A conversation on reviewing

One of the 800-plus reviews I have left on Goodreads drew an interesting conversation about the process of reviewing books. I rated the first Gervase Fen mystery as a 2.5* read, reviewing it with this (full review reproduced here):

My Review: Tedious, fusty, and supercilious.

Well, that about sums that up.

Then along comes someone with a made-up Goodreads username:

PERSON: I agree {with your review of this book}, mostly. Why rate "ok" if not? I'm debating between 1* or 2* myself right now, so question is serious.

I've been trolled an awful lot by nastygrams from sock puppets, by people wanting to "engage in debate" (aka make me see how wrong I am to have my particular opinion), by former friends making an effort to assure me I'm the world's least worthwhile reviewer, so as often as not I ignore this kind of leading post. This time, I didn't.

ME: I rated it 2.5* because it's not a *bad* book, just tediously predictable for me. I found the style annoyingly arch, but that's a matter of taste. On my own scale, a 1* book is one that is truly just *bad* and people need to be warned away from it. I don't feel that way about this book.

That would, for most trolls, be enough to get the flames burning. So then whoever it is sent this:

PERSON: Good point put me back pondering dithering all over again.

Hmmm. So I've just posted this response, and look forward to seeing what comes next:

ME: It's all subjective, this rating dodge. It's never really easy to justify putting a judgment on a book, or a TV show, or a work of art; after all, who cares what another person thinks of them when what counts is what we ourownselves think of them?

Plenty of people, myself included, don't have unlimited time to devote to enjoying the many wonderful things there are to enjoy in this life. I use reviews by review sources I've got reason to trust to narrow down my field of operation.

I learn to trust them by comparing our opinions on things we've both reviewed. At about 70-75% similar, I learn the most from a person's opinions, by making interesting discoveries or getting my own opinions challenged by a new and intriguing perspective.

Above that, it's all about having fun reading that person's take...not too many of those. But I treasure them when I find them.

But that going back and forth, debating with yourself about what to say, what to tell people, why you think a particular thing about a book, a movie, a play, a painting...that's the part that makes writing about what others have done so satisfying and such a worthwhile exercise.

And that's where we stand.

THE DEAD IN THEIR VAULTED ARCHES, Flavia de Luce comes of age in book 6!

THE DEAD IN THEIR VAULTED ARCHES (Flavia de Luce #6)
ALAN BRADLEY
Delacorte Press
$24.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.9* of five

The Publisher Says: On a spring morning in 1951, eleven-year-old chemist and aspiring detective Flavia de Luce gathers with her family at the railway station, awaiting the return of her long-lost mother, Harriet. Yet upon the train's arrival in the English village of Bishop's Lacey, Flavia is approached by a tall stranger who whispers a cryptic message into her ear. Moments later, he is dead, mysteriously pushed under the train by someone in the crowd.

Who was this man, what did his words mean, and why were they intended for Flavia? Back home at Buckshaw, the de Luces' crumbling estate, Flavia puts her sleuthing skills to the test. Following a trail of clues sparked by the discovery of a reel of film stashed away in the attic, she unravels the deepest secrets of the de Luce clan, involving none other than Winston Churchill himself. Surrounded by family, friends, and a famous pathologist from the Home Office--and making spectacular use of Harriet's beloved Gypsy Moth plane, Blithe Spirit--Flavia will do anything, even take to the skies, to land a killer.

My Review: Childhood's end comes to each of us at very different times, and in very different ways, but always comes in a single moment. Nothing is ever the same again. No perception is unaltered, no thought is ever again innocent. One minute you are a child, and preoccupied with child things, and the next you are not.

It's memorable, I suspect, for all of us, no matter the event that precipitates it or the age at which it happens. In this sixth Flavia de Luce novel, she leaves childhood behind. Bradley's description of the moment, of a great wooden cog on a vast gear moving a notch, is spot-on. I can't quote it directly because it would spoiler a plot point.

