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. :-)

Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, Helen Simonson

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One of the best love stories I’ve read in the past few years, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand depicts the relationship between the staid, stiff-upper-lip English gentleman Major Ernest Pettigrew (retired) and the warm, friendly Pakistani shopkeeper Mrs. Jasmina Ali. I love the subtle, almost repressed, romance between the butler and the maid in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day, and Major Pettigrew features a similar romance: a multi-cultural Remains of the Day in a small English village.

In the village of Edgecombe St. Mary, the blossoming romance between Major Pettigrew and Mrs. Ali is not controversial at all, mostly because none of the villagers even perceive it as possible. Though Major Pettigrew was born in India and Mrs. Ali was raised in England, the villagers insist on maintaining their image of him as the quintessential Englishman and her as absolutely foreign. In an especially telling – and hilarious – scene, the villagers decide to throw a Mughal-themed party, and ask Mrs. Ali about Indian history, completely ignoring Major Pettigrew’s interjections about all the historical inaccuracies in their party plans.

Helen Simonson’s language is wonderfully subtle. The attraction between Major Pettigrew and Mrs. Ali is beautifully suppressed, with the tiniest steps made significant yet handled very delicately. Take for example a scene near the beginning of the novel, where Major Pettigrew considers dropping by Mrs. Ali’s shop: “He… decided that he might benefit from a short walk through the village. He might stop in at the village shop to purchase some tea. It would, he thought, be generous of him to make a visit and give the busy Mrs. Ali a chance to make her excuses for not coming to see him.” So much emotion is kept between the lines, and that just makes it even more potent.

While Major Pettigrew and Mrs. Ali are physically attracted to each other, their connection is rooted firmly in friendship, particularly in a shared love of literature and conversation. Because both characters are past middle age, they both also have to contend with family issues, with being thought of as irrelevant. Major Pettigrew’s “last stand” refers to a gun that belonged to his father, which Major Pettigrew wants to keep but which his son wants to sell to advance his own career. These just add texture to their growing relationship, and Simonson interweaves the various subplots masterfully.

Major Pettigrew is Helen Simonson’s first novel, and I definitely look forward to reading more of her. Major Pettigrew is a beautifully written, subtle love story, which also deals with issues of culture, family and the very human need to find someone to grow old with.

Water Rat of Wanchai, Ian Hamilton

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This first in a new mystery series introduces us to a literally kick-butt heroine. Ava Lee is a world travelling, Starbucks Via swilling master of bak mei, an ancient Chinese art taught only to the highest echelon of kung fu warriors. She’s also a forensic accountant, a job that conjures images of middle aged men in business suits who crunch numbers rather than a young woman who travels the world and plays hardball with gang lords and crooked cops while hunting down money from people who cheat her clients.

In Water Rat, Ava travels from Toronto to Hong Kong to Guyana, dealing with the seedy underworld while investigating what is essentially a white collar crime. Ian Hamilton has a gift for language and a clear fascination with Asian culture. His descriptions of the places Ava visits are incredibly vivid and his descriptions of the food Ava eats are mouth watering. Water Rat invokes Asia and Asian cuisine in a way similar to Donna Leon’s depiction of Venice in her Brunetti mysteries. The book also talks a lot about Ava’s family; it’s a fascinating look at Hong Kong culture and the Chinese-Canadian community in Toronto, and I’d be interested to know how accurate it is.

The book is really more of a thriller than a mystery – Ava knows almost from the beginning who the bad guy is, and the story is more about how she can track him down and convince him to pay her client. As a thriller, the book is very exciting. There are lots of twists in the story and while I can certainly imagine it as a movie, the book never devolves into cardboard cut out action movie scenes. I’ve heard Ava compared to Alan Bradley’s Flavia de Luce, and Ava is certainly as brilliant as Flavia. But I’d probably compare her more to Lisbeth Salander – though nowhere near as dark and disturbed, Ava is at least as kick-ass.

I love mysteries. I’m a fan of Hercule Poirot, Guido Brunetti, Inspector Alleyn, Inspector Lynley, John Rebus, Flavia de Luce, the list can go on forever. With its strong, fascinating heroine, and its travel lit and foodie lit style passages, Ian Hamilton’s Ava Lee series has officially made it on to that list. A note of warning: this book will make you crave dim sum.

Apocalypse for Beginners, Nicolas Dickner

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Apocalypse for Beginners grabbed me from the title alone. It promised irony, wit and humour, and the book did not disappoint. For generations, the Randall family has been gifted (cursed?) with the ability to prophesy the exact date of the end of the world, and each has gone insane when their predictions are proven false. The book focuses on Hope Randall, whose childhood with a pill popping, non-perishable food hoarding mother perennially on the run from an impending apocalypse has turned her into a logical, scientifically-minded girl who doesn’t put much stock in Randall visions of the apocalypse. Hope hasn’t received her own vision, and believes that if there were to be an apocalypse, the best way to determine its date would be through chance, through the mathematics of probability rather than a nightmare.

 

Mickey Bauermann, the book’s narrator, falls in love with Hope and his friendship provides a bit of normalcy in Hope’s life. Their relationship is sweet, more friendship than passion and romance, and together, they watch major world events of the 1990s unfold on TV. Hope is very interested in science and politics, and while none of the Randalls’ apocalyptic predictions have come true so far, the book touches on 20th century events that are somewhat apocalyptic in that they each ended a kind of era in world history – Hiroshima and the atomic bomb, the end of the cold war, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and David Suzuki and contemporary concern for the environment.

The story really takes off when Hope explains to Mickey that one needs mathematical elegance to determine the date of the apocalypse. Using a pair of dice, she comes up with the date July 17, 2001. Her prediction takes on a more ominous tone for her, however, when she realizes that all the packages of the ramen noodles her mother has in the house have July 17, 2001 as their expiration date. In fact, all packages of that brand of ramen noodles she finds in the grocery store also have the same expiration date. Worse, she unearths an old comic book with an ad by a psychic also predicting July 17, 2001 as the date for the apocalypse. The signs all seem to point to her mathematical prediction succeeding where previous generations of Randalls have failed, and Hope finds herself falling into the family pattern.

Her adventures in investigating her own prediction for the apocalypse make for a fun, light hearted read, and Mickey’s unflagging affection and concern for her inject the perfect amount of tenderness into the story. As a reader, I was eager to find out how Nicolas Dickner would deal with the approaching date of the apocalypse, and I cared enough about the characters to want them to have a happy ending together. The ending was a bit disappointing for me – I felt that after so much build up, the story just petered off – but overall, I found Apocalypse for Beginners to be a fun, enjoyable read.