strange and random happenstance

Putting the Fun in Funeral by Diana Pharaoh Francis
Published by: Lucky Foot Press in conjunction with BVC
Publication Date: September 4th, 2018
Format: Kindle, 296 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
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Beck Wyatt's mother is dead. In the most gruesome yet amusing way possible. She was crushed to death by the phallus of one of the gargoyles that perched on the roof of her mansion. Don't worry, she deserved it. Which is something the police can't quite grasp and why Beck is a person of interest. The bereaved usually don't ask for crime screen photos to put on display. Or go about planning the tackiest funeral whose theme could literally be "Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead!" Because besides being her mother, she was a literal witch. A trait that Beck has inherited, though she made sure never to let her mother know about her powers. This woman spent years torturing Beck, who knows what would have happened if she knew about her powers. A lifetime of cages, chains, trials, and now she's free. All the secrets she kept bottled up to protect the three people in the world she loved can now be decanted like a cheap wine. Jen, Lorraine, and Stacey have always been there for Beck. They knew the Wicked Bitch was trouble, she did enough damage to their own lives, but they never knew how bad until now. Now that Beck can actually say what happened with impunity. When she's ready that is. First there needs to be much drinking, and tons of cheesecake. Of course, as "luck" would have it, her mother's death sets off a chain of events Beck could never have foreseen. First there's the attempted kidnapping by the very sexy Damon Matroviani. Then there's the death curse. Then there's the near death experience of plunging through a river to remove the death curse. More and more "incidents" keep happening to Beck which keep making her interesting to the police. She just wants to bury the Wicked Bitch and get on with running her business, a resale and consignment shop that also runs estate sales. Which of course means her business and home are attacked. And it turns out that Damon might have seen this all coming and warned her more properly. Because Beck is the daughter of two very powerful bloodlines and was kidnapped by her aunt at birth and raised without any knowledge of the world she should have taken a place in or her magical abilities. So once again Wicked Bitch AKA Aunty Mommy screws over her life. Here's hoping Beck can get it back, but on her terms, no one else's.

I feel there's really no way to properly classify Putting the Fun in Funeral. It might be one of the oddest Urban Fantasy books I've ever read. There seem to be two genres fighting for dominance and they couldn't be more different. On the one had it wants to be magical chick lit, with the girls giggling about guys while drinking margaritas and eating cheesecake. On the other hand it's straight up horror. The torture and PTSD that Beck has is heartbreaking and horrifying. And the book swings from one extreme to the other. Reading this book is almost like getting repeated whiplash. Yet somehow it works. There's a disconnect but also a tentative balance. It makes sense that Beck wants that part of her life that is hers to be almost superficial. I'm not saying that her connection to her friends isn't bone-deep, it's just that they let her set the boundaries and that means they stick to the "fun" as it where. They gossip and drink and drink and gossip and then get around to the cheesecake, because this is what Beck needs to counteract the horrors she faced in her past and still faces minimally twice a month at the hands of "Aunty Mommy." Though for me the real horror is when Beck learns more about the magical world she was kept apart from. That world is about bloodlines and status, in other words, if the Death Eaters and the Republic of Gilead from The Handmaid's Tale got together and created a breeding program this is what it would be. And it scared the shit out of me. This moved the book so far away from chick lit into straight up dystopian horror that I shudder just thinking about it. Beck would have no control over her reproductive rights. She would be forced into contracts and used as a broodmare to the benefit of her father's family. What's more, due to the whole "magical" nature of these people, she can be forced to carry twins or triplets. Oh, and every consummation guarantees conception. Just hell no. I just can't. The books that are the most successful are ones that despite whatever genre they are reflect the real world and real crises the readers are facing. This was almost too real. This is the world that so many people want to see become a reality. They want to take away all my rights to my own body. And I'll be standing at the ramparts with Beck screaming no. This is my body. You stay the fuck away.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: An Urban Development, Beck Wyatt, Chick Lit, Damon Matroviani, Death Eaters, Diana Pharaoh Francis, Everyday Disasters, Gilead, Horror, PTSD, Putting the Fun in Funeral, Reproductive Rights, The Handmaid's Tale

The Atlas Complex by Olivie Blake
Published by: Tor Books
Publication Date: January 9th, 2024
Format: Hardcover, 496 Pages
Rating: ★
To Buy

If someone offered you all the power would you say yes? That doesn't make you a villain. It doesn't make you a hero. It makes you human. But power has to be taken from someone. And both Atlas and Ezra took that power with both hands and created a foundation of futility built on despair that was destined to rot. Atlas watched as his cohort suffered. As his cohort died. Somewhere, out there, he and Ezra chose a different path. But Altas needed the six to bring about this change. He needed them to destroy the world. He had to have Libby and Nico, Reina, Parisa and Tristan. He even needed Dalton. But not Callum. Callum was the sacrifice that should have been. They should have never trusted Atlas. Now that Libby is back they have an additional problem. Their agreement with the library is unfulfilled. Just like when Atlas and Ezra tried to trick the library, tried to deny it it's pound of flesh, the six now owe the library a death. The promise unfulfilled has led the library to be draining them. They aren't living up to their potential because they didn't read the terms of service carefully enough. If only they had realized that they were making a deal with three separate entities, the Society, the archives, and Atlas. Therefore they have some choices before them, keep working for the library, or beat Atlas at his own game, win the multiverse arms race, and perhaps acknowledge that they have a god complex. That last one is specifically for Reina. The plan wasn't to destroy the world, but to make a new one. The idea isn't necessarily a good one, but it is one nonetheless. Gideon is the one to confront Nico that Nico's world is falling apart. Altas is missing, Dalton is lying, and their obsession is compromising them. They don't realize that they are trapped in their very own multiverse trolley problem. They can't see the forest for the trees. They want to prove that they can do it so they will, damn the consequences. And that's why Atlas chose them. Their lack of morals. Nico though always thought that in the darkest of times he could rely on Libby's moral compass. But she has been corrupted. He doesn't know what happened when she return from the past. What went down in Atlas's office. Something happened there that changed everything. Perhaps she is now like the archives, soulless. But how many times can you burn the world down and still walk away unscathed? And what if their goal isn't to succeed but just survive? Their burden is the burden of survival.

I was being generous when I said this series should have been a duology. There wasn't enough material for two books let alone three. This should have been one book. Nothing more. Possibly less. The Atlas Complex was one of the most excruciating reads of my life because it adds nothing, it does nothing, it is nothing. Hundreds of pages of nothing can break you. And what's worse, I think it's trying to be clever. It's trying to hide the reveal that Atlas and Ezra were murdered by Libby when she returned to the present and therefore the six just keep up this pretense that everything is normal when nothing is. That means it's just more of the same. More of them doing nothing. More of them accomplishing nothing. Because you know that big, destroy the world experiment that Atlas had hand-selected them for? Well, they decide to do it and then they just stop. At the cost of Nico. So THE THING this whole series was building to, well, it doesn't happen so we never find out what would have happened. But that's not the only loose end. For a story that could have been one and done we have a trilogy of the unanswered and the unexplained. We aren't even privy to who lives and who dies. We've been following these six characters for so long and we aren't given the common courtesy of some kind of ending. I mean, could I at least have found out about the archives and it's sentience? Nope. That wasn't in the cards. Olivie Blake obviously wanted this to be about the six characters and their excruciating relationships which meant what minimal plot there was didn't matter in the end. Either you loved these deplorables or you deplored the book. I deplored the book. And speaking of deplorables... Trump. So, at the end of The Atlas Complex Olivie Blake explains that this entire series was written as a way for her to process the trauma of Trump's presidency. I'm not sure if her process involved passing that trauma onto me, but she sure did. The "themes" in this book are how people want ignorance, people want hate. They will knowingly turn away from the truth if it's not what they want to hear. Which is exactly how we've ended up in this situation for a second term. Oh dear god, I hope that doesn't mean we're going to get more books in this series for her continued therapy. I'm a completest but I just can't. I seriously can't. I don't want to be her therapy! Because now I need more therapy. First to deal with my anxieties and second to deal with my PTSD from this series. And I don't want to be facetious, but I think just being able to finish this series gives me hope that we can get through anything. Even this second term.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Alexandrian Society, Atlas Blakely, Callum Nova, Donald Trump, Ezra Fowler, God Complex, Libby Rhodes, Nico de Varona, Olivie Blake, Parisa Kamali, PTSD, Reina Mori, The Atlas Complex, The Atlas Six, Therapy, Trilogy, Tristan Caine

Murder on the Christmas Express by Alexandra Benedict
Published by: Poisoned Pen Press
Publication Date: October 3rd, 2023
Format: Paperback, 272 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy

Roz Parker has something to celebrate. She's taken early retirement from the Met and is traveling home to Scotland to welcome her first grandchild. Though her daughter has gone into labor six weeks early. Which means she's broken her promise to her daughter. Again. But really, she had to tie up that last case. She's not one to leave a job unfinished. One thing Roz has always dreamed of doing is taking the sleeper train to Fort William. A dream that everyone at her station knew about, so they pitched in to buy her a first class ticket as part of her leaving present. Despite the seasonal, if problematic, weather, Roz's train hasn't been cancelled and she'll be home for Christmas and hopefully before the birth of her grandchild. To stave off panic she starts to manipulate her Mirror Cube, like the Rubik's Cube she mastered, but harder. Her solitude is broken into by a young couple arguing; Grant and Meg. Grant is what most would consider handsome and Meg is an influencer who won a singing contest with the song "In No Time." And she's not gone unnoticed by the fellow passengers. But Roz sees what her fellow passengers in the first class lounge don't, the bruise on Meg's upper arm. There's the students trying to get on the quiz show Geek Street. The family with the baby, their teenagers having been the ones who noticed Meg. Then there's Ember, a romantic, actually bringing a copy of Murder on the Orient Express with her. And Tony and his mother Mary who don't have tickets to the first class lounge, but seeing as it's Christmas, Roz gives Mary her seat, much to Grant's objections. Given the ructions in the lounge it's with a sense of relief that the passengers board the train. One might even say a festive air returns. But this isn't going to be a smooth ride. It's not just the weather threatening them, but the dynamics between the guests is combustible and there's a killer amongst them. And Roz's panic is rising, her own memories linked to her daughter's birth are surfacing, trauma sticking to trauma. When Roz makes it to the club car things really start to kick off, and that's before the train derails. And Meg is found dead. But hers won't be the only corpse on this train. Roz will be lucky to survive, let alone meet her grandchild.

Holy hell, this book should have been called Trauma Train. Having read Alexandra Benedict's previous holiday themed mystery, The Christmas Murder Game, I know that, despite appearances, these aren't cozy mysteries. And while you could say that Midsomer Murders is a cozy series despite a high death count, that's done with a light touch. There is no light touch here. It's blunt force trauma. Which leads me to mention that if you ever want a good laugh, read some of the reviews of this book from people who judged it by it's cover, they got a way different ride than they expected. I was luckily prepared. Though in all seriousness, did they really consider Trauma Train as a possible title? It would have been perfect! The holidays are hard on many people. Just the sight of a Christmas tree or a carol heard on the radio can send them into a deep depression that won't lift until the last of the snow has melted. I know many people like this. Add to that family stress and strain. Complicated relationships between family that's forced together and you can see why many people do as I do and spend the holidays reading about family gatherings where there's quite a cull. In my mind, one of the relationships that has the most strain put on it is between mothers and daughters. If you have issues with your daughter or your mother or sadly both, this book needs a big old trigger warning for you. In fact Trigger Warning Train, another good title. Because despite fraught family relationships, Benedict then piles on the PTSD, the sexual assaults, the psychological abuse, the domestic abuse, the pregnancy fears. The horror just keeps being piled on. Yes, you can say, at least the main abuser gets what they deserve so there's some sort of collective sigh of relief, but really, there isn't. Which means that this book could, quite conceivably, ruin your love of holiday murder mysteries. My solution was to read something else as fast as I could as a palate cleanser and seek psychological counseling. In fact, everyone in this book needs psychological counseling. They need psychiatrists, psychologists, and maybe a few exorcists. Also, I think primal scream therapy would do nicely. It's better than a Rubik's Cube and Scottish Tablet. But to each their own.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Alexandra Benedict, Murder Most Foul, Murder on the Christmas Express, Pregnancy, PTSD, Roz Parker, Rubik's Cube, Scotland, Sexual Assault, Sleeper Train, The Christmas Murder Game, Trauma Train, Trigger Warning

The Witch Elm by Tana French
Published by: Penguin Books
Publication Date: October 9th, 2018
Format: Paperback, 528 Pages
Rating: ★★★
To Buy

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 Golden Tresses of the Dead by Alan Bradley
Published by: Delacorte Press
Publication Date: January 22nd, 2019
Format: Hardcover, 352 Pages
Rating: ★★★
To Buy

One would think one's sister's marriage to a dashing German would be the most exciting thing in one's life. They'd be wrong. Because Flavia is far more excited about Arthur Dogger and Associates, the detective agency her and her father's valet have founded after all the cases Flavia has solved over the years. For appearances sake Dogger's name is on the letterhead, but Flavia can't deny that whenever she's come up against a problem in her cases Dogger has always been there to be a sounding board and to offer her keen insight. Yet little does Flavia realize that the wedding will turn out to be far more interesting than she could have expected, because it yields her several mysteries. First, the best man is missing, Reggie Mould is MIA, second there's a problem with the wedding cake. As in there's a finger in the wedding cake. A severed finger. This makes Flavia's day. Not only does it elicit a piercing scream from Feely, but how often are you going to find a severed finger in a wedding cake? What's more, it's not a finger from someone recently deceased, it's been embalmed. Who would want to take the finger of someone already dead? Also such a distinct finger. Because Flavia and Dogger soon discover it is the finger of recently deceased guitarist Mme. Adriana Castelnuovo. But even that's not the most interesting thing. They have gotten themselves a client, an Anastasia Prill. Anastasia is worried about some missing correspondence and needs the help of Arthur Dogger and Associates. But she soon ends up dead. What's more, there's a connection between the finger and Anastasia, the guitarist's son, Colin Collier, is also the nephew of Anastasia! This can't be a coincidence. But with two missionaries foisted on Flavia by the vicar's wife her time is becoming more and more precious. Yet soon she starts to suspect the missionaries. Is everything connected or is she totally on the wrong track?

The Golden Tresses of the Dead is the unexpected ending to the successful Flavia de Luce. Unexpected in that the previous volume, The Grave's a Fine and Private Place, seemed to finally be setting up the next big arc of the series, Flavia and Dogger opening up a detective agency. Instead we got this book, wherein they did start their detective agency, but everything else is a bit of a muddle. In fact, after the initial six book arc, ending with the revelations about Harriet and pheasants, the series hasn't really been on solid footing. Perhaps if Flavia's adventures had continued on at Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy in Canada, transforming the series into something new, it's longevity might have been assured. Instead the series has been slowing declining until it ended with this. And really, what was this? What was the ending? It was all muddled with no real resolution. Sure Flavia finally realized she could use Undine as a tool to help in their investigations, but there needed to be something more. And by something more I don't mean Dogger transforming into Sherlock Holmes. Dogger has always been the most relatable of characters. His backstory is tragic, and how Flavia was the only one able to help him with his PTSD gave them a special bond which has resulted in him becoming more of a father figure than her own father ever was. But here he seems too different. I know he needed to step up when Flavia's dad unexpectedly and unnecessarily died, but he's too competent, too all knowing. Looking at Dogger here compared to where he was just in the previous volume makes me feel like I've missed a step. Something has irreparably changed and not in a way that makes sense. But really, nothing in this book makes sense. Other than the fact Alan Bradley was obviously watching Lark Rise to Candleford while writing this book. I agree, that show is my one weakness too.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Alan Bradley, Dogger, Flavia De Luce, Lark Rise to Candleford, Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy, Murder Most Foul, PTSD, Sherlock Holmes, The Golden Tresses of the Dead, The Grave's a Fine and Private Place

Mrs. Dalloway
Based on the book by Virginia Woolf
Starring: Rupert Graves, Vanessa Redgrave, Amanda Drew, Oliver Ford Davies, Natascha McElhone, Alan Cox, Hal Cruttenden, Lena Headey, Amelia Bullmore, Rupert Baker, Alistair Petrie, John Franklyn-Robbins, Phyllis Calvert, Katie Carr, Selina Cadell, Michael Kitchen, Robert Portal, John Standing, Margaret Tyzack, Robert Hardy, Denis Lill, Kate Binchy, Sarah Badel, Janet Henfrey, Faith Brook, Tony Steedman, and Christopher Staines
Release Date: September 4th, 1997
Rating: ★★★
To Watch

