"The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it." (James Bryce)

Friday, February 26, 2016

DEATH OF A NURSE (M.C. Beaton)

What do I need to say?  Hamish is discontented and wishes he had someone to love, as always.  When a beautiful nurse is found murdered on the beach, red herrings abound, Blair interferes, and Hamish ultimately solves the case.  If you love Hamish and you love the antics of the strange people of Lochdubh (lock-doo) and the Scottish Highlands, you'll thoroughly enjoy this latest (32nd!) addition to the series.  It's a great weekend read!

Thursday, February 25, 2016

THE THINGS WE KEEP (Sally Hepworth)

This is a scary book.  It will remind you of Lisa Genova's Still Alice, which is also about a woman with early onset Alzheimer's.  Like Alice, Anna has family support, to an extent, and the reader experiences the progression of the disease through Anna's eyes and mind.  Anna is just 38 years old when the story begins and has recently moved to a nursing home.

Unlike Still Alice, The Things We Keep is written from the point of view of several other characters, Eve and her daughter, Clementine, as well as Anna's.  Eve is a recent widow whose husband, Richard, was a financial manager convicted of cheating his clients out of millions of dollars with a Ponzi scheme.  After his suicide Eve and their daughter, Clementine, were left penniless and disgraced to face the contempt and hatred of Richard's victims, most of whom are convinced that Eve herself shares responsibility for Richard's crimes.  Eve meets Anna when she is hired as cook and cleaner at a private nursing home in her daughter's school district, where Clem can continue to attend the same school.  From Clem's narration we see the stress and anguish of a 7-year-old child missing her father, outcast and bullied by her classmates, and desperately trying to hang on to memories of her past life with both of her parents.

This novel raises a lot of questions about what is "right" for victims of Alzheimer's.  Should they be allowed, as adults, to engage in adult relationships (even if they do need to be reintroduced to people every day)?  Can people with Alzheimer's fall in love?  Where should the line be drawn between physical safety and emotional well-being? Anna's story is one that we all hope that neither we nor a loved one will ever have to live.  Hepworth presents us with 2 women of similar age and intelligence.  Each suffers a devastating setback in life.  One has the means and opportunity to fight her way back to some semblance of a normal life, always defined by her past, while the other faces the reality that her past is disappearing and her future is nonexistent.  I'm still thinking about this book.  I would highly recommend it.  I may add more to this review later on!

A WEE MURDER IN MY SHOP (Fran Stewart)

Delightful and endearing are two of the words that come to mind when trying to describe Stewart's first ScotShop mystery.  I am a lover of all things Scottish (well, except for maybe the food) and I embrace my Scottish ancestry wholeheartedly, so I reveled wholeheartedly in the talk of tartans, bagpipes, and sporrans and Peggy's treks around the Scottish countryside.

Peggy Winn (of Welsh, not Scottish descent) owns the ScotShop, a store devoted to all things Scottish in the tiny Vermont tourist town of Hamelin.  each year she travels to a village in the highlands of Scotland to purchase stock and make connections for her shop.  This year she discovers a small shop on a dark side street, where purchases a beautiful antique tartan shawl that comes with something extra.  When she unfolds the shawl and places it on her shoulders a handsome, 14th century ghost appears!  On her return to Vermont she discovers that not only has the ghost, "Dirk," traveled back with her, but that the dead body of her unfaithful ex-boyfriend, Mason, is under a fallen bookcase in her shop.  Since her cousin Shoe's baseball bat was used in the attack on Mason, Shoe is accused of the crime and jailed, prompting Peggy to investigate with the aid of handsome police detective harper.

While the mystery is fine, the best part of this novel is the series on verbal exchanges between Peggy and Dirk, who turns out to be a very intelligent and curious ghost, asking constant questions about language, customs, and technology.  This is fun read!

Monday, February 15, 2016

THE CHRISTMAS SURPRISE (Jenny Colgan)

Jenny Colgan just has a way of making you fall in love with her characters.  Rosie Hopkins and Stephen Lakeman are back and it's just after Christmas time in the village of Lipton.  Stephen's mother is still horrible and Aunt Lilian is still the voice of reason and love.  If you read the previous Rosie novels (Rosie Hopkins' Sweet Shop of Dreams and Christmas at Rosie Hopkins' Sweet Shop) you'll know that Rosie and Stephen have recently gotten engaged.  They are, however, in no hurry to get married, mainly because Stephen's aristocratic mother, Henrietta, will inevitably demand a "society" wedding rather than the simple, joyful ceremony the couple would prefer.  After a tragic personal turn of events, the couple decides to take a trip to Africa to visit the village where Stephen had taught and been injured by a land mine that killed two young boys.  Now the boys' sister is pregnant and Stephen and Rosie travel for days by plane and jeep to see the family and offer support to the new mother and baby.  When they return to England they bring back a joyous surprise (I won't tell you what), but complications ensue.

