strange and random happenstance

The Witch Elm by Tana French
Published by: Penguin Books
Publication Date: October 9th, 2018
Format: Paperback, 528 Pages
Rating: ★★★
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Toby Hennessy is a golden child. Favored not just by his family but by the world. Nothing has ever stood in his way. Coddled in his privilege, that is what Toby is and assumes he will always be. But that is all about to change. There was a contretemps at work. He threw a colleague at the art gallery he does PR for under a bus in order to keep his job. Even though he himself was complicit. Such a victory deserves a celebration, a night out with the lads. A night that ends up with him being brutalized by burglars in a home invasion. He could have stayed in his room and called the cops. But he didn't. Because situations like this don't happen to people like him. People like him scare the burglars off, they don't end up forever changed, they don't end up with brain damage. His luck has finally run out. What's more, his family has been keeping secrets from him. The first of which is his beloved Uncle Hugo is dying of Cancer. Though this gives Toby an opportunity, to heal and help at the same time. Hugo has always lived in Ivy House. The home is the heart of the Hennessy family. Toby and his two cousins, Susanna and Leon, spent every summer there. There were perfect days and wonderful nights spent in the glorious garden out back under Hugo's benevolent eye. If anywhere can heal Toby it's Ivy House. He moves in with his girlfriend Melissa and for a short while it's perfect. Hugo spends his days working on genealogy with Toby's help and when Melissa get's home from work they spend the evening having a delicious meal in contented splendor. It almost seems as if this little bubble of calm and happiness with never burst. The attack is in the past and Hugo still seems his old self. But Susanna's son discovers a human skull in the wych elm and things start to fall apart. Ivy House is now a crime scene and the victim is Dominic Ganly. He was a classmate and friend of Toby's who supposedly committed suicide the summer before college. This is no suicide. This is murder. As Toby and Hugo both start to deteriorate, Toby is convinced that it was one his cousins who committed this crime. But obviously he would have helped them to take care of a bully and a pest, wouldn't he? He wishes he could remember. He wishes he knew the secrets. He should be careful what you wish for.

So far this is my favorite Tana French book after The Likeness. And I strongly suspect it's because of their similarities. They both are mysteries contained and concerning a home that is at once a safe haven and a crime scene. There's that bubble, that golden glow, that takes the characters out of time and they just live a small, circumscribed, but wonderfully content life. It's the day to day details, the joy taken in wandering from room to room and preparing a meal in the kitchen and strolling out into the garden that I just love. It's too bad that the story didn't stick to this cozy contained little world. And it's oddly not the murder or the secrets that implode this world, it's the fact that Toby is a privileged asshole. Yes he's an unreliable narrator, but you can love an unreliable narrator, you can't love Toby. What's the problem with Toby? Well, everything. He views that he's a good guy. He thinks he's always been a good guy. But, you know as well as I do, that golden boys aren't the good guys they appear to be. They have secrets, and if the worst of them is that they are oblivious to the plight of those around them, well, consider yourself lucky. So Toby could be worse, he just turned a blind eye to the torture of his cousins at the hands of Dominic, because Dominic was like him, he was his friend, and what his cousins said couldn't possibly be true. Here's the thing Toby. It's not how people treat their equals that matters but how they treat those who they view as their inferiors that does. And Dominic made Susanna and Leon's lives a living hell. And that's on you because you could have stopped it. And in your deluded PTSD brain you imagine that perhaps you did. Perhaps you helped them. You didn't. Your type never does. But that's not the main reason why I hate Toby. I hate Toby because he thinks doing a radical action will somehow free him, return him to his previous self. When Susanna and Leon did what they did to Dominic it released them from the horrors of their lives up until that point. Therefore Toby thinks that by doing a suitably grand gesture he too will be freed. There is no logic in Toby's thinking. He kills a cop who was simply doing his job, not a bully who was destroying lives, and he thinks, this will, what? Free him? That this will restore him? While I could just say two wrongs don't make a right, that's too trite. Too tidy. Instead I will say that Toby is a deluded narcissist who couldn't handle an imperfect life so decided to make it worse because there was no making it better or even sustainable. And this, this is why I hate him. You play the cards you are dealt, you don't shoot the dealer.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Art Gallery, Bullies, Burglary, Cancer, Cold Case, Dublin, Genealogy, Ivy House, Murder Most Foul, Privilege, PTSD, Secrets, Suicide, Tana French, The Likeness, The Witch Elm, Toby Hennessy, Unreliable Narrator

