Category: B Reviews

Review: The Benevolent Society of Ill Mannered Ladies by Alison Goodman

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B+ Reviews> blog tours> book reviews
Review: The Benevolent Society of Ill Mannered Ladies by Alison GoodmanThe Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies (The Ill-Mannered Ladies, #1) by Alison Goodman
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, large print, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery
Series: Ill-Mannered Ladies #1
Pages: 464
Published by Berkley on May 30, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A high society amateur detective at the heart of Regency London uses her wits and invisibility as an 'old maid' to protect other women in a new and fiercely feminist historical mystery series from New York Times bestselling author Alison Goodman.
Lady Augusta Colebrook, "Gus," is determinedly unmarried, bored by society life, and tired of being dismissed at the age of forty-two. She and her twin sister, Julia, who is grieving her dead betrothed, need a distraction. One soon presents itself: to rescue their friend's goddaughter, Caroline, from her violent husband.
The sisters set out to Caroline's country estate with a plan, but their carriage is accosted by a highwayman. In the scuffle, Gus accidentally shoots and injures the ruffian, only to discover he is Lord Evan Belford, an acquaintance from their past who was charged with murder and exiled to Australia twenty years ago. What follows is a high adventure full of danger, clever improvisation, heart-racing near misses, and a little help from a revived and rather charming Lord Evan.
Back in London, Gus can't stop thinking about her unlikely (not to mention handsome) comrade-in-arms. She is convinced Lord Evan was falsely accused of murder, and she is going to prove it. She persuades Julia to join her in a quest to help Lord Evan, and others in need—society be damned! And so begins the beguiling secret life and adventures of the Colebrook twins.
A rollicking and joyous adventure, with a beautiful love story at its heart, about two rebellious sisters forging their own path in Regency London

My Review:

Lady Augusta Colebrook is an ape-leader. She’s a 42 year old spinster with no prospects of marriage whatsoever – and she’s content in that state, living with her twin sister Julia in rather well-upholstered circumstances. Lady Augusta and Julia may still be under the control of the younger brother who inherited the title, but his control is limited to general opprobrium and ownership of the house they live in as they have independent means of their own.

What makes Lady Augusta (generally called Gus by her friends and intimates) an ape-leader? The term is from an old English adage which said that a spinster’s punishment after death, for failing to procreate, would be to lead apes in hell. Technically both Gus and Julia are ape-leaders, but Gus’ personality tends toward leading considerably more than Julia’s does or ever will.

Julia is a peacemaker who thinks the best of everyone. Gus is the person in whose wake Julia is generally trying to make peace after Gus has refused to kowtow to the behavioral expectations due to her gender.

The sisters should be content to sit on the sidelines of Regency society and mind their own behavior while observing the misbehavior (amorous and otherwise) of the younger and livelier members of the ton.

But there’s life in both of these “old girls” yet, and Gus at least is determined to make sure that both of them experience that life to the fullest – for whatever time her sister might have left. Which leads them to the kind of dangerous derring-do that neither of them ever expected.

The kind of adventure in the kinds of places that may very well get them killed – even as it opens their eyes to the kinds of things that no well-bred, well-behaved woman is expected to see or know.

But once they’ve seen, once they know, they can’t unsee. And they can’t help but try to fix what they can with as much benevolence as possible.

Escape Rating B+: “Well behaved women seldom make history” or so goes the famous quote by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, which may be a quote from 1976 rather than the Colebrook sisters Regency – but very much still applies.

It’s also the reason I picked this book up.

The cover, and the blurb, both lead readers to the impression that this book is going to be on the light and frothy side, but that is far from the case. Rather than being a look at the frivolities and minor disgraces in the life of the ton, as so many Regency romances are, The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies shines its light in very dark places, in a way that is not dissimilar to C.S. Harris’ Sebastian St. Cyr series.

Both the Colebrook sisters and St. Cyr are conducting their investigations during the Regency period, in this book specifically 1812 – which is also the year in which books 4 through 8 of the St. Cyr series (Where Serpents Sleep, What Remains of Heaven, Where Shadows Dance, When Maidens Mourn, What Darkness Brings) take place. Both series expose the slimy underbelly of the glittering Regency, but they do it from different perspectives.

St. Cyr, as a member of the aristocracy, operates within the halls of power, while the Colebrook sisters, as disregarded females on the outskirts of the ton, expose the dangers that specifically affect women in that society merely for living while female. In a way, it’s as though Sebastian’s wife Hero, a social reformer in her own right, was the focal point of his series.

(This is all a very large hint that if you enjoy the one series you’ll probably enjoy the other, as they are shining their lights into the dark places of the same historical period. Just not the same dark places.)

What makes the dark places that the Colebrook sisters so chilling is that the places their so-called ill-behavior takes them were all much too real. And it’s much too easy for a reader to imagine themselves in those circumstances. Women really were not just their husband’s property in this era, but his to seemingly dispose of as he pleased, even into an early grave whether indirectly by way of an insane asylum or by an outright murder which was entirely too easy to cover up in a world where a man’s word was law, his wife was chattel and forensic science hadn’t even reached infancy yet.

It’s no wonder that Gus has no desire to marry – she’s too intelligent not to be aware that for a woman with both independent means and an independent streak a mile wide, the costs for her could be deadly.

The conditions that Gus and Julia investigate in the three stories that make up this book are dark, gruesome and inescapably real, to the point where this book needs a whole lot more trigger warnings than that blurb would lead one to believe.

Whether or not a reader will stick through those dark places is going to depend a lot on how one feels about Gus and Julia, because they, especially Gus, are the ones leading us through multiple valleys of the shadow of death, and if they aren’t people you’re willing to follow, then it does work.

I felt for Gus, and liked her intelligent observations of the conditions she was supposed to live under and decided to refuse from her position of relative privilege. I’m not totally sure she successfully walked that fine line between giving a historical-set heroine enough agency to do the things we need her to do to be the protagonist without making her more of a creature of our time than hers. Julia does feel like a woman of her times, which is why she drove me a bit crazy as a character as I couldn’t get into her head at all.

Your reading mileage may vary when it comes to Gus and Julia, but there seems to be no debate on the personality of their brother Duffy. Duffy is used to demonstrate just how circumscribed their lives are supposed to be by the lights of their society. He’s also a total arsehat, a person whose head is so far up their arse that they are wearing it for a hat. And in Duffy’s case, only the British spelling will do. He’s the character we all love to hate. If this were the froth that the cover picture leads you to believe, he’d be both the villain AND the comic relief.

Instead he’s a symbol of everything that’s wrong and just why Gus needs to fight back so damn much and so damn hard.

While there is a bit of a romance hinted at, this is far, far, far from being what is usually meant by a Regency romance – and it’s a much more interesting book for it, but perhaps not for the faint of heart.