Now let me address a fact of the series novel's life. Some books in a series are middle books, like middle children. They are there, but somehow not quite noticed enough or given a good space of their own to occupy. There is not a single series in which this is not, eventually, the case. Who remembers Framley Parsonage? Do you even know it's the fourth in Trollope's Chronicles of Barsetshire? When enumerating the series, I frequently have to search for this book in the Dead Letter Office of my brain. It's not as if nothing happens in the book, either. (And there's a character in this series names after a pivotal character in this book. More on that anon.) The marriages and the resultant intertwining of the fates of so many plot threads in the series make it a pivotal book. But who ever cites it as a favorite novel, or even a favorite in the series?

Middle Book Syndrome.

This is a middle book. It's not at all a bad book, just a middle book. And the fun is just beginning at the end. What the book is not is a mystery, in the puzzle-solving, here-are-the-clues sense. The mysteries Flavia is solving this time are, to put it simply and still not spoiler anything, the ones we all must resolve to discover what, now we are no longer children, we are. Flavia's extremely well-developed sense of herself, unusual in a child, is at last made part of a world that the girl must join. Herself is explained to herself, if you follow that convoluted thought process.

The world awaits. And that's a giant risk Bradley is taking: The world Flavia is joining will either cause people to put the series down for good, or will cause them to send him nastygrams for not writing faster. It is that polarizing a development.

I'm on the fence. I can see this going horribly wrong as we sink into the Swamps of Seriousness, and I can see it being amusingly fluffily unserious. But what I can't see is why this particular development surprised me so much. After all, an eleven-year-old sleuth isn't the set-up for a long-term cozy series, is it? So something had to tie the bow on the tushie of her childhood. And here it is. Heart it or hate it, the next books will not be the same kind of cotton candy, and won't be in the same world that child Flavia saw in Bishop's Lacey and Rook's End (there's a chess joke in that name which I only just got reading this book) and the Palings.

Having finished this book quite late last night, I was ruminating on its connection to Framley Parsonage and was struck by a thought: The character of Adam Sowerby, introduced earlier in the series, recurs here; and Sowerby is the name of a pivotal character in Framley Parsonage...could Bradley be creating his own corner and his own take on my dearly beloved Barsetshire? I have lamented in other threads the absence of a 21st-century Angela Thirkell, an extender of the deep and abiding Englishness of Barsetshire. Might Bradley, the Canadian, be weaving us some more tales from the rag ends of Trollope's beautiful creation?

Gosh, I hope so.

Sexist Nonsense in Beautiful Sentences 13 December 2013

AFTER THE FIRE, A STILL SMALL VOICE
EVIE WYLD
Vintage Books
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 2.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Set in the haunting landscape of eastern Australia, this is a stunningly accomplished debut novel about the inescapable past: the ineffable ties of family, the wars fought by fathers and sons, and what goes unsaid.

After the departure of the woman he loves, Frank drives out to a shack by the ocean that he had last visited as a teenager. There, among the sugarcane and sand dunes, he struggles to rebuild his life.

Forty years earlier, Leon is growing up in Sydney, turning out treacle tarts at his parents’ bakery and flirting with one of the local girls. But when he’s drafted to serve in Vietnam, he finds himself suddenly confronting the same experiences that haunt his war-veteran father.

As these two stories weave around each other–each narrated in a voice as tender as it is fierce–we learn what binds Frank and Leon together, and what may end up keeping them apart.

My Review: How awful it must be to be heterosexual...to know, with the full force of society's blasting, trumpeting inculcation of knowledge that your Object of Desire will not, can not, indeed may not, ever make sense to you.

Evie Wyld presents the stories of three generations of miserable men and the women they screw up in this, her debut novel. Lady's got guts, let's hand her her just props...she writes of the horrors of war as experienced by these men with the assurance of a far more mature (in experiential terms) writer. She fails signally to give these three generations of men any distinguishing characteristics. She tells the tale through the eyes of two of the three men, in (for no apparent aesthetic or organizational reason) alternating chapters.

She writes well when we're considering lines (plenty of examples, just open the book anywhere and you'll hit a good 'un); but why did Evie Wyld tell this particular story? I don't know. And that, ladies and gents, is a problem.

