The Book of Cold Cases

The Book of Cold Cases
by Simone St. James
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 9780440000211
Publication Date: March 15, 2022
Pages: 352
Genre: Fantasy, Fiction, Mystery
Publisher: Berkley

Here’s the thing with me – and I can’t blame it on age, I’ve always been this way – when I read a book that resonates with me, of course I look for more by that author, but I want some of the same … template I got in the first story. I like the predictability; it’s relaxing to a degree (any why I enjoy a good series so much). So, when I pick up an author’s later books and they go and change it up, I did my heels in and become truculent.

With no other author has this been more true than with Simone St. James. I loved her first 5 books. They were spooky, don’t-read-at-night ghost stories set in the interwar period. Then came Broken Girls and I got my feathers so ruffled over the change to a dual timeline, present/past format that I’d decided I wasn’t going to read it. Nope. No way. Doesn’t matter how long that lasted, because of course I caved and read it. And I loved it. So I eagerly bought The Sun Down Motel and liked it too, and when the announcement came out for The Book of Cold Cases, I pre-ordered it. Only to find out that she’s messed with the format again.

The changes she made this time were more subtle. It’s still a dual, present/past timeline, but this go-around both the characters are still alive and they’re interacting, facing off in a weird frenemy sort of fashion – shades of Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale. There are definitely ghosts and at least one is malevolent, and the spookiness kicks off immediately. (What is it about turning around to find all the cabinet doors open at once that is so creepy and spooky?) What’s most dramatically different though, it that although there is a definite resolution to the mystery the Lady Killer Murders, there isn’t an ending to the book that wraps everything up in a neat, tidy package, with everyone getting the emotional release they want.

So did I like it? Well, yes, after I got done sulking through the first several chapters. The ghost(s) were unsettling, and St. James took the mystery in all sorts of jagged directions; both the reader and the MC had to pry the facts of what happened out of the story and Beth (the past’s MC). I never knew what was happening until it happened, and the ending left me feeling unsettled, which I suppose is what a ghost story should do.

Did I like it as much as her previous books? No. It was good, but I still prefer the style of the first 5, and something about The Broken Girls felt edgier than this one, but I’m not sorry I read it or that I bought it. It’s a solid, well told ghost story with a straight forward mystery.

I read this for Halloween Bingo 2022 for the Ghosts & Hauntings square.

The Cat Who Saved Books

The Cat Who Saved Books
by Louise Heal Kawai (Translator), Sosuke Natsukawa
Rating: ★★★★½
isbn: 9780063095724
Publication Date: December 7, 2021
Pages: 198
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: HarperVia

Bookish high school student Rintaro Natsuki is about to close the secondhand bookstore he inherited from his beloved bookworm grandfather. Then, a talking cat appears with an unusual request. The feline asks for—or rather, demands—the teenager’s help in saving books with him. The world is full of lonely books left unread and unloved, and the cat and Rintaro must liberate them from their neglectful owners.

Their mission sends this odd couple on an amazing journey, where they enter different mazes to set books free. Through their travels, the cat and Rintaro meet a man who leaves his books to perish on a bookshelf, an unwitting book torturer who cuts the pages of books into snippets to help people speed read, and a publishing drone who only wants to create bestsellers. Their adventures culminate in one final, unforgettable challenge—the last maze that awaits leads Rintaro down a realm only the bravest dare enter . . .

An enthralling tale of books, first love, fantasy, and an unusual friendship with a talking cat, The Cat Who Saved Books is a story for those for whom books are so much more than words on paper.

I have no idea how I discovered this book – I know I read about it somewhere online, and I thought it was here, but I can find no reference to it, so I’ll just throw out a ‘Thank you!’ to the universe at large for putting this book in my path.

Saying that, the title is a little misleading; I’d argue that the cat does not save the books, but is merely a guide for the teen-aged boy who does save the books. Since I don’t speak Japanese beyond ‘arigato’ I can’t say if this is a translation issue or a marketing one.

