Books Completed Since July 1

  Re-read: My Own Cape Cod, Gladys Taber

I'm getting close to my re-read of the main Stillmeadow books with this volume about Taber's Cape Cod hideaway, Still Cove, near Nauset, MA. It was the first of two books she wrote about the beach cottage, which she and her best friend Eleanor Mayer ("Jill" in the books) bought together, thinking they would retire there and leave Stillmeadow to their children. Alas, Jill passed away before that could happen.

 

As in the Stillmeadow books, Taber talks about the landscapes, the weather, and the personalities surrounding her second home; a little differently, she doesn't share the usual recipes, and, of course, there is no talk about Jill's usual projects and active lifestyle. If you've read the previous books it rather leaves a hole in the narrative. She talks mostly about Amber, her Abyssinian cat, with some chatter about Holly, the Irish setter, but in the past tense, so it seems Holly may have died by the time the book was published. She also captures a little bit of the times: some talk about the Vietnam War, and some sad commentary about the aimless hippies who wander about flaunting their freedom, but to Taber seem sad and without purpose. Happier tales capture the traditional country stores, Snow's and Ellis', who extend credit and which are clearinghouses of neighborhood information, and her generous neighbors, one who comes to check the house regularly, another who plows her driveway in winter and tries to set the garden in order in summer, and a young man named Bobby who Taber watched grow from age ten to a husband and father who is a skillful builder of homes.

 

There's also talk, of course, about the "summer people," the tourists who migrate to the Cape the moment it gets warm and then vanish in September, sometimes leaving disorder and abandoned pets in their wake. But mostly it's about the beauty—and sometimes the inclement weather—of the area.

 

  The Mammoth Book of Historical Detectives, edited by Mike Ashley

I got this in a slipcase along with The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits, and although I enjoyed the other wayyy back in 2017, this collection seemed to have more stories that "didn't set a foot wrong." It begins with an intriguing story set in prehistoric aboriginal Australia and ends with another enjoyable Solar Pons tale about a governess hired ostensibly to care for two children, but who finds many strange things going on in the beautiful home they live in. One mystery actually comes from the Bible, and another is tackled by the Wise Men. To me one of the least interesting was "The Duchess and the Doll," more a history lesson than a mystery, although the history itself was absorbing; both the nuns' tales were enjoyable, and Sister Fidelma's was in addition suitably creepy to suit its subject; Gordianus the Finder and his young ward Eco solve a theatre murder in ancient Rome, while Judge Dee searches for the murderer of a beggar in ancient China—in another Chinese-set story, two brothers with completely different philosophies track down the murderer in a monastery; Harrison Hull looks into the real-life poisoning of George Wythe in early America, while western cowpoke Ben Snow trails a bank robber in mission-era California. All in all, one shy of thirty enjoyable stories.

 

Literally dozens of these "mammoth books" were published in the 1990s, including volumes of nonfiction, and the historical mysteries collected are some of the best. 

 

  Great Maps, Jerry Brotton

I found this for five dollars at Ollie's Discount Outlet and enjoyed checking it out: it's an oversized DK/Smithsonian volume of historical maps, from Ptolemy's first map "of the world" all the way to Google Earth. Inset closeups for most of the maps show you items of interest, like the first mention of "America" on a map, or how a place is portrayed, or other legends of note. There's Dr. Snow's famous "cholera map" that was the first to link feces-contaminated water to disease, a Catalan map that looks like a modern AAA "Triptik," the famous vellum Hereford "Mappa Mundi," a map of Utopia, Chinese maps that were made long before European exploration, the first surveyor-made map of France, and lots more. Perfect for map fans!

 

  The Bombay Prince, Sujata Massey

In 1921 Bombay, preparations are under way for the visit of the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VIII. Not everyone is happy about this: many Indians are already clamoring for freedom from British rule. One day Perveen Mistry, the only female solicitor operating in India (mainly because her brother is totally unfit to take over the family business and her father has enough clout to make her work meaningful) is surprised when a Parsi student from the local university visits her for advice. Freny Cuttingmaster is lucky enough to be one of the few female students and wonders if not showing up to greet the prince as the rest of the college will be doing will endanger her student status. Perveen advises her to consult her student manual.

 

Next day Perveen joins her British friend Alice Hobson-Jones, a university instructor, to await the Prince's parade. Noticing Freny is missing, Perveen goes looking for her, and finds her murdered in the center of a quadrangle. The police are eager to believe that insurgents killed Freny; her parents are only frantic to get her body released for funeral services, which must happen within a certain amount of days in Parsi society. Perveen wants to help them, but she also wishes to find out why Freny was killed; she doesn't believe for a moment it was one of the political protestors. Making her investigation even more difficult (since as a woman she should be keeping her nose out of it) is that riots have broken out about the Prince's visit and parts of the city are blocked off.

 

This is the third book in the Perveen Mistry series, and the first one I've read. I chiefly enjoyed the historical aspects of the story, and the machinations that Perveen has to observe to be able to investigate Freny's death. I also did not know anything about Parsi society and am now embarrassed that I thought they were a sect of Hinduism. They are actually followers of Zoroastrianism, which originated in Persia, today's Iran. The Mistry family are also Parsi.

 

  Star-Spangled Banner: The Unlikely Story of America's National Anthem, Marc Ferris

When Mark Ferris became curious about our national anthem, he discovered a lot more than he thought he'd find.

 

What is an "anthem," anyway? Derived from Church of England tradition and the word "antiphone," it's a type of song exciting an emotional response. "God Save the King," for instance, became England's anthem during the takeover attempt of "Bonnie Prince Charlie." Early on, "Yankee Doodle," originally a derisive song chanted by the British, became an American rallying cry, but later another song, "Hail, Columbia" (not to be confused with "Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean," a later song) became popular. Then came the War of 1812. "The Defense of Fort McHenry" (the song's original title) was the ultimate rallying cry.

 

Yet over the years the song has also been controversial. Most people say it's too hard to sing. Even professional singers have mangled it at sporting events and important occasions. Others complain that it glorifies war and doesn't adequately represent the United States. Katherine Lee Bates' "America the Beautiful" is so much easier to sing and prettier. Or what about "My Country, Tis of Thee"? Sure, it's sung to "God Save the King," but it's got American words! And it mentions those new heroes, the Pilgrims!

 

One of the most interesting sequences in this book is how the Confederacy tried to co-opt "The Star-Spangled Banner" as their own. After all, it was written by a Southerner and slave-owner, Francis Scott Key, and it was written in the South. It belonged to the Southern states! Eventually, of course, other songs, like "The Bonnie Blue Flag," became representative instead. ("Dixie" was actually written for a minstrel show. By a Northerner and abolitionist, to boot.)

 

It's all here: how different songs have been proposed, but nothing found to replace it; efforts to at least simplify it—to howling protest; and everyone weighs in on how good or bad it is. A thorough discussion of the song, the alternatives, the protests, and more.

 

  Murder at Veronica's Diner, J.D. Griffo

Alberta Scaglione, her sister (the ex-nun) Helen, her sister-in-law Joyce, and her granddaughter Jinx are meeting for a customary breakfast at Veronica's Diner, Helen's favorite eatery, when they notice their favorite waitress, Teri Jo, looks tired and harried, so when she asks them to see that a package gets mailed, they willingly agree. Minutes later Teri Jo emerges from the kitchen with a knife in her back. Later, searching behind the diner, they find a small figurine of a Swiss girl, and then Alberta's house is broken into (thankfully, Lola the cat is safe). Still, the Ferrara Family Detectives aren't about to back down, especially when they discover Teri Jo wasn't who she seemed. Teaming up with the police, and with Father Sal and Alberta's sweetheart Sloan trailing behind, the improbably quartet find themselves involved with a secret in Brooklyn.

 

Okay, when the comic book appeared did you start screaming at the characters in the book? Seriously, it took them so long to catch on to that clue! I wanted to stand up on a chair and yell at them to pay attention. Otherwise, a fun mystery with yet another eyebrow-raising improbable ending.

 

  A Mudlark's Treasures: London in Fragments, Ted Sandling

This is an interesting little English history with the history told through fragments of items found while "mudlarking" in the Thames—searching the shore of the river during low tide. In Victorian times and earlier, trash of all sorts was thrown into the river, then buried in the estuary sands, and during those times, the wretchedly impoverished scoured the sands during low tide for valuable items to sell so they could buy food and shelter. Today, "mudlarkers" still do it for fun, still pulling up dozens of pipe stems, Victorian bottle caps, 17th and 18th century glassware, Pepys-era wig curlers, RAF buttons, and even Roman-era items.

 

Each entry talks about an item, like the wig curlers or bottle bases, and what it represents in the historical narrative. (I was pleased to note that Sandling doesn't ignore the fact that the wealth that prompted the manufacture of many of these items was founded on the back of slavery.) The only thing I didn't like was that the items, which are prettily reproduced in watercolor on the book endpapers, are not linked to the book's chapters in any way, and some of the items he talks about are not pictured. I feel like I need to go back through the book with a pen and note on each chapter the number of the item pictured on the endpaper and/or note the pages relevant to the item underneath it. The watercolors are pretty, but I would have preferred photos of the items. Still, a really nifty walk through English history and the world of mudlarking.

 

  The Twilight Man: Rod Serling and the Birth of Television, Koren Shadmi

This is a quirky little graphic novel about Rod Serling's life told in flashbacks as he chats to a woman on an airplane flight, from his being the short Jewish kid that got picked on to bulling his way into airborne school during World War II (he was technically too short to be a paratrooper, but his superiors admired his persistence and his chutzpah) to fight Nazis, only to be sent to the South Pacific and viewing the gruesomeness of war to his homecoming when he starts writing for radio and then for infant television and wants to "say something" in his media work, which repels networks and advertisers alike. From early attempts and advice from his older brother Robert (also a writer) to his failures to his successes, it brings home his driving personality and propensity for overwork that eventually came to tell on his health.

 

As for the ending—well, it's a bit derivative, but it did give me an uncomfortable chuckle, and probably suitable for the guy who conceived The Twilight Zone.

 

If you're interested in Serling (and the network stupidity he had to go up against), but don't want to tackle a full biography, this might be your cup of tea.

 

  Lincolnomics, John F. Wasik

Okay, I was intrigued by the title of this book. We hear about Abraham Lincoln all the time, but always in the context of the Civil War or about his assassination; some paragraphs are given to the Lincoln/Douglas debates or his early law work. And you might have read the "Lincoln and Speed" historical mysteries. Wasik discusses Lincoln's other beliefs, and how they are still pertinent today, especially investment in the newest technologies. In his early years Lincoln was an advocate for good transportation, which in his era was the canal system. He believed in the expeditious transport of goods and people, and at the time water was the most efficient way to carry both. His one patented invention, in fact, is a device to shift a boat off a sand bar and back into the river current. Later he expressed interest in the railroads and probably would have led the way in their development had he not been so early taken out of the equation. He also supported land-grant colleges and inexpensive education as education made better Americans.

 

There are a lot of interesting historical tidbits here, but I thought the prose was a bit turgid and had to fight a little to get through it. There was also a word choice that flummoxed me:"telegrammed"? I looked up the word to see if it was proper usage and it is, but wouldn't "telegraphed" or "wired" have worked better?

 

  The Happy Hollisters and the Mystery of the Golden Witch, Jerry West

Finally! It's book 30 in the Hollisters series and the family is home in Shoreham! And it's October to boot. Pete (age 12), Pam, 10, seven-year-old Ricky, and Holly, age 6, plus 4-year-old Sue are off with their parents to the Johnson farm to buy pumpkins for their annual Hallowe'en party. They find Farmer Johnson stuck in the lane that leads to his pumpkin farm, his tractor broken. This means he won't be able to harvest his pumpkins and sell them at his farm stand. The warmhearted kids offer to help him harvest, tend the stand, and loan him their little burro, Domingo, and his cart until the crop's in, as well as offering their collie Zip as a watchdog for the burro. They also, while exploring the farm, discover a private graveyard and a riddle on an old headstone that hints there might be a treasure hidden on the farm! Plus Farmer Johnson has an old Model-T Ford in his barn, and the kids spot a strange young woman prowling near it. But it's when Pete and his friend Dave meet a man who offers them a reward if they find a weathervane in the shape of a witch that the mystery really starts.

