Book log archives - March 2008

Archives - March 2008

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Margaret Mahy, The Tricksters: Harry Hamilton's family like to think of their vacation house, Carnival's Hide, as "open to haunting", because of the years-past drowning death of brilliant, handsome young Teddy Carnival, son of the house's first owner. One Christmas, though, three mysterious young men appear at the house, and Harry must figure out who they are and what they want. Mahy blends the supernatural with the everyday gorgeously, as Harry navigates the troubled waters of her family's secrets and of the three tricksters' games until everything comes together in a searing, seamless climax.
Joan Aiken, If I Were You: As they prepare to leave their English boarding school, Louisa Winship has a dangerous proposal for orphaned Alvey Clement: they look so much alike they could be twins, so why doesn't Alvey return to Louisa's home and family, posing as Louisa and freeing her to pursue a forbidden life as a missionary in India? Alvey is intrigued despite herself and accepts, taking her place within Louisa's family. As she struggles not to reveal her identity, warm-hearted Alvey is drawn deeper into the family's troubles. Oh, and did I mention Alvey wants to be a novelist and is working on a book called Wicked Lord Love? Just knowing that would have made me want to read this, but the impostor plot really made it a must-read, and I wasn't disappointed: it's richly characterized, has a lovely sense of place, and is utterly delightful.
Joan Aiken, The Girl from Paris: The Girl from Paris follows The Weeping Ash and The Smile of the Stranger in the Paget family series, and it's definitely the weakest of the three Paget family books. Ellen Paget leaves her Brussels boarding school, where she's become involved with an attractive schoolmaster, to become a governess in a noble French family. The plot is derivative in places (the beginning bears a distinct resemblance to Villette, for instance) and oddly disjointed, taking Ellen in the middle of the book back to her family in England and into a different story and setting which never feels very related to the Parisian part of the book (which I did enjoy). Also, the romance is barely there, with practically no development of it onstage; it's mostly developed offstage and in the backstory, which makes it feel sudden and not very engaging once it does become part of the onstage story.
P.G. Wodehouse, Jill the Reckless: When Jill Mariner is dumped by her rich, pompous fiancé and loses all her money on the same day, she decides to cross the ocean to New York with her rapscallion uncle Chris. After a short stay with some relations on Long Island, she ends up on Broadway, in the chorus of a new musical and having an unexpected new romance. I thought the book was a little overlong and could have been tightened; it feels a little rambling in places, particularly during the Long Island interlude, which connects the London and New York parts of the book but isn't terribly interesting in and of itself. I did like the feisty heroine and her romance, which was rather more heartfelt than usual in a Wodehouse, and Wodehouse's insider's look at 1930s Broadway is funny and engaging.
Madeleine L'Engle, The Small Rain, A Severed Wasp, And Both Were Young: While deciding what I felt like reading and thinking that I wanted some nice comfort rereading, I discovered I was in the mood for Madeleine L'Engle, so I went and picked out The Small Rain and A Severed Wasp from the shelf, and then added And Both Were Young. The former two are directly related, being about pianist Katherine Forrester Vigneras; the latter is only related in that L'Engle-ish way in which characters from one book show up in another (only very tangentially here), but it and The Small Rain both deal with boarding school experiences and felt as though they could be read together.

L'Engle's books quite often have to do with art, but these are particularly focused: Katherine is a pianist, from a family and background of musicians, composers, and actors, while Philippa (Flip) Hunter of And Both Were Young is an artist, as is her father. The Katherine books are very good on the artistic life, from its beginnings in The Small Rain, which covers Katherine's childhood and adolescence, to its later stages in A Severed Wasp, in which an older Katherine looks back over her life and tries to come to terms with her memories. The Small Rain, which was L'Engle's first novel, is full of adolescent angst and emotion; A Severed Wasp is also emotional but is more contemplative. I always read them together; they make a beautiful pair.

