My Name is Memory, by Ann Brashares

Posted on September 18, 2010 by Thistle

mynameismemoryI keep trying these books about love through multiple lives, but just like with Reincarnation last year, this was not what I was looking for. It was too young, the topics too shallowly-touched on, the plot too predictable. I probably need to just stop reading these books on eternal love and reincarnation, because so far they’ve all been disappointing and way too similar to each other. I swear, reading (well, mostly skimming) this one was like rereading Reincarnation.

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We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson

Posted on September 15, 2010 by Thistle

castleI don’t want to say anything at all about the plot of this book and give stuff away. I made the mistake of reading the back of my book when I was a short way into it. At the time, I thought it would help me clear up some confusion. It did, but it also deprived me of learning each detail step by step, which would have been way more fun. So I’ll keep my description here to a bare minimum: this is the story of two sisters, Constance and Mary Katherine, who have not left the Blackwood home in five months. It’s told from Mary’s point of view.

My first experience with Shirley Jackson was in 1999 with The Haunting of Hill House. I’d just seen The Haunting and wanted to read the book it was based on. I didn’t realize at the time that the book was 40 years old. I thought it was modern, and by modern standards, it seemed silly, clichéd, and predictable. I was looking at it through the wrong eyes, and it wasn’t until last year’s RIP season that I realized that. I resolved to read something else by Jackson now that a decade had passed and I knew a little more about what I was reading. The book I settled on was We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

Brilliant book. Oh I had so much fun reading it! Mary’s narrative is so precise and meticulous, just like she is. It doesn’t take long to figure out something is really, really wrong with that girl. She, and the Blackwoods in general, are just a tad bit messed up.

Now I admit, there were some things in this book that might be considered predictable or clichéd, but that’s just my modern brain talking. At the time of publishing, they probably weren’t, and even if they were, it hardly matters. The real brilliance of this book was not the plot but the tone. The atmosphere. The completely oppressive, creepy, aching, haunted feeling so pervasive through every page. It’s been a long time since I read a book that captured tone so well. Books like Rebecca or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, whose words just teem with life. That’s where We Have Always Lived in the Castle really shines.

Secondary to that is its characterization. I don’t want to talk about the climax, but for those who have read it, the amount of human life and hysteria that runs through the crux point, the collapsing of all barriers and boundaries, is just amazing. All of those college lessons on civilization and humanity falling into barbarism at the least provocation? Well, let’s just say I remembered them poignantly while reading.

I am very impressed with Shirley Jackson, and I need to go back and reread The Haunting of Hill House. I now look back at my 20-year-old self and wonder just how differently we’ll see things! Perhaps that will be one of next year’s RIP reads!

Posted in 2010, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

Flush, by Virginia Woolf

Posted on September 14, 2010 by Thistle

flushFlush is a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog, whose name was, of course, Flush. Flush was a golden Cocker Spaniel who was apparently very finely bred, though I personally know nothing whatsoever about dogs or dog breeding. The book goes from Flush’s birth to his death, as most biographies are known to do, and is really a ruse for a partial look at Ms. Barrett Browning’s life.

I have to admit, at first I was really disappointed with this book because I thought it was an autobiography, told from the point of view of the dog. The narration did mostly stay with Flush, but it was all third person. Having read the whole book now, I can see why it wouldn’t have worked any other way, but I was very excited about the prospect of seeing Woolf write from the point of view of the dog.

My disappointment quickly subsided, though. This is an extremely clever book and I adored it. I’m not even a dog person – I really don’t like dogs at all – but I loved Flush and the things he thought and did. More, I loved seeing Ms. Barrett Browning, who is fast becoming a little obsession of mine. I have yet to read Aurora Leigh (I’m still a bit too intimidated), but I really want to, and I want to read more and more about her life.

Even better, I had a whole novel idea bloom from reading this book! It actually has nothing to do with anthropomorphic animals or Ms. Browning, but a few words from the narrative sparked an image in my mind which sparked the seed of an idea, which grew…

I would highly recommend this book! It rates an EASY on the Woolf scale, not difficult to read at all, and it’s light, happy, and pleasant. Some people say they don’t like reading animal memoir-type books because inevitably the animal dies at the end. While this, of course, is true in this biography (and it’s not a spoiler to say that – the real-life Flush did indeed die in the 1800s and is not still living as a vampire dog in present-day Europe), his death is not at all sad, but triumphant and uplifting. As no one knows how Flush actually died, Woolf gave him a proud, loving, completely unrealistic sort of death. Not a hero’s death, where he dies saving a child from a burning building, but the sort of symbolic death where one minute he is alive, and the next, his body becomes a monument to his living self. No sadness at all. So don’t let sadness keep you from this one!

