strange and random happenstance

The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz
Published by: Forge
Publication Date: November 1st, 2011
Format: Hardcover, 294 Pages
Rating: ★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)

Watson has always hesitated sharing this story. He felt it was too shocking and would destroy the fabric of society. But as a world war rages he once again puts pen to paper. Holmes is gone and he feels this story needs to be told, though he will request that it is withheld for one hundred years so that hopefully society will not be as scandalized. The adventure started as many did, as Holmes and Watson sat in front of the fire of 221B Baker Street. A Mr. Carstairs arrived wishing for their assistance. He was an art dealer who inadvertently got on the wrong side of a thuggish Irish gang in Boston called "The Flat Cap Gang." He has reason to believe one of the two ringleaders has followed him to London to exact revenge. Holmes and Watson quickly resolve his problem as the man, the supposed Keelan O'Donaghue, ends up dead and the case is closed. But in actuality it is just the beginning. In finding "Keelan O'Donaghue" one of the Baker Street Irregulars has gone missing. Usually this wouldn't be a cause for concern, but there's something about the way young Ross reacted to seeing Mr. Castairs at the crime scene that has Holmes wondering. As Holmes digs further into the case of Ross he starts to hear mention of "The House of Silk." Holmes is certain that if he could only find out who or what this organization is that everything would fall into place. But even Mycroft warns him to back away, and soon Holmes is in grave danger. Whomever they may be, The House of Silk doesn't want Holmes exposing them and eliminating one detective, no matter how famous, is a small price to pay in their eyes.

There is no doubt that Anthony Horowitz is talented. If his only legacy was Foyle's War he'd be good as gold. But he also helped adapt Midsomer Murders for television as well as Poirot, not to mention the wonderful mini-series Injustice he created, they are all wonderful fare. But for me he's polarizing. For every right move he makes, he makes a wrong one, like marrying Sam to that numskull Adam. That sin alone deserves some sort of punishment, like being slapped silly with a large fish. Sam was meant to end up with Andrew! But then again, Julian Ovenden doesn't seem to be able to catch a break, he loses Sam and then Lady Mary on Downton Abbey chucks him for Matthew Goode. So for all my love of Anthony Horowitz, there's some hate in there as well, and a lot of that hate is now centered on The House of Silk. This predictable mess of a mystery doesn't deserve to be endorsed by the Conan Doyle Estate, it needs to be burned in effigy as a crime against the legacy of Sherlock Holmes. There are so many good books out there that are reimaginings and continuations of Holmes it baffles me that this is the one given the seal of approval, that little mark of Sherlock in his deerstalker hat with the shadow of Conan Doyle and his walrusy mustache. The most mind-boggling thing about The House of Silk is how Horowitz seems to purposefully set out to undermine all other non-canonical books. It's not enough that he's "official" but that everyone else has to be wrong. He is forcibly trying to change every preconception other writers have given Holmes over the years. Holmes doesn't outlive Watson, Mycroft is also equally indestructible, living to an old age despite his corpulence, which Horowitz takes glee in elucidating. Horowitz is the new voice of Holmes and he won't let there be any ifs, ands, or buts about it.

Horowitz spends too much time randomly answering questions that have popped up over the years without regard to anything but his whim. Holmes wasn't at Watson's wedding, Watson had three children in his second marriage, Mary died of typhoid fever, and on and on, just throwing out little tidbits that will appeal to those with an obsessive desire to know everything about these characters. Yet these little glimpses would have worked had Horowitz proved he actually knew Holmes and his canon. It becomes quickly apparent that Horowitz is a dilettante when it comes to Holmes so therefore all these little insights come across as self-indulgent crap as he tries to leave his mark on a greater writer's legacy. The canonical issues would drive any true fan to distraction. While I wouldn't say I'm an obsessive, I would say that the least he could have done was got it right in order to earn that badge of honor from the Conan Doyle Estate. The scenario that drove me most round the bend was when Horowitz repeated almost verbatim the scene of Holmes baffling Watson with his "mind-reading" abilities that was originally in "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box" but was reused in "The Adventure of the Resident Patient." It wasn't reusing this scene for a third time that annoyed me most, it was what came after. One of the key parts of this original scenario was Watson and his newly framed picture of General Gordon and his contemplation of framing his portrait of Henry Ward Beecher to make a matching set. Yet in the bizzaro world of Horowitz where things like canon don't matter, the portrait of General Gordon came with the flat! Excuse me? Antony Horowitz broke canon, one that was doubly stated, just so that Holmes could have a throw-away line about how the walls of 221B Baker Street don't actually reflect him because he didn't chose any of the hangings. Where did I put that giant fish...

But canonical issues aside (yeah I agree that sounds unlikely), but seriously, even if we are able to do this, it can't change the fact that Horowitz isn't able to capture the voice of Conan Doyle through Watson. He isn't able to do what a children's author did with a story about mice. Wrap your mind around that if you will. Here Watson is a whiny little bitch. I kid you not. In the canonical books he's all stoic and I'll grab my service revolver and follow you into the gates of hell, while being a little melodramatic about the whole thing, and maybe once or twice staying by the fire to tend to his war wounds. Here it's all whining and whinging and oh his aches and pains. I actually wanted to punch him in the shoulder and be like, "how's your wound now bitch?" Yet it's not just about his overnumerous physical problems that I take umbrage, it's the fact that Watson is so overly loquacious and verbose, leading to the whole book feeling overwritten. If I ever thought that Watson was long winded before, I take it all back. Bring back the real Watson and get rid of this imposter! This upstart who thinks it's cool to mention all his old cases again and again. Guess what? Watson doesn't do that in actuality, he only mentions old cases occasionally, and if he does mention other cases, it's ones we've never read about, he's never so self-referential and meta. Gaw, make it stop. Yet it doesn't stop. The sloppiness with the canon and with Watson even carries over to all aspects of The House of Silk and it's writing. The book's internal chronology doesn't even work! How could Carstairs marry his wife six months before he even met her?

