Author: Goodreads

The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti reads like a fairy tale. And I’m not sure if I have much more to say than that (although not having anything much to say has never stopped me before). It reminded me of Life of Pi, really, with it’s quasi-fantastical elements. Yes, that’s the right word for it: fantasy. But not the kind with dwarves and giants and castle… although there was indeed a dwarf and a giant and a castle in the novel.

I haven’t read Big Fish but I’ve seen the movie; The Good Thief has that sort of feel to it. Except whereas the main character in Big Fish spins a tale of magic out of his real-world experiences, with The Good Thief you only get the realworld parts. A few small towns in colonial New England, an isolated monastery turned orphanage, a mouse-trap factory built like a castle. An adventurer, a school-teacher turned drunk, and a boy with only one hand.

It’s a novel filled to bursting with symbolism, although I can’t say that I’m ready, yet, to tell anyone what all those symbols mean. The book doesn’t have much of a plot, reading more like a picaresque. Sort of.

I’m afraid I’m not doing a very good job of explaining any of this. You should just read the book. I came across it from a friend, a long-time friend who loves to read as much as I do. She told me she loved this book, and I can see why. It’s interesting that, for the most part, we rarely agree on how good a book is, or what it means. But on occasion we do agree. I’m going to get a copy of this one and have my wife read it. When my kids are old enough, I’ll have them read it too.

View all my reviews

No Easy Way Out by Dayna Lorentz
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

No Easy Way Out is the sequel to No Safety in Numbers, and god help us, there’s a third book in the series. The first one was terrible. Somehow, this second one was worse. I can only imagine how awful the third one will be. No, scratch that—I don’t think I can imagine that at all. I have post-traumatic stress from reading this. I’ve been through the five stages of grief. I literally had bad dreams while reading this book.

And to think that, in addition to an author, this book had an editor, and a publisher, proof-readers, consulting doctors even. There really are people out there who thing young adults are idiots. I mean, the only people I can think of who would buy this nonsense are the unrealistic, unlikable, uninteresting characters in the book itself.

The book is a muddled mess. It has no semblance of self-cohesion, starting not even on the last page of the prequel, but a few pages before the prequel’s ending. And the ending of No Easy Way Out? It just ends. Like the publishers decided to arbitrarily chop a big fat stack of pages into thirds.

But wait, there’s more mess. Here’s a book for young adults, and so, it can’t say, for example the F-word. Instead, the word “fark” is used. There’s cold-blooded, violent murder, torture, even a scene involving premature ejaculation (no, it’s not a scene written to be humorous), but we can’t harm the teen-reader’s mind with the F-word, can we.

No, instead, we’ll just bludgeon them with stupidity. With situations that would never occur, people saying and doing things they would never do. I’m not talking about people being jerks, I’m talking about wishy-washiness, changes in attitude that follow, at best, the cadence of a new sentence. Whatever’s convenient for the author to create conflict, she puts in. A whole mall shut-down, and somehow there’s a team of security guards with riot gear and stun-batons? A you farking kidding me?

I really don’t know what else to say. This was one of the most difficult reviews for me to write. I might be brain damaged. Don’t read this book.

View all my reviews

The House of Silk: A Sherlock Holmes Novel by Anthony Horowitz
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I tried to read The House of Silk last summer. It took me a week to get through 70 pages, but then I gave up. I just wasn’t in the mood. I’m more in a reading mood lately, and this time I polished off the whole novel in a single day. I am definitely in a reading mood now. Also, the book’s very readable.

My last several reviews have contained some form of the phrase “a friend loaned this to me,” and I’m almost done with that stack of book. Honestly, this is not the sort of pick I’d pick out for myself. Does a Sherlock Holmes novel not written by Conan Doyle amount to, essentially, fan fiction? Not that fan fiction is, in and of itself, bad. But certainly there’s something about Doyle’s style that only Doyle can do, yes? So why read Anthony Horowitz’s version?

Because it’s all about character, isn’t it. And I think that when most folks think of Sherlock Holmes, they go with not Doyle but the cartoonified Basil Rathbone version from the late 1930s. On top of that, they may layer the very modern Benedict Cumberbatch. Or Robert Downey Jr’s version. Maybe they’ll even throw in TV’s House, or memories of Encyclopedia Brown.

The point is, Doyle’s Sherlock is not the only Sherlock, and what Horowitz does is take the Holmes trope and write a mystery around it. And that’s pretty much it. He takes advantage of the Holmes legacy and mentions Moriarty and the Red-Headed League and the Baskervilles and the 7-Percent Solution and all that stuff, but really, at the end of the day, The House of Silk is just a mystery novel set in 1890‘s London.

