books are mentioned, as are African and Indian and Chinese contributions, but the focus is chiefly British.

 

Still miffed because they mentioned "The Youth's Companion" and several other periodicals, and completely forgot "St. Nicholas," which was really odd since several of my compilations of that noted magazine are from British editions printed by Beatrix Potter's publisher, Frederick Warne & Company!

 

  The Library Book, Susan Orlean

Susan Orlean interweaves her love for books with the story of the 1926 Goodhue Central Library of the Los Angeles library system and the terrible fire the historic building suffered in 1986 when a suspected arsonist lit a fire in the stacks and the tinder-dry books in the badly-ventilated area burned as if they had been soaked in gasoline, with temperatures that reached over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit. As firemen desperately fought the fire in one part of the building, courageous volunteers raced inside the unaffected portions to rescue books until it became unsafe. Days later, more volunteers rescued waterlogged volumes, hoping to save some of them. The arsonist was never caught, but long suspected was Harry Peak, a misfit who said he was nowhere near the library, then changed his mind and said he was there, then said he was not again...each time he was questioned changing his story. It's also the story of the Los Angeles library system itself, including its pioneering women head librarians who were eventually booted out to make way for an eccentric who had no training in library science but who was a man, an odd duck who actually did do positive things for the library. Orlean even examines the role of libraries today, especially urban libraries who are attempting to make themselves relevant, especially in low-income neighborhoods, and how they are attempting to diversify the audience they serve.

 

If you're a book lover, this volume is like a treat from a candy store. The accounts of the fire will make you weep in realizing how many historic volumes were lost. While Harry Peak's involvement (or non-involvement) was never proven, you'll become equally annoyed at his aggrandizement of himself and his shifting stories and excuses. Heck, Orlean's story about her trips to the library with her mother and about the books she loved are almost worth the price of the book alone.

 

  The Vanderbeekers Lost and Found, Karina Yan Glaser

What a change from two years earlier, when the Vanderbeeker family's landlord was a cranky recluse living a solitary life in his top-floor apartment. Now the five Vanderbeeker children: teen twins Isa and Jessie, Oliver (the only boy), knitting-mad Hyacinth, and little Laney are helping Mr. Beiderman train for the New York City marathon. But their excitement is tempered by a bombshell: the identity of the homeless person living in the shed in the neighborhood's communal garden. It's someone they both know and love, and they'd do anything to keep this person from leaving their neighborhood and possibly leaving them forever. In the meantime, Hyacinth is unsure of how to make new friends at school, and Isa worries that a boy she likes may not like her any longer.

 

Amid the joy that is always around when the Vanderbeekers assemble, the kids have to face some hard truths about all families not being like theirs. And, even more daunting, is that something I feared in The Vanderbeekers to the Rescue has come to pass. If you are reading this to a child, please note there is a death in this book and be prepared. It's beautifully related but terribly sad and made me cry.  The children are given an opportunity to prepare, participate, and grieve in their own way, which is as it should be instead of being protected from life's inevitable truths.

 

  Re-Read: Harvest at Stillmeadow, Gladys Taber

It's that time of year when I go looking among my to-be-read pile for "something that is like Gladys Taber." Alas, I've spent something like 30 years looking for someone "like" her; best to just go back to the beginning and re-read the Stillmeadow books. Taber, originally from Wisconsin, spending her married life living in New York City, bought a vintage Connecticut farmhouse (as so many New Yorkers did from the 1930s-1950s—remember the I Love Lucy episodes set in Connecticut?) near Southbury, raised cocker spaniels, planted a garden, cooked luscious meals and relaxed (sometimes) on weekends and in summer before coming to live there full time, and Taber, in "Ladies' Home Journal" and "Family Circle," wrote about her experiences at "Stillmeadow." These columns were later published in over a dozen compilation volumes, of which Harvest at Stillmeadow was the first.

These columns, from 1935 to 1940, and covering two years at Stillmeadow, are simple journal entries of daily life: the vagaries of the spaniels (Star and Sister, their two main dogs, hated each other), the travails of gardening and then the succulence of the food that came out of it, closing the house for the winter and reopening it in the spring, the perils of having summer visitors (the behaviors of which made me rather indignant; it's impolite to invite yourself over, keep your hostess hopping with requests for items and entertainment, and then leave her to clean up your mess!), the adventures of the children, and the passing of the seasons. Reviews of her books often show up on blogs and sites about mindfulness; certainly there's a slow, easy pleasure about a Stillmeadow book, one that makes you think longingly of homes in the country, shady gardens, homecooked dinners, watching sunny meadows and frosty evenings from a garden chair or from before an open fire. It's a mellowing experience.

This, the first of the books, is a little less polished than the later ones, where gradually the childhood tales give way to Gladys musing about growing older, the state of the world, the disappearance of the countryside around her—but always about her pets and her cooking. In fact, I came to her through her dogs: a volume called Especially Dogs, Especially at Stillmeadow in my junior high school library. Once tempted by Stillmeadow, it's hard to turn away ever again.