Repeatedly saying to myself "but if Horowitz had just..." isn't going to change anything. It's not going to magically make an editor who happens to be fluent in the canon of Sherlock Holmes appear and fix the book, because there is no way to fix this book. And there's a part of me that thinks a lot of the sloppiness might have been done on purpose. That maybe the muddle was there for a reason. At one point there's a meta aside wherein the characters discuss the tangle the two cases are making and how they seem to be getting more entwined versus less. Yes, this did piss me off, this signalling that Horowitz knew how he was infuriating me. But more importantly it shows that the muddle was on purpose. So, why would an author purposely muddle his book? Because he couldn't be bothered to create a half decent mystery and is throwing as many fish at you of the herring variety so that you won't notice this deficiency. Guess what "Tony." It. Did. Not. Work. Your book is 294 pages. You introduced the character of Ross on page 52, less than ten pages later, on page 61 I had the entire mystery solved. I had to read a further 233 pages of obfuscations and interferences and Watson's whining to have my deduction validated. Seriously, this isn't how you write a mystery. You don't read about a quarter of a book and go, oh, so this, this, and this happened, that's it. A book shouldn't be as easy to solve as a mystery on TV which can usually be deduced by the casting choices. I wanted something, I don't know, that actually made me invested in the book, that made me want to flip to the next page, that wasn't just the desperate need to make it end.

As for the mystery itself... we are supposed to find it shocking. That, after all, is the gimmicky reason that Watson withheld it for one hundred years, despite the fact that Holmes's arrest and various other incidents would have made the papers and would have therefore had to have been included in the original canon but are somehow overlooked. And the saddest thing is that the mystery isn't shocking. The book seems to be nothing more than a reflection of the British press of today. Because this is nothing more than the cover-up of another sexual abuse scandal wherein high ranking government officials are using orphans and street kids to satisfy their disgusting pedophiliac desires. Seriously, google "child sexual abuse UK" and there are over a dozen notable cases of these "rings" uncovered just within the past five or so years! Yes, this is horrifying. Yes this should be shocking, but the sad truth is that with it constantly being on our television screens and in our newspapers we have become desensitized to it but at the same time hyper-aware so that I could solve the mystery of The House of Silk in a matter of minutes. There have been other narratives of similar cases in books, films, and television. Heck, even the Inspector Morse spin-off Endeavour's pilot was about such a sex ring. This is sadly something that happens in the world, and if it's happening now it must have been happening than, so all in all, not much a mystery, just a sad reflection of reality, which most of us could do without when we are reading to escape. Plus, this has added a whole creepy undertone to the Baker Street Irregulars that I could have done without. Though the final thought I am left with is, would this case really have effected Holmes so? Would he have been moved? This Holmes was, the canonical Holmes, that's highly unlikely.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Anthony Horowitz, Arthur Conan Doyle, Baker Street Irregulars, Canon, Endeavour, Foyle's War, Inspector Morse, Julian Ovenden, Midsomer Murders, Mystery, Sherlock Holmes, Sherlocked, The House of Silk, Watson

Welcome Home, Bernard Socks by Paul Magrs
Published by: Obverse Books
Publication Date: December 5th, 2015
Format: Paperback, 240 Pages
To Buy

"Fester Cat returns us to his favourite place in the world, and casts a wry but compassionate eye over events in the house on Chestnut Avenue. In the months following his death Fester watches his hapless housemates Paul and Jeremy cope with living in a quiet, catless house, and gradually come to the decision that they must adopt a new friend. It is at the eccentric cat rescue / charity shop THARG where they first meet the robust and sproingy young Bernard Socks – the black and white cat who is destined to inherit Fester’s place in their home and garden down beside the railway tracks.

But things are never simple and straightforward in this family, and there follow months of excitement, adventures and downright palavers. Bernard Socks escapes and discovers a ghostly cat parade that happens every Midsummer Night’s Eve in Levenshulme. He helps the boys through the sudden death of a close friend. He gradually settles into his new life on Chestnut Avenue and everything seems fine, as Autumn draws near.

But then the men from the roofing company arrive and set up scaffolding all over the terrace and pretty soon all the ceilings are falling in and it seems that the three boys’ precious home is never going to be the same again. By the end of the year everything feels as if it’s in jeopardy – even the health of Bernard Socks himself. But what can Fester Cat do to help, watching all of these disastrous events unfold? How can that tough little, much-missed companion still make his voice heard by the humans that he loves?"

Because duh. 

Dead to the Last Drop by Cleo Coyle
Published by: Berkley
Publication Date: December 1st, 2015
Format: Hardcover, 432 Pages
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The official patter:
"After the White House asks coffeehouse manager and master roaster Clare Cosi to consult on the coffee service for a Rose Garden Wedding, she discovers a historic pot was used as a CIA "dead drop" decades before. Now long-simmering secrets boil over, scalding Clare and the people around her...

Clare's visit to the nation's capital is off to a graceful start. Her octogenarian employer is bunking with her in a charming Georgetown mansion, and she's invited to work with a respected curator on the Smithsonian's culinary salute to coffee in America.

Unfortunately, Clare's new Village Blend DC is struggling to earn a profit--until its second floor jazz club attracts a high-profile fan, the college-age daughter of the U.S. President. Clare's stock rises as the First Lady befriends her, but she soon learns a stark lesson: Washington can be murder.

First a stylish State Department employee suspiciously collapses in her coffeehouse. Then the President's daughter goes missing. Is she a runaway bride or is something more sinister in play? After another deadly twist, Clare is on the run with her NYPD detective boyfriend. Branded an enemy of the state, she must piece together clues and uncover the truth before her life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness come to a bitter end."

It's starting to be winter, which means it's time to get some cozy reading in... what better choice than this series, a favorite of my friend Paul Magrs!

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Bernard Socks, Cats, Cleo Coyle, Cozy Library, Dead to the Last Drop, Fester, Paul Magrs, The Story of Fester Cat, Tuesday Tomorrow, Welcome Home Bernard Socks