 

We're taking a break from the travelogue stories of the last few books with a homegrown mystery involving the witch weathervane, why the mysterious "Curie-Us" is looking for it, the young lady who was found wandering near the barn, and even a woman entrepreneur, Aunt Nettie, who runs the local cider mill. Of course there's Joey Brill and Will Wilson to toss in a few mean pranks, and the Shoreham Hallowe'en festivities. An enjoyable entry in the series, with a couple of novel Hallowe'en items (like the RSVP for the party invitations) that I'd never heard of before.

 

  Re-read: Country Chronicle, Gladys Taber

This is the last of the "Stillmeadow books" that actually talks about Stillmeadow, as Taber by this time was pretty much living full time at Still Cove, her cottage in Orleans, MA. Once again recipes dot the text, and you can tell she's getting older: she comments some about hippies, the inexplicable music, and mourns drug use and the loss of old-fashioned values. Still, she finds beauty in both countryside of Connecticut and shore of Massachusetts, and talks glowingly about her wonderful friends and neighbors, along with Amber, the eccentric Abyssinian cat. She also chats about the wildlife she feeds at the Cape, including Blackberry the skunk (she's braver than I am; I wouldn't go near one!).

 

I find it funny that Taber raves thus about the maple syrup from the Stiles farm: "the pale, honey-colored syrup we all prize...the later run is dark and is what one buys commercially" when in my own home we eschew the pale syrup and want the dark, deep, dense maple taste of the later run! The light stuff is too much like corn syrup to us! Also was amused when she talks about finding time to read, and comments "you can also read while you wait for the washing machine to go into the rinse cycle." Wow, I hadn't thought about having to do that in years! (For you young whippersnappers or for those of you who don't remember, washing machines in the 1960s didn't have dispensers. You threw the detergent and/or the bleach into the washer—or, if you had a GE washer, into the FilterFlo that sat on top of the agitator. If you wanted to put fabric softener in the washer, you had to set a timer until just before the wash cycle ended, and be at the washer just as that happened. You then shut the washer off, poured the fabric softener in a cup you reserved for the process (no measuring cap lids then, either) and then into the washer, then turn the washer back on so the rinse cycle began.)

 

  The Atlas of Christmas: The Merriest, Tastiest, Quirkiest Holiday Traditions from Around the World, Alex Palmer

 

  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!

 

  The Sound of the Sea: Seashells and the Fate of the Oceans, Cynthia Barnett

This is one of the best books I have read so far this year, but I find it hard to describe. Basically, it's the story of seashells: conches, scallops, the chambered nautilus, clams, oysters, etc., and how their environment is endangered by rising temperatures and sea levels.

 

Shells, Barnett tells us, have been with us throughout history; shoreline archaeological digs teem with seashells. However, they have not just been useful as a source of food, with humans and animals seeking the creatures inside. Shells have been money ("wampum" used by Native Americans was made from shells, and cowrie shells were also used as money, later coming to symbolize slavery and the cruel "Middle Passage" that brought Africans to the shores of the Americas). Cahokia, a great civilization that apparently flourished in the now Midwest-area of the United States, was built on a foundation of shells which were taken for trash until they were more thoroughly studied. Barnett even tells the story of the Shell Oil Company, which began with an English entrepreneur who sold seashell souvenirs and became wealthy, later partnering with the Royal Dutch oil company. Shell creatures as food, like oysters, clams, and snails, are not ignored, nor the use of shelled creatures for dye (the murex, which provided "royal purple" for kings). We meet fascinating people like Charles Lyell, geologist; Geerat Vermeij, a blind fourth-grader who fell in love with shells thanks to his teacher and who became an expert in them; and one of the forgotten women of conchology (the study of mollusk shells), Julia Ellen Rogers, who wrote one of the primary textbooks on the collection and study of seashells, but whose name was later buried by male scientists. Anne Morrow Lindbergh's classic book Gift from the Sea is also cited, as well as the Victorian mania for collecting seashells, and, of course, today's efforts to save their habitats.

Barnett's writing is a dream. She evokes vivid personalities, landscapes, and historical practices. You'll be sad when the book comes to an end, especially if you grew up with the song of the ocean as your childhood lullaby (the Atlantic, in my case).

 

  Fan Fiction, Brent Spiner

This is a mostly fun mystery/comedy/noir novel that Brent Spiner based on his time playing the android Data (who, like Pinocchio, someday hoped to be a "real boy") on Star Trek: The Next Generation and the often-odd fan mail he received. It's 1991, in the middle of Next Gen's run, and Data has become a very popular character, hence Spiner receives a lot of fan letters. As the book opens, he receives a disturbing missive supposedly from "Lal," the android "daughter" Data built in one of the episodes. She threatens to kill him, and next day the rather loutish Paramount deliveryman brings him a package containing a pig penis floating in blood. Concerned, he contacts the police, but the officer assigned to the case seems to be too busy trying to sell a Next Gen script. Then, when a post office employee is cut by a razor blade in another missive addressed to Spiner, the FBI is called into the case and assigns an agent to him: an attractive woman who just happens to have a twin sister who's a private detective. Spiner's eventually wigged out enough to hire the latter as a bodyguard.

Spiner juggles the mystery of the too-attentive and -aggressive fan, the 12-hour days on set, the fan letters (including one from a Canadian woman who is pretending Spiner telephones her), his co-stars (who he paints with an admittedly exaggerated brush), and the two attractive law-enforcement characters, along with recurring memories of his charismatic but inflexible stepfather Sol which haunt his dreams. He also parodies some fan fiction tropes, especially the "Mary Sue" (or rather "Marty Stu") convention of having the FBI agent (Cindy Lou) and the private eye (Candy Lou) be love interests, and there's even a red herring.

I'm on the fence on this one. I was a Data fan myself and it's fun going back visiting those days. Spiner said he wrote his co-stars as exaggerated versions of themselves and that's fun, too. However, I don't particularly like stories about stalkers (or the gross things they send in the mail), and the whole sex-wish-fullfillment with the twin sisters kinda turned me off, as did a scene where a non-medical person offers him a Quaalude and he just takes it as if drug use is okay. If you like thrillers with quirk, you may enjoy that portion of the novel more.

 

  A Christmas Legacy, Anne Perry

 

  Hell is Empty, Craig Johnson

One snowy day Absaroka County sheriff Walt Longmire and his deputy Saizarbitoria are transferring three prisoners to the state line. They stop to feed their prisoners at a roadside diner where further lawmen turn up with other prisoners to be transferred. However, the arrival of the FBI throws a spanner into the works. One of the prisoners, an adopted Crow named Reynaud Shade, who Walt considers a bit creepy, has told the law that he murdered a Crow boy ten years earlier and buried him in the Bighorn Mountains, except for one bone which he mailed to compatriots, telling them he had money stashed from a robbery. Walt's heart sinks when he hears the child's name: he knows the family. And when the convicts, orchestrated by Shade and with the help of an unlikely source, escape with two FBI agents as hostages, Walt knows he has to keep tracking them to bring justice for the dead boy, in a frosty, frightening odyssey up to the highest peaks of the Bighorns, and luckily he has help from a Native man he mistakenly arrested for a murder two years earlier, Virgil White Buffalo.

 

Johnson has written a taut thriller of Walt's rather Ahab-ish pursuit of Shade through many ordeals (and you will be wondering if Longmire is indeed made of iron rather than flesh by the end) paralleling Dante's Ninth Ring of Hell (Saizarbitoria is reading The Inferno and gives the book to Longmire before they separate) which is, despite the sobriquet "inferno," is ice cold. Driven by his need for justice, neither fire nor ice nor snow will stop Longmire on his quest to return the Crow child's body to his family.

I noticed this garnered a lot of criticism because "it didn't feature the usual gang" of characters and that some were bored or confused by Walt's nearly solitary odyssey. Myself I found it tense and an exploration of Walt's psyche, especially the blurring of the lines between reality and fancy—even if I did wonder about how he'd really survive the punishment.

 

 Thunderstruck, Erik Larson

In 1910, the North London Cellar Murder was as much as a news event as the O.J. Simpson trial in the 1990s and the Kennedy assassination in 1963. The difference was that it happened on the cusp of another technological marvel, the birth of wireless communication—and it was wireless communication that finally trapped the alleged murderer.

 

Dr. Hawley Crippen was an American homeopath who basically sold patent medicines in the US, and later in London. Infatuated with a blowsy young woman named Cora who wished to become a musical performer, he married her. From all accounts he was a gentle, indulgent husband who bought his wife a huge wardrobe, supported her career even though she wasn't that talented, and didn't seem to mind her having a supposedly non-sexual relationship with a fellow male performer, Bruce Miller. Cora later changed her stage name to Belle Ellmore, and it was under that name she disappeared. Crippen initially told everyone that she'd gone home to America to nurse an ailing relative, had gotten sick herself, and died, to cover up the fact, he confessed, that she had run away to the US with Miller. By this time Crippen was being unfaithful with his secretary, Ethel Neave. The police had no reason to doubt his story, until Crippen and Neave left town and someone started poking at the bricks in the cellar.

 

As in Devil in the White City, Larson tells Crippen's story parallel with Guglielmo Marconi's efforts to transmit wireless telegraph signals. Marconi, a driven, spoiled man with an Italian father and Irish mother, had read about Hertz's discovery of electromagnetic waves, and, not really understanding them, pressed on with inventions that transmitted them, and was convinced that these waves could carry telegraph signals "through the ether." At the time transatlantic cables could carry messages from land to land stations, but ships at sea had to rely on passing ships to tell them news or flares to signal distress. Marconi's massive wireless stations, with their blue sparks and thunderclap sounds, would revolutionize communication with ships. But he faced stiff competition with British scientist Oliver Lodge and scientist and magician Nevil Maskelyne, among others, who also had been working on Hertz's "waves," but in a less aggressive fashion, and who considered Marconi a foreign interloper with an unproven system.

 

As always with Larson, well written, but if you're in this for the true crime stuff (Crippen's was the second most famous British murder case, after Jack the Ripper), the Marconi stuff will bore you, and if you're in it for the science, the Crippen portrayal of a disintegrating marriage will probably make your eyes glaze over. There's also a great deal of Marconi's legal disputes with Lodge, Maskelyne, and even people he's recruited to help him, like Forrest. But there's also a great deal to like in the Marconi parts, especially the portraits of early wireless telegraphy stations—the blue sparks and the crackling of the early transmitters sound at once both frightening and fascinating—and the weather they battled against. Enjoyed, but you must have patience with it.

 

  Murder at Ochre Court, Alyssa Maxwell

In the sixth in the "Gilded Newport" series, reporter Emmaline Cross, related to the Vanderbilts on the "poor side" of the family, returns after a disappointing year writing for James Gordon Bennett of the New York World. Instead of writing real news stories as he promised her, she's been relegated to the society column because of her connections in society. Emma has resolved to quit after writing one final social story for the World: the "coming out" party of Cleo Cooper-Smith at Ochre Court, one of the famed Newport "summer cottages." Mrs. Goelet has fashioned a spectacular tableau vivant for Cleo's coming-out, complete with a throne for the girl as "Cleopatra," illuminated by the new electric lights. But Cleo is electrocuted instead, putting suspicion on the electrician, a friend of Emma's. She resolves she must clear him.

 

I mostly enjoyed this installment of Emma's adventures, which features not only the mystery but the face of changing Newport, with controversies over the changeover to electric power and away from gaslight, and a rising problem in 19th century America, the establishment of criminal gangs. Plus there's Emma's internal struggles: primarily her determination to get away from society reporting, but also her conflicting feelings for two different suitors, Jesse Whyte, the police officer, and Derrick Andrews, the wealthy scion of a newspaper publisher, and some of the action takes place at Fort Adams, still a working fort in those days, which I've visited several times. There's also an interesting supporting character in this book, Cleo's older sister, Ilsa, who is not considered marriageable due to a severe curvature of the spine, a scathing indictment about the treatment of differently-abled people in that day.

 

My only problem: Maxwell keeps tossing in modern terms that make me cringe. Some of them can be glossed over, but "growing a business"? In 1898? Seriously?

(Note: Ochre Court still exists, but is not one of the Newport mansions you can tour. It is the headquarters of Salve Regina College.)

 

  Earthed, Rebecca Schiller

One thing you must understand about this book is that it's not just about a woman, her husband, and two children moving to a smallholding and attempting to make a difference by raising their own food (vegetables, goat's milk, and eggs). Schiller and her husband did agree to do this because it had been a dream of theirs, but the story became much more: for years Schiller had felt there was something wrong with her, that she wasn't good enough, that she was inordinately clumsy and said the wrong thing at the wrong time, that she fell into some projects with enthusiasm and others she was incapable of following through. And although raising crops, enjoying the flowers and trees with her children, and caring for her animals did "ground" her somewhat, she still found her emotions erratic—one morning she beats a pitcher against her head and destroys some china cups. Diagnosed initially with anxiety, she did as the doctor asked and found herself still at sea, with physicians not believing she wasn't being helped by the treatments. If this wasn't bad enough, just as she thought a correct diagnosis of her condition had been found, COVID-19 reared its ugly head.

