A Line to Kill

 by Anthony Horowitz

This was a strange book.  It is by the author who is behind Midsomer Murders and Foyle's War.  He is also the author of a series of children's book.  In this story, an author, this author actually, goes to an island with a detective he is writing books about for a book festival

It turns out there is conflict on the island about a potential technology development.  The detective has some past history with an employee of the person who has funded the festival.  The detective was accused of pushing the man downstairs and crippling him, while pursuing him on pedophile charges.  The festival funder is not a likeable person either.

The rich man and his wife end up getting killed.  It appears the employee may have done it.  But in the end it turns out it was one of the other authors at the event who was angry at the festival sponsor because her son committed suicide after becoming addicted to the man's gambling site.

It was an okay story but I found it very bizarre that the author would insert himself and his real life into the story so much.  I like Midsommer Murders and Foyle's war much more.  The stories are much more interesting, the characters more intriguing.

A bit of a disappointment.

Cloud Cuckoo Land

 by Anthony Doer

This is a highly anticipated book by the author of All the Light We Cannot See, which I enjoyed.  I looked at some of the reviews/ratings for this book and they ranged from 1 star to 5 stars.  I can understand this.  This was a long book and a bit of a hard slog.  All the parts came together at the end but I am not sure it was worth it, in my opinion.

First of all, the author obviously values libraries and books, in fact he seems to bemoan the loss of anything written that has disappeared.  I am not sure all books are worth mourning....

The basic thread linking all the various lives/times in this book is a partial book that has been discovered Called Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes.  It is the story of a Shepherd who seeks to become a bird and make it to a land in the sky Cloud Cuckoo Land which is supposedly a paradise.  As the man strives to make it there he meets gods who first turn him into a donkey, he is treated harshly by his masters; then he becomes a fish inside the belly of a whale; then he becomes a raven and makes it to CCL where he still isn't happy.  When he goes to see an Oracle he basically discovers that he wants to be back where he came from and goes home.

There are several stories that relate to the book

- A girl from 14th Century Constantinople and a young boy from a farm outside Constantinople.  The girl discovers the manuscript while scrounging for books to sell to booksellers during a siege of constantinople.  Eventually she flees from the city and meets up with the young boy who is leaving the seige and returning to his family.  They eventually marry and after she dies her husband returns the scrolls to Urbino where the story appears to have originated.

Another character is a gay man, who was a prisoner of war in the Korean war.  As an old man he is working with children at a library to act out the story.  While they are preparing the play a young autistic boy who is angry because the forest next to his mother's property was razed for development and the owl he loved has disappeard.  The boy has gotten into anti-establishment posts on the internet and decides to bomb a real estate office but as he cannot get into the real estate office undetected he decides to put the bomb in the library.  He has used the library a lot.  The bomb is discovered, in a panic the boy shoots a Librarian and the old man ends up dying when he runs out of the library with the bomb.

The first story is about a space ship leaving earth with a destination hundreds of years away.  One of the families includes a young girl, her father and mother.  The ship gets a virus, many people get sick, the mother disappears (has died or been quarantined).  The father tosses his daughter into a room with the main computer, Sybil, with supplies and locks her in.  Why would a father want his daughter to survive alone??  The girl also has been told the CCL story by her father.  The girl is able to access a library using 3D goggles, supposedly the library has all knowledge.  She is also able to go see parts of the earth in a snapshot like a googlearth shot of a street.  Eventually the girl realizes that Sybil and the library do not have all info or are not willing to give her access to all info.  She discovers that if she finds an owl icon somewhere she can actually break through the images to get active views of things and see the devastation, tragedy in the world.  Ultimately the girl suspects that she is  not really travelling through space at all.  She breaks out and finds a community on Greenland where she spends the rest of her life.  The company that planned the space ship had programmed the library to show their preferred views of the world.

The young bomber, while in jail, learns to translate the CCL story.  When he gets out he asks the children who were at the library when he bombed it to meet him.  When they come he gives them copies of his translation of the books.  We also find out that the young bomber was hired by the spaceship company to "edit" clips of reality for the library files on the ship.  He eventually starts to sabotage/edit the system, using the Owl icons to allow people to access the truth rather than the sterilized views of earth.

The book certainly stressed the value and power of stories to engage us.  It was interesting how the author wove the various lives together because of their involvement with the book.  However, I did find it a hard slog to get to the end.  This may have been an interesting, challenging, intellectual exercise for the author but my final thought was, you took us on this long journey, so what, for what?? The character in the main story, after his trials and tribulations decides he wants to be back home.

Book Jacket quote: "Dedicated to 'the librarians, then, now and in the years to come'. Cloud Cuckoo Land is a beautiful and redemptive novel about stewardship -- of the book, of the Earth, of the human heart.  I am not sure it was all that redemptive, only one of the character, the Turkish girl and the spaceship girl seem to have ended with a happy life....

August Into Winter

 by Guy Vanderhaeghe

I read another book of his a number of years ago, the Last Crossing.  As I recall I really enjoyed it so I was looking forward to this book.

" You carried the past into the future on your back, its knees and arms hugging you tighter with every step."

This book is about a number of very damaged people. Vanderhaeghe is a masterful storyteller but I just couldn't deal with all the sadness and violence in the book.

The book is set in a small town where a number of petty crimes occur.  One of the local police is convinced that a young man in town is responsible for the crimes.  This young man is a loner and is scared because his parents had him but didn't really want a child.  They farmed him out to other relatives for awhile.  His father has died and the boy, Ernie, is now loving with his mother but there is no affection there.

The police officer goes to confront Ernie and is murdered by him.  

The other police officer wants to track down Ernie.  There is a big rainstorm which makes the roads impassable so the police officer recruits the help and the horses of a local farmer.  The local farmer is a widower is a scarred war veteran who has guilt because he feels he is repsonsible for his wife's death as he got her drinking along with him when he came back from the war.  His brother is even more damaged.  He is living in a local hotel, supported by his brother, and is writing a great opus as he is convinced he is in direct communication with god.  The farmer, Oliver Dill, has a grudge against Ernie because his wife seemed to like him and rely on him more than her husband.

The two men set off on horseback.  While this is being organized Ernie has packed and taken his late father's car.  He has also picked up a local girl, who is only 12 years old.  He is in love with her and tells her he will marry her when it is legal to do so.  She is happy to leave the house where she lives with her sister as her sister treats her like a slave.  They head off but end up crashing the car in a ditch.  Ernie gets her to the local teacher's house/school and tells her to stay there til he can get the car fixed. They tell the teacher that they are brother and sister and that she is being taken to a boarding school.  But from the girls shabby clothes the teacher knows this is a lie.

The teacher is new to the area, and is there reluctantly.  She lost her teaching job in Winnipeg after it was revealed she had an affair with a married man.    Her lover, a fellow teacher, went to fight in Spain and was killed.  She has received the diary of his time in Spain and pours over it morning his loss.

Eventually the cop and farmer see the crashed car and go to the teacherage where they discover the girl. The teacher is asked to look after the girl.  Ernie goes to a nearby store and robs it and kills the owner and hurts his wife.  The girl sets fire to the school and teacherage.

Eventually the farmer and police officer find Ernie.  He escapes but not before he kills the police officer.

The farmer offers the teacher money to buy some clothes and that she can stay at his place until she figures out what she is going to do.  As the school is destroyed she is told she will not get paid but she has to stay around to be a witness in the arson trial against the girl.  

The farmer is  in love witht he teacher and hopes he can convince her to marry him but she longs for the big city.  So the teacher does't feel to beholding to him he asks her to type up his brothers document.  He is but crazy but she does it. She also dreams about publishing her lover's journal.  The farmer asks her to marry him but she says she can't.  He does everything he can to endear himself to her even taking her to an all expenses paid weekend to Winnipeg, not strings attached.  He even tells her she can stay in Winnipeg if that is what she wants to do but she decides to return with him as she has to be a witness at the trial.

Meantime, the boy Ernie is plotting an escape from prison, to take place while they are being transferred to the court for the trial. He and another prisoner are able to escape.  Ernie has two goals, to get his girlfriend out of prison and to kill the farmer and the teacher because they are going to testify against his girlfriend.

In the end the farmer, his brother and the teacher are running from Ernie and the farmer's brother stays behind to say his brother and the teacher.  He is killed by Ernie but Ernie is wounded and dies in the snow also.

In the end the farmer and the teacher go to Vancouver where the teacher finds and teaching job and is very happy, the farmer who is happy just to be with her, does odd jobs. It seems that the teacher might have finally developed affection for him because he is such a good man and has been so good to her.

It was brilliantly told, but a little long I think, the long sections of the lovers journal could have been shorter, I think.  But as I said all the violence and craziness was a bit hard to take in these covid times. At least two of the characters found some type of happiness.

April in Spain

 by John Banville

This is the second mystery book I have read by Banville.  He used to write more general fiction and in fact one the Booker Prize for one of his books.  I wonder why he switched to mysteries.

I love his writing.  He has incredible descriptions of settings, etc.  He also does a superb job of describing his characters and what motivates them.