The Only One Left by Riley Sager
Published by: Dutton
Publication Date: June 20th, 2023
Format: Hardcover, 400 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
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Kit McDeere is out of options. When she became a caregiver she never thought it would mean that years would pass by without barely even noticing. The patients changed, the routine didn't. And then her name was splashed across the papers. She was taking care of her mother who had terminal Cancer. Only her mother died of a drug overdose. Her name has been cleared but it is not clean and no one is willing to take a chance on her. No one except for another person with nothing left to lose. Lenora Hope was an urban legend when Kit was growing up. There was a rhyme and everything, "At seventeen, Lenora Hope. Hung her sister with a rope. Stabbed her father with a knife. Took her mother’s happy life. 'It wasn’t me,' Lenora said. But she's the only one not dead." Kit never thought Lenora was real, and yet she is. Lenora needs constant care, she's in her seventies and confined to a wheelchair from a series of strokes. The only way she can communicate is using her left hand, mainly taping out yes or no answers. And yet when Kit arrives at Hope's End she is terrified of this bedridden woman. It doesn't help that the previous beloved nurse disappeared in the night never to be heard from again. The story that Kit is told, that she had to leave for a family emergency, doesn't add up. Especially when Kit tries to put unpack in her new room. Because there is no room for her possessions because their place is taken up with the previous nurse's possessions. Clothes, books, even her medical kit. This doesn't make any sense. The other staff aren't that comforting, a house keeper, a cook, a young maid, and a groundskeeper. They all seem to be a part of the pall that hangs over the estate. And as for the house itself? How does anyone live here? The floor is canted as the whole house leans towards the ocean, promising that one day it will crash off the cliffs into the cold waters below. Could that be what happened to her predecessor? One day she got too close to the edge and over she went? Kit doesn't know what or who to trust, is the schoolyard chant tainting her perceptions, or are the cracks in the walls getting bigger, the creaks in the night, the shadows under the crack in the door to Lenora's room, everything is imbued with menace. And yet, she stays, because Lenora is able to laboriously type with her left hand, and she has promised to tell Kit the truth. But what if the truth is the most dangerous secret of all?

Riley Sager perfectly understands the building blocks of a good Gothic novel. It all goes back to family and location. Just think of Flowers in the Attic, AKA incest in the attic, the Gothic pulp of it's day, family and location. Here we have two families full of secrets and a location that is to die for, literally, it might just collapse into the ocean at a moments notice. The way that Sager weaves Lenora Hope's tragic history of lost love is the stuff of Gothic nightmares. A mother, father, and sister tragically murdered, and her, alone, living at the scene of the crime, trapped forever in the past, with only her loyal retainers. A woman who should be a subject of pity but instead is a subject of fear. Fear that works it's way into Kit McDeere's mind as her own family trauma is revealed. A mother dead, the Cancer was killing her but that isn't the cause of death. That death is why Kit is at Hope's End. But there's more. There's always more with Sager, and the way these two women's lives start to come together shows what a master storyteller he is. As for the house? I never really feel that a book can be considered Gothic without a memorable location. There are so many pretenders out there who don't realize this necessity. Hill House, Manderley, Wuthering Heights, Belasco House, and now Hope's End, these are the gold standard. These are places you dream about, places that haunt you. Places you never want to visit but after you read about can never leave. Hope's End is perfection, in the most decrepit, moldering, uninhabitable way possible. It's not just that the evidence of the murders still lingers, blood spots on the stairs, a missing pool table, and a broken chandelier, it's that the house is literally falling into the ocean. You could call it hubris to build a house on a cliff, but that just adds to Lenora's father haunting her forever, his vanity destroyed her in more ways than one. But what really got to me was the fact that once you're on the second floor there's a cant the house. It is leaning towards oblivion. This makes Hope's End a kind of fun house, or should I more correctly say a house of horrors? An attraction at a local fair that has an air of menace about it, where dark carnies prowl the space between tents, and the fun house is the most terrifying place you could be trapped. Every second that they stay in the house is a second too long. You know as they do, that everything will come crashing down in the end, but the wait for that end is agonizing. This book had me reading with baited breath, a not uncommon occurrence with Sager's writing, but the ending crashed on me like the weight of those stones on the ocean as Hope's End fell. That was some ride.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Belasco House, Cancer, Family, Flowers in the Attic, Gothic, Hill House, Hope's End, Kit McDeere, Lenora Hope, Lizzie Borden, Manderley, Murder Most Foul, Riley Sager, Stroke, The Only One Left, Wuthering Heights

