Karen

This murder mystery set in a upper class girl's school in Dublin has a poignant portrayal of friendship and solidarity among a group of four girls as they navigate high school and teenage social pressures together. Although they are at an all girls' school, the corresponding all boys' high school is right next door and they interact with the boys regularly. When one of the students from the boys school turns up dead on the grounds of the girls' school and the police fail to find the murderer, it leaves everyone at the school uneasy. This story starts when one of the girls brings a postcard that announces "I know who killed Chris Harper," which she found posted in her school, to an ambitious detective in the Cold Case division of the police. The framing of the story is that this Cold Case detective brings the postcard to the detective in the Murder division who was in charge of the case when it first was investigated and the two of them revive the investigation.

The investigation aspect of the story was the least compelling to me. I really wasn't interested in the dynamics between the two detectives, and I found it hard to swallow the idea that the entire investigation portrayed in the book took place over the course of one long day. But I truly enjoyed the part of the book that focused on the friendship between the girls, and the hostilities with a rival group headed by their archnemesis Joanne. If Tana French had left the cops out of it and let the girls figure it all out amongst themselves, The Secret Place might have been really interesting. As it was, it was a pretty good mystery.

I was a fan of Alison Bechdel's comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For back in the early 90s, but this is my first book length Bechdel. I liked it! This is at once a memoir and analysis of Bechdel's relationship with her mother from childhood to the present and a mini course on the life and psychological theories of D. W. Winnicott, who is known for his insights into children's psychological development.

Bechdel is open about her struggles with not feeling loved and valued by her mother (or, secondarily, by anyone else), depicting herself in therapy sessions, in conversations with her mom where she looks for affirmation and doesn't receive it, and in relationships with women who are ambivalent about committing to her. Her use of WInnicott's theories to analyze what might have been going on between her and her mother is a little technical and dry for someone not used to reading psychology texts, but her illustrations and the bits of information about Winnicott's life that she provides helped me through. Virginia Woolf and her novel To the Lighthouse also figure in this book. My favorite parts were when the text of the comic was about something from Winnicott or To the Lighthouse, but the illustration showed Bechdel and her mother having an interaction.

Overall, I'd recommend this if you already like Alison Bechdel or if you struggle with your relationship with your mom. Either way, it's insightful, compassionate, and the illustrations are great.

This story of a schoolgirl friendship that grows complicated in cultural revolution era China is short, but powerful. The difficulty of retaining your humanity in a totalitarian society is a major theme.

An accessible book which attempts to establish which of the Mary stories in the four canonical Gospels are about Mary Magdalene, based on biblical evidence, and then interprets the significance of those stories for people in the modern world. I read this book just at Easter, so the story of Mary Magdalene at the tomb was fresh in my mind. I find methods of interpreting ancient texts fascinating, so this topic was interesting to me. Dr. McNutt doesn't think the "woman taken in adultery" or the sinful woman washing Jesus's feet and wiping them with her hair are Mary Magdalene, and offers compelling arguments to support her case. I'd love to see the best arguments on the other side. It's hard to imagine that they would measure up.

This book has one of the most unpleasant, unhappy protagonists I have ever encountered. Isabel is the middle child in a family that moved from Amsterdam to a rural area of Holland for safety during World War II, to a house procured for them by Uncle Karl. Isabel, now in her early 30's, is the only one who still lives there, and she guards the house and its contents fiercely, firing her hired maids when she suspects them of stealing silverware or other small items. Although Isabel is the sibling with the strongest attachment to the house, it's understood that the house belongs to Louis, and if he decides to take possession (to raise a family), Isabel will have to find somewhere else to live. So far this has not been an issue, because Louis is a womanizer who shows no inclination to settle down, but it lives in the background of Isabel's consciousness. Things come to a head when Louis brings a new girlfriend, Eva, to stay at the house while he's away on a business trip. She presses all of Isabel's buttons, and Isabel makes herself as unpleasant as possible. Meanwhile, some hidden truths about the house and Eva start to come to the surface.

Although Isabel is painfully unpleasant, we know enough about her background to understand a little bit about why she is that way. She's aware of some anomalies in her life, although she isn't able to resolve them on her own--maybe isn't quite aware that they need resolving, until her life blows up. I thought this situation was built very beautifully. Her two clueless brothers (clueless in different ways) just want her to relax, maybe get married to Johan, the neighbor who has shown some interest in her, and not take everything so seriously.