Review: Dear Chrysanthemums by Fiona Sze-Lorrain

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B+ Reviews> book reviews
Review: Dear Chrysanthemums by Fiona Sze-LorrainDear Chrysanthemums: A Novel in Stories by Fiona Sze-Lorrain
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, literary fiction
Pages: 176
Published by Scribner on May 2, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads


A startling and vivid debut novel in stories from acclaimed poet and translator Fiona Sze-Lorrain featuring deeply compelling Asian women who reckon with the past, violence, and exile—set in Shanghai, Beijing, Singapore, Paris, and New York.

“Cooking for Madame Chiang” set in 1946: Two cooks work for Madame Chiang Kai-shek and prepare a foreign dish craved by their mistress, which becomes a political weapon and and leads to their tragic end. “Death at the Wukang Mansion” set in 1966: Punished for her extramarital affair, a dancer is transferred to Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution and assigned to an ominous apartment in building whose other residents often depart in coffins. “The White Piano” set in 1996: A budding Asian pianist from New York settles down in Paris and is assaulted when a mysterious piano arrives from Singapore. “The Invisible Window” set in 2016: After their exile following the Tiananmen massacre, three women gather in a French cathedral to renew their friendship and reunite in their grief and faith.
Evocative, vivid, disturbing, and written with a masterful ear for language, Dear Chrysanthemums renders both a devastating portrait of diasporic life and inhumanity, as well as a tender web of shared memory, artistic expression, and love.

My Review:

In the beginning, or at least the chronological beginning of this “novel in stories”, there are two women in a third woman’s kitchen. That story, “Cooking for Madame Chiang, 1946” manages to both tell a complete story AND weave together all the threads that permeate the entire work in a way that seems to achieve more depth and more interconnectivity the more I think about it.

The two women in that kitchen, Little Green and Chang’er, are cooking for Madame Chiang Kai-Shek in 1946 after the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War, known in the West as World War II and just prior to the Chinese Communist Revolution.

All the stories in this collected novel relate back to those three women and what they represent, sometimes figuratively, often literally as many of the stories are centered around Chang’er’s descendants.

So this is a collection of stories of women’s perspectives on 20th century China, as seen through the eyes of Chang’er and her daughters and granddaughters who became part of the Chinese Diaspora in Singapore, while Little Green’s story is hers alone as her service to the Westernized Madame Chiang made her a target of the Revolution.

Some of the stories’ connections to Chang’er and Little Green are not obvious at first (“Death at the Wukang Mansion, 1966” is one such story) and are only revealed as the reader follows the course of the braided novel back and forth through time.

It is also symbolic that all of these stories take place in years that end in the number six, from the 1946 of “Cooking for Madame Chiang” to the 2016 of “The Invisible Window”. The number six in Chinese divination signifies a “smooth life”, something that none of the women in these interconnected stories manages to achieve.

But in their less than smooth lives we get glimpses of the choppy seas that each of them navigated, whether they remained in China or fled to far-distant shores, and how the experiences that led or followed them impacted the rest of their lives – and their century.

Escape Rating B+: I left this collection feeling both enchanted and teased. Each story is a bit of a treasure hunt and a chef’s kiss wrapped into one. The treasure is figuring out how each woman connects to the others. The chef’s kiss is in the way that each story is complete in itself, beautifully told, but still leaves the reader wishing for more – not necessarily more of that story in particular, but more of the history and background in general. The way the stories are each told make it clear that there are vast depths to be explored that this collection can only hint at.

I was also struck by the way that Dear Chrysanthemums manages to achieve the result that last week’s Daughters of Muscadine fell short of. Both are attempts to tell a kind of braided, linked story through a collection of stories, but Daughters missed that connectedness where Dear Chrysanthemums achieved it in every story through that treasure hunt of hints and references and casting back on long lives lived after tragedy and loss.

While there were a couple of stories that either didn’t work for me at the initial read (“Death at the Wukang Mansion”) or didn’t work at all (“The White Piano”), for the most part this collection told fascinating stories of women’s lives that hinted at so much to explore beneath the surface. I was initially a bit reluctant (last week’s reads were really frustrating) but I’m happy I picked up this gem after all.

Review: You Are Here by Karin Lin-Greenberg

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | audio reviews> audiobooks> B- Reviews> book reviews
Review: You Are Here by Karin Lin-GreenbergYou Are Here by Karin Lin-Greenberg
Narrator: Jennifer Aquino
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: literary fiction
Pages: 304
Length: 8 hours and 39 minutes
Published by Counterpoint, HighBridge a division of Recorded Books on May 2, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The inhabitants of a small town have long found that their lives intersect at one focal point: the local shopping mall. But business is down, stores are closing, and as the institution breathes its last gasp, the people inside it dream of something different, something more. You Are Here brings this diverse group of characters vividly to life.
The only hair stylist at Sunshine Clips secretly watches YouTube primers on how to draw and paint, just as her awkward young son covertly studies new illusions for his magic act. His friend and magician's assistant, a high school cashier in the food court, has attracted the unwanted attention of a strange boy at school. She tells no one except the mall's chain bookstore manager, a failed academic living in the tiny house he built in his mother-in-law's backyard. His family is watched over by the judgmental old woman next door, whose weekly trips to Sunshine Clips hide a complicated and emotional history and will spark the moment when everything changes for them all.
Exploring how the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are inextricably bound to the places we call home, You Are Here is a keenly perceptive and deeply humane portrait of a community in transition, ultimately illuminating the magical connections that can bloom from the ordinary wonder of our everyday lives.

My Review:

You are here, in an America where the driving economic engine and social-type phenomenon called a “shopping mall” is clearly dying. All you have to do is look at the vacant storefronts in even the largest and seemingly busiest malls around you. Or at the vast acreage of sparsely populated parking lots that surround them.

There are lots of stories about what happens in small towns when the largest employer in the area leaves or dies. Stories about the economic depression and eventual death of the town it once supported.

But what happens when a shopping mall dies? (We’re probably in the process of finding out in real life, as they do seem to be dying all over.) Greenways Mall in upstate New York has been dying for years at the point where this book picks up its action.

Or rather, the lack thereof, which is the problem in a nutshell. There is very little going on at the mall. It’s dying and everyone knows it. It’s been dying for years, to the point where its actual demise won’t be much of a blip in the local economy. Not many stores are still open, not very many people still work there, not many people, even in the neighborhood, still shop there. It’s a vicious circle, cycling rapidly towards the drain.

But the lack of traffic in the mall, writ large, does not mean that the place isn’t the hub of several people’s lives and/or their economic mainstay. They are the central figures in You Are Here, Tina Huang who is the last stylist at Sunshine Clips and her little boy Jackson who spends his after school hours doing his homework at the salon. Kevin, the manager of the chain bookstore outlet, is killing time in a dead end job because he can’t make up his mind about what he really wants to be doing with his life. And all too aware that his wife is running out of patience with his lack of pretty much everything except crazy business ideas that will only eat up money they don’t have.