Murder Rooms
Inspired by the life and works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Release Date: 2000-2001
Starring: Ian Richardson, Charles Edwards, Simon Chandler, Mossie Smith, Malcolm Sinclair, Dermot Crowley, Sean Wightman, Caroline Carver, Beatie Edney, Ben Macleod, Robin Laing, Claire Harman, Dolly Wells, Alexander Armstrong, Crispin Bonham-Carter, Rik Mayall, Charles Dance, Annette Crosbie, Paul McNeilly, Anton Lesser, John Sessions, Ronald Pickup, Nick Haverson, Roger Lloyd Pack, Ian McNeice, Clare Holman, Warwick Davis, Matthew Macfadyen, David Hayman, Ruth Platt, and Henry Ian Cusick
Rating: ★★★
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Arthur Conan Doyle has gotten his medical degree from Edinburgh and set up practice in Portsmouth. Though the patients aren't exactly beating down the doors; in fact the longevity of his practice is a source of concern to those who care for him. One outlet to fill his time is to write stories, many of which get published. Yet his greatest literary creation is yet to come, and he will be based on his close friend and mentor, Dr. Joesph Bell. Dr. Bell is still working up in Edinburgh, but he finds the time to journey south and visit his most favorite student as often as possible. It doesn't hurt matters that Conan Doyle has started to partake in one of Dr. Bell's favorite pastimes, amateur crime solving. The sleuthing starts innocently enough with Conan Doyle trying to help one of his patients. With the arrival of Dr. Bell they become a detecting duo, much like Sherlock Holmes and Watson will be in the future. And once the duo are known to the police, they are invited to help on other cases, especially in the morgue where they are short staffed and men with medical knowledge are needed. The two insinuate themselves into adventures concerning Spiritualism, Fenians, and even soldier's with PTSD. They connect with their cases on many levels, some of which are personal. But only one thing is certain, the origins of the greatest literary consulting detective of all times was anything but staid. The dark beginnings of Sherlock Holmes are as memorable as the great detective himself.

Murder Rooms had it's origins in the TV movie Dr. Bell and Mr. Doyle, an uneven production that scandalously underused Matthew Macfadyen, had ludicrous wigs, a Doyle that could be outwitted by even the dumbest of Watsons, the requisite doomed love affair, and a tendency to stop and laboriously draw the connection between the real Dr. Bell and his fictional counterpart Sherlock Holmes. But for all that it was a clever conceit, to take truth and spin it into the most famous of fictions. Because that's where the genius lies. This show, at it's core, is based on truth. Not many people realize that Sherlock Holmes didn't spring fully formed from the mind of Arthur Conan Doyle. He in fact had a very real counterpart in Doctor Joseph Bell. The future author was a medical student when he met Bell in 1877 when Conan Doyle served as a clerk in the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh. Bell was known for his keen observational eye and often helped the police with their investigations. Bell inspired Conan Doyle with his unique methods and the man himself was in fact flattered to know that he was, however loosely, the impetus for the detective that seized the imagination of the reading public; unlike Holmes himself who rather frowned at Watson's endeavors. Bell even got some notoriety outside the realm of fiction as an an expert witness in the sensational Ardlamont Murder. And right there is the key to why this series worked, like the Ardlamont Murder, this series embellishing of reality gives the show real world stakes; it makes Murder Rooms feel more alive than the staid Victorian adventures of Holmes. By having the author and his inspiration with Conan Doyle playing Watson to Dr. Bell's Holmes, there's this feeling of truth, an immediacy that was never present in the stories despite how well they were written. The "truth" in the beginning matters for what came after.

Yet for how fun the series is it would never have worked if they hadn't been willing to see the mistakes in that initial TV movie and fix them. I wouldn't say it was precisely a reboot, more like how when Being Human went from pilot to series, they ditched what wasn't working, aka original Mitchell and Annie, but kept the plot as a through line. So we still have Doyle dealing with the death of Elspeth, only it's a Doyle who can actually act and an Elspeth you don't long to see dead. We still have Ian Richardson magnificently cast as Bell, he did play Holmes once dontcha know, only he no longer has that very disturbing Tom Jones wig. Seriously, the TV movie has some of the worst wig work I've ever seen, but Ian Richardson as Tom Jones is the most surreal. The revitalized show also brought in many great British actors, as in a rounded cast of awesomeness, not just, oh here's Charles Dance cause he'll appear in anything, he's totally not the villain just our red herring, oh look, he has red hair, haha. Instead we get the likes of Clare Holman from Lewis and David Hayman from The Paradise, Roger Lloyd Pack from The Vicar of Dibley, Dermot Crowley from Luther, and Ian McNeice from Doc Martin and Doctor Who, and Anton Lesser from everything British you've ever seen. But most surprising of all, Rik Mayall from The Young Ones and Bottom. And not surprising because he's in it, but surprising because of the depth of his acting. You will not believe the acting he is capable of if you've only seen the slapstick and surreal humor of his work with Adrian Edmondson. He is a talent who we lost too soon. It's actors like these that make Murder Rooms memorable. Despite it's unevenness, which is still there in spite of the rejiggering, it will stick with you.

The real success lies outside the casting in the fact that David Pirie was willing to step back from the blunt and ludicrously overt Sherlockian references in the original script and develop a more cunning narrative by drawing on the lives of Conan Doyle and Bell. They reflect and mirror images we have seen in the stories, like "The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist" referenced in "The Patient's Eyes," but that is not where the mystery begins or ends. By taking this step back, for those who know a little about Conan Doyle's life, you get far more excitement working out the connections and also the foreshadowing of his life to come. The episode that excels the most in this regard is "The Photographer's Chair." By having a story that deals with Spiritualism and photography we get a glimpse into what will define Conan Doyle's later life. While he starts out as a skeptic at the beginning of the episode, you just know that it will soon turn to belief. In real life it was the deaths of many close to him that led him to take solace in Spiritualism. He defended his beliefs in word and deed. He even lost many friends over his unswerving convictions. But his second wife was a strong believer, she even claimed to be a medium. To see these facts as a burgeoning story dramatized on TV was just fascinating to me. Nothing is overt, it's all subtle. He participates in his first seance, he talks to the medium played by Clare Holman, and his convictions against a spirit realm are doubted. Could there be a world beyond? His doomed love affair of the TV movie also is used for the first time logically, giving him a reason to believe, versus creating a reason for a monastic existence like Holmes and a Moriarty like nemesis.

Though Conan Doyle's belief in Spiritualism also extended to other things beyond the ken of man, such as fairies. The Cottingley Fairies are infamous photographs for the fraud they perpetrated, but more so for the vocal support of Conan Doyle who was utterly taken in by the fakes. The reason they were able to stand up to scrutiny is that the girls didn't mess with the photographic process, they just took pictures of themselves with fairies they had made. Ten years ago I was lucky enough to get to see these originals, and you can almost see why Conan Doyle and others were taken in. They look real enough, but it's more because they wanted to believe. That is where the photography element comes into "The Photographer's Chair." Men and woman who have suffered grief are being killed in an attempt to capture their soul leaving their body. The villain is just trying to capture another aspect of the supernatural, such as the two girls did with the fairies, because he believes with the zealotry of a madman. To take that further, the killer expounds on frauds within Spiritualism, making sure that we know there is truth in the supernatural, but it's being corrupted by the scams. If you have an interest in the more odd Spiritualist frauds I suggest reading Mary Roach's Spook. But if you want a good mystery that tackles the possibility that this could be true or false, then please watch this episode. If you ever thought that Conan Doyle and his later beliefs were a little crazy, it makes you connect to him in a way you never thought you could. Oh, and the little photographic evidence at the end of the episode, it casts such possibilities that you're not quite sure what to believe.