Posted in 2010, Adult, Prose | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Bleak House, by Charles Dickens

Posted on September 13, 2010 by Thistle

bleakhouseBleak House would be impossible to describe in terms of plot. There are lots of plots, many of which eventually become connected, but not until the second half of the book. The plot elements vary from bad law cases to family secrets to blackmail to forgery to spontaneous combustion.

My thoughts on Bleak House are…not kind. In fact, if I hadn’t been reading it for the readalong, I never, ever would have finished it. After reading Great Expectations earlier this year, I was prepared to think perhaps my first experience with Dickens (A Christmas Carol) was just a bad read and that I might actually like the author after all. Bleak House put an end to those thoughts. I hated it.

Really, it was the way it was written that I hated. I suppose the story itself was good enough, if you don’t count all the amazing coincidences and the miraculous deus ex machina and the fact that the story itself only counts for a small fraction of the 850+ pages of the book. Shaved down, Bleak House could have been fun – in fact, I’m prepared to bet watching a movie version of it will be much better. But the book itself? Ugh.

I guess I just expected Dickens to be something more than the Victorian equivalent of a TV sitcom. Bleak House was published in monthly installments of about 40 pages, each one equivalent to a cross between a few 1980s household staples: Family Matters, Full House, and America’s Funniest Home Videos. Every character was a stereotype, from the angelic blond-haired-blue-eyed beauty, to the “perfect” woman who is mild and obedient, to the “bad guys” who invariably have a “major physical defect”: short height, bent back, acne, or greasy hair. Not only were these “characters” personified solely by their stereotypical qualities, but they were assigned a set joke that was repeated every single time they appeared on the page. After a hundred repetitions, I just wanted to gag.

Some of it, of course, can be attributed to the serial form, and trying to help people remember the characters when there were just so many! But at the same time, it’s very possible to help people get to know the same number of characters in a fraction of the time by giving them real personalities. Zola, for instance, does that incredibly well. But Dickens does not go deep for his characterization. He’d rather use the stereotypes and gags that made up the farce of Bleak House.

It is interesting to see how little things have changed, though. We no longer need to read our sitcoms, but we do still watch them. People watch the same shows every week, and those shows are incredibly repetitive, no matter if the show is dramatic or funny. I’m not saying this is a bad thing! Personally, I love NCIS, which does tell the same jokes every week, all 7 seasons so far, and I still love it. My problem with Bleak House was that it was like watching a sitcom that I despise. It’s really just a matter of taste and preference. I don’t like farce. I don’t like stereotypes. I don’t like gags. I don’t like repetitive writing or wordy fluff or the canned-laughter comic timing that Dickens uses. I prefer more subtlety in both my drama and my humor. And therefore, I don’t like Bleak House.

I won’t say Bleak House is a bad book, just that I personally hated it and was rather disappointed by the whole experience. I have no plans to read anything more of Dickens in the future. That’s one good thing finishing Bleak House did for me – it permanently confirmed what I suspected regarding my feelings towards Dickens. I still like Great Expectations, but I’m going to guess now that that will remain the one exception to the rule, and I have no intentions to try to read myself out of that judgement any time soon. There are enough other authors in the world for me to explore.

If you ever plan to read Bleak House, keep in mind that there are like 50 different plots in the beginning, and that they don’t start coming together until about halfway through the book. There’s almost no movement for a very long time. You have to be patient with it. Knowing that the first half of the book is purely introduction and setup might help you to work your way through this tome!

A note on the BBC adaptation:

I borrowed this 8-hour adaptation from my friend Karen, and after watching, I do wish I’d just watched the movie version instead of reading the book. There were some minor changes to the plot, but for the most part, it was pretty faithful to the book. On the one hand, that meant that the story was far more understandable and followable, and that all Dickens’ fluffery was cut out. It was also a lot easier to see the themes that Dickens was playing off of, which is a good thing because I didn’t get any of that out of my reading experience.