Holding is Ireland's answer to a procedural show that is Broadchurch meets Ballykissangel. It's nice and pastoral with crimes that are comfortably in the past even if their shadows are now finally being felt in the present. Everyone is on a spectrum of "hot mess" from secretly binge eating in their car to drunkenly heckling bad karaoke singers to shagging in an abandoned ambulance. Yet somehow everyone is OK with just plodding along. The show is based on Graham Norton's first fiction book and while the show does keep you engaged over it's four episodes you could tell by the very structure that he is a first time author. How you might ask? Well, the ending is just too convenient. When you set up a decades old crime and then in the present have one of the characters dying of Cancer, well, to make the killer the Cancer patient, that's too pat isn't it? Life isn't that simple. Life can't be tied up in a nice little bow that quickly heals the community. Nature being the bringer of justice not to mention the whole "maybe guilt brought on the Cancer" is just lazy. Just because you have quirky characters and a pastoral setting doesn't make this charming. In fact, there's one aspect that skeeved me out so bad that it tainted the entire show. Evelyn Ross is in her thirties and has never gotten over her true loving abandoning her after he beat her to a pulp and she miscarried on the night of his wedding to another woman. Of course his is the body that was discovered. Evelyn, to numb herself, is having an affair with Stephen Chen. Stephen is seventeen and the son of Evelyn's sister's partner. At least they kind of call out the "incest" but they never really call out the whole pedophile aspect of this relationship. So yes, he's technically of the age of consent. But that's a technicality that doesn't get ride of the whole creepiness of it. Plus they are having sex in an abandoned ambulance. How is this sanitary!?! I mean, I just can't on so many levels. And here's the thing, consent is more important than ever and how we talk about power dynamics in a relationship, and if there's anywhere in the world more associated with pedophiles than Ireland, strictly because of the Catholic Church, I don't know where that would be. Therefore to be telling this story in Ireland at this time, I think it needed to be done more sensitively. Just by having the woman being the older of the two doesn't make this OK, just look to Mary Kay Letourneau, may she be singed for an entirety. But what adds insult to injury is when Evelyn apologizes at her sister's wake to Stephen saying that what she did was wrong and him then saying to basically forget about it because he loved every minute of it... Excuse me? He's a child, he might think this way now, but what about when he gets older and realizes that their relationship was actually abuse? It's not cool or sexy or anything to be in this kind of relationship and Holding didn't real emphatically say otherwise. Therefore I can do nothing but look back on this series with a kind of creepy regret. It could have been something, but it was out of touch and unoriginal.        

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Abuse, And the Emmy Goes To, Ballykissangel, Broadchurch, Cancer, Catholic Church, Evelyn Ross, Graham Norton, Holding, Hot Mess, Incest, Ireland, Mary Kay Letourneau, Miscarriage, Murder, Pedophile, Stephen Chen

The Learning Curve by Melissa Nathan
Published by: Arrow
Publication Date: September 4th, 2006
Format: Paperback, 464 Pages
Rating: ★
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Nicky Hobbs loves her job teaching school, even if she often dwells on the fact that her life at thirty is far different from the life she dreamed she'd have when she was twenty three. Well, only her ex Rob knows she wanted to be married by now with three kids... too bad she's working with him, and soon closer then ever. Rob and Nicky are appointed deputy heads of the school which it turns out is a way to test their suitability to see who would be the ideal headmaster or mistress when the current Head, Miss James, retires. Rob really wants the job and is willing to manipulate Nicky into rethinking her life and into feeling the tick of her biological clock. Nicky doesn't realize the extent to which Rob is willing to go to get this job and thinks that maybe he has turned over a new leaf, much like the new employee at the school, Mark Samuels. Mark Samuels is the father of Nicky's favorite student, Oscar. Mark Samuels is the absentee parent from hell who Nicky decides to throw the gauntlet at. Mark picks it up and by the time they are working together he is a new man... could he even be Nicky's new man? But Nicky is so confused that by the end of the school year she won't even know which end is up or what her future might hold.

Melissa Nathan ranks right up there in my mind as the pinnacle of Chick Lit. She was one of, if not the first Chick Lit author that I fell hard for. I remember being in Barnes and Noble and picking up Pride, Prejudice and Jamsin Field off one of their featured tables down the middle of the store. Besides the premise of a theatrical production of Pride and Prejudice, I had more then a little cover lust because it totally looked like Caroline Bingley (aka Anna Chancellor) with one of her hats from Four Weddings and a Funeral and yes, I really am that easily sold on a book. Because she was a British author with only one book released stateside (sometimes American publishers baffle me), Amazon UK became my drug dealer, getting me all her new releases as soon as they came out until her untimely death of Breast Cancer right around the publication of The Learning Curve.