And that's what it all comes down to in the end. Evidence. If that glass plate had survived, that might have been something... but evidence is what is needed for unassailable proof. And it's Dr. Bell's way of approaching evidence that is unique. He could literally be considered the beginning of the forensic sciences. He uses his observational skills to examine patients and come to conclusions about their health, or, if he's in the morgue, about their death. It is these observational techniques that Holmes uses in literature to examine all of life, not just the human body. It is just fascinating how forensic evidence can lead to analytical evidence which can lead to enlightenment. To take your doctoring skill set and apply it to crime solving. Of course in this day and age we take it for granted with all the various CSI offshoots that this is how crime solving was always done, but that isn't the case. Just as recent as the Regency period there wasn't even a police force as such, and if you have a desperate need to actually know more about that read P.D. James's Death Comes to Pemberley. So to have Dr. Bell going out and solving crimes in a way that is unheard of is revolutionary. Don't be jaded by all that has come after, or take anything for granted. Just because the popular image of detection comes from Sherlock Holmes shouldn't detract from "the beginning." It should enhance it! The subtitle for Murder Rooms is "The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes" but it really could be "The Dark Beginnings of Modern Detection." This might be nothing more than a TV show, but taken in the greater context of crime solving, it's a revolution.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Arthur Conan Doyle, Being Human, Cottingley Fairies, Dr. Bell, Dr. Bell and Mr. Doyle, Ian Richardson, Lewis, Luther, Matthew MacFadyen, Murder Rooms, Sherlocked, Spiritualism, Spook, Tom Jones, Vicar of Dibley

The Dark Water by David Pirie
Published by: Pegasus Books
Publication Date: May 1st, 2003
Format: Hardcover, 354 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)

Arthur Conan Doyle's nemesis has returned to England. He and Dr. Bell have made it their life's work to capture this man, Dr. Neill Cream, and see him pay for his crimes, not the least of which is murdering Elspeth, Conan Doyle's fiance. Yet Conan Doyle didn't expect Cream to strike first, kidnapping the would-be author and holding him hostage while heavily drugged. But Conan Doyle miraculously escapes, and thanks to some help in the unlikeliest of places, he reunites with Dr. Bell in Edinburgh. They retrace Cream's steps through England, where he is using the name Dr. Mere, and realize that this murderous man is in desperate need of funds. Dr. Bell starts going over everything that Conan Doyle remembers of his incarceration and Cream's mention of the sea seems to coincide with a suspicious disappearance of a wealthy man in the town of Dunwich. Sir Thomas Jefford had just inherited a house in Dunwich, The Glebe, when he disappeared. His friends thought it was a joke, but locals believe it is tied up in the legend of the Witch of Dunwich Heath, which Jefford was planning on writing about. Conan Doyle and Bell set out for this remote village on the Eastern Coast and slowly start to piece together what has happened. But soon there are not just dealing with a disappearance, but deaths. Murder! Can they separate facts from fiction and catch Cream before he has a chance to escape their grasp once more?

Recently I was having a conversation with one of my friends about people who rate books on Goodreads when they haven't finished them. We were in total accord that it's unfair to the book and the author. To give a star rating that is factored into the overall rating for something you couldn't be bothered to finish skews the results. You either finish the book and rate it or abandon it, there is no middle ground. This then morphed into a discussion on when do you give up on a book. Do you give it fifty pages, a hundred pages, what? When do you know in your gut that enough is enough? When do you know that you can't make it to the end and have the satisfaction of adding your two cents on Goodreads? I'm a masochist, because I can really count on one hand the number of books I have actually given up on. I'm in it for the long haul, no matter what. Rage reading, incentives, whatever it takes, I WILL finish that book. The reason I bring this up now, other than the wacky serendipity that made these two events happen within days of each other, is that if I was the type of person to actually give up on books, well, The Dark Water would have been abandoned early. Yet you will notice that in the end I really liked it. I mean, I REALLY liked it. So how long did it take for me to get into it? 123 pages. This just proves that there is no magical page number at which you should abandon hope. A book with a disjointed and awkward start can click from one page to the next and become a true page-turner. Plus, it's always nice to have your patience rewarded, it's awkward when the book goes the other way, ie, to the dogs.

The Dark Water is actually the third book in David Pirie's series about Dr. Joseph Bell and Arthur Conan Doyle. While I didn't actually know this when I bought the book, before reading it I looked up the summaries to the first two books, The Patient's Eyes and The Night Calls, and realized that they sounded very familiar. See, this series actually didn't start out as books, but as a television show, Murder Rooms, therefore doing the opposite of most adaptations out there. 'The Patient's Eyes' was the first episode after the pilot, while the pilot became The Night Calls. While I think 'The Patient's Eyes' is one of the strongest episodes, the pilot isn't of the highest quality, so I figured I'd be safe just skipping to the new story. Because that is what I was really excited about. I was sad when Murder Rooms was cancelled and here, with this book, it felt like the axe hadn't fallen. Yet upon starting The Dark Water there were all these mentions to things I hadn't heard about, little stories that didn't line up with the show. References or asides I just didn't get. This could in fact be one of the reasons it took me 123 pages to get into the book. It was just a weird experience, like hearing a story you've heard a hundred times but with key points changed for no perceptible reason. I almost felt as if the books took place in a parallel dimension to the television series. You knew enough about the world to get around but it was just that little bit off to be disconcerting. Therefore, given the chance to do this over, I would read the first two books first, because maybe it would make those first 123 pages interesting.