As I was reading, two thoughts stayed with me: the first was that this book had a definite Wrinkle in Time vibe – which should be taken with a grain of salt, because I never liked that book, so the parallel is likely tenuous – and second, the philosophy that props this book up feels far more Franciscan than Zen. The translator’s notes at the end point out the so-obvious-I-missed-it connection to Greek mythology and it’s labyrinth, so who knows what connections each reader of this book will make? And I think that’s one of the points this book makes – each reader takes what they need from every book they need, and rarely do two people need the same things.

As a story, it’s an engaging one; a little sweet, a little naive from a Western viewpoint (I’m assuming school attendance laws are laxer in Japan? And perhaps too emancipation laws?), but it’s also a fantasy, so some slack needs to be cut, but not all that much. Rintaro’s life in his grandfather’s bookshop sounds like heaven to me, even without the talking cat; Tiger the Tabby just made it even better. But the ideas addressed about books and the people that love them are anything but sweet and naive, and for book lovers, there’s some deeply fundamental stuff going on just under the surface.

The book seemingly wants to end after the 3rd labyrinth, when suddenly a fourth one is tacked on – and it feels tacked on. At first I resented this … addendum, because it felt like it was pandering and gilding the lily, so to speak, not to mention the ill-fitting ‘save the damsel’ conceit of it. But I have to not only concede that it worked, but that 1/2 star in my rating is for Natsukawa’s cleverness. I like what he did there, in spite of the way he framed it. The ambiguity of who is at the centre of the fourth labyrinth is delicious – I have my suspicions, but so will others that read this book, and I doubt any of us would agree and none of us would be wrong. I love it when that happens!

Lessons in Chemistry

Lessons in Chemistry
by Bonnie Garmus
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 9780857528124
Publication Date: April 5, 2022
Pages: 390
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Doubleday

Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. In fact, Elizabeth Zott would be the first to point out that there is no such thing.

But it's the early 1960s and her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute take a very unscientific view of equality. Except for one: Calvin Evans, the lonely, brilliant, Nobel-prize nominated grudge-holder who falls in love with - of all things - her mind. True chemistry results.

Like science, life is unpredictable. Which is why a few years later, Elizabeth Zott finds herself not only a single mother, but the reluctant star of America's most beloved cooking show, Supper at Six. Elizabeth's unusual approach to cooking ('combine one tablespoon acetic acid with a pinch of sodium chloride') proves revolutionary. But as her following grows, not everyone is happy. Because as it turns out, Elizabeth Zott isn't just teaching women to cook. She's daring them to change the status quo.

This was a total impulse purchase. It showed up on my Amazon feed when I was looking up another book. The colourful cover caught my eye and at first I thought it was non-fiction, which is why I clicked on it. Turns out it was fiction, but with an interesting story line that promised to be funny. So I bought it.

The narrative jumps around on the timeline a bit at the start, and the first ‘flashback’ wasn’t funny. It was dark and there’s a definite trigger warning for sexual assault. The story takes place in the late 50’s so the misogyny is ripe on the ground and infuriating to read. But there are moments of humor and more importantly, there are men who aren’t assholes. In fact, the ratio is about 50/50, and the author includes a number of misogynistic women too, so that this story is set in what was probably a very realistic late 50’s/early 60’s backdrop. The story itself … not quite so realistic but it was a lot of fun imagining what it would have been like had it been a realistic story. The scenes on-set were hilarious, and I loved the dog (and his name).

There’s a come-full-circle, fairy tale ending to the whole thing but the only other alternative ending I can imagine would involve a romantic HEA, and I much prefer this one, as it makes the story far more empowering without any knights in shining armour.

A solid read.

Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts

Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts
by Kate Racculia
Rating: ★★★★½
Publication Date: October 8, 2019
Pages: 359
Genre: Fiction

A handsome stranger. A dead billionaire. A citywide treasure hunt. Tuesday Mooney’s life is about to change…forevermore.

Tuesday Mooney is a loner. She keeps to herself, begrudgingly socializes, and spends much of her time watching old Twin Peaks and X-Files DVDs. But when Vincent Pryce, Boston’s most eccentric billionaire, dies—leaving behind an epic treasure hunt through the city, with clues inspired by his hero, Edgar Allan Poe—Tuesday’s adventure finally begins.