The story is about a coroner who is reluctantly vacationing in Spain with his second wife.  The guy has a lot of issues, he doesn't like change, he doesn't want to be anywhere but home.  One day he sees a girl in a restaurant and is convinced that she is a friend of his daughter who was supposedly killed by her brother a few years ago.  The brother admitted to the killing and killed himself but the body of his sister was never found.

He contacts his daughter in England, who is having issues with her boyfriend.  He tells her of his suspicions and convinces her to come to Spain to see if he is correct.

Before she leaves England the man's daughter contacts the police and the girl's uncle telling them of her father's suspicion.  It seems a weak case but the police decide to send an officer along with her to Spain.  The uncle is shocked and dismayed at this news and makes arrangements for a hitman to go and kill his niece.  He feels news of her being alive and knowledge of some family business dealings will ruin him as a politiican and businessman.

The man's daughter does meet up with her friend who is working as a doctor in the local hospital.

The author does a great job or portraying the cornoner, is very supportive, encouraging wife, the psycophathic hitman, and others.  The books comes to a shocking climax as the hitman arrives in the restaurant of the hotel where the coroner, his wife and daughter, the policeman and the friend are sitting. The hitmans kills the coroner's wife and the police officer kills him.  It seemed sad that the poor wife had to die.  We find out that both the girl and her brother were abused by their father and then had an incestual relationship.  The uncle know about this.  He gets his just desserts in the end.

A very intersting book.

Mistress of the Ritz

 by Melanie Benjamin

I picked this book up on a whim at Chapters.  I expected it to be a light read about WWII.  Boy was I wrong,,and pleasantly surprised.

The book is based on the life of a real couple, the Manager of the Ritz Hotel in Paris, and his American, Jewiish wife, Claude and Blanche Auzello.

The story takes place in Paris when the Nazis have orverrun the city and taken over the Ritz for their headquarters.  The two people are disgusted to have to be nice to the Nazis.

The couple have quite a fiery relationship.  The wife is especially upset when her husband insists that he has to have a mistress because it is what French husbands do.  The wife is upset at how her husband cowtows to the Germans.  She does not know that he is working with the resistance, feeding information  to the resistance, hiding away supplies for the resistance.  

Blanche meets a kind of wild woman, a gypsy, on a boat when she is returning to Paris after leaving her husband for a time.  The two become fast friends and the girl, Lily, convinces Blanche to help her with her work for the resistance.  While Blanche's husband thinks she is off drinking and partying she is actually on missions to help downed soldiers, etc.  It is ironic that neither of them know what the other is doing until late in the book.

One day Blanche makes a mistake, she throws a drink at a Nazi while she is at a famous restaurant with Lily.  She is arrested and tortured.  The Germans know what Lily is and want her to turn Lily in.  Both of them end up in a prison.  While she is in prison Blanche keeps telling them she is a Jew to take attention off Lily but the Germans won't believe her. Blanche assumes Lily dies there.  When the Americans enter Paris the prison doors are opened and Blanche is able to make it back to the hotel.  Her husband is shocked at how much she has changed.  After the war Blanche is plagued by nightmares of her torture and what she experienced in the prison.  Finally one night Claude shoots her and then himself.  At the end of the book we find out that Lily did survive and kept awared of Blanche and Claude but she never got in contact.  Perhaps if she had Blanche would have been able to recover a bit.  She felt guilty for thinking she was responsbible for Lily's death.

This turned out to be a very interesting book with very powerful characters.

The Reading List

 Sara Nisha Adams

This is another sad book

It is the story of a girl Aliesha who is living with her brother and their mother who is severely depressed and always needs to have one of her kids present to look after her.  The mother seems to prefer the son and Aliesha is very hurt by this. 

Aliesha is on summer break from school and gets a job at a local library.  She isn't a reader and just wants to listen to her music and check out books.  An elderly man, grieving the loss of his wife, finds a book she had read, The Time Travellers Wife. He is not a reader but picks it up and finds he enjoyed it. He has become very reclusive despite the urgings of his daughters.  He decides to overcome his lethargy and go to the local library and ask for another book to read. She is very rude to him and just waves him over to the stacks.The man is embarrassed and runs from the library with a drivers manual.

Aliesha is chastised for her treatment of the man.  While she is checking in books she finds a reading list of 8 quite diverse books: To Kill A Mockingbird, Rebecca, The Kite Runner, Life of Pi, Pride and Prejudice, Little Women, Beloved and A Suitable Boy.

She is able to see the man again and gives him the first book on the list she found to read.  Then she decides she better read that book and the others on the list so she can recommend other books to him.  They become friends after this and discuss the books and also share some of the sadness in their lives.

Gradually Mukesh starts to go out more including to his church and starts having his wife's best friend over for dinner.  They just want to be friends.

We learn that other people also find copies of the booklist in other places.  Mukesh buys some of the books for his young granddaughter and takes her to the library to get a library card.  This cements their friendship.

Aliesha's mother really needed treatment, not sure why they didn't get her hospitalized.  Her behaviour was a huge burden on both kids, neither of them could have a life, with friends, etc.  One day the brother, who seemed to be the strongest one in the family kills himself by jumping in front of a subway train.  The mother's reaction to the daughter is "get out... I don't want to see you again".  Totally devastating.

In the end of the book we find many people have been changed by reading the books on the list and it appears that Mukesh's wife may have been who shared the list.  Mukesh and Aleisha come up with a plan to have an event to invite people to the library for a drop in Wed. morning event with food, to promote the library, and in memory of the brother.

In the end it looks like the mother is making small steps to seek help.

The book was interesting in that it talked about books as escape but also what you can learn about life from books, but in the end it is friendship and connections with people that are most important.

-

Bewilderment

 by Richard Powers

This is the latest book by Powers.  It is one of the books on the Booker list this year.

I read Powers previous book Overstory, which won the Pulitzer Prize.  As I recall, I did not like it.  I did not like the characters and I think I was in disbelief that one of the characters would turn in one or some members of the group.

This book is about an single-parent Astrophysicist.  The man's child has some un-diagnosed disorder, autisim, ADHD.  The man's wife was a high energy activist who died of cancer.  Both the man and his son remember her and miss her terribly.  The boy wants to see videos of his mother making presentations in front of government committees.  He seems desperate to stay connected to her.

The boy has frequent, sometimes violent meltdowns.  As the book opens the father and son are on a camping trip.   The boy has been taken out of school because he attacked another boy.  The father and son like looking at the stars and the father makes up stories about what life is like on some real/make-believe stars.  These planets have various lifeforms, many quite different than life on earth.  This is the father's work in real life, speculating on potential life forms in the universe.

Prior to the wife/mother's death the man and his wife are invited to take part in a scientific experiment being run by a former friend/lover of the wife.  They each are put in a booth and told to think about some emotions and their brain activity is monitored.  The woman is able to watch the images of her husband's brain activity and vice versa.

The father is really having difficulty handling his son and trying to decide if the son needs to be medicated.  In desperation he goes to the Doctor who did the experiments on him and his wife asking for professional advice about his son.  The Doctor explains they are now using the equipment to treat people to help them learn to manage their emotions.  He asks the man if his son would like to be a test subject.

The man agrees.  The therapy seems to help the boy almost immediately.  He becomes calmer.  He talks about having "people" in the machine who help him. As part of the process the boy is exposed to his mother's brain activity from the experiment she participated in.  The boy is really pleased to be connected with his mother.

The man and the boy are reading the book Flowers for Algernon about about and a mentally disabled man (Charlie) who are made smarter... so you know what is coming....  This seemed a bit lame.

In the story there is a horrific president (like Trump).  This president is intent on destroying funding on science activities. 

The only reference to Bewilderment is on Page 238 "That first Tuesday in November, online conspiracy theories, compromised ballots, and bands of armed polled protesters undermined the integrity of the vote....I wondered how I might explain the crisis to an anthropologist from Proxima Centaurti  In this place, with such a species, trapped in such technologies, even a simple head count grew impossible. Only pure bewilderment kept us from civil war"

Definition: Bewilderment: a feeling of being perplexed and confused

 The father actually speaks before a committee in support of programs he is working on but funding for a planned project is cut.  The Doctor who is working with them man's son tells him his lab has also lost its funding so he can no longer treat the boy.  The boy starts to deteriorate, his curiosity, energy declines.  

Eventually the father and the boy go camping again.  During the night the boy leaves the tent and goes out into the river. The father finds him half frozen in the current and is unable to save him.

I just read a review of the book in the New York times that says it is sentimental and not as complex as Overstory.  I think I agree.  The contrast -- the father being an astrophysicist and his speculations/storytelling about other worlds and his inability to find a way for his son to a way to happily exist in the natural, non-tech induced world was a bit of an obvious construct.

For me Powers again asked us to look at what we are asked to consider what we are doing to our planet.  While the story may have been weak I enjoyed it more/disliked it less than The Overstory.

Great Circle

 by Maggie Shipstead   

This book is nominated for the Booker this year. 