 

Schiller writes beautifully, whether talking about the landscape, her children, the discoveries she makes about those who lived on the land previously, and even about her emotional difficulties, which make it easy to understand her confusion, pain, and sense of isolation. She also cares deeply, not only about her family and her farm, but about injustice, the past, and the future, and bares her soul. Reading this is an emotional experience in every sense. If you are looking for a simple "how I moved to a small farm and how it changed my life" narrative with an emphasis on animals and plants, I would look elsewhere.

 

  One Dozen and One Short Stories, Gladys Taber

Gladys Taber made her living from writing; some from books, some from her columns, but, from what I've gathered, a great deal from short stories which she published in numerous magazines. Today, with television, the internet, streaming video, and the like, we rarely see magazines with short stories any longer, but they were a big part of the past. Magazines that are still published, like "Redbook" and "Woman's Day" had short stories "way back when," but no longer. Tiny romance short stories and mysteries are published in "Woman's World," but they are a sad cry from the past. The only magazine I know that still regularly publishes short stories of the type Taber would write is a Scottish favorite, "The People's Friend," which just celebrated its 150th anniversary!

 

These are G-rated stories of the type that would have been found in "The Saturday Evening Post" and "Ladies' Home Journal" among others. They are not necessarily "love stories" as you might classify something in the "chick lit" category. Five involve or are about dogs, including the sweet "Little Goat Goes Up," about a runt cocker spaniel who isn't valued because she's not a show dog. "Portrait of a Gentleman" and "Money of Her Own" are both based on Taber's childhood memories, the former with a dog based on Timothy, her Irish setter as portrayed in Especially Dogs, the latter based on an event later recounted in Especially Father. "Dear Bachelor" is a romance, but told in a nifty epistolary fashion. "Just a Little Havoc" is a comedy; "Impetuous Wedding" is sort of an early version of John Grisham's Skipping Christmas. "When the Wood Grows Dry" has Good Morning, Miss Dove overtones.

 

Definitely not for the sex-or-deep-social-commentary crowd, but pleasant before-bed reading.

 

  Re-read: Still Cove Journal, Gladys Taber

I am technically at the end of my Stillmeadow re-read, although I have other Taber nonfiction: Stillmeadow Album, which is a photo book; Especially Father, about eccentric Rufus Bagg; and Harvest of Yesterdays, where she reminisces about her childhood. (There are also the two "Amber" books, both which I just bought after finding inexpensive/no postage copies. I'd read them electronically, but electronic books rarely stick in my brain long.)

Taber's daughter, Constance Taber Colby, opens this final book by her mother with an account of Taber's final illness in February 1980. She was rushed to the hospital with heart palpitations in February and never left the hospital again, passing away on March 11. Amber, Gladys' last cat, died soon afterward, even though she was tenderly cared for by Connie and Gladys' neighbors. Colby finished editing Still Cove Journal, which was published in 1891. One more time we joined Taber at Still Cove, enjoying the beauty of Cape Cod, even during its storms, and tales about the wild animals and birds Taber fed. What really shines in this book is the friendships and old-fashioned kindnesses done for Taber by her Cape Cod friends: they define "neighborliness" effortlessly. Someone brings her firewood, or fuel oil, neighbors at the local stores will take Gladys' groceries home for her rather than her having to drive out for them, when she is sick or absent they will come over to care for Amber.

I thought the Stillmeadow books rather faltered after Eleanor Mayer's (Jill) death. It's obvious, despite all her wonderful friends, Gladys had lost the one person she synched with most in the world. She also seemed to give up all her dogs at that point, probably because a cat was easier for her to care for on her own. Still, there's magic to be found in the books following Another Path, especially Taber's wonderful friends in Orleans, MA.

  Stillmeadow Album, Gladys Taber with photographs by Jacques Chepard

This is an oversize book with 61 photographs taken at Gladys Taber's Stillmeadow. Some are of the house and grounds (including Gladys' well-loved Quiet Garden and her prized milk glass collection), several of her granddaughters Anne and Alice and also her daughter and the rest of the family, a couple of the two neighbor boys who faithfully came to help her (and earlier her and "Jill" [Eleanor Mayer] with shoveling snow, working with the trash, burning paper, fetching the mail (Erwin, the boy standing with Taber in the photo on the back cover, still lives on Jeremy Swamp Road, near Stillmeadow), and of course photos of the dogs, including Holly the Irish setter arranged artfully across the sofa. Anyone who's read the books will love the homey comfort of Stillmeadow, which is still in daughter Connie's family (Connie, known in the earliest books as "Cicely," passed away in 2020). For Stillmeadow lovers everywhere.

Books Completed Since June 1

  Beth & Amy, Virginia Kantra

This is the second book in Kantra's two-part Little Women modernization taking place in Bunyan, North Carolina, this time concentrating on the two younger March sisters, who are bound together emotionally by being raised in their sisters' shadows. On the surface both Beth and Amy are doing well. Beth's music has taken her far from Bunyan, where she's become songwriter, singing partner, and lover to Colt Henderson, famous country music star. Amy has gone from struggling in her fashion-oriented career to success after she designed a handbag that was used by Meghan Markle, and she's thinking of expanding her business. But Beth is hiding a secret, and Amy is still trying to cope with her long-term crush on the March family's "brother by choice," Trey Lawrence—who's still smarting from his aborted romance with Jo March.

 

I pretty much guessed what was going on with Beth from the first and was indignant that she felt as she did. Amy comes off much better than she does in Little Women (but as Kantra points out in the afterward, we always saw May Alcott, the original of Amy, from Louisa's point of view, the babied younger daughter who missed the drama of Bronson Alcott's aborted communal living experiment at Fruitlands and who wasn't forced to go to work like her elder sisters because her father refused to do "inappropriate" labor); she truly wants Trey to love her, not to "settle" for her as an also-run after not marrying her sister.

 

Abby and Ash March's marriage problems are also addressed in the story, which, in this volume, works very well, and Kantra also introduces a new "old" character, a veteran named Dan who helps Abby with the goat farm and becomes a friend of Beth, her attempt to give Dan of Jo's Boys a happier ending.

 

I enjoyed this more than Meg & Jo because it gave Beth and Amy chances to shine—and because there wasn't a lot of talk about being a chef and cooking. 

 

  What the Dog Saw, Malcolm Gladwell

This is a collection of Gladwell's "New Yorker" essays over the years that explore everything from the history of Ron Popeil and the kitchen gadgets Ronco has pushed over the years to the generalization that all pit bull dogs are dangerous. There's a nifty article about why, although there are many kinds of mustards, ketchup has remained the same over the years (did you know there were specialty ketchups?); how Clairol and L'Oreal made hair color legitimate (and not something just "floozies" did) using two different advertising campaigns, both which work; how Cesar Millan uses body language to work with dogs; how interpreting photography—both for mammography and for spy photography—isn't the cut-and-dried affair you might think it is (leading the military to believe in "weapons of mass destruction"); the difference between "choking" and "panicking"; why some genius burns early and others are "late bloomers"; and analysis of why Enron failed; and more.

 

The only essay I couldn't make much sense out of was the one about investments, but it was well-written; the failing was mine. Enjoyed this more than I did The Tipping Point; interestingly enough, a friend read the same two books and liked this one less. YMMV.

 

  Dear America: One Eye Laughing, The Other Weeping, Barry Denenberg

I always approach a Barry Denenberg "Dear America" book with trepidation. Once again, it's deserved. The good news and the bad news: Denenberg does not soft-pedal in the first half of the book, where Julie Weiss, her parents, and her brother experience the rise of Adolf Hitler and the annexation of Vienna, which brought misery and death to Jews like themselves. Be aware reading this that the story includes abuse, violence, virulent bigotry, betrayal, and suicide, as was experienced by the Jews of Vienna. Her mother is referred to as "a Jewish b---h" twice in the text.

 

Denenberg says in his afterward that he kept Anne Frank's diary near him as he wrote this. Indeed, much of the plot echoes Frank: Julie is jealous of her talented older brother (rather than sister), spoiled by her dad, and you can see an echo of Peter's mother in Julie's. The opening diary entries chronicle Julie's trivial schoolgirl problems until little hints tell us all is not well. Then the Nazi terror builds until Dr. Weiss sends Julie to America to be with her aunt and uncle. Here she faces nightmares until her Aunt Clara, an actress, and her Uncle Martin, a stockbroker, break down her defenses. The end of the story has Julie getting involved with Aunt Clara's play and goes back to being trivial again.

 

Along with Nazi abuse there is an undercurrent that adults would more understand than children. The Weiss marriage seems troubled. There is some mystery about Aunt Clara, and once Julie gets to the US, a mystery about someone named Eva. There's a real horror story here, but it seems disconnected, and the whole business about Julie and the play seems mere fantasy. As always, Denenberg's epilog is depressing (although here it is expected) but a few people do survive.

 

[Note: the author also makes a mistake in dating a famous historic event. He portrays Orson Welles War of the Worlds adaptation as taking place on October 31. Although the broadcast was intended as a Hallowe'en treat, it was actually performed on October 30, 1938.] 

 

  Buffy the Vampire Slayer FAQ, David Bushman and Arthur Smith

This is another enjoyable entry in Applause's "FAQ" series which also acknowledges the original film, which creator Joss Whedon intended to be more serious, and the comic books, especially the "Season Eight" issues that are considered canon. It also touches briefly on Buffy's "sister series" Angel.

 

I read a criticism of this book that it's basically a rehash of the two Watcher's Guide books and therefore an overview of episodes, characters, arcs, and seasons. All I can say is that there are unique interviews to this book, and there may be people out there just getting into Buffy who haven't read the Watcher's Guide. If I have any complaint about this book, it's that it sometimes repeats information about an encounter from every single different viewpoint. Talk about overkill. And sometimes the narrative is a bit too cutesy. Otherwise I enjoyed the photos and information.

 

  Re-read: Lammas Night, Katherine Kurtz

It is a known fact that Adolf Hitler and many of his followers were great believers in the occult and, as also noted in Raiders of the Lost Ark, collected occult items in an attempt to use them to advance the cause of the Axis powers. It is also believed that during the time of the Spanish Armada, the psychic forces of England's esoteric community caused the storm that vanquished the ships.

 

The British esoteric community is still fighting the forces of evil in this military fantasy set during World War II. Intelligence agent Colonel John "Gray" Graham is not only an important operative in MI6, but a leading member in England's occult community. An operative has just brought them information that the Nazis' occult community is planning dark magic against their enemies; Graham must try to organize the British equivalent against them. He finds assistance in an old friend, Prince William, the youngest son of King George V. William, the twin brother of epileptic Prince John, most often feels like a fifth wheel in his family, fit only for minor diplomatic social events. He doesn't know about Gray's secret life, but the situation has become dire enough that Gray considers revealing more to him.

 

Kurtz paints the military and wartime life of Britain realistically and with great effect, and treats the occult portions of the story with equal respect. It's all very down-to-earth, with no over-the-top fantasy elements, which makes the idea approachable. However, my favorite aspect of the story is Prince William. Since Victorian-era and Edwardian-era history is one of my favorite topics, I know something about the British Royal Family and that Prince John, who had epilepsy and was possibly autistic, did not have a twin brother. Yet William is so realistic that I had to go back and check the family tree I had in one book! 

 

  Terry Nation: The Man Who Invented the Daleks, Alwin W. Turner

This isn't a biography of Nation as such, although it discusses his early life and love of pulp magazine adventure and fantasy fiction. Rather, it is a history of Nation's life against his work in England and in the United States in television, from his first work on The Goon Show and Tony Hancock's different shows to his creation of the Daleks—a creation whose popularity amazed everyone—along with his famous British series Survivors and Blake's 7 (both shows examined in depth), as well as his being producer of The Persuaders and MacGyver in the United States. Two lesser-known series, The Champions and The Baron, are also profiled.

For fans of British television, of Terry Nation, and/or of Doctor Who and Blake's 7.

 

  The Last Passenger, Charles Finch

This is the third and last of Finch's Charles Lenox prequels that take place before the official first book of the series (A Beautiful Blue Death). It is here we first meet Kitty Ashcroft, who returns to help Lenox in the next book of the series set in Lenox's "present day, and also of his friendship with Lady Jane's husband, who is about to come to a tragic end.