 

  On Spice: Advice, Wisdom, and History With a Grain of Saltiness, Caitlin Penzey-Moog

I gave this to James on his birthday because one of our favorite things to do is go over to the Penzey spices store on Roswell Road and smell the spices. He handed it off to me, a small book, and said "It's an easy read." It is, but also a fun one. Penzey-Moog grew up helping in her grandparents' spice store and learned more about food seasonings than most will ever know. She gives a history of each spice (or herb; she decided to go with the broader sense of the definition of "spice" as an additive to food dishes, whether they were from seeds, roots, plants, flowers, etc.) with interesting commentary on history (such as the French and the Dutch basically lost their monopoly on their spice islands because they treated the indigenous workers so badly that these slaves would give away the precious seeds/plants), and chat about plants which were used as medicines. You'll learn what we use as cinnamon really isn't (unless it's from Vietnam, it's probably cassia); that turmeric (the "new" wonder spice) is actually good for you, but not as good as its press insists; why a few threads of saffron are so expensive; and much more. She also talks about what spice mixes contain (Cajun seasoning, five spice powder, jerk, vadouvan, and more), the difference between "peppers" and "peppercorns" (not to mention paprika), and many other items of food trivia.

 

Not a fan of cooking, but an interesting read due to the history.

 

  The Happy Hollisters and the Mystery of the Little Mermaid, Jerry West

This is number eighteen in the book series about the Hollister family (dad owns the Trading Post, a sports/hobby/hardware store, mom is a housewife but always ready to join or head family adventures, and there's the kids: Pete, age 12; Pam, 10 years old; Ricky, age 7; and Holly, 6—there's also a younger sister, Sue, age four), not to mention the collie, the cat and five kittens, and the pet donkey. They travel to interesting places and usually solve some sort of mystery doing so.

 

In this entry, they're winging it to Denmark to visit Copenhagen, when a fellow passenger, Miss Petersen, an assistant to the Queen who is returning a priceless Little Mermaid statue to the royal family from a museum loan, allows the kids to see the artifact. Unfortunately, she also allows another passenger, a bearded man Sue calls "Mr. Bushyface," to check out the statue. When they reach customs, the statue is gone and the kids suspect the bearded man. They tell Miss Petersen they will search for the statue while touring Denmark.

 

No sooner do they leave the airport than Sue is rescued by Karen Clausen, a schoolteacher, who introduces the family to her Farfar and Farmor (grandfather and -mother). Through the Clausens, the Hollisters learn of another mystery: someone is breaking into old churches which have ships' models hanging in them (an old Danish tradition), and destroying the models. Are the crimes related? If you said no, you haven't read enough Hollister adventures.

This is a picturesque volume with the family visiting many Danish landmarks, including, of course, Tivoli, the amusement park that inspired Walt Disney to build Disneyland. That's one of its problems, too; it's almost too much of a travelogue, the author trying to wedge in all the cool attractions and a very active mystery as well, where the Hollisters and their Danish friends are always bolting off on a new chase after a fresh clue. It makes its breathless way from one to the next with almost no stopping.

Problems: What kind of steward was Miss Petersen for allowing "Mr. Bushyface" to take the mermaid statue in its case to his seat when she was supposed to be protecting it? In real life she would be so fired. Also, what's with Ricky in this book? He's constantly disobeying his parents and getting into dangerous situations; once he almost takes Pete with him. The kids are usually so much smarter than this.

Big plus, though: with the Hollisters away from Shoreham, we don't have to put up with Joey Brill for a whole book!

 

  North to the Night, Alvah Simon

Alvah Simon had always had an affinity for the north, and as an adult this crystallized into wanting to winter above the Arctic circle in a sailboat and learn about the native Inuit who make the area their home. He has met a woman who shares his adventurous spirit, if not quite as much of his passion, and, with the purchasing and refitting of the steel-hulled sailboat The Roger Henry, Alvah and Diana will make his dream come true in Tay Bay in Canada.

 

And then Diana's father dies.

 

This is mostly the story of Simon's odyssey, alone except for a frightfully mercurial kitten named Halifax, frozen in the ice on Tay Bay throughout the long Arctic night, suffering early from miscalculations he made about the amount of oil he needed, at least once going blind for several days from an unknown ailment and blessing his habit of always keeping gear in the same place, almost freezing to death in his sleeping bag after his cabin becomes moisture-ridden due to a lantern kept on too long, and other everyday survival efforts in the -50℉ cold. There were times when I really thought he was crazy for doing this, and I still wonder why he and Diana had to stay on the boat; couldn't they have camped on the shore?

 

On the other hand there are beautiful moments when he ventures out between snowstorms and discovers the grandeur of the Arctic, and profound encounter with the Inuit, who never hurry, accept what they need to do to survive, temper their anger, and live fulfilling lives. He observes local wildlife and keeps a respectful distance from polar bears, who menace him on more than one occasion, and, in one case, is betrayed by a duplicitous "naturalist" who talks him into letting him take photos of a rare bird's nest.

Despite occasionally thinking Simon needed to chill out somewhere, I was enthralled by this book.

 

  The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt, Caroline Preston

This is a darling graphic novel told in "typed" commentary along with vintage 1920s mementos: magazine clippings, ticket stubs, old photos, menus, telegrams, note paper, schedules, postcards, paper dolls, school documents, maps, advertisements, etc. to tell the story of Frances "Frankie" Pratt, from Cornish, New Hampshire, who gives up on her dream to go to Vassar and goes to work as companion to an elderly woman, whose shell-shocked son romances Frankie without telling her he's married. Once again given the opportunity to attend college after her disapproving mother intervenes, Frankie is off to Vassar where she makes friends, and then heads up for more adventures in New York City and in Paris.