On the other hand, most of the characters still held on to that Dickensian stereotyping, melodrama, and one-sidedness. The people I disliked in the book (Guppy, Vholes, Skimpole, Smallweed), I hated even more in the movie. The jokes got old, the melodrama was WAY over the top, and there were no characters I really felt connected to. Not feeling connected meant it was difficult to be happy or sad when happy/sad things happened.

In the end, I liked the movie more than the book, though it wasn’t a favorite. It was fun to watch once, but it’s not one I’ll ever want to see again and I’ll probably forget it in a few months. It has the great advantage over the book of cutting out all the unnecessary stuff and being much, much shorter, and it still portrays everyone exactly as Dickens wrote them. I highly recommend it for people who really want to know the story of Bleak House but can’t seem to get into the book itself.

Posted in 2010, Adult, Prose | Tagged | 2 Comments

The Imposter’s Daughter, by Laurie Sandell

Posted on September 11, 2010 by Thistle

imposterI don’t think I’ve ever seen a review of this book that wasn’t mixed. People seem to like it, but with reservations, not fully connecting with it. I, on the other hand, really, really enjoyed it. I kept waiting for it to take a turn that would bother me, but it didn’t. In fact, it’s the first graphic novel I’ve read in nearly six months that I fully enjoyed!

Posted in 2010, Adult, Visual | Tagged , | Leave a comment

The Curse of the Blue Figurine, by John Bellairs

Posted on September 10, 2010 by Thistle

bluefigurineMy first experience with John Bellairs, The House With a Clock in its Walls, was mixed – I liked it, but had trouble really connecting with it. The Blue Figurine was happily much better, a creepy little children’s book perfect for reading around Halloween. I loved Johnny Dixon and the Professor, and I felt the narrative flowed better than in the other I read. I miss having Edward Gorey illustrations, though.

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Juliet, Naked, by Nick Hornby (audio)

Posted on September 9, 2010 by Thistle

Juliet-NakedTucker Crowe, a middling rock star from the late 70s and early 80s, disappeared from public life in the mid-80s. Since then, he hasn’t made any music or given any interviews. It’s rumored that he lives on a farm in Pennsylvania.

Duncan, half a world away in Gooleness, England, considers himself an expert on Crowe’s music, career, and the decades of silence since. He is heavily involved with a website devoted to Crowe, and pretty much centers his life on the ex-musician.

Annie is Duncan’s partner of the last fifteen years. She was introduced to Crowe’s music through Duncan and she likes it well enough, though Duncan’s obsession has led her to feel that she can never be the primary object of affection in his eyes. She wonders if she’s just wasted the last fifteen years of her life on a man who can never really love anyone but Crowe.

When a demo version of Crowe’s album Juliet, entitled Juliet, Naked, suddenly breaks through the decades of silence from the musician, it changes everything in all three of their lives.

Normally I don’t take so long to describe the setup of a book, but it would have been difficult to really summarize Juliet, Naked without all that. Each character has their own storyline, from Annie’s regret and desperation for a child, to Duncan’s romance with a world that isn’t really there, to Tucker’s struggle with mortality and decades of baggage. All three storylines are delicately woven together, and the audio version nicely has three readers to separate out Duncan’s, Annie’s, and Tucker’s sections.

Chris told me about this book back in December last year. I’d never read anything by Hornby before (and was in fact quite afraid of him). Chris mentioned a general plotline, that the book was about a couple obsessed with a former musician that barely anyone had ever heard of. He said it reminded him of my own obsession with Stiffs Inc, and that instantly sold me on the book.

I know what it’s like to love a band that hasn’t existed in over a decade. I know all about the searches for the tiniest bits of information, the hankering for new material, the joys you can get from the slightest gestures from band members. Like for Duncan, it does become a sort of romance, and you have to be careful to keep it from flipping over onto the stalker-ish side (as Duncan, sadly, is not careful enough about). The internet – with ready access, with information ranging from rumors to truth all over the place, with the sudden proximity of fellow fans for a band 99% of the population has never heard of – becomes a tool and a curse, all at once. It is too easy to take your love for a band or musician and blow it up to epic proportions. What is significant to you may just look psychotic to that musician you love. The contrast between Tucker’s and Duncan’s points of view was fascinating.

