Burn(ed)
Once again I have to ask: Peter Heller, where are you going with this?
I picked up his book Burn from the library early in the week and once I started reading it I couldn’t put it down. I’m having some trouble right now with excessive edema in my legs, so sitting up for periods longer than the half hour I usually dedicate to eating a meal can be problematic in terms of extra swell and knee pain. I kept turning the pages on this one for another half hour or more in every instance, because I so wanted to know what came next. But I never found out…despite finishing the book.
Jess and Storey have been friends since childhood, growing up as close-by neighbors in rural Vermont. They still meet up every year (Jess having moved to Colorado) for a few weeks of hiking, camping, and hunting in various wilderness areas of the upper northern states; this year, they chose moose hunting in the middle of Maine. Jess is particularly glad of this year’s trip; his wife left him and he needs the distraction and the away time with his friend.
There has been a lot of rash talk on the news from secessionist groups in Maine and a few surrounding states about leaving the union, but the guys figure this is something that will work itself out in the courts. That’s until they emerge from their vacation off the grid to replenish their provisions and buy a tank of gas, only to discover that the town they chose to visit has been decimated. Unlike when a wildfire passes through, leaving some houses partially or wholly standing amongst the devastation, the force behind this act was concentrated and deliberate; although a few outhouses and sheds remain, every single house in the town is burnt down to its foundations. The implied savagery is bewildering and disturbing.
The strangest part of it is there are few bodies—they have discovered just four out of a population of more than 2700—and no live people left in the town, but for some reason all the boats docked by the nearby lake are pristine and untouched. There is no cell phone reception, no radio reception, nothing to tell them what happened here, but it’s plain that the talk of secession has escalated into a real and frightening battle. They have no idea who is “winning”—secessionists or U.S. military (or could Canada be involved?)—or how far the devastation stretches, so they decide to figure out a route to get back home (Storey has a wife and two daughters in Vermont), scavenging food from the lockers in the boats, camping under cover in the woods, and dodging human contact after they discover that the new world order is to shoot first and ask no questions. Then something happens that interferes with this plan and changes their whole trajectory.
Up to this point, I was breathless with the need to keep reading. But then the book goes off into a lot of flashbacks into Jess’s teen years and, while interesting, it didn’t further the story at all. It also seemed strangely inappropriate that he would be sitting around reminiscing about this in the midst of the disconnect the two friends are experiencing from the present-day world.
I should also add that the book, as is usual with Heller’s writing, is a poetic and passionate ode to both nature and human emotion, which I always appreciate. I was enthralled by both the possibilities and the story-telling; I kept waiting for progress, for some kind of reveal, but we just kept circling around the same information—we don’t know what’s happening or who we can trust, we don’t know what to do about it, we need to go home. After the event that changes their focus, the story was still compelling until I turned a page after a particularly dramatic scene to discover that it was the last page. What?!
I honestly don’t know what Heller is doing. I do understand some of the statements he was attempting to make—the pondering over human nature and friendship, the disbelief and dismay at the violent divisions over things that seem small but accumulate into a reason for war, but…I want to know how it ends! This is the second of his books that has simply stopped in what I would consider mid-story with no resolution. It is a beautifully written story, but…what happens? Will there be a sequel? Or is that it? As someone similarly frustrated said on Goodreads, Gripping? yes. Satisfying? no.
I don’t know whether to say to read it anyway for what it does offer, or to be outraged by what has been omitted. It was too good to call it a waste of time, but…I’d love to know other reactions to its abrupt full stop.
Grainger, cont’d
I have to date read two more of Peter Grainger’s mystery novels featuring DC Smith. Although the second in the series felt a little lackluster to me, being exceedingly low-key and petering out into a “solve” that everyone knew was coming, the third one picked things up again and my attention was retained for the rest of the series. I am currently in queue for the next two from the library.
New-to-me mystery
I’m always looking for a mystery writer previously unknown to me who will keep me interested the way dozens of others have in the past. I have devoured all the books of Penny, Morton, Johnson, Hill, Harrod-Eagles, the Harrises (Charlaine, C. S., and Joanne), Hamilton, Griffiths, George, Galbraith, French, Frear, Francis (pere, not fils), Crombie, Crais, Connelly, Bolton, and Atkinson, and that’s only a partial list, some of whom take up two to four pages of book listings in my Goodreads account. In addition to all of these, I have read three to six books by countless other authors, either because that’s all they have written to date, or because I liked the first few but didn’t continue for various reasons. These books include all categories of mystery, from cozy to procedural.