 

The inventiveness of Preston's storytelling makes up for the fact this is just a historical romance novel, with Frankie becoming involved with three different men, all who contribute something to her understanding of adulthood without ever holding her back from becoming her own person, as well as with a useful but ultimately "user" of a college roommate and a very odd instant onboard friendship with a young woman who'd planned to go to France to live and ends up marrying a Russian on board.

 

Preston also has another of these scrapbook tales out, A War-Bride's Scrapbook, that looks just as endearing. 

 

  The Last Seance and Other Stories, Agatha Christie

I picked this up as Hallowe'en reading and was not disappointed, although some of the stories are better than others. This basically collects any Christie story that involved some type of supernatural element, even if the element is later proven to be a trick, so there are even some Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple tales here. The titular tale sets the scene with a creepy narrative about a medium who's about to abandon her calling but reluctantly agrees to do just one more seance. Other stories involve a solitary family being visited by a stranded motorist, a Poirot mystery about an Egyptian dig that results in a curse, a man whose cousin has an aversion to gypsies due to a perpetual nightmare, the story of an old house and a little boy and a very persistent ghost, an elderly woman who starts hearing her deceased husband whispering to her from the radio, the unsettling tale of a man who has seemingly lost his mind and acts like a cat, a deadly cult who inherits its members' money, and more.

 

The whole volume was enjoyable, but I especially enjoyed "The Dressmaker's Doll," about two sisters who are nonplussed by the arrival of a mysterious doll in their midst. A real page-turner of suspense!

 

  The Life and Times of Edward VII, Keith Middlemas

I've been interested in the life of Queen Victoria's heir "Bertie" (Edward VII) ever since I saw the British drama Edward the King. Victoria expected him to emulate his clever (and, to her, perfect) father, the beloved Prince Albert, and as a middling student (he might even have had a learning disability) especially compared to his quick older sister, and not quick to catch on, he was a lifelong disappointment to her and this treatment told on him all his life. He begged to have more responsibility, but thinking him indolent, much of it was handed over to his younger brother, leaving the bored prince to get involved with gaming, horse racing, society gatherings, and "fast" women, which only increased his mother's scorn.

Make no mistake, as Prince of Wales "Bertie" was no saint. He had affairs, gambled (but never got into debt) with friends, took advantage of his position in life, and basically lived the lifestyle of the privileged few. But he did much good for the country in other ways, including diplomatically, and served ten useful years as king, not to mention was an adored grandfather and an affectionate parent. Had his mother actually given him the responsibilities he wanted, his life and reputation might have turned out differently.

This book is a lavishly illustrated story of his happy childhood, unhappy boyhood, discontented adulthood, and term as monarch, with photographs, drawings, printings, cartoons, and other illustrations providing visual reference of both his private and public life. Quite enjoyed it.

 

  Really Truly, Heather Vogel Frederick

This is the third book in the Pumpkin Falls Mystery series, featuring Truly Lovejoy and her family. Dad is a retired Army officer who lost his arm to an IED; they now live in Pumpkin Falls, New Hampshire, running the family bookstore. Truly, already six feet tall in eighth grade and a prodigious swimmer, has two older brothers and two younger sisters, and loves birdwatching. Living in New Hampshire wasn't in the plans for the family until her dad lost his arm, and Truly still smarts from being away from her favorite cousin/best friend Mackenzie—until, during her mom's family reunion being held in Pumpkin Falls, Mackenzie insists Truly come with her to "Mermaid Camp," interrupting Truly's carefully planned summer.

 

I have to admit, although the foray to Mermaid Camp pushes the remainder of the plot of the story, I spent about half the book stewing at the fact that "best friend" Mackenzie basically bulldozes Truly into going to what I consider a really stupid camp. Sure they found out about a hidden treasure and meet a couple of elderly ladies who swam with Esther Williams in her films...but, really, "mermaid camp." Ugh. And having to put up with snooty Hayden Drake on top of it. All you need is a Nellie Oleson at your camp.

 

Once Truly's back home and gets roped, reluctantly at first, into a community project, the story perks up. Unfortunately to succeed Truly must run afoul (several times) of her strict dad; one understands where he's coming from, but you can't help feeling sorry for her efforts continually getting her in hot water. So, while I really enjoyed the book...ick, mermaid camp! Science camp, birdwatching camp, swimming camp, book camp...but mermaid camp. No. Not ever.

Books Completed Since June 1

 The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson
I don't think I've read an Eric Larson book I didn't like, even if Devil in the White City was supremely creepy and I don't believe I'll be reading it again. This is one of those books I dived into and didn't come up until I was finished. It begins in May 1940, when King George VI requested Winston Churchill to start a new government and ends with the United States' entry into World War II, since Churchill realized early that Great Britain could not stand against the juggernaut German war machine and if the Nazis decided to invade, they would indeed "fight them on the beachheads, etc." but in the end would lose.