It was a sad sad day for Chick Lit when Melissa passed. Based on the quality of her work what might she have gone on to do? And now I've turned my review into a total buzzkill. Hey, at least I didn't reprint her forward to the book which had me in floods of tears. With only five books to her name I was extra hesitant to read the final unread book I had on my shelf, The Learning Curve. Once I finished this book, well, there would be no more. I kind of wish that I hadn't read it. The happy anticipation that there would always be another Melissa Nathan book out there for me to read has been replaced with the sad reality of how awful this book was. Sometimes looking forward to something is so much more satisfying then the reality, and the reality of this book is painful.

Before ripping apart The Learning Curve for it's themes, I have to tackle something that just drove me round the bend. This book was riddled with inconsistencies, not to mention an unwieldy cast of characters you have to memorize in the first two pages. Now, I don't know if this was because Melissa was pushing through to get this book done that they didn't bother with any kind of continuity editing, but it is a disservice if this is the case. Seriously, edit this book and get it back to me without the days of the week being helter skelter, with Friday occasionally being followed by Monday, and there once in awhile being a few extra days between Monday and Thursday. Seeing as we all live by the calendar, the least this book could do is follow said calendar.

But the temporal issues are nothing compared to clothes magically changing from leaving for school till arriving at school. Shoes being high heels then flats. But worst of all, in the beginning of the book Oscar's camera phone is a big plot point and then when he's spying on teachers during the school trip he has to use a crappy disposable camera? Um, us the freakin' phone! OK, I've got to stop being nitpicky about this, and other little things like how plodding the pace is, how I dislike every character, how sometimes it all just goes a little creepy with blackmail and inappropriate student teacher relationships, how is Nicky at thirty even qualified to be a headmistress, and how crap Johnny English is so stop using it as the only movie mentioned, and move onto other things. Ok, I think I got the rant out. All these problems could have been fixable but the truth is it wouldn't have fixed the book.

Through the entire book there are strained relationships between the males and females. I wouldn't even say strained covers it, it has such an antagonistic dynamic that when it even turns a little violent in the last few chapters I can't say I was surprised. There was anger and tears and recrimination behind this battle of the sexes. It all boils down to the age old question of men being the ones with the jobs and women being the ones rearing the children. With Nicky we get almost 600 pages of her griping about children/career/children/career/children/career/children/career. There is no progress with this internal and external dialogue, there is just the dialogue. Nicky is baby crazy but can't justify giving up her career to have kids and therefore bemoans this for hundreds and hundreds of pages. I think she really needs some psychological help.

Of course it doesn't help that her supposed best friend who happens to be her ex is playing on these doubts. But seriously, there was never any furthering of the dialogue or a change to it, just a broken record going over and over and over the same bloody tune till I hated this book and the read rage fully embraced my soul. Just writing this review I want to take this book and hurl it out a window. You can usually tell how much I care for a book by the treatment I give it. Those I love and cherish don't have creased spines or loose pages... this one looks like it was run over by a truck, which then backed over it again and again... besides breaking the spine I think I loosened the pages enough that if I were ever to try to read it again in some masochistic torture, well, they'd all fall out. Right now I'm wondering if book burning is a good idea... I'm a little cold and this book is quite thick... stop it brain, just stop it. Constructive criticism. Legitimate reasons for the hate, don't rant, critique.

But the heart of this book I think is the sad truth that Melissa Nathan knew she was dying. Look at the story, not Nicky's, but Mark's. Mark is a single workaholic father who lost his wife when his son Oscar was four. Melissa's husband Andrew lost her when their son Sam was three. So there's a part of me that doesn't want to criticize this book. There's a part of me that thinks perhaps this book was cathartic, that Melissa needed to write it. She was writing a story to tell her husband that he could move on as long as what he did was doing what was best for their son Sam. That it's not about being trapped in the past but knowing that life goes on. This then becomes such a personal book it's almost too sad to bear. Maybe she should have just gifted it to her husband and not put it out there in the world. It's a jumbled mess of unlikable characters and mixed messages and in the end, a dying woman's message to her husband of hope and love. This sad yet kind of creepy revelation makes me feel like a peeping tom that has just written a scathing review of someones innermost thoughts. Perhaps it's for the best that she can never see this review.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Battle of the Sexes, Biological Clock, Cancer, Chick Lit, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Johnny English, Melissa Nathan, Pride and Prejudice, The Learning Curve, Widower

The Blessing by Nancy Mitford
Published by: Vintage
Publication Date: 1951
Format: Paperback, 256 Pages
Rating: ★★
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Grace Allingham is engaged to a nice English boy. He didn't push for the marriage to happen before the war and therefore when Charles-Edouard de Valhubert comes into her life and sweeps her off her feet, it's really Hughie's own fault for not locking that down. Charles-Edouard is French and exciting. He loves art and beauty and Grace. Grace, like her father, is taken by all things French and is therefore really taken with her new husband. They have two glorious weeks together till he ships out and she doesn't see him for seven years. In those two weeks she managed to get pregnant, so the seven years away from her husband that she barely knows is spent raising their son Sigi and tending goats.