Puzzle-loving Tuesday searches for clue after clue, joined by a ragtag crew: a wisecracking friend, an adoring teen neighbor, and a handsome, cagey young heir. The hunt tests their mettle, and with other teams from around the city also vying for the promised prize—a share of Pryce’s immense wealth—they must move quickly. Pryce’s clues can't be cracked with sharp wit alone; the searchers must summon the courage to face painful ghosts from their pasts (some more vivid than others) and discover their most guarded desires and dreams.

How much fun was this book? I had a blast reading it; there are very pale shades of Mr Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookshop to it, although it’s an entirely different beast. Scavenger hunts! Unsolved mysteries! Lost fortunes! Secret codes!

Enough exclamation points – it was a thoroughly enjoyable adventure with an engaging cast of characters and the closest to unreliable narrators (not really) that I can come without hating a book. The narrator is reliable, but so much of the information she gets is not. There are stories within stories and games within games and the author does a phenomenal job putting it all together in a way that doesn’t leave the reader behind. Racculia also scores points for combining brutal violence, a happy ending, and poetic justice in a way that I was willing to buy without a blink.

There was only 1 thing that left me hanging – a very minor plot point that was never addressed:

View Spoiler »

This is the kind of book you pick up when you just want to surrender a few hours to having an adventurous good time.

Adult Assembly Required

Adult Assembly Required
by Abbi Waxman
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 9781472293619
Publication Date: May 17, 2022
Pages: 375
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Headline Review

When Laura Costello arrives in downtown Los Angeles, her life has somewhat fallen apart.

Her apartment building has caught fire, her engagement to her high school sweetheart has been broken off, and she’s just been caught in a rare LA downpour and has no dry clothes.

But when she seeks shelter in Nina Hill‘s local neighbourhood bookshop, she finds herself introduced to the people who will become her new family. And as Laura becomes friends with Nina, Polly and Impossibly Handsome Bob, things start to look up.

Proving that – even as adults – we all sometimes need a little help assembling and re-assembling our lives. . .

This is a good read; I’d have called it a great read if I hadn’t already read The Bookish Life of Nina Hill and The Garden of Small Beginnings, but I have and it doesn’t quite measure up. The snappy wit that made me laugh out loud in the first two books was much more subdued in Adult Assembly Required (a title that doesn’t make any obvious sense after reading the book), and while all three tackled some pretty serious anxiety issues, the first two did it with a level of tension that AAR never achieved. I think I also ‘clicked’ with Nina and Lily, the MC’s of each of the first two books in a way that I didn’t connect with Laura.

Saying that, it really is a good read; I may not have connected with the MC, but holy wow, her parents – well, her mom, really since dad never got any direct page time – was a piece of work. As was her ex-fiancee. I’ve met these people in real life, but I’m sort of surprised in this day and age they haven’t gone the way of the dodo. I really enjoyed seeing the characters from Nina and Garden come back, all slightly further ahead in time; it’s fun to see the ‘after’ part of their happily ever afters.

I’m caught up now with my Waxman reads, but I’ll be on the lookout for whatever she writes next – they’re fun without being horribly shallow, without being stories about a bunch of drama llamas. A fabulous summer read, even if where you live is in the middle of winter.

A Pelican at Blandings

A Pelican At Blandings
by P.G. Wodehouse
Rating: ★★★½
isbn: 9780099514022
Publication Date: August 7, 2008
Pages: 249
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Arrow Books

Unwelcome guests are descending on Blandings Castle uaparticularly the overbearing Duke of Dunstable, who settles in the Garden Suite with no intention of leaving, and Lady Constance, Lord Emsworth's sister and a lady of firm disposition, who arrives unexpectedly from New York.

Skulduggery is also afoot involving the sale of a modern nude painting (mistaken by Lord Emsworth for a pig). It's enough to take the noble earl on the short journey to the end of his wits. Luckily Clarence's brother Galahad Threepwood, cheery survivor of the raffish Pelican Club, is on hand to set things right, restore sundered lovers and even solve all the mysteries.

Who doesn’t like Wodehouse? It’s situational and narrative humor at its best. But you really have to be in the mood for it, and even then, I’ll go so far as to say Wodehouse is best consumed in short story form. It’s hard enough to sustain the humor for a novel length book at Wodehouse’s madcap pace, but it’s been harder to sustain the laughs. After a few chapters a reader can become inured to the comedy, and start to feel a bit numb, especially when character development is necessarily thin-to-non-existent, and the plotting not much more complex than the characters. This isn’t a criticism; humor succeeds where both are pushed to the background.