It is basically the story of two women, a fictional woman pilot who disappeared while on an attempt to circle the globe from pole to pole and and actress whose career is in tailspin who takes on the role of playing the pilot in a movie.

The book starts with a ship captain who marries a rather unsuitable woman.  She gets pregnant and has twins.  While the captain's family is sailing on one of his atlantic crossings the boat sinks.  The owner had been storing weapons material on the ship (in an effort to serve the war effort).  The captain is vilified and imprisoned when he jumps from the ship with his two children leaving the ship and many passengers to go down without him.

The father drops the children off with their uncle in Montana.  He is a somewhat famous artist and lets the kids kid of run wild.  The kids are friends with a local boy who is also somewhat on his own as his mother is a drunk.  The girl and this boy have an on again off again relationship over the years.

The uncle is a drinker and a gambler and basically gambles away the money he is given for the children's care.  One of the twins is a girl. She sees some barnstormers and decides she wants to become a pilot.  A local man, a rum runner (during prohibition) becomes enamoured with the girl and funds her flying lessons.  Eventually she marries him, feeling grateful for what he has done for her and because he bailed her uncle out of his debts.  The marriage does not go well.  She feels trapped, he no longer wants her to fly and he wants her to have a child and she doesn't want to. Eventually she flees to Alaska and sets up a flying business.  Shes always fears her husband will find her.

Her brother leaves Montana for the coast and makes a living sketching people in parks. One day he meets a girl who introduces him to her father.  Her father wants him to paint the girl and also catalogue his art collection.  The man makes his money from meat.  When he finds out the young man is vegetarian he kicks him out.  The young woman and young man are in love, the brother is devastated at the loss of his love.  The girl eventually marries someone else.

The other story takes place in the present, an actress is starring in a series of movies.  She is fired from the series when she is publicly seen out in public with another actor.  The director and writer of the series feel she has damaged the "brand".  The young woman is then offered a role in the story of the female pilot who was lost trying to circumnavigate the globe.  The actress is interested as she had read a book about the woman as a child.

The story gives more details in both women's lives.  In the end the actress is introduced to a person who has more information about the pilot because she is a relative.  It turns out that they pilot's brother an the woman he loved did hook up during WWII while the woman's husband was fighting in the war.  She got pregnant with his child. The pilot's brother was working for the U.S. military painting images of the war.  His sister thought he would be safe as an artist but he ends up getting killed while traveling during the war.

The information the actress receives indicates that the woman pilot did not die after all but reinvented her life again in Australia after crashing her plane near and island.  Her childhood friend apparently visited her in Australia but they never married.  She left her estate to her dead brother's love child.

It was an interesting story with the two intertwined lives but was a bit slow going at times.  The ending was an interesting surprise. 

As far as I am concerned this is not the best book nominated for the Booker this year, it will be interesting to see which one wins.  I will have read most of the books on the shortlist soon.

 

The World Gives Way

 by Marissa Levien

This book is set in the future, I assume.   It is about a space ship, rigged to look like the earth, which has been traveling for about 100 years with the destination a distant planet.

The main character, Myrra, is one of the many contract workers who are obliged to work for 50 years before they get their freedom.  She had been sold into contract work after her mother, a contract worker, disappeared.  She was five years old.  Many contract workers seem resigned to their fate but not Myrra, she is working to save money, or get married to someone who can buyout her contract and free her.

Initially she worked in a laundry and later a bakery.  As the book opens she is working as the housekeeper and babysitter for a wealthy connected couple on the ship.  One day she is summoned in the middle of the night to the penthouse by the wife of the family.  The woman commits suicide by jumping off the building, leaving Myrra to care for her daughter.  Before she dies she hints that her husband is dead and that Myrra should help herself to money/cards in the vault.

Myrra goes to her bosses office area and finds he has killed himself in the tub.  As she needs a palm print to open the safe she cuts off his hand.  She is careful to take a card that she thinks was a card for unknown accounts of his.  She sets off with the baby and tries to get out of New London before she can be caught.  Before she leaves Myrra learns that her employers probably killed themselves because the ship was going to collapse soon because of a hole in the hull that could not be repaired.

The deaths are discovered quite quickly and two security officers are sent to find her to charge her with murder and or kidnapping.  She doesn't go to the city they think she will go to.  They go to an underwater city but it starts to collapse because of earthquakes and they only barely escape.  They eventually track Myrra down and she tells them what happened and that the world is going to end but they don't believe her.

Eventually the earthquakes and collapses continue and it is announced that the ship is in danger.  The older of the two security people  decides to leave to return to his family. The other security officer, who is now an orphan as his adopted father died in a building collapse, decides to try to find Myrra.  He knows there is no point arresting her, he just doesn't want to be alone.

They eventually travel through a fake desert and reach the inner and outer hulls of the ship.  They meet someone who knows Myrra's mother and she is able to find out that her mother didn't really abandon her, she was arrested and taken to this hull area to work there.  The young security officer calls his real parents, who are in prison for a variety of crimes, they don't seem to have changed and won't believe him when he tells them the world is going to end.

As the book ends it appears the world will collapse but Myrra and Tobias are glad to be together at the end.

This was an interesting story, very well told.  It did a great job of describing this "created" earth and of the building tension as the story and the catastrophe developed.  I was hoping for a more positive ending but don't know how one could have happened given what was going on and so quickly on the ship.

However, the deaths of the two people are disc

China Room

by Sunjeev Sahota

This is another of the books on the longlist for the Booker Prize this year.  It is the story to two people, a woman (Mehar) and her great-grandson.

Part of the reason I enjoyed the book was the author's beautiful descriptive language.  The other reason was the engrossing, somewhat bizarre story.

The story takes place in the Punjab.  Mehar is engaged at a very young age, in an arranged marriage.  When it takes time for the wedding we find that three brothers in the same family will all be wedding on the same day.  The men's mother is the boss of the family.  In the culture the women are to keep covered including their faces.  In a bizarre situation the women never get to really know which of the three men is their husband.  The only time the husband's come to them is to a room, totally in the dark, where the men have sex with them and leave.

The mother in law treats all three brides as dirt and bosses them around.  Mehar thinks she knows which man is hers but it turns out she is wrong.  She is actually the bride of the oldest brother.  However, a brief encounter with one of the other brothers outside the house convinces her that another of the brothers is her husband.  They start meeting on the sly and seem to fall in love and enjoy having sex together.  The question has to be asked if this man was indeed her husband why didn't he just arrange meetings in the dark room on a regular basis.  It is bizarre that they women would not be allowed to have normal daily interactions with their husbands, not being "kept in the dark".  We do learn that the mother in law was apparently not allowed to marry the man she wanted to.

Eventually Mehar discovers the truth.  She is distraught and starts to cut herself and get ill.  She shuns her husband and he respects her wishes. She continues to have liaisons with the other brother and they plan to run away to Lahore.  Mehar gets pregnant by her lover.  The mother in law knows what is going on.  

At this time the fight for Indian Independence and Independent Punjab state is gaining strength.  The mother tells her eldest son that he should offer his brother as a soldier.  The man and Mehar are caught just as they are planning to leave.  Mehar is put in a room with locked bars, we don't know anything of her life after that other than she has 5 more children from her actual husband.  Mehar often wonders what happened to her lover, if he is alive or dead.  Her husband visits him in prison but doesn't tell her he has seen him.

Mehar's husband does seem to forgive her infidelity, he gets the house painted her favourite colour, he is willing to accept her rebuffs at first.  You have to wonder if she ever came to accept/respect him.  However given the locked bars on her room I am doubtful.

The second part of the story is about the young university student, great grandson of Mehar.  His parents had moved to England.  They and the boy are scarred by the verbal and physical attacks on them because they are immigrants.  The boy is on a summer break from uni.  He is a drug addict.  He stays with an uncle for a time and is misdiagnosed with dengue fever.  His aunt doesn't really want him around because of neighbourhood gossip,  He agrees to go to the old family home on a farm.  The house where Mehar was imprisoned.  His uncle sends him food.  He reluctantly starts to clean up the place a bit and deal with his withdrawal symptoms.  He is befriended by a local woman doctor and a local teacher.  They visit him, help him get the place painted etc and become friends.  The boy know that the room he is sleeping in was where his great grandmother was imprisoned but he doesn't seem to be interested in finding out the story although he does hear local gossip.

At the end of the story the boy wants to tell the Doctor he loves her but discovers she probably is having a relationship with the teacher, at least that is what the local gossips say.  It doesn't matter because the female doctor has been assigned elsewhere and he has to return to uni, where he has had failing grades.

We learn at the end that he does go back and has a couple more drug relapses but eventually gets clean. It was an interesting story, just surprised the young man wasn't more interested in getting to know more about his great grandmother.

I think the book is about isolation and imprisonment, real or psychological and unrequited love and the consequences.

The Madness of Crowds

 by Louise Penny

I looked at a couple reviews of this, the latest Louise Penny book.  The descriptions included: "her darkest book" and "difficult to read".  I think I have to agree on both counts.