It's also a splendid portrait of Winston Churchill, warts and all, at his most resolute, and his family (including his disappointingly drunken and dissolute son Randolph, who was even disliked by his mother), and of a Britain mobilized into its now-classic "Keep Calm and Carry On" response. We're taken into 10 Downing Street, Chartwell (Churchill's "weekend home" in Aylesbury that became a second planning center), the bombed London streets, the crowded and dirty Tube shelters, Lord Beaverbrook's fruitless attempts to resign, and even into the plans of Rudolf Hess involving a trip over the English Channel.

As always Larson intertwines events, personalities, and places with absorbing ease. Loved this book—can't you tell? (This would be a good book to read along with the new Agents of Influence, about William Stephenson and the pro-British propaganda movement in the 1930s United States.)

 The National Review Treasury of Classic Children's Literature, Volume 2, selected by William F. Buckley
This is the second of two volumes where the short stories were chiefly taken from "St. Nicholas" Magazine, and, seeing that I have this "St. Nicholas" fixation, it had to become part of the household. (Three stories exactly are from other magazines, including Ellis Parker Butler's hilarious "Pigs is Pigs," and the complete Tom Sawyer, Detective, which, unlike Tom Sawyer Abroad, at least as a beginning, a middle, and an end.)

Like in the first volume, Buckley seems a bit too fond of the fairy tales (sorry, not a fan of Burnett's "Queen Crosspatch"), but there's a fine assortment of other tales, including two selections from The Jungle Book/The Second Jungle Book, "Another Chance" about a girl given a chance to go to a toney school who almost ruins herself by getting in with a wealthy crowd, the medieval adventure The Boy and the Baron, Jack London's "Cruise of the Dazzler," and, probably my favorite in the volume, L. Frank Baum's "Aunt Phroney's Boy," about a wealthy young man whose automobile is stranded outside a country farm where an elderly woman waits for her husband to come home from the local fair (her thrifty husband explaining to her that it's "too expensive" for her to go). It's heartwarming and funny all at once. 

 Four Funerals and Maybe a Wedding, Rhys Bowen
It's finally going to happen: Lady Georgiana Rannoch now has no obstacles in her way to marry dashing spy Darcy O'Mara, but as always with Georgie, there are problems to overcome. Her wedding's been turned into a larger affair, she's having problems communicating her ideas for a wedding dress to her best friend Belinda, and, worst of all, when Georgie and Darcy go residence-hunting, their meager incomes mean they'll be living in one-room walkups with insect infestations and mold. Plus Georgie's worried that her mother's intended German spouse is getting too pally with the Nazis.

Luckily Georgie's godfather (and first stepfather) Sir Hubert Anstruther comes to the rescue. Since Anstruther, an avid explorer, uses his estate Eynsleigh so little, he's willed it to Georgie, and wants her to set up housekeeping there; he only asks she leave him a few rooms in one wing to live in when he occasionally visits home. Georgie is delighted and heads to Eynsleigh to start prepping the house for her married life, only to discover the familiar butler and old staff are gone, to be replaced by a lazy, sullen butler, a chef who can't cook, a snooty maid, and two lazy gardeners. Plus, Plunkett the butler tells her Sir Hubert's elderly mother lives in one of the wings and is quite mad. Not able to contact with her godfather, who's on one of his exploring treks, Georgie tries her best to cope with the lazy servants, and soon realizes something is "really wrong in the state of Denmark."

Enjoyable as always, although Georgie seemed slightly naive about the servants. Would love to see Sir Hubert in another book, and glad Georgie's mother has taken a new tack.

 Re-read: The Andromeda Strain, Michael Crichton
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...okay, not that far. It's 1971. There's a new film at Garden City Cinema for Memorial Day: a scientific thriller called The Andromeda Strain. My best friend and I see this together. And boy, do we fall. Hard. We go see it again, although both our practical fathers are aghast at the idea of paying to see a film for a second time! A month or so later, I manage to see it a third time when I inveigle my parents with "But you haven't seen it!" When it played on NBC Saturday Night at the Movies some years later, I audiotaped it. And, of course, the moment we got out of the theatre the first time, I bought the book.

In The Andromeda Strain, a space satellite lands in an obscure corner of Arizona and kills all but two people in a tiny town: an elderly man and a small baby. These two survivors are brought to an underground lab in Nevada where scientists prepared for a biological crisis try not only to categorize and explain this new, deadly germ, but try to figure out what it was about the man and the baby that kept them alive.

Crichton fooled many a reader by almost making them think this (or a version of this) had really happened by citing scientific papers, referring to sober-sounding Government projects and teams, using known or realistic technology in the diagnosis—in short, making this like a memoir instead of like a standard thriller. There's no real fancy technology, explosions, or gore, just a realistic narrative about the relentless repetition of tests enable scientists to solve the mystery of a deadly disease. Action fans will certainly find it dull; I still find it absorbing and utterly realistic, if not terrifying. Still one of Crichton's best, despite the dating, since it's firmly grounded in its era and "could have happened."