Then there’s Ro Goodson, an elderly widow who comes to the mall because she’s lonely. She’s Tina’s only regular customer, and she’s a fixture at Greenways. A disapproving one who bestows judgemental advice on everyone she meets, making it clear that none of them are measuring up to whatever standards have ossified inside her barely polite and unconsciously bigoted head.

The mall and its denizens all seem accepting of their fate, trapped in a cycle where nothing good ever seems to happen, until something truly terrible occurs to shake them out of their respective sloughs of despond. It may be the making of each of them. Or it may mow them under.

Time will, as it always does, tell.

Escape Rating B-: The premise of this book has a tremendous amount of potential. Shopping malls, once a bright fixture of the landscape, are dying pretty much everywhere. So there are lots of Greenways Malls out there and probably one near where you live just as there is here. So this sounded like it would have lots of story potential. Which it does.

The question for the reader is whether or not the book in hand lived up to that potential. As you might surmise from the rating, I ended up with very mixed feelings.

One of the parts that is done very well is that each of the individual characters, from 9-year-old Jackson Huang to 89-year-old Ro Goodson, is distinct and distinctly well portrayed. We get to know who these people are and how and why they’ve ended up in this crumbling place – and just how much of their lives will crumble with it.

But not a lot happens in You Are Here. It’s a slice-of-life kind of story, where every character is shuffling along in their rut – except for 9-year-old Jackson – and can’t see over the edges of the rut they’ve worn down for themselves.

Even the big event that knocks everything off course is downplayed as it happens very late in the book. The chapter with the most verve is actually an epilogue, where we learn the effects of that event nearly a decade later.

The story as it goes along is a story of quiet desperation told in plots and subplots that knit together well but don’t seem to go much of anywhere until that sharp break almost at the end.

And that was pretty much where this story fell down for me on not one but two fronts. As I said above, the characters are distinct and well-drawn, which should have made this a great book for audio. But it wasn’t, which was pretty jarring after the marvelous performance of The Wager earlier this week.

In the case of You Are Here the narrator is very precise but her reading is flat. She doesn’t voice the characters enough to make each one as distinct as they are in the text. I had to drop the audio and switch to text very early in the story just to keep going with this one, as my reading group recommended it and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

The other reason this didn’t work for me as well as it did for others in that group is that it is VERY much in the literary fiction tradition, which means that not much really happens but the characters angst about it a lot. If that’s your jam this will work for you, but if it’s not, it likely won’t.

Which is too bad, because this slow build of a novel confronts a whole lot of serious issues in 21st century life, and does a great job of making the reader feel those issues through those well-drawn, distinct, characters. For this reader, that made You Are Here an interesting but not compelling book.

Review: The Boyfriend Candidate by Ashley Winstead

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> blog tours> book reviews
Review: The Boyfriend Candidate by Ashley WinsteadThe Boyfriend Candidate by Ashley Winstead
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: contemporary romance, Romance, romantic comedy
Pages: 384
Published by Graydon House on May 9, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

“Charming, swoony, and utterly unputdownable. I LOVE this book!”—LYNN PAINTER, New York Times bestselling author of Better Than the Movies
A laugh-out-loud rom-com about learning to embrace living outside your comfort zone.
As a shy school librarian, Alexis Stone is comfortable keeping out of the spotlight. But when she’s dumped for being too meek—in bed!—the humiliation is a wake-up call. She decides she needs to change, and what better way to kick-start her new more adventurous life than with her first one-night stand?
Enter Logan, the gorgeous, foul-mouthed stranger she meets at a hotel bar. Logan is audacious and filterless, making him Alexis’s opposite—and boy, do opposites attract! Just as she’s about to fulfill her hookup wish, the hotel catches fire in a freak lightning storm—and in their rush to escape, Logan is discovered carrying her into the street, where people are waiting with cameras. Cameras Logan promptly—and shockingly—flees.
Alexis is bewildered until breaking news hits: pictures of her and Logan escaping the fire are all over the internet. It turns out Logan is none other than Logan Arthur, the hotshot politician challenging the Texas governor’s seat. The salacious images are poised to sink his career—and jeopardize Alexis’s job—until a solution is proposed: to squash the scandal, he and Alexis could pretend to be in a relationship until election day…in two months. What could possibly go wrong?

My Review:

We’ve probably all done some really weird, out of our comfort zones things while getting over an ex. Or getting vicarious revenge on said ex. Most of us don’t get struck by lightning while we’re doing those things. Or get caught on camera, whether in deshabille or not, while doing said things. Whether or not we’ve been doing those things we might someday regret with someone currently running for governor – of our state or any other.

Not that both Alexis Stone AND Texas gubernatorial candidate Logan Arthur don’t look fairly ungoverned in the pic that has taken the internet by storm. And thrown Logan’s candidacy in a tempest of its very own – one that the opposition is guaranteed to take advantage of – unless Logan’s people get ahead of it first and very, very fast.

Both Logan and Ashley are single and unattached. This isn’t THAT kind of political scandal. It’s just that in the looks department Logan makes Justin Trudeau look like he isn’t really trying, AND he has a well-deserved reputation as a playboy. His older, settled, highly respected opponent has made a great deal of political hay over Logan’s inability to commit to a relationship with anyone and questioned whether he’s mature enough to commit to a relationship with the entire state. Of Texas.

Logan’s campaign wants Alexis to agree to a fake relationship with the candidate until after the election is over, win or lose. If Logan wins, they can break up quietly and he can go on to become the first Democratic governor of Texas in entirely too damn long. If Logan loses, it won’t matter anyway.

Or so everyone believes. Whether it’s going to matter to either Logan or Alexas after two months of fake dating in front of seemingly all the cameras in Texas is a question that no one seems to have asked.

Whether a shy, downright introverted school librarian is willing or able to put herself in front of those same ever-present cameras and put her entire life on display on the campaign trail is a huge, ginormous ask.

Whether Ashley can keep her heart to herself while she’s doing it is something that she needs to ask herself. Seriously. Before it’s much too late. For her heart. And, much to Ashley’s surprise, for his.

Escape Rating B: The Boyfriend Candidate starts out with one of the most sizzling meet-cutes ever. As Alexis and Logan are seducing each other with words over an increasing number of drinks and over-the-top stories they tell each other, the steam practically rises off the page. To the point where it’s not all that surprising that the sparks they strike from each other result in an actual lightning strike.

And that’s where the story really heats up!

The fun part of this one is the way it tackles the “fake dating” trope and then uses it to say a whole lot of really important things about how important it is to love yourself first and figure out what you really want in life before you inflict yourself on anyone else.

Both Logan and Alexis have dreams to fulfill but both of them have been too caught up in being what other people want to take the necessary hard look at what they themselves really want. They are both, in entirely different ways, people pleasers. For Alexis that means twisting herself into an emotional pretzel out of fear that if she rocks the boat even a little bit people will leave her. As her father left her mother – and then was killed in a car crash. As her sister emotionally abandoned her after those same events. Although their relationship is better now the stress of those dark days still lingers. On Alexis at least.