 

During a terrible rainstorm Lenox is summoned to a railway station, where the conductor and the stationmaster are guarding a startling secret: a murdered man. Apparently he was killed on the route from Manchester and no one else in the railway carriage knew anything about it. Oddly, all the labels are cut from his clothing. Next Lenox and the police discover that the real conductor—for the man they thought was the conductor was not—dead by the side of the railway tracks. And finally they discover an American traveler is missing: one who was to speak to the British government about the slavery problem in the United States. Another of his companions, a former slave, is on the run, and a third has died in what was thought to be simply a freak accident. Have American opponents to slavery followed the men to England in order to kill them?

England abolished the slave trade and slavery some years before the United States, but repercussions still abound in this mystery which is also part history lesson. You learn something about the attitudes to "the peculiar institution," as well as revisiting Lenox's past household with all its familiar figures like Graham, Lenox's manservant, and Mrs. Huggins, the housekeeper, as well as Lady Jane and her husband.

 

I picked up on at least one whopper of a historical blooper; in one chapter Charles thinks of something as a crossword puzzle clue. The book takes place in 1855 and crossword puzzles were not invented until the 1920s.

 

 The Happy Hollisters and the Whistle-Pig Mystery, Jerry West

I almost feel like I needed to take notes on this, the 28th story in the series.

 

As the book opens, the kids (Pete, age 12, Pam, 10, seven-year-old Ricky, and Holly, age 6, plus 4-year-old Sue) worry about Blackie, the cocker spaniel companion of Indy Rhodes, the Native American head salesman at John Hollister's store The Trading Post, after his playmate, a woodchuck, abandons his burrow on Indy's property. A news story on TV tells them about a train robbery in "New England" (the individual states are never mentioned) where a million dollars in mail sacks were stolen. (Why money would be in mail sacks is never explained.) At the same time the Hollisters' old friend Fritz the wood carver in Germany asks them if they can get him the measurements of a wooden Indian called The Settlers Friend, apparently thinking this statue is common knowledge to all Americans. Well, since Indy is a Native American, of course he has a book about wooden Indian art! In this way, the Hollisters discover the statue is in the Pioneer Village, a museum in Foxboro—amazingly the same place where the robbery took place! Not only that, but the kids discover there's a wooden Indian statue in a basement of an old house in their home town that the owner doesn't want. Guess what! Pioneer Village has a whole exhibit on wooden Indians!

Quicker than you can say Pocahontas, Indy volunteers to take the kids and the wooden Indian to Foxboro. Since he can't be expected to ride herd on all five by himself, he recruits his sister Emmy to come along, and off they go to Foxboro, where they find a third mystery: they're looking for a copy of the signature of a woman named Patience Jones, who owned the property an old covered bridge sits upon. The bridge is going to be demolished rather than moved unless the caretaker of Pioneer Village can prove Jones' signature on a will is legit. The kids hope her signature is on one of the historic "autograph quilts" that 19th century women made.

Confused yet? Just wait: there's also a kid named Wally who helps the children detect, a little girl named Zuzu who tells tall stories, a hurricane that hits during the story (and nobody takes precautions), a flood after a dam breaks, an abandoned waterwheel mill, a church belfry, and an elderly farm woman named Mrs. Willow, who owns an oodle of friendship quilts. And more groundhogs, which unfortunately Emmy tells the Hollisters are known as whistle-pigs, so the name appears over and over in the text.

Although the story attempts to point out that Native Americans look like everyone else—seriously, the kids almost miss Emmy at the airport because they expect her to be in buckskin—there are entirely too many instances of Indy "flashing his white teeth." This is annoying because the Seminoles in the previous Sea Turtle books are mostly not treated as curiosities. Also, it seems dumb for someone (I'm looking at you, adults!) not to take the wooden rifle of the Indian the Hollisters found in the cellar and keep it somewhere safe, because the darn thing keeps falling off.

Also weird that West uses the name "Foxboro" for the city where the money goes missing, but never identifies, as any fan of the New England Patriots can tell you, that Foxboro is in Massachusetts. It would have been better to make up a name, especially as "Pioneer Village" appears to be a dead ringer for Massachusetts' classic living history museum, Old Sturbridge Village, which is sixty miles from Foxboro, not right next door. (There's a "Pioneer Village" in Salem, MA, but that's not close to Foxboro, either.)

Kids will like the perpetual motion plot, but for adults the constant coincidences and the annoying repetition of "whistle-pig" will probably sour the broth.

 

  The Hollywood Spy, Susan Elia MacNeal

In her tenth adventure, Maggie Hope, former codebreaker for the British (although originally from Massachusetts) and trained spy, has flown to Los Angeles at the request of John Sterling, an RAF pilot and writer who was once her lover. John's fiance has died, drowned in a swimming pool, and the story is she was drunk and possibly on drugs, and John hopes Maggie can suss out what happened. Since this is a mystery, Maggie of course, susses out a good deal—including the suppression of other murders and a planned "major event" that will rock the city, and be blamed on Jews.

 

This is a difficult book to read, because it tackles the tawdry underbelly covered by the gloss Hollywood projected in the 1930s and especially in the 1940s. Under the sunny skies, Los Angeles was a dark place of bigotry. You might have learned about the "Zoot Suit Riots," where Mexicans were harassed by police and military alike, but 1940s L.A. was also a hotbed of the Ku Klux Klan and Nazi sympathizers. Most of businesses were still segregated, not only against people of color but against Jews, and the KKK also fomented prejudice against Catholics and gays. One of the characters involved is the teenage son of a KKK member, who warns him against dating "that Mick," a Irish Catholic girl. In another subplot, Sarah befriends Henri Batiste, a Creole clarinet player, and when they want to go somewhere to eat, they have to consider what restaurants will accept Henri. I'm a little puzzled that Maggie is so surprised about the racism in Hollywood when in a previous book, which took place in Washington DC, she encountered a black man about to be executed for a crime he didn't commit and was trying to help to clear him. Also, so many of these historical books seem to imply that white Britons were not bigoted and readily accepted people of color and gay people. It is true that during the war the British did not have segregated facilities as in the U.S., but you have only to read British books published in the past to see Indians referred to as "wogs" and treated as if they were subhuman, gay men and women considered abhorrent, and people of color insulted, reviled, and referred to with the "N" word.

 

MacNeal did a lot of research on this book and much of it shows. She takes great delight in describing the Technicolor aspects of the 1940s: the cars, the beaches, the restaurants, the homes, the clubs, the countryside, backstage on soundstages, and tries to make the 1940 face of L.A. come as alive as possible. She tosses in lots of trivia like the fact that Los Angeles experienced its first smogs during the 1940s due to the pollution from war plants. (She missed at least one thing: while criticizing the heinous internment of Japanese-Americans, she has a character state that neither Germans nor Italians, also our enemies, were interned. Actually 11,000 Germans and somewhere between 3,000 and 10,000 Italians, some of them naturalized citizens, were put into internment camps as well.)

 

The mystery is fairly complex, but you have to be willing to get through some stomach-churning moments to get there—not just violence, but a disgusting scene with the KKK boasting about their wholesomeness at a church event, for example. Be warned.

 

  The Pioneers, David McCullough

Back in my school days, I read Lois Lenski's historical children's book A'Going to the Westward, the story of the United States citizens' first move west, from the New England states to the newly-acquired "Ohio country." So it was with interest I picked up this book, which is a nonfiction recounting of the event. The bulk of the story revolves around several men: Manasseh Cutler, who drafted the original Northwest Territory charter and got Congress to approve it (the charter proposed some novel resolutions of the time: there would be complete freedom of religion, education would be guaranteed, the Natives would not be molested, and slavery―still legal in all thirteen states at the time―would be absolutely forbidden) and his son, Ephraim, who lived in the Ohio territory; Rufus Putnam, former Continental Army soldier; Joseph Barker, the builder; and finally Samuel Hildreth, who served as the big names in the history of the settlement that would eventually be Marietta, Ohio, named for Marie Antoinette.

 

Alas, the Indian resolve was short-lived. The Native people welcomed the whites from the East so long as their numbers were small; when more emigrants showed up, they felt surrounded, and they began attacking white communities. Pleas for help finally brought an army led by Mad Anthony Wayne which drove the indigenous population away forever. However, their other resolves were stronger and slavery was kept out of the area through the endless work of Ephraim Cutler. McCullough chronicles the founding of Marietta from the first wagons moving into the deep woods of Ohio―just the words recounting the work required to fell the trees is exhausting―to the late 1830s.

 

This is a good book about a time in history not much covered by nonfiction, but a bit plodding.

 Re-read: A-Going to the Westward, Lois Lenski
Having read The Pioneers, I went back to the original Lenski volume. She is most well-known for her regional novels like Strawberry Girl, Prairie School, Judy's Journey, etc. and the similar "Roundabout America" books for younger children, but she also did a half-dozen or so historical books, the best known which is Indian Captive.

Reuben and Roxana Bartlett and their two children, sensible 12-year-old Betsy and sensitive 8-year-old Thomas, are just one of many new American families "a-going to the Westward" to join an uncle. They are joined by one of their church deacons, cobbler Joel Blodgett, Reuben Bartlett's other brother Robert, and the redoubtable Matilda Stebbins, a spinster relative who is on her way to Ohio to be reunited with her niece, and,  unfortunately, by the rowdy Perkins family: coarse and often drunken Jed, ever-ill Parthenia, and their two children Ezekiel and Florilla. Jed is glad to be leaving Connecticut with its Blue Laws and strict Calvinist teachings, and he has a burning desire to best the Bartletts and their "annoying piety."

Today this might be considered a very strange children's book, but I've always loved it from my teens because Lenski tries hard to stick to the child-rearing and stoic customs of the times. The children do not expect to be hugged and coddled unless they are very ill, and the adults do not comfort or support them as they would today. No one is told it's "okay to cry," or to shirk on chores in an emergency; Betsy is always knitting or sewing—no playing dolls for her. At one point Betsy is left behind (a machination of Jed Perkins)  and, while her parents do worry, they pray that responsible Betsy will fall in with another family going west and will join them in Pittsburgh; eventually Joel goes back for her. Lenski is also unstinting about the hardships of the western trail: there are no merry days picking flowers and enjoying nature, but there are many days when the breakdown of their wagons, or a stopover at a dirty inn with drunken men, or long days of rain sorely test the resolution of the families. Conniving Jed Perkins is also determined to sabotage the Bartletts' progress and is a continual thorn in their sides.

Another aspect of the story is the Connecticut Yankee meeting new cultures on their journey. As they travel through Pennsylvania they meet the Ermintritt family, a hard-working clan of "Pennsylvania Dutch" also heading west, and while the adults initially distrust the German-speakers and think they are continually swearing at them, Betsy makes a fast friend in twelve-year-old Lotte. Once arrived at their homestead, they must befriend the Kentucky-bred Scruggs family who distrust book-learning and think the Yankees are snooty. There is as much story about the adults as there is about the four children; especially feisty and stalwart Matilda and merry Joel and bookish Uncle Rob and Reuben and Roxana Bartlett, plus characters like Herr Ermintritt, the German innkeepers, their flatboat pilot, and the elderly German man Betsy meets enroute all have their stories and their experiences on swollen rivers, in crowded filthy wayside inns, riding in wagons that overturn or jounce teeth against teeth as they bounce through the ruts. This book is worth reading even if just once to see how the first westward pioneers endured and prevailed on the trail.

 

Also, after reading The Pioneers, it's fun to see what the Bartletts experience that was mentioned in that book: "the River Beautiful" as the Ohio was called, the New Orleans (first steamboat on the river), the town of Marietta, the Muskingum River, the village of Belpré, and Blennerhasset's island with its beautiful plantation house described by McCullough; the Blennerhasset family later got mixed up with Aaron Burr's traitorous plot for the Northwest Territory to break away from the United States. Several of the people mentioned in McCullough's book provided the historical manuscripts Lenski consulted when she wrote A'Going to the Westward.

 

  Murder, Take Two, Carol J. Perry

It's number ten in Perry's "Witch City" series set in Salem, MA, and Lee Barrett (neè Maralee Kowalski, journalism graduate, young widow of a race car driver, and now back living upstairs at the home of the librarian aunt Isobel [Ibby], who raised her) receives a call from one of her former students at the local community college: his nephew, a local professor, has been accused of murder. Not only that, the murder almost perfectly mimes a real-life Salem mystery, the murder of a sea captain in 1830. Roger Temple and his twin Ray are on their way to Salem to help him, but beg Lee to look into the crime; they don't believe Cody McGinnis is guilty. Neither do many of his students: they've already formed a defense fund for him.