The family situation has some parallels with the post-Holocaust environment of 1961 Netherlands. Although the war is over, the reckoning is not. The majority of the country would like to move on and live a "normal" life, but it's not possible until the murder and displacement of the Dutch Jewish population in the Holocaust is addressed.

Stories based on Tim O'Brien's service in the Vietnam War. Difficult to read, but so beautifully written. In our book club discussion, we pondered how many of these stories were likely to be factually true vs. conveying the truth of the experience of being an American soldier in the Vietnam war.

A Legacy of Spies revisits the events of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold from the perspective of Peter Guillam, who is called in from retirement when the Circus is sued by the son of Alec Leamas. Guillam revisits documents from the operation and tells the investigating lawyers (some of) his part of the story. The gloomy atmosphere of shabbiness, moral ambiguity, and futility that is present in le Carre novels is in full force here, except, strangely, when George Smiley finally enters the scene.

This is the second Kurt Wallander mystery I've read, and it's #2 in a series. The first one I read was #3 in the series, so I'm going backwards in Wallander's life. In this book he is something of a sad sack, drinking too much, thinking about getting out of the police force and taking a job as a security guard, wondering why he puts so much of himself into his work only to get frustration and health problems out of it. While he's in this emotional morass, two dead men in a red life raft wash up on shore and an investigation begins that eventually sends him to Riga, Latvia. At this time, Latvia is still a totalitarian society under the control of the Soviet Union. His movements are watched, and he suspects that the police who are hosting him, who he is supposed to be assisting, are actually in on the crime.

This is a nice, moody mystery of the Cold War era.

Almost 300 pages into this book, author Leigh Clare La Berge describes Carl Van Vechten's 1920 book The Tiger in the House with this sentence: "Indeed, the reader can never be entirely sure whether she is reading a proper academic study or a farce." I might describe La Berge's book the same way. In Van Vechten's case, La Berge cites the lack of politics in the book that takes away from its gravitas. In La Berge's case, it isn't a lack of politics that causes the confusion, but the inclusion of puns, playful metaphors, and a distinct sense throughout the book that the author had a twinkle in her eye as she wrote it. In fact, I feel sure that she wrote the sentence above knowing that it applied to her book as well.

Ostensibly about the way that cats have served as symbols for different elements or forces in political life from feudal times to the present, the book also asks whether Marxism can expand to include non-human animals in its scope. The style is academic, but also a bit mischievous, and includes tiger's leaps of imagination. Nerdy fun for left leaning animal lovers.

The character of Jim in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has deserved a book of his own since the original was written, and I'm glad Percival Everett was the one to write it. This retelling sticks closely to the events of TAHF for the first half of the book, and then diverges for a different storyline that gives James a more active role in what happens to him. That's fine with me. I want a retelling to add something new to the story I already know, and the story Everett tells allows James to reveal more of himself than he would if he were sitting chained up in a cabin trying to keep his temper with Tom Sawyer.

The changed storyline also allows for some pointed conversations between Huck and James about fatherhood, friendship, slavery, and what it means to be a Black person in the US at the time the story takes place (and by extension, today). Having re-read TAHF in preparation for reading this book, I'm so glad this book was written. The relationship between James and Huck needed explication, as James needed character development, and this book provides it in a very moving way.

My dad read this book to me as bedtime stories when I was a kid, and I've read it a couple of times since, but not for many years. I re-read it this week in preparation for reading Percival Everett's James. On one hand I was in familiar and beloved territory, especially in scenes where Huck is lying his head off to some adult and in danger of getting caught. On the other hand, the incessant use of the "N" word is shocking, and it's more shocking to me that I don't remember it being incessant from previous readings.

This time around I also recognize more clearly how subversive this book is on the subject of race and slavery, in Huck's worry about how helping a runaway slave is "wrong" according to the social rules he's been raised to believe, and how there must be something wrong with him for not being able to turn Jim in, and in so many other subtle and not so subtle details of the story.

