THE MYSTIC AND THE MISSING GIRL, first in a well-made paranormal series

THE MYSTIC AND THE MISSING GIRL
VIKKI VanSICKLE
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Reluctant psychic Drew Benson can read tarot cards and get impressions from objects—she just never expected to use her gifts to investigate an infamous cold case.

Drew Benson has a secret. She gets visions, something she hasn’t tapped into since she was a teenager, when her late aunt, a TV psychic known as Hannah Mystic, became the scapegoat in the unsolved disappearance of a local teenager. Twenty years later, Drew is happy to ignore her gift, focusing instead on keeping the metaphysical shop she inherited from Hannah afloat, wrangling her sole, astrology-obsessed employee, and dodging local rake Foster Banks in her picturesque lakeside hometown.

But when Drew's arch-nemesis from high school, now a big city reporter, decides to investigate the cold case from all those years ago, it’s Drew’s ability that could finally make a break in the decades old mystery. With bills piling up, a disapproving mother laying on the guilt, and a local vandal who wants Drew and her witchy store gone, Drew has a lot to lose. But what she stands to gain—finding out what happened to the missing teen, clearing her aunt’s name, and a second chance at belonging—could change everything.

In The Mystic and the Missing Girl, Vikki VanSickle seamlessly draws readers into an utterly charming world in this unputdownable, small town mystery.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Drew's a woman who just will not let unfairness or inequitable bullshit rampant in our world go unchallenged. Her "...but that's not right" meter's calibrated very finely indeed, which is probably why those who've gone before in dishonest or unkindly meant ways trust her to bring fairness and closure to their stolen lives.

What makes all that work on a story level is that Drew doesn't have evidence until she, and a very unusual partner in Nick, do the investigation to actually solve the crime. That was very satisfying to me, as was the fact that Drew had to overcome significant internal hurdles to accept and trust her psychometry practice was giving her accurate information to aim the shoe-leather-wearing investigation parts.

Nick being a normal adult and a reasonable guy who learns the right lesson...Drew can be trusted, the leads she turns up in this weird way all pan out or lead to the right data...is a relief. No disbelief carried beyond the point of learning Drew's correct, no rufftuff manly-man nonsense.

The small-town weirdness is played for laffs but that's how it goes in mysteries of a cozy bent. I didn't think any of them were incredible. Unlikely, but that's bog-standard nowadays; rolling with it was fine, especially as they were all adding their bits to the shoe-leather-wearing investigation part as well as fleshing out the history of Drew's late auntie Hannah, their former neighbor who also had paranormal abilities that quite famously failed her once...and that was all the town needed.

Drew needs to redeem her aunt's memory. Nick needs a resolved cold case. Their work styles mesh better than is the norm in cozy mysteries. It's clear we're going to get a series, sooner rather than later please, because the paranormal edge is neither overemphasized nor played for humor...that's all in the town's responses to it.

Drew's shop having a pweshus cutesypooh c-a-t was the loss of the fifth star.

ANTOINE LAURAIN'S PAGE: THE PORTRAIT, firstborn fiction by the author; & FRENCH RHAPSODY, meditation on Les Jadis and how much today is the same

FRENCH RHAPSODY
ANTOINE LAURAIN (tr. Emily Boyce & Jane Aitken)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.9* of five

The Publisher Says: Middle-aged doctor Alain Massoulier has received a life-changing letter—thirty-three years too late.

Lost in the Paris postal system for decades, the letter from Polydor, dated 1983, offers a recording contract to The Holograms, in which Alain played lead guitar. Back then The Holograms had believed in their cutting-edge sound. However, the music industry remained indifferent, and eventually the band split up, each going their own way.

Alain is overcome by nostalgia, and is tempted to track down the members of the group. But in a world where everything and everyone has changed . . . where will his quest take him?

