These are mini reviews of some books I read in March:
- The 7 1/2 Lives of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton. I can't even begin to adequately explain the plot of this book. Imagine the worst English country house party ever. Then a murder that doesn't look like a murder. Then a man whose consciousness jumps between seven different people as he tries to solve the murder. If he doesn't solve it by 11:00 pm on the day of the murder, his memory is wiped and everything starts over again. He must solve it to escape the loop. To say this is a complicated book is an understatement. There is the murder to solve, there are the rivals who are also trying to solve the murder and escape the loop, and there is the whole mystery of why is there a loop in the first place. I took this book with me on a short getaway weekend. That was a mistake. It was too complicated to read in spurts. I found myself frustrated with it as I read it and disappointed when I finished it. The plotting is clever (perhaps overly clever) but I'm not sure it really worked . At the end I found myself doubting that all the loose ends had been tied up and I didn't think that the ending really made sense. Also, the cleverness of the plot masked the shallow development of the characters. I found that I didn't really care about the main characters, and there were too many secondary characters to keep track of. On the whole, not a success for me.
- Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney. I very much enjoyed Sally Rooney's Normal People. I thought she captured the angst of teenagers and young twenty somethings perfectly. I was carried along by her writing style. In this novel she tries to capture the angst of two thirtyish women and the men they are involved with. This is not a novel with a lot of plot, it's all about character. The two main women characters write long existential emails to each other about the world (and not too much about themselves). Even though I generally like novels where characters bat around ideas, I found myself skimming those emails. As far as the relationships went, I never really understood why the two women were friends and most of the time I just found myself wondering why the men didn't give up and leave the women. If I had been in their places, I would have. But at the same time I found the men super annoying because they seemed to have been crafted to belong at two ends of a spectrum of behaviour - one comes off as rude and selfish and the other comes off as annoyingly selfless. All in all, this just wasn't the book for me.
- The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout. When reading a blog post about the Lucy Barton books I discovered that the character of Bob Burgess who appears in Lucy by the Sea came from an earlier book written by Elizabeth Strout called The Burgess Boys. So I immediately found it. It is the story of the three adult Burgess siblings: Bob and his twin sister Susan and their older brother Jim. We also meet Jim's "perfect" wife Helen and Bob's ex-wife Pam. This is a different kind of book than the Lucy Barton books. There is more plot ( a messy, chaotic plot that involves family issues as well as immigrant issues in a small community), although she still puts a great emphasis on building the characters. I remember thinking that reading Lucy by the Sea would be triggering for me and it wasn't. But I was surprised to find parts of this book triggering. It was published in 2013 and parts of the plot dealt with white supremacists and hate crimes and I kept thinking about how much worse the world has gotten since then. But I did really enjoy this book. I stayed away from Elizabeth Strout for years after reading Olive Kittridge because I thought all of her books would be written in that same short story way. I was wrong.
- Standing Dead by Margaret Mitsushima. This is the next installment of the Mattie Cobb series set in Colorado. Mattie is a local police officer in a small town and her K-9 partner is Robo. I love the way Robo is portrayed, you can tell Mitsushima is a dog lover. This isn't a bad series from a writing point of view, she has good descriptions of the settings and at this point she's built the characters so we know them. Her plots move along. But ... one of my pet peeves is when writers (of books or TV) make the plot all about the cop having to save family or friends who are in mortal danger. And Mitsushima continues to do that. In this case I felt like she really reached to create a bad guy from Mattie's past who seemed created just to have a bad guy and never actually seemed real. I hope, if this series continues, that she has Mattie and Robo solve some "regular" crimes.
- Due Diligence by Michael Kahn. This was a bookclub pick, chosen mostly because the author lives in St. Louis and the story is full of St. Louis landmarks. I read this long ago and had mostly forgotten the plot. It brought back memories of working in law firms in the days before the internet, when we still had secretaries who answered our phones. And when sexist jokes were expected and laughed at if you were a "cool girl".
- The Shadows of London by Andrew Taylor. This was the latest in the Marwood and Lovett mystery series. Set during the reign of Charles II, Lovett is Cat Lovett a woman architect and Marwood is James Marwood who works for Scotland Yard in the days before there was a Scotland Yard. I've always been ambivalent about this series. I like it because it takes place in a time period I know little about. However, I don't think he writes women that well. This time he decided to write parts of it from the point of view of a young woman destined to become the mistress of the King and ... I just never really believed in her as a character. It is telling that I put it down one night after reading about 75% and then forgot about it for a couple of days.
- Storm Watch by C.J. Box This is the latest in the Joe Pickett series and, plotwise, it's as over the top as any in the series. It's hard to describe but it involves a dead body that disappears, extremists, Joe's mother-in-law Missy, the Governor who hates Joe and the FBI. And, as usual, if Joe were a real person, he'd be dead. As with all the Joe Pickett stories I enjoyed the descriptions of Wyoming - this time in the snow. I like the way Box writes but as usual I find his women characters underdeveloped and you have to be able to tolerate crazy eye-rolling plots.
