Category Archives: Book Review Blog

My book reviews and fun bookish news as a book blogger. All about other people’s books, and not my own. :-)

A Lesson in Secrets, Jacqueline Winspear #50BookPledge

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It all started when my friend Jen asked if I read Maisie Dobbs. She knew how big a fan I am of Agatha Christie, and thought I’d enjoy Jacqueline Winspear’s novels as well. She happened to have an advanced reading copy of the latest in the series, and gave it to me. All I can say is, thank you, Jen! I just love Maisie Dobbs, and, like the Harper Collins executive who wrote the ARC’s cover letter, I too have become “an unabashed fan.”

A Lesson in Secrets begins with Maisie realizing that her car was being followed. In a style that reminds me of classic Nancy Drew, Maisie turns the tables on her pursuers and quite charmingly requests that they tell her why they were tailing her. It turns out the British Secret Service wants Maisie to go undercover as a lecturer at a private college in Cambridge, just to keep an eye out for any potential threats to the government. It’s 1932, and while the up-and-coming Nazi party still isn’t viewed as a threat, Britain is still reeling from the First World War and eager to establish stability. The college’s founder, Greville Liddicote, is a staunch pacifist, a controversial stance when love for one’s country is equated with the willingness to fight and die for it. So when Liddicote is found murdered, the novel broadens far beyond one man’s death, and tackles the overall sense of fear and confusion in Britain post-World War I. Winspear portrays the era wonderfully – we see the struggle between the war-engendered suspicion of foreigners and the desire for international cooperation, the discrimination against conscientious objectors to the war and its effect on their families, and Maisie’s own growing apprehension about the Nazis.

In Lesson, Winspear makes a strong case for the power of words. A lot of the mystery focuses on a children’s book about a group of fatherless children who try to end the war. The book was censored for its effectiveness at promoting pacifism: “The plight of orphaned children will always tug at the heartstrings.” Still, it was distributed widely through underground channels, and was rumoured to have caused a mutiny and an increase in conscientious objectors. Later on, during a debate, Maisie “felt a tremor of foreboding” because she sensed that a student “had stepped up with an intention to set the hall afire with his rhetoric” rather than “win the debate with honor.” Quite fittingly, Maisie’s primary weapons are her words. She investigates by talking to people, by reading between the lines and using sympathy and charm to get the information she needs. She lies easily, and more than once wonders at her ability to lie without blushing.

Above all, in an era when the very idea of nationalism is questioned, Maisie is adamant in her belief in Britain, to the point that her concerns about its future palpably affects her: “She had already seen much that she thought was not in the interests of the country she had served in a war still too easily remembered.” She, like Britain, has been scarred by the War, and again, like Britain, all she wants is to be able to live in peace. And she fights for this peace, eagerly and with conviction.

I especially love Maisie’s vulnerability in her personal life. In contrast to her confidence in solving murders and acting as a secret agent, Maisie is very hesitant when it comes to romance. Upon finding out that her lover James may have lied to her about his whereabouts, Maisie worries that her internal sensors have failed her somehow. Asked by friends about the possibility of marrying James, Maisie balks, partly because of the social convention that women give up their careers after marriage, but also partly because, she realizes, she’s afraid to believe in a “happily ever after.” Her concerns are very much grounded in the reality of women in her time, reminding us of all the women who have been left behind by those who’ve died in the War, and making her even more real.

A Lesson in Secrets has nuanced characters and an interesting mystery, and offers a fascinating look at Britain between the wars. I am now officially a Maisie Dobbs fan, and will be checking out the other books in the series.

The Great Night, Chris Adrian #50BookPledge

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When I think of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I remember my university English professor lecturing about the farcical hilarity of the young lovers running after each other in the woods and getting lost. I remember Robert Sean Leonard in Dead Poet’s Society, one of my all-time favourite films, as Puck, with a crown of leaves gleefully explaining his plan to another fairy, then looking absolutely dejected in the final soliloquy, as he notices his family in the audience. I do not imagine the world of Puck transported to present day San Francisco, but I’m so glad Chris Adrian has. The Great Night has transformed one of Shakespeare’s most delightful plays into a dark, contemporary novel that blends horror, fantasy, humour, and, if I may say so about a novel populated by fairies, realism.

No longer a mischievous trickster, Adrian’s Puck is a malevolent being who has been held captive by fairy royals Titania and Oberon. Puck in The Great Night is scary – “he was often the image of one’s worst fear or most troubling anxiety.” Titania becomes a grieving mother – her adopted son has died, and her husband has left her. She releases Puck in despair, hoping this would bring Oberon back to her, and instead setting off the series of events in the novel. Midsummer’s young lovers are now three young people who are broken hearted in some way, and the troupe of actors are now a group of homeless political activists who plan a Hamlet Mousetrap-esque musical for the Mayor.

I love what Adrian has done with this story. While he uses Midsummer characters like Titania and Puck, and some Midsummer plot devices, The Great Night is in so many ways a completely original story. Titania in particular is such a nuanced character. She cattily insults a human nurse, barely bothering to maintain the fairy glamour that makes humans perceive normality and social convention in the presence of a fairy. Yet even in that scene, she is terrified of losing her human Boy, whom Oberon has given to her as a gift and whom she has grown to love, even more than she loves Oberon. She is a fiercely protective mother, and the tragedy is that, even with all her fairy powers, she is still utterly helpless against human illness.