It is a beautiful summer's day in June. Mrs. Dalloway wonders aloud how is she so lucky to have her party on such a perfect day. When she was young, at Bourton, every day was perfect and spent with her friends, several of whom are coming to her party that night. As she walks to the florist she runs into one of them, Hugh, a rather hopeless case then and now. But he has his purpose. After picking out the sweet peas at the shop, just like her dear friend Sally Seton used to decorate the table one night all those years ago, a car backfires and she sees a young man in distress through the shop window. Septimus Warren Smith is out with his wife Rezia. They are due for an appointment later at the doctors because Septimus keeps threatening to kill himself and sees his dead friend Evans wherever he goes. The image of that young man will stick with Clarissa all day as she prepares for her party. And she has some unexpected hurdles; her daughter, Elizabeth, is insisting she won't attend because she'll be helping her friend Miss Kilman in her charitable work. There is also a little do-to about a boring acquaintance wishing to attend whom Clarissa would rather not. But the biggest surprise is when Peter Walsh walks through the door. Peter has been in India ever since Clarissa threw him over for her husband all those summers ago at Bourton. Peter's life, and in particular his love life, is a shambles and he breaks down in front of Clarissa. He can't help be overwhelmed by what his life has become and the thought that he loved Clarissa. He's uncertain if he still does, but the fact that he did has colored his entire life. Despite saying that under no circumstance would he be invited to the party he gets an invitation shouted after him as he flees the Dalloway's residence. Then finally, the hour has come, the party is to start, and Clarissa is sure it will be a failure. She just wishes to create this one perfect evening for her guests so that they can go out into the world afterwards and look back on the wonder of the perfect memory, the perfect evening, the perfect conversation, the perfect party. She worries that one of her guests, a rather renowned doctor, will ruin everything by discussing the suicide of his patient Septimus Warren Smith, by bringing death into her domain, but sometimes life, love, and memories, are greater than death, which has it's own kind of freedom.   

Remember the days when you'd just channel surf and see what was on because the only other way was to drag out the TV Guide, an actual, physical, small newsprint block of information, not that glossy mag that's still around today, and try to figure out which channel was which because each cable company had a different channel lineup? Well, back then I stumbled on this wonderfully British and evocative movie. I only got to watch about twenty minutes of it because dinner was ready but it left enough of an impression that I bothered to dig out the TV Guide after the fact and figure out that it was called Mrs. Dalloway. Knowing it was based on the book by Virginia Woolf, and at this time I would never watch an adaptation without reading the book first, I went out and got myself a copy of Mrs. Dalloway and it sat on my shelves for years. Then after The Hours came out a new edition of Mrs. Dalloway was released including the short story which was the initial inspiration for the book so I thought to myself, lucky I didn't read Mrs. Dalloway without reading it's precursor first! So the first copy sat around for five years and the second copy sat around for, I'm almost ashamed to say it, seventeen years, until it was finally dug out and read this year. Here's the thing, the book is a lot of work to read whereas this is an easy adaptation that you don't have to work for. Which means it's probably the exact opposite of what Virginia Woolf would have wanted but makes for a pleasurable moviegoing experience. Eileen Atkins, yes, that Eileen Atkins, the Dame, has taken Mrs. Dalloway and made it into a rather sweet coming of age story combined with the wistfulness of aging and first and lasting loves with an edge of social satire that has everything to do with the casting and nothing to do with the source material. In fact, the closer it gets to the source material, especially with regard to Septimus, played by Rupert Graves, and his PTSD, the less the movie works. This movie falls squarely into the time period of Rupert Graves's acting that I hate. He took himself so seriously and overacted so abysmally that I don't know how anyone can watch him in anything he was in from the start of his career to about 2005. In fact it wasn't until Sherlock in 2010 where I started to like him after the loathing and indifference. So if you can stomach some truly bad acting on his part and want a nice summery escape to an England that exists only in dreams of the past this idyll is for you.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Adaptation, British, Dames, Eileen Atkins, Michael Kitchen, Mrs. Dalloway, Party, PTSD, Roaring Back to Reading, Robert Hardy, Rupert Graves, Septimus, Sherlock, Suicide, The Hours, Vanessa Redgrave, Virgina Woolf

A Spear of Summer Grass by Deanna Raybourn
ARC Provided by the Publisher
Published by: Harlequin MIRA
Publication Date: April 23rd, 2013
Format: Paperback, 400 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy

"I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass."

- Walt Whitman

With her latest scandal, another husband dead, this time via suicide, and a fight for his inheritance of the Volkonsky jewels arising, Delilah Drummond's family has convened in Paris to discuss her exile from polite society. She must remove herself from public scrutiny or face being cut off forever by her Grandfather back in New Orleans. The imperial "they" have decided that she will hide herself away at her ex step father's house Fairlight, in Kenya. Delilah doesn't have much of a say and agrees to the arranged banishment, knowing full well that as soon as the allotted time is over she will be back in Paris, or New York, or whatever city will have her, probably not New York... that pesky Volstead act kind of puts a kink in ones cocktails. Arriving in Africa with her "devoted" cousin Dodo as her chaperon, Delilah doesn't quite know what to make of her situation. Kenyan society is made up of the outcasts of respectable civilization, meaning people Delilah already knows. It's quite a shock to be relocated yet still surrounded by those who were a little too outre for everyone else.

There is a part of Delilah that feels at home, and not just because she picks back up where she left off before getting married to husband number two with the artist Kit Parrymore, located near at hand on the Fairlight property. The dinner parties hosted by Rex and Helen Farrady, as the reigning King and Queen of Kenya are just the kind of social occasions Delilah is used to with booze flowing and witty conversation larded with innuendo. Though Helen's private parties are another story... But soon Delilah is fighting not just her new found love for Africa and the exiled life she has reluctantly embraced, but she's also fighting her attraction to Ryder White. Ryder, that great white hunter. The man of contradictions, who believes in the preservation of Africa and it's animals, while also leading Safaris for those who are willing to overpay him. For the first time Delilah isn't giving in immediately to her fleeting fancies... but that could be because Ryder rankled her with placing a bet that he would be the first to bed her. Is it wrong that she took delight in sleeping with Kit so fast just to make him lose? Yet how long can she deny that she has stumbled into everything she's ever needed?

Like the Whitman poem the book takes it's title from, there's a freshness, a freeness to Deanna's Africa with its overt sexuality that makes this book an addictive and delicious read. While I feel that this is the best Raybourn book I have read I have a feeling that the rawness and sexuality might deter other readers, whereas I felt that it perfectly captured the time and the place epitomized in the character of Delilah. Raybourn is able to take old tales and stories from the Happy Valley Days and inject a new life to them. Helen's bathtub, and in fact Helen herself, with nods to Idina Sackville, doesn't feel heavy with the baggage of multiple retellings. Deanna was able to incorporate aspects and anecdotes of the time without making it feel like you've heard it all before, which is a true gift after all the books on Africa I have read. Deanna made Africa feel new to me and I don't think there are many authors or books I can say that about. Delilah had so much life that, while we do get a mystery buried deep down, A Spear of Summer Grass is more a character study than a whodunit, and I didn't regret that for a minute.

Of course I have a soft spot for Kenya that I think might be a genetic disposition. My mother throughout my childhood was obsessed with books and films on Africa. Her studio space was actually influenced by African safaris. And while we might disagree on the literary merits of Out of Africa, we can come together and agree on our love of Kenya. Therefore this book gave me great joy in seeing someone else, albeit a fictional someone, fall in love with a country she viewed as a punishment. It's weird to think of a place you've never been having such a magnetic pull on you. I'd never want to live in Kenya, but I do want to visit. But the Kenya I love is the Kenya of the past. And there is that tendency to romanticize a time and a place, and British Kenya is such a time and a place. Yet the society is the exact opposite of the society I crave in real life, which would be preferably quiet and bookish. Therefore Kenya is an escape for me, a look into a life that calls to me but would never be mine and therefore A Spear of Summer Grass is the perfect escapist read. It was everything my heart wanted but knew I would never embrace in my own life. IE, a perfect book.

That perfection is achieved on so many levels, yet they all have one thing in common, and that's taking something you thought you knew everything about and making it fresh again. The most refreshing aspect though was that while Delilah had the Great War baggage and the night terrors and all the typical signs of PTSD, we are not forced to dwell on this. As I have ranted before, so many modern books belabour this point and make more of it then what it is, not a part of the character, but something that is bigger than the character and becomes a separate entity weighing down the whole book. Delilah is damaged, but everyone in Africa is damaged in some way according to Ryder. Blessedly Deanna handles this balance just perfectly and I didn't have to read about guns in the distance causing flashbacks, yet again. And this isn't to diminish people who do suffer no matter how it presents itself, just to state that stereotyping PTSD does the disease a disservice. Everyone battles it in their own way and it's nice to see someone understand that and write about it.