 

This story almost threw me: usually by chapter five or so, Lee, who has a scrying gift, has seen some type of mysterious vision in a reflection which holds a clue to the mystery. This story is almost straight mystery, with a portion of the plot revolving around Lee's plan for a live-action Clue game, with her visions appearing very late in the story. Also, I didn't like the Charlie's Angels bit with Aunt Ibby and her two friends with Rupert Pennington as "Charlie." It seemed kind of silly. On the other hand, I thought it was cute that Ray Temple was also interested in Aunt Ibby; romance doesn't end when you get older!

 

  The World of Upstairs, Downstairs, Mollie Hardwick

Long before there was nonstop interest in Downton Abbey, another wealthy-family-and-their-servants saga was a big hit in both the UK and the US, Upstairs, Downstairs, the story of the Bellamy family from late Victorian times to the Great Depression, living in their city home on Eaton Place in London. The Bellamys (Richard and two different wives, Marjorie and Virginia, his son James, and their ward Georgina) and their numerous servants: Mr. Hudson the proper butler, Mrs. Bridges the cook, and the maids and servingmen Rose, Sarah, Daisy, Ruby, Edward, Thomas, Alfred, and Frederick were once household names to those who followed their weekly adventures on Masterpiece Theatre, hosted then by urbane Alistair Cooke, for many seasons. To their audience, they were fast friends.

 

Author Hardwick sets the stage for the Bellamy family and company with stills from the series interspersed with real-life photographs, maps, cartoons, engravings, and other illustrations to chronicle the great social changes and even upheavals that began with the death of Queen Victoria and came to a head as the 1930s continued. A great volume for history buffs and Upstairs, Downstairs fans.

 

  A Second Chance, Jodi Taylor

The third in the Chronicles of St. Mary's, Taylor's rough-and-tumble series about the academics at St. Mary's Institute of Historical Research, who investigate the past—but kindly don't call it time travel! Madeleine Maxwell and her disaster-prone crew of researchers dip into Isaac Newton's time and then attend a cheese-rolling event in Gloucester without too many problems, but when they set up a longer mission to Troy, first to see the city as it was and then to see it under siege by the Greeks (and find out the truth of the Trojan Horse and the infamous Helen), things go very, very wrong for what was supposed to be "Max's" last mission—once seeing Troy, she has promised security chief Leon Farrell that they will make a life together.

These books are enjoyable (okay, I'll say it) time travel adventures, and Taylor, a historian (without time travel herself) does a great job of making both ancient Troy and, in a later excursion, the Battle of Agincourt, come to life. Max and her fellow historians are a unique group, each with their own quirks, but still a strangely appealing family group. The storylines are similar to Connie Willis' time-traveling historians in The Domesday Book, etc., but done with more humor and earthiness.

 

  The Happy Hollisters and the Ghost Horse Mystery, Jerry West

In book 29 of the series, Indy Rhodes, trusted employee at John Hollister's Shoreham store The Trading Post, and his sister Emily are on the way home with the five Hollister children, Pete (age 12), Pam, 10, seven-year-old Ricky, and Holly, age 6, plus 4-year-old Sue, after their solving several mysteries near "Foxboro" in a generic New England. Then Pam spots a pink sea gull at the side of the road. Finding the animal and returning it to its home on the shore has the kids all excited about helping out an Audobon project to study the gulls, and also return a young screech owl named "Fluffy" to the wild. Indy and Emmy relent—they can stay one night on Wicket-ee-nock Island to see the project, but they must be getting home afterwards! Alas, someone sabotages the sole ferryboat serving the island, and without it there's no other way of getting their vehicle back to the mainland, so the two adults and five kids are trapped camping out in an old inn. There is an older couple nearby, but they are very secretive, and there's a "ghost horse" galloping around the island. Trust that the kids aren't going to let the grass grow up under their feet solving this mystery, and in the meantime they help the college students marking the gulls, and enjoy the beach.

 

Kids (and maybe their parents) will be positively gobsmacked that Pete and Pam are allowed to go back to the ferry port on their own (hitching a ride with a friendly clammer), rent a boat, pick up groceries, etc. The kids can also camp out on the beach with the college students, no adults in sight. Ah, for the good old days! Heck, the adults even join them for a stake-out, with only Sue left behind, when the mystery deepens! And once again little Sue provides a vital clue! Besides a couple of identifiers of "the Indian" for Indy and Emmy that really aren't needed, as in this book they are pretty much in loco parentis for the kids, a nifty mystery with a nice salty seashore coating!

  My Heart is Boundless: Writings of Abigail May Alcott, Eve LaPlante

Much has been written about Louisa May Alcott (including fictional mysteries) and some about her visionary but deadbeat dad Bronson, but not much at all about her mother, the tireless provider for her family, Abigail "Abba" May Alcott, who was the inspiration for Little Women's Marmee. Eve LaPlante has chosen to right that wrong with Marmee and Louisa and now this volume of Abba's diary entries and letters.

 

Sadly, both show what happened to poor Abba, who, at first was educated by reading her brother's schoolbooks and her journals and letters reveal a bright and promising girl, and later woman, whose mind did not stay confined to "a woman's sphere." Then she met Bronson and the rest of her letters and diaries are full of endless pleas for assistance and a chronicle of her travails trying to keep her children fed while Bronson wittered around talking philosophy and ideal communities where "everyone was equal" (except for Abba, naturally, who worked like a horse). (I'm sorry. I hate Bronson Alcott. Can you tell?) Eventually Abba gave up on Bronson and relied on her two eldest Anna and, of course, Louisa) to keep hearth and home together.

 

This book just made me desperately sad.

 

  A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson (illustrated edition)

I read this book wayyyyy back in 2008:

 

What's your favorite thing in the entire world to indulge in? A box of chocolates? Shoes? New clothes? Computer parts? Bryson's book of science, irresistible from the first chapter to the last (starting with "the big bang" [if that's even how it happened] and ending, alas with Homo sapiens and our irresistible urge to make things extinct), is like an enormous container of every favorite thing you've ever wanted. Even if science wasn't your favorite subject in school, you will find this an immensely readable narrative of the cosmos, stars, planets, atoms, molecules, cells, Earth, life, evolution, and finally the rise of Homo sapiens and the people who studied them. Call it "science made comprehensible," and even better, science narrative that makes you want to continue pursuing other science narratives. Like popcorn. Chocolate. Books...

 

The illustrated version is liberally sprinkled with photographs (including the scientists profiled), maps, illustrations, graphs, cartoons, paintings, snapshots, landscapes, botanical specimens, news articles, woodcuts, vintage posters and book covers, etc., in short, all the supporting information that makes the volume even more delightful.

 

  Chesapeake Requiem: A Year With the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island, Earl Swift

Tangier Island, in Chesapeake Bay, has a long history going back to the original Virginia settlement, but is more well-known as a tight-knit inter-related community several generations old of shellfishing natives who pretty much know no other life. Like the Gullah of the coastal South, they have their own accents and a difficult way of life most would not like to follow. Swift visited the island several times between 2010 and the publication of the book, and brings to life their hardscrabble life making a living supplying most of the crabs eaten on the East Coast and doing without what are considered necessities today, like the internet and cable TV. Plus the islands themselves are slowly eroding away, whether it is from "erosion" as the natives claim (and indeed the area appears to have been eroding since its founding) or whether by sea level rise due to climate change.

 

By the time you finish this book, you will feel invested in the people you meet, whether you concur with their beliefs or not. Most of the island population belongs to a Methodist parish or an offshoot of it, and many of them believe that Tangier has been protected by God all these years. They are also politically conservative, yet at the same time they work hard to make their living and don't think off-islanders understand the area as they do because they have lived on the land so long.

 

I was rather upset by the internet comments that were made about the islanders after they came out strongly for Donald Trump in the 2016 election, which smacked of the offensive comments made by similar people when fires destroyed part of Gatlinburg, Tennessee—basically that the people of Tangier (and of Tennessee) didn't deserve to live because they voted Republican. These critics, whose morals are supposed to be "better" than the people they oppose, showed themselves as being just as bigoted and narrow-minded. Shameful. 

 

  Return of the Pharaoh, Nicholas Meyer

Juliet Watson has a cough which is all too familiar to her husband, Dr. John Watson. Encouraged by her physician to take her to a warmer climate, Watson picks Egypt, where Juliet is enrolled in a severe course of treatments at a noted clinic, leaving Watson on his own much of the time. It's then he runs into Colonel Arbuthnot—in reality, an undercover Sherlock Holmes, trying to discover the whereabouts of an English duke who's become enamored of Egyptology, but has vanished, leading to inquiries from his wife and the Home Office. As part of his investigation Holmes has discovered several other Egyptologists have died, or gone missing, as well. The story follows Holmes' and Watson's search, from a hotel with a disappearing room to finally end in a railway trip that nearly turns deadly, and then, with the help of Howard Carter (several years before he became famous for discovering "King Tut"), tracking down a tomb which has apparently remained untouched and is full of gold and other riches.

The pros of this book: Meyer has his Victorian vocabulary pretty much down pat, so it sounds like something Arthur Conan Doyle might have written. His Holmes/Watson badinage is fair; it doesn't sound quite as good as in his previous works. Meyer also brings Edwardian-era Egypt to life, from the heat to the smells and sounds of the streets and the marketplaces to the vintage treatments Juliet has in the sanatorium to the realities of the environment to the sensations of crawling inside tombs thousands of years old. The cons: to me it just kind of ambles along, with no suspense until the second half, a little like a Rick Steves' travelogue. So I enjoyed it, but there were certainly bits where it dragged in spots, especially in the first half of the novel.

(Also wondered if Meyer's reference to the wallpaper at the duke's hotel was a tip of the hat to Charlotte Perkins Gilman...)

 

  Re-read: Busman's Honeymoon, Dorothy L. Sayers

I'd had no plan to pull this and re-read it, until TCM did a day of vintage honeymoon flicks and played Haunted Honeymoon, the only film made of a Lord Peter Wimsey novel, with debonair Robert Montgomery (yes, Elizabeth's father) as Peter and Constance Cummings as Harriet Wimsey, neè Vane. While the plot had to cut most of the various charming interchanges between the characters as in the book, they did stick closely to the story: Peter has bought Harriet, as a wedding gift, a home she loved in her old hometown, a cottage called Talboys, and brought her there to spend their honeymoon. But when they arrive, the house has not been prepared as Peter had been assured it would be, and, indeed, the housekeeper and the former owner's niece know nothing about the sale. Alas for the Wimseys' honeymoon: the body of the former owner is found on the stairs to the cellar, and foul play was obviously involved.

 

Sayers and a partner originally wrote this as a play, after she finished Gaudy Night in which Peter eventually proposes to Harriet, and said no more novels were in the offing, and then novelized the play. As in all the Wimsey books, it contains a delightful contingent of characters: the snoopy Mrs. Ruddle, who cleaned for the victim; spinster Aggie Twitterton, the deceased's niece; Frank Crutchley, the handsome handyman who's also handy with the ladies; Inspector Kirk, who can match Peter quote for quote from literary sources; Joe Sellon, the constable with a secret; Tom Puffett, the chimney sweep; and other village denizens. I'd forgotten some of the soul-searching bits, where Peter thinks he's not good enough for Harriet and Harriet of course thinks she's the one that's not the ideal mate; also the battle between Peter's efficient manservant Mervyn Bunter and the meddling Mrs. Ruddle which ends in a gastronomic tragedy; and Sayers' once again skillful skewering of the Press. Plus there are the well-remembered delightful bits: the story being opened with a series of letters, including one from Peter's wonderful mother, the Dowager Duchess; and of course the postscript where Harriet goes to the Ducal seat for the first time and tours the family home.

Since it's the last in the series and has built upon Peter and Harriet's relationship as set up in Strong Poison, Have His Carcase, and Gaudy Night, this is best not read first—but then Peter is best read in order, even if the first book, Whose Body? isn't one of the better stories (they take off with the second volume, Clouds of Witness, complete with a nice Sherlocky-setting on the moor). Sayers' Wimsey series is delightfully intelligent, witty, and conveys the mores of 1920s and 1930s.