A year after the war is over Charles-Edouard sweeps back into Grace's life and whisks her away to France and a new life. Only Charles-Edouard is determined to continue living his old life. Sure, he has a wife and son, but that doesn't mean he's not going to reunite with his mistresses and perhaps pick up a few more. When Grace catches him in the act she flees back to England and the familiar. The couple want to reunite, but they both want what the other can't give. Meanwhile Sigi sees an opportunity. It appears to him that keeping his parents apart might benefit him. He would no longer be ignored but would be lavished with presents and attention. Plus, if he could also get bribes off of perspective suitors for his mother's or father's hand in marriage... he might come out very well, as long as his parents don't rumble his con.

The Blessing is an odd novel in that it feels like you are reading about ghosts long gone, a feeling enhanced by the visit to the Père Lachaise Cemetery in the book. Grace Allingham and Charles-Edouard de Valhubert are quite literally Linda Radlett and Fabrice de Sauveterre from The Pursuit of Love brought back from the dead. There are many questions this brings up. Is The Blessing a long "what if" novel wherein Nancy was wondering one day what would have happened if Linda and Fabrice hadn't died? Did she just love these characters so much that though she parted with them she had to bring them back in some way? Or was she using the ghosts of the past to recapture the best seller cache of her previous two novels, The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate? All or none of these things may be true, but as a reader I felt like I was just trudging over terrain I had already gone over and over and was now trapped in a rut. There are only so many phone conversations between louche Frenchman and naive English girls that one can take in a lifetime and I think I have had my fill.

By giving Charles-Edouard/Fabrice and his lackadaisical morals full reign the book, no matter how Nancy tries, isn't a love story but a reflection of an amoral society that you aren't quite sure she's making fun of or even trying to justify in some sick way. The situations in The Pursuit of Love are able to push Fabrice into being a loving antihero for awhile, but without the strictures of the war, you see that Fabrice would have easily reverted to Charles-Edouard and his philandering ways. Charles-Edouard in some ways does love Grace, but the truth is, it isn't a love I would accept on any level. She must abide by his character or else lose him.

How is this fair? And why does everyone expect Grace to just accept this? Charles-Edouard has a long standing mistress, but of course it's "innocent" because the sex doesn't matter as much as the conversation. Then there's the young nubile mistress who Grace catches him with, though he still denies that there wasn't anything wrong with what she saw. Then there's the danger of any pretty woman anywhere that he might just wander off with at a moments notice. Yet Grace is expected to just be ok with this? No. It's not funny, it's not ok, it's sad. Everyone deserves to be loved exclusively without caveats. Sorry Nancy if you think this is acceptable, I don't.

And speaking of Nancy, and her sad Francophile life... the truth is maybe she didn't find this acceptable but she was trying to justify her own life. In 1942 she met a man, Gaston Palewski. He worked closely with Charles de Gaulle and was key in the French government for many years. Nancy fell in love, hard. Gaston was the love of her life, she dedicated a book to him and based both Fabrice and Charles-Edouard on him. Sadly, she wasn't the love of his life and he would never give up his ways as a reckless womanizer. In 1946 she moved to Paris to be closer to Gaston, with her life revolving around whenever he could spare a moment for her. She was willing to drop any plans if she could see or hear him for just a few minutes.

This obsession is oddly similar to Unity's obsession with Hitler and the stalker qualities it brought out in her. Nancy could easily be said to have been Gaston's stalker, seeing as their relationship was mainly one sided. She would have killed herself willingly for Gaston, a situation he found flattering and amusing. In 1969 Gaston married another one of his mistresses who was not much younger then Nancy. Nancy soon after became ill and eventually died of Cancer. He broke her heart. The Blessing might be see as one long justification of the life Nancy lived, a way to con herself into believing that just being a part of his life, just being one of his women was enough. I, on the other hand, find it heartbreaking. That such a smart, witty, bright woman could think that this was enough for her, that this was the life she deserved, it breaks my heart.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Cancer, France, Gaston Palewski, Hitler, Love in a Cold Climate, Mitford March Mach Deux, Nancy Mitford, Paris, The Blessing, The Pursuit of Love, Unity Mitford, Womanizer

Beautiful Chaos by Gary Russell
Published by: BBC Books
Publication Date: December 26th, 2008
Format: Paperback, 242 Pages
Rating: ★
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Donna has asked The Doctor to take her home so that she can be with her mother for the anniversary of her father's death. The Doctor doesn't really do families well so he tries to stay out of the way of the bickering that ensues once the Nobles gather together. Plus, The Doctor has always gotten on well with Donna's granddad, Wilf, so it's easier to just spend time out with him in the allotment looking up at the stars. In fact there's a few new stars in the sky. Wilf was the first to find one of them and he's getting a dinner in his honor which he hopes The Doctor will attend. The Doctor doesn't seem so fussed about the dinner, but the other new stars, the ones that seem to be coming into alignment, well, they worry him.