But then again... I think not. The reason those first 123 pages don't work is because of Cream. Dr. Thomas Neill Cream is an historically interesting person; a Scottish-Canadian serial killer known as the Lambeth Poisoner who tried to claim the victims of Jack the Ripper as his own. So we have historical precedence of his evil deeds and ways. But, despite this book being fiction, the sheer unlikelihood of his ever crossing paths with Conan Doyle, nine years his junior, let alone becoming his arch-nemesis just strains credulity. Add to that the whole lovelorn Conan Doyle who lost his first love at the hands of Cream and we're in absurd penny dreadful territory. While there's a disconnect between the fictional Conan Doyle and the actual, artistic license allows a little freedom, but taking Cream and forcing him into the role of Moriarty to Conan Doyle's Holmes... it just doesn't work. And not just the fact that Bell is the true Holmes of this narrative. It's fun seeing the little hints of how life became fictionalized in Conan Doyle's stories, but this is too heavy handed. Too obvious. Cream is taking Moriarty too far, especially at the end. Subtlety is needed to make this conceit believable. Subtlety and just enough reality. Cream is too over the top. Too theatrical. His kidnapping of Conan Doyle and holding him hostage is so overly dramatic and also tedious that it bogs down the first two sections of the book. It's not until Cream disappears offstage that the book starts to work. If it wasn't for Cream this could be a near perfect book, but alas, it isn't. Also, is there anyone else that thinks the name Cream doesn't inspire terror?

Getting beyond Cream and into the history of the small English town of Dunwich captivated me. Dunwich is a small coastal town on the eastern coast of England that was mentioned in the Doomsday book. Much of the town has been lost to coastal erosion and now lives under the sea. They have stories that you can still hear the bells of the churches under the water calling you. This locale brought with it the haunting atmosphere that made The Hound of the Baskervilles so memorable and easily Conan Doyle's greatest story in the Sherlock Holmes canon. There's something about desolate and bleak settings that just up the Gothic impact of a mystery and make me all the more invested in it. It's the haunting landscape of Cornwall coupled with her writing that makes Daphne Du Maurier so memorable. Her writing wouldn't have had the same impact set anywhere else. Plus she had a symbiotic relationship between her and the land that makes me think if it wasn't for Cornwall who knows if she would ever have really written anything memorable. That is what Dunwich does for The Dark Water. The town becomes a reflection of the story and becomes a character in it's own right. The treacherous walks along the cliffs where even holy landmarks to God were destroyed by the forces of nature sends a frisson of excitement through me just thinking about it again. The wind and the rain which might be a detriment anywhere else here become a real danger. Now I'm not saying I ever want to go there, but the way this book transported me there, it feels like I've already been.

Yet Dunwich wouldn't have had the impact unless it was coupled with the mythology and folklore that surround the town, and not just the ghostly bells. The way "The Wylde Hunt at Dunwich" and the Witch of Dunwich Heath not only added an otherworldly element to the story but spread fear and cleverly concealed the real killer is the beating heart of this book. I have always been fascinated by the idea that Fairy Tales may be real and that mythology and folklore must have some basis in fact. I love how Dr. Bell instantly sees through these scare tactics, such as the howling man roaming the moors, but realizes the importance of these stories and the effect they will have on the surrounding community if they are believed. He works backward, from the stories that have survived, knowing that they have a grounding in reality. He is able to find how seemingly impossible deaths were accomplished by using the truth within the story. But it's not just the ability to use these stories to catch a killer, but the stories themselves that give you a glimpse into the past. You get a mini history of this small community through their folktales. Regional folktales are the way history has been passed down through the generations. You learn more about an area and it's past from it's stories than from some staid history written to set the record straight. Plus let us not forget that in his old age Conan Doyle set more store in fairies and folklore than in his own writing. Fairy Tales are just history and mystery coming together, and in this instance they are used to catch a killer.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Arthur Conan Doyle, Daphne Du Maurier, David Pirie, Dr. Bell, Dr. Neill Cream, Dunwich, Fairies, Fairy Tales, Moriarty, Murder Rooms, Mythology, Sherlocked, The Dark Water, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Witches

Felines of New York by Jim Tews
Published by: Simon and Schuster
Publication Date: November 24th, 2015
Format: Paperback, 240 Pages
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The official patter:
"Featuring more than 100 photos and quotes from cats in America’s most glamorous city, Felines of New York exposes the furry underbelly of New York City’s most glamorous, self-important residents.

Where the humans of New York are accomplished, interesting, thoughtful, creative, and even sometimes tragic figures, the cats are simply cats. They do not stand in line for brunch, or have season tickets to the Met, or go indoor-rock climbing in Brooklyn. They do not shop at thrift stores or nibble finger sandwiches at the Russian Tea Room. And they certainly do not give a flying f*ck about the Yankees.

No, the felines of New York bathe, purr, bask languidly in the sun, and occasionally cast baleful glances at the humans who provide them food and shelter. They are proof that behind every New Yorker, there lays a cat just waiting to destroy their IKEA futon and then eat their faces off when they die."

As for the "Humans of New York" trend I could take it or leave it... but the furry kitty counterpart? The world and my Facebook feed would be a bleaker place without it.

Sherlock Holmes: The Novels by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Published by: Penguin Classics
Publication Date: November 24th, 2015
Format: Paperback, 608 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
"All four legendary Sherlock Holmes novels, collected in a unique Graphic Deluxe Edition with an introduction by Michael Dirda.

Though endlessly reinterpreted, reinvented, and imitated, the Sherlock Holmes stories have never been surpassed. Sporting his signature billowing coat and pipe in hand, the genius investigator Holmes captivates readers with his alluring melancholy and superhuman intuition, while his partner, Dr. Watson, remains ever the perfect foil, a classic Victorian gentleman with brilliant intellect. Collected here are all four Holmes novels—A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, The Hound of the Baskervilles, and The Valley of Fear—tracing the origins of the pair up through showdowns with their greatest archenemies, including the infamous Professor Moriarty. Set in the seductive shadow world of Victorian London, the stories of Holmes and Watson live on, as immediate and original in our time as in their own.

For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators."

