Author Archives: Jaclyn

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About Jaclyn

Reader, writer, bookaholic for life!

Review | They Thought I Was Dead: Sandy’s Story, by Peter James

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SandysStoryLong-time fans of Peter James’ Roy Grace mysteries know his tragic backstory: his wife Sandy disappeared without a word years ago, and he’s been dealing with the heartbreak since.

In They Thought I Was Dead, Sandy finally gets the chance to tell her story. And it turns out to be both gripping page turner and tragedy. Sandy’s a compelling and complex anti-hero: smart and resourceful, yet seeming cursed to make one terrible choice after another. We want very badly for her to succeed, yet we can only keep reading as she digs herself out of one hole only to land in an even bigger one.

Her story begins when she meets a wealthy woman in Pilates class, and realizes she wants more out of life than her comfortable but staid existence with Roy. This leads to some risky choices that soon put her on the wrong side of Roel Albazi, an Albanian career criminal who becomes the catalyst for Sandy running away.

To Sandy’s credit, as much as she tries to justify her decisions and blame others for her situation, she’s also self-aware enough to admit, even to herself, that others weren’t to blame for her choices. Tamzin may have tempted her towards a more glamorous lifestyle, but then her desire for an exciting and glamorous life began all the way from childhood, when she vowed not to turn out like her ultra-thrifty working class parents. Roy’s career may have led to much loneliness and many cancelled date nights, but Roy did not cause her to have one night stands with other men. Sandy’s gambling may have landed her in a mountain of debt she could not even begin to pay, but she would somehow figure something out.

And you know what? Kudos to her. For all the mistakes Sandy makes and all the downward spirals she has to deal with, she consistently takes responsibility for her actions. She also undergoes tremendous growth throughout the story. Her story may involve moments where she gets mired in one serious addiction or another, but it also involves many moments where she makes choices to free herself from those addictions and truly work towards a better life. So even when she stumbles once or twice, we are fully on her side cheering her on to pick herself back up again.

That’s why it’s so hard to read the chapters from Roel Albazi’s point of view. Even though he ceases to be a majorly visible figure in her life partway through, his chapters tell us that he’s never forgotten her, and that he continues to be obsessed with causing her harm. And while he remains a nightmare figure in Sandy’s subconscious, she’s much more focused on the villains and misadventures in her present-day. Honestly, I just wish she’d told Roy about him. I don’t know how much Roy would have been able to help, but I hated that Albazi remained a threat even as Sandy continued to work her way back up.

The last few chapters are particularly tough to read: Sandy has finally achieved some sort of happiness, and yet can’t help but long for the life with Roy she’s left behind. Unfortunately for her, he’s already moved on, and is in a serious romantic relationship with a forensic pathologist. This leads Sandy to doing things that she herself admits to her psychologist she’s not proud of. (From my past blog posts, there seems to be some overlap with events in Roy Grace Book 10, Want You Dead.) And honestly? It’s tragic. We want her to be happy, and it’s hard to see her making all-new bad choices that jeopardize that.

Sandy’s story is a fast-paced and page-turning read, but it’s not an easy one. Peter James turns this shadowy figure from Roy Grace’s past into a captivating anti-hero on her own merit.  I would have loved to read more stories from her, but I’m glad we have at least this one book. As Sandy says in the prologue, referencing the dash between the year of birth and year of death on a person’s gravestone: “I’m just fleshing out the dash a bit on my odd little life.”

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Thank you to Publisher’s Group Canada for an advanced reading copy of this in exchange for an honest review.

Review | Pride and Joy, by Louisa Onomé

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PrideAndJoy

SUCH a fantastic book!

Pride and Joy hooked me with its very first paragraph:

Mama Mary Okafor is turning seventy today, Good Friday, and at first, no one was happy about this. Simply put, if there’s anything anyone, including Mama’s daughter, Joy, knows about Mama, it’s that she would rather die than upstage God, and yet, here she is turning seventy on a holy day.

As someone who grew up in a devoutly Catholic country and with a devoutly Catholic mother, this opening made me laugh. With two simple sentences, Onomé has painted me a vivid picture of exactly who Mama Mary Okafor and her daughter Joy are, and how they relate to each other.

Onomé’s skill in writing vivid characters carries through as the story continues to unfold. Mama Mary then proceeds to die in her sleep, and before Joy can even figure out how to grieve, Mama Mary’s sister, Auntie Nancy, declares that she has had a premonition that Mama Mary will rise from the dead on Easter Sunday. The declaration is both comic (she got the insight from seeing a brown cow on the road) and tragic (beneath it all is very real grief that the sister she has followed her entire life is gone, and to a place she cannot follow), and it’s testament to Onomé’s skill that the author balances both emotions so masterfully.

As the story progresses, an ever-intensifying escalation into absurdity barely conceals the family’s ever-intensifying struggle to manage their grief. A reporter comes to film the resurrection, dozens of Nigerian Canadians show up on the lawn to hold vigil, and a cousin shows up live streaming the happenings to her social media followers. All at the same time, relationships — between siblings, between romantic partners, amongst cousins, and across generations — deepen, fracture, and heal in varying degrees. And the birthday party turned resurrection vigil gradually morphs into a beautifully moving, raw, and gut-wrenchingly real portrait of a family coming to terms with a heartbreaking moment in their living history.

The Okafors are Nigerian Canadian, and, with the caveat that I’m not myself of that culture, the book very much feels Nigerian. Characters speak Igbo, details like the cow in Auntie Nancy’s premonition feels culturally specific, and when they Zoom in Pastor Lazarus and his congregation from Nigeria, it’s both hilarious (“Lazarus” being the name of someone who was brought back from the dead in the Bible) and also very vividly brought to life.

