May was a good month for reading. I liked all but one of the books I read.
- The Perfumist of Paris by Alka Joshi. This is the third book in Joshi's trio of books that began with The Henna Artist and continued with The Secret Keeper of Jaipur. Although technically a sequel to the stories of Lakshmi, Malik and Radha, this novel doesn't follow immediately after the last book; time has moved on to the 1970's. Where The Henna Artist focused mainly on Lakshmi and The Secret Keeper of Jaipur focused mainly on Malik, this novel focuses on Radha who is living in Paris with her husband and two children and working as a perfumist. Lakshmi and Malik are in the novel but this is Radha's story. I found Radha's career fascinating. I'm not a great wearer of perfumes myself but I really enjoyed reading about how they are mixed (and it made me want to take a trip to the Guerlain or Channel counter and sniff perfumes). Radha also has to deal with the issues that working mothers always have to deal with, including trying to get her husband to value her career and worrying about her relationship with her French mother-in-law. Plus she had some unfinished business from the first book to deal with. I thought Joshi handled all of this well although I did think there were a few too many false endings. But all in all, recommended. There is a decent plot but I think Joshi's books rely more on characterization and, to a certain extent, sense of place. It isn't really necessary to read the other two books to enjoy this one but I do recommend you start at the beginning with The Henna Artist.
- The Last Remains by Elly Griffiths. This is the last installment of one of my favorite series and changes are coming to Ruth Galloway's life. Although a tenured professor, her own department of archaeology is on the University's cutting block and she has decisions to make. Then there is Nelson, the father of her child, who is now separated from his wife Michelle and is pushing Ruth to move in together. But does she want that? And of course there is a skeleton discovered that needs to be investigated. One thing I really liked about this installment is that Griffiths does not pretend that COVID is over. This takes place in 2021 so people are still wearing masks (except the ones who refuse), people exposed to COVID still have to quarantine and her good friend Cathbad (who almost died of COVID in the last book) is still recovering and is not himself. While I'm sad that the series is ending because I always enjoyed the archaeology in the books, I was (I admit) getting tired of the on-again, off-again relationship with Nelson. I think she ended the series on a good note and even managed to bring the story around to the very first mystery in the series in a very satisfying way. Recommended but especially if you read the whole series. This has a decent stand alone plot but much of it depends on the characters she has built up over the years.
- Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club by J. Ryan Stradal. An intergenerational story about five women (Betty, Florence, Mariel and Julia), and a couple of men, who all own/work at the Lakeside Supper Club in northern Minnesota at different times beginning in the Depression. The main storyline follows the story of Mariel and her husband Ned (who also comes from a restaurant owning family) and their desire to have Ned figure out what he wants to do in life and also their desire to have a baby. But there is a secondary storyline about Mariel's mother Florence who has arrived back in town, causing emotional turmoil for Mariel. The underlying story (or moral) is that not all family members in a family-owned business want to carry on the business and you should never assume that one of your children (usually a son) is better suited to carrying on a business than another (usually a daughter). A complicated inter-generational story is a lot for an author to strive for in a novel that is only 350 pages long (on e-reader) and I didn't think this author really succeeded. This is one of those novels that switches back and forth in time, telling Florence, Mariel and Ned's story (and Betty and Julia's) with each chapter being in a different time and, often, place. The result, for me, was that I was never truly invested in any of the stories because I kept being jerked out of one story and plopped into another story. I'm not sure that the author intended this to be a sad book (it is marketed more like a beach read) but I thought it was sad. Of the six people who are affiliated with the supper club - three of them would leave it in a heartbeat, one of them is only a caretaker and the other two are literally killed by the place. I thought this would be a nice book for me to read at the start of summer since I vacation in northern Minnesota each year but it didn't have as much of a sense of place as I expected and could equally have been set in northern Wisconsin. The author bio says that he was born and raised in Minnesota but now lives in California with his family and, to me, the book reads like it was written by someone who is grateful to have escaped Minnesota.