And Both Were Young is good as boarding school stories go and has a sweet, quiet romance, but I don't think the part of the plot which has to do with Paul's history works very well with the rest of it. I mean, the wartime amnesia thing is fine and interesting, but not the mysterious stranger part. Anyway, I do like the convincing way in which Flip grows from shyness to confidence during the course of the book, and of course I pretty much always like boarding school stories.
Venetia Murray, An Elegant Madness: High Society in Regency England: This social history of the Regency period (which Murray arbitrarily defines as 1788-1830) is an entertaining read, but with some issues. It's organized by topic rather than chronologically, which leads to a lot of jumping around and repetition, as well as inevitable confusion about how things actually changed over the long period she's considering (particularly as there aren't a lot of dates). There are flat-out errors; she confuses various members of the Spencer and Cavendish families, for instance, and a look at the reviews on Amazon leads me to believe that there are more errors I just didn't catch, not being terribly well-read in the period. I mean, I can't say I didn't enjoy reading it, because it's fun and sprinkled with numerous quotations from letters and diaries, and it does provide some background for Heyer and other Regency romance writers. But I think I'd have been better off just reading some of the sources she quotes, or a good political history of the period, or a good biography of George IV.
Iain Pears, An Instance of the Fingerpost: In Oxford in 1663, a don is poisoned, and a servant girl is accused; she confesses and is sentenced to be hanged. On the surface, this is what happened, but below the surface, there's plenty more going on. Pears uses four different narrators, each telling his own story, each revealing what he saw (or thought he saw), which often isn't what the others saw. Pears handles the multiple narration trick really well; though I found the second and third narrators unsympathetic, I couldn't stop reading. The structure made me think of a sort of double spiral: one starting small and widening as Pears added narrators, information, and scope; and one starting out big and narrowing down until the truth of the mystery was revealed. It's a long, complex, but very rewarding novel.
Betty MacDonald and Anne MacDonald Canham, Happy Birthday, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle!: Betty's daughter Anne found one of the stories that makes up this book in Betty's things after her death; the rest of the stories are written by Anne from Betty's notes. This was a pleasant surprise, actually. I wouldn't say that Anne captured Betty's unique style exactly, but she's managed to create a fairly entertaining book: not quite up to the rest of the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books, it's still a worthy attempt and a fun read.
Justina Chen Headley, Girl Overboard: Syrah Cheng is the youngest daughter of billionaire businessman Ethan Cheng; she lives in a mansion, goes to a private school, and has everything...apparently. But her half-siblings hate her, her parents are distant, her best friend's girlfriend is coming between them, and she's suffered a drastic knee injury in a snowboarding accident, causing her parents to forbid her to snowboard, the only thing she loves. I loved Headley's examination of Syrah's relationships, especially with her family and with her old nanny, and her appraisal of how superwealth makes Syrah's life more difficult as well as easier. As in Headley's first book, there's a real sense of history; Syrah's family has been very affected by the Cultural Revolution in China, in ways Syrah doesn't even know about and has to discover in order to resolve family conflict. There's a lot going on here, and Headley does a really good job weaving all the threads together. She's gotten even better since her first book, and I look forward to seeing what she does next.
George Barr McCutcheon, Graustark: I can't believe I even read this, but my grandmother loaned it to me, so I thought I ought to give it a fair shot. It's a romantic tale of a manly American who falls in love with a mysterious European girl, who turns out to be the ruler of the tiny country of Graustark. I enjoyed it, but perhaps not in the way she intended: I laughed all the way through. I mean, who could not laugh at prose like this?

"She greeted this glowing remark with a smile so intoxicating that he felt himself the most favored of men. He saw that smile in his mind's eye for months afterward, that maddening sparkle of joy, which flashed from her eyes to the very bottom of his heart, there to snuggle forever with Memory's most priceless treasures."

I think it's the snuggling part that really makes that paragraph.