This week I started a new series, and the first book gives me the hope that its promise will lead to another series favorite.
The book is An Accidental Death, by Peter Grainger, and I came across it by chance on Kindle Unlimited. The synopsis made the protagonist, DC Smith, sound likeable, and the book turns out to be something of a hybrid between straight mystery and police procedural, with a controversial lead detective and the rookie newly under his direction poking at a death deemed accidental to see if there is something more to discover. I read it in four sittings, and now have the next three on hold at the public library, which will hopefully cough them up sooner rather than later.
There were parts of it that both intrigued and frustrated me; it seems like the book begins in the middle of a previous story, but it is plainly listed as the first of the series, and no other stand-alone books or other series precede it, so I must assume that the mystery and intrigue of how DC Smith became involved in a police investigation that went “tits up,” as the Brits say, and then came back from leave to continue working despite some fairly heavy pressure on him to retire will be revealed eventually. A few details surface in this book, including the naming of an adversary on the force named Wilson, who was apparently culpable for the mess made of the previous case and is now under a cloud, which he blames on Smith.
The plot involves a young man on a river bank, getting boisterous and drunk with his friends, who jumps into the water in pursuit of a man in a canoe to prank him, and ends up dead. It’s assumed, from where he was found and in what condition, that the death was accidental and attributable to the combination of inebriation and poor judgment, but something sticks out to DC Smith’s superior officer, Reeve, and she asks him to take a look. When he does, his examination reveals a bigger picture that no one in the police was, perhaps, meant to know about, and he gets into fairly deep water himself before it’s resolved.
The storytelling reminds me in some ways of Cynthia Harrod-Eagles’ Bill Slider series, in that the protagonist is a focused and determined detective who resists both bureaucracy and promotion in his determination to keep solving crimes. Both detectives (Bill and DC—his initials as well as his rank) are thoughtful, smart, and also witty. I enjoyed the first book and am anticipating reading the next and having it turn out just as engaging.
New-to-me fantasy
Sorry for the long silence—I have been reading steadily, albeit slowly, but haven’t been able to sit up at the computer to post due to an illness that put me in hospital for five days and has taken a couple more weeks to resolve. I’m well on the way to mending now, but am still needing to spend a lot of the day with my feet up and my head down.
Right after I read the Heller book, I picked up a fantasy from Kindle Unlimited by an author called T. Kingfisher. I’d never heard of this author, but the premise for the book sounded intriguing and I was in the mood for (free) fantasy, so I decided to give her a try. I am a little wary of books that pop up for free, because that can mean that they didn’t sell well for various reasons, and someone is trying an alternate promotion opportunity, so they may not be good. But this time I couldn’t have been more wrong.
I’m not going to go into a lot of detail here, because A. I don’t have the energy for a lengthy review, and B. these books are best experienced for yourself with little to no preview. But I am now a confirmed fan.
The first book I picked up was called Nettle and Bone, and it opened on such a grisly scene that I almost put it down. I’m so happy I didn’t, because it rapidly resolved into a wonderful story about a third sister (in the classic fairy tale tradition of three siblings—but they’re usually men) who becomes a reluctant heroine once she realizes what’s at stake in the marriages of her two older sisters to an abusive prince in a neighboring more powerful kingdom threatening their own. It’s populated by fairy godmothers, former knights (this one rescued by the heroine, Marra), and demon-possessed chickens, and it’s magical.
As publishers and authors so cleverly do with Kindle marketing, the first chapter of another of Kingfisher’s books was included after this book ended, and completely sucked me in. That one was A Sorceress Comes to Call and it was, if anything, better than the first. After that, I was hooked, and have now read Minor Mage, A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking, Hemlock & Silver, and The Seventh Bride, which I just finished this morning. I found them all delightful, intriguing, and filled with unexpected twists; her characters are truly individual, her writing is engaging, and she has a wonderful tongue-in-cheek sense of humor.