Perhaps that’s underwhelming. Oh well. Like a sci-fi novel that has lots of fun techno-gadgets to play with, Horowitz has the Sherlock observation/deduction tricks to play with, which he does, so that the novel is fun to read, entertaining in that sense. But deep, evocative, thought-provoking? No, not really.

Stereotypical Victorian era London, with snooty aristocrats, ragamuffin street children, pea-soup fog, dens of ill repute, etc etc. All with a modern take on moral outrage to keep the modern reader sufficiently horrified by the novel’s end. If you like that sort of thing, you’ll enjoy The House of Silk. If not, give it back to the friend who loaned it to you and return to your Camus.

View all my reviews

Bury Your Dead by Louise Penny
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This will be a review for people who, like me, have not read Louise Penny before, A friend loaned me a stack of books, including Bury Your Dead, which is itself 6th in a series about Chief Inspector Armand Gamache. Normally, I’d dutifully plow through the earlier books so as to be able to appreciate this one the more. But this time I decided to try an experiment, see if the book stood on its own.

And I’m happy to report that it does. Penny manages to stack four mysteries on top of one another: Who killed Augustin Renaud? Who kidnapped Agent Morin? Did Olivier really kill the Hermit? And just where is Champlain buried? Some of the mysteries are intertwined with one another, but some are not, serving more to thematic support the other mysteries, and help develop Armand Gamache for the reader.

Which is why the book stands on its own. I don’t know what Gamache is like in the earlier books, and maybe I wouldn’t be able to travel with him on his journey of sorrow and shame if I knew him already. Here is man, seemingly, intelligent, thoughtful, and heroic, who is nevertheless all too human and therefore fallible. And what do they say about the mighty when they fall?

But for all that, Bury Your Dead can be taken as just a good cozy who-dun-it. It’s a murder mystery, a history mystery, and book mystery. There’s also a little bit of politics but only a very little if, like me, you’re an apathetic American who can appreciate neither Catholic vs Protestant nor French Canadian versus English. In that sense, the novel’s somewhat exotic, but not too rich to give you a toothache.

I suppose I’ll get around to the earlier Gamache novels eventually. Although I’m tempted to leave my memory of this one intact by not getting to know the younger Chief Inspector more. Perhaps when I’m ready, I’ll try another experiment. As for you who have not read Penny yet: go ahead.

View all my reviews

The Spellman Files by Lisa Lutz
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’ve got this problem where I don’t read enough books by non-white non-mail authors. This, despite the fact that two of my all-time favorites are Percival Everett and Hillary Mantel. However, when it comes to (so-called) genre fiction, I don’t wander enough. But can you blame me? A friend loaned me The Spellman Files, and this is what it says on the back of the book: “She’s part Bridget Jones, part Columbo.” Another blurb gushes: “Isabel Spellman… the love child of Dirty Harry and Harriet the Spy.” Those quotes come from USA Today and People, by the way.

You see, that’s my complaint a(my lame-ass excuse if you’re being critical). A few blurbs clearly written to intrigue what the publishers feel are female readers. That’s an insult to women, if you ask me, but let’s move on. This is supposed to be a review. I’m here to tel you that The Spellman Files is nothing like Bridget Jones, Columbo, Dirty Harry, or Harriet the Spy. “Jason Bourne is part James Bond, part Good Will Hunting.” You see how ridiculous that sounds.

I read the book anyway. Thank goodness. A lot of fun, but pretty tense in places. I think it’s supposed to be considered funny, and while there are some characters that make you grin, for the most part it’s sort of dark. The Spellman Files takes the whole dysfunctional family trope and exploits it to the nth degree. But it doesn’t come across as cliché’d or trite. If anything, this is a coming-of-age novel for character who comes-of-age in her late 20s.

I say “novel” but it’s not really a novel. There’s a loose over-arching plot, but it’s stop-gapped with what amounts to short stories, which themselves are sometimes not plotted at all, but are just long character studies. The book’s title has “Files” in it afterall, which sets the right tone. Me, I like that sort of thing. I’d read more of that sort of thing if it became it’s own subgenre.

Altogether, this is a good read, and I’ll be reading the sequels, which I think is praise enough. As for non-white non-male “genre” authors, I’ve learned my lesson. Don’t read blurbs.

View all my reviews