 

  A Darker Reality, Anne Perry

This is the third book in Perry's new Elena Standish mystery series, taking place in the mid-1930s. Elena (a professional photographer and neophyte MI6 operative) and her parents, British Charles and American Katherine, are in Washington, DC, to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Katherine's parents, Wyatt and Dorothy Baylor. At the celebratory party at the Baylor home, Elena instantly connects with a woman named Lila Worth, an Austrian beauty married to scientist Harmon Worth, who is working on atomic physics. Several hours later Lila is murdered by having been run down by her grandfather Wyatt's car—and Wyatt can't prove where he was at the time of death. With the help of James Allenby, ostensibly from the Foreign Office, but really a fellow MI6 operative, Elena will search for the person who has framed her grandfather.

This all sounds terribly exciting, but...seriously, it's not. The first half of the book is endless soul-searching (with four shifting points of view) among Elena, Charles, Allenby, Elena's former MI6-head paternal grandfather Lucas, and Elena's mentor at MI6, Peter Howard, about whether it's right to involve Elena in an investigation, or if Elena is going to find out something about her grandfather she'd rather not know, or how Wyatt Baylor can be so conservative in personal values when Elena has seen the terror Adolf Hitler is causing in Berlin (and would he still have those beliefs if he knew?). It's only in the second half of the novel that their actual investigation begins and people are questioned, and then in the final quarter of the book the pace picks up with Elena finding out more about Lila Worth.

Several great discussions of luscious-sounding gowns (as always in a Perry novel) and of the calm quiet of the Baylor house and its wonderful rooms, but the soul-searching first half will make you wonder if it's worth plodding on. Yes, it is, but be aware it takes awhile.

Books Completed Since May 1

  Re-read: Friday, Robert Heinlein

I still like this book. I've heard all the complaints, and, yeah, I know all the ones about Friday being ready to shag anyone. Heinlein was in older-man-wish-fulfillment mode at the time. Hard to ignore as it's part of her character, but I try to look beyond it. Other complaints annoy me: Friday likes to be raped. Um, no, she doesn't. As a courier she's been trained against torture methods, which include rape. People who read this get so distracted by the sex that they don't seem to realize that Friday doesn't react to normal conventions simply because she was brought up in a laboratory and as an Artificial Person she doesn't get a normal "human" upbringing because, despite the fact she looks, smells, sounds, feels, and is genetically human, she and her fellow APs are not considered human because they were not born and therefore do not have souls. So basically, unless someone buys an AP and frees them, they are slaves, and their "master" can do any damn thing to them they please, including using them as a sex slave or torturing them/experiment on them.

But Friday was lucky: she was "adopted" from her "creche" and given employment as a confidential courier by a heavyset man she knows only as "Boss." She's good at her job, but she wants one thing more than anything: to be part of a family—to take part in the ordinary, everyday things we take for granted, like loading the dishwasher, cooking a meal, having a garden, playing with kids or pets, and—yeah, okay—having sex. But political times in Friday's universe are parlous; North America has been balkanized into smaller republics and theocracies and dictatorships and freewheeling democracies, and each of them seem to be at war with one another—or is the war caused by other forces altogether?

From being ambushed on her way back to her home base, tortured, rescued, and rehabilitated, to going "home" to her family for the last few years only to be tossed out due to prejudice, to meeting new friends and eventually having a new job, Friday embarks on a picaresque journey through the troubled political climate—but still wants one thing: a place to call home and friends who do not hold her origins against her. Behind all the shagging, Heinlein was still satirizing all the prejudices humankind still manages to erect to keep "undesirables" away.

I like Friday. She's nice people. In fact, I like her better than some of her critics. YMMV.

 

  Re-read: Stillmeadow Calendar, Gladys Taber

Jill's memory is still alive in this first complete Stillmeadow book since Eleanor Mayer's death. Signs of the times abound: Gladys' complaints about the depredations of the Japanese beetle, and lingering fears of atomic blasts as the Cold War plods on in the real world. She's still tossing recipes into the text, which make me a tad cross, but she also talks about new friends (also writers) like Faith Baldwin and Hal Borland (she made Borland sound so yummy I am taking a dip into one of his books myself once it arrives). Alas, apparently The Stillmeadow Road was the last of the Edward Shenton illustrations; but there are some nice pen-and-inks by Sidonie Coryn. And of course there's always the dogs!

 

  Once Upon a Wardrobe, Patti Callahan

It's the closing days of 1950. Megs Devonshire is a young woman fascinated by mathematics and facts, with not a lot of room in her world for fancies, who attends Somerville College at Oxford University. The one thing she loves more than numbers and logic is her family, especially her eight-year-old brother George, who was born with a heart condition and spends most of his life in bed. His one consolation is reading, and as the story opens, his soul is on fire from a new book he finished, The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. Megs sees it as just another storybook, but George requests that since she attends Oxford, where C.S. Lewis teaches at a different college, she must ask him "Is Narnia real?" And if it isn't, where did it come from?

Megs, reluctant to address Lewis on campus, follows him one day to the home he shares with his brother, and she is found by "Warnie" Lewis, who introduces her to his brother, who prefers to be known as "Jack." But when she asks him about Narnia, instead he starts telling her the story of his life, and while George loves the stories she brings home about "young Jack," she is continually frustrated: why won't he tell her the one thing George wants to know? But even as she tells George the stories, it awakens his creativity and curiosity, and also, with the help of a redheaded fellow student named Padraig Cavender, opens Megs' mind to the unseen mysteries of the world, the ones that can't be explained by maths and facts.

I read this as an advanced reader's copy, and it's actually due out before Christmas, which is a perfect time for its release: it's definitely a "Christmas book" in theme. Callahan works a bewitching magic in this book; her vocabulary is pitch-perfect vintage English, and she describes Oxford, the Kilns, and even the Devonshires' cozy house with such warmth that it's like walking out of the wardrobe and arriving in Narnia. It has the same warm, familiar feeling as a Beatrix Potter drawing or the passages about Mole and Ratty in The Wind in the Willows. Douglas Gresham, C.S. Lewis' stepson, has given this book a big thumbs up, as do I. Enchanting.

 

  The Scent Trail, Celia Lyttelton

I buy too many books by hearing about them on podcasts. This one came from "Travels With Rick Steves."  It all started with Lyttelton, who was already fascinated with scent and its effect on our memories, wanting to create her own "signature scent." (Gosh, to have that kind of money...) In order to put it together the way perfumers did, composed of top notes, heart notes, and base notes, Celia has her personality and memories analyzed, and then sets sail, drives, and flies to the rose-growing fields of Turkey, the lavender fields in France, vetivert distilleries in India, and the sands where ambergris (basically whale snot, and the fixative for most perfumes) washes up on shores. She finds out about the two earliest perfumes, musk and castoreum, which are now artificially produced because they both come from animals (a deer and the beaver, respectively) and the "harvesting" of them is cruel. Enroute she also learns how each culture used perfume (the earliest use, of course, being to cover body odor), of its sexual side and its use in male/female seduction over the years, the use and origins of the most famous of perfumes frankincense and myrrh, and the use of spices and herbs as perfumes (vanilla, ginger, and cinnamon, for example). Along the way we see glimpses of the different cultures.

Never been very interested in perfume, but this mixed geography, sociology, different cultures, and vintage customs into a heady (pun intended) brew indeed.

  Marilla Before Anne, Louise Michalos

This book starts out promisingly enough: Marilla Cuthbert at eighteen is as high-spirited as the orphaned Anne Shirley the Cuthberts adopt in late middle age. Subdued most of her life by an emotionally abusive mother who realized that her husband loved someone else and only married her because it was "the right thing to do," Marilla and her older brother Matthew have lived for the few kind words from their reclusive father. She has bloomed after she meets William Baker, a shipbuilder, and William returns her love, but her mother wants her to marry local, and wealthy, John Blythe, who has always assumed he would marry Marilla. William promises to come back to Avonlea after he completes a job in a Boston shipyard and ask Marilla's father for her hand in marriage, and if he doesn't say yes the couple still plans to run away together. The night before William leaves, Marilla spends the night with him. Sometime later, the news arrives that William has been killed in an explosion at the shipyard. Marilla is not only heartbroken, but now she has a secret that may destroy her future in Avonlea. Thankfully her Aunt Martha arrives to help her out of her problem.

 

I find I can't review this book without giving away spoilers, so

 

SPOILERS--YOU WERE WARNED

 

Of course you've figured this out by now. Marilla is pregnant, out of wedlock, a disgrace in 1841. Her aunt takes her away to Nova Scotia under pretenses of helping her to get over William's death, but in reality so she can have her baby and it can be adopted. Only after the baby is born and her aunt's partner (Aunt Martha is in a "Boston marriage" which shocks Marilla briefly) has found a wonderful couple to take the child, Marilla discovers William is alive. He has been writing to her mother and her mother has hidden the letters instead for forwarding them, so he thinks she found someone else. It turns out he's living right near her, with an overprotective landlady, and by the time he finds her and then she finds him and the misunderstanding is sorted out, the baby is safely with its new family. William later dies and Marilla becomes a friend to the couple who adopted her child. The child writes her letters and meets her in person, but she can't reveal who she is, she can only follow the child's progress during its growing years.

If this wasn't all soap opera-y enough, Marilla has named the baby "Anne," which is her middle name. The adoptive parents change the child's first name, keeping "Anne" as her middle name.

To Bertha.

If you are any kind of an Anne of Green Gables fan, you must get it by now. Bertha is the young woman who became a schoolteacher and married a nice young man named Walter Shirley. They had a little daughter they named Anne, and then died of sickness within days of each other, and little Anne was sent to strangers who, as she grew older, used her simply as a servant. And then she ended up in an orphanage. So Marilla, who by now has lost touch with Bertha, is Anne Shirley's real grandmother.

Oh. Ooof. No. I could see that with Marilla having a child, and then losing the man she loved, and the child, and knowing her mother had kept secrets from her, it had made her dour and not finding much joy in her workaday life. But Anne actually being her granddaughter? And then Marilla manipulating it so that Mrs. Spencer thinks she's supposed to bring a boy back to Avonlea, but she's really going to bring Anne all the time? And finally Marilla never having to let on her real relationship to Anne because there would be a scandal (for both her and Anne, as well as Matthew)? I'm about to flip myself over with eyerolls because it's like one big TV soap opera. What a shame because the book was well-written and could have been good. Instead, it's just another storyline in an 1800s Days of Our Lives.

 

  Starship Theraprise, Justine Mastin and Larisa A. Garski

This book is so disappointing.

I’ve written fan fiction since I was ten years old and scribbling stories about Timmy and Lassie; I really thought this was going to be about people writing their own fan fiction in order to help them deal with problems in their lives. Anyone who’s ever written fan fic knows that many frustrations with the “real world” can be dealt with by addressing the same problems in fan fic, especially when one feels kinship to a certain character because their problems mirror yours. How many hundreds of people who felt “different” in the 1960s took Mr. Spock of Star Trek to their heart because he personified the alienation (no pun intended) they felt in their life? Hundreds of fans wrote to Leonard Nimoy letting him know how important he was in helping them feel that it wasn’t bad, or wicked, or stupid to be “different.” Instead the narrative is written in a flip style by two very fannish and enthusiastic therapists who work up little fan fics about characters in (mostly) today’s media, like Dean Winchester from Supernatural, coming to them to talk, and their attempts to make the character understand their actions and how they can feel better about themselves. I do like the fact that they emphasize that if you are “different” they do not want you to consider yourself “broken”; you are just different and there is no reason that you have to measure yourself up to some ideal of “normal.”

Unfortunately, in an effort to be “hip” and “with it” (or whatever the terms are for it today), the authors come off as trying too hard. After chapter 3 I started to get annoyed with the numerous footnotes of smirky “I’m in on the joke” fannish asides–and whose idea was it to number them with lower-case Roman numerals that are so. hard. to. read? It becomes a tiresome struggle to get through it all. Also…yoga poses? Really? With lame little chibi-character drawings for each? How cutesy-poo can you get? I would have much preferred this if it was written from a serious point of view instead of this buddy-buddy we-know-where-you’re-comin’-from narrative. Frankly, after awhile the chumminess became more creepy than helpful.

Two stars because (1) it was an interesting idea and (2) fan fiction isn't treated as some weird aberration and no one asks "Why would you write that junk when you don't get paid for it? Why not write your own characters and get paid for it?" (Uh, because some of us love to write and it doesn't matter if we don't make money from it? Why do you play golf or watch football?)