- The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish. This is a long (very long) novel about two modern academics who discover a trove of old documents that reveal a story that wasn't previously known. If that sounds a lot like the plot of Possession by A.S. Byatt, it is. In this case the academics are Helen Watt, a British historian of Jewish history (although she herself is not Jewish) on the brink of retirement struggling with Parkinson's, and Aaron Levy, a young American Ph.D. student who is loaned to Helen to assist in translating and studying the documents, which consist of household records and letters from a Jewish household in 1600's London. Helen and Aaron are very different from each other and part of the story is about their relationship which is impacted by each of their pasts. They very early determine that the documents belonged to a household of a blind rabbi and that the rabbi's scribe is, very unusually, a woman. Eventually, the story leaves the modern period and we enter the world of Ester Velasquez, newly arrived in London in the mid-1600's from Amsterdam where many Jews fled from Spain and Portugal during the Inquisition. The double plots are, to say the least, complex. The history of Hasidic Jews in London in the 1600's is not something I knew anything about before reading this. I also knew nothing about the philosophy of Spinoza (I'm not sure I know much more after reading the book because I admit I skimmed a lot of the philosophical discussions.) I know that in the last year I have complained many times about novels that jump between two different time periods, but this is a novel that does it correctly and to great effect. After reading the first chapter I hoped that I would end up loving this book the way that I love Possession. But although I liked it quite a bit, I thought it could have done with a bit of editing. There are big info dumps in the various letters that the academics translate (in addition to the long disquisitions on philosophy) that drag the plot a bit. With that warning, I do recommend it. It has very interesting characters and (if you ignore the philosophical letters) a plot that kept me wanting to know more. It has a good sense of place - Restoration London with the plague and the great fire as well as the tightknit Jewish community. And I think you can skim the info-dump sections like I did if you aren't that interested in the philosophy discussions (they really aren't necessary for the plot, but are there mostly for character development).
- Act of Oblivion by Robert Harris. I didn't intend to read two long novels this month that were both set during the Restoration , but that's what happened. After Charles II was restored to the English throne, the "Act of Oblivion" was enacted which caused all the men who signed the death warrant for his father to be hunted down, tried and put to death. A great number of them were immediately arrested and put to death. But some escaped by leaving the country, leading to a worldwide manhunt. In this novel, two of them (Edward Whalley and his son-in-law William Goffe) escape to America, first to the Massachusetts Bay colony, then to Connecticut and finally to New Haven (which at the time was not part of Connecticut and wanted to be recognized as its own colony.) Whalley and Goffe are relentlessly pursued by Richard Naylor who leads the manhunt on behalf of the King and as part of his own personal vendetta. I believe Naylor is a fictional character but Whalley and Goffe were actual Regicides. In some ways this is a story about fanatics - on both the Puritan side and the Royalist side - but Harris does a good job showing the fanaticism without necessarily making the characters completely dislikeable. Although primarily a plot-driven novel, this novel has everything: a good plot, fully fleshed characters who are not perfect, a true sense of place (Puritan America) and really fine writing. My only complaint is that the story drags on a bit towards the end - but I think that is because it is based on a true story and he couldn't (or didn't want to) fudge the dates.
- Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead. Benji (who thinks he is old enough now to go by Ben) spends his summer on Long Island hanging with friends, working at the ice cream shop and wishing he was much cooler than he is. Colson Whitehead sets this book in a part of Sag Harbor that, in the 1940's, began to attract a Black middle class population. Like all summer homes, it has emotional resonance for the children and grandchildren of those first owners, all of whom have memories of the long summer days they spent there before they became adults. With every Colson Whitehead book I read, I become more firmly convinced he is one of our best writers. Be warned, if you are looking for a page turner, this is not it. There is no real plot. This is a picture of a place and also of a time (the early 1980's) that, if you lived through it, you will remember even if you are not Black and never set foot in Sag Harbor. It's the kind of book you can take on vacation, to the beach or pool, and read in spurts. His rendering of location is vivid and Benji and his friends come to life on the page. It was the perfect book to start the summer.
