« Because I Need Something To Distract Before the NCAA Tournament Starts | Main | You Know You're Weird When... »
March 17, 2006
Books I Read in March
I've been a rather one-track reader, so let me just condense the books in the Russell-Holmes series to one entry. I'm addicted--and rather sadly, I'm on the last one so I'll have to find a new passion after this week. Suggestions are welcome.
The Russell-Holmes Series by Laurie R. King
A Letter of Mary - It is the summer of 1923. England is recovering from the First World War, and the Second is not yet on the horizon. Russell and husband Holmes are busy with their various pursuits in the quiet Sussex countryside when an old friend's afternoon visit and subsequent murder get them embroiled in a mystery with lots of red herrings. Mary and Sherlock, assisted by Inspector LetradeJr., Mycroft and Billy of the Baker Street Irregulars, go undercover to investigate suspects.
The Moor - In The Moor, fourth in the series, Holmes and Russell are summoned to Devonshire to solve a tin miner's mysterious death. Lonely Dartmoor provides plenty of opportunities for King to both relate the haunting legends of that part of the world and offer some amusing revisions to one of Holmes's most famous cases, The Hound of the Baskervilles. Though Holmes purists might resent the liberties taken with their hero, readers in search of a strong female protagonist, some fascinating local history, and spooky ambience will enjoy The Moor.
O Jerusalem - Although O Jerusalem is Laurie King's fifth book in her Holmes-Russell series, it actually takes us back to the era of her first book, The Beekeeper's Apprentice. Perhaps King was afraid that her characters, Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes, were becoming too cozy as an old married couple, and she wanted to recreate the edgy sexual tension of their first encounter. It's 1918. Nineteen-year-old Mary and her fiftysomething mentor are forced to flee England to escape a deadly adversary. Sherlock's well-connected brother Mycroft sends them to Palestine to do some international sleuthing. Here, a series of murders threatens the fragile peace.
Justice Hall - Justice Hall brings back two colorful characters from earlier in the series: Bedouins Ali and Mahmoud Hazr (now known as Alistair and Marsh), who last appeared in O Jerusalem. At their request, Holmes and Russell take up the trail of the doomed heir to Justice Hall, who has been executed for cowardice in the bloody trenches of France. As the detectives strive to make sense of his death and to locate another heir to the family title, an attempt is made on the life of the man who's soon to be welcomed as the new duke. Holmes and Russell soon realize something sinister is afoot, and that they must untangle a web of deceit to discover which of the many suspects is taking steps to shorten the line of inheritance.
The Game - The seventh Mary Russell adventure may well be the best King has yet devised for her strong-willed heroine. It's 1924, and Kimball O'Hara, the "Kim" of the famous Rudyard Kipling novel, has disappeared. Fearing some kind of geopolitical crisis in the making, Mycroft Holmes sends his brother and Mary to India to uncover what happened.
My Review - My goodness, I just can't get enough. My only complaint is that I feel like Mary undergoes a serious mental breakdown too often. While it may seem that dealing with her "conditions" is the only way to plausibly show Sherlock Holmes as a care-giver, it grates on my nerves.
----------
Little Children
by Tom Perrotta
Publishers Weekly: The characters in this intelligent, absorbing tale of suburban angst are constrained and defined by their relationship to children. There's Sarah, an erstwhile bisexual feminist who finds herself an unhappy mother and wife to a branding consultant addicted to Internet porn. There's Todd, a handsome ex-jock and stay-at-home dad known to neighborhood housewives as the Prom King, who finds in house-husbandry and reveries about his teenage glory days a comforting alternative to his wife's demands that he pass the bar and get on with a law career. There's Mary Ann, an uptight supermom who schedules sex with her husband every Tuesday at nine and already has her well-drilled four-year-old on the inside track to Harvard. And there's Ronnie, a pedophile whose return from prison throws the school district into an uproar, and his mother, May, who still harbors hopes that her son will turn out well after all. In the midst of this universe of mild to fulminating family dysfunction, Sarah and Todd drift into an affair that recaptures the passion of adolescence, that fleeting liminal period of freedom and possibility between the dutiful rigidities of childhood and parenthood. Perrotta (Election; Joe College; etc.) views his characters with a funny, acute and sympathetic eye, using the well-observed antics of preschoolers as a telling backdrop to their parents' botched transitions into adulthood. Once again, he proves himself an expert at exploring the roiling psychological depths beneath the placid surface of suburbia.
My Review: This is a book club selection, so I don't want to really think about it too much before our meeting. However, it struck me as odd to be reading what basically amounted to a chick lit book written by a man. In the reviews, this book is never mentioned as chick lit, but it has all the signs--families in crisis, subverted romance, the slightly dowdy woman who finds she's more than competition for her more attractive competitors through her sparkling personality alone. It was how I envisioned the next edition of Bridget Jones.
----------
The Dew Breaker
by Edwidge Danticat
Publishers Weekly: Haitian-born Danticat's third novel (after The Farming of Bones and Breath, Eyes, Memory) focuses on the lives affected by a "dew breaker," or torturer of Haitian dissidents under Duvalier's regime. Each chapter reveals the titular man from another viewpoint, including that of his grown daughter, who, on a trip she takes with him to Florida, learns the secret of his violent past and those of the Haitian boarders renting basement rooms in his Brooklyn home. This structure allows Danticat to move easily back and forth in time and place, from 1967 Haiti to present-day Florida, tracking diverse threads within the larger narrative. Some readers may think that what she gains in breadth she loses in depth; this is a slim book, and Danticat does not always stay in one character's mind long enough to fully convey the complexities she seeks. The chapters—most of which were published previously as stories, with the first three appearing in the New Yorker—can feel more like evocative snapshots than richly textured portraits. The slow accumulation of details pinpointing the past's effects on the present makes for powerful reading, however, and Danticat is a crafter of subtle, gorgeous sentences and scenes. As the novel circles around the dew breaker, moving toward final episodes in which, as a young man and already dreaming of escape to the U.S., he performs his terrible work, the impact on the reader hauntingly, ineluctably grows.
My Review: This was the book club selection from the month I missed while in Europe, and I only got around to reading it now. I understand that others who read it had a hard time letting go of the narrative, but I enjoyed the different viewpoints. It reminded me of a book of short stories I read a couple of years ago (whose name escapes me, but it was another book club book), where the stories seemed to be slightly intertwined. While I was moved while reading it though, it didn't stay with me the way other books about "heavy" subjects have.