 The Andromeda Evolution, Daniel N. Wilson
One of the differences between The Andromeda Strain the film and Andromeda Strain the book was in the film they actually kill the virus at the end; in the book it mutates into a non-infectious form and they let it be. That decision comes back to bite them in the butt in this recent sequel to the classic novel: something dark and sinister is starting to grow in the midst of the Amazon rain forest. And nothing seems to stop its progress. Luckily Project Eternal Vigilance has never forgotten Andromeda, and when word comes, a new Project Wildfire team is assembled to investigate the Amazon growth: an Indian doctor, an African scientist, a Chinese pathologist, an American astronaut/scientist monitoring the situation from the International Space Station, and a last minute replacement, the son of one of the original Project Wildfire scientists, James Stone, son of Jeremy Stone.

The original novel was a taut, quiet thriller taking place in a laboratory. This story is what happens when you take the original story and graft on a half-dozen other Crichton ideas, including Sphere and Jurassic Park, add duplicitous military men, an Amazon native tribe, a "space elevator," and a woman who has a genius mind but whose physical problems really should have a deterrent to her being assigned to the Space Station in the first place. Elements of horror films creep in everywhere, whether in the jungle, in the installation in the midst of said jungle, and up on the space station. People get swallowed up, native Amazonians get massacred, and the space station sequences have elements of Alien and Doctor Who's "The Ark in Space." The result is a mess, and the only reason I kept reading was because I wanted to see what happened to James Stone. The most interesting thing in the story is the one other link it has to the original novel, which made did make me smile.

 Game of Dog Bones, Laurien Berenson
Margaret Turnbull, Melanie Travis' renown and often annoying aunt, had been awarded the dog world's ultimate accolade: she's been chosen as a group judge at the Westminster Kennel Club dog show. Melanie accompanies Aunt Peg to New York City as assistant and companion, and must literally fend off an old "frenemy" of Peg's on the way to the hotel: Victor Durbin, whose questionable breeding methods and involvement in a dog café venue for adoptions have made him persona non grata with many people, but especially Aunt Peg, so when he turns up murdered Peg is the prime suspect. Naturally, Melanie throws herself into the investigation.

The mystery itself involves something in the news a lot these days and is suitably complicated for a cozy. The real strength with this book, the 25th in a series, is in the details: behind the scenes at august Westminster, Melanie's teaming with her sister-in-law Bertie, and the approaching wedding of flamboyant Terry and conservative Crawford (something happens at the wedding that made me cry). Davey continues with showing his poodle Augie, and of course there's kindergartener Kevin for comic relief.

By the way, I agree with another reviewer that we'd love to see Sam involved in a mystery!

 A Question of Betrayal, Anne Perry
This is the second in Perry's newest series set in pre-World War II England and Germany, featuring Elena Standish, talented photographer and daughter of a former ambassador to Germany. In the first volume of the series, Elena discovered her beloved grandfather was the former head of MI.6, Great Britain's international spy network, and she had successfully completed an errand that sent her to Berlin and put her in great danger. In this outing, Elena has an even more difficult mission: extricate her former love Aiden Strother, a man who revealed himself as a traitor to the country and got her fired from her job at the British Embassy, from Italy, since it turns out he was a double agent all along. The man who customarily passed Aiden's reports to England has not been heard from in weeks and it may be that Strother, too, is in danger. Can Elena get him out of Italy while putting aside her personal feelings?

In a subplot, Elena's older sister Margot goes to Berlin to attend the wedding of a dear childhood friend, who she realizes is marrying a heartless member of the Gestapo. Margot wonders: is her friend just too besotted with love to understand the hate within the man, or is there something more sinister going on?

I probably would have been better off reading the previous book first so I would know the particulars about her grandfather and how losing her job affected her and her family, but this can be read pretty much stand-alone if you don't mind being missing some background information. There's the distinct Perry touch of two capable women surviving in hostile environments, detailed descriptions of the ladies' fashions at the time, and welcome detail to 1930s life, and there's a tense plot right until the very end. The buried sinister machinations under German bonhomie is especially well done, making for uneasiness in many chapters. However, I don't find I like Elena or Margot as well as her two other leads, Charlotte Ellison Pitt and Hester Latterly Monk; the sisters don't seem to have the depth that either of Perry's Victorian protagonists have.

 How Did It Begin?: The Origins of Our Curious Customs and Superstitions, Dr. R. & L. Brasch
This is an Australian-published (since much of it is Anglo-Australian in focus) book of trivia that I picked up ages ago on a remainder table and have read in a desultory fashion for literally years now. Interesting facts about customs surrounding death, birth, courtship, drinking customs, homes, sports and other pastimes, religion, time, etc..Basically this is what I call "a bathroom book," something kept in the john to read during, as Frank Gilbreth called it, "unavoidable delay." Not true how much of these facts are true, as some of the word etymologies are iffy, but some trivia for your entertainment.

 Tunnel in the Sky, Robert A. Heinlein
This is a Heinlein juvenile I had never read, and when a friend said she was reading it, I decided to try it as well. I have heard it described as Lord of the Flies-like, but it really isn't.

Rod Walker lives on a future Earth threatened with overpopulation and starvation. Luckily a scientist has invented a device that can teleport humans—the titular "tunnel in the sky"—to other planets to colonize. Rod dreams of being one of these colonists, and, in his final year of high school, he takes an elective "survival course," the final exam which is being teleported to an uninhabited planet to survive for a week before being retrieved; the choice of survival equipment taken is the student's. His older sister Helen gives him good advice on what to take, and he is able to survive the anticipated test period, even after most of his gear is stolen. But retrieval back to Earth doesn't come, and Rod finally partners with a friend from school and another student from a different school. When they become resigned to the fact that retrieval may never come, Rod and his friends find other students, both good and bad, and start building their own civilization.

