Throughout May I kept thinking that it was a bad month for reading. Looking back on it, though, although I read fewer books than usual in May, I read longer and more complex books than I have been able to get through in recent months.
These are the books I finished in May.
These Days by Lucy Caldwell
It is a deficiency in my education that I never knew that Belfast suffered a Blitz during WWII. This novel begins in April, 1941 right before the first bombing. There also is another bombing on the Tuesday after Easter. The final bombings were at the beginning of May. The novel is divided into three parts (one part for each bombing) and follows the lives of one family: the father Philip is a doctor at the local hospital, the mother Florence is still in grief over the loss of her first love in World War I and trying to find a purpose in life now that her children are mostly grown, oldest daughter Audrey is dating a (controlling) doctor named Richard who works with her father, middle daughter Emma is a volunteer and in a secret relationship with a women, and son Paul is too young to really feel the panic. There is also Mrs. Price, the family's daily help, as well as Betty who comes in to help her. Caldwell also briefly introduces another somewhat middle class family with a young daughter named Maisie. The bombings change all of them, and Belfast, forever. Along the way the women in the novel grapple with cultural expectations and changing times. This novel won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction in 2023 which is why I picked it up - I'm not usually one for WWII novels. I learned a lot and it was very sad but I never really became invested in the characters. For instance, Maisie and her family tell a part of the story of the Blitz but the characters don't seem to exist other than for that purpose. This novel has a very good sense of place and some of the individual stories are compelling but as a whole I had trouble with the narrative flow and I kept putting it down for days at a time.
The Trees by Percival Everett
It is hard to categorize this novel and it really needs more than a paragraph to really describe it. It starts out as a murder mystery but moves into horror (including zombies) but is also very funny. I mean laugh out loud funny. The action begins in Money Mississippi sometime during the first Trump administration although the racial attitudes seem to still be stuck in the 1940's. The (white) sheriff is perplexed. There is a murder of a white man whose body is castrated. A dead black man is found with him, holding the white man's testicles. Did the black man kill the white man? But then how did the black man die? Then the body of the black man disappears from the morgue, and reappears with another dead white man who is also castrated. How did the body disappear? Two (black) detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation are sent to assist, to the chagrin of the Sheriff (and the town). Eventually the FBI gets involved. Everyone agrees that the whole thing is strange. And things just keep getting stranger. Everett takes as his starting point a true story - the lynching of Emmet Till, a boy who was accused of speaking to (and touching) a white woman. The woman, years later, said she lied about it. The two dead men at the start of this novel are descendants of the killers of Till. I don't want to give too much away but this is a novel that is enjoyable AND thought provoking.
Breaking Creed by Alex Cava
This is the first book in a mystery series but I think the main character is a spinoff from another series (because the person who seems to be from the other series and the main character here have a past). I've had this series on my TBR for a long time because it is a mystery with dogs. Ryder Creed, an ex marine, trains dogs to do various searches and then hires himself and them out to law enforcement. This story involves a drug cartel and human trafficking. I'll probably read another of these although it was a little bit more violent than I usually like.
Under Lock and Skeleton Key by Gigi Pandian
This is another mystery (first in a series) that has been on my TBR for a while. The premise is good. Tempest Raj is a magician with a big successful Las Vegas show but something goes wrong that puts the whole audience in danger and she ends up broke and back at home with her widowed dad and grandparents. Her dad runs a construction company that installs secret rooms and hidden staircases in homes. When a body is found in a secret room on his latest job, it isn't clear if the victim was actually intended to be Tempest. This is a locked room mystery which I generally like, but I did not like this book because I did not like Pandian's writing style. At first I thought maybe this was first novel problems, but it wasn't. Not even close; she's written a number of novels. Pandian does a lot of "telling", not "showing" and most of her telling is, in my opinion, just unnecessary. Here is an example where Tempest is visiting a friend: "Tempest hopped onto a window seat in front of the ceiling-high wall of windows in this industrial live-work apartment in the South of Market neighborhood of San Francisco known as SOMA." None of that detail was necessary or added anything to the scene. That's what the whole novel is like. This novel was not for me at all.
Radio Girls by Sarah Jane Stratford
In 1926 Maisie Musgrave, a Canadian with a secretarial certificate, is living in London looking for a way to support herself. There is an opening for a secretary at the BBC, a public corporation in charge of radio broadcasting, which is still fairly new. Maisie surprises even herself by getting the job and ends up working as an assistant to the secretary to the Director General of the BBC himself. But she discovers that she is also to be "shared" by the head of "Talks" programming, a woman named Hilda Matheson. Sarah Jane Stratford, in an afterward, tells us that she was fascinated by the career of Hilda Matheson and wanted to write about it and the early days of the BBC which was one of the few places that hired women for important jobs. Stratford weaves in a tale of incipient fascism to be discovered and revealed (although this book was published in 2016 there are many parallels to today unfortunately) that was interesting but I thought was ultimately unnecessary - the story of the BBC was enough. I did enjoy this novel. Maisie is our point of view character but Stratford doesn't make her too naive or stupid to be annoying, just an outsider needing to ask a lot of questions.
Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe by Carl Zimmer
Last year, one of my 10 favorite books of the year was She Has Her Mother's Laugh by Carl Zimmer. That was a book about genetics (broadly). This latest book is about aerobiology, the study of what's alive (or can stay alive) in our atmosphere. It traces, among other things, the quest to prove whether some diseases, like tuberculosis and measles, can be transmitted through the air (spoiler alert: they can). He starts at the beginning with the discredited theories of miasmas, and takes us through history including the attempts to catch germs in the air by Louis Pasteur, Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earheart. He scares us (at least, he scared me) with the attempts by the US Military to perfect biological warfare with anthrax and other matters. And he frustratingly recalls the early days of COVID where we were told that washing our hands and not touching our eyes was enough to protect us. Zimmer writes for, among others, the New York Times and he has the ability to relate a compelling narrative in terms "Everyman" can understand. I fully expect this book will be on my list of favorite books of 2025.
Shadowplay by Joseph O'Connor
In April I read and very much enjoyed My Father's House by Joseph O'Connor, which probably will go on my list of favorite books of 2025. This month I read his 2020 Walter Scott Prize-winning novel Shadowplay. The main character is Bram Stoker who is known as the author of Dracula. What I never knew was that he supported himself as the manager of the Lyceum Theater in London, and as the personal assistant to its owner the great actor Henry Irving. O'Connor tells Stoker's story through snippets of letters, newspaper articles and bits of unfinished autobiography (all fictional) of Stoker. The novel revolves around Stoker's relationship with Irving, a mercurial figure, and with the great British actress Ellen Terry (sort of the Meryl Streep of her day). At night the sleepless Stoker wanders the streets of London at the same time that Jack the Ripper is at large. He writes unsuccessful books in his free time, all the while gathering subconsciously the bits and pieces that will eventually become Dracula. O'Connor doesn't try to recreate the writing process but as the novel goes on the reader who remembers Dracula will notice where certain ideas came from. And if you have never read Dracula, you simply won't notice those and will just enjoy the story. This is a very good novel; I really like O'Connor's writing style. I think for the general reader they would like My Father's House a little bit better - it is more of a thriller. People who enjoy theater and/or Dracula will like this novel which provides a wonderful look backstage at a Victorian theater.