Some of the books are loosely—and I can’t emphasize that word enough—based on original fairy tales, but the directions in which she takes them are truly unique. Several of the books could as easily be considered for young adults, since their protagonists are in the 15-18 age range, but in no way would I characterize these as specifically YA Lit; they are merely terrific fantasies whose main characters are youthful.
I’m not going to go into more detail about the individual books here; but if you like fantasy with a fresh, slightly humorous voice but with serious issues as their subjects, I encourage you to explore the worlds of T. Kingfisher! (which is the pen name of Ursula Vernon, who also writes both children’s books and comics).
A Heller of a book, until…
Peter Heller has written a couple of books that are favorites. The top one is (predictably) The Painter, and I loved The Dog Stars. I can also say that I tremendously enjoyed The River, The Guide, and Celine. So choosing to read his latest was predictable for me. It started strong, and parts of it remained strong, but…
Yeah, there’s that dot-dot-dot. Heller’s writing about nature in The Last Ranger was as beautiful and lyrical as ever. He creates a sense of awe and wonder that is contagious—even if it is his protagonist who is expressing these feelings, they gradually seep into your own consciousness as if you are experiencing that environment and the engendered response firsthand. I could never find fault with that aspect of his writing.
I also liked the characters he created for this book, and enjoyed absorbing knowledge from them about how the various people in and around Yellowstone spend their days. The protagonist, Ren, is a park ranger for whom the reward of living a solitary, blissed-out life in the midst of nature must be balanced by preventing parents from taking photos of their adorable three-year-old cozying up to a baby moose while its mama is ready to kill everyone within charging distance. He breaks up traffic jams caused by too many tourists trying to photograph something-or-other by the side of the road, he prevents the wildlife from being shot by “individualists” with no respect for the boundaries of the park or the laws of the land, and everything in between those extremes. His life is sort of predictable and sometimes irritating, but ever-changing and therefore not boring.
Ren’s best friend is Hilly, a biologist who finds herself up against both man and nature when advocating to protect the wolves of Yellowstone. There are a host of other characters, both local and transient, whose descriptions and actions are meaningful and/or entertaining even when the scene or description is fleeting. That is the power of Heller’s writing.
This time, however, the big lack is in the plotting and especially the resolution of the “mystery.” As the story develops, the focus centers on the brazen actions of a local poacher and then transitions towards the end to the discovery of a large semi-secret group of wealthy men who are at odds with the goals of a national park and are inciting rebellion amongst suggestible locals. But there are so many segues from these threads into a sort of “day in the life of” narrative about both Ren and Hilly, so many outtakes about fistfights between tourists, and ignorant sightseers putting themselves and others in jeopardy, and an unexpected and exceedingly awkward romance that the story line gets lost. And just when you think it’s going to resolve itself in the last 100 pages, you get some directional hints, you get a few minor questions answered, but everything else is simply left hanging.
I’d say there’s a sequel coming, but Heller hardly ever writes sequels, let alone initiates a series, and has not indicated one here. Given that, I feel like as readers we are owed the resolution to at least three plot threads, and no amount of euphonious language has made up for that in The Last Ranger. Disappointing.
A pirate and a serial killer
All the Colors of the Dark has been widely touted on all the Facebook readers’ pages I frequent, yet never really explained. The title alone made me curious, so I put it on the holds list at the library and waited a very long time for it.
When I started it, I was immediately filled with a sense of dejá vu; it reminded me forcefully of another dark, complex book I had read a few years back, but I couldn’t remember the name. I looked on Goodreads because I knew I had listed that book in my “coming of age” section, and then laughed; it was by the same author, Chris Whitaker, whose novel We Begin at the End bowled me over when I read it four years back.
I looked up my review of that book, and was not surprised to see that my description would pretty much do for both books:
“It is the saga of multiple people caught up despite themselves in various forms of tragedy they are mostly unable to avert.”
There are other similarities: The main characters begin as young teens with absent or derelict parents; they live in a small town and are outliers in their peer group; and they have an odd array of adults who try to look out for them but are mostly no match for what’s coming to them.