Logan wants to do good. Really, truly, seriously. He knows that being governor will give him the kind of reach and influence, not to mention the really tall bully pulpit, that he can use to make good things happen. But being a candidate is making him squeeze his outsize, blunt, profane and argumentative personality into a tiny, meek, mild-mannered little box. And it’s not working for either him or the campaign.

But to make his campaign work, Alexis needs to get on board. To make that work for her, she has to find a voice of her own no matter how much it scares her. And Logan needs to own his own truth to have a real chance, both with the voters and with Ashley.

There’s a lot to love in The Boyfriend Candidate. While Ashley’s journey is the toughest, and the one we’re most intimate with as she’s the one telling the story, Logan’s journey is just as important to making the whole thing work, both for them and for the reader.

There’s also a lot that gets said about the state of politics in general and in Texas in particular. Especially about the state of libraries and education and education funding, as those issues become Ashley’s platform in a huge and necessary way. The best and worst thing is that all of the issues that Ashley raises in her platform, from decreasing funding for education, year after year, to increasing book bans everywhere, are all substantially true. For this librarian, the inclusion of those issues was a huge plus. Some readers may not and your reading mileage may vary.

Howsomever, as a reader I did have one issue with this story, and it’s an issue that took me completely out of the story to the point where the grade landed on B. It’s clear throughout the book that whatever Ashley and Logan might be saying out loud, neither of them has managed to keep their hearts to themselves. There’s going to be a crash before the final HEA. The way that crash came about, when Ashley’s sister forced her between a rock and a hard place in a way that was guaranteed to explode all over Ashley, Logan, and his campaign, read like the kind of sabotage that was not part of Ashley’s current relationship with her sister. It came out of left field in a way that didn’t work for me at all.

Which doesn’t mean that I didn’t enjoy the book as a whole, because I most definitely did. (It also reminded me quite a bit of Jasmine Guillory’s Party of Two, and I adored that book and the whole Wedding Date series it’s a part of, so I was a bit pre-determined to like The Boyfriend Candidate. And I did. I just wish there’d been a way to stage that inevitable explosion that felt more organic to the story.

Review: The Beach Reads Bookshop by Lee Tobin McClain

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> blog tours> book reviews
Review: The Beach Reads Bookshop by Lee Tobin McClainThe Beach Reads Bookshop by Lee Tobin McClain
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: contemporary romance, relationship fiction, women's fiction
Series: Hometown Brothers #3
Pages: 352
Published by HQN Books on April 25, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Running a bookstore on a quaint Chesapeake island is exactly the life Deena Clark would have chosen for herself--but helping billionaire businessman Luis Dominguez figure out fatherhood is part of the package. Can bonding over books and one little girl help them open their hearts to each other?

My Review:

“When one door closes another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.” At least according to Alexander Graham Bell. But what if, as occurs in – and at – The Beach Reads Bookstore, it’s not the looking forward and back that does you in, but rather looking next to you at the person who needs to walk through that new door with you – and not trusting them well enough – or at all – when it comes to crossing that next threshold with them at your side.

Two doors have shut behind 50something Carol Fisher. She lost her job and her husband on the same day to the same cause, stupidity. Institutional stupidity on the part of the college where she is suddenly no longer employed in the tutoring center – which is slated to go online. Testosterone-induced middle-age midlife crisis stupidity on the part of her soon-to-be ex-husband, who she caught carrying his nurse through the house on the way to some hanky-panky. A piece of stupidity he’s going to pay for in more ways than one, as he’s currently collecting disability that is going to stop the minute his duplicity is revealed.

An entirely different set of doors has closed for Deena Clark. Her best friend and roommate has died, leaving Deena with custody of her friend’s baby girl, who shows signs of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. Deena loves Willow, and wants more than anything to be her mother. But she’s also at the end of her rope. She was barely scraping by financially when she was sharing the apartment, but now that she’s on her own and responsible for a baby who needs extra care, she knows that she doesn’t have the resources to get Willow the help she needs. And that’s just not good enough for little Willow.

Deena sees only one option – to take Willow to her sperm donor and hope that the rich entrepreneur will provide the child support he didn’t know he was responsible for. But Luis Dominguez, once he accepts that Willow is incontrovertibly his, has no plans to pay Deena to make the baby and her caregiver go away.

He intends to be Willow’s father – and he’s willing to cajole or connive in order to make that happen. With all the best intentions – because he’s that kind of Type-A steamroller who believes he always knows best.

His plan is to buy the old, dilapidated bookstore on Teaberry Island, the place where he grew up and where his family still lives, and pay Deena an exorbitant amount of money to manage the bookstore and take care of his daughter – with the able and conveniently nearby assistance of his mother, his two brothers and their wives. His plan keeps Deena with him, gives him something to do on Teaberry Island, and most importantly, gives him time to be a real father to his little girl. All he has to do is tear himself away from his high stakes, high pressure, big time consulting firm in DC.

That his plan to open a door for Willow, Deena and himself runs headlong into Carol’s plan to reopen that same dilapidated bookstore that her family still owns isn’t even on his radar – and he wouldn’t care if it was and doesn’t care when he finds out.

But Teaberry Island is a small town, and everybody pitches in to get the bookstore open again under Luis’ plan for Deena. Except for Carol and her new-found friends, who have plans to take things in an entirely different situation.

Let the games begin!

Escape Rating B: At first it seems as if Carol – along with her friends – is being set up as the villain of this story. Which is entirely unfair, as she’s in every bit as big of a mess when the story begins as Deena is.

But the “A” plot in The Beach Reads Bookshop is Deena’s slow-burn romance with Luis and their pretty inevitable shift from being strangers to becoming a family. It’s cute and it’s sweet and they each have some lessons to learn along the way – but where they’re going to end up is obvious from the beginning so it’s not exactly a surprise when they get there.

Carol’s story, that “B” plot, on the other hand, had a few more twists and turns. (It also went into one nasty corner that I’ll get to in a minute). Carol is the character who is doing a lot of that “regretting the closed door” at least at the beginning, that the quote is talking about. It’s not just that she misses her job and is mourning the end of her marriage, but she’s looking back even further, all the way back to when her grandfather owned the bookstore and the world was just a bit different.

But her sister sold the bookstore out from under her before she even knew Carol wanted it. Which is the point where Carol barged into Deena’s life.

At first it’s that long ago nostalgia that Carol is really trying to recapture – no matter how badly she goes about it. And no matter how much trouble it gets her into. It’s only as she embraces the new life she’s creating on Teaberry Island that her situation really gets interesting – even as it nearly takes a sharp left turn into “grand theft bookstore”.

Once she starts looking forward instead of back she realizes what a fantastic opportunity all of the doors that slammed behind her really were. And while it wasn’t a surprise that her soon-to-be-ex tried – badly – to get her back, it was great that she did not let herself get sucked back into that boring, unfulfilled and unsatisfactory life.