Seeing as we're in the midst of "Sherlocked" this is a very appropriate book to buy... plus seriously, look at that awesome cover. Damn you Penguin making me buy all the books! ALL OF THEM! But, the separate Sherlock adventures are better than the short stories in my opinion, so this is totally a solid buy.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: A Study in Scarlet, Arthur Conan Doyle, Cats, Felines of New York, Jim Tews, Sherlock Holmes, Sherlocked, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Sign of the Four, The Valley of Fear, Tuesday Tomorrow

Mr. Holmes
Based on the book by Mitch Cullin
Release Date: July 17th, 2015
Starring: Ian McKellen, Laura Linney, Milo Parker, Hattie Morahan, Roger Allam, Phil Davis, Patrick Kennedy, Hiroyuki Sanada, Frances de la Tour, John Sessions, Francis Barber, and Nicholas Rowe
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy

Sherlock Holmes is returning to his home in the Sussex Downs after visiting Japan. After the death of his brother Mycroft he realized that his powers of recollection were waning. He couldn't for the life of him remember his last case. The case was thirty-five years ago and involved the wife of a Mr. Kelmot and was the catalyst to his leaving his profession and moving to Sussex. Of course Watson wrote it up, as he did all Holmes's cases, but he changed it, made Holmes the hero and tacked on a happy ending in that infuriating way of his. Before he dies Holmes wants to write down the story as it happened. Truth not fiction. But he can't find the truth. He can't recollect it. Which was the reason for his recent trip to Japan. He had been in correspondence with a Masuo Umezaki who had read Holmes's treatise on the use of Royal Jelly as a memory aid and told Holmes how the jelly of the prickly ash plant that is found only in Japan is supposedly even better. Holmes and Umezaki journey to Hiroshima, where among the devastation wrought by the recent war, they amazingly find a prickly ash plant that Holmes takes with him back to England. During his absence his housekeeper's son Roger snuck into his study and read the preliminaries of Holmes's story about Mrs. Kelmot and wants Holmes to finish the story. As Holmes struggles to recall his reasons for leaving his profession an unlikely friendship develops between him and Roger and the care of Holmes's bees. But can a ninety-three year old man get back his past and change what is left of his future?

To be one of the actors with enough skill to play Sherlock Holmes you enter a rarefied category. Because, for most, you will forever be known for that role, but you will also be harshly judged. Jeremy Brett, Benedict Cumberbatch, Johnny Lee Miller, and Basil Rathbone are linked inextricably with Holmes. They have become one with Holmes and will never separate fully from this legacy. But there are other actors, those who have made a name for themselves prior to donning the deerstalker as it were; Michael Caine, Robert Downey Jr., and Rupert Everett, like McKellen, were known entities. They all successfully became Holmes to some extent, but have maintained their own identity. It is to this secondary category that McKellen belongs. One wonders at McKellen so easily taking up this signature role. For countless people McKellen is Gandalf from Tolkien's works, and for countless others he is Magneto from the Marvel comics. In other words, McKellen has never shied away from playing iconic roles. But one gets the feeling that he is tired of doing this. And yet... he became Sherlock Holmes. It is my belief that he did this because he is the only actor with the ability to realize this character as he was written here. Of all the actors who have played Holmes, McKellen is a virtuoso, wherein you never see him as himself, he is Holmes. But he doesn't just capture one Holmes, he captures two distinct iterations of the icon at two different stages of his life. He takes the character we have always known, built on it, aged it, and given it back to us in a way that is sure to get him his first Academy Award win.

The more you think on Mr. Holmes the more you realize it isn't just a movie simply about the man who solved unsolvable mysteries. The heart of the film is darker, melancholy without falling into the trap of being morose and unbearably sad. Sherlock Holmes has been a man who relied his entire life on his mind to never fail him. His mind palace, as it were, was inviolable. But as we age, our memory, our ability to recollect starts to fail. This is happening to Holmes. He is unable to remember his last case, the case that defined his life as it has become. Most people balance the life of the mind with emotions and love and heart. Relationships that are more than just business. But what happens when the mind starts to go and you have never had heart? There is no corresponding emotions to bring recollections to the light of day. And this all ties into Holmes's last case. He perfectly understood Mrs. Ann Kelmot. He analyzed her and made her secrets bare. But he lacked empathy. He could see everything but he couldn't see that even if someone is fully aware of their situation that sometimes that isn't enough. Sometimes a heart is permanently broken and the knowledge of this can never put it back together. Holmes failed Mrs. Kelmot and therefore failed himself, leading to his new bucolic life. By going back into his past, by trying to remember this case as he forges his relationship with his housekeeper Mrs. Munro and her young son Roger, Holmes is given a lesson in empathy. He finally understands not just the mystery of Mrs. Kelmot, but what he has been missing his entire life and that people sometimes need a little compassion, a little fiction to survive.

I find it interesting that over the years an aging Holmes has really captured the imagination of Sherlockians. This idea that Holmes, the ever unchanging pillar of logic, would somehow change in old age. That there is something, some event, that would somehow make him more human, more relatable. The cold analytical man is what countless generations of readers have latched onto, but in works like Chabon's The Final Solution and the inspiration for this movie, A Slight Trick of the Mind, they humanize him. While I really enjoyed this movie there's a part of me that knows it's just a "what if?" This would never be Holmes, this is an idealized hypothesis of what could, what might have happened with a fictional character. But it's an enjoyable idyl. Never to be taken too seriously, but to be enjoyed nonetheless. One wonders what Conan Doyle would think. He puts in a passing reference in one of his last Holmes stories that he is raising bees, and now that's written in stone as the only thing that Holmes may do in his old age. What would Holmes's creator think of this obsession with this one detail? With this need to humanize his legend. Holmes was never human, he came back from the dead after all! And those bees sure have stuck. Thanks to Conan Doyle and Wilkie Collins detectives can only raise bees or cultivate roses in their retirement. I personally think this is a bit boring and narrow.

One of the main reasons I was excited to see this film was because of Nicholas Rowe. He is my childhood (and current) crush from playing the starring role in The Young Sherlock Holmes. The fact that he was playing Matinee 'Sherlock' in a movie version of Holmes's last case as presented within the movie made me giddy. The fact is this film is acutely aware of the history of Holmes, not just the literary works, but also all the adaptations, as well as Conan Doyle's life itself, raised it to a special place for fans of Holmes and the meta universe he now resides in. Phil Davis, the killer cabbie of Sherlock makes an ironic appearance as a Police Inspector as well. But these casting choices are just the tip of the iceberg. What really drew me into the story and therefore the mystery was the glass harmonica and it's obvious spiritual connections. The haunting music alone coupled with Mrs. Kelmot's talking to her dead children where enough to convey the spiritualism aspect of the musical instrument, long before Holmes pointed it out. Mesmer himself even played this instrument. Spiritualism was the overriding obsession of Conan Doyle's later years. He lost friends, including Harry Houdini, because of his beliefs. Within the framework of Mr. Holmes it not only adds this meta layer, but it provides an ingenious red herring that gives the film the depth that makes you continually invested, even when it's obvious what the outcome of the case will be.