Antoine Laurain's new novel combines his trademark charm with a satirical take on modern France.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Republication of these titles comes after Gallic Books' acquisition by Pushkin Press is picking up steam. I'm all over it, I loved Gallic Books and am (obviously) fond of Pushkin Press (and imprints).

In this rather odd tale, we go down the rabbit hole of missed chances. Every person this accident of fate changed came under Author Laurain's scrutiny in separate chapters, with life stories and so on. It made for nice reading...but what was I supposed to get from these stories? I know them but possess no framework to see what I'm to make of the fates of the post-The Holograms members. Maybe I'm insufficiently au fait with modern French society to get the full import of the meaning.

That said, I really resonated to the right-wing politician's trajectory, he who was the bassist. I've forgotten his name because I despise his politics (and his screed-spouting lectures) and, like Endora from Bewitched, I forget the names of those I dislike. Nonetheless, I thought it was very interesting to read about whatsisname's trajectory. How he got into it, what he does...all very timely. Especially for a book first published in 2015....

The others stuck with me less but were absorbing enough that I kept picking the book up to read more every time I put something else down. A clutter of wacky neighbors and hero's-journey cicerones detract from the central story's momentum, none of whom end up making a real difference. I found the ending...pat.

So I'm rating it only a tad under four stars. I got chuckles, I got angry mutterings, but I never got bored. That, my olds, is worth a lot in a literary month cram-jam full of heaps of nothing interesting.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE PORTRAIT
ANTOINE LAURAIN (tr. Emily Boyce & Jane Aitken)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A Parisian antiques collector finds himself in a case of mistaken identity after buying a portrait which curiously resembles him

While wandering through a Paris auction house, avid collector Pierre-François Chaumont is stunned to discover the eighteenth-century portrait of an unknown man who looks just like him. Much to his delight, Chaumont's bid for the work is successful, but back at home his jaded wife and circle of friends are unable to see the resemblance. Chaumont remains convinced of it, and as he researches into the painting's history, he is presented with the opportunity to abandon his tedious existence and walk into a brand new life.

Chaumont needs a fresh start—he and his wife fell out of love long ago, and the only thing that holds meaning for him anymore is his search for perfect objects. But this portrait is more than just a painting. The first night he owns it, Pierre-François dreams of another life, lived as the Comte de Mandragore, in a rural chateau, with a beautiful young wife. Awaking from the dream he’s determined to find this place—but it will take all his collector’s avidity, ingenuity, and unscrupulousness to make it his own. And when he finally has the chance to do so, will he be willing to pay the price to make it last?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Republication of these titles comes after Gallic Books' acquisition by Pushkin Press is picking up steam. I'm all over it, I loved Gallic Books and am (obviously) fond of Pushkin Press (and imprints).

This is the novella that started it all. Told in first-person, it's as immediate as a récit but takes place outside the narrator's skull, so it's not one. It's a sweetly-smiling stab at modern greed, the lust for Stuff that fills the gaping emotional holes in many modern people.

There's a sharp edge here, a flensing eye that spares no one...the unloved, unloving wife, their circle of "friends", the man himself...no one looks all that good under the pithy judgment of Author Laurain:

Modern eyes? They have no soul; they no longer look up to heaven. Even the most pure are only concerned with the immediate. Vulgar lust, petty self-interest, greed, vanity, prejudice, cowardly appetites and envy. Those are the abominable emotions swarming in today’s eyes. We have the souls of notaries and cooks. That’s why the eyes on the portraits in museums are so spectacular; they reflect prayers and tortures, regrets and remorse.

What a pompous peroration! What a quiet proof that simply being misunderstood and softly maligned does not equal being Right.

It's an afternoon's read. It will keep you involved if, like me, you think Stuff is an addiction that speaks more loudly about what it is...about greedily stuffing yourself...than what it isn't...a fulfilling and worthwhile use of you one wild and precious life (that endlessly apt and beautiful phrase from Mary Oliver).