If you can set aside the horrifying callousness towards black enslaved people, the grim blood feud that kills off an entire family, and the grifters out to rob as many people as they can, Huck Finn's adventures are also hilarious and beautiful in parts. But the hilarity is also mixed up with callousness. I agreed with Jim that they'd had enough of kings and dukes, but honestly, I'd had enough of Tom Sawyer's insistence on prolonging Jim's imprisonment so that he could mimic the Count of Monte Cristo or other romantic escapes from prison.

This is an important piece of Americana, a great satire on American morals and conscience during slavery, and a classic adventure tale all in one, and it's ripe for a retelling from James's side. I'm looking forward to seeing what Percival Everett does with it.

In the beginning of this book, an unnamed woman goes to a Catholic retreat center near her home town in Australia, suffering from unresolved grief over her parents' deaths, especially her mother's, as well as grief, guilt, and shame over other events in her life. She seems exhausted. She's not particularly religious, and doesn't at first intend to go to the daily prayers, but then she does go after all. In the next chapter, some time has passed and we find that this woman has come back for the fourth time and this time she has stayed. She has left her husband Alex and all her friends, quit her job working for an endangered species advocacy organization, and taken on the job of cooking and housekeeping for free in exchange for permission to stay at the center.

We never do learn the woman's name or what happened to her marriage. Instead we read her close observations of daily life at the convent and her ruminations on her mother and other people she knows who have died, including a number of suicides. A woman from her past who makes her very uncomfortable appears at the convent, and there is a rat infestation of biblical proportions.

Stone Yard Devotional is not comfortable reading. I stuck with it because the narrator's preoccupations resonated with me, and I found her to be observant and somewhat insightful (if not about herself). I wanted to see if she came to any resolution in her self-exile. In retrospect, I'm glad I read it. More than a week later, I'm still thinking about several aspects of the book--the narrator, why it was written the way it was. The book club I read this for was vehemently divided over whether reading it was worthwhile, though. Reader, beware!

A satirical novel in which Americans elect a fascist as President, who then remakes the country into a totalitarian state, complete with firing squads and concentration camps. The hero of the novel, Doremus Jessup, is a newspaper editor in the fictional Vermont town of Fort Beulah.

Unfortunately, my book club chose to read this in November 2024, as Donald Trump was re-elected President, so it felt sickeningly real. If you've got the stomach for it, let it poke holes in your complacency.

Set in the not-very-distant future, this is a novel about pulling Earth back from the brink of catastrophic climate change. The bureaucratic sounding Ministry for the Future is an agency of the UN, headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland, and tasked with figuring out how to accomplish that impossible seeming goal. It's headed by Mary Murphy, an Irishwoman with a strong memory of the Troubles, with staff from all around the world. Chapters are from the perspectives of many different people (and other entities!) experiencing changes. A few characters return repeatedly (Mary Murphy and her staff among them), while others pop up only once.

The opening chapter is a heart rending description of people in a town in India experiencing a catastrophic heat wave. I had to put the book down for a couple of days after reading it, but given the subject matter I was surprised that that was the hardest chapter to read. The story wrestles with whether drastic enough change can be brought about quickly enough without violence. Some of the chapters go quite in depth on banking and world economic systems and don't read like a novel at all. This is a wide ranging, kind of shaggy novel with an optimistic heart.

Kate Bowler's cancer diagnosis when she was a young mother came as a shock. As a professor of theology who studies the Prosperity Gospel and its adherents, it also put her directly in the path of some of the toxic messages American society, and in particular some evangelical communities, send to people suffering adversity. Her memoir is a readable and somewhat lighthearted (given the topic) story about how she grappled with her illness amid the cognitive dissonance.

I read this for a book club.

Alice and Eileen are two young Irish women who have been friends since college, now out making their way in the world. Alice is a novelist who has published two successful novels and has recently recovered from a mental breakdown. She's renting an old rectory in a seaside village 3 hours from Dublin. Eileen works for a literary journal and shares an apartment in Dublin with roommates. Part of this novel is the text of the long emails they exchange about how they're feeling about life, with existential questions like what one should do about the suffering of people living in deep poverty or under oppressive regimes. The rest of the novel follows Alice and Eileen as they navigate their relationships with young men Felix and Simon. Alice meets Felix, a warehouse worker who doesn't read novels, on Tinder. Although their first meeting is inauspicious, they keep meeting and surprisingly, Alice asks Felix to come with her on a work trip to Rome (and equally surprisingly, he agrees). Eileen has known and loved Simon since she was a young girl, but although they are close friends and occasionally have sex, they have never been in an acknowledged Relationship.