That her journey brings her around to a point where she and Deena are running that bookstore together – and enjoying it and each other’s company – brought everything full circle and tied the story up with a pretty – and somewhat unexpected – bow.

Reviewer’s Note: There was one fly in the sweet-smelling potpourri of this story, at least for this reader, that lies in the way the conflict over the bookstore played out. As ironic as this may sound, in the beginning, both Carol and the local librarian indulged in more than a bit of reader-shaming over the idea that the bookstore would focus on light, fluffy, “beach read” type books. There is a debate, even in library circles, over the question of whether libraries should push people to read “better” books, or if it’s just terrific that people are reading and enjoying it no matter what they choose to read. It’s a debate that was resolved long ago in favor of being happy that people are reading and that it is REALLY bad karma to shame people for what they read. So it left a really bad taste in this reader’s – and librarian’s – to see that debate played out in a rather snide fashion in the earlier parts of this book, especially the way the local librarian was reader-shaming her own patrons. Your reading mileage, of course, may vary. But I hope that whatever you read and love, that we all stop trying to shame other readers for their choices. 

Review: Happy Place by Emily Henry

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B+ Reviews> book reviews
Review: Happy Place by Emily HenryHappy Place by Emily Henry
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, large print, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Chick Lit, contemporary romance, relationship fiction, women's fiction
Pages: 400
Published by Berkley on April 25, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Harriet and Wyn have been the perfect couple since they met in college—they go together like salt and pepper, honey and tea, lobster and rolls. Except, now—for reasons they’re still not discussing—they don’t.
They broke up six months ago. And still haven’t told their best friends.
Which is how they find themselves sharing the largest bedroom at the Maine cottage that has been their friend group’s yearly getaway for the last decade. Their annual respite from the world, where for one vibrant, blue week they leave behind their daily lives; have copious amounts of cheese, wine, and seafood; and soak up the salty coastal air with the people who understand them most.
Only this year, Harriet and Wyn are lying through their teeth while trying not to notice how desperately they still want each other. Because the cottage is for sale and this is the last week they’ll all have together in this place. They can’t stand to break their friends’ hearts, and so they’ll play their parts. Harriet will be the driven surgical resident who never starts a fight, and Wyn will be the laid-back charmer who never lets the cracks show. It’s a flawless plan (if you look at it from a great distance and through a pair of sunscreen-smeared sunglasses). After years of being in love, how hard can it be to fake it for one week… in front of those who know you best?
A couple who broke up months ago make a pact to pretend to still be together for their annual weeklong vacation with their best friends in this glittering and wise new novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Emily Henry.

My Review:

Ironically, Harriet’s “happy place” isn’t all that happy when she arrives – no matter how much everyone, including Harriet, tries to recapture the happiness they all always feel when they get there.

Once upon a time, all the way at the beginning of their freshman year at Mattingly College, the algorithm that matches up roommates matched three girls who, on the surface, couldn’t have been more different.

A serendipitous match that gave Harriet, Cleo and Sabrina the ‘sisters from another mister’ that none of them had ever had. They belonged together in a way that was so profound that it took them through college, graduate school, and beyond, culminating every summer at Lobster Fest in a tiny coastal town in Maine where Sabrina’s extended birth and step-family owned a gigantic, fully stocked summer house. (Honestly, more like a summer mansion or a compound. It’s vast and sprawling and perfect – except for one teensy little problem which we’ll get to in a minute.)

Every summer, the girls share one fantastic week together, a tradition that has not wavered as they have each found other roommates, friends and lovers along life’s way. As this summer visit begins, the three have been six for several years, and they are all thirty years old or on the cusp of it.

Sabrina, the great organizer of the group, has pulled them all together – in spite of more than one person’s reluctance – because this is going to be the last summer of their happy place. Her dad has sold the house.

But that’s not the only rain on this particular parade. On the one hand, there’s the good news that Sabrina and her lover, Parth, are getting married that weekend, on the beach near the house, with all their besties around them.

Sabrina and Parth’s good news – if it actually happens – is overshadowed by whatever is eating at Cleo and her girlfriend Kimmy – which is in its turn eating at Sabrina. Harriet, in the second year of a medical residency, has pushed everyone away, partly out of exhaustion but mostly in denial over her own depressing secret.

A secret that greets her at the door, when her long-term ex-fiance is waiting, intending to help her keep up the deception that they are still together. When they’re not. And haven’t been for several months but haven’t managed to tell anyone.

Because they fear it will affect the dynamic of the group – a group which has become a family they both need – whether separately or together.

And because they don’t really want to let each other go – no matter how much they each believe the other is better off without them.

Escape Rating B+: I went into Happy Place hoping for another Book Lovers – which I utterly adored. When I didn’t get that, I found this to be a tough read for most of its length, but now that I’ve finished the book I keep thinking about it and it’s turning out to be one of those cases where the whole is absolutely greater than the sum of its parts.

The story as it progresses seemed like a giant misunderstandammit for the longest time. But the thing about those kinds of books is that what makes them so awkward is that it’s obvious to the reader that all it would take would be one frank conversation to clear up the mess.

That’s not true here. While a bit of frankness would go a long way, it would take WAY more than one conversation to clear things up. All of them are bottling up how they really feel or what is really going on in order to keep the peace – and it’s not working for anyone.

Just as occurred in Book Lovers, this mess needs to build up to an explosion for that air to get cleared. It just takes a week of heating up before it all boils over.

On top of that, what really got to me about this story as I looked back at it was just that, the looking back. Because this is the last summer at their ‘happy place’ they are all aware that an era is ending. That, in combination with all of them turning 30 this year, makes all of them realize that life is changing and that this family that sustains all of them could come to an end if they don’t figure things out and learn to adapt to the changes they are all going through.

And yet, with the secrets hanging over them, they are in danger of not figuring things out. With all the nostalgia on tap on this trip, and with all of the music they play because it is the background of their lives together, (and because they mention Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” playing on the radio) I realized that this is the summer where they are all aware that whatever happens next for any of them, the years they spent together are the “Glory Days” they will be looking back on for the rest of their lives.

The question in the story is whether they can get beyond what’s driving them apart to find a new way to hold each other together – no matter where the future takes each of them.

In the end, I didn’t love Happy Place the way I did Book Lovers. But once I finished I realized that I liked it quite a bit more than I initially thought!