I think it's evident it's a first work, the sheer improbability of the plot is up there with Thorne Smith that whole school of magical objects that open portals from modern to ancient (ot just other) times. The characters are, as is almost inevitable in novellas, not developed beyond the necessity of moving the plot forward.

It's a pleasant and worthwile read. Maybe don't hunt for it everywhere, but if you have the budget and the device, download it of a dull Sunday afternoon to enjoy its real pleasures.

RED SHIFT, unjustly neglected mismarketed and beautiful

RED SHIFT
ALAN GARNER
HarperCollins Children’s Books
$12.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.8* of five

The Publisher Says: Collins YA editionA disturbing exploration of the inevitability of life. Under Orion's stars, bluesilver visions torment Tom, Macey and Thomas as they struggle with age-old forces. Distanced from each other in time, and isolated from those they live among, they are yet inextricably bound together by the sacred power of the moon's axe and each seek their own refuge at Mow Cop. Can those they love so intensely keep them clinging to reality? Or is the future evermore destined to reflect the past?

NYRB edition (now O.P.)In second-century Britain, Macey and a gang of fellow deserters from the Roman army hunt and are hunted by deadly local tribes. Fifteen centuries later, during the English Civil War, Thomas Rowley hides from the ruthless troops who have encircled his village. And in contemporary Britain, Tom, a precocious, love-struck, mentally unstable teenager, struggles to cope with the imminent departure for London of his girlfriend, Jan.

Three separate stories, three utterly different lives, distant in time and yet strangely linked to a single place, the mysterious, looming outcrop known as Mow Cop, and a single object, the blunt head of a stone axe: all these come together in Alan Garner’s extraordinary Red Shift, a pyrotechnical and deeply moving elaboration on themes of chance and fate, time and eternity, visionary awakening and destructive madness.

My Review: Why didn't I hear about this back in 1973? I'd've lapped it right up with happy warbles and gruntled slurps. But what completely baffles me is how anyone could read this unpunctuated marvel of modernism and say, "YA shelves, next!" or even more utterly inapt, "Fantasy novel incoming!" WHAT. THE. ACTUAL. FUCK. are these people thinking? Teens might get absorbed in the time-travel element, and some goodly percentage of them will like the Cormac McCarthy-esque attributionless dialogue, but the fantasy reader is going away very sorely disappointed. Yes, there's a goddess, and heaven knows we're up to our hips in angsty teens. BUT THAT'S NOT THE POINT!

*fantods*

Okay, I've been ungently squawked at for spoilery reviews. (Good lord, grow up people! Don't read reviews of books you want to read if you're phobic about it!) There are three stories here. All of them take place in a very very tight geographical locus. They are separated by 1500 years (earliest to middle) and 300 years (middle to modern). The dialogue is all modern English, and still Alan Garner manages to convey a sense of the temporal location of the story...if you're paying attention!

And all the teens are able to experience each other. It's all psychometric in genesis (go look it up if it's new to you), and Garner handles it *beautifully* by not Explaining it, only making sure you know what happens as a result of the time loops.

I'm not sure what else I can say without giving too much of the game away, so let's cut to the chase: I don't like phauntaisee nawvelles and I'm pretty durned hmmmmm about time travel these post-Outlander days. And this novel, this gem of a McCarthy-writes-The Sound and the Fury-with-Virginia-Woolf novel, hooked me, gaffed me through the gills, landed me in the bottom of the boat and (at the very very end) exploded my teensy ickle brain-like thing with wowee.

So why aren't all sorts of people warbling their lungs out about it? Same reason I didn't until today: Never heard of it. I picked it up, idly, unsuspectingly, from a shelf in the house...looked at the "99¢" Day-Glo orange Jamesway sticker on the silver-foil coated jacket, winced, and then

and then

oh some more and then

And now here I am, warbling about a YA time-travel teen-angsty romantic novel. With me on how weird that is? See the thing that doesn't fit the picture, namely me smiling?

Buy. Read. Yes.