To bring this review back around to where I started, we are back once more with Ian McKellen. McKellen has reached an age where he doesn't need to work for money anymore, he does what he likes when he likes with who he likes. This can be both a boon and a burden for the audience, he has many fabulous friends who are actors. For example, take his recent foray into television with Vicious, a show clearly made to hang out with Derek Jacobi and Frances de la Tour. This Are You Being Served? throwback is tasteless and camp, in all the wrong ways. France de la Tour makes an odd appearance in Mr. Holmes as the glass harmonica instructor, Madame Schirmer. She once again proves that she can only act so far over the top that she almost derails the film with just a few lines. But the true fault of the film is Laura Linney, who would NEVER have been cast if not for her friendship with McKellen. I have no doubt that she is a nice person and she has always been an amazing advocate for LGBTQ rights for years, hence her friendship with McKellen. But she is just woefully miscast. I will admit that I have never liked her, but I was willing to be open-minded here. And the only saving grace is that she didn't have too many lines. Those lines she did have were in a dialect that appears nowhere on this earth. I think she might have been trying to do Welsh... but why they didn't just cast someone Welsh is down to Ian McKellen. He's a superb actor, and while he might know a lot of superb actors, he sometimes should know when to reign in on the nepotism.  

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: A Slight Trick of the Mind, Arthur Conan Doyle, Bees, Empathy, Ian McKellen, Meta, Mr. Holmes, Nepotism, Nicholas Rowe, Sherlock Holmes, Sherlocked, The Final Solution, The Young Sherlock Holmes, Wilkie Collins

The Final Solution by Michael Chabon
Published by: HarperCollins
Publication Date: November 9th, 2004
Format: Hardcover, 131 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)

Sherlock Holmes is retired to the South Downs where he doesn't concern himself with more than his bees and not falling over some detritus in his house and dying ignominiously. But one day he is intrigued when he sees a young boy with a parrot on his shoulder walking down the railway tracks. He observes the boy is about to urinate on the third rail and rushes as fast as his feeble frame will allow him to stop this dangerous pursuit. The boy doesn't answer to his shouts, yet the parrot does, issuing a long string of numbers in German. Curiouser and curiouser. It turns out that the young boy Linus is a Jewish refuge living at the Vicarage, which the Panickers also run as a boarding house. There the parrot has excited some of the residents and his strings of numerals are believed to be more than random. In fact the parrot's abilities are of interest to more people than just those in the South Downs... could the numbers in fact mean something to the war effort? When one of the Panickers's lodgers is brutally murdered and the parrot goes missing with young Reggie Panicker as chief suspect, the local police think perhaps it is time to consult the great detective himself. Holmes agrees to help. Not out of concern for Reggie Panicker or for the war effort or to stop a murderer, his bees are all that he really cares about. He agrees to help to reunite the young boy with his parrot. Because if ever there were two creatures more in need of each other it is this young boy and his bird. If he happens to solve the murder and the mystery of the numbers along the way, well, that's why he was at one time the greatest consulting detective in the world. A world which has now radically changed.

I'm fairly confident that The Final Solution became the "must read" book for me almost ten years ago because of a really good blurb in the Bas Bleu catalog. The problem with the Bas Bleu catalog is that they are masters of writing the perfect precise that makes you not just want to, but need to read the book they are selling. I have had Bas Bleu backlash many a time, most memorably with Agatha Christie's Endless Night. Yet the Endless Night debacle was in my future at this point, and so I excitedly curled up on a summer's day on my side porch to delve into The Final Solution; where I instantly felt I needed to be reading the book with a dictionary constantly open. My initial feelings were that Chabon was a little too self-impressed with his ability to obfuscate his story while simultaneously being a bit of a show-off. For some reason, despite what should be viewed as negatives, because a writer shouldn't try to make his book inaccessible, I was left with this impression that The Final Solution was a masterpiece that I just couldn't fully understand or appreciate. Flash forward almost a decade, with all the expanded knowledge and vocab that time can bring to a voracious reader and I now see the truth. This is a self-indulgent novella that exudes smug self-importance. Just because a book is dense and impenetrable to the point of incomprehensibility doesn't mean it's good and you are the problem in the equation. It means you need to look closer at the book and realize that the dense narrative might be hiding the author's smug self-satisfaction in plain sight. The purposeful use of obscure and highfalutin language combined with the "gimmick" to never actually state outright that this book is about Sherlock Holmes and only deal in allusions and asides makes this book smack of pretension and alienates the reader. A book should service the story NOT the ego of the writer, and hence this book is a failure.

Finally being able to see beyond the veil of academic and writerly gimmickry you see that all it did was mask the problems of the story. The major problem is that this isn't an ode to Conan Doyle but more posturing by Chabon. The LEAST Chabon could have done is capture the essence of Holmes in the slightest. Instead this book seems to intentionally set out to be the exact opposite of all things Holmes and Conan Doyle. Conan Doyle is a writer that is only occasionally melodramatic when writing as Watson, but he is never superfluous. If he is writing as Holmes, as is the case in two of his short stories, the language is terse and to the point. The Final Solution, being in the waning days of Sherlock Holmes, would obviously be written from Holmes's POV, and therefore would necessitate Holmes's narration style. Yet here Chabon luxuriates in description and verbiage. The actual plot could be summed up by Holmes or Watson in a couple of sentences, but it's spun out for 131 pages! This wallowing in the unnecessary and insignificant might be a nice idyl for a writing exercise, but not for a story which suffers under these pretensions. Plus, I don't know if it's just me, but there's a reason Conan Doyle didn't write Holmes into his dotage, aside from being sick of writing him, and that's because no one wants to see the great and mighty struggling to get out of a chair. Yes it might be interesting if handled properly, like the recent film Mr. Holmes, but here it isn't handled properly or reverently like it should be. It's all just Chabon showing off. But what got under my skin more than anything was that while he peppers the book with allusions to Holmes's great works at the end Chabon doesn't understand Holmes. He got him so wrong. "The business of detection has for so many years been caught up with questions of remuneration and reward that although he was by now long beyond such concerns he felt, with surprising vigor, that the boy owed him the payment of a smile." Holmes rarely took any form of payment! I can think of one, maybe two times that entered into it, in ALL of his adventures. All SIXTY of them. As for a reward? He liberally gave all the credit away to different police officers. Gaw! Just SO WRONG!