This was a very powerful book, more than just a mystery, I think it ventured into social commentary and discussion of the value of a life and what could justify murder, who can you trust, and can you trust yourself.  She said that the book was partially triggered by people suggesting she write a book about the covid pandemic.

The book takes place just after the pandemic and people in Three Pines are rejoicing in being able to socialize again, hug again.  Armand Gamache is given a strange assignment.  He is supposed to coordinate security for controversial speaker who will be coming to speak at a local university gym.  This doesn't seem to be an appropriate job for him and his team.  The speaker is travelling with her Assistant who has been a best friend since childhood.

When Gamache does research and finds out that the speaker has a fanatical views and is very popular on social media and amongst fringes of society he gets concerned and tries to get the Chancellor of the University to stop the event.  She pleads that universities need to air all opinions and won't cancel.  We later find out that the speaker is a fried of hers and that the Chancellor actually booked the hall but under a fake name.  The speaker is a statistician, who was hired by the government to write a report.  The report is so shocking the government refuses to release it.  So the woman takes her message to the Internet and gains a big following.  She is proposing that the way for the economy to grow after the pandemic is to eliminate all the vulnerable (handicapped and aged).  This strikes a nerve with Gamache and his son-in-law who has a daughter with Downs Syndrome.  The son-in-law has been wrestling with his feelings about having a handicapped child.

At the event there is high security, people are searched for weapons.  Gamache, because he wants to protect Jean Guy for the message of the speaker and the support she gets from the crowd, orders Jean Guy to stay outside the doors of the venue.  But Jean Guy does go inside.

While the speaker is speaking a firecracker goes off. This frightens the crowd.  Shortly after gun shots are aimed at the stage.  Gamache falls on the speaker to protect her.  They discover the shooter is a local man, not known to police, they don't initially know how the gun could have gotten into the building.  When Gamache finds out Jean Guy did not follow his instructions he is furious.

As the story goes on various people who are interviewed don't tell the police the truth.  For example a local retired academic, who is known as something like the bad saint, does not tell them he was at the event, standing next to the gunman and did nothing to stop him from firing.  We later find out that this academic, early in his academic career, was working for a scientist who conducted devastating experiments, bordering on torture on psychiatric patients.  This work was funded by the FBI.

An additional character in the story is a young Sudanese woman who is visiting Three Pines.  She is a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize.  Everyone of course expects her to be saintly because of all her work fighting for refugees, women and children.  However, she is very ascerbic.

As the story goes on we learn that the Speakers mother was a victim of these scientific experiments and committed suicide after she came home from the treatments.  She left behind the Speaker, her handicapped sister and her husband.  A few years later the sister dies, Gamache comes to suspect she was murdered and the father commits suicide.  He sends a letter to the Chancellor (who at that time was a close friend) asking her to give the letter to his daughter.  He does not admit to killing the daughter.

Gamache tells the Chancellor to take the speaker and her assistant and have them stay at her place for their safety.  Instead she brings them to a New Year's Eve Party in Three Pines.  The assistant is found murdered, bludgeoned, just after midnight.  They are trying to figure out if she was killed on purpose or was mistaken for the speaker.

In the end it turns out that the speaker actually killed her assistant when the assistant confessed she had smothered the woman's sister to get the women freedom.  There is a confrontation in which the speaker has a gun on Jean-Paul and he has a gun trained on her.  He is tempted to use it on her and she seems to be seeking "suicide by cop".  Added to all this conflict we also learn more about the Sudanese woman and the murders she committed to escape capture and save others.

The book is very intense, Gamache and Jean-Paul wrestle with whether they are being truly logical in handling this case or whether their emotions are colouring their judgment.  Gamache of course always thinks he is logical so the thought that he might not always be is a test for him.

It isn't just about murder, it is about the right to life, is murder ever justified? when you see something bad happening and you don't act, how we expect "good" people to be saints, and they're not necessarily.  It is about lies, truth, loyalty we think we owe to friends, emotion, logic and the insanity of crowds, a commentary of current social media.  She threw everything into this story,

No One is Talking About This

 by Patricia Lockwood

This book is one of the books on the Booker Prize Longlist this year.  It is about a woman who is addicted to Internet Social Media.  She is seen to be a guru and is invited to speak around the world.  The book portrays all the nonsense with mis-information in social media, the striving to get attention by controversial or even ridiculous posts. The woman ignores her husband.  At one point she agrees to have her phone locked in a mini-safe so she can't go online but she doesn't even last a day and begs her husband to unlock the safe.

About this point I was ready to give up on the book.... it is too much like real life right now and we don't need more crap on the Internet.

She is on a speaking tour when she gets a message from her mother that something is wrong with her pregnant sister's foetus.  She rushes home.  It turns out the baby has Elephant man disease.  There is discussion about aborting the fetus but is is a late stage pregnancy and the laws of the country would have dire consequences for the parents and doctors if this was done.  While doctor's understand why the parents may wish to do this they are eager to find out what happens with the baby if it survives.

The baby survives and the internet addict forgets about the internet.  She and all the family are in love with and engrossed in this beautiful, blind, deaf, deformed child.  They are excited to see her beautiful blue unseeing eyes grow bigger when they cuddle her or play music to her.  At one point it is proposed to sew her eyes shut... don't know why.  But when it comes time to do it the doctor says he can't won't do it... wouldn't do it if it was his child.  The main character has been taking numerous pictures and videos of the baby throughout its short life on her phone.

The child's days are numbered, they all know this but they spend as much time as they can with her until she eventually stops breathing.  

As the book ends the author has been speaking at a conference.  While she is speaking, she has really been thinking about her niece.... She is invited for a drink.  Then it says someone "lifts" her phone from her pocket.... and she feels lighter.... Not sure what this ending is supposed to mean.

This was a difficult book but the author really did a great job of switching from the internet addiction and the need for attention in the cyber-universe to the preciousness of an individual life.

She did a brilliant job.  I am glad I stuck with the book.

Thursday Murder Club

 by Richard Osman

This book is about a group of seniors in a Seniors Home who as a hobby practice trying to solve previously unsolved crimes.   One of the group is a former police officer who kept copies of some case files.  Other members of the group include a psychiatrist.

The group is merrily pursuing their various activities at the home but are intrigued when an actual murder occurs, the developer who built their seniors complex, and has expansion plans, is murdered, as is theman who was his second in command.  

The group had made contact with a police officer previously.  She had come to give them a presentation as a public service.  The group wants to be involved in solving the crime.  As they are not police officers they do not have to do everything by the book.  They manage to get their friend the police officer assigned to the team working the murder cases.

In several ways the group seems to be ahead of the police, but they also try to find out what the police know that they don't know.  They manage to find one of the people the police feel may be responsible before the police do.  Eventually they share their info with the police and the cases are solved.

The characters in this book are all characters, many of the people in the home have "back stories" which add to the colour of the story.

It was an entertaining read.  I am looking forward to the next book in the series which is being released next month.

Island Queen

 by Vanessa Riley

This is a fictional account of a real woman, Dorothy Kirwan Thomas.  Dolly as she liked to be called began her life as a slave, she was raped by her half-brother (son of her slave owner father).  The story tells of her life and loves, the many children she bore by several men including a prince of England.  He documents how she worked to become an entrepreneur, hiring out housekeepers, to raise money to free herself and her family members from slavery.  She succeeded at that and became a very wealthy and powerful woman in the caribbean.  Men seem to have been smitten by her.  She was lucky, she had many white men who were willing to work with her or for her to help her achieve her goals.  She faced a lot of hurdles trying to be a black business-woman.

She faced many hardships, her first lover kept the daughter she had by him, convincing her it was better to take the girl back to England to the family of him and his wife.  She never forgave him for this.  The book describes the history of slavery, the battles between England and France over some of the islands and a rebellion by the slaves on one island.  Her daughter and the daughter's husband were involved int his and Dolly had to get her to another island and change her name to save her from being tried or killed (her husband died in the fighting). Dolly eventually married one man, Mr. Thomas and they had several children together.  She loved him but couldn't really admit it and she always did what she wanted even if he advised against it.

The book then goes on to document her life building stores, and hotels, a plantation which got destroyed in the slave uprising.  She admitted that the girls she hired out as housekeepers often ended up having sex with her employers and eventually she had someone buy slaves for her to help her build her hotels and work on her plantation.  She justified this by saying she treated them better than the white "mastas" would have.  She was a very determined and complicated person.

The book was well researched and interesting.  I do feel that the book could have been shorter, a few of the details of the family lives and adventures could have been skipped.

Anne's Cradle: the Life and Works of Hanako Muraoka

 by Eri Muraoka

This book is about the Japanese translator of the Anne of Green Gables and other L.M. Montgomery books (16 of 21).

It is a fascinating story about an amazing woman.

Hanoka was one of the children of a poor tea merchant.  All the other children were sent into service of some kind but Hanoka's father, who had become a Christian, decided to send her to a girl's school run by Christian missionaries.  She was sent there at 10 years of age and lived in a dorm at the school.   Most of the students were of wealthy parents but somehow she got in on a scholarship.  Most of the missionaries were Canadian.