Along with his overblown language, McCutcheon also had a tin ear for names -- witness these gems: Grenfall Lorry (the hero), Harry Anguish (the hero's best friend -- this one is even better when you say it out loud), and various Graustarkian and other foreign names, such as Quinnox, Mizrox, Bolaroz, and last but not least, Ogbot.
Mollie Panter-Downes, Good Evening, Mrs. Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes: Panter-Downes was an English writer who wrote for The New Yorker for many years (46, in fact): Letters from London, book reviews, Reporter at Large pieces, and short stories, including these 21 stories which Persephone has collected for the first time. They're simply small slices of life in wartime Britain, of different characters in different situations. Some are humorous, some are melancholy; all are sharp and vivid, small gems of observation.
Barbara Hambly, Sold Down the River: This is the fourth in Hambly's historical mystery series about Benjamin January, free man of color in mid-19th century New Orleans. I really liked the first two and was less enthralled by the third, but Sold Down the River absorbed me utterly from start to finish. Hambly engages very directly with the life of slaves, as January assumes the disguise of a slave in order to investigate mysterious happenings on the plantation he belonged to until the age of seven. There have been sabotage, arson, and murder, and if January cannot discover the culprit, all the slaves on the plantation will suffer for it, beyond their daily experience of humiliation and hurt. The previous novels, all set in New Orleans, were dark in their depiction of black people's lives in that time and place; this one is even darker, searing yet evoking the courage and fellowship of the slaves as well as the horrors of their lives.
Iain Pears, The Raphael Affair: This is the first in Pears' series of art history mysteries, featuring British art scholar Jonathan Argyll and Italian art investigator Flavia di Stefano, who meet while looking into a possible long-lost painting by Raphael. I certainly wasn't expecting a book on the level of An Instance of the Fingerpost, but I hoped for a good, entertaining mystery. Unfortunately, though I thought the main characters were interestingly quirky, neither the plot nor the secondary characters particularly held my interest. I started the second novel in the series, The Titian Committee, but abandoned it about halfway through, when I realized I just didn't care. I guess I'll try The Dream of Scipio instead.
Patrice Kindl, Goose Chase: Alexandra Aurora Fortunata, in spite of her mellifluous and fancy name, is simply an orphaned goose girl, living by herself with her flock of twelve Geese...until the day she is polite to an old beggar woman, who of course turns out to be a witch and gives Alexandra three gifts: gold dust shall fall from her hair when she combs it, diamonds shall fall from her eyes when she cries, and she shall be as lovely as the dawn. Sounds good, right? But as Alexandra notes, no good deed goes unpunished, and her new gifts get her in a lot of trouble when King Claudio the Cruel and Prince Edmund of Dorloo lock her in a tower to keep her safe while they compete for her hand in marriage. I love fairy tale riffs, and this is a delightful one. Alexandra's narrative voice is splendid, slightly archaic without being forced or stilted, and Kindl weaves many fairy tale elements into her tale with grace and wit.
Sherwood Smith, A Posse of Princesses: Rhis, princess of the small kingdom of Nym, is going to a party: all the eligible princesses around have been invited to the coming-of-age party of Lios, the crown prince of Vesarja. Though Rhis feels out of place and plain next to Iardith, the most beautiful of the princesses, she soon finds a circle of friends she can have fun and be herself with, and when Iardith is kidnapped, Rhis and her friends go to the rescue. The idea of princesses competing for a prince could easily be clichéd, but here it isn't at all; the story's fresh and charming, with vivid characters, several delightful and engaging romances, and the supportive relationships Rhis and her friends develop.
Maureen F. McHugh, China Mountain Zhang: In McHugh's vision of the future, China is the dominant power on Earth, there are communes on Mars, and Rafael Zhang ("China Mountain" is a translation of his Chinese name) is an American-born Chinese who has to hide his half-Hispanic heritage and his sexual orientation. The story is mostly Zhang's, though McHugh also weaves in pieces of other narratives, by people whose lives touch Zhang's: a Martian settler whom Zhang tutors in engineering, the daughter of Zhang's construction crew foreman, a human-powered kite flyer. The worldbuilding is especially strong; I thought McHugh did a brilliant job of layering in bits and pieces of information about the world, building up a complex picture without resorting to infodumps. This is a very thoughtful and rewarding novel.
Joe Posnanski, The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O'Neil's America: Posnanski spent the 2005 baseball season touring the country with Negro Leagues legend Buck O'Neil, who had an equal passion for baseball and for life. I think it might be hard to write a bad book about the marvelous O'Neil, but Posnanski has produced an outstanding one, full of stories and laughter and hope: hope in spite of racial discrimination, in spite of O'Neil's inexplicable non-election to the Hall of Fame, in spite of the scandals that mar today's game. The Soul of Baseball is full of sentiment without ever being mawkishly sentimental; if you love baseball, you should read it.
Pamela Brown, Maddy Alone: This is a sequel to The Swish of the Curtain, in which Maddy, the youngest of the Blue Door Theatre Company, is chosen to star in a film while the others are away at drama school. It's cute but slight, and I missed the other young people, as the interplay between them was a large part of what made The Swish of the Curtain enjoyable. Plus, the idea of a whole film being rewritten and recast because of a -- gasp! -- historical inaccuracy made me larf and larf.
Judith Ivory, Sleeping Beauty: Newly knighted Sir James Stoker has just returned from an expedition to Africa in which he found treasure and tragedy. Coco Wild is an older, scandalous courtesan, who's locked her heart away from anything that might hurt her. James could ruin himself by associating with her, yet they find each other irresistible. This is my first Ivory, and I liked it quite a lot. Fairy tale associations are usually a plus for me, of course, but mostly, I really liked the hero and heroine and how well Ivory fit in their story to a larger plot about the fate of the African expedition. (Since reading it, I have bounced off Untie My Heart and Beast, unfortunately, mostly due to too much of a power imbalance between the heroes and the heroines, which I didn't think was a problem in Sleeping Beauty.)


Last updated 2 June 2008. All text and photographs © George Mitchell and Margaret Johnston, unless otherwise noted Comments, questions, suggestions to margaret@lonelymountain.net.