Everything in this book, even the PTSD, has to perfectly fit the character because this book is more a character study than a plot driven narrative. If there was one little character trait or quirk out of place it would have stood out more than in other books. The originality and the connection between these characters are what made me devour this book. While I do really really like Ryder as the hero and his luscious Han Solo Harrison Fordness which was tailor made for the fair Princesses among us, he wasn't the big draw for me. I know, shocking! But if you really want more Ryder, and I can't really blame you because Han Solo was it for me as a kid, you should check out his little prequel novella, Far in the Wilds. I quite enjoyed it. Moving beyond Ryder, the two characters I connected with most are Ryder's best friend Gideon and his little lame brother Moses, who are native Masai. The way Gideon becomes Delilah's best friend and how they bond over just talking about the simplest of things, like the Masai words for plants, made him far and away my favorite character in the book.

To me Gideon was so real that he walked right out of the pages and into my heart. Likewise his younger brother Moses. To not only have a connection because of his being a sweet boy with a lame leg who doesn't speak, I mean, how could you not love the little Tiny Timness of him? But to then have that couched in the language of what these disabilities really mean within Masai culture, and how his disabilities mean that he is not only different, but that because of this he can't get cattle to raise and if he doesn't get the cattle then there is no way he can afford a dowry and without that he will never marry and have a fulfilled life, according to his upbringing, just pulls at the heartstrings. The fact that Delilah hires him, that this simple gesture means that Moses could have a real and full life because he is now able to contribute, makes you have the feels all the more. I would even go so far as to say that because of Deanna's integration of characters and culture that you are reading a deeper book than most of the books on Africa out there.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: A Spear of Summer Grass, Africa, Deanna Raybourn, Dodo, Far in the Wilds, Han Solo, Happy Valley, Harrison Ford, Idina Sackville, Isak Dinesen, Kenya, Masai, Out of Africa, PTSD, Ten Years, Tiny Tim, Walt Whitman, WWI

Burn Bright by Patricia Briggs
Published by: Ace
Publication Date: March 6th, 2018
Format: Hardcover, 320 Pages
Rating: ★★★★★ 
To Buy

Bran is MIA after helping rescue Mercy in Europe. This leaves his son Charles in charge of the Aspen Creek Pack. Instead of Anna and him being on the outer fringes of the pack and living in their home that is more a haven than anything else they are ensconced in Bran's house, Pack HQ, and Bran's wife Leah isn't taking too well to having house guests. She's used to having the pack in and out of her house at all hours, but not her step-son and daughter-in-law underfoot. It's almost a relief when a crisis arises. The hills behind their small Montana town are filled with wolves that are under Bran's protection but can not live amongst the pack. A danger to themselves and others, they live off the radar. These wildings are often left to their own devices but can call on the pack in times of crisis. One such crisis has arisen. Men have shown up in the woods. Well armed and prepared men. They have abducted Hester, a member of the pack, and her Fae mate Jonesy has called for help. Due to the remoteness of their location it's a miracle that Anna and Charles arrive before Hester is gone. The ensuing fight leaves many dead but even more questions that need answering. These militant attackers came into the Marrok's territory and attempted to take a pack member under his protection when they knew Bran was gone. They were too well prepared and well informed, indicating an enemy that is well funded and a possible mole within the pack. Yet there is a surprise in store. One of the attackers is known to Anna. He was there when she was abused in her old pack. Charles would kill him if the man wasn't already dead. Hopefully there will be no more death. With that goal in mind the strongest wolves set out to visit the wildings and when Anna meets the werewolf artist Wellesley and connects with him everything starts to make sense. The puzzle pieces are falling into place. But will they be able to accept what is revealed?

An ongoing perk of being a blogger is access to NetGalley where you can request digital advance reader copies of books. Yet NetGalley is a double edged sword, not just because you might end up requesting so many books there's no chance you'll ever finish them, of which I am guilty, but because sometimes instead of allowing you to request a book, in it's place, taunting you, is the "I Wish" button. Of course sometimes they do grant wishes, they tell you right there as you're desperately clicking the button hoping it will transform into a request one. Of all the authors I've read through NetGalley over the years I have never gotten such a thrill at seeing a book listed as with Patricia Briggs. Those gorgeous covers by Dan dos Santos though are always followed by nothing more than a wish. Yet in these instances my wishes have all been granted, thankfully without some nefarious deal with a fairy on the back end; just a request for my honest opinion, and my honest opinion is that I love Patricia Briggs and all her books set in the world of Mercy Thompson. Yet it's hard to review these books if just for the simple reason that after fifteen installments it's hard to find something new to say... except this time there is something new to say, and that's my realization that I love the Alpha and Omega series more. As long as there aren't any more horses. Yes, I entered this world through Mercy's adventures, but I relate more to Charles and Anna. At first I was wondering if it's because with only five books under their belt they had less baggage, but as seen here this series carries Mercy's baggage as well as it's own. Therefore I thought, perhaps it's the more focused narrative with less characters, but here we dealt with a pack bigger than the Columbia Basin Pack. In the end it comes down to the fact I relate more to Charles and Anna. They are more introspective, more removed. They are a part of their pack yet cherish their alone time, and that's something I can relate to.

As for the Aspen Creek Pack, they really take center stage in Burn Bright. Aside from their first adventure, Charles and Anna have been traipsing all over the continental United States and rarely have time to take in the Montana air. This time isn't downtime either, with Charles's farther Bran MIA after helping rescue Mercy in her previous adventure, but Charles being placed in charge of the pack means he's stuck on his home turf. Therefore, for what I feel is the first time, we're really getting a firsthand look at the pack. It's not filtered through Mercy's memories or passed down gossip that eventually gets to Charles and Anna, it's on the ground and immediate. We get to not only see the pack, but see what they are like without Bran present, who is such a dominate force he can overpower any plot line. And while each and every revelation of how the pack structure works was interesting to me, what I was most drawn to was the insight into Leah. Leah is Bran's mate, a mate who no one likes. Sometimes it seems that Bran doesn't much care for her either. In each and every one of her appearances, be it Mercy's stories or Charles's, she comes across as a really self-centered and bitchy stepmother. I won't say wicked, because she's never done anything altogether malicious, but she's always appeared to be cut from the same cloth. Burn Bright started out in this same vein and yet, while Leah never changed we readers finally got insight into how she became the way she is and the benefits of that. It's often the case that being able to put yourself in someone else's shoes lets you empathize with them and so it is here. We got to the bottom of her rage and came out seeing her with new eyes. She has even earned the respect of Charles, and that's saying something.

We also learned about "secret" pack members. Enter the wildings! Oh, how I love that Patricia Briggs has taken a word that is so heavily associated with Game of Thrones and George R. R. Martin and made it her own. The wildings, instead of being people just living behind a really big wall are werewolves, occasionally with their mates, who can no longer live in a pack setting. They are either too damaged or too dangerous, or a combination of both, to be allowed entrance to the town of Aspen Creek. Some of them occasionally can join the pack hunts, but most of the time they are secreted away on their own large parcels of land under Bran's supervision. Why this resonated with me so strongly is that I've felt for awhile that the black and white nature of who deserves to live and who deserves to die due to their behavior in this fictional universe was needing some grey. Having Charles as executioner to Bran's judgment was harsh. Bran seemed to make Aspen Creek a haven for the damaged, but only up to a point. Yet now we find out that he's actually been hiding his people out in the woods to protect them instead of giving them a fatal punishment. It makes Bran more human to me. He's no longer this untouchable, this unknowable force, he has a heart, and not just for Mercy. This is also seen in the expanding of Leah's past. The superhumans are coming down to our level and that just makes this a more relevant series. Briggs has always explored the all too human side of suffering with her series, and this is another great entry into seeing ourselves more clearly through something that is "other."

All the wildings could be considered crazy, to an extent. It's almost as if Briggs is creating her own spectrum, from unable to take human form to will kill you rather than look at you, we see a wide range of problems. Yet all this boils down to the notion of what makes us crazy and who cares for crazy. I was drawn to the first problem, what makes us crazy. Due to things that have been happening in my own life I felt the importance, the weight of this question. Is it environmental factors? A genetic disposition? An outside factor like drugs? Or, as we are in a supernatural world here, magic? With each different wilding we see a different presentation of madness, and yet, Anna shows that by approaching the situation with compassion these issues can be dealt with. With how Anna carefully deals with Wellesley we see what it is to be an Omega. She is the carer. She has had so much pain inflicted on herself that she knows what others who are injured need. So much of the book ties back into Anna's past traumas, in other words perhaps a re-read of her introductory short story from On the Prowl is needed, that we see there is no instant cure. Anna is still recovering. Her marriage and mystical connection to Charles didn't automatically heal all wounds. In fact, through dealing with her problems and then helping the Wildings, Anna is finding her place in the pack. Your damage, your illness, your problems, whatever they may be, they don't make up who you are, they inform who you become, and Anna is becoming an amazing heroine. My heroine.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Alpha and Omega, Anna, Bran, Burn Bright, Charles Cornick, Fairies, Game of Thrones, GRRM, Leah, Marrok, Mental Illness, Mercy Thompson, Netgalley, Pack, Patricia Briggs, PTSD, Werewolves, Wildings, Witches

A Spear of Summer Grass by Deanna Raybourn
ARC Provided by the Publisher
Published by: Harlequin MIRA
Publication Date: April 23rd, 2013
Format: Paperback, 400 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy

"I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass."