So am I supposed to think she's brave, for writing about men, or am I supposed to think she's sensitive, for understanding them? I don't think she's brave because she's created one man, a miserable loser with no delusions as to his own adequacy still less superiority; a character who, no matter which name-label she slaps on him, doesn't grow, change, or even demonstrate more than lizard-brain function. I don't think she's sensitive because each and every man she limns is a shit of the first water, abusive of or vampiring off the women in the book.

I'm really, really sick of women portraying men in this light, and then having other women yodel their praises for doing this eternal, socially acceptable hatchet job on men. This book, for reasons I can't understand, is a longlister for the Orange Prize. She's got promise, I grant you, and she's got some native *thing* that makes her place evocations arm-hair-pricklingly good. But this isn't a book I will ever read again, and I don't recommend it.

Beautiful Tropical Getaway (to 1845!) for Snowed-In Folks 10 December 2013

AS FLIES TO WHATLESS BOYS
ROBERT ANTONI
Akashic Books
$15.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In 1845 London, an engineer, philosopher, philanthropist, and bold-faced charlatan, John Adolphus Etzler, has invented machines that he thinks will transform the division of labor and free all men. He forms a collective called the Tropical Emigration Society (TES), and recruits a variety of London citizens to take his machines and his misguided ideas to form a proto-socialist, utopian community in the British colony of Trinidad.

Among his recruits is a young boy (and the book's narrator) named Willy, who falls head-over-heels for the enthralling and wise Marguerite Whitechurch. Coming from the gentry, Marguerite is a world away from Willy's laboring class. As the voyage continues, and their love for one another strengthens, Willy and Marguerite prove themselves to be true socialists, their actions and adventures standing in stark contrast to Etzler's disconnected theories.

Robert Antoni's tragic historical novel, accented with West Indian cadence and captivating humor, provides an unforgettable glimpse into nineteenth-century Trinidad & Tobago.

My Review:

We sat in silence, exhausted, filled-up. We didn't move. We couldn't have moved--not a muscle--because we didn't exist yet. Neither me nor him. Only the story existed, during those few final moments of silence after my father's voice had come to a halt.

Catnip. This book was catnip for me, pure uncut catnip of the finest grade. Robert Antoni teaches master's degree fiction-writing classes at the New School. Lucky men and women who take the classes, to hear him tell his stories!

At its heart, this is a simple tale of greed, passion, and the lifelong effects of believing in a dream. Chicanery is always a worry for the True Believer, because the promise of a dream come true is ever the best bait to lure them into disaster, personal and financial and, not infrequently, mortal. Something dies when a person's True Belief is taken from them, or lost, or simply abandoned (as if this abandonment is ever simple). Many times, I suspect, the pain of it is unendurable and the bereft believer sees no reason to go on...disease or despair carry him off.

Others, like our narrator Willy, live on and make life, actual life, work for them without dreams, but with some weird, warped hopes left, hopes that don't see much daylight as the ex-dreamer isn't likely to chat them about. Willy doesn't really want to have hopes. He wants to find his dreams. I think all of us know that quest's end. But the novel, well, a novel is a place to work out the truths of endings and the frailties of beginnings. This novel's truth is in the ending, and it stings the soft places of a tender soul. It also rings perfectly true and wistfully beautiful. A family, once created, is a hard thing to leave, to destroy; even death doesn't do the job.

But most families have invisible members. Some have more than others. Willy...Mr. Tucker, as he becomes...carried the invisible members of his family until, exhausted, he lost the eternal battle with gravity. How, and why, and what he made, these are all the subject of the novel, and the meat of life as we all live it.

Only most of us don't have beautiful words to wrap our truth in. Fortune smiled on William Tucker. His truth comes enrobed in lovely, lovely language, satisfyingly musical in the inward ear.

A pleasure of a read. A lovely artifact of a book. A delight on many levels, and a deeply felt, deeply moving novel.