The young humans are fascinating as well. They each have detailed back stories, and are all seriously messed up, in quirky and endearing, but also heart-tugging ways. Molly, for example, grew up in a foster family that had a gospel band, and is now dealing with her boyfriend’s suicide. Harry has a phobia of dirt and has just broken up with his boyfriend, and Will wants to get a girl’s attention.

Adrian alternates between chapters about their current predicament – being trapped in San Francisco’s Buena Vista Park on their way to a party – and glimpses into their lives. At times, this got a bit confusing, as Adrian travels often not just between present day and background, but also between layers of back story. I found myself having to go back sometimes to check who a particular character is. It was mostly an odd mix between being solidly grounded in reality and being kept off-balance by rapid jumps in time and between characters. Adrian is nowhere near as skilled as Ishiguro who, in The Unconsoled, created such a wonderful world of unreality yet with such a core of reality. Then again, I don’t think he aspired to do that. On the contrary, Adrian grounds his story in realism, yet with enough fantastical elements to keep us off-balance, and I think his writing style helped enhance that experience.

I enjoyed reading The Great Night. The characters are wonderfully fleshed out – even Puck is revealed later in the novel to have an almost human motivation for his actions. Adrian’s tone moves from humour (both dark comedy and slapstick) to screwball eroticism to straight up terror, but all with a strong emotional core. Adrian is one of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” to watch, and I can see why.

The Knife of Never Letting Go (Chaos Walking Book One), Patrick Ness #50BookPledge

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Imagine a world where you can hear what everyone else is thinking, and they can hear everything you are thinking. You can’t shut it off, it’s an endless barrage of Noise, and most of what you hear are thoughts of pain and grief. That’s how it is in Prentisstown, where all the female settlers are dead and the Noise virus has left the males with the ability to hear each other’s thoughts and the thoughts of animals.

The only remaining boy in a town of men, Todd Hewitt is a month away from his thirteenth birthday and officially becoming an adult when he and his dog Manchee encounter an odd pocket of Quiet near a river. When Todd’s adoptive fathers Ben and Cillian find out about it, they pack Todd some food and his mother’s journal and order him to take Manchee and get as far from Prentisstown as possible. Turns out that a lot of what Todd believes is actually a lie, and Prentisstown has a terrible secret in its past, and the Mayor is pulling out all the stops to bring Todd back.

Knife is a powerful book, especially because we’re thrust right into Todd’s perspective. I especially love the scenes where the book describes the Noise – the overlapping lines of text in varying fonts are a veritable cacophony. I’m usually a big fan of e-reading, but the image of Noise contained within the mechanical boundaries of the e-reader screen just does not compare to the splash of words words words practically spilling over the edge of the page. Patrick Ness uses this sparingly – most of the time, he focuses on a particular character’s Noise, signified by a different font – and when he does, we are just sucked into the chaos that Todd must endure every day. Faced with the visual representation of this chaos, we can feel the desperation in Todd’s constant repetition of the mantra “I am Todd Hewitt.”

Todd speaks in a rough dialect, and Ness expresses this through his spelling. I normally don’t mind deliberate misspellings as long as the purpose is clear and consistent, and I was fine with a lot of it in Knife (e.g. “yer” instead of “your”). For some reason, “-tion” spelled “-shun” (e.g. “stayshun” instead of “station”) really bugged me, and I think it’s because I’d imagined this narrative to be primarily oral (Todd is literally telling his story) and I don’t hear enough of a difference to justify that particular misspell. That being said, about a third of the way through, I hardly even noticed it anymore, which I guess means the book really did suck me in completely. Interestingly, Todd later meets a character whose pronunciation is more conventional, and when that character tries to correct Todd’s grammar, Todd gets very defensive. I liked that; Todd’s dialect then became not just a writing gimmick, but more of a cultural stance. A friend told me he saw the unconventional spelling and grammar in Knife to mean that the old rules, what we thought of as rules in our world, just no longer applied.

Minor comment, I love how Manchee’s speech is limited mostly to “Poo” and “Squirrel.” So many books with talking animals treat them mostly as humans in animal form. I have no problem with animals able to speak intelligently (I love Snoopy, for example), but limiting Manchee’s language makes him just a creature of such boundless joy and friendship, a welcome Noise of innocence and happiness in such a confusing, dangerous world.

Ultimately, Knife works because it dares to ask the questions: how far are you willing to go to survive, and how far can you go without losing yourself? Faced with the opportunity to kill a man who wants to kill him, Todd says “But a knife ain’t just a thing, is it? It’s a choice, it’s something you do. A knife says yes or no, cut or not, die or don’t. A knife takes a decision out of your hand and puts it in the world and it never goes back again.” The decision of whether or not to kill has even more significance than Todd can begin to imagine, and he faces this decision over and over as he struggles for survival. Having a knife becomes a moral dilemma, one that haunts Todd and forces him to reflect on what makes a boy into a man.

It’s a fantastic book, first in the Chaos Walking trilogy. It felt a bit long at some points, but just when my attention drifted, something major happened that snapped me right back in. Knife ends on a cliff-hanger, with a very interesting, unexpected development that promises an exciting beginning to Book Two.