There are two characters around which the story revolves. The first is Joseph “Patch” Macauley, a boy born with one eye. His mother tried, in his younger years, to ameliorate this by sewing him a series of eye patches and buccaneer vests to let him play the pirate, but that may have made him even more of an outcast. The second is his best friend, Saint, a girl raised by her grandmother to be uniquely herself. In a small Missouri town where 13-year-old girls are mostly yearning to dress up, wear makeup, and start going on dates, Saint is more inclined to wearing overalls and keeping bees. The two are pretty much inseparable, each for their own reasons. Saint loves Patch and also wants to help him; Patch believes that Saint’s primary emotion for him is pity, because she invites him to dinner as often as she can, knowing that his mother can’t seem to hold down a job or keep the electricity on and the refrigerator stocked.
There is a girl at their school named Misty, a girl so far out of Patch’s league that even to speak to her might be considered sacrilege by her crowd of friends, a rich girl, a beautiful girl, a girl who takes life lightly—until the day she is kidnapped. Patch becomes her unexpected rescuer, and this act is like the butterfly that causes the tornado, enveloping everyone in his vicinity in chaos.
This book, like the other, is a complex interweaving of mystery, thriller, love story, and coming of age—or perhaps not that, but coming into one’s own. It’s about friendship, love, obsession, degradation, inspiration, hope. As with the first book of Whitaker’s, I don’t want to say too much more about the plot, partly because it’s too complicated to describe, but mostly because when you read it you need to do so without knowing what’s going to happen.
The thing that makes me know this is a great book is that it has some flaws that I would normally have been critical (or even scathing) about in a review. It’s far too long; at one point I thought I must be at least three quarters done, but looked at my Kindle gauge and discovered I was only 52 percent in. It has vastly unbelievable details and plot twists that, again, in another book I might have scoffed at. And he does what I dismissed in my review of the book Things You Save in a Fire as unforgiveable: He writes what feels like the end, but there are five more chapters, each of which also feels like the end until you finally get to the end. I usually hate that, but here I wanted so much to know what happened in every circumstance that I was grateful to turn a page and find more book behind it.
It’s not an easy book to read, for many reasons. There is a lot of tragedy and, just when you feel like you have encountered the worst, there’s more. But it’s also a book full of unexpected lightness and even humor, and if you are a fan of beautiful language and imagery, you will be captivated.
I won’t say it’s not a challenging read; but for me it was all-enveloping and, in the end, vastly satisfying. I will think about it for a long time.
Re-reads
I got frustrated by the length of time I was having to wait for new library books and decided to do some rereading this week, since older books are easily obtainable. I chose the first book, The Good Sister by Sally Hepworth, because I had just reread Eleanor Oliphant and their protagonists share some things in common.
Although I remembered the story pretty well, there are always things that you don’t pick up on the first time through. One of the ones I enjoyed this time was protagonist Fern’s description of her mode of dress. She starts out by saying she is a librarian, and at 28 years old she is much younger than the average librarian (apparently the average is 45!). She comments that many librarians tend to be stodgy dressers, but Fern likes to express herself, so her typical outfit is a rainbow T-shirt topping a long, swirly skirt in some bright color (that day’s was sunshine yellow) with a pair of rainbow- and glitter-covered “trainers” (Brit for sneakers or tennis shoes) to match. She tops off all of this by putting her long strawberry blonde hair into two braids and then rolling them up above each ear for a Princess Leia look-alike effect, although she asserts that she is not copying that style; it is merely a handy way to keep her hair out of her face while working.
As a person who went to library school at 48, I was definitely up in that core demographic, but I did share some characteristics with Fern. I liked wearing colorful, full, knee-length skirts (flowered, striped) with matching solid-color leggings, black boots, and a T-shirt or sweater on top, depending on the season, and although I never did the Princess Leia ‘do, I did wholeheartedly embrace braiding during my 11-year career as a teen librarian.
I enjoyed this book as much this time around—it definitely held up. The characters are either delightfully quirky or deliciously sinister, and the action and narrative are nicely balanced to hold your interest. If you would like to read my initial full review, you can find it here.
The second book I picked up was one I hadn’t read since 2015 when it first came out, and I didn’t remember a lot about the story. It’s The Reversal, by Michael Connelly, and it was the book where he shook things up in several ways: Mickey Haller (the Lincoln Lawyer) crosses the aisle to become a prosecutor for one case; he partners up with his (first) ex-wife, Maggie McPherson, an assistant district attorney for Los Angeles; and instead of his usual investigator, he hires his half-brother, LAPD detective Harry Bosch, to help put a child-killer behind bars for the second time.