- Walt Whitman

With her latest scandal, another husband dead, this time via suicide, and a fight for the his inheritance of the Volkonsky jewels arising, Delilah Drummond's family has come together in Paris to discuss her exile. She must remove herself from public scrutiny or face being cut off forever by her Grandfather back in New Orleans. The imperial "they" have decided that she will hide herself away at her ex step father's house Fairlight, in Kenya. Delilah doesn't have much of a say and agrees to the arranged banishment, knowing full well that as soon as the allotted time is over she will be back in Paris, or New York, or whatever city will have her, probably not New York... that pesky Volstead act kind of puts a kink in ones cocktails.

Arriving in Africa with her "devoted" cousin Dodo as her chaperon, Delilah doesn't quite know what to make of her situation. Firstly, Fairlight is in far worse shape then she was led to believe. Secondly, she is now a part of Kenyan society. A society made up of the outcasts of respectable civilization, meaning mainly people Delilah already knows. It's quite a shock to be relocated but still surrounded by those who were a little too outre for everyone else. There is a part of Delilah that feels at home picking back up where she left off before getting married to husband number two with the artist Kit Parrymore, located near at hand on the Fairlight property. Also the dinner parties hosted by Rex and Helen Farrady, as the reigning King and Queen of Kenya, are just the kind of social occasions Delilah is used to with booze flowing and witty conversation larded with innuendo. Though Helen's private parties are another story...

Soon Delilah is fighting not just her new found love for Africa and the new world and experiences she has reluctantly embraced, but she's also fighting her attraction to Ryder White. Ryder, that great white hunter. The man of contradictions, who believes in the preservation of Africa and it's animals, while also leading Safaris for those who are willing to overpay him. For the first time Delilah isn't giving in immediately to her fleeting fancies... but that could be because Ryder rankled her with placing a bet that he would be the first to bed her. Is it wrong that she took delight in sleeping with Kit so fast just to make him lose? Yet, how long can she deny that she has stumbled into everything she's ever needed?

Like the Whitman poem the book takes it's title from, there's a freshness, a freeness to Deanna's Africa with its overt sexuality that makes this book an addictive and delicious read. While I feel that this is the best Raybourn book I have read I have a feeling that the rawness and sexuality might deter other readers, whereas I felt that it perfectly captured the time and the place that was epitomized in Delilah. Raybourn is able to take old tales and stories from the Happy Valley Days and inject a new life to them. Helen's bathtub, and in fact Helen herself, with nods to Idina Sackville, doesn't feel heavy with the baggage of multiple retellings. Deanna was able to incorporate aspects and anecdotes of the time without making it feel like you've heard it all before, which is a true gift after all the books on Africa I have recently read. Deanna made Africa feel new to me, and I don't think there are many authors or books I can say that about. Delilah had so much life that, while we do get a mystery buried deep down, A Spear of Summer Grass is more a character study then a whodunit, and I didn't regret that for a minute.

The most refreshing aspect though was that while Delilah had the Great War baggage and the night terrors and all the typical signs of PTSD, we are not forced to dwell on this. As I have ranted before, so many modern books belabour this point and make more of it then what it is, not a part of the character, but something that is bigger then the character and becomes a separate entity weighing down the whole book. Delilah is damaged, but everyone in Africa is damaged in some way according to Ryder. Blessedly Deanna handles this balance just perfectly and I didn't have to read about guns in the distance causing flashbacks, yet again.

Being a book that is more a character study, it was the originality and the connection between these characters that made this book get devoured by my eyes. While I do really really like Ryder as the hero and his luscious Han Solo Harrison Fordness which was tailor made for the fair Princesses among us, he wasn't the big draw for me. The two characters I connected with most are Ryder's best friend Gideon and his little lame brother Moses, who are native Masai. The way Gideon becomes Delilah's best friend and how they bond over just talking about the simplest of things, like the Masai words for plants, made him far and away my favorite character in the book. He was so real that he walked right out of the pages and into my heart. Likewise his younger brother Moses. To not only have a connection because of his being a sweet boy with a lame leg who doesn't speak, I mean, how could you not love the little Tiny Timness of him? But to then have that couched in the language of what these things really mean within Masai culture, and how his disability means that he is not only different, but that because of this he can't get cattle to raise and if he doesn't get the cattle then there is no way he can afford a dowry and without that he will never marry and have a fulfilled life. The fact that Delilah hires him, that this simple gesture means that Moses could have a real and full life because he is now able to contribute, makes you have the feels all the more. I would even go so far as to say that because of Deanna's integration of characters and culture, that you get to read a deeper book them most of the books on Africa out there.

But if you really want more Ryder, and I can't really blame you, you should check out his little prequel novella, Far in the Wilds. Now I must go listen to some music, because if there is only one flaw in the book, it's that now I can't get Tom Jones's Delilah out of my head...

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: A Spear of Summer Grass, Ashford April, Deanna Raybourn, Dodo, Han Solo, Happy Valley, Harrison Ford, Kenya, Lauren Willig, Masai, PTSD, Tiny Tim, Tom Jones, Walt Whitman

How To Be a Good Wife by Emma J. Chapman
Published by: St. Martin's Press
Publication Date: October 15th, 2013
Format: Kindle, 288 Pages
Rating: ★
To Buy

Marta has lived her married life to her older husband Hector quite literally by the book. She has learned How To Be a Good Wife. Though the book doesn't tell you want to do when your son goes off to college and your life becomes meaningless. Marta starts to unravel. She drinks, she cleans, she takes her meds, she doesn't take her meds, she starts to remember, but are her memories real? She remembers a room under the house and being held captive and brainwashed till she was the wife Hector wanted. She tries to tell her son, Kylan, but he has his own life now. She is unhinged, she is a danger to herself. She is not the Marta that they remember, but did that Marta ever truly exist?  

If you have a book with an unreliable narrator there has to be some kind of revelation, an inside or outside force that is able to give some kind of resolution to the unfolding drama, even if it is a dissatisfying resolution, re Agatha Christie's Endless Night. To be left without any closure makes for a disgruntled reading experience. But then again, being in Marta's brain for even the short amount of time it took to read this book had already alienated me against her and her antics, so what's one more nail in the book's coffin eh? Marta is scatterbrained, obsessive about the weirdest things, her dinner party for her son is such a disaster it makes the Christmas dinner in The Ref look like the best party in the world. She's unstable, unlikable, and, well, selfish. Why did I read this book again? Oh yeah, book club.

The question though remains, did or didn't Hector create this wife? My mind thinks no. Because it's just too outlandish. If he had done it his own mother would have been complicit, something I don't think she'd ever have done. Plus, let's look at it this way. If Hector was making the perfect wife, after all these years of brainwashing why would she crack? Yes, empty nest syndrome, but this is a major psychotic break. And her meds wouldn't make her more compliant, after all this time she'd totally be in the thrall of Stockholm Syndrome, so drugs wouldn't be needed. Whereas if she's just crazy, going off her meds would do something. They'd make her go back to her natural crazy state. But in the end I don't care. No, seriously, I hated each character so much there was no sympathy and well, fuck the lot of them.

With Marta we are given a woman who is neurotic and self-destructive as well as more then a little dumb. Instead of doing anything logical she runs around like a chicken with her head cut off. If she had just sat down and laid out her thoughts and provided proof of her delusion, perhaps someone would have believed her. Instead of making it seem like her illness was responsible for her inability to tell her suspicions Chapman made Marta's failings feel like an idiotic character flaw of the greatest order, total dumb blond syndrome. Perhaps her decision making is completely impaired, but for some reason I just don't think so. I have this feeling that Marta has a very fixed view of the world and her place in it and when things don't go her way she acts out. This seems to be supported by how everyone treats and coddles her. She's a selfish woman who may have issues, but in the end it's her selfishness that defines her. How else would you categorize the fact that she kills herself on the day of her son's wedding? She's making the happiest day of his life all about her.