Short or long length though, Wodehouse is a genius.

A Cup of Silver Linings

A Cup of Silver Linings
by Karen Hawkins
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 9781982105563
Publication Date: August 1, 2021
Pages: 354
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Gallery Books

Ava Dove—the sixth of the seven famed Dove sisters and owner of Ava Dove’s Landscaping and Specialty Teas—is frantic.

Just as her new tearoom is about to open, her herbal teas have gone haywire. Suddenly, her sleep-inducing tea is startling her clients awake with vivid dreams, her romance-kindling tea is causing people to blurt out their darkest secrets, and her anti-anxiety tea is making them spend hours staring into mirrors. Ava is desperate for a remedy, but her search leads her into dangerous territory, as she is forced to face a dark secret she’s been hiding for over a decade.

Meanwhile, successful architect Ellen Foster has arrived in Dove Pond to attend the funeral of her estranged daughter, Julie. Grieving deeply, Ellen is determined to fix up her daughter’s ramshackle house, sell it, and then sweep her sixteen-year-old granddaughter, Kristen, off to a saner, calmer life. But Kristen has other plans. Desperate to stay with her friends in Dove Pond, she sets off on a quest she’s avoided her whole life—to find her absent father in the hopes of winning her freedom from the grandmother she barely knows.

The follow up to The Book Charmer, and the book that arrived yesterday. I figured I should dive right into a book that inspired me to take my first solo walk in over 6 months.

Is there a fairy tale involving an evil grandmother? If so, this is a take on that, sort of. Kristen’s mom dies, she has no idea who her father is, and so her estranged grandmother comes riding in on her metaphorical bulldozer to rescue her grand-daughter, who, by-the-by, doesn’t need rescuing. Grandma is a selfish, stubborn, wealthy cow, but Kristen is stubborn and as it turns out, rather wealthy too, so there.

In a parallel and connected story line, Ava Dove, one of the ‘gifted’ Dove sisters, is stressing about having kept a secret for a couple of decades, and the secret is fighting back. Remember, this is magical realism, so the secret is literally fighting back, trying to escape its box and throw Ava under the bus for a stupid mistake she made when she was a kid. Ava is also trying to get a tearoom reading for opening and the special bespoke teas she makes to help people are starting to cause some strange behaviours in those that drink them, leaving Ava scrambling to figure out why.

On the fringes of this is an unresolved plot point from the first book involving Ava’s sister, Sarah. It all comes together into a fairly coherent story line, and if you suspend your disbelief enough to enjoy magical realism, the redemption of Grandma ice queen is believable. Still, the secrets (Ava’s and who is Kristen’s dad) are both pretty transparent to the reader, the former especially if one remembers events from the first book.

Overall, it’s a charming read, with strong individuals and friendships that make the story work better than it might have otherwise.

Other People’s Houses

Other People's Houses
by Abbi Waxman
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 9780399587924
Publication Date: April 3, 2018
Pages: 330
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Berkley

At any given moment in other people’s houses, you can find…repressed hopes and dreams…moments of unexpected joy…someone making love on the floor to a man who is most definitely not her husband…

*record scratch*

As the longtime local carpool mom, Frances Bloom is sometimes an unwilling witness to her neighbors’ private lives. She knows her cousin is hiding her desire for another baby from her spouse, Bill Horton’s wife is mysteriously missing, and now this…

After the shock of seeing Anne Porter in all her extramarital glory, Frances vows to stay in her own lane. But that’s a notion easier said than done when Anne’s husband throws her out a couple of days later. The repercussions of the affair reverberate through the four carpool families–and Frances finds herself navigating a moral minefield that could make or break a marriage.

Well, this is not the Abbi Waxman I was looking for. This was a much more intense, painful story than the other 3 I’ve read so far, and while the humor is still there, it’s not at all light-hearted. This is a story that reads like a fictionalised version of the author’s experience (there is no evidence at all that this is the case). The language is cruder, the emotions are rawer; there’s a lot of anger. There’s also a lot of navel gazing about parenthood, which, you know, not really my jam. But the writing is excellent and I got sucked into the lives of all these people, whether I wanted to be there or not. A very compelling read.

