Book review: Conspirata by Robert Harris

The forty-seventh book I read in 2016 was Conspirata: A Novel of Ancient Rome, the second in Robert Harris's Cicero trilogy.  It picks up where Imperium left off, with what should have been Cicero's greatest triumph, his election as consul. 

This volume deals with the Catiline conspiracy.  Steven Saylor addresses the same events, in what he admits is a revisionist manner, in his Gordianus the Finder novel Catilina's Riddle.  Harris takes the traditionalist view: that Catiline was both guilty and dangerous.  The emphasis here, however, is less on Catilina's plot and more on Julius Caesar's political manipulations, the eventual outcome of which will doom both Cicero's political career and, ultimately, his beloved Republic.

Book review: Emma by Alexander McCall Smith

The forty-sixth book I read in 2016 was Alexander McCall Smith's Emma: A Modern Retelling.  Having been a longtime fan of McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, I can't tell you how excited I was to discover that the same author had produced a modern retelling of Emma.  Nor are mere words enough to tell you how disappointed and disgusted I was with the project.  If I thought that Isabel Dalhousie was an unlikable character, she's Elizabeth Bennet compared to McCall Smith's Emma Woodhouse.

McCall Smith, in my opinion, utterly fails to translate Emma forward two centuries.  Rather than trying to get Harriet Smith married so she can have her own household and some security, McCall Smith's Emma is only trying to set her up with a rich sugar-daddy so she can have an exotic gap year abroad before dumping the man who paid for it.  Pretending these two goals are morally equivalent is ridiculous.  In addition, Emma gets Philip Elton drunk on purpose in hopes of his coming on to Harriet, which leads to him being arrested for DUI, losing his license, and being humiliated in the press.  (All Austen's Emma did was reject his proposal.)  Austen's Emma was self-centered and vain, but her heart was in the right place.  This Emma is just a horror show.

Book review: The Wright 3 by Blue Balliett

The forty-fifth book I read in 2106 was Blue Balliett's sequel to Chasing Vermeer, The Wright 3.  Having moved back from New York with his mother, Tommy Segovia had hoped that everything would go back to the way it had been before they moved away; however, the house they lived in before is occupied by a new family so they have to move into an apartment.  Worse, he finds he now has to share his best friend, Calder Pillay, with a girl, Petra Andalee, who with Calder recovered a stolen painting in his absence.

Balliett resists the urge to merely add a third character to the pairing from her earlier book, like Brains Bellingham and Mari Yoshimura to the McGurk Agency.  Tommy's resentment of Petra's relationship with Calder is true to life.  In addition, he is not as good a student as the other two and doesn't find the same enjoyment in Ms. Hussey's unorthodox sixth-grade class on which they thrive.  He has bigger problems in his family past than Petra's too-many-siblings or Calder's only-child syndrome, and it's not entirely surprising that he lies about a carved stone fish he found in a place he wasn't supposed to be.

Where in the last installment, the artist around whose work the plot twists is Vermeer, in this book, it is Frank Lloyd Wright.  The Robie House, owned by the University of Chicago, is set to be sectioned and sent to four different museums around the world in parts.  Ms. Hussey feels that to tear apart a work of art like that equates to murder and leads her class in trying to find a way to change the university's plans. Tommy's new apartment is right across the street from the house, and the house itself seems to choose him -- and the two other children who together make up the Wright 3 -- to save the structure.

Book review: Messenger of Truth by Jacqueline Winspear

The forty-fourth book I read in 2016 was Messenger of Truth, the fourth book in the Maisie Dobbs series by Jacqueline Winspear.  In it, Maisie is hired by Georgina Bassington-Hope to look into the death of her artist twin brother Nick, a death which has been deemed an accident by the authorities.  The Bassington-Hopes are a wealthy, artistic family haunted by (what else?) World War I, in which the oldest daughter's husband was killed.

There's a lot of kerfuffle about the youngest Bassington-Hope, a jazz musician, and gambling debts he owes to the criminal underworld; Nick's American client; the gallery owner; and even Georgiana herself, a writer who has been artistically blocked since the war.  When it comes down to it, however, the story behind Nick's death is somewhat less dramatic than Winspear sometimes leads us to hope during the narrative.

There's a B-plot about smugglers, which feels a bit Jamaica Inn but serves to bring Detective Inspector Stratton into the story.  Maisie finally breaks up with Andrew Dene, who has to have been among the most underdeveloped and uninteresting romantic attachments ever to have stretched lifelessly over four books of a series, the Steadman Graham of 1930s British detective fiction.  And there's a heartbreaking development in Billy Beale's family, which is supposed to make the reader feel the need of Clement Attlee and his Public Health Service but only makes me question why Maisie Dobbs, while she's swanning around England visiting country houses and jazz clubs in her MG, doesn't pay Billy enough for him to take his children to the doctor.

Book review: Chasing Vermeer by Blue Balliett

The forty-third book I read in 2016 was Chasing Vermeer by Blue Balliett.  I have enjoyed sharing with Faith and Eric the JFic series of my library-haunting childhood, like McGurk and The Three Investigators.  Blue Balliett's contemporary series is in the same "kid detective" genre, but where the older teams of investigators were white kids in the suburbs, Calder and Petra are mixed-race children living in a diverse neighborhood next to the University of Chicago, where their parents are employed.

Both feel like misfits and outsiders at the progressive school they attend, Calder even more so as his one friend has recently moved out of state.  Initially hostile to one another, the pair are drawn together when a Vermeer painting on loan to the Art Institute in Chicago from the National Gallery of Art disappears en route and a series of coincidences leads them to believe they are the only ones who can find it.  The text is accompanied by illustrations with a built-in code for readers to decipher.

My biggest problem with the book are the coincidences.  The "kid detective" series of my past were of the old-school Scooby-Doo philosophy that, if there appears to be a ghost or a monster or some sort of supernatural phenomenon involved, there's a bad guy in a rubber mask or a hidden tape recorder behind it; the protagonists solved the case with determination, logic, and bravery.  Balliett's world is in the magical-realism genre: Yes, the subject of A Lady Writing really did communicate with Petra through a vision, and the pair unravel the case not because they were clever and determined but because they are special children magically chosen by the universe for greater things.  The message is not, like in Encyclopedia Brown or Harriet the Spy, that anyone can, with ambition and attention to detail, set up their own neighborhood detective agency; it's that, if you're "special" (with specialness seemingly determined by being unpopular), you can do things that the great unwashed mass of children cannot because you really are Better Than Them.

Also, while the main characters are well-developed, the secondary characters are disappointingly flat.  Petra, in particular, is unhappy about being one of five children in a chaotic household, but apart from her original complaints about how much time she has to spend helping take care of her younger siblings, they don't interfere in her activities for the rest of the book; I don't think we even learn their names.  Parents are only slightly more visible and relevant than in Peanuts cartoons.

Despite my qualms, however, the story is enjoyable and holds together, once you've accepted the premise that  the universe is collaborating to empower the protagonists.  There's a great deal of information on Vermeer and his paintings, which is not merely educational but really intrigues the reader to learn more about him.

Book review: One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp

The forty-second book I read in 2016 is one of those books that was everywhere when it was new.  EVERYWHERE.  It spawned: a study guide, a devotional, a "selections from" if you just weren't up to reading the whole thing, a copy in baby-blue imitation leather with a ribbon bookmark, not one but two Christmas-themed companion products, a ... DVD? really?  Okay.  And I did not buy it.  I so did not buy it.  I did not buy it with conviction.  It was too popular, and I did not trust it.

Well, now, five years later, I looked it up in Half Price Books, figuring that the malign influence of its ubiquity must have dissipated, at least in part, and I have finally read One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are by Ann Voskamp.  For those of you who, like me, have avoided it (or, unlike me, don't live in the evangelical subculture where it was impossible to miss), the author, Ann Voskamp, with a house full of kids, a bank account full of farm-based anxiety, and a haunting childhood tragedy hanging over her head, was challenged by a friend to list one thousand things for which to be thankful -- and actually to be thankful for them, not in a rote "yes, lots of people in the world are worse off than I am" way, but sincerely thanking God for each and every one of them.  She found that it transformed her perspective on life, changing her default mode from defensive worry to enthusiastic embrace of each moment.

There is some really good stuff in here, particularly in the early chapters, including commentary on 2 Kings chapter 20 by her bereaved brother-in-law that I copied into my Bible notes.  There's also the reminder that being thankful because things could have been worse doesn't help when things are the worst: if her son escaping permanent disfigurement after a serious accident is the grace of God, then what is there to tell the family whose son died in an accident the same day?

The language is really dense, almost twee.  It's like Gerard Manly Hopkins for over two hundred pages of prose.  I occasionally had to stop and take a break from hacking my way through the poetic expressions.  And, frankly, there are times I think she goes too far: when one child throws toast at another and rages upon being reprimanded, "Why don't you ask what he did to me first?" I have no interest in taking his words as a deserved rebuke.  I think the correct parental answer is "I don't care who did what to whom when; using food as a projectile weapon is never appropriate," and I don't apologize for it.

At the end, however, I agree with Voskamp's critics who say she goes too far in describing her intentional gratitude as "making love to God."  There is an orthodox window for erotic language applied to man's relationship to God that is almost completely filled by some interpretations of Song of Solomon and the description of the church as the Bride of Christ.  Where I believe Voskamp steps over the line into well-intentioned heresy is her statement that she (we) can know God as Adam knew Eve.  No, the church is the Bride of Christ, not the husband.  In relation to God, we are all feminine, receptive.  We are never the active seeker, but the lost one who is sought.  At best, we can know God as Eve knew Adam, but even the Bible's marital language puts the consummation at the end of days.  Ecstatic union before the Marriage Supper of the Lamb is illegitimate.

Book review: The Story of the Trapp Family Singers by Maria Augusta Trapp

The forty-first book I read in 2016 was The Story of the Trapp Family Singers by Maria Augusta Trapp.  Yes, that Maria, as in How Do You Solve a Problem Like.  This is the memoir she wrote which, as the cover page asserts, "inspired The Sound of Music."

Note that word: "inspired."  Yeah, you've got the nun-to-be, the widowed Navy Captain father, a house full of kids, and Hitler looming in the background, but the musical is heavily fictionalized.  First of all, there's not one of the movie kids that has a real name.  (Pre-Harry Potter, Hedwig wasn't going to fly in Hollywood.)  Baron von Trapp wasn't actually to blame for the children not having play clothes; there was an aristocratic woman running the household who felt it her duty to make sure the children behaved properly (e.g., didn't wear play clothes, didn't sit on the floor, didn't play outside).  The children knew how to sing; they just didn't know all the folk songs which Maria had learned in the Catholic Youth Organization.

The film's timeline is heavily compressed, as well.  In actuality, Maria and Georg didn't return from their honeymoon, incorporate the family singing group, and flee Austria in the space of about a week; they had been married ten years and had been performing for two before the Anschluss.  And they didn't have to hike over the Alps, though they did use the fiction of a mountain-climbing trip to Italy to leave Austria by train before the borders were closed.

Probably the biggest difference between the book and the musical can be grasped from the fact that the big wedding scene (where the nuns, thankfully, did not actually sing about the bride being a "clown" and a "problem" to be "solved") takes place on page 61 of a 312-page book.  Clearly, the real Maria didn't feel that her story ended with her marriage, or even with fleeing Nazis!  Transitioning to America , and to Americans, is the main piece of her story.  There's a charming scene with Maria on the ship crossing the Atlantic for the first time, learning English by approaching American passengers:

"Please, vat is fat?" pointing to my watch.
"A watch," a gentleman answered, looking very friendly.
"E Votsch," I wrote down seriously.  "and fat?"

There's a terrific pay-off to the story later on when the family is in America.  One of the passengers does his part to teach Maria popular slang, so when a nun at a Catholic college where the family is singing is nervous about the concert, Maria kindly advises her to "keep her shirt on," and when she is politely motioning a bishop to go first through a doorway they have both reached at the same time, she says, "Please, Bishop -- scram."

A side note: the movie's Baroness, in Maria's memoir, is the Princess Yvonne.  She comes off even worse in the book than in the movie, though one must keep in mind that the source was her romantic rival.  Captain von Trapp breaks the engagement upon receiving a letter from Maria and tells the princess that she put him off too long and should have agreed to marry him two years earlier when he first asked.  Maria lays a rumor that the Captain married her because she was pregnant at the princess's feet, a breathtaking act of pettiness, if true.

And yet ... according to Wikipedia, there is a question about the birthdate of Maria and Georg's first child.  When answering questions upon immigrating to America, Maria gave her wedding date as November 1927 and Rosmarie's birthdate as February 1928!  It's always possible that between the language barrier and the stress of travel and financial hardship that she misspoke, however.  The Trapp family insists Rosmarie was born in 1929, and the ship manifest from their first visit to America in 1939 lists the child as being ten years of age rather than eleven.  More to the point, existing wedding photographs provide no evidence that the bride was six months pregnant at the time.

Book review: Leepike Ridge by N. D. Wilson

The fortieth book I read in 2016 was Leepike Ridge by N. D. Wilson.  Faith finished The Golden Goblet yesterday, and I had to pick her next book for her daily reading comprehension questions so I read through this quickly in a few hours yesterday afternoon.

I ended up not including this in her lessons.  Although it's a fine adventure story for free reading, it's not up to the quality level of 100 Cupboards, in my opinion.  Tom Hammond is an eleven-year-old boy with a dead father and a mother who may be getting serious about one of the teachers at his school.  Acting out in rebellion, Tom ends up in a dangerous situation and must find a way to survive and return home.

It's a boys' adventure story, a little too much of a boys' adventure story, if you ask me.  Tom is right about everything.  Bad people are ugly so you can tell who to trust.  The mom, however, is clueless and doesn't recognize the danger signs of unattractive people; if only she let her young son make all her decisions, she'd be fine.  This is a dangerous worldview to hand to a kid who is already getting to the age where he thinks he knows better than his elders about everything.

The setting is interesting; the action is exciting; Tom turns out to be impressively resourceful in a dire situation.  But there is literally one female character (the mother) who gets damsel-in-distressed, has to be rescued by males, and then is married off to a character she's known for, like, a week maybe. Disappointing.

Book review: Jeeves and the Wedding Bells by Sebastian Faulks

The thirty-ninth book I read in 2016 was Jeeves and the Wedding Bells by Sebastian Faulks.  I was astonished to see a "new" Jeeves book on the shelves at Half Price Books and was willing to pay half-price to see how well the author managed to replicate P. G. Wodehouse's inimitable writing style.

The cover describes the book as a homage to Wodehouse; the author's note calls it a tribute.  Faulks doesn't overpromise but professes humility in taking on the task of the authorized sequel and in the most worthy of causes: that of directing new