Chapman is obviously trying to explore the themes of PTSD and what it does to us knowingly or unknowingly, after all if you didn't get it she talks all about it in her afterword. But the problem is we don't know if Marta is suffering from PTSD or is just run of the mill crazy. Either way Marta is not a sympathetic character so whether she was always crazy or became crazy signifies very little to the book itself. But I think if I was a sufferer of PTSD that this would signify very much to me if I was reading this book, which I wouldn't recommend anyone to do. Because How To Be a Good Wife doesn't exactly portray PTSD in a flattering light. In fact the book kind of makes sufferers of PTSD get lumped in with people with severe mental illnesses. Now, while PTSD is a mental illness, well, it's a different kind and to have it lumped in with the psychotics, this is doing the sufferers of this disease an injustice. In fact everything about this book should offend anyone with any kind of mental instability, because Chapman obviously doesn't get it and doesn't have the compassion to render their fight with compassion and honesty.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Agatha Christie, Book Clubs, Christmas, Emma Chapman, Endless Night, How To Be a Good Wife, Kindle, PTSD, The Ref

Whose Body? (Lord Peter Wimsey Book 1) by Dorothy L. Sayers
Published by: Harper Torch
Publication Date: 1923
Format: Paperback, 212 Pages
Rating: ★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)

Lord Peter Wimsey and his manservant Bunter are very lucky in their lifestyle, in that they get to indulge their passions. For Lord Peter, this is rare Folios and amateur sleuthing, for Bunter, this is photography, which can be very helpful in amateur sleuthing. When Lord Peter hears about a body mysteriously appearing in the bathroom of the architect Thipps, his curiosity is peeked. He is even willing to miss a rare book auction to get there before the police cordon makes it impossible. Lord Peter sees many things amiss, but can't quite put his finger on anything in particular, aside from the fact that the police have got it all wrong.

While at the same time, Inspector Parker, a friend of Lord Peter's, is investigating the disappearance of Sir Reuben Levy. At first the cops jump to the conclusion that the body in the tub must be a shorn Levy... but aside from their both being Jewish and of a similar appearance, this is obviously not the case. Yet... could the two be somehow connected. Inspector Parker with Lord Peter and Bunter are determined to get to the bottom of this, even if it puts them in personal peril. At least if they have to hole up at Lord Peter's there is plenty to read and drink.

Please don't attack me for not liking this book. Send me no death threats or piercing glances. No flamethrowers in the darkness to wake me from a deep sleep. I know it verges on sacrilege to say I didn't like this book, but... I just didn't like this book. I will use as my "get out of jail free" card the fact that many people have told me to just skip to Strong Poison and the arrival of Harriet Vane or to just skip ahead to Gaudy Night, which is the best by far. So, my thought is, that what they're really saying, instead of emphasising the awesomeness of Harriet Vane, they're pointing out the flaws in the earlier books and are trying to get me to skip ahead so I won't abandon Lord Peter before he meets his match. That's how I'm justifying it, ok?

The overwhelming problem with Whose Body is that Dorothy L. Sayers can't write. I mean, literally, this book verged on the incomprehensible. Shall I sweep this under the rug as the foibles of a first time writer? Or shall I ripe her to shreds? Shreds it is. Whose Body almost reads like some bizarre exercise to get as many styles of writing into one book. First, there's the standard third-person narration, which isn't well executed, but, at least it's expected. Then she throws in some straight up back and forth dialogue, which, I'm cool with, Lisa Lutz does it all the time, so, that's fine, and also, for the 1920s, pretty novel. Sayers occasionally verges into epistolary form, which again, I'm down with that. Her haphazard and incomprehensible annotations are more then a little odd. I really don't know why she does them, they don't further the plot or even make sense.

Where the book really started to fall apart is when she randomly, I mean seriously, why did she just do this for a few random pages, went into second-person narration. Second-person narration never really works for me, and here it just comes out of left field. Was I supposed to feel like I was there at the graveside exhumation? Because the narrative shift just made me think I was reading some bizarre experiment by a bad writer and instantly pulled me out of the book. Finally, the meta. While meta is a concept that has taken on in recent years with it's self referential attitude, it's not really a new thing. Agatha Christie would sometimes have Poirot joke about how "real life" isn't like a "detective story" and the reader would laugh thinking, little did Poirot know, he's fictional. Sayers takes this further and is having Lord Peter always joke about detective stories and Sherlock Holmes and Raffles. Ok, cute a few times, but you've beat it to death. Stop. Just stop. Nothing you can do, even making me laugh (which I didn't), redeems the slipshod writing and amateurish style.

So how about the characters? They are so flat and similar that I couldn't tell who was speaking till a "what" tagged onto the end of a sentence made me go, oh, Lord Peter must have been talking. Peter and Parker, their mode of speaking and the habit of Sayers to not qualify the speaker makes Whose Body a muddled mess. Then there's the fact that Lord Peter and Bunter are really just bad shades of Jeeves and Wooster with crime solving inclinations. Which wasn't helped by my recently watching the new show Blandings (horrid first episode, gets radically better), because I kept picturing Jack Farthing as The Hon. Frederick Threepwood with his bland acting, over the top facial expressions and fly away hair as Lord Peter. Why you might say? Because Freddie has the "what" disease, that seems to plague the upper crust in order to get a laugh. While Wodehouse did this humorously, as I've said, I think Sayers just did it, not as a character trait, but as an afterthought... some way to make Peter not Parker. The one aspect of Lord Peter that did interest me was his PTSD. I've railed against this before in literature, but it's interesting to see it in literature of the time, before it was diagnosed to death and had "stereotypical symptoms." This shell shock could prove to be interesting.

Now, I will say, one thing that I did find interesting. Yes, there really was only one, because I figured out the killer damn early and was offended by the antisemitism. There are many groan worthy lines, but one was so obviously, "Look Here! KILLER!" that it made me audibly groan. Ok, enough of the being mean, here's what I liked. I liked that Lord Peter is so obviously not Poirot. That needs some explanation. So, with The Murder on the Links, Poirot is always railing against the modern methods, the fingerprints and footprints and what have you, while Lord Peter and Bunter are openly embracing them. In fact, Bunter is often updating to the latest gadgets just because he can. While endlessly reading about forensics might get boring after awhile, I find it interesting that Sayers, writing at the same time as Christie, decided to take such a radically different approach. Good on you Sayers, but I'm still hugely grateful this wasn't chosen as my bookclub's selection, I don't think they would have ever forgiven me for how bad it is.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Agatha Christie, Bunter, Dorothy L. Sayers, Freddie Threepwood, Golden Summer, Jeeves and Wooster, Lisa Lutz, Lord Peter Wimsey, Poirot, PTSD, Raffles, Sherlock Holmes, The Murder on the Links, Whose Body

A Spear of Summer Grass by Deanna Raybourn
ARC Provided by the Publisher
Published by: Harlequin MIRA
Publication Date: April 23rd, 2013
Format: Paperback, 400 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy

"Picture it. May of 2011. Two writers having drinks in the lounge of the Yale Club after a tough day signing books at Book Expo America.

Then picture two glasses of prosecco simultaneously sloshing over as Deanna and I discovered that we were both working on books set in 1920s Kenya. Around the same group of people. At the same time. Well, maybe not exactly the same time: Deanna’s was 1923 and mine was 1926. But close. Our characters had come from the same sorts of background and found themselves in the same milieu. Once we got our jaws back in place—and ordered some more prosecco—we were both bouncing in our chairs, chattering a mile a minute, comparing notes and sources, so delighted to have someone working in exactly the same world.

We tried to get Tasha Alexander to start writing 1920s Kenya, too—just so we could all keep going on tour together—but, sadly, she resisted our blandishments." - Lauren Willig

"I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass."

- Walt Whitman

With her latest scandal, another husband dead, this time via suicide, and a fight for the his inheritance of the Volkonsky jewels arising, Delilah Drummond's family has come together in Paris to discuss her exile. She must remove herself from public scrutiny or face being cut off forever by her Grandfather back in New Orleans. The imperial "they" have decided that she will hide herself away at her ex step father's house Fairlight, in Kenya. Delilah doesn't have much of a say and agrees to the arranged banishment, knowing full well that as soon as the allotted time is over she will be back in Paris, or New York, or whatever city will have her, probably not New York... that pesky Volstead act kind of puts a kink in ones cocktails.