Review: White Cat Black Dog by Kelly Link

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
Review: White Cat Black Dog by Kelly LinkWhite Cat, Black Dog: Stories by Kelly Link, Shaun Tan
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Genres: fairy tales, fantasy, horror, retellings, science fiction, short stories
Pages: 272
Published by Random House on March 28, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Seven ingeniously reinvented fairy tales that play out with astonishing consequences in the modern world, from one of today's finest short story writers--MacArthur "Genius Grant" Fellow Kelly Link, bestselling author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Get in Trouble
Finding seeds of inspiration in the Brothers Grimm, seventeenth-century French lore, and Scottish ballads, Kelly Link spins classic fairy tales into utterly original stories of seekers--characters on the hunt for love, connection, revenge, or their own sense of purpose.
In "The White Cat's Divorce," an aging billionaire sends his three sons on a series of absurd goose chases to decide which will become his heir. In "The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear," a professor with a delicate health condition becomes stranded for days in an airport hotel after a conference, desperate to get home to her wife and young daughter, and in acute danger of being late for an appointment that cannot be missed. In "Skinder's Veil," a young man agrees to take over a remote house-sitting gig for a friend. But what should be a chance to focus on his long-avoided dissertation instead becomes a wildly unexpected journey, as the house seems to be a portal for otherworldly travelers--or perhaps a door into his own mysterious psyche.
Twisting and winding in astonishing ways, expertly blending realism and the speculative, witty, empathetic, and never predictable--these stories remind us once again of why Kelly Link is incomparable in the art of short fiction.

My Review:

Perhaps it’s a lingering fondness for the old Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons, but I’ve always had a fondness for properly Fractured Fairy Tales. As the author of this collection has long been a writer I intended to read but never quite found the appropriate ‘Round Tuit’ for, this collection seemed like the perfect opportunity to indulge in a bit of cartoon nostalgia while discovering an author I’d heard of – often – but never actually read.

Also, there’s a cat in the title so I figured that I couldn’t possibly go wrong reading White Cat, Black Dog. And I did not.

There are only seven stories in this collection, each based on a different, but frequently familiar, fairy tale. As with all collections there are exceptions to the rules – but always interesting ones.

Of those seven stories, my favorite was the first – and titular story, “The White Cat’s Divorce”. I’m not at all familiar with the fairy tale it was based on, The White Cat, but this is one where I honestly didn’t care. It’s a story where the reader does guess what’s coming fairly early on, but it’s such a glorious delivery of just desserts that one doesn’t mind. Also, the concept of a clan of talking cats running a marijuana farm and dispensary is just too funny for words.

My next favorite story was “The Lady and the Fox”, based on Tam Lin, which I DO remember. It’s probably the story in this collection where the grimdark is on the lightest shade of darkness, as it’s a holiday story that leans into the warmth of the season and does result in at least the possibility of a happy ending. The romance at the heart of the story could go either way after the end, but by ending where it does it is possible for the reader’s mind to wrap the whole thing in the glow of its season.

The story that creeped me out the most was “The White Road”, based on The Musicians of Bremen, a fairy tale which rings only a faint bell. Its setup actually has a lot in common with Station Eleven, but it’s not a pandemic or lawless scavengers that come creeping for those who stray into the wrong places or in the wrong ways, but rather a road that comes for the dead but can be put off by really good – or even really hammy acting.

Several stories hit the middle of their road for me. “Prince Hat Underground” just went on too long. I loved the concept, even though it reminded me more of Orpheus and Eurydice than its intended fairy tale. Something about it just didn’t work for me, although many readers loved it. My feelings about “The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear” were similar in that it also did not work for me.

“The Game of Smash and Recovery” was supposed to be a take-off of Hansel and Gretel and I just plain didn’t see it. It did remind me of a combination of Medusa Uploaded and In the Lives of Puppets, which made it a very weird place to be even though the fairy tale was fractured completely beyond recognition.

Last, but not least in either size or scope, is the final story in the collection, the story that includes the titular Black Dog, “Skinder’s Veil”. This story about a waystation for the denizens of fairy and the house-sitter substituting for an absentee owner who may or may not be Death and who may or may not be a dead-ringer (pardon the pun) for its protagonist had a fascinating premise as well as characters who told some equally fascinating stories. And who probably would feel right at home in Bill Willingham’s Fables. I liked the story a lot as I was reading it, but at the end it felt like something had either just slipped through my grasp, or that the entire point of the thing was in the implications it left behind.

Ultimately a fascinating conundrum but too puzzling to be a favorite. Which may very well sum up my thoughts about the collection as a whole – but I’m glad I read it just the same.

Escape Rating B: In any collection, there’s usually at least one story that doesn’t work for a particular reader, and that was certainly true for this reader. Howsomever, a sign of a good collection is that when one looks at reviews for it, that story or two that turned out to be not quite what the individual hoped are different for each reader.

And that’s certainly true with White Cat, Black Dog.

So, if you’ve been meaning to become acquainted with this author, or curious about the work of someone who won one of the MacArthur “Genius Grants”, White Cat, Black Dog is a great place to be introduced to Kelly Link and her eclectic tales that merge fantasy, SF, horror and the most classic of classic fairy tales into a twisty, spellbinding whole, this is a great way of going about it.

Review: Her Lost Words by Stephanie Marie Thornton

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> blog tours> book reviews
Review: Her Lost Words by Stephanie Marie ThorntonHer Lost Words: A Novel of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley by Stephanie Marie Thornton
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: biography, historical fiction, women's fiction
Pages: 448
Published by Berkley Books on March 28, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

From A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to Frankenstein, a tale of two literary legends--a mother and daughter--discovering each other and finding themselves along the way, from USA Today bestselling author Stephanie Marie Thornton.
1792. As a child, Mary Wollstonecraft longed to disappear during her father's violent rages. Instead, she transforms herself into the radical author of the landmark volume A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in which she dares to propose that women are equal to men. From conservative England to the blood-drenched streets of revolutionary France, Mary refuses to bow to society's conventions and instead supports herself with her pen until an illicit love affair challenges her every belief about romance and marriage. When she gives birth to a daughter and is stricken with childbed fever, Mary fears it will be her many critics who recount her life's extraordinary odyssey...
1818. The daughter of infamous political philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, passionate Mary Shelley learned to read by tracing the letters of her mother's tombstone. As a young woman, she desperately misses her mother's guidance, especially following her scandalous elopement with dashing poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Mary struggles to balance an ever-complicated marriage with motherhood while nursing twin hopes that she might write something of her own one day and also discover the truth of her mother's unconventional life. Mary's journey will unlock her mother's secrets, all while leading to her own destiny as the groundbreaking author of Frankenstein.
A riveting and inspiring novel about a firebrand feminist, her visionary daughter, and the many ways their words transformed our world.

My Review:

As a young woman, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (the future Mary Shelley) must have felt as if she would always live in the shadow of her scandalous, reviled, radical mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of the famous – or infamous – philosophical treatise,  A Vindication of the Rights of Women.

After all, even when the younger Mary first met the love of her life, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, even he confessed to being a fan of her mother’s work.

But the tides of history turn, and for more than a century after Mary Shelley’s death it was HER great work that captured the limelight – and much of the popular imagination – while her mother’s achievements were covered in the shadows cast by her daughter’s monster, the doctor who made him and the literary genre they started.

Mary Shelley and her Frankenstein gave birth to modern science fiction at the age of 19, an achievement for which she is celebrated every bit as much as both mother and daughter were reviled in their own times.