She was an eager student and especially liked to devour the English language books in the library.  She shrived in the school and while she longed to be a translator she started out by being a school teacher. At quite an advanced age for a young woman, she met and married her husband whose family ran a publishing company.  This was of course right up her alley.  However, an earthquake destroyed the printing business and the other brother who had been co-managing with it also died.  Hanako and her husband struggled to start up another publishing company.  In addition to earning money for her own family Hanoka also tried to support her family as well so money was tight.

She was committed to publishing books for children. She translated a lot of english language books such as Twain, Dickens and Buck.  She also became active in the Japanese suffragette movement.

When world war started the teachers at the school had to leave the country.  One of the teachers gave Hanako a well-worn copy of Anne of Green Gables before she left.  Hanako and her husband's printing business was destroyed, by a bomb this time.  While the war raged on Hanako would take the copy of Anne of Green Gables and her translation notes with her every time she went to a shelter.  She knew that if she was caught with this book by the "enemy" she would face imprisonment or even death but she kept on.

After the war she tried to get the book published and finally in 1952 she was successful.  It was an instant success, exceeding the expectations of Hanako and the publisher.  She went on to translate more of Montgomery's books.  She never made it to PEI.  Eventually she was part of the group to convince the Americans who were "governing" Japan after the war that women should have the right to vote and they did get the right.

Hanako's house had a huge library, later in life she opened her private library to the neighbourhood children and eventually donated the collection to some institution.

An fascinating women who had an amazing life.  Like Anne she persevered through many difficulties, death of her son, loss of businesses, the war, etc.

In the Footsteps of the Group of Seven

 by Jim and Sue Waddington     

This book is a history of the Group of Seven with photos of the locations they painted with the paintings of the locations.

It was very interesting to see how they "interpreted" what they saw when they painted.

I hope to keep that in mind when I paint.

My Brilliant Friend

 by Elena Ferrante

This is the story of a young girl growing up in post war Italy near Naples.  As the book opens she gets a call from the son of her best friend who tells her his mother has disappeared.  All her clothing etc. are gone.  The woman isn't surprised by this development and tells him not to contact her again as she has no idea where his mother has gone.

The book is the first of a series of books which I assume will ultimately explain where the woman's friend, Lina, has gone.

The book follows the life of the girls as they become best friends.  Lina is a very intelligent but also very spunky, even aggressive girl who doesn't take guff from anyone.  The main character is enthralled with her best friend.  She relies on her friendship, thinks about her all the time, even when Lina is cruel to her.  There is a lot of conflict and violence within families and between young men trying to assert their manhood,  One man drove a widow crazy when he wooed her, when his wife forces them to leave the neighbourhood, the woan really loses it.

The book does and excellent job of portraying life, tragedies, scandals and gossip in the small town.  It shows the girls as they get interested in boys and vice versa.  Lina always seems to have to the need to show she is smartest, even when she is forced to leave school to work in her family shoe repair shop.

When she learns that the main character is taking Latin  , Lin a borrows books from the local library learns latin on her own.

Lina and her brother plan to develop a company making shoes, but don't tell their father.  Everyone, adults and especially young men seem enthralled with Lina.  One wealthy young man asks to marry her.  She says no but her parents welcome his attention.  They also accept his investment in their shoe company.  Lina finally accepts a proposal from a boy whose family own a grocery store.

While all this is happening the main character continues to go to school, but she starts to wonder what it will get her.  She is also hurt that her friend keeps getting all the attention, she feels ugly by comparison.

The book ends up being a little like a soap opera but it did a great job of portraying life in Italy, the coming of age of the girls, the family dynamics, the gap between the wealthy and the poor, the neighbourhood conflicts.

The book ends with Lina's wedding.  She is shocked to see her first suitor come to her reception wearing the first pair of shoes she and her brother made.  Did her husband sell them to this man?  We imagine Lina won't react well to this.

The story is now on Netflix.  I think I may continue to watch the series on Netflix rather than read three more books.

 

The Eighth Detective

 by Alex Pavesi

This is one of the most original mystery books I have ever read.  I really enjoyed it.

The story starts with a woman who is supposedly an Editor for a small mystery book publisher who wants to meet the author of a mystery book called the White Murders that was published 20 years before.  She says her company wants to publish the book.

The author is reclusive, living on a Greek Island.  He was a math prof who wrote a book about the mathematical elements of mystery stories. He asks the woman to read each of the stories aloud to him.  She does so.  One chapter will be the story, the next chapter will be their discussion of elements of the story.  I have to say each of the stories is quite unique.  It starts off with one victim and one murderer, a victim and several murderers, a story where the detective is actually the murderer... etc

The woman wants to know if the author named the book after a famous murder of a woman named White, which occurred around the time that the book was self-published.  The author denies any connection.

The lady points out some inconsistencies in the stories.  The author replies that he put these in to tease his readers.  As the stories go along the woman seems to be getting suspicious.  In the end we find out the woman is not really an Editor, she has come to see the author because she believes he was her father.  She became suspicious of the man she was speaking to and starts revising parts of the stories or the endings.  When he doesn't confront her about this she challenges him that he is not really the author.  The man then admits that he was the author's lover.  The author had been wearing the man's jacket when he was killed when the edge of a cliff collapsed under him.  The village assumed the author's lover had died which was fine with the lover as he took on the persona and continued to live of the pension of the author/mathematician.

It then comes out that the mathematician did not write the stories.  The murder victim, Miss White, had come to the prof asking his feedback on her stories.  He murdered her and claimed the stories were his own.

This was an intriguing book, both the mystery stories themselves and the way the story developed.  I look forward to reading other books by this author.

Sufferance

 by Thomas King

About two million years ago, man appeared. He has become the dominant species on the earth. All other living things, animal and plant, live by his sufferance. He is the custodian of life on earth, and in the solar system. It's a big responsibility.”

— George Wald

Quotes from the flyleaves of the book:

"To the memory of what we have lost and what we continue to destroy"

"Then who do we shoot?".  1940 film adaptation of Steinbeck's book Grapes of Wrath.

Wow, this is a very different book than his detective books and his last book Indians on vacation.  It is going to stay with me a long time. It is called a satire, and I would agree with that but it is also subversive.  The story is also timely with the recent discover of the graves of hundreds of children on the properties of former residential schools.  The story is also very complex.

The story takes place in an Ontario town adjacent to an Indian reservation.  The main character, Jeremiah Camp is trying to hide from the world in a residential school (irony??).  He has been given the school by his former employer (how would one go about buying a residential school??).  He has no tv nor Internet and likes it that way.  He spends his time going to the river and digging up large flat stones to replace the wooden crosses in the school graveyard with headstones on which he carves the names of the children.

Camp has returned to this town but he really doesn't know it.  His mother died when he was young and after that he spent years in foster homes away from the reserve.  The only thing he has of his mother's is a battered lunchbox with a few photos in it.  He thinks he knows which person is his mother but doesn't know who other people are.

Camp does not speak, by choice.  People on the reserve and in the town speak to him.  The town has quite a cast of quirky characters. He has a regular routine, quinoa for breakfast, then he goes into town to by a brownie which he takes to a cafe which is only open to him and a few other people.  There he has a cappuccino and is read the news of the day by the cafe owner.

The people on the reservation are living in government supplied trailers which are plagued with black mould.  At one point officials come out with spray cans they say will eliminate the mould.  One man sprays the officials car and it takes the paint off the car.....  The indigenous residents have another problem.  The mayor of the town has cut off water and electricity to the reserve. He is trying to force them off the land.  He wants to build a new town on their land.

Camp's seclusion is disturbed by the arrival of three men, employees of the daughter of his former employer (who is now dead).  They refer to him as the Forecaster and tell him to come with them for a meeting.  The head man is named Flood. He is reluctant but feels he has no choice.  He doesn't want to have anything to do with his old life.

He meets his employer's daughter who tells him about a list of twelve names he had compiled in the past.  Several of the people on the list have died, including her father.  She wants him to figure out the connection between these deaths.  He doesn't want to do it and goes back home.

His seclusion is further disrupted when an aboriginal woman, now a lawyer, returns to the reserve with her young daughter.  She has no place to live and Flood has set the woman and her daughter up with furnished rooms in the residential school and installed internet and satellite tv.  The little girl likes flood and he likes her but he resents his solitude being disrupted.

Later Flood also arranges for the local homeless people, who are being chased from their camping spots to be housed in the residential school.  Now Camp is really upset.  He goes to stay in a local hotel at the "company's" expense, to an abandoned building formerly used by the homeless and finally to the mouldy trailer of a relative who is also now recuperating from pneumonia at the school.  Flood even finds him there.

Flood keeps getting hauled back to meetings with the dead bosses daughter and eventually determines that all the names were associated with one Foundation.  It turns out all the people associated with the foundation were wealthy people who were trying to achieve immortality.  They were thinking this would be good for society, but the question has to be asked for whom?  Only the super rich??