Then there’s Annie, sitting on the sidelines of this romance, knowing but not admitting until far too late that she’ll never be able to compete. By the time she realizes that she wants someone to love her most, that she wants to marry and have kids and lead a normal, non-Tucker-centric life, she’s forty and worried that she’s too old to really change anything. Her journey was actually the most interesting to me. There’s this huge thematic element, brought up both by Annie and Tucker, of wasted time. What do you do when you realize you’ve wasted 10, 15, 20 years of your life? How can you make up for that? Which parts can be considered waste, anyway? Can you bargain yourself into thinking you’ve led a more productive and useful life than you really did?

I really enjoyed this book for the most part. My only complaint was that the ending seemed to happen way too quick. I think it was meant to be cathartic, the way things happened, but instead it all seemed overly optimistic compared to the tone of the rest of the book, and it was a little too ambiguous. I actually listened to the last tracks of the audiobook several times, trying to wrap my mind around what I was hearing, wishing for a paper copy so I could just check a few things. It’s not that I mind the ending that I think it ended with (trying to avoid spoilers here) but it just seems to happen too fast, too ambiguously, too unsure. I don’t know. The climax passed over me without leaving much of an impression, which is sad because the rest of the book spoke volumes.

As for the audio production, it was pretty good. The readers for Duncan and Annie (Ben Miles and Jennifer Wiltsie) were excellent, particularly the latter. The reader for Tucker (Bill Irwin) did great when he was playing Tucker, and not so great when any of the other characters spoke, especially Tucker’s son Jackson. The book was a good one to hear on audio. Except for the very end, like the very last track, I never felt like I wanted to have a paper copy in front of me to flip through and reference things. It was easy to follow and I was completely engrossed in the story, so much so that I spent more time listening to the audiobook than actually reading in this last week!

All in all, it was a WIN for my first experience with Hornby, and I’m no longer as afraid of him as I used to be. Now I just need to decide what to try from him next.

Posted in 2010, Adult, Prose | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Callback: Crossed Wires

Posted on September 5, 2010 by Thistle

crossed-wiresI first read/reviewed Crossed Wires last fall, and it ended up being one of my favorite books of 2009. I remember debating at the time whether or not I should do a giveaway – I wanted more people to have a chance to read the book, but I also wanted to keep it for myself. In the end, I decided to keep it. Crossed Wires also has the distinction of being the very first book I accepted for review. The author herself kindly sent it to me. I still have that copy with her postcard inside.

With all the new-to-me books I’ve been reading lately, I’ve been in a bit of a nostalgic mood, wanting to revisit some old favorites. I sorted through all my cravings and in the end decided to reread Crossed Wires. I’m very glad I kept it last year! It was every bit as good this time around, perhaps even better, and I wanted to enumerate all the things that kept me loving the book.

(I’m not looking at my thoughts from last year before I write this up, so I apologize if I end up repeating myself.)

1. I love hearing about all the family dynamics. Of course there’s the triple-dose of single parenthood – of Mina raising her ten-year-old Sal who has never known her father; of Mina’s own mother having been a single mom, with two kids from two different fathers; and lastly of Peter’s widowhood, raising his nine-year-old twins. This book doesn’t make family and parenthood sound easy or even all the time a wonderful blessing, which makes me so happy. Sometimes, parenthood isn’t a joy! I know there are some people who enjoy it 100% of the time (mostly in retrospect once their kids have moved out, I expect), but I’m a more typical mom who definitely needs some time away from kids! I can’t imagine doing it all single-handedly! I liked the realistic look at family and parenthood here.

2. Then there’s the way the book dives into several issues without ever making them feel forced or heavyhanded. The twins have several friends who live in an Irish traveler camp on the edge of town, who are later bullied out of town. Peter’s neighbors are an elderly gay couple with several very unusual dimensions to their relationship. There’s also a lot of discussion of teen pregnancy and the responsibilities that come with parenthood. All these things are in the book, but naturally there and not pushed on didactically.

3. And of course, there is the romance, which I absolutely love. It isn’t a one-night-stand, jump-into-bed sort of romance. In fact, it can hardly be called a romance book, with how slow it goes and how ambiguous the relationship between Mina and Peter is. But I love that. I love how realistic that is, relationships building out of friendship over a longer period of time. And I love how the two really get to know each other through phone calls. That last part is pure nostalgia on my part, since my husband and I met through a mutual friend over email and spent two months getting to know each other by letters and phone calls before we ever met in person.