At the dinner the other astronomers are grating and Donna is actually a little relieved when Wilf's lady friend, Netty, has an episode. Netty is dealing with Alzheimer's, which means that Wilf and Donna's mom are also dealing with it. Yet when The Doctor fully realizes the impact of the alignment, he has an even better excuse to leave the dinner, Donna in tow. With a cunning use of computers, astrology, genealogy, and astronomy, an old evil that The Doctor has faced before is going to use the human race to launch it's empire across the stars. Something The Doctor seriously wants to avoid happening.

I don't like to read about illness and despair, I have enough of that in my own life, thank you. This isn't the place to talk about it really, but I must touch on the issue so that you'll understand why this book made me want to get up in the author's face and explain a few facts to him, possibly with my fists. When I was in grade school my mom had two bouts of Cancer, which she survived. Though surviving took a toll. The chemo and other therapies sped things up so that while she is only thirty years older than me, her body thinks it's really fifty years older than me, which makes her the same "age" as when her mother got Parkinson's. My mom has Parkinson's. This is a daily struggle. Therefore, I think you can see why I use reading as an escape. I want to be anywhere and anywhen then here, and a book that dwells on these issues, no thank you.

While Russell's use of an incurable illness, in this case Alzheimer's, as the real evil is apt, he goes too far into the braveness of the battle. Netty dealing with her chronic illness bravely and nobly (sorry, I HAD to use that pun) just felt like some sort of propaganda for dealing with this kind of crisis in a stiff upper lip, keeping up appearances way. The message was heavy handed. People who talk about fighting this kind of battle as "brave" or "courageous" just make me want to scream. These are platitudes designed to make you, yeah, you, the one who doesn't have to deal with this shit better. To people in my position, well, it makes me want to punch you. Do you all not understand that there's your public face and your private face? That there's what you should to the world, what you show to the patient, and what you show to yourself? Yes, sure, I guess we could say that at least Donna's mom deals more with the reality of all this, but in the end, no, she doesn't because Netty joyously declares that she wants to go into a nursing home. Please (insert me rolling my eyes)! Show me one person out there who's like, "Nursing Home, SIGN ME UP!" No one will even want this, even if they know they can't handle their life in their current environment. My great aunt, she's 89, and she's steadfastly vetoing any kind of help or assisted living. And she's just the most recent of my family members to do this.

I had such hopes for this book because Donna Noble is my favorite companion in the new series, hands down, perhaps even in all the series. When The Doctor lost Donna, that was really the end of this Doctor. His life after that was filled with sadness and loneliness. The heartbreaking scene when Donna has to have her memory removed has taken on a fuller life her and made into a staggeringly heartbreaking novel. By bookending a story about Altzheimer's with Donna's own memory lose, it's a punch to the gut, that's what it is. But more then that, by showing the struggles that Donna's mother and grandfather are going through, it makes Donna's decision to travel in the TARDIS seem callous. Russell has taken my favorite character and put a spin on her that I don't like one bit. If I where just to say, fuck it and up and leave, well, I don't know what would happen, and that's a fear that I live with all the time. I admired Donna before, now... now I see someone in my position being heartless and unfeeling. Ug, just someone, remove this book from my mind, I want my Donna back.

As for the "plot," well, take out the struggle with family and illness and do we really even have much of a plot? No we don't. The author has made a flimsy story about Mandragora returning, which, for those of you not inculcated into every medium The Doctor appears in, television, written, and audio, well, you might be more then a little lost, but Russell doesn't seem to care or even want to explain for those new to this evil. Not every reader knows everything Doctor Who! A book like these needs to be written for all levels of readers. Also the evil computer/world domination bid with some little kids helping out, well, it made it more like a saccharine episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures if it had be touched up by Michael Crichton. Also, the Doctor is more then a bit bitchy and down on humans, oh, and, seriously, authors, don't have the title of your book used like fifty times throughout the story, it's annoying. Ok... I think my rant is over... can't be sure, these episodes are unexpected, much like Netty's... gaw, Netty...