It's a fascinating portrait of how villages begin and how teamwork provides survival, and also how the lazy or callous can erode the group's safety. The story works because Rod isn't a model teen—he doesn't want to play politics, but leaves that to another young man, only to find that costs and causes problems—and that things can go wrong simply from underestimating the local flora and fauna. It is very anti-Lord of the Flies because, despite problems from a few students who refuse to cooperate, the students do manage to found a thriving community instead of descending into barbarity.

When Heinlein wrote this book, he refused to use stereotypes to delineate his characters, and intended that his protagonist be a person of color. Although other POC are featured in the story, most notably Caroline, who is of Zulu heritage, his publishers in the 1950s were extremely reluctant to have a lead character who was black. Since then publishers have portrayed Rod as white (and even blond) on covers over the years. However, this book is notable for a 1950s book in that its lead character is black, and refreshingly non-stereotyped compared to most 1950s efforts. Old-fashioned (the colonists usually go to new planets in covered wagons drawn by horses or oxen, or riding horses), but food for thought.

 The Happy Hollisters at Lizard Cove, Jerry West
A shipment of pineapples and the tiny iguana that stows away in it send the Hollister kids (12-year-old Pete; 10-year-old Pam; Ricky, age 7; Holly, age 6; and 4-year-old Sue) and their parents on not only a wonderful vacation but an interesting mystery in this entry in the series. Mrs. Hollister discovers the sender of the pineapples is an old school chum who married a doctor in Puerto Rico, and that she is in town with her two children, Carlos and Maya. The Villamils persuade the Hollisters to spend the week at their home at Lizard Cove, where the kids return "Lucky" the iguana to his native land, play in the surf, and explore. They discover an old stone with carving on it, and discover it may lead to a stolen Spanish relic. In the course of the story, they also help a boy named Manuel, who attends the local school for the blind, recover his stolen guitar, a memento from his grandfather. Would you be surprised to know that the stolen guitar and the two men trying to steal the stone the kids find are connected? Probably not, because this is a Happy Hollisters mystery after all.

This is part mystery and part travelogue, as the kids learn some Spanish and visit historical sites, plus learn what an infanta is (it's the 1950s, so Columbus is still treated in a positive way—time for a learning moment). Joey Brill, of course, mutters about "foreigners" when Carlos and Maya visit the Hollister kids' school, and gets set straight about them being Americans by one of their classmates, so apparently 1950s kids knew what a lot of modern adults don't understand. Contains a few 1950s gender-role stereotypes, but, again, all the kids go on the hunt for the thieves, not just the boys, and the girls are just as clever as the boys at picking up on clues.

 Mousse and Murder, Elizabeth Logan
I tend to pick up my cozies by location—I admit, I favor New England-set ones, and ones not in warm places—and when I saw this was set in Alaska, I thought I might get a softer, gentler Sue Henry-like mystery story. Alas, not to be. Our heroine is Charlie (short for Charlotte) Cooke, who switched from law school to culinary school in San Francisco, and has been running the town diner The Bear Claw, since Mom retired to travel with her father, who teaches international seminars. So, protagonist now back in small town (Elkview, Alaska, near Denali National Park) after fiancee ran off with co-worker. Check. How about the rest of the stock cozy conventions? Cute pet? Check, an orange tabby cat named Eggs Benedict, Benny for short. Romance with cute guy? Check, newspaper reporter. (At least the romance is not with the town police officer, as in so many of these.) Best friend who runs local business? Check, Annie, who runs local, family-founded inn. Things that designate the location? Lots of snow, cold weather gear, tourists, and moose, alive and in the stew and meatloaf served at the diner.

Anyway, Bear Claw head chef, temperamental Oliver Whitestone, has an argument with Charlie over trying something new on the menu, and walks out in a tiff. Next thing they know, he's dead, and it's murder. In a little bit of a twist, since Elkview has a tiny police presence (one state trooper, his wife, and his deputy), newspaperman Chris and Charlie are actually deputized to help with the murder investigation (usually the characters investigate on their own). No dangerous stuff, just research and interviewing some family and friends. What time Charlie doesn't spend running the diner and going off sleuthing with Chris (who loves her car with the heated steering wheel), she spends using the "Bennycam" she has in her house to interact with the cat. (If all the Bennycam stuff was deleted, the book would be about twenty pages shorter.)

There's an iffy character from day one, once a clue shows up about halfway through the book you know who the bad guy is, Chris and Charlie actually go in Oliver's house and remove stuff without a warrant figuring it's okay because they're deputies, everyone else in the diner loves working there and will take over at a moment's notice when Charlie goes off sleuthing, and, goodness, she's obsessed with that cat. As far as I can tell, no Native Alaskans live in Elkview or go to Charlie's diner (unless assistant chef Victor and his sister are natives; they are described as dark haired).