In the end Flood finds out that that his boss's daughter has been wiping out the 12 super rich because she doesn't like what they are trying to do.  She tries to get Flood to help her identify other rich people who should be removed.  He declines to assist.

While the book is proceeding the band office trailer has been burned down.  People originally blame the mayor but it turns out to be a mentally handicapped native boy who poured gasoline on a hot generator while trying to fill the tank.  That is what caused the fire.

The boss's daughter hires the lawyer woman to handle a project to re development the buildings on the reservation.  The company also pays her fees to get herself reinstated as a lawyer.  There are also plans to turn the abandoned building into low cost housing, by the company.  The woman tells Flood that now that she has a real job she and her daughter will find their own place to live.  The mayor is under investigation for misuse of funds (taking bribes on business contracts).

The resident cat at the school had gotten into Camp's mother's lunchbox.  When Camp's relatives see the pictures they tell him that the woman he had thought was his mother is not his mother.  They don't see her in any of the pictures and don't know who the other people in the pictures are.  His one connection to his mother evaporates.

As the book ends Camp is continuing to work on the grave markers but isn't sure if he will stay or go when his job is done.

The book is very topical as I mentioned at the beginning, the historical abuse and current neglect of native reserves is vividly portrayed.  The huge gap between the rich and poor and the rights, abuse, ego of the rich is front and centre.  Taking action against the rich is quite a step.  It was really interesting how the main character never spoke but people spoke to him and seemed to know what he was thinking or what he wanted.  We never did find out why he decided to quit speaking and quit his job.

 

 

Swimming Back to Trout River

 by Linda Rui Feng

This is a book set in China around the time of the Cultural Revolution. 

It starts with a young couple, Momo and Cassia, who have a handicapped child.  The woman decides to give her child to her in-laws to raise.  They love her and care for her very well.  First the grandfather makes her a wheeled cart that she can propel with sticks.  Eventually he makes her some prosthetic legs.  The father loves the girl and wants her to learn to play the violin but when he gives her a small violin and tries to teach her to play she throws it away.

We later learn that the girl's mother had loved a young man who died and she feels she was punished for this illicit affair by having the handicapped child.

Another character in the book is Dawn, a young chinese violinist, who has achieved acclaiim.

Momo has received permission to go to the U.S. to study.  He hopes to have his wife and daughter join him.  The daughter doesn't want to leave her grandparents.  His wife does make it to San Francisco but decides to stay there rather than join her husband.  She becomes a nanny for a little boy and has been told to only speak to him in Chinese.

Eventually Mom and Cassia develop relationships with other people in the U.S.

Momo has written Dawn telling her how impressed he is with her work and also telling her a bit about his life and his wish for his daughter to play the violin.

Dawn travels to the U.S. with a Chinese orchestra and then seeks asylum in the U.S.  She has left a man she reluctantly married behind in China.

In the end of the book Momo has learned how to drive so that he can drive to San Francisco to try to convince his wife to join him and for them to get their daughter to America with them.   The woman tells him she has a lover.  They go for a drive and are killed in a car accident.

The book ends with Dawn arriving at the daughter's home in China with her violin and a child-size violin.

It was an interesting story, sad to see how the mother didn't care for her own child but could bond with someone else's.  However, I think I would have to read it again to understand the relationship between Dawn and the family,

Book of Lost Names

 by Kristin Harmel

I have been reading so many books set in WWII that I was a bit reluctant to start this book.  But I am really glad I read it.  It was a fascinating story, really well told.

The story starts with an old woman in the U.S. learning about a project to return stolen books back to Jews.  One of the books identified is an old Christian text.  The woman decides she must go to Berlin to see the book.  Her son doesn't understand why she needs to go and convinces her not to go but while she tells him she won't go she does book a flight.

The story is set in Paris as the Nazis are rounding up Jews in that city.  A young woman works at the local library with her parents.  A Jewish friend of hers tells her that things are getting dangerous and she and her parents should make plans to leave. She tells her parents what she was told but they refuse to leave.  They don't realize how bad things will get.

One night a neighbour, who hates them because they are Jewish, asks for help babysitting her children while she goes to look after her sick mother.  The woman and her mother go to the woman's apartment.  While they are there the girl hears a noise in the hallway and witnesses her father being hauled away.  The girl and her other are devasted.

The mother doesn't want to leave Paris.  She hopes her husband will return.  But they find out that the neighbour who hated them has taken over their apartment. They manage to get fake travel documents which enable them to travel to a french town on the border of Switzerland.  The plan is to make their way to Switzerland.  However the girl is soon recruited, because of her artistic skills, to help make fake documents.  She works with a young Jewish man in a room in the Catholic Church.  The priest is part of a network of people in the town who are helping Jews, including orphaned children escape to Switzerland.  

The girl's mother is furious with her for 1) not trying to find the father 2) not wanting to escape to Switzerland, 3) associating with the Catholic priest.  She thinks hanging around the Catholics will cause her to lose her faith.  The girl does make it to a detention centre.  She is told her father was executed.

The girl continues to help forge documents, having to adjust as the officials get more astute and identifying forgeries.  She knows she is in danger but she feels she has to do what she can to help others.  The girl feels sad that Jewish children's names and identities are being erased through recreating identities for them.  She wants to preserve a record.  She and her forger partner devise a plan to put different marks above different letters in an old religious text in the church room they are working in.  The marks spell out the young children's names and there is also a coded message between the girl and the forger.

The young man who first warned her about danger in Paris shows up. As he is Jewish her mother is happy he is there and encourages her to marry him.  The girl however is falling for her fellow forger, a Christian.

Eventually the young forger decides he needs to be a fighter and help escort people across the border. The resistance people are ultimately identified by a traitor to their cause.  It turns out it was the young Jewish man the girl's mother wanted her to marry.  He did it to save his own life.  Many local people are killed because of him.

The young woman and the forger agreed to meet on the library steps in Paris after the war.  She returns to Paris and goes to the steps over many days.  When her lover doesn't show up she assumes he has died. The books from the church library are stolen and the church is burned.

The woman's mother dies but she is joyful when after the war she is reunited with her father who survived the camps. Her father dies shortly after.

One day she meets a young American soldier in Paris.  They have similar interests.  After a short time he asks her to marry him and she agrees as she has nothing left for her in France.

When the woman returns to Paris and goes to the museum that has the book that has the names, she is shocked to learn that another man has come to claim the book. It turns out to be her forger lover.

She decides it is time to tell her son about her life during the war.

This was a very well written story, with lots of suspense and great historical details.

The Vanishing Museum om the Rue Mistral

 by M.L. Longworth

I had to read something a little lighter after The Pull of the Stars so I picked up a little mystery.

The story is set in southern France near Marseilles.  The Musee Quentin-Savary in Aix-Aux-Provence

features some local ceramics and has just been bequeathed a painting by an important painter.  The Director of the museum and his assistant are totally devoted to the museum.

One night they are shocked to find that the entire museum has been cleaned out.  Everything but the reception desk is gone.

Around the same time the apartment of a recently deceased woman has been broken into and while there are valuable things there the only thing take is some ceramic dishes.

There is a judge and a police officer working on solving both cases.  They speculate the cases are connected but the items stolen don't seem to be of great value.  The police interview the museum officials and also one of the two residents of the building.  The man's family owns the building in which the museum is located and I believe he has some claim on the museum but can't remember how.  No one likes this man.  He is pompous and rude.  The police suspect he might have something to do with the theft.  The Directors of the museum are called to the town and it is learned that there was a proposal to merge the museum with one in Marseilles.

One of the humourous parts of the book is the judge.  He likes food and is always thinking about food.  When he finishes breakfast he is thinking about lunch and when he finishes lunch he is thinking about supper so there is lots of talk of french cuisine.

When the museum assistant goes to the museum one morning she finds her boss has been hit on the head and is unconscious and the owner of the museum in Marseilles that proposed the merger is dead. Things are getting serious.

The break in the case comes when one of the police sees a report about a rare Chinese vase selling for a high price at an auction, supposedly one of a set of two vases.  The police officer remembers seeing the vase in apartment of the man who is disliked.  Then we learn that the vase had been in the museum with flowers in it.  No one had realized it was valuable except the dislike man.  It also turns out that some of the ceramics in the museum could be valuable because they were part of a dinner service commissioned by Napoleon.  

The police decide to search the apartment of the other building tenant, who is a travelling salesman. There they discover some of the hidden ceramics.  The tenant is shocked to find police in his apartment when he returns home.  The disliked guy is arrested for the theft and the murder.

It was a light read but the setting in France made it interesting and the quirky officials added to the fun.

 

The Pull of the Stars

 by Emma Donoghue

This is the book about a maternity unit at a hospital in Ireland during the Spanish flu.  The book is set in a small room, with only three beds, where pregnant women with the flu are put for care.

The nurse is on the cusp of her 30th birthday.  She has a brother who returned from the war unable to speak.  The book covers various cases that come into the ward while the young nurse tries to cope with all the medical emergencies on her own.  A young girl, from a local orphanage has come in to help as a volunteer.  In the short time they are together they get very close.  The nurse is amazed at how curious the girl is and how quickly she learns.  