The story in Her Lost Words takes the lives of this pair of literary giants and tells them in alternating first-person chapters. So we read about the mother’s life from her not-early-enough escape from her abusive father’s house to her death alternating with her daughter’s life from learning to read using the letters of her mother’s tombstone to her return to England after the publication of Frankenstein, the birth of her own child and Shelley’s tragic early death as she navigates her own storied life.

Their stories are intertwined – but also entirely different. The older Mary was always in search of a life of the mind – even though women were supposed to be incapable of such a thing. The younger Mary expected to have such a life but devoted more of her passion to her relationships, particularly with Shelley, until her monster took over her literary ambitions.

One was thought, one was feeling. Each was a towering genius in their own way. Her Lost Words does its best to set them both in their times, showing their influence on each other and their respective legacies while doing its best to see them each outside the long shadow that the other cast.

Escape Rating B: Someone needs to do a literary survey of just how many fictional and even non-fictional biographies of famous women in history begin with a dramatic scene of parental or spousal abuse. Not that I do not believe it’s true in the case of the older Mary, more that it should be telling in a profound way that it happened so damn frequently but somehow that message never seems to penetrate the male psyche. Which is a part of what made A Vindication of the Rights of Women such a radical document, not just in its day but still. Because we haven’t achieved all the rights she set out in the late 1700s even to this day.

If behind every successful man there stands his mother-in-law, quite surprised – or more likely a supportive woman in one or many roles in his life, in historical fiction, at least, it does seem as if behind every successful woman stands a male authority figure, generally a spouse or parent, with his hand still raised to deliver yet another blow as she runs away as far and as fast as she can.

(I’ll climb down off my soapbox now but considering the general opprobrium both of the subjects of this dual fictional biography faced in their lifetimes, if there was ever a book to make that soapbox germane, this is it. I digress, but not as much as usual.)

I ended up with mixed feelings about Her Lost Words. I really enjoyed the history, and I liked the dueling dual portraits of these two incredible women. I think where it didn’t work quite well for me was in those first-person singular voices, because this story was told as women’s fiction, centering their personal lives as much as their professional lives, and dealing as much with their emotions as it did with their written thoughts and words.

First-person narratives can be excellent in drawing a reader into the mind of a character, but Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley weren’t fictional characters, they were real women who each left behind a considerable body of literary work. I was more interested in what they actually said and wrote and what they actually did than anything else. The book was very well done for what it was, but the presentation of historical figures as characters in women’s fiction didn’t quite work for this reader.

I wanted to be all in on this one and I just wasn’t. I’m still interested in Wollstonecraft and Shelley, and will probably refer myself to Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft & Mary Shelley by Charlotte Gordon, a nonfiction dual biography that covers much of the same ground as Her Lost Words, and features in the author’s references the next time my towering TBR pile catches its breath.

So if you’re looking for more of a factual biographical presentation, this may not be the book for you, as it was not for me. But if you are searching for a fictionalized history, Her Lost Words is a well-written exploration of these towering literary figures told from a personal and even intimate point of view.

Review: And Put Away Childish Things by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B+ Reviews> book reviews
Review: And Put Away Childish Things by Adrian TchaikovskyAnd Put Away Childish Things by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook
Genres: fantasy, horror, portal fantasy, science fiction
Pages: 208
Published by Solaris on March 28, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Harry Bodie’s been called into the delightful fantasy world of his grandmother’s beloved children’s books. It’s not delightful here at all.
All roads lead to Underhill, where it’s always winter, and never nice.
Harry Bodie has a famous grandmother, who wrote beloved children’s books set in the delightful world of Underhill. Harry himself is a failing kids’ TV presenter whose every attempt to advance his career ends in self-sabotage. His family history seems to be nothing but an impediment.
An impediment... or worse. What if Underhill is real? What if it has been waiting decades for a promised child to visit? What if it isn’t delightful at all? And what if its denizens have run out of patience and are taking matters into their own hands?

My Review:

If the title of this book sounds familiar, it’s because it’s from the New Testament quote from Chapter 13 of I Corinthians below. But as much as the first line is directly referenced in the title, the second line is every single bit as applicable to this story and the way that it all works out.

“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

The first question the story raises is “who decides?” Who decides what a childish thing is and when we should put it away. The second revolves around what it takes to truly be known, by oneself as well as by others.

Because as the story opens, Felix “call me Harry” Bodie doesn’t know himself or where he came from very much at all. And honestly doesn’t seem to want to. What he wants is to hide himself behind the mask of a working – if barely – actor and bury his past as the grandson of a famous juvenile fantasy author.

His grandmother, Mary Bodie, was the author of the Underhill books, a story and a world not all that different from Narnia. Or at least a Narnia without Aslan and the overt Christian allegory that seemed to exude from the lion’s mane.

Underhill was a place with quirky, intelligent animals and not too perilous dangers just perfect for a pair of young human scamps to slip into for adventures. Harry is more than happy to cash the decreasing royalty checks that still drop into his accounts and forget the rest. Or so he believes.

It’s only when he takes a rather desperate chance on a spot in the British equivalent of the Finding Your Roots program that he learns that Grandma Mary was born in an insane asylum to a woman who claimed to come from fairyland, and that she told her daughter all about it. It’s those stories that became the roots of the Underhill series.

The revelation of his great grandmother’s insanity draws the most rabid side of the still-active Underhill fandom out into the light of day – just as the real-world pandemic is about to drive everyone, everywhere under quarantine.

The world is going insane, and Harry is all too afraid he’s going with it. Especially when he starts seeing a diseased, desiccated version of Underhill’s resident trickster faun in the alleys behind his apartment – while a woman who claims to be a private investigator stalks him on the street.

Together they drive Harry straight out of this world and down into Underhill, which is rather more real than he ever imagined. And considerably more dangerous than his grandmother’s books EVER led him to expect.

Escape Rating B+: The thing about this book, at least for the first half of it, is Harry. And it’s not exactly a good thing, because Harry himself isn’t exactly a good thing. Nor does he have a good thing. Nor does he believe he has or is a good thing. Harry’s a bit ‘meh’ at best, pretty much all the way down to the bone. He doesn’t like himself, he doesn’t like his life, he isn’t going anywhere and he thinks nobody likes him because he honestly works at not being likable. He’s no fun to be with, not as a character and not even for himself.

So the beginning of the story is a bit rough because we don’t care about Harry – because he doesn’t even care about himself. At least not until he goes through a wardrobe, even though that’s the other fantasy series, and finds himself in Underhill. Or what’s left of it.

The place is dying and diseased and scabrous and NOTHING like the books. But for once in his life Harry is not being paranoid – everything left in Underhill really is out to get him. Or at least to find him.

Because he’s the heir to the entire blighted mess. Whether he wants to be or not. It’s the first time he’s been important in his whole, entire life. So he decides to seize the day – or at least the creepy twilight that is all that’s left in Underhill.