 Re-read: Life is a Banquet, Rosalind Russell, with Chris Chase
My mom picked this out of the book club back when it was published; at that point I had only seen Rosalind Russell in The Trouble With Angels, and knew only that she was a classic film star. But the first pages of the book looked so interesting I was drawn into it. Now it's one of my comfort reads; after you watch a few Russell films (for me, I cannot resist stopping and watching Auntie Mame any time I see it running, and love His Girl Friday and The Women) you can hear "Roz" talking to you as you read this book, starting with her active life with her siblings and parents in Waterbury, Connecticut, and the wonderful adventures she had with her Mame-like sister nicknamed "the Duchess." It is the greatest charm of the book, that it feels like she is sitting there telling you her life story. She covers her career and her personal life in a delightful, honest style, admitting when she made downright boners like acting snooty about parts or turning down lucrative ones, and she downplays a lot of her own personal tragedies, like having a nervous breakdown and the illnesses she contracted later in life (she became a spokesperson for people with arthritis and pretty much ruined the rest of her career because no one wanted to hire a women with arthritis). She talks about meeting the famous, but also wonderful stories about people she thought were courageous, like Colonel Hans Adamson and Sister Kenny (Russell played this Australian nurse who challenged the standard treatment of polio patients in a film). She talks so lovingly about her husband (they were married for thirty-five years) and her only son that I wish I could have met all of them, and you get some different views of celebrities like Cary Grant and Frank Sinatra.

 The Annotated Black Beauty, Anna Sewell, introductions/annotations by Ellen B. Wells and Anne Grimshaw
I love annotated books. Some friends of mine were thinning out their library on New Year's Eve (boy, if I known then what I know now...) and this is the book I found to take home with me. I have loved it since I was young and had the Whitman edition.

Though thousands think of this as "a children's book," it was definitely not written for children, but as a tract by the Quaker Anna Sewell, who loved all animals, but horses most of all; lame most of her life, she depended on them to get around to have any sort of life outside the home, and was cruelly grieved when she saw them mistreated. So she wrote the story of Black Beauty, the finely-bred colt brought up on a gentle farm and at first owned by the kind Gordon family, where he makes friends with the other horses, including the formerly mistreated Ginger and the pony Merrylegs. Alas, Mrs. Gordon takes ill, and there Black Beauty's perfect life goes astray, as the mistress of his new household believes in the cruel "bearing rein." As his fortunes ebb and flow, going from high-stepping carriage horse to livery horse to cab horse, Sewell talks about the sometimes brutal life horses lead.

The annotated edition adds so much information to the story; besides explaining now archaic terms and horse-care facts that would have been normal back then, the book is full of illustrations from just some of the numerous editions of the book, and indeed the illustrations of the terrible "bearing rein" (here in the U.S. called a "checkrein") make it horrifyingly obvious what horses rigged out in this cruel item suffered.

 A Christmas Resolution, Anne Perry
Celia Darwin, who lost her cousin Kate to murder in the William Monk mystery Dark Tide, has married John Hooper, Monk's current assistant at the Thames River Police. Celia is looking forward to their first Christmas together until she finds out her closest friend Clementine Appleby is marrying Seth Marlowe, a new member of her church and the Reverend Arthur Roberson's former brother-in-law. Roberson is a shy, retiring man who preaches forgiveness while his brother-in-law is an unyielding, judgmental being who still has not forgiven Celia for perjuring herself at the murder trial, even though the court gave her clemency for her decision, and forbids Celia to speak to Clementine except for "matters of housekeeping and motherhood." Clementine believes her gentle love will change him, but Celia finds out Marlowe's wife, "a strumpet," he called her, committed suicide and his daughter ran away from home. Was it true? Were Marlowe's wife and child so deceitful that it's understandable that he's bitter? Or must further investigation be done so that Clementine does not suffer the same fate?

A thoughtful story and within the theme of Christmas about forgiveness—but about how with forgiveness must come acceptance that truths must be faced and corrected. This isn't my favorite of the Christmas mysteries—that's A Christmas Promise with Gracie Phipps—but Celia and John are fine characters I'd love to know and I appreciate the love Celia has for her friend that she dares Marlowe's wrath to assure Clementine is happy.

 Tea & Treachery, Vicki Delany
Another advanced reader copy here, from NetGalley, the first in Delaney's Tea by the Sea mysteries set on Cape Cod. Lily Roberts is happy working in her new tea shop set on the shores of the Cape, in a converted gatehouse next to the Victorian bed and breakfast run by her grandmother Rose, a transplanted Englishwoman with an independent streak a mile wide. Lily helps make breakfasts at grandma's B&B in the mornings and then runs the tea shop in the afternoon, a stretch of kitchen work that makes me faint just to think about it. Next to Rose's property is another Victorian seaside home and property, this one crumbling and overgrown, and a local land developer wants to buy the property to set up a humongous hotel/golf course/resort that will, of course, destroy the tranquility of both the tea shop and the B&B.

And then the land developer meets his death falling off the sea wall near Rose's property. And of course the stupid chief of police suspects that this feisty, but 80+ year-old woman is the main suspect, although his new assistant from Boston doesn't.