While Rosie's friend and sweet shop coworker Tina is planning her wedding, Stephen's sister Pamela breezes into town from America and decides to settle in Peak House, a dwelling on the Lipton estate where Stephen and Rosie had been tentatively planning to live because they needed more room.  Chaos ensues, of course, with Pamela's Peak House renovations, a fire in Tina's planned wedding venue, and dealings with nasty dentist Roy Blaine.  Of course, it all comes out fine in the end, but throughout the novel you will worry about Rosie and Stephen, two of the nicest and most adaptable people you would ever want to meet.  Don't confuse "nice" with boring, though.  These two have their struggles, but they always love and support each other and pitch in to help and nurture anyone else in need.  There's just something about Jenny Colgan.  It's not rocket science, but her stories have such a warm, appealing quality.  You want her characters to be happy because they make you happy.  That's the best thing about her novels.  I want to read more!

SUMMER SECRETS (Jane Green)

I read Summer Secrets on my Kindle, which is not my favorite way to read.  I like being able to go back and check previous details, like dates and names, and reading an e-book makes that difficult.  Still, it's free and easy with our library's OneClickDigital database!

Main character Cat, a divorced mother, is an alcoholic.  The novel mainly covers 1998 through the present, starting in 2014 and then going back to earlier times in Cat's life and to the early years of her parents' marriage.  Cat started drinking young and her dependence on alcohol spiraled out of control until she has evolved into a full-blown alcoholic by her early 20's.  Typical of some alcoholics, Cat doesn't really believe that she has a "problem,", but tries to sober up when she meets the recovering alcoholic who will turn out to be the love of her life.

The story here is not unique:  Girl grows up in dysfunctional family, becomes dysfunctional herself, discovers secrets in her past, falls in love, tries to get her act together, fails and tries again.  While there is much family drama here, it is basically a novel about a woman's struggle with alcoholism. My impression is that Jane Green must be close to someone who has struggled with a drinking problem, or that she is a great researcher, because she gets right to the heart of alcoholism, bringing us into the inner world of an alcoholic.  Don't look to be uplifted.  I found the book kind of depressing, but insightful and informative.  I have to admit that I picked it because it was by Jane Green without really paying attention to the subject matter.  I am glad that I read it and I would definitely recommend it to anyone interested in a look at the inside world of an alcoholic.


Tuesday, February 2, 2016

A SUPERIOR DEATH (Nevada Barr)

Nevada Barr is an expert at creating a strong sense of place.  In A Superior Death readers can almost feel the icy water of lake Superior closing in over their head and experience a sense of panic at diving far beneath the surface of the lake with a precise amount of time to return to the surface.

Barr's Anna Pigeon, a ranger with the U.S. National Park Service, has been reassigned from the Texas desert to remote Isle Royal in Lake Superior, where the waters are deep and mosquitoes in amply supply.  Hidden in the frigid waters are the wrecks of several sunken boats, including Kamloops, where the bodies of six crew members have been partially preserved for almost 70 years. Divers discover a 7th body, that of Denny Castle, a newlywed and expert diver, floating inside Kamloops dressed in old fashioned sailor's garb.  So the investigation begins.  Barr has managed to include possible cannibalism, domestic abuse, pedophilia, a federal agent obsessed with the idea of drug smuggling, grief, betrayal, incest, a missing person, teen angst, assault. and the bends into this action-packed (yet a bit slow-moving) story.  Unbelievably, it all fits successfully.  Barr, who has worked as a ranger herself, presents her readers with incredible detail, leaving us feeling as if we have just returned from a trip to Isle Royal, and grateful that we have escaped with our lives.

Nevada Barr is not for the reader who wants to breeze through an unrealistic techno-thriller.  She is for the reader who wants to immerse themselves in another life and another place, being drawn into the setting so far that sometimes the feeling of being in Isle Royal stays with you long after you've put the book down and gone about other business in your life.  This is a book that you can sink into.