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Alzheimer's, Beautiful Chaos, Cancer, Doctor Who, Donna, Gary Russell, Mandragora, Michael Crichton, Nursing Home, Parkinson's, Sarah Jane Adventures, The 10th Doctor, Wilf

The Last Word (The Spellman Files Book 6) by Lisa Lutz
ARC Provided by the publisher
Published by: Simon and Schuster
Publication Date: July 9th, 2013
Format: Hardcover, 320 Pages
Rating: ★★★★★
To Buy

Izzy thought that sweeping in and wresting control of her family's company would bring a new sense of purpose to her life and more control over her wayward parents. She just wanted a little respect. Instead everything is a thousand times worse. Her parents are acting out, spending more time thinking of ways to infuriate their new boss, aka their daughter, then actually investigating cases for their clients. Rae has suspiciously asked to return to work for the business, despite having sworn it off entirely in the past. Izzy's one reliable worker, D, is stressed out and up to something. And then Izzy is accused of embezzling money from her top client Mr. Slayter. How could she embezzle the money? She doesn't even know how to balance her company's accounts let alone do something so nefarious on such a large scale. Everything is in jeopardy, the business, their sanity, and quite possibly even their lives. It's just another day for the Spellmans.

If you follow a series long enough you hope that each installment will be better then the previous. Building on the characters and their foibles as the author's writing gains strength and assurance. I feel a personal connection to this series as I've been a reader since the beginning, even sending away for a signed book plate from Lutz's website prior to finally meeting her in 2009. As Lutz's writing has matured she has also become more assured at her author signings. From the sleep deprived writer asking high schoolers what their handout they were filling out for their class was back in 2010 at Boswell books to the witty and well dressed author describing how she would defend her home from burglars, even dealing with a brain hemorrhage to hilarious effect, at the event in Madison for this most recent book, see has matured along with her writing. And while I anticipate her newest non-Spellman novel, having previously enjoyed Heads You Lose, it's the Spellmans that will always hold my heart.

While this is actually not the final volume as many previously thought, the book's title did lend an ominous finality to the series, there does come a time when a series should end. We, as readers, don't want the Spellmans to overstay their welcome. We want them to end on a strong note and not degenerate into a shadow of themselves. Each book has evolved their story and their relationships and there comes a time when a happy medium will be reached and the end will be nigh. The Last Word handles the "big topics" more then previous volumes. Death, loyalty, and acceptance being high on the list. This is one of the many reasons I thought this might be "the end." And yes, I was sad, because I did think this was surely the end and I wasn't quite ready, but then I had a Rae (ha ha) of hope. If the next book goes with Rae and gives us another viewpoint it will enliven the series, but I still have to brace myself for a time when their stories will end. But I will hopefully be better prepared then I was for this ersatz ending.

The biggest topic the book handles is Albert's Cancer. This is the impetus to bring the waring family back together. To me it felt a little trite. Yes, your family, if they love each other, will certainly rally around in times of a health crisis, but it felt like Lutz had forced her characters so far apart that something cataclysmic was the only way to bring them back together. So, while Albert and his health have always been a source of comedy and concern throughout the series, using his health to effect a reunion just seemed too pat. Yes I was momentarily concerned Lutz would kill him, again thinking this was the last book, but the truth comes down to I don't like Cancer being used for reconciliation. Perhaps it's just having been raised in a house with my mother battling Cancer twice before I was even in Junior High, but to use the disease in this way and then not really handle the illness in more detail, well, just too trite.

Oddly enough the most painful part of the book for me was Henry, Izzy's on-again off-again boyfriend. I love Henry. I love Izzy. I love the idea of Henry and Izzy. But in reality they never quite worked and I was unwilling to truly let them go their separate ways. I felt like they belonged together in the true love that never dies way. Of course the happily ever after I wished for them was completely unrealistic given their personalities and their life goals. I give Lutz big props for being willing to break them up and keep them broken up. The ending she chose with Henry finally finding happiness, it was realistic. To have Izzy and Henry walk off into the sunset, that would have been just too trite, and we've already had one incidence of that in this book, so here's to something new and different. I just hope that they can remain friends because I love Henry too much to see him never grace the pages of a Spellman book again.