There are occasional romantic moments, but these relationships are spiky and uncomfortable. Alice and Eileen are smart and capable young women, but they are both uneasy with their places in the world and with the vulnerability that is necessary for "Relationships" to grow. The epistolary parts of the novel are the easiest to read, I think because Alice and Eileen are comfortable with representing themselves in writing, where they have control over how they come across. Their in person interactions with each other and with Felix and Simon are painful at times, because all their insecurities, resentments, and fears are so close to the surface. So, I admire this book, but it is not a cozy read.

Because her mistress shows her off to her dinner guests, Luzia Cortado's "milagritos," little pieces of magic that make her life of drudgery as a kitchen maid a bit easier, get her noticed by a nobleman who is trying to win the favor of King Philip of Spain. She gains a patron and is entered in a contest for holy magicians, the winner of which will be presented as a gift to the King. In preparation, her patron's servant (or familiar) Santangel, who is a striking man with white hair, light eyes, and a presence that strikes fear in people's hearts, gives her lessons in how to develop her magic.

Everyone in this book has a very human longing for something--a better social position, a more secure life, a life with beauty and pleasure in it, a chance to be powerful, love, what have you. The longing propels them, but it doesn't lead them where they expect or hope to go. This fact of life is explicit in the story. It's Valentina's longing that gets everything started, and at the end almost everyone's life has been completely altered.

The Familiar turned out to be more of a romance than I expected, but it's well written, with an unusual plot. I enjoyed the historical setting of late 16th century Spain, with the shadows of King Philip, Elizabeth I of England, and the Inquisition.

A very sweet book about looking past appearances, allowing yourself to change, healing from trauma, and finding your people. The main character is an adult in his 40's just trying to get through life and meet his responsibilities when he is presented with a task that pushes him to ask more from life.

In the world of this book, magical people exist and there is a lot of hostility towards them. All magical people must register with the government so that tabs can be kept on them, and most non-magical people are fearful and suspicious of them. The main character Linus's work situation is comically hostile and Linus is basically shut down, distanced from his emotions, just to survive. As a caseworker for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth (DICOMY), he investigates the "orphanages" where the magical youth are housed to render judgment on whether the orphanage is doing its job properly and should be allowed to remain open. Because of his ability to distance himself emotionally from his work, Linus is sent to Marsyas Island where some very unusual children are being housed. The children are unusual indeed, and so is their caretaker, and Linus's ability to keep his distance begins to falter.

At first I wasn't a fan of the overly black and white situation in this book with an adult main character, and the sweetness of what he finds at the orphanage on Marsyas Island. But as I read on, it won me over. It's a YA book for adults. It's an encouraging hug. It's really pretty good!

This biography of Virginia Hall tells an amazing story of a tough, independent young American woman who was out to blaze a trail for herself in the 1930s working abroad for the State Department when she suffered a disabling accident that effectively ended any chance she might have had to become a diplomat. However, she went on to distinguish herself working for first British and then American intelligence during World War II by organizing and aiding the French Resistance as an undercover agent. She endured physical and emotional hardships living in occupied France, evaded capture by the Gestapo and the French police in spite of their best efforts to find her, and was instrumental in helping to liberate France from the Nazis. There are many edge-of-your-seat moments, both for Virginia Hall herself, and for her many comrades who weren't able to evade capture. The book has an index, end notes, and a bibliography, plus photos.

The one thing that disappointed me was that at times the tone of the book was a little too much like a fan magazine. I thought the facts spoke well enough for themselves that I didn't need to be told repeatedly in so many words what a hero she was, and that sexism held her back in her career. Otherwise, highly recommend this book about a war hero I had never heard of before.

A mystery about a teenage girl going missing at her family's summer camp in upstate New York, years after her younger brother went missing at the same camp. Her disappearance is investigated by a young female detective who is just beginning her career and also just beginning to claim some independence from her very traditional family.

This was a perfectly enjoyable mystery.