I looked forward to reading it again because I liked that all my favorite characters were in one place. But in the end, I didn’t find this to be one of his better stories. I did enjoy having Haller, Bosch, and McPherson all working together on a case that Mickey was prosecuting, but there was a bit too much courtroom (without enough drama). The man they are prosecuting has spent 24 years in jail for the crime and everyone is still convinced he is guilty. But some new DNA evidence proves compelling enough for the courts to grant him a retrial, and in the meantime he’s out in the world while the trio tries to find enough evidence to put him back in prison.
I felt like not enough happened “in the field” in this book, and I also didn’t enjoy the guy in the role of defense attorney; he was whiny and not sufficiently developed in comparison to his opponents. There is also a huge foreshadowing element with the murderer that never comes to fruition, which was both disappointing and annoying, and the ending is both rushed and anticlimactic, after a big build-up. I actually dropped my rating on this one from four stars to three after rereading it. I’m still a loyal Connelly fan, but in certain books he seems off his game, and this was one for me.
Two of my “new” (to me) books just came in and got transferred to my Kindle, so there will be fresher reviews coming soon.
We All Live Here
I just finished JoJo Moyes‘s latest, We All Live Here, published just under a year ago. In looking at the list of her books that I have read, most have received four or five stars from me; but there’s always one…and this seems to be it.
I thought, after reading the blurb, that I would relate to this protagonist. After all, both of us were left by our husbands, ostensibly to take a time out to consider the relationship but in actuality to hook up with someone younger and more fit. I didn’t have the burden of raising two children (we didn’t have any), and neither of my parents moved in with me (although my mother did insist that I should move home, back into my childhood room, after my seven-year marriage was over!), but still…empathy, right? (BTW, I did not move back in with my parents!)
Unfortunately, this book reads more like those ubiquitous “AITA” (Am I the A$$hole?) videos on Facebook, where someone tells a story in which someone behaves badly and then wants validation about whether or not they are the, er, bad guy. In the context of the book, I decided, fairly early in the story, that Lila the protagonist was the a$$hole, despite the fact that yes, she had a lot to endure: A philandering husband who left her to raise her two daughters while he started a new family with a new model; a stepfather who was recently widowed (Lila’s mother died) and seemed to have moved in with Lila and her daughters without invitation; and an absent father she hadn’t seen since she was a teenager, who showed up on the doorstep expecting to inhabit the spare room and weasel his way into the hearts of his granddaughters.
It would seem to be easy to have sympathy, at least, for someone so beleaguered, and yet Lila makes it so difficult. She is self-centered, self-pitying, and whiny, and she dwells inside her own story with total disregard for those around her for a good part of the book. The final self-realization epiphany comes so late that I just didn’t care. Also, there was one incidental detail in the story that drove me mad until it was solved, and there was no resolution until the last 40 pages of the book.
Even though I have enjoyed some of her books much more than others, I never thought I’d read one and simply say “Don’t bother.” Who knows—maybe your reaction to Lila etc. will be materially different from mine. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.
I’m fine
That’s everyone’s socially acceptable response when someone asks “How are you?”, right? But how often is it actually true?
My initial reaction to the first third of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, by Gail Honeyman (despite some clues in the opening pages that would have led me elsewhere had I been paying sufficient attention), was that it reminded me of The Rosie Project, by Graeme Simsion. Socially awkward protagonist with no friends, wedded to routine, on whom a random suggestion acts as a catalyst to start changing things up, check. Protagonist meets someone completely outside their wheelhouse and makes an unexpected connection, check. But that’s not quite how this book ended up going. The two books share a sense of humor, and their protagonists share the quality of being literal and inept at human relations as they attempt to navigate their way through life. But the reasons behind their similar states are different, as are the resolutions.
There are lots of books out there (fiction and nonfiction) about various kinds of mental health issues. Not many of them, however, address the situation of loneliness as either a cause or an outcome. Eleanor believes that she is completely self-sufficient—after all, her physical needs are being met, and in all her years in the foster care system she didn’t get a chance to indulge any emotional needs, or even recognize that she had any. But when she has two chance encounters that change her focus, these events and the people connected with them worm their way into her formerly solitary existence and begin to show her that she had very little idea what a full life could be like.