I admit, I picked this to read because takes place "just up the road apiece" from my old home town. And yep, this one hits all the cozy cliches: talented protagonist who moved back home from the big city because her boyfriend was a louse; her quirky best friend Bernadette (call her "Bernie") who's a writer in search of a subject (and cute guys), a tea shop and a B&B with cute names, the standard stupid police officer who couldn't find a black cat on a snow field, a cute pet with a cute name (this one's a labradoodle named "Eclair"), the by-now requisite cute guy (the gardener, who—amazing!—also has baking experience so he can help Lily). And then there's Grandma Rose. I liked her the first few chapters and then finished the book being totally annoyed by her selfish, self-serving ways. It's not bad enough Lily works like a dog cooking breakfast and then making teas—Rose is "do this, check out that, make sure of this..." How annoying can you get?

The mystery was adequate, but Grandma Rose got on my nerves.

 Accidental Presidents: Eight Men Who Changed America, Jared Cohen
Eight men stepped from Vice President of the United States to the office of Presidency upon the death of their predecessor: John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, Chester Arthur, Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman, and Lyndon Johnson. These are their succession stories.

This is a dense book, but the author does well in keeping the pace going even if the political machinations do get a bit deep at times. We discover that when John Tyler took over after William Henry Harrison's brief one-month tenure, there was not even a vehicle in place should the President be unable to serve. Much of Congress, who hated Tyler, thought the succession should go to the Speaker of the House or to someone in the Cabinet. Andrew Johnson, who was a Southerner who did not believe in slavery, changed his tune completely under power and completely sealed his fate. "Silent Cal" was so silent he was a "sea change" from Warren Harding; Theodore Roosevelt was, alternatively, so well known for being a maverick that Congress viewed with horror "that cowboy" becoming President. Chester Arthur was a product of machine politics, the complete opposite from the almost saintly James Garfield. Harry Truman was at the time of his succession so obscure no one knew what to expect, and he turned out to be a powerhouse. Lyndon Johnson, crude and bombastic, spent his presidency juggling the Vietnam war and the leftover remnants of the Kennedy White House. He lost such prestige over Vietnam that he really did not get to further work on what should have been the standout of his career: the Civil Rights Act. And really, how many books actually talk about Millard Fillmore? (Really, there should be a book out about "the unremembered Presidents" like Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, Martin Van Buren, and Rutherford Hayes.)

The final chapter talks about Gerald Ford and things that didn't come to pass, either because the miscreant was caught (an attempt on George W. Bush) or because modern medicine saved the day, i.e. Ronald Reagan.

I enjoyed this volume about a little-known subject.

 Life Among the Savages/Raising Demons, Shirley Jackson
One of the short stories I remember from my school readers over the years was the tale of "Charles," the story of a small boy named Laurie who goes to kindergarten and comes home with hair-raising stories about a schoolmate named Charles who does everything against the rules. This story is taken from Jackson's wry domestic columns in "Women's Day" and other magazines about raising four children in a rambling old house in Vermont while carrying on with her writing (including the disturbing The Haunting of Hill House and the startling short story "The Lottery," which "The New Yorker" reports was the feature that garnered the venerable magazine the most letters). Childish obsessions, frozen car radiators, missing boots, overflowing books, and the antics of Laurie, Jannie, Sally, and Barry fill the pages with eye-rolling exasperation and shaken-head laughter as Jackson juggles kids, home, professor husband, and her own errands against rain, snow, and neighbors who are either helpful or think them strange. (Jackson once said "The Lottery" was written as a small revenge at certain narrow-minded townspeople.) In the second book baby Barry comes into his own and they move to another home with a crooked gatepost, which obsesses almost everyone.

Amusing commentary on keeping house, working as a writer, and raising a high-energy brood in the 1950s.

 The Happy Hollisters and the Scarecrow Mystery, Jerry West
In this fourteenth book in the series, when John Hollister's store "The Trading Post" is robbed, he's afraid the thieves have made off with his new creation, a lightweight collapsible canoe, but axes and geiger counters were stolen instead. When another businessman wishes to invest in the canoe, he suggests Mr. Hollister test out the canoe at Fox Lake, and camp on his lakeside property. In fact, Fox Lake has been in the news because there are rumors that uranium has been found there.

You've got this now, right? Yep, John and Elaine Hollister and the kids, 12-year-old Pete; 10-year-old Pam; Ricky, age 7; Holly, age 6; and 4-year-old Sue, plus Zip the collie dog, are off to camp, swim, and canoe—and are warned off the moment they arrive by a tricked-up "talking" scarecrow. Nevertheless, they persevere, and good thing they brought along Zip, because they are further threatened with notes, have their tires and camping gear and supplies stolen, and even approached by a frightened boy who pleads with them to get out of there. Plus there's wildlife, swimming, and lots of lessons in hiking survival, like blazing trails. (At one point Pam gets praised for not doing something that will later help corral a bad guy.) Does it surprise you that geiger counters are involved? Not me.

Ah, well, in this one the guys are the ones to test out the canoe in the rapids (although Pete and Pam do it together on the lake first) while all the girls do is do a clambake with beans, taught to them by the untidy older man who asks them to call him "Scarecrow." However, Pam does get the first few outings in the canoe, adorable Sue does discover two clues to the mystery, and Holly, already an expert swimmer at six, discovers where the bad guys have hidden the Hollister tires.

There's never a dull moment in this one!