In short, I enjoyed this reread so much! Absolutely loved it. I wish I could recommend this book to everyone (and tell them to please, please, please ignore the silly cover which doesn’t at all represent the content inside!).

Note: I have now read my thoughts from last year and apparently I had taken a bit of an issue with some abrupt changes from one paragraph to the next. During this read, there was only once that a section end felt abrupt and jarred me. Perhaps I was more prepared for the flow this time? It’s definitely a very British book, with lots of Britishisms in the language that I had to adjust myself to, but I enjoyed that. It felt very authentic.

Note: Review date is only an approximate of when this book was read/reviewed in 2010.

Posted in 2010, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

The Return of the Native, by Thomas Hardy (audio)

Posted on August 29, 2010 by Thistle

The_Return_of_the_Native_Thomas_Hardy_unabridged_compact_discs_Audio_PartnersOh Thomas Hardy! I offer you my sincere apologies for not having read this book sooner. It’s just, after reading Tess of the D’Urbervilles, I was a little scared to read another of your books. I loved Tess, don’t get me wrong, but oh my god those first 125 pages were excruciating to get through! I swear it took me twice as long to read them as it did to read the last 250 pages. There was just so much pastoral, scenic description that I wanted to gag! I understand that the landscape is a character. I really do. But that doesn’t mean I like those descriptions any better. Tess was wonderful, but I couldn’t help wanting to scream, “Get to the point!!!”

It took me a long time to work up the nerve to read something else, and in the end, I didn’t even read – I listened. Glorious, wonderful Alan Rickman, my second favorite voice in the world after the brilliant Mr. Sterling’s, read this book to me. It was a lovely production. Not only did I get to listen to 15+ hours of Mr. Rickman, but he SANG to me. And then he sang to me IN FRENCH! It really doesn’t get any better than that. This audiobook was perfect. (Except for the cover art, which makes no sense at all. Wild turkey and guns in the woods?? What does that have to do with anything?)

So what about the story? Because as it was said to me on Twitter, “Alan Rickman could read the phonebook and I’d listen.” Well, it was wonderful! The Return of the Native would be painfully difficult to sum up in general terms. It’s like an 1800s soap opera on Egdon Heath. The best part about it, though, was the distinct lack of 125-page landscape descriptions! Sure, Hardy describes the world around these characters from time to time, but it’s never too much. Never so much that I wanted to fast forward. And the descriptions – particularly read aloud in such a beautiful voice – were evocative and refreshing. I loved it.

To tell you more about the book itself, I’ll need to break it down into the players. There are five main characters in Return of the Native: three men and two women.

The Men

Clym Yeobright, aka The Dreamer: Clym is arguably the primary character in the book, even though he doesn’t arrive on scene until at least a quarter of the way through this chunkster. He is the “Native” from the title, returning to Egdon Heath from Paris, where he sold luxury trinkets. He is frustrated with his lot in life, wanting to do something more idealistic, for the good of mankind and in particular for the poor rural folk.

Love interest(s): In former days, his cousin Thomasin. After returning from Paris, Eustacia Vye.

Damon Wildeve, aka The Scoundrel: Mr. Wildeve is a cad, toying with the affections of two different women in order to try to get the most benefit to himself. He runs the local inn/pub. He is a slave to his pride.

Love interest(s): Primarily Eustacia Vye, though he has a passing affair with Thomasin Yeobright which eventually causes him to propose marriage (because her aunt doesn’t like him, which hurts his pride). It gets him in quite a difficult situation.

Diggory Venn, aka The Gentleman: Diggory, a reddleman by trade, is the steadfast, loyal man of the trio, down to earth and hardworking. He has a solid sense of self-irony, and is honest, brave, and selfless. He travels for his profession, and always ends up in Egdon Heath whenever wrongs need to be set right.

Love interest(s): He carries an undying passionate love for Thomasin Yeobright, even years after she’s rejected him.

The Women

Thomasin (Tamsin) Yeobright, aka The Angel: Thomasin is the very epitome of innocence, naivety, kindness, and childlike foolishness. Everything she does and feels is young, immature, and easily taken for granted. No matter how much evil she’s exposed to, she is never corrupted.

Love interest(s): Despite offers of marriage from both her cousin Clym and Mr. Venn years prior to the beginning of the book, Thomasin does not know love until she meets Mr. Wildeve.