 

  Love and Death Among the Cheetahs, Rhys Bowen

Georgina Rannoch, once in the line of succession for the British throne (35th) and now just Georgina O'Mara after marriage to adventurous Darcy, is amazed when he announces they are going to Kenya on their honeymoon. Alas, it wasn't his romantic choice, as Darcy is nearly as penniless as Georgie: in his super-secret job for the British government, he's tracking a jewel thief to a British settlement called Happy Valley—which is anything but, to Georgie's eyes. The couples living there are all cheating on each other, taking drugs, and drinking themselves senseless, especially a rude lout called Lord Cheriton, who keeps trying to seduce Georgie. But on their way home from a terrible party, Darcy and Georgie find Cheriton's vehicle parked on a bridge, and him lying dead (and half eaten by scavengers). So yet again Georgie, partnered now with Darcy, is trying to solve a murder—as well as keep herself alive. The Happy Valley holds too many secrets.

 

This is a change of pace from the usual Georgie novel, but except for one or two people, the inhabitants of the Valley are so crude that you really don't care if all of them are murdered. (Even worse, Bowen says the real British settlers in the real Happy Valley followed the same customs!) The only saving grace is that many of the involved "get theirs" and Lord Cheriton certainly deserved what he got. The revealed murderer should get a medal.

 

  The Seine: The River That Made Paris, Elaine Sciolino

I've spent my life wanting to go to Great Britain (I was an Anglophile from the moment I saw Richard Greene as Robin Hood). I'd love to go to Italy where all four of my grandparents came from. Now, if someone gave me an all-expenses paid trip to France (or just Paris), you bet I'd go. But I've never wanted to go to France—yet I have all these travel books about France that I've loved over the years: Paris to the Past, Paris to the Moon, Eiffel's Tower, Back to the Front, The Olive Farm. Doesn't anyone write books like this about Germany? Spain? Scotland? One of the Scandinavian countries? Is it only France that pushes writers to such literary enthusiasm? Surely there are beautiful and interesting things elsewhere?

 

As Sciolino proves chapter by chapter, the Seine has as many faces as a theater audience. She has been a transportation route, a symbol of romance, dangerous at flood and beautiful for painting. Sciolino talks to barge residents, historians, owners of floating shops, romantics, the river police; finds the source of the river; discovers that, as an estuary, the Seine should properly be called le fleuve, but is always called la rivière; learns about the goddess Sequana whom the Seine is named after; investigates the effort to reverse the water pollution around Paris. We discover the painters, the heroines (like Joan of Arc), the writers, the films, the manufacturers who have looked to the Seine for inspiration. She also visits the other cities along the Seine's meandering route, not just Paris, but Rouen and Le Havre.

Entertaining, absorbing, full of historical facts and modern goodies. Loved it.

 

  Re-read: Especially Dogs...Especially at Stillmeadow, Gladys Taber

Technically, this is not a Stillmeadow book, but is a memoir of Taber's dogs. But to me, this is it. This is the Holy Grail. This is, when I was twelve years old and scouting the Hugh B. Bain Junior High School library for something new to read, and was in 636 (Animals) of Dewey Decimal organization and got to 636.7 (Dogs), the book I found. Mom didn't read "Family Circle," so I had no idea who Gladys Taber was, or what on earth "Stillmeadow" referred to, but there was a great big Irish setter on the cover (I already loved the Disney film Big Red) and when I opened it up there was Gladys telling the story of how her father planned to give her a diamond ring as a high-school graduation present and instead she asked for an Irish setter. (A girl after my own heart!) Rufus Bagg wasn't a dog lover, but he bought Timothy Pepper for Gladys, and "Timmie" romps through all of chapter one with his funny ways, like snatching things off neighbors' porches (leash laws? none in 1917!). When he died, "Father" refused to get another dog and thought Gladys was a traitor for buying her first cocker spaniels.

 

Timmie and Holly, Taber's first and last "Irish," bookend the volume, with the central chapters about Taber's beloved cocker spaniels (proper cocker spaniels, what we call an English cocker spaniel today, not the modern American cocker with the absurdly tiny head): Star, Sister, Rip, Jonquil, Teddy, and her beloved Honey. Interspersed with spaniel tales Taber talks about dog care and picking out a dog more carefully than one chooses a party dress. She talks amusingly of each of the dogs' personality quirks—Star and Sister, for instance, couldn't stand each other, and had to be kept in separate rooms if not watched closely; Saxon, as a puppy, would only nurse if laid on his back; Holly liked to retrieve things, usually dead ones.

 

Bain had this delightful tradition that if you used the library respectfully and never were late returning books and never damaged one, you could take ten books home during summer vacation. And so for three years, I did, and Especially Dogs was one of the ten. I reveled in Timmie and Holly and Sister and Jonquil the summer of 1969, 1970, and 1971. Alas, next year was high school and they were lost to me again.

 

It was only many years later, when my husband and my mother and I were touring Mystic Seaport, that I found reprints of Taber's Still Cove Journal and Stillmeadow Daybook...and all those memories came flooding back. It hooked me on Stillmeadow forever.

For Stillmeadow fans...but especially for the fans of the dogs.

 

  The Consequences of Fear, Jacqueline Winspear

Freddie Hackett earns all the money he can: his violent drunken father wastes any salary he earns. The 12-year-old is a strong runner and passes messages through bomb-riddled Blitz-era London for Robert McFarlane, supervisor at MI6. One night during an air raid, he sees a man fatally knife another man, and although he dutifully tells the police, they don't believe him  plus no body can be found. So Freddie goes to another customer, someone he can trust: Maisie Dobbs. Psychologist and investigator Maisie and her assistant Billy go back to the crime scene and do find some minor evidence, but the police still think Freddie saw nothing. But if he didn't—who's spying on Freddie at his school? Are they a danger to his mother and younger, handicapped sister?

 

Maisie is also at odds with herself. She is working for McFarlane, giving psychological exams to people who will be planted in France as spies against the Nazis. The fact that these people well may be killed or tortured upsets her, even as she knows they volunteered—two of them, in fact, are personal friends. She's also feeling guilty about neglecting her adopted daughter Anna, and wondering about her future with American diplomatic agent Mark Scott.

 

We meet all our old favorites here, like Billy, Sandra, Maisie's dad, and some great new characters: Gabriella Hunter, an old friend of Maisie's mentor Maurice; MacFarlane's driver Charlotte Bright, Pascale and Elinor, the two brave young women ready to be spies in France; Freddie and his family; and an imperious old French major who fought in the previous war, all entangled in the mystery of the murdered man. The title is particularly apt in this case, as every different character must cope with some type of fear. Enjoyable as always, as the spector of the first war rises up in the midst of the second.

 

  Robin Hood FAQ, Dave Thompson

This is one of the more interesting FAQ books, but don't expect it to be all about movies and television versions of the legend. Half of the books is Thompson's delving into the legend and what built it—could there really have been a gallant thief like Robin Hood, who did "rob from the rich and give to the poor"? Reading Thompson's findings, probably not, as early versions of the Robin Hood legend describe the character (or another character something like the Robin Hood character) as rather venial. He was mostly passed along to the next generation in ballads and songs in which verses were changed, swapped, amended, added to. Robin Hood is even mentioned in Shakespeare, but the really romantic, noble version of him started showing up later, especially after his cameo in Sir Walter Scott's classic Ivanhoe.

 

The last third of the book delves into Robin Hood in the media and some quirkier versions of the stories, like a 2005 British production, and also the replacement of one Robin with another in the now-classic Robin of Sherwood series. Howard Pyle's classic illustrated book of Robin's adventures, a series of Robin Hood comic books, and even musicals and an opera based upon the story are also touched on.

 

How much you enjoy this book depends on how much you want to survey various oral tales and rousing ballads about "Robin the Hood," "Robyn of Locksly," etc. and see how they all boil down into the classic Errol Flynn movie everyone seems to know. (Incidentally, Maid Marian's horse in that film? It's Trigger. Yes, Roy Rogers' horse. Roy Rogers who did a film called Trail of Robin Hood. Things do come around!)

 

  A Snapshot of Murder, Frances Brody

This is the tenth Kate Shackleton mystery, in a case Kate becomes involved with personally.

In her spare time, Kate devotes herself to photography and the local photography club, along with a friend Carine Murchison, who learned photography from her mother, a professional in the field. Carine was once in love with Edward Chester, a poetic young man who died in the Great War, and she eventually married Toby, Edward's best friend who came to tell her about his death. Toby suited Carine's father much better than Edward, but Derek, Carine's young errand boy and a friend of Kate's niece Harriet, confides to the young woman that Toby abuses Carine. Kate also knows that Carine is exhausted from nursing her housebound father, and still waits for her mother, who abandoned the family when Carine was a little girl, to return for her as she promised.

All these relationships come to the fore when the Photography Club goes on an outing to the newly-opened Brontё museum in Haworth. Carine ends up booking them at a ramshackle inn with a hostile landlady and her often-invisible mother. Then, during the dedication to the museum, Tobias is stabbed. Did he fall on his own sword cane? Or did one of the members of the Photography Club, who were standing around him, kill him? Frighteningly for Kate, one of the suspects is Harriet, the other is Derek, who had a crush on Carine and wanted to rescue her from Toby. Carine, who was taking refuge in the church at the time of his death, is devastated.

 

The murder doesn't take place almost until 200 pages into the story; the first part is more a psychological portrait of emotionally- (and perhaps physically-) battered Carine. Several friends wish she was free of both husband and father, and Toby had enemies, including one in Haworth. Once Kate's partner Jim Sykes and her landlady Mrs. Sugden join her, they must get through a tangle of personalities to find the culprit. (However, there is one tiny clue early on that spills the beans. Look for it.)

My favorite part was the subplot involving getting Kate's parents a new bloodhound after their old faithful Constable dies. The dog—who washed out of police school for being too friendly—is accidentally delivered to Kate's office and falls in love with her, Jim, Mrs. Sugden, and Harriet instead, and he also solves part of the mystery.

 

The volume includes the short story "Kate Shackleton's First Case," which I found almost more entertaining than the novel.

 

  This Hill, This Valley, Hal Borland

In her later books, Gladys Taber begins to mention her friends Hal and Barbara Borland, stating that Hal's book This Hill, This Valley should be on all nightstands to read at bedtime. Who am I to argue?

 

Borland, a New York Times nature writer, and his wife lived in the city until 1950, when Hal nearly died from a ruptured appendix and peritonitis. He spent most of the winter in the hospital, and when he came home realized he didn't want to spend the life that had been given back to him in the city. He and Barbara move to an old farmhouse in northwestern Connecticut. This is Hal's diary of a year there: the following of the seasons, the animals, the landscape, the plants, the self-sufficient farmers and workers who are his neighbors, the joys of country living and the physical problems as well (frozen pumps and water pipes, mosquitoes, the lot). They have a mixed-breed dog named Pat who wanders freely, as opposed to Taber's carefully watched cocker spaniels, and there are no musings about cooking or milk glass, but in tone the volume is similar to a Stillmeadow book, and Gladys is correct in saying it's a great bedside book. I enjoyed the book until I got to his fall entries, and then I came to love it, as Borland is definitely a kindred spirit in regards to the autumn!

 

Only disappointment are the "illustrations," if you can call them that, by Peter Marks, which look more like kids' drawings of trees, flowers, and grass. 

 

  The Happy Hollisters and the Punch and Judy Mystery, Jerry West

We are back on tour in this 27th book in the Happy Hollisters mystery series for kids, this time set in Italy. Just as the kids (12-year-old Pete; Pam, age ten; mischievous 7-year-old Ricky; plucky Holly, age 6; and 4-year-old Sue, who mostly acts cute) are giving a Punch and Judy puppet show to raise money for charity—resident bully Joey Brill finally gets some consequences when he tries to swipe some of the proceeds—when they meet a little Italian girl, Nada, who is upset that her Uncle Giovanni (a highly-praised maker of Punchinello puppets) has disappeared from his home in Rome.

 

With the help of a contest Pam has entered, hoping to win either the first prize, a trip, or the third prize of a horse (it's complicated), Mrs. Hollister and her brood of five are off for Italy in the company of Uncle Russ, who is on a special mission: get a beautiful scallop shell carved into a cameo for the First Lady by a noted Italian cameo artist! So not only are the kids on the case of Uncle Giovanni, they're also chasing thieves who rob the cameo factory and make off with the completed trinket for the President's wife.

 

All this and they manage to sight-see in Venice, Florence, Pompeii, and Rome, which means the action is nonstop! Seriously, the family does sleep, but the heroine of the book is Elaine Hollister, who keeps her cool when her 12- and 10-year-old are doing surveillance, Ricky and Holly keep exploring, and she has to drive, make hotel reservations at the last minute, and pack, all without the help of the internet.