The book is about the flu but it is more about women's state in the world.  We find out that one of the women, who eventually dies, is malnourished and has had too many children so her health is frail.  She dies as does her unborn child.  A wealthy woman is in the ward.  Her baby is stillborn.  Another girl comes in, a ward at the same orphanage as the helper.  She is looked down upon because this is her second pregnancy out of wedlock.  We learn that the orphanage girls are basically slaves, having to work off their board at the orphanage.  Another young woman is obviously the victim of spousal abuse.  The nurse asks her if she has any family who will take her in.  When she says yes she advises the woman to leave her husband if he continues to abuse her.

The story also includes a female doctor who was charged with crimes for being part of a potential separatist group.  She is allowed to work because she is a doctor but eventually gets tracked down and arrested again.

This book was brilliantly written It was so intense, so brutal, it felt claustrophobic.  I don't think it is a book a man would want to read as it has so much graphic detail about women and pregnancy and complications.

As we are currently going through the Covid pandemic it made it even more difficult to read.

The Missing Treasures of Amy Ashton

 by Eleanor Ray

This story is about a young woman who has become a hoarder. She holds down a job in an office but only feels comfortable in her home which is stuffed with treasures she has found, little bird ornaments, cook books, cups, lighters (she doesn't smoke), wine bottles etc.  Amy has been devastated because her best friend and her boyfriend disappeared 11 years before.  She cannot accept that they would treat her like that.

One neighbour is concerned about her hoarding and has reported her to the local council.  Officials visit asking to check her house but she refuses to let them in.

New neighbours move in next door, a couple with two small boys.  The man and boys seem to take a liking to Amy but the woman doesn't like Amy nor her "step-sons".  While the boys are playing in Amy's back yard they break some pots she has stacked there.  She finds a ring in the debris, a ring she had shown to her boyfriend.  She wonders how it got there, did he buy it?  They why did he abandon her.  She also finds a waterlogged letter which appears to have been written by her best friend.

All this gets Amy on the hunt again to find out where her boyfriend and girlfriend are.  She talks to a band-mate of her boyfriend and a policeman who was the boyfriend of her best friend.  Then one day Amy is devastated that all her garden pots in her front yard have been smashed, no other neighbour has suffered vandalism.  Amy decides to resume contact with her girlfriend's mother.  While this is going on she being pursued romantically by a man in her office.  She finds out from her boss that he is supposedly married.  He claims he is separated,

Finally one day Amy's former girlfriend shows up at her door.  The woman had been contacted by her mother and told that Amy was still trying to find her.  Amy's girlfriend tells her that she was a victim of abuse by her cop boyfriend and that he killed Amy's boyfriend after seeing the friend and the boyfriend together in a park.  The boyfriend had been showing Amy's bestie a gift (the ring) he planned to give her for an engagement ring.

The policeman shows up at the same time as Amy's girlfriend is visiting.  He hits Amy and threatens her girlfriend.  Amy tips a box of her precious possessions on him.  He is injured not killed and the girlfriend tells what he did to Amy's boyfriend.   She is believed.  A picture that the girlfriend had sent to Amy is a clue to where the boyfriend is located.  The park is dug up, his body is found and the cop is arrested.

The book ends with Amy, with the help of her neighbours, included the man next door who has now lost his partner, trying to declutter her place.  She makes slow progress. The book ends with her and the neighbour kissing.  He will likely help her empty her place and heal her heart.

This was an okay story, I would call it a summer read.

The Sea Gate

 by Jane Johnson

This is the story about a young cancer survivor, Rebecca, who has given up her artist career while recuperating, she is living with a young potter.  When her mother dies Rebecca and her brother go to the mother's house to clean it out.  Rebecca finds a letter to Rebecca's mother from a cousin of her mother.  The woman is asking the mother to come help her urgently as she is running the risk of being put in a nursing home.

On a whim Rebecca decides to go find out about this cousin in Cornwall.  The house is empty, inhabited only by a rude mouth parrot.  The cousin is in the hospital because she had a fall.  Social services will not let her go home unless the house is renovated with an indoor bathroom and walk in shower on the main floor and a bedroom on the main floor.  The cousin asks Rebecca to undertake these repairs which Rebecca is eager to help wih.

However, when she goes to the bank she finds the cousin doesn't have much money but has been giving a sizeable sum to her housekeeper every month.  Rebecca gets these payments stopped and is threatened by the housekeeper's sons.

Rebecca asks her brother to lend her some money (from their mother's pending estate) to complete the work.

While this story is taking place in the present, part of the story goes back to WWII. We learn that Rebecca's father was killed in the war.  A woman and her daughter showed up at the house.  Rebecca's mother then left, supposedly for London.  Soon after the mystery woman leaves, leaving Rebecca with her troublesome 5 year old daughter, saying she has to go look after her dying mother.  Rebecca is about 15 at this time and struggles to look after herself and the little girl as neither woman provides her with  any money.

Two land girls had been living in the home but decide to leave when Rebecca is accused of lying and worse.  Rebecca saw a neighbour boy and an Austrian POW raping a local "simple" girl.  Rather than believing Rebecca the community seems to believe the story the men tell.  I found this very surprising and the fact that Rebecca's mother didn't send her any money to live on.

Rebecca rescues a parrot from a sailing ship that local women want to kill and cook.  He has a sailor's tongue.

One day the Austrian POW breaks into the house and tries to steal the keys for Rebecca's family car.  When she tries to stop him the man almost kills her.  She is saved when another POW, an Algerian kills the pow.  They drop the body down a tunnel from the cellar of the house which leads to the sea.  The Algerian tells her the Austrian killed the little "simple" girl.  Police come looking for both pow's.  Rebecca tells them she has not seen them and hides the Algerian in the cellar.  They eventually become lovers and one day the little girl sees them and threatens to tell on them

Rebecca realizes it will never be safe for her lover in England so she hires a ship to get him back home.  When her other finally returns from Morocco where she had been looking for her husband and stayed after he died, she finds Rebecca is pregnant and sends her away until the baby is born.  Rebecca is told the baby was still born.  Her other dies shortly after.

Then back in the present we learn that the young girl Rebecca was forced to look after was a love-child of her father.  The child is now the housekeeper and has been blackmailing Rebecca about the dead body and the black lover for years.  

While all this is going on Rebecca has become attracted to an Algerian man who has been doing the renovations to the house.  When Rebecca's boyfriend shows up she tries to send him away and is outraged when she finds out he is stealing art from the house.  She and the renovator lock the man in the celllar,  Her ex tries to escape down the tunnel and is buried in a landslide.  Rebecca calls the police and authorities and finds out her ex has a criminal record.  The skeleton of the Austrian is also found in the rubble so Rebecca has to explain what happened in the war.

We also find out that Rebecca's cousins child did not die.  Her mother paid to send it to the father in Algeria.  The father was tortured and died in prison for his political activism.  They find this out because the renovator is actually the cousin/nephew? of Rebecca's lover.  He arranges for Rebecca to speak to her daughter, who is still alive, by Skype.

Maybe things got tied up a little too neatly at the end but it was an interesting read.

The Girl in His Shadow

 by Audrey Blake

It is mid-nineteenth century London.  A London surgeon, who does a lot of free work with the poor finds a young girl barely alive, suffering from a plague, the rest of her family has died from the disease.  He decides to bring her home much to the chagrin of his housekeeper.

The housekeeper eventually warms to the girl, treating her as a daughter.  The doctor is a surgeon but also a scientist.  He pays gravediggers to bring him corpses so he can study them and learn more about diseases.

As the girl grows she assists the doctor in his work in his clinic as well as his scientific inquiries.  She basically runs his office and keeps his lab clean.  She also draws sketches which the doctor often includes in his papers.  The girl also does some simple procedures like stitches or removing stitches.

The doctor is highly regarded in the medical community but there is another surgeon, a rival, who thinks he is dangerous and often criticizes his experimentation.

One day the girl is shocked and dismayed to find another doctor arrive on the premises as an Intern to the surgeon.  She feels she will not longer have the freedom and opportunities she had before as women are forbidden to practice medicine.

Eventually the young doctor does find out what she does and what she knows, he is shocked and wonders if he should report the doctor but he is loyal to the doctor.

Eventually a case occurs in which the older doctor is put under investigation.  To "protect" the doctor the young girl admits she is the one that did the surgery on a twisted bowel.  Up to this point surgery on the abdomen has been forbidden.

The older doctor's reputation is damaged, the young doctor's fiancee cancels their engagement.  The young girl is offered the opportunity to go to Italy and be trained as a surgeon by an Italian doctor.  She is in love with the young doctor but asks him to wait for her.

It was an interesting story, if the ending was somewhat predictable.

The Windsor Knot

 by SJ Bennett

This is a mystery about a murder that takes place at Windsor Castle.  A young pianist who performed at the castle is found hung in a closet in his room at the castle.  Scotland Yard and MI 5 suspect the Russians but Queen Elizabeth thinks they are pursuing the wrong line of enquiry.