This family drama concerns the Madigans, an 21st centurt Irish family whose four children are coming home from far flung places to visit their mother, Rosaleen, for Christmas. Rosaleen has hinted that she is going to sell the house they all grew up in, so there is some consternation among the siblings, Dan, Emmet, Constance, and Hanna. We get to see the siblings as children together, and then individually as adults, before we see them back together as a family. We see their weaknesses and faults, their attempts to manage their relationships with their mother and siblings, and where the family rifts are. Rosaleen is a formidable character herself, with the power to raise storms within her family and then quiet them. If you like complex family relationships, this is a great book for you.

Isaac Fitzgerald's memoir of growing up in Massachusetts, first in Boston, and later in a rural part of the state, is a unique story about growing up with a troubled childhood. His family was colossally unhappy, and although he describes the unhappiness in ways that make his father and maternal grandparents look pretty bad, the book is anything but bitter. He describes using drugs and alcohol from the age of 12, and for long periods his use was heavy, but he never describes himself as an addict or as realizing that he needs to stop, although his drinking and drug use apparently destroyed some important relationships. I would describe this book as the most joyful memoir of growing up with a troubled childhood I've ever read. Not that his experiences growing up were joyful, but the author's attitude towards his younger self is forgiving and compassionate.

Birnam Wood has been described as a thriller, but I think it might be more accurate to call it a tragedy in the old fashioned literary sense.

There are some great things in this book, especially the development of the main characters. I loved the ambivalent relationship between Mira and Shelley, which is the center of the novel. There is obviously friendship chemistry between them, but there is also offhanded contempt and resentment to complicate it. From the beginning I had more sympathy for Shelley, but I was rooting for them to work it out by the end of the novel.

The dynamics of the environmental activist group Birnam Wood would be recognizable to anyone who has been involved in similar endeavors. Mira and Shelley's relationship fits so well into the tensions between remaining true to principles and the drudgery of sustaining activism when you're always on the edge of flaming out. When Tony, a former Birnam Wood member who has been away for a few years, arrives back on the scene just as Mira announces that the billionaire Robert Lemoine is offering to fund them, those tensions boil up into an argument about whether the group can stay true to itself if it takes the money.

There are discussions about various aspects of that question throughout the book: what are the things you just wouldn't do, no matter what? How important is it to be authentic, versus doing what is expected of you? Is it better to say "sorry" or to thank someone for their patience, forbearance, etc?

The characters are struggling with self awareness, how to be in relationship with each other (even if they've been married for decades), and how to hold true to their own visions of how things should be.

We learn early on that Robert Lemoine has no scruples about being authentic or having a relationship with another person, and my question as I read the book was whether any of these normal human characters would be able to hold onto themselves as they encountered him.

I really hated the ending. It seemed like such a waste of all that character development to have everyone die. The only way I could make sense of it is to think of this story as a tragedy, where character flaws (of the kind that are discussed throughout) lead people to not be able to do what they should do. I'd be interested in what others think about this.

This novel is a genre bender. Or maybe it would be better to say it has some of almost every genre in it. It has prose narrative from almost every perspective, in different styles, from a doctor's case notes to true crime tabloid, and plenty of third person omniscient that flows along so seamlessly that you might forget that you are reading as you are mesmerized by the stories of a house on a plot of land in the western Massachusetts woodlands and the succession of people (and animals and insects) who lived there over the years since colonization. There is poetry, song, photography, thwarted romance, and an unabashed ghost story. Some of this sits together a little awkwardly. When you start to get comfortable in one section of the book, look out, because you are about to be unseated and it may take you a while to settle in again. I found the end pulled everything together for me, though, so the disparate parts made a convincing, beautiful, slightly melancholy whole.

I really enjoyed this detective story, where Elizabeth II is the detective behind the scenes. The main characters are well fleshed out, so I felt I got to know them as I read the book. One of the characters who was almost universally disliked was humanized by the Queen (for the reader, not for the characters in the book). Each time I thought I knew where the story was going, it went somewhere else instead. As far as mysteries go, it was not formulaic, nor was it too cozy. Apparently this is book #2 in a series, and I am thinking about looking around my library system to see if the first book is available. I would definitely read another book by this author.

I've been keeping my reading light this summer because I have a lot of stressful stuff on my plate. I read this in my back yard over 3 days.