Only to discover that being the heir to the place isn’t remotely what he thought it might be. But then again, nothing and no one in this adventure has turned out to be anything like he expected. Not even, in the end, himself.

And that’s where things get interesting. At last. One way or another.

While it’s the off-kilter resemblance to Narnia that initially hooks the reader, it’s the subversions of any and all expectations – about Harry, about Underhill, about pretty much everyone and everything he’s met along the way – that give the story its, well, everything.

Initially, I thought this was going to be a bit like Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, which is also a play on Narnia. But The Magicians plays it more or less straight, turning Fillory into a version of Narnia that, while still fantastic, doesn’t mess with religious allegory and simply turns into an adult version of Narnia with a heaping helping of dark academia on top.

Instead, And Put Away Childish Things mixes the central theme of Never Too Old to Save the World with Carrie Vaughn’s Questland, and Tchaikovsky’s own Ogres to create a story about being called to save a portal fantasy world in midlife only to learn that the whole setup is SFnal and not fantasy after all, and that the person who can really save the place – or at least its heart – is the folklorist who everyone believed was just hanging on to prove her weird theories about literature that so-called “true academics” have discounted as either childish or merely unimportant and uninteresting to “real scholars”.

At the end, the seemingly childish things turn out to be not so childish after all, and Harry is known, to himself and to others, in a way that he never would have let himself be or even feel in the so-called real world. And it’s the making of him and the making of the story – even though – or perhaps especially because – he turns out not to be the true hero of after all. Although a hero he certainly becomes.

Review: The White Lady by Jacqueline Winspear

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
Review: The White Lady by Jacqueline WinspearThe White Lady by Jacqueline Winspear
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, large print, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, mystery, World War I, World War II
Pages: 352
Published by Harper on March 21, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The White Lady introduces yet another extraordinary heroine/sleuth from Jacqueline Winspear, creator of the best-selling Maisie Dobbs series. This heart-stopping adventure follows the coming of age and maturity of former wartime operative Elinor White—veteran of two wars, trained killer, protective of her anonymity—when she is drawn back into the world of violence she has been desperate to leave behind.
A reluctant ex-spy with demons of her own, Elinor finds herself facing down one of the most dangerous organized crime gangs in London, and exposing corruption from Scotland Yard to the highest levels of government.
Post-World War II Britain, 1947. Forty-one-year-old “Miss White," as Elinor is known, lives in a village in Kent, England, so quietly and privately as to seem an enigma to her fellow villagers. Well she might, as Elinor occupies a "grace and favor" property, a rare privilege offered to faithful servants of the Crown for services to the nation. But the residents of Shacklehurst have no way of knowing how dangerous Elinor's war work had been, or how deeply their mysterious neighbor continues to be haunted by her past.
It will take the child of Jim Mackie, a young farmworker and his wife, Rose, to break through Miss White's icy demeanor—but Jim has something in common with Elinor. He, too, is desperate to escape his past. When the powerful Mackie crime family demands a return of their prodigal son for an important job, Elinor assumes the task of protecting her neighbors, especially the bright-eyed Susie, who reminds her of the darkest day of her life.
Elinor’s wartime training and instincts serve her well, but as she endeavors to neutralize the threat to Jim, Rose and Susie Mackie, she is rapidly led along a tunnel of smoke and mirrors in which former wartime colleagues – who know the truth about what happened in 1944, and the terrible event that led to her wartime suicide attempt – are compromised by more powerful influences.
Ultimately, Elinor will hold a gun to the head of a Mackie crime lord to uncover the truth behind the family's pursuit of Jim, and in doing so, reveal the far-reaching tentacles of their power—along with the truth that will free Elinor from her past.

My Review:

For the past several years of her cases (since The Mapping of Love and Death) March has been the month of Maisie. Maisie Dobbs, that is.

Which means that all of Maisie’s fans and friends are pretty much primed for a book every March  filled with Maisie’s inimitable style of detection and the combination of found and birth family that she has gathered around herself to help her both solve her cases and live a life that combines danger and intrigue with a intense insight into the human nature that has created the situations in which she regularly finds herself.

Maisie seems to have taken a vacation this March, and in her place we have Elinor White, who both is and is not the ‘White Lady’ of the title.

Elinor’s story is told in two timeframes, both her present in 1947 and the past that led her there, from her childhood in occupied Belgium through her wartime service in the top-secret Special Operations Executive to the point where her past meets her present after the war.

We first meet 1947 Elinor, a middle-aged spinster living in a ‘grace and favor’ cottage in Kent. That cottage was granted to her for her lifetime for services rendered to the crown in both wars, and it’s what those services consisted of that makes up the past we have to see, and the lessons Elinor has to learn, before the person we met in 1947 comes fully into focus.

And then shatters when she learns that what she believed was the worst crime she ever committed was nothing that she did at all. The crime was committed by someone she believed was a friend and an ally. Although she is certainly the one who paid for it then, and very nearly does again.

It’s only after the smoke clears, quite literally, that Elinor White may be able to step forward into a future that holds more than waiting for fate to catch up to her and make her pay for all the wrongs she committed in the name of a greater purpose.

If she can set aside the necessary cautions that come from having survived not one but two wars as a spy and saboteur.

Escape Rating B: I ended this book with a LOT more mixed feelings than I expected going into it. I enjoy the Maisie Dobbs series because I find the history interesting, Maisie’s perspective fascinating, and the story as a whole absorbing. I like the characters and more importantly I CARE about them every bit as much as I care about seeing the solution of the mystery.

It’s the care that was missing in my reading of The White Lady. The history was every bit as fascinating as I was expecting from this author. While Britain’s Special Operations Executive and the women who served as agents in it have appeared in an increasing number of stories lately – as have the women of Bletchley Park – Elinor’s experiences as an agent of La Dame Blanche – the Belgian resistance in World War I funded by Britain – were new to me. Her experiences in the Belgian Occupation, when she was just barely into her teens, were searing and absorbing.

But something about those experiences feels like it set Elinor herself just a shade apart from real life – or at least from her own real life. She seems so used to keeping herself utterly guarded – a necessity during the war that kept her alive – that she remains just a touch removed from the life we read about in this story. It makes it difficult to know her well enough to care about her character.

I didn’t feel invested in her journey and it kept me from being absorbed in the story.

Which doesn’t mean that parts of it were not fascinating, because her surprising – to herself most of all – foray into a police investigation of the criminal gangs controlling vast swaths of London had the potential for chills and thrills – and delivered them as well as a bit of schadenfreude that the men who thought they knew everything – both among the police and among the criminals – discovered they were wrong, wrong, wrong. And still weren’t convinced they’d been hoodwinked by a gang of women. Or that a woman figured out the real crime being planned while all the experienced detectives dismissed her at every turn.

In the end, I liked The White Lady but didn’t love her. I’m glad I read this one but not disappointed that it appears to be a standalone title and not the start of a new series. I hope we see Maisie again next March – or whenever her next adventure appears.