Arriving in Africa with her "devoted" cousin Dodo as her chaperon, Delilah doesn't quite know what to make of her situation. Firstly, Fairlight is in far worse shape then she was led to believe. Secondly, she is now a part of Kenyan society. A society made up of the outcasts of respectable civilization, meaning mainly people Delilah already knows. It's quite a shock to be relocated but still surrounded by those who were a little too outre for everyone else. There is a part of Delilah that feels at home picking back up where she left off before getting married to husband number two with the artist Kit Parrymore, located near at hand on the Fairlight property. Also the dinner parties hosted by Rex and Helen Farrady, as the reigning King and Queen of Kenya, are just the kind of social occasions Delilah is used to with booze flowing and witty conversation larded with innuendo. Though Helen's private parties are another story...

Soon Delilah is fighting not just her new found love for Africa and the new world and experiences she has reluctantly embraced, but she's also fighting her attraction to Ryder White. Ryder, that great white hunter. The man of contradictions, who believes in the preservation of Africa and it's animals, while also leading Safaris for those who are willing to overpay him. For the first time Delilah isn't giving in immediately to her fleeting fancies... but that could be because Ryder rankled her with placing a bet that he would be the first to bed her. Is it wrong that she took delight in sleeping with Kit so fast just to make him lose? Yet, how long can she deny that she has stumbled into everything she's ever needed?

Like the Whitman poem the book takes it's title from, there's a freshness, a freeness to Deanna's Africa with its overt sexuality that makes this book an addictive and delicious read. While I feel that this is the best Raybourn book I have read I have a feeling that the rawness and sexuality might deter other readers, whereas I felt that it perfectly captured the time and the place that was epitomized in Delilah. Raybourn is able to take old tales and stories from the Happy Valley Days and inject a new life to them. Helen's bathtub, and in fact Helen herself, with nods to Idina Sackville, doesn't feel heavy with the baggage of multiple retellings. Deanna was able to incorporate aspects and anecdotes of the time without making it feel like you've heard it all before, which is a true gift after all the books on Africa I have recently read. Deanna made Africa feel new to me, and I don't think there are many authors or books I can say that about. Delilah had so much life that, while we do get a mystery buried deep down, A Spear of Summer Grass is more a character study then a whodunit, and I didn't regret that for a minute.

The most refreshing aspect though was that while Delilah had the Great War baggage and the night terrors and all the typical signs of PTSD, we are not forced to dwell on this. As I have ranted before, so many modern books belabour this point and make more of it then what it is, not a part of the character, but something that is bigger then the character and becomes a separate entity weighing down the whole book. Delilah is damaged, but everyone in Africa is damaged in some way according to Ryder. Blessedly Deanna handles this balance just perfectly and I didn't have to read about guns in the distance causing flashbacks, yet again.

Being a book that is more a character study, it was the originality and the connection between these characters that made this book get devoured by my eyes. While I do really really like Ryder as the hero and his luscious Han Solo Harrison Fordness which was tailor made for the fair Princesses among us, he wasn't the big draw for me. The two characters I connected with most are Ryder's best friend Gideon and his little lame brother Moses, who are native Masai. The way Gideon becomes Delilah's best friend and how they bond over just talking about the simplest of things, like the Masai words for plants, made him far and away my favorite character in the book. He was so real that he walked right out of the pages and into my heart. Likewise his younger brother Moses. To not only have a connection because of his being a sweet boy with a lame leg who doesn't speak, I mean, how could you not love the little Tiny Timness of him? But to then have that couched in the language of what these things really mean within Masai culture, and how his disability means that he is not only different, but that because of this he can't get cattle to raise and if he doesn't get the cattle then there is no way he can afford a dowry and without that he will never marry and have a fulfilled life. The fact that Delilah hires him, that this simple gesture means that Moses could have a real and full life because he is now able to contribute, makes you have the feels all the more. I would even go so far as to say that because of Deanna's integration of characters and culture, that you get to read a deeper book them most of the books on Africa out there.

But if you really want more Ryder, and I can't really blame you, you should check out his little prequel novella, Far in the Wilds. Now I must go listen to some music, because if there is only one flaw in the book, it's that now I can't get Tom Jones's Delilah out of my head...

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 2 comments  

Labels: A Spear of Summer Grass, Ashford April, Deanna Raybourn, Dodo, Han Solo, Happy Valley, Harrison Ford, Kenya, Lauren Willig, Masai, PTSD, Tiny Tim, Tom Jones, Walt Whitman

Mark of the Lion by Suzanne Arruda
Published by: NAL
Publication Date: December 5th, 2006
Format: Paperback, 346 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy

"Here’s a closely guarded secret for you: the odds are that, on most topics and time periods, historical fiction authors tend to draw from a roughly similar pool of sources. (I say “most” because there are some periods for which there are oodles of accessible sources available, which stirs up the pool a bit.) When I read Mark of the Lion, after several months immersed in the history of British East Africa, I was deeply amused to recognize people, places, events and anecdotes. There are times when the past can feel like a very small place…." - Lauren Willig

Jade del Cameron is a plucky girl. Growing up in the American West she knows how to handle herself in just about any situation. Yet she is still haunted by her ambulance work in the great war. The insane laughing of the wounded will never leave her, nor will the memory of David. David wanted to marry Jade and have a happily ever after. Jade wasn't sure but didn't really have the chance to decide when David was shot down and died in her arms pleading with her to find his secret half brother and look into his father's suspicious death in Nairobi at the start of the war. Jade takes dying wishes seriously, and with writing work for the magazine The Traveler as cover, she sets out for British East Africa to find out just what is going on.

David's father did indeed die under strange circumstances. How was he mauled to death in a hotel, on the second floor? Africa though is not what Jade expected and it looks like her duty to David might be harder then she thought. Things happen in Africa. Weird things. Everyone just accepts this. Death by animal is common, even if it was in an uncommon location. Here they believe in witches capable of using animals as their familiars to kill. Yet, what if the witches are real? And what if they have taken against Jade?

As Lauren Willig says, "the past can feel like a very small place." This was indeed what I felt upon first cracking open the pages of Mark of the Lion. Having a little African reading extravaganza means that I am reading these books back to back. I try to insert a little something different between the volumes, but to all intents and purposes, I've been living in British East Africa for awhile now, both in fictional and non-fictional works. So therefore hearing anecdotes directly lifted from other books, in particular The Flame Trees of Thika, which I had just finished, seemed a little redundant. I would say this could have been amusing, seeing the same cast of characters through yet another author's eyes, but coming directly after reading the one, it felt a bit like flogging a dead horse. Thankfully Suzanne Arruda soon went off in her own unique direction that was actually inspired by a true tale from Bror von Blixen, the husband of author Isak Dinesen, and the book soon found it's own legs with a dash of danger and more then a little mysticism.

The mysticism is what really drew me into the story. For those who know me there are two obvious categories my reading tastes lean to, firstly is the historical fiction, secondly is the urban fantasy. By bringing in witches and animals controlled by these dark forces, it's like adding a dash of urban fantasy into Kenya's Happy Valley. While of course it's traditional folklore and not fantasy that is feeding the laibon, aka witch, isn't all urban fantasy rooted in folklore? Therefore this book is like the urban fantasy of the day, if the day was 1919. Even in more biographical books like The Flame Trees of Thika, Elspeth Huxley fully admits that whether you believe or not, that sometimes it's better to be open to other things that can not be understood. I love that Suzanne Arruda was willing to embrace the fact that there are just some things that can't be explained away unless you expand your definitions of what is possible and what is impossible. A world where everything can not be neatly compartmentalized and there is room for magic is a world I want to live in.

Now to the nit-picky bit, which little old me can never just skip. Let's talk about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder folks. This is a trap that many modern writers fall prey to. The thing is, while I fully admit that PTSD was around prior to it's official designation in the 1980s; if this were really a book set in 1919, yes Jade would be shell shocked after her work in the war, but there would be the whole "stiff upper lippedness" that had people dealing with it on their own and just carrying on as it were. Sure, you can use the excuse that she's American, so she handles things differently... but I've seen this more and more that any book written by a current writer set after a war the hero or heroine will have textbook PTSD, it's almost rote in mystery books at the moment. It just gets to be a bit much, know what I mean? I like that Arruda used a specific incident in Jade's past to have hyena's trigger her attacks, but still, enough with the PTSD, ok folks?