The Final Problem could have been a sweet little story about a boy and his parrot, but the need to make the story ostensibly about Sherlock Holmes, though remember he's never directly named, derails the tale and drags it out. To make a book of only 131 pages seem overly long is a true talent that Chabon should be congratulated on. Instead of focusing on the relationship of the boy and his bird, we suffer through long reminiscences of what it is to be old and dying. Oh, and not just dying, but to die in an ignominious way. To die sprawled out in an inglorious way that would be very embarrassing for one's reputation, though technically you shouldn't care because, you know, you're dead. The reason I think The Final Solution would have been more successful concentrating on Linus is that you forge a connection with the boy. You never really make a connection to Holmes. Holmes is a character of wonder and magic, and to make him old and feeble, it stripes the character of what connection the reader had. Dwelling on his various daydreams of death doesn't help us connect either. There is only one time you feel a connection to Holmes and the man he was and that's when he journeys back to London in search of Linus's bird. London was the epicenter of Holmes's world. This is a city that bowed down to his greatness and the villains were in constant fear of him. Now London is no longer the place he rules but a place he no longer recognizes. With the onslaught of the Germans he expected to see the city in ashes, and one wonders if perhaps he actually wished this to be true. That London, without the great Sherlock Holmes, had ceased to exist. That it's very lifeblood no longer flowed because of his exodus. Instead there is destruction, but more then that, new buildings, new life, all the new that he doesn't know. He knew this city like the back of his hand, every alley and every bolthole. To see that the city moved on, changed while his knowledge didn't, is the first and only time in the book you feel what it's like to be Holmes, the pinnacle of the previous discarded century.

Going back to Linus and his parrot, I can not express how much a story concentrating only on the two of them would have succeeded. Their relationship is a connection between two souls. When you are young and form a connection to an animal something magical happens. It's not that you're just kindred spirits, you are each others soul mates. Chabon so eloquently describes this connection with the looks exchanged between the two, the way the boy mummers to his parrot and the way the parrot ruffles Linus's hair, that it's almost painful in it's beauty. I had this relationship once with my little cat Spot. We met when I was only eight and we were together for twenty-two years. He was my best friend, my confidant, my better half. He was everything and I see that relationship mirrored in this book. This is the heart and while to an extent it is also the driving force of the narrative, it's too often relegated to the sidelines to actually keep your interest. But to look at their relationship further, I can't help but think about how this bird is truly a service animal. The boy is effectively a mute and is therefore viewed as developmentally disabled by many of the people in the community where he lives. So much study has gone into the aid animals can give to children who are autistic or have learning disabilities, and here we have a story that shows the depth of these connections and how they work yet it is constantly pushed aside. The most interestingly narrated chapter in the book is when the parrot's POV is explored. Here we get more insight into his relationship with Linus, but again this is second fiddle to the importance of the crime committed. Chabon, I am totally calling you out. You set this up so well and had such an opportunity and you wasted it time and time again to indulge yourself and not serve the story or the characters. Get with it already. Edit, rewrite this and get back to me.

Yet the biggest flaw in the book has nothing to do with the story, it has to do with the illustrations. Jay Ryan created a memorable and unique cover, but his interior illustrations leave something to be desired. They feel unfinished and childish, which is the exact opposite of the story whose language is so polished it almost blinds you and is very adult in nature. Seriously, only an adult could have the vocabulary to get through this book not to mention the themes of aging, persecution, espionage, and murder. I am a graphic designer and have done many illustrations. Illustrations are different than regular drawings, they are there to accompany and add insight to the text. They REFLECT the text. Image and words in a symbiotic relationship that is balanced. Here it's not balanced. Stupid childish drawings that you could argue were to capture the childishness of Linus, but I refute that argument. Linus doesn't live in the world of a child and the things he's seen make him unique. Therefore dumbing down the illustrations doesn't enhance his viewpoint, it harms it. While the style of writing and the narrative annoyed me to no end, there is a beauty in the images that Chabon conjures up. There is a lushness in the text that is completely derailed by these technical and awkward images. This isn't how the words make this world appear. If anything these images are 100% the exact opposite of what I see in my mind's eye while reading this book. While most people will probably just flip to the next page ignoring the images, I can't. They are a stumbling block that brings down the book even lower in my estimations. Quite literally you start the book thinking it will be amazing, a five star tour de force. Then Holmes is introduced and mishandled, then the drawings start showing up, then this, then that, and you are left with a book that could have been something magical, but isn't. Not in the least.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Bas Bleu, Endless Night, Illustration, Michael Chabon, Mr. Holmes, Novella, Parrots, Pretentious, Sherlock Holmes, Sherlocked, South Downs, Spot, Watson, WWII

Word Puppets by Mary Robinette Kowal
Published by: Prime Books
Publication Date: November 17th, 2015
Format: Paperback, 336 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
"Celebrated as the author of five acclaimed historical fantasy novels in the Glamourist series, Mary Robinette Kowal is also well known as an award-winning author of short science fiction and fantasy. Her stories encompass a wide range of themes, a covey of indelible characters, and settings that span from Earth's past to its near and far futures as well as even farther futures beyond. Alternative history, fairy tales, adventure, fables, science fiction (both hard and soft), fantasy (both epic and cozy)-nothing is beyond the reach of her unique talent. WORD PUPPETS-the first comprehensive collection of Kowal's extraordinary fiction-includes her two Hugo-winning stories, a Hugo nominee, an original story set in the world of "The Lady Astronaut of Mars," and fourteen other show-stopping tales."

What did I do to have two of my favorite authors have books on the same day? Also, how perfect is the title of this book for Mary?

A Bride's Story Volume 7 by Kaoru Mori
Published by: Yen Press
Publication Date: November 17th, 2015
Format: Hardcover, 3192 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
"As Mr. Smith continues his journey to India, he is welcomed into the home of a wealthy tradesman and his wife, Anis. Custom dictates that, as a woman, Anis is not permitted to meet their visitor face-to-face, but even so, she counts herself blessed to live in such a beautiful estate and be married to a man who devotes himself solely to her. Still, one cannot help but long for the companionship of another person when one's closest friend is a reluctant Persian cat. In her loneliness, Anis visits the public bath house and discovers a place where she feels immediately free among her fellow sisters."

I seriously think I might love this series more than her "Emma" series... and that's saying something...

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: A Bride's Story, Glamourist Histories, Kaoru Mori, Manga, Mary Robinette Kowal, Short Story, Tuesday Tomorrow, Word Puppets