 

Again, a big plus for Joey finally getting in trouble this time!  

 

  Peace Talks, Jim Butcher

Harry Dresden, now the Winter Knight for Queen Mab's faery court, for once, is at peace as this 16th "Dresden Files" urban fantasy series: he and his daughter Maggie are living in a safe apartment (guarded by svartalves) belonging to his long-time friend and one-time student Molly Carpenter, now the Winter Queen. He and Maggie are bonding, and times are calm, until his half-brother Thomas, a vampire, tells Harry that his partner, Justine (also a vampire) is pregnant. Things immediately unravel not long after: Harry's grandfather Ebenezar tells him the White Council is looking to boot Harry out, otherworldly beings are testing the limits of the magical Accords which keep them out of our world, and Harry's expected to be one of the guards at negotiations to stop magical hostilities. And then Thomas does something so heinous that, although Harry knows he probably did it to save Justine, he's sentenced to death. And Harry, whose family by blood and by choice has been threatened too many times, knows he can't let his brother die. But he'll have to defy everyone, including his grandfather, to do so.

There hasn't been a Dresden book for a few years now, so I grabbed this off the rack at Walmart (of all places; never saw it in paperback at Barnes & Noble!) and practically swallowed it. Once again, except for some scenes between Harry and Maggie and between Harry and Murphy, it's nonstop action as Harry attempts to juggle his responsibilities as White Council wizard, Winter Knight, and family man, protect his friends and family, and flat out stay alive.

After all these years I wonder how Harry still is alive (although technically he did die several books ago, but Queen Mab wanted him alive). Butcher keeps matching him against stronger and stronger villains and more and more difficult emotional choices until I wonder how he hasn't lost it by now. By the time he finishes the series he's going to have to be committed to a hospital for extreme mental trauma. I'm almost scared to read the next book since I saw a spoiler for it, and I wasn't happy.

But...addiction.

 

  Beyond: The Founding of Valdemar, book 1, Mercedes Lackey

Praise Ghu! After Lackey's simply dreadful Eye Spy with its carbon-copy instantly-recognizable avatar for a Certain Public Figure—a true plot cheat—I was afraid she'd forgotten how to write a good book.

 

If you, too, suffered through Eye Spy (or part of Eye Spy, as I did; I couldn't finish the awful thing), please note she has not forgotten how to write a great book. Here she gives fans of her Valdemar universe what we have wanted for years: the story of the Kingdom of Valdemar and its founder, Duke Kordas Valdemar. Kordas' duchy is a rural community of mostly yeoman farmers and livestock breeders; Kordas himself loves and breeds horses, including the stunning "Valdemar Gold." As the story opens, a new Gold filly is born and given as a gift to Delia, Kordas' sister-in-law (who harbors a secret crush on him after he saved her life).

 

Behind this bucolic facade, Kordas is a worried man. Like all his contemporaries, he was "fostered" (read: held hostage) at the court of the Emperor at a young age and then sent home expected to obey the avaricious and self-absorbed commands of his liege lord. But Kordas' father has taught him to expect that some day the Empire will try to invade Valdemar, lay waste to its beautiful lands, and take all that they need, including the beloved horses. So for years his father, and now Kordas, have gathered mages and made preparations for the population and the livestock of Valdemar to escape via magical Gates to lands far in the west where the Empire cannot encroach on them. Their plans are set to come to fruition during the upcoming annual Empire Regatta in. Then Kordas is summoned to the Capital for a meeting of the heads of all the principalities, dukedoms, baronies, etc. Kordas goes, leaving his capable wife Isla, Delia, and his mages in charge, but what he finds at the Capital—including Air Elementals enslaved in scarecrow-like artificial bodies and "foster" children toed into line with obedience spells—so horrifies him that he finds he must help more than just the people of Valdemar.

A whopping great tale, with memorable characters, including "the Dolls" (whose secret will make you squirm), and a constantly moving plot. There are still avatars for Certain Public Figures (and their actions), but they are well disguised in the plot and not at all smack-in-the-face smirkingly obvious. Lackey hasn't written such a good adventure in several volumes. Definitely looking forward to the next two books and the definitive story of how the Companions came to be.

If I had one quibble, it's that we're told how special the Valdemar Golds are, but...why? Is it just their color? We almost learn more about the Chargers (including the two sent the Emperor who are "fake" Valdemar Golds), the Tow-Beasts, the Sweetfoots (riding horses), and the Fleetfoots (race horses) than we do about the Golds.

 

  Northland, Porter Fox

When I reached the last page of this book, I was so sad that the voyage was over.

Fox spent three years exploring the border country between the United States and Canada. He canoes the first portion, then rides a freighter through the Great Lakes, and finally finishes "the medicine line" (that chiefly straight border between Lake of the Woods, Michigan, and Washington state) via car (and some by foot). This is a travelogue (especially in the canoe sequences) through beautifully described boreal areas, a sociological study of the people who live in the border area (and the guys who manage to stay sane on the interminable freighter runs—the cook he encounters aboard the "Equinox" is a real character), and a history, from the voyageurs to the surveyors to the fishermen to the river pilots to the prairielands to the current struggles of the Lakota and other tribes over not only land rights, but over the pipelines that somehow still get built across their property even though it has been forbidden. (Did you know these oil pipelines, supposedly so well constructed and "no threat to the environment," leak someplace on their route every day? Superfund work is still being done on a farm that was ruined by 840,000 gallons of oil ten years ago.)

Fox tells the history not only of "the settlers and the explorers" (there are good summaries of the explorations of Champlain, who apparently respected the natives he found on this "newly discovered" land, and LaSalle as well as Mackenzie), but of the people who originally inhabited the land: the Iroquois, the Mohawk, the Huron, the Ojibwe, the Cree, the Blackfeet—their customs then and how they survive today, despite government effort to "beat the Indian out of them" in the past. He visits once-popular now-nearly-abandoned tourist camps (there's no wifi, so fewer tourists come), industrial plants, campsites on both the Canadian and U.S. border, that corner of the U.S. that sticks up into Canada (Lake of the Woods) due to an error by Benjamin Franklin, and Indian activist sites. His descriptions of the wild lands still left are breathtaking (if not always pleasant): beautiful birds and fish, starry nights, daunting storms, and clouds of mosquitoes.

As I said, part tourguide, part social commentary, part history text—all enjoyable!

 

  Death Among Rubies, R.J. Koreto

I lucked into this series when I found a remainder copy of the first book at Ollie's Discount Outlet, and I had to get the other two in the series (so far—Koreto is thinking of doing another). Lady Frances Ffolkes is a forward-thinking woman of the Edwardian era who attended university in the United States and has come home a suffragette and determined to be independent, even though she is in love with her good friend Henry Wheaton, a solicitor and amateur painter. Lady Frances ("Franny" to her friends) even lives at a hotel for women (shocking!) with her young, more traditional maid June Mallow, who insists on being called by her last name and puts on airs as the lady's maid of a titled woman. When two of "Franny's" friends, level-headed Thomasina ("Tommie") and more flighty Gwendolyn, travel to Gwen's ancestral home Kestrel's Eyrie, she goes along when she finds out Tommie has been threatened with an ugly note promising to reveal the truth about her relationship with Gwen if she does not stop living with her.

Kestrel's Eyrie is filled with visitors, including a noveau riche American businessman and his awkward daughter, a Muslim man who frequently breaks Islamic law, and two widows who have been helped by Gwen's family. Gwen's gallant cousin Christopher and his businesslike mother run the house for Sir Calleford, Gwen's father, and all seems well until Sir Calleford is found murdered. Now Gwen is his heir and will certainly be pushed into a marriage she doesn't want by his death—which makes her a suspect. But clues point out Tommie as the apparent murderer! Lady Frances knows Tommie would never kill anyone, but how can she allow the stupid constable who keeps the peace in that area to arrest Tommie, or go after the "burglars" he initially thought committed the crime? And what's going on with the Muslim and American visitors, especially when Lady Frances finds out her diplomat brother is involved? So it's back to sleuthing for her and the stolid, determined Mallow.

I blamed a couple of people for the murder initially, and then zeroed in on the correct suspect, but for a reason I didn't suspect until the end. This is a novel series for me in that I love the protagonist's sidekick even more than I love the protagonist. Mallow is wonderful. Under her demure servant's garb she's resourceful, clever, and great in emergencies. I could see her being played in a TV series by Nell Hudson, who played the queen's dresser Skerrett in 𝑉𝑖𝑐𝑡𝑜𝑟𝑖𝑎. Oh, Lady Frances is cool, too, as is Hal Wheaton, who loves her enough to let her be herself, but Mallow is the real treat in this series. Do I see a future between her and Dickinson, the younger police constable? Oh, I hope so!

 

  The Diary of a Bookseller, Shaun Bythell

I love this book. I loved it from when I opened it and started reading James the diary entries.

At eighteen, Shaun first visited The Book Shop, a used/vintage store in Wigtown, Scotland, a town that has since reinvented itself as a "booktown" like Hay-on-Wye in Wales. Twelve years later, discontent with employment opportunities, he went back to the store looking for a book, ending up buying the store from the owner, who wanted to retire. Eventually he started a blog about the endless problems running a book store, the odd customers who wandered in alá The Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops, the events and festivals the store participates in, buying collections of old books, etc. for the period of 2014 and early in 2015. Here we meet Nicky, Shaun's eccentric hippie associate; Anna, his current girlfriend; his buddy Eliot who stays over at the apartment above the shop and is constantly leaving his shoes where Shaun can trip over them; Mr. Deacon, the elderly regular customer; Vincent, the mechanic who keeps the rattletrap bookstore van running; Captain, the resident cat; plus an entire train of customers, many who use the shop to find books and then order them cheaper on Amazon, some who argue that a book priced online no cheaper than £20 is too expensive at £5, some who bring in old dirty romance paperbacks expecting them to be worth a lot more than they are, and on, and on, and on.

Shaun is, if you read on, more than a bit cynical and does not "suffer fools gladly," you may even find him a little grumpy for your tastes. However, knowing what I do about retail sales from my husband and other friends who have gone that route in employment, I find I still sympathize with him because of the damnfools that wander in, complaining, reading the books by the fire for hours and never reading anything, pennypinching to the point where it's infuriating, etc. There are some poignant bits, too, when he attends estate sales and goes to buy books from people who are cleaning out their parents' home after they die. You find out "how it all came out" in the epilog.

And there's a sequel!!!

 

  A Good Horse Has No Color, Nancy Marie Brown

Here's yet another book I bought due to it being mentioned on a podcast ("Travels with Rick Steves" strikes again!). Nancy Brown fell in love with the Icelandic sagas as a teen; also, as a horse lover and moderately good rider she fell in love with the Icelandic breed, which is small, but sturdy and has natural gaits similar to a Tennessee walking horse, the ground-eating "tolt" and the fabulous "flying pace." This is Nancy's story of her love of Iceland and her search for two Icelandic horses that she could purchase to take home to the U.S. Guided by two men she trusted, Haukur, a farmer who lived next to a home she and her husband rented after his mother was murdered, and Elvar, a horse breeder, Nancy goes on an almost obsessive search for two "perfect" horses. Her indecision and emotional needs, as well as her inexperience with choosing a good horse (and an Icelandic horse is different from the standard breeds you would find in the U.S.) almost sabotage her efforts.

I'll admit listening to her narrate the Icelandic sagas was a bit much, but in all the stories an extraordinary horse is crucial to the plot, and to Icelanders as well. The horses are carefully bred, and a limited number of them are exported, and then only the perfect ones (imperfect ones are usually destroyed and, surprisingly, often eaten). They can cover landscapes that would lame other horses, swim against strong currents, and were essential to Icelandic survival before cars, trains, paved roads, and bridges. Because they are so small, they are referred to as ponies, but calling them this in Icelandic culture is an insult.

Nancy spends a lot of time studying the complicated Icelandic language to be able to communicate, but one wishes she'd studied the better points of Icelandic horses and how to ride them (the seat is completely different) before she wanted to look for one. She has to depend on Haukur and his family and Elvar and his family to tell her if the horse is good or bad, and despite the fact she despises people who pick a horse for color or looks, she does the same thing herself, only coming to that realization at the end. She also seems to expect the horse she picks to instinctively know how to teach her, which seems unreasonable to me—maybe it's not.

But those are minor quibbles: the descriptions of Iceland are wonderful, and the breed is fascinating. However, I think you must at least like horses to get anything out of this.