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 2 comments  

Labels: Ashford April, Bror von Blixen, Elspeth Huxley, Happy Valley, Isak Dinesen, Jade del Cameron, Kenya, Lauren Willig, Mark of the Lion, PTSD, Suzanne Arruda, The Flame Trees of Thika, Urban Fantasy

Mockingjay: The Final Book of The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
Published by: Scholastic
Publication Date: August 24th, 2010
Format: Hardcover, 400 Pages
Rating: ★★★
To Buy
"Fire is cathing. And If we burn, you burn with us." Katniss may be out of the area and in the medical ward of District 13, but she is not out of the games. The inhabitants of 13 lead a very ordered life with everything planned and regimented, from your schedule printed on your arm when you wake, to how much food you need to survive. All of which Katniss ignores, choosing to sleep and hide. But President Coin has plans for how they will destroy the current government and the Capital. Plans that hinge on Katniss being the Mockingjay. After much to and fro Katniss acquiesces. But President Coin's use of Katniss is very similar to her use in the hunger games... Katniss will be the face of the rebellion with staged skirmishes and perfectly disarrayed hair. In other words, the rebellion will be just as fake as the government it is trying to destroy. The problem is Katniss rings false, she can't act, so in the end she gets just what she wanted, action. She's thrown into situations with her own film crew who then create the rebellion's propaganda. The capital retaliates with Peeta and a few bombs, the rebels counterattack with harsh truths of prostitution and poisonings. One thing is clear, having any of the victors at the mercy of the Capital is now unacceptable and a jail break is planned. They succeed, but maybe they were meant to. Peeta has been turned against them with all his memories distorted so that he no longer trusts Katniss and attempts to kill her. Having the one thing she was sure of yanked out from under her she realizes that it's time to step it up and take on the Capitol on their home turf. A home turf that has been rigged and bobby trapped more elaborately than any arena ever. As the death toll rapidly rises and mutts are at their heals, it is clear that Katniss doesn't plan to survive if she can win. But can you trust anyone? President Snow may be evil, but he has never hidden the fact. A new regime that is built on false promises and hidden cruelty could be a greater sin than letting the current leaders stay. But the real question is, will there be another Hunger Games?

The final book lived up to my expectations, true or not true? Not true, sadly. While I think, in the end, everyone ended up where I wanted them to be, there were some people left missing. Suzanne Collins killed some characters I can never forgive her for. Yes, I know it's a rebellion, yes, I know casualties are inevitable, but still, there are some people who shouldn't die. There are some people who should be safe. This is fiction, you can have the good live and the bad punished. Despite it being a chilling depiction of war, let some innocents live please! I think that's where this book failed me, it's just a long war. Katniss is a pawn at the mercy of this giant war machine where we don't get the minute to minute struggles, we get the greater picture while Katniss spends a lot of her time in a drug induced haze. This book is so contemporary while being a distopian future that it's jarring. The human race has fought and will always fight, maybe even to the brink of extinction. But it's the battle scared, drug addicted, pained wrecks that are left to re-create the world, when all they want to do is retreat. The characters seemed to have lost themselves and we are left with shells. It's a PTSD lineup of who's the most damaged. It's almost as if everyone has become Haymitch. They all have a crutch but have all lost their sense of humor. I am glad it's over, I'm glad they won, but I'm still sad because I feel like it could have been so much more than a post apocalyptic version of The Hurt Locker.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Katniss, Mockingjay, Peeta, President Coin, President Snow, PTSD, Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games, The Hurt Locker

I must apologize, I meant to get my post up for episode three last Saturday after it aired, and then the dreaded homework did interfere. But at least this means, two for the price of one Saturday! It's like a mega sale at K-Mart! A review of two episodes, versus the paltry one you'd normally get, I say that's a win, and not just me covering my ass. Last week's episode saw what appeared to be politically motivated bomb attacks leading up to the Thatcher general election of 1983. Pretty ho hum episode, nothing really big or revolutionary, except this episode exemplifies a tread I'm hating more and more, the PTSD of soldier's pre PTSD. Now, I'm not saying that they didn't have it, far from it, the shell shock is a horror I can never imagine. My problem is the labeling of it as PTSD pre labeling. I guess it's the whole, I know more than you because I know the name smart aleck from the future Alex, versus just dealing with the horror and helping the person afflicted. Ray had some great moments, as did Shazz the week before. I am intrigued by these episodes apparently each having one of the supporting cast being a focal point, as well as the odd fade to black freeze frames that I feel will somehow tie into the overall mythology of the show and the final solution. Plus, what is the significance of the stars and 6-6-20... is that a future date that something happens on or does it relate to the dead man Alex keeps seeing? Nothing really great stood out on the Gene Hunt front, but just for being Gene he gets a 7 out of 10. Now Alex... ah Alex, you did fail this week. Great hair and red earrings, but that strippy/leopardy shirt!?! Knocks you down to a 5, lowest yet for this season!

Ah, look who we have in episode four! Bryan Dick. Now this boy has become synonymous with cult and sci-fi shows that I just happen to love. From Adam on Torchwood, Sykes on Being Human, to even David Tennant's second in command in Blackpool, it's fun to see Bryan! Basic drug syndicate story with a family creating a monopoly and an undercover cop in the middle. Though there was some nice cryptic graffiti for Alex and I'm thinking Gene's license plate might be important, July 75 I believe it said... Alex wore a really ugly turquoise shirt with a hideous necklace, making it a 7 day. But Gene, oh Gene, a perfect 10! You drove, slightly drunk, cause it was near the dinner hour, smashed a desk with a golf club, but best of all said that a crippled man had the right to compliment Alex on her tits cause he was handicapped after all, but nothing can top your speech at the end, you almost had sunshine coming out of your ass. You go my non-pc Gene. You go!

Posted by Miss Eliza at 1:38 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Alex Drake, Ashes to Ashes, Being Human, Blackpool, Bryan Dick, David Tennant, Gene Genie, Gene Hunt, K-Mart, PTSD, Thatcher, Torchwood

The Last Surgeon by Michael Palmer
Published by: St. Martin's Press
Publication Date: February 16th, 2010
Format: Hardcover, 384 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
"Michael Palmer’s latest novel pits a flawed doctor against a ruthless psychopath, who has made murder his art form. Dr. Nick Garrity, a vet suffering from PTSD—post traumatic stress disorder—spends his days and nights dispensing medical treatment from a mobile clinic to the homeless and disenfranchised in D.C. and Baltimore. In addition, he is constantly on the lookout for his war buddy Umberto Vasquez, who was plucked from the streets by the military four years ago for a secret mission and has not been seen since. Psych nurse Gillian Coates wants to find her sister’s killer. She does not believe that Belle Coates, an ICU nurse, took her own life, even though every bit of evidence indicates that she did—every bit save one. Belle has left Gillian a subtle clue that connects her with Nick Garrity. Together, Nick and Gillian determine that one-by-one, each of those in the operating room for a fatally botched case is dying. Their discoveries pit them against genius Franz Koller--the highly-paid master of the “non-kill”—the art of murder that does not look like murder. As Doctor and nurse move closer to finding the terrifying secret behind these killings, Koller has been given a new directive: his mission will not be complete until Gillian Coates and Garrity, the last surgeon, are dead."

What's that you say? You haven't heard of my giveaway to win this lovely new book? It will be signed! Go enter already! What are you waiting for? The giveaway ends tonight!

The Man from Beijing by Henning Mankell
Published by: Knopf
Publication Date: February 16th, 2010
Format: Hardcover, 384 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
"The acclaimed author of the Kurt Wallander mysteries, writing at the height of his powers, now gives us an electrifying stand-alone global thriller.

January 2006. In the Swedish hamlet of Hesjövallen, nineteen people have been massacred. The only clue is a red ribbon found at the scene.

Judge Birgitta Roslin has particular reason to be shocked: Her grandparents, the Andréns, are among the victims, and Birgitta soon learns that an Andrén family in Nevada has also been murdered. She then discovers the nineteenth-century diary of an Andrén ancestor—a gang master on the American transcontinental railway—that describes brutal treatment of Chinese slave workers. The police insist that only a lunatic could have committed the Hesjövallen murders, but Birgitta is determined to uncover what she now suspects is a more complicated truth.

The investigation leads to the highest echelons of power in present-day Beijing, and to Zimbabwe and Mozambique. But the narrative also takes us back 150 years into the depths of the slave trade between China and the United States—a history that will ensnare Birgitta as she draws ever closer to solving the Hesjövallen murders."

Ever since Kenneth Branagh brought the brooding Wallander to the English speaking world, people can't get enough of Henning Mankell. Lucky for us that Kenneth loves to brood, almost as much as he loves to pose and preen, and we love a wicked murder. Plus, Swedish writers... very "in" right now, you have all heard of Stieg Larsson right? Go check out what people are talking about! I know I will.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Giveaway, Henning Mankell, Kenneth Branagh, Kurt Wallander, Michael Palmer, Nick Garrity, PTSD, Stieg Larsson, Swenden, The Last Surgeon, The Man from Beijing