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AMERICAN SALVAGE, extra-special story collection from a new-to-me Michigander

AMERICAN SALVAGE (Made in Michigan Writers Series)
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL
Wayne State University Press
$19.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.6* of five

The Publisher Says: American Salvage is rich with local color and peopled with rural characters who love and hate extravagantly. They know how to fix cars and washing machines, how to shoot and clean game, and how to cook up methamphetamine, but they have not figured out how to prosper in the twenty-first century. Through the complex inner lives of working-class characters, Bonnie Jo Campbell illustrates the desperation of post-industrial America, where wildlife, jobs, and whole ways of life go extinct and the people have no choice but to live off what is left behind.

My Review: Solid craftsmanship, a fearless imagination, and a complete lack of corrosive, cynical piety and pity make this collection of short stories exceptionally enjoyable.

I share nothing with these characters except the right to trial by jury, and yet I was enrapt by them. I loved "The Solutions to Brian's Problem" the best, since I never expect to see a male PoV on abuse by women. This book is seething with the rage of characters whose lives turned out bad, as in the TV series "Breaking Bad," and are flat-out irredeemably broken. This same territory was trodden by Barbara Ehrenreich in Nickel and Dimed from the factual PoV...it was revolting to read that book, it hurt me in ways I can't recover from, but Bonnie Jo Campbell has brought home to me the true emotional cost of indifference.

I don't thank her for that.

But I do recommend the book highly. Now, my thoughts and a rating on each story using the Bryce Method.

MY FIRST MURDER, a Finnish Scandicrime Procedural...An Umlautfest!

MY FIRST MURDER (Detective Maria Kallio #1)
LEENA LEHTOLAINEN (tr. Owen Witesman)
AmazonCrossing
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: Maria Kallio has just been assigned her first murder investigation. To prove to herself and her squad that she has what it takes to be a detective, she’ll have to solve the death of Tommi Peltonen. Found floating facedown at the water’s edge of his Helsinki villa, Tommi had invited his choir group to spend a weekend at his retreat. But beneath the choir’s seemingly tight-knit bonds seethed bitter passion and jealousy. As Maria sets out to determine the difference between friends and foes, she uncovers the victim’s unsavory past—and motives for all seven suspects. Now it’s up to her to untangle a complex set of clues before the killer strikes again.

The first book in Leena Lehtolainen’s bestselling Finnish crime series starring Detective Maria Kallio, My First Murder offers hard-boiled realism from a female perspective.

My Review: I gave in and read a Scandicrime book. It's a serviceable police procedural told in first person by thirtyish Maria Kallio, law student and relentlessly single female interloper in the world of career police detectives. She appears as a replacement for a broken-down cop who injured himself in the line of duty, and she rapidly worked her way up the chain of command because 1) she's a girl and b) she's tough as nails.

Now, as to the mystery part, I liked it fine but didn't love it. Some interesting characters were adequately developed. What made my eyebrows rise was the reportedness of the atmosphere in which Maria works. She tells us a wee bit, basically a log-line, about the other crimes she and her department are pursuing; not enough to make us care, more than enough to make us curious, and just enough to bring the sense of urgency about the main case of this book to a halt. Can't put this down to first-book-itis, either, since this author had her first book published when she was twelve!

So what was I left with? A sea of Finnish names, all of which look wrong to me, and locations I know nothing whatsoever about, and a sense of being slightly seasick as Tommi and Tomppa and Tiina and Tiiu and Riku and Antti all blended into a mass of UUUUUIIIIUUYYPPPPAAAA. Finnish, when spoken, raises my hackles with its sheer alienness. When written, it causes me distress because it's got nowhere for me to grab hold of anything to give it meaning to me. Plus everything seems to wear umlauts, those freaky-deaky fangmarks that make all previously comprehensible sounds turn into strangled moans.

It's free to borrow on your Kindle, and that's what I'd recommend you do. At $4.99, it's not a break-the-bank download, but see if you can hang with the sheer Finnishness before committing actual funds to it.