To me, while Izzy's growth is a barometer of how things have changed over time in the books, I look more to Rae. Rae started out wild and out of control and she has now found a maturity that I didn't think would ever be possible. I am actually quite sad about losing the old Rae. Rae, to me, was the most fully formed character I have ever read. At times I expected her to quite literally walk out of the book, sit down next to me and hustle me for money or candy or both. But she is no longer wild and out of control. She is reasonable, sensible, and actually helpful. I'm glad she's grown up, but it has made me wistful. Yes, her parent's behaviour did help bring back some of the feeling of the old Rae... but her maturity makes me realize that when the time comes I will be able to let go of this series. It will be a sad parting, but I am hopefully prepared.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: ARCs, Cancer, Heads You Lose, Henry Stone, Izzy, Lisa Lutz, Private Eyes, Rae, The Last Word, The Spellmans

Mary Ann in Autumn by Armistead Maupin
Published by: Harper
Publication Date: November 2nd, 2010
Format: Hardcover, 304 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy
Mary Ann has returned to the city of her youth. Full of familiar faces both welcome and unwelcome. Her life is in major upheaval following the realization that her life coach and her husband are having an affair and she has been diagnosed with Cancer. Heading to seek refuge in San Francisco and lick her wounds, she takes up residence with her oldest friend, Michael "Mouse" Tolliver and his young partner Ben. Mary Ann sees her life as a series of probable missteps. She left her first husband Brian, and her adopted daughter Shawna, to be an East Coast tv star, which lasted all of five minutes. Following which she set herself up as a housewife and raised her stepson. Her dreams and ambitions for celebrity thwarted as well as the lives she ruined back in the Bay Area. Ben cunningly thinks that what Mary Ann needs more than anything is to realize she was someone and that this adoration and love will do more to help her heal than anything. Enter Facebook. She connects with many friends and fans who remember her from her old show back in San Francisco. From her silly hats worn when the Queen of England arrived, to her sub par interviews that have a campy nostalgia among the gay community. But this is also when the mysterious messages start to arrive from Fogbound One. Hinting at a dark secret in Mary Ann's past that she has never revealed. A dark secret that will help her connect to the daughter she abandoned. Shawna has followed Mary Ann's love of journalism, only in a more modern and outrageous method. Shawna is a sex blogger. But she's getting sick of the hipster, Betty Page look and wants something more. Enter "Leia." A homeless woman with a mysterious past. A past that Shawna hopes to uncover. A past that might lead back to her "mother." Can Mary Ann get a second chance at the life she threw away? Or will she become even more lost in the fog of her past? And what of those who orbit her?

Returning to the narrative style of short character studies whose lives all magically interweave, we see Maupin once again at the top of his game. Forgiven is the first person narrative style of Michael Tolliver Lives which I hated in it's overly sexual wallowing. Maupin excels at slowly weaving his story, thread by thread, where the web forms and then you realize how all the disparate elements form together into one cohesive whole. And here, he's not just working with the present, but Mary Ann's past is brought in as well. Those horrors not spoken of are back with a vengeance. The characters of the Tales of the City books are the voices of a generation. They will go down as some of the most memorable characters who so well captured a defining moment in our history. Maupin's stories have encapsulated the world as it was happening, particularly when these stories ran as a weekly serial and could move and flow with current events. Which, to an extent, works against him in this book. The earlier books, being separated from the now by a decade or more, feel timeless, at least to me. But once you start throwing Facebook around, it just seems too linked into the now. Of course, this may seem contradictory, because it was his capturing of the time that made the books what they were. Maybe I'm just a hypocrite, or maybe I'm just sick of references to Facebook. In his defense, he uses Facebook in a way that Hitchcock would be proud of. Maupin has always had that bit of Hitchcock in his more successful novels. Perhaps it's just San Francisco bringing out the macabre and the mysterious, or perhaps it's something in the water.

When Maupin starts a little mystery and slowly links it back and loops it around, I can't help but stay up into the wee hours to see where he will finally lead me. His web didn't fully enthrall me this time. Within the denouement, things started to fall apart. Everything almost seemed rosy in the end. After the bleak humor with a dark edge, it felt that Maupin forced his characters into a happy ending. He has never been shy of the darker endings before, so is it age that has mellowed him? His new young love that Ben is modelled on? I almost felt like there'd be a sing song when all the characters came together. I just think there was one too many pairs of rose tinted glasses for my liking. Mary Ann is Cancer free now? From someone who has had many Cancer battles in her family, I can say from experience, it doesn't work like that. It's not a few weeks playing with Facebook, a little surgery and you're better. It's a bloody fight that can only be won by those who struggle hard. Mouse's struggle with AIDS has been a big theme of these books, so it seems that, one, Mary Ann's Cancer is unrealistic and two, he was giving us a bone, a curable illness among the incurable. Again, rose tinting the story. This is what brought the book down a full star in the final analysis, that and why can't we have Brian and Mary Ann in the same book. It seems that since their breakup we are only allotted one. And while Mary Ann was wonderful and back to her original charm, unlike the harpy she became in later books, I have to say, I missed Brian, I have a soft spot in my heart for him.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: AIDS, Armistead Maupin, Betty Page, Cancer, Facebook, Mary Ann in Autumn, Michael Tolliver Lives, San Francisco, Tales of the City