She enlists the services of her personal assistant to dig out information which the Queen subtly feeds to the police so they think they solved the case.

This was a cute story, told with affection for the Queen and Prince Phillip but perhaps not all the royals. It was a fun read.

Sparks Like Stars

 by Nadia Hashimi

This books is about a young girl whose entire family is killed when they are at the Presidential palace in Kabul when there is a coup.  The girl's father had been a senior advisor to the President.

The girl is found alive and is taken away from the palace by one of the guards, a guard she believes executed her family.  He keeps her locked up at his home but eventually takes her to the home of an American diplomat.  The diplomat and her mother try to figure out how to get the girl out of Afghanistan.  They believe that if the leaders of the coup find out she is alive they will try to kill her.

They decide that the girl will take on the name of her deceased sister.  This sister was born when the parents were studying in the U.S.  They feel this will be an easier case to sell.  While the diplomat is doing her best to convince officials to save the girl, the diplomats mother convinces some Americans who are passing through Afghanistan to take her and the girl to Pakistan.  They make their way to the U.S. embassy in Pakistan but not after being in a vehicle accident on a treacherous road.  The U.S. officials are skeptical even after hearing from the diplomat.  But when the Pakistan embassy is under attack the old woman and girl are able to get on a flight to the U.S.

The girl is put in a horrible foster home.  She is traumatized by what she has been through and wants to know what happened to her parents.  She keeps asking to see the old woman but eventually learns that the old woman has died, possibly because of injuries from the crash.  The diplomat eventually adopts the girl and they travel around the world because of jobs in the diplomatic service.  The girl eventually returns to the U.S. and becomes a successful surgeon.

The girl has a boyfriend, she has never been able to tell him the full story of her life. When he announces he has political aspirations and wants her to marry him she realizes she cannot make that kind of commitment and breaks off with him.  She realizes politics will always be foremost in everything he does including having a non-white wife, a successful surgeon,

She is shocked one day when the soldier who kidnapped her and who she thinks killed her parents comes to her for treatment for cancer.  She keeps asking him what happened and he finally tells her that he did not kill her parents and instructed a soldier to bury them on a hill where they would have av view,

News comes out that some graves have been located in Afghanistan which are believed to hold the remains of the murdered President and his family.  The girl convinces her mother and a journalist who has written books about Afghanistan to go back with her.  She pushes her way in to see officials in the Ministry of Interior who tell her that the remains are only the president and his family.  She is about to leave dejected when she recalls that there were trees and a hill near the prison where the other remains were found.  She convinces the government officials to try digging on the hill and they find the remains of her family.  She is finally able to lay them to rest, and it appears that she now may be able tl let herself love someone, the journalist.

Parts of the book were very distressing but it was a very well written and interesting story.  This is another author for which I will be looking for previous books.

Dig

 by John Preston

A movie of this name recently came out.  The book is pretty much the same story as the movie/.

The story takes place just as WW II is starting. The story about a woman in England who finds a man with archeological site excavation experience to come to her property and excavate some of the ancient mounds there.  They don't make much progress initially but eventually find an ancient ship and extensive gold and other artifacts.  One of the best finds ever of an English site.  The site is called Sutton Hoo.  The artifacts are incredible and are now at the British Museum.

As soon as officials find out about the potential value of the site the local museum and the British Museum start to 'fight' over who has the right/responsibility to continue on with the dig.  They try to push the original digger out of the picture but the owner fights to keep him involved.

Apparently this man did not get any credit initially for his work but eventually he was acknowledged by the British Museum.

It was an interesting story but not much different from the book.

Town Called Solace

 by Mary Lawson

I read Crow Lake by this author a few years ago and really enjoyed it.

This book certainly did not disappoint.  It was a touching book with very interesting characters.

The story features three main characters, a young girl Clara, her elderly neighbour Mrs. Orchard and a 30 something recent divorcee named Liam Kane.

Clara is very upset, her older sister has run away from home.  She is also worried about her neighbour Mrs. Orchard.  Clara has been going into Mrs. Orchard's house to feed her reclusive cat.  Clara is upset when she sees a young man enter the house and start packing some of Mrs.Orchard's things.  Mrs. Orchard has died but her parents don't tell her this.  Liam and she become friends but Liam tells her she can only be in the living room so her parents can see her through the window, so they don't suspect him of anything.

The stories develop through the course of the book, some of the chapters are about Mrs. Orchard who is dying in the hospital, some about Clara and her family and some about Liam.  We find out that Liam has recently divorced and quit his job.  Mrs. Orchard had looked after him as a young boy and loved him so much she tried to kidnap him from his parents.  As she is dying Mrs. O. finally takes responsibility for what she did and the people she hurt, including her husband.

Liam has come to the town preparing to get the house fixed up and put on the market.  He soon meets a local repair man who puts him to work in return for doing repairs on the house and later starts to pay him. He starts what he thinks is a temporary relationship with the local librarian.

Clara's sister is eventually found in Toronto, a victim of traffickers.  The sister is devastated by the experience.

It sounds like a simple story but she did a great job of portraying the characters and very gradually giving us glimpses of their lives.  I am looking forward to reading some of her other works.

 

Memory Collectors

 by Kim Neville

This is a book by a BC author.  It is an unusual book, but unlike Peaces, I enjoyed it.

The story starts with a young girl who likes to help her father collect old furniture and restore it.  Then we find out that the girl and her sister became orphans.  The girl, Ev, now dumpster dives to find things with good feelings about them.  She has a sensitivity to the energy/stories contained in objects.  She seeks and sells the good feeling ones because she knows they will appeal to people.  We learn that she and her sister were raised in foster homes and now are estranged.

Ev has a friend, an artist, Owen, who also dumpster dives to seek objects for his art projects.  He befriends Ev.  One day they discover some potentially interesting boxes in an alley but are chased away from them by a woman, Harriet.  The boxes are hers.  She had them in the hallway of her apartment building and one of her neighbours has thrown them out on her.  Owen offers to take them back to her apartment and finds she is a serious hoarder.  Harriet senses that Ev is special and wants to make contact with her.  

Harriet has received an eviction notice and in deciding what to to do decides to buy an abandoned building and make a museum of happy objects.  She wants Ev's help but Ev is reluctant at first because some of Harriet's objects have very evil or unhappy feelings and these really upset Ev.  She finally agrees to help when Harriet agrees she can decide what doesn't get kept.

Ev's sister, Noemi shows up, she keeps bugging Ev for what she knows about their parent's murder suicide.  Ev claims she doesn't remember.  

As the story progresses we find that Harriet has stored boxes of the girl's family possession in her old family home.  The girls eventually break into the house to retrieve what they consider their property.  Noemi eventually leaves with the boxes in her car.  By this time Ev has told her she had nothing to do with the murder and actually saved her little sister from the father.  They find that Noemi also has some of Ev's powers but she is more selfish and self serving so we do not know how she will use them.  ONe nice thing she did for her sister was get her sailing lessons.

Harriet eventually sets fire to her house, Ev develops a company going to houses to cleanse them.  She has learned that she can take the evil out of things.  Owen takes Ev to live with him.

The only puzzling part of the story was Harriet went to the library to find out about Ev and her backstory.  However, if she had bought all their stuff at the estate sale why wouldn't she already know the history of the family?

It was an interesting read, nice to see peculiar people treated with kindness and acceptance.

Peaces

 by Helen Oyeyemi

This book has been getting a lot of buzz and the reviews have been good.  That is why I bought it.  However, I felt the book was unusual but not interesting or engaging.

The story is about two gay men who are given a free "honeymoon" trip on a mysterious train by the aunt of one of the men.

The young man, relative of the aunt, was bounced around from one set of relatives to another as a youth as he was an orphan.  His aunt is the only one who seemed to care about him.  On one of the trips when he was travelling from one relative to another he is alone in a train car.  A man and his young daughter join him.  The young boy is attracted to the girl.  Later a woman joins them and attacks the man, if I remember because of some past history.  The man's daughter ends up killing the woman.

Back to the "present" the two young men board the train, destination unknown, with their pet mongoose.  While they are travelling they are upset to learn that the former boyfriend of one of them seems to have dropped in to visit the aunt.  They are suspicious of his motives.  While on the train a clown? gets on and the men get him tossed off

They are told they should make no effort to meet the owner of the train, a recluse.  They do meet her, find out that she plays the thermin and also has a mongoose.

As they tour the train they also run into a woman who is the girl who killed the woman on the train when the one man was a boy.  As the story progresses they learn that the recluse is isolating on the train because of a will she is close to inheriting.  If she can stay sane for a few more days she will inherit the wealth.  The man who is on the verge of leaving her the money had an adopted son (was he the clown) but decided to leave him nothing and leave the money to her.  The woman had come to the man's house to play the thermin during the night to comfort the son.

As the story ends it appears the woman has reached her deadline to inherit and the other people on the train can no longer see the young men....

Weird, no idea what the point of this story was.  I like unusual stories but this one didn't grab me at all.