Eustacia Vye, aka The Demon: Descended from upper class and now forced to live on the Heath with her backward grandfather, Eustacia is passionate, wild, arrogant, contemptuous, lustful, and greedy. She hungers for a life better than the one she has now. She wants nothing more than to escape her current life, as long as that escape doesn’t involve any sort of work on her part.

Love interest(s): Herself. In a partner, she favors Mr. Wildeve at first, then later transfers those leanings onto Clym when he can give her something more to her advantage.

***
The rest of the cast is filled out by Mrs. Yeobright, whose parenting skills towards Clym and Thomasin are contrasted by those of Captain Vye, Eustacia’s grandfather. There are also a handful of comic relief characters scattered around the Heath.

The biggest thing I got out of this book was that you should marry not the person you love, but the person who treats you the best (Go for Diggery Venn! Really! You’ll be happier if you do!!)! This is particularly the case for the women, who in that time really had nothing they could do for their own lot in life and depended heavily on their husbands. Going into marriage with contrary opinions or when your future spouse’s affections aren’t always true is a BAD IDEA. I suppose, perhaps, that in some ways, it’s a lesson people still learn today – that strong, passionate love in the beginning does not necessarily lead to lifelong compatibility.

There was also parenting contrast, as mentioned above. Mrs. Yeobright was a wise woman who was very involved with her wards’ lives. She saw things and knew what her children should do, even if there was nothing she could do to get them to believe her. She foresaw all the problems they would have if they took certain paths. One of my favorite quotes in the book came from her:

Why is it that a woman can see from a distance what a man cannot see close?

Captain Vye certainly didn’t have a lot of foresight. Once Eustacia was under his care, he never bothered with her. He didn’t try to direct her behavior or have a hand in her upbringing, but instead let her run wild on the Heath. Eustacia, consequently, never has much direction in her life and must make her own way the only way she knows how.

Eustacia herself is a fascinating character. Despite what I said above in describing her, there were parts of me that sympathized with her. She was trapped by her situation and upbringing. While she certainly could have made better decisions, I understood why she manipulated things the way she did. She was always trying to find the most advantageous path to take, while keeping other doors open in case something didn’t work out. This sort of manipulative scheming is awful, but how many of us haven’t done something like that? Trying to figure out the best way to go by taking a couple steps down each road? I both disliked and loved Eustacia.

Happily, the end of this book was not the utter depressing misery that ended Tess. Of course, there is some share of tragedy. You must expect that from Hardy. But the end is mixed, with good and bad, and it left me completely satisfied in all respects. I loved this book. And I loved listening to Alan Rickman read it to me over the course of 5 weeks. It was a perfect experience altogether!

*****
Note: This book was reread and re-reviewed in January 2019.

Posted in 2010, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , , , | 8 Comments

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, by Alan Bradley

Posted on August 28, 2010 by Thistle

200px-The_Sweetness_at_the_Bottom_of_the_PieFlavia de Luce, an eleven-year-old chemistry prodigy in 1950 England, is taken by surprise early one morning by the discovery of a body in the garden of her house. The police are called in, but Flavia, not wanting to be left out, sets off on her own investigation.

I’m probably the last person in the blogosphere to read this book. Everyone has talked about how wonderful it is, but I wasn’t convinced until Kerri reviewed the second mystery in this series, The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag. I loved the cover and title far better than I ever had Sweetness, and I put both books on my TBR list.

This book was awesome. I’m not always a mystery fan, but about this time of year, I start craving one or two mysteries, which satisfies me for the next year. Most of the time I read some generic cozy, but this year’s selection was far better! I adored Flavia, with her love of chemistry, her battles with older sisters Ophelia and Daphne, and her absolutely ridiculous and unbelievable narration. No one, and especially no child, speaks the way she does, but because it felt too over the top to be believable, it made me grin all the way through. It’s a writer’s technique that I’ve always thoroughly enjoyed.

The mystery was also a lot of fun. I never had a clue in advance what I was going to find out, and the setup was not the traditional flirting between several main suspects. Instead, we gathered information as we went along in Flavia’s wake. She reminded the reader of crucial moments just at the right times, and there was never any bait-and-switch trickery. The mystery was straightforward, as was the path towards the truth. I’ve never read a mystery quite like this, where trying to find the answer in advance wasn’t at all important.

I’ll add my voice to the chorus of people saying what a wonderful book Sweetness is.

Posted in 2010, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , | Leave a comment