The book also feels very Nigerian Canadian, specifically in Joy’s anxiety that her son Jamil has learned more about his Italian heritage from his father than about his Nigerian heritage from Joy. With Mama Mary gone, who will teach Jamil the language and all the traditions that Joy isn’t confident about knowing herself? It’s an anxiety that struck a chord in me as an immigrant; my mom was my strongest link to my Filipino heritage, and ever since her death, I’ve felt more pressure to remember and keep alive all the many traditions and practices that used to be such a naturally large part of my way of life.

Overall, I absolutely adore this book. The way characters come together in the end, how they’ve grown as individuals, and how their relationships have evolved over the course of Easter weekend… it’s all so masterfully done. I particularly felt my heart swell at a scene near the end where Joy and her brother Michael “do something dumb.” The song “Sweet Mother” isn’t familiar to me at all, but I imagine it’s as meaningful to some readers as it is to Joy and Michael. The scene is pure silliness, and a vivid reminder of how cathartic and full of love silliness can be.

Read this book. It’s fantastic.

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I won a copy of this book in an online giveaway, with no expectation of a review. I just loved it so much that I wanted to blog about it.

Review | The Cat Who Solved Three Murders, by LT Shearer

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Murder! Cats! Art theft! Seriously, take a look at that adorable cover. How could I not fall in love with this book?!

The Cat Who Solved Three Murders is a cozy mystery starring a retired detective, Lulu Lewis, and her talking calico, Conrad. He talks only to Lulu; to everyone else, he simply says “meow.” It’s a unique concept, but one that, I’m afraid, turned me off somewhat. As a cat person, what I love most about cats in books is how the author manages to bring to life all the wonderful ways cats communicate without having to say a word. By giving Conrad human dialogue, I feared that LT Shearer simply created a regular human-like sidekick who just happened to have four legs and a tail.

That being said, Conrad does get his lovely moments of pure kitty cat. He comforts people by sitting on their laps and purring. He delights people by how skillfully he balances on Lulu’s shoulder. And in two delightful scenes, he turns action hero with claws and hisses. (My cats may, of course, argue that any self-respecting cat would’ve skillfully disappeared from sight in those scenes rather than put themselves in such danger, but, ehh, kudos to Conrad the action hero kitty.)

The mystery that Lulu and Conrad tackle is pretty good. The story begins when Lulu is invited to the mansion of a wealthy friend, Julia, for Julia’s husband Bernard’s 60th birthday party. But when Lulu and Conrad (her plus-one, which I thought was cute) arrive, they learn that Julia and Bernard’s home had been burgled. Julia was fortunately out of the house when it happened, but an insurance agent who’d been at the house to assess the value of some paintings had been killed, and Bernard injured. Some of the details around the burglary strike Lulu and Conrad as odd, and when someone is killed at the birthday party, they realize the need to dig deeper.

Like I said, the mystery aspect is pretty solid. The clues aren’t very subtle, so the big reveals are easy enough to figure out, but it’s still fun to see the story unfold. I like that Conrad is the one who discovers a significant clue by the pool, and there was a bit of fun in how Lulu had to come up with an elaborate story for why she’d noticed the clue herself but didn’t mention it till a day later.

Beyond that, as refreshing as I thought it was that this cozy mystery had a professional detective who was actually competent and receptive to the heroine’s contributions, I found it a stretch that Tracey included Lulu on so much of the investigation. It doesn’t matter that Lulu used to be a detective herself; surely, some of the things Tracey shared with her should have been confidential? Tracey treated her more like a partner than a civilian; she included Lulu in suspect interviews, allowed her to see the autopsy results, and just shared information like phone records without a single thought. Even though the author explained that Tracey was young and inexperienced, and even though it clearly worked for the best with this investigation, it still struck me as unprofessional on Tracey’s part, and I feel like that should have been addressed somehow.

And as much as I like Conrad, I do wish he’d been more cat-like. As affectionate and compassionate as he is in some scenes, his personality still came off as disappointingly flat. I do get that cats are often portrayed as jerks in books, so it’s kinda nice that this cat is portrayed as a nice character. But, well, Prozac in Laura Levine’s Jaine Austen mystery series shows more personality in a single scene than Conrad does over multiple chapters.

Conrad’s dialogue does often make him feel like a human stand-in. Even though he reminds Lulu about his cathood multiple times (like when he hears something that she doesn’t, and he reminds her it’s because cats have better hearing), it comes off as unnecessary. Worse, it’s a glaring reminder of how easy it is to forget that Conrad is a cat, not because he’s such a special creature for being able to speak, but because he isn’t quite as compelling as real kitties are. Also, as much as I love cats and appreciate how many characters seem delighted by Conrad’s presence, the whole “that’s a cat!” “he’s on your shoulder!” “he meows!” type of scene actually got old. Even for me, which says a lot, because normally, I love scenes of people gushing over cats. But here, it just happens so often, and in pretty much the same way each and every time, that the novelty and charm eventually wore off.

Still, overall, Conrad is still a pretty cool cat, and I like that he literally saves the day a couple of times. Lulu seems a good series lead, and the mystery itself was fun to read about. This may not have met my (admittedly ridiculous) high hopes of becoming my new favourite mystery series, but it’s a fun mystery nonetheless. And I’m all for more cat detectives in fiction, please and thank you!

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Thank you to Publishers Group Canada for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.