Vinegar Girl

Vinegar Girl
by Anne Tyler
Rating: ★★★
isbn: 9780804141260
Publication Date: June 21, 2016
Pages: 237
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Hogarth

Kate Battista feels stuck. How did she end up running house and home for her eccentric scientist father and uppity, pretty younger sister Bunny? Plus, she's always in trouble at work - her pre-school charges adore her, but their parents don't always appreciate her unusual opinions and forthright manner.

Dr. Battista has other problems. After years out in the academic wilderness, he is on the verge of a breakthrough. His research could help millions. There's only one problem: his brilliant young lab assistant, Pyotr, is about to be deported. And without Pyotr, all would be lost.

When Dr. Battista cooks up an outrageous plan that will enable Pyotr to stay in the country, he's relying - as usual - on Kate to help him. Kate is furious: this time he's really asking too much. But will she be able to resist the two men's touchingly ludicrous campaign to bring her around?

I bought this book originally purely because of a sign. Not a portent sign, but an actual sign. Neon, actually, and registered as a historic landmark, it’s about 2 miles from us and sat over what was the Skipping Girl Vinegar factory.

Anyhoo, it sat on my TBR for years because … I bought it for its dubious coincidence of naming with a sign I’ve always liked. And I’ve never read The Taming of the Shrew, nor have I previously read any Anne Tyler titles. But yesterday I picked it up and read the flap and thought, yeah, why not?

It’s an easy one-day read, but it’s weird. I can’t say I liked it, but it wasn’t bad either. As individuals, the characters were well constructed, fleshed out. But put them together in a scene and they didn’t interact well with each other at all – they all turned into mechanical constructs that sort of bumped along together. Was this on purpose? I don’t know. But the result was a story that didn’t work, that felt clumsy and dysfunctional.

The ending was … I don’t know what the hell it was. (See: haven’t read Shakespeare, above.) It felt like Kate was assimilated into the Borg that is her father and Pyotr. There was a complete lack of emotion involved and a sense of passivity about all her movements. And there was quite a rousing Stepford wife speech at the end that I suspect Tyler meant in all sincerity but failed to sell me; had I been in that scene I’d have thrown food at her – preferably something sticky – and told her to get over herself. But then the epilogue clearly showed me that I missed a cue somewhere in the story, one that showed Kate definitely possessed a will of her own.

So … 3 stars because: weird.

The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend

The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend
by Alice Menzies (translator), Katarina Bivald
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 9780701189068
Publication Date: June 18, 2015
Pages: 376
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Chatto & Windus

Sara is 28 and has never been outside Sweden - except in the (many) books she reads. When her elderly penfriend Amy invites her to come and visit her in Broken Wheel, Iowa, Sara decides it's time. But when she arrives, there's a twist waiting for her - Amy has died. Finding herself utterly alone in a dead woman's house in the middle of nowhere was not the holiday Sara had in mind.

But Sara discovers she is not exactly alone. For here in this town so broken it's almost beyond repair are all the people she's come to know through Amy's letters: poor George, fierce Grace, buttoned-up Caroline and Amy's guarded nephew Tom.

Sara quickly realises that Broken Wheel is in desperate need of some adventure, a dose of self-help and perhaps a little romance, too. In short, this is a town in need of a bookshop.

Another re-read – I seem to be on a general-fiction-involving-books spree at this very moment.

This time though, my take on the book is very different. I first read this in 2016, before the End Of Life As We Knew It. Now, living mid-shitstorm as we are, this story struck me as melancholy. So very melancholy. This is a town gasping its last breath, and an MC that has lived her whole life in a shade of grey, whose massive adventure in life is to visit her elderly pen pal in a tiny town in Iowa. Every single one the people in this story has given up. Until Sara arrives and the novelty of a tourist gives them all something to focus on.

The plot itself is highly improbable, but the outlook is so dismal it doesn’t matter – anything to give these people some hope – and the improbability gives the story and the characters a chance to be their quirky selves. It’s a story with a happy ending for everybody – maybe even the town.

My previous review (inside the spoiler tags to save space):

View Spoiler »