Eleanor is, in many ways, profoundly broken, and her metamorphosis depends on courage that she wouldn’t have found without making some human connections, but it is not a romantic book, for which I was grateful. This is a book about Eleanor, and Gail Honeyman doesn’t fall into the trap of leading her out of her unhappiness by making her fall in love—in fact, quite the contrary. Her story is told in a tender, sweet, and humorous way that isn’t manipulative and never descends into mawkishness, that pulls both Eleanor and the reader out of melancholy into hopefulness. I was impressed that this was the author’s debut novel: The language, the characters, and the world in which she places them are smart and engaging, and she writes with confidence.
I have encountered only a few books that, the minute I turned the last page, I wanted to go back and re-read to see what I missed or to re-experience the emotions brought forth by the story. This was one of them.
Note: This was a re-read for me—I originally read this in 2018 and had the impulse to revisit it. The above was my review from 2018. Nothing materially changed from the reread, except that I found the book, if anything, more emotionally moving. If you enjoyed this book as I did, you might also like to read The Good Sister, by Sally Hepworth.
Saving the library
My next book on the library holds list was The Last Chance Library, by Freya Sampson, and I’m happy to report that I am now two for two (two good reads in a row) for 2026.
This was Sampson’s debut novel, and it might be my favorite. I hate to be predictable, but I do love a book about books. I don’t, however, always love books about libraries and librarians, for the simple reason that the authors don’t do their research to understand what role is filled by degreed librarians as opposed to assistants, circulation staff, shelvers, etc. But Freya Sampson is among the few who get it absolutely right. She acknowledges the need for a degree in order to be a librarian, she describes the duties of her main character, June, a library assistant, perfectly and consistently, and no one ever calls June “the librarian.” She hasn’t had the requisite schooling to be acknowledged as a librarian, and the lines in this book are always clear. That may sound elitist to those who are not librarians, but as someone who worked hard for two years to get my masters degree in order to be one, it’s so demoralizing when anyone who has a job at the library is assumed to possess the same abilities. It would be like going to your lawyer’s office and believing that everyone working there must be a lawyer, or that the people who staff the reception desk at your doctor’s office are qualified to diagnose.
Anyway…with that out of the way, let me say that this was a delightful book, although not as lighthearted as some of hers. Sampson has a gift for characterization that makes the plot situations believable and engrossing. You like (or dislike) these people, you get to know them pretty thoroughly, and you therefore invest in their circumstances. Despite the fact that the characters may fall into standard categories—curmudgeonly old lady, nosy neighbor, old friend turned love interest, etc.—Sampson fleshes them out so that you don’t mind the use of a common trope.
In this case, the protagonist, June, has been a library assistant at a rundown stand-alone library in a small town since she started there part-time as a teenager. She is now 28 years old, and seems frozen in place; her mother, who was the librarian for most of June’s life, died of cancer eight years ago, and since then June’s life has turned into a predictable round of work, frozen lasagna or takeout, and reading. She gave up all thought of college when her mother got sick, staying home to nurse her, and now she lives in the house in which she grew up, and has changed nothing since her mother passed. She has no friends and relies on library patrons for any form of human contact, but retreats into her silent solitude whenever she isn’t shelving books or helping seniors log into their email accounts on the library computers. In a word, she’s stuck.
She is also almost debilitatingly shy, so nothing seems likely to change—until outside circumstances interrupt her cycle. The local council has signified that they will be considering closing up to six libraries in her town, Chalcot, and five other adjacent townships, due to budget cuts, and replacing them with a once-a-week visit from a bookmobile. The regular patrons of the library are immediately up in arms and ready to do whatever is necessary to save their library, but June is told by her boss that as an employee she is forbidden from participating in any of these activities. June unhappily acquiesces, but a chance comment from someone new in her life causes her to think of ways she can subvert this order and help keep her beloved library open.
There is a nice incipient romance in this book but, as with Sampson’s other books, it isn’t the dominating theme; that is more nuanced, and brings insight to various aspects of the human condition and the best ways in which we interact when important issues are on the line. I really enjoyed this and read it in two days. Sampson’s books couldn’t be considered “literature,” but they are certainly good stories that provoke both feelings and reactions. I will continue to read them.
The Book Adept 