Second Episode, Third Book...all good

MURDER ON THE BALLARAT TRAIN (Phryne Fisher #3)
KERRY GREENWOOD
Poisoned Pen Press
$14.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 2.5* of five

The Publisher Says: When the 1920s' most glamorous lady detective, the Honourable Miss Phryne Fisher, arranges to go to Ballarat for the week, she eschews the excitement of her red Hispano-Suiza racing car for the sedate safety of the train. The last thing she expects is to have to use her trusty Beretta .32 to save lives. As the passengers sleep, they are poisoned with chloroform.

Phryne is left to piece together the clues after this restful country sojourn turns into the stuff of nightmares: a young girl who can't remember anything, rumors of white slavery and black magic, and the body of an old woman missing her emerald rings. Then there is the rowing team and the choristers, all deliciously engaging young men. At first they seem like a pleasant diversion....

My Review: This numero tres in the Phryne Fisher series that I read all in a gulp one week. The library in my village had it not, but as I needed to grocery shop in Baldwin, a village or two over, I checked their liberry and lo and behold! They had this and only this volume in the series. Apparently the county likes to make reading an entire series into a treasure hunt.

Now, I get the whole terse and concise quiz when writing hard-boiled fiction. But why use it in these books, and to the point of being taciturn? Pages one through five, for example, take place in the first class carriage of the train to a place called Ballarat, filled with people who have been chloroformed for no obvious reason. Why is Phryne, the saviour (oh dear, oh dear, I'm coming all over Aussie) of all and sundry, on the train with Dot, her faithful Watsoness? What does an Aussie train carriage from the 1920s look like, who is on a train that's apparently taking an overnight trip, blah blah blah? None of these questions is addressed, still less answered.

The police in the State of Victoria appear, to a man, to be in thrall to Phryne's pheromonal field, allowing her to see evidence, trample crime scenes, interview witnesses, blah blah blah. The court system of the State of Victoria appears to have the greatest possible respect for the Honourable (oh oh, more misspelling a la Oz!) Phryne because it allows her, without demur or even so much as a meet'n'greet, to take serious legal steps.

Now, shoehorning two mysteries into 151pp is no small feat. Greenwood does this. She is, obviously and welcomely, growing in her craft with each outing. But what the hell does the sheila have against exposition?!? It can be done, and done well, and it can make or break an otherwise incredible story.

Characters from the first two books appear like mushrooms after a rain, and several new and obviously intended to be recurring characters are introduced. This does give the series the charm of feeling like one is involved in the life of the series. It's a trick that works brilliantly for Southern States writers like Charlaine Harris and Joan Hess. One character from the end of the previous book, "Flying Too High", appears again, to my discomfort and mild displeasure. I feel that I should caution parents of girls that some of Greenwood's recurring plotlines will cause you discomfort and should be brought to your attention early on. I do not encourage the very sensitively constructed to read this particular installment of the series.

But I, for reasons I can't yet fathom, want to keep reading these cocktail peanut books, and have in my moistly fumbling fingers books four, five and six of the series. So I guess it would be hypocritical to not recommend Murder on the Ballarat Train subject to the parent/sensitive caution given above.

Television Episode Review: How gorgeous the men are in Phryne's second televised episode, despite the book being third in the series, is a matter of opinion. I myownself don't get it in any of these men's cases. However, the sexual tension subplot gets short shrift in the 54 minutes allotted to the show.

What makes this episode noteworthy is the introduction of Phryne's ward, Jane, a young girl thief who will change the life of the terminally single and utterly unmaternal lady detective. It's also noteworthy that this is the first episode of the show that brings together the charming Scoobygroup of Dot, the lady's maid, the butler Mr. Butler, Jane the lightfingered lassie, and Bert and Cec the handymen/cab drivers/muscle, all in the same big, lovely home.

Another of my favorite characters, Phryne's beautiful red Hispano-Suiza touring car, makes her first appearance here as well. Australian Broadcasting Corporation and its production partners have done an amazing job with the design and the props and the costumes. The book, not a terribly exciting read for the reasons above, makes a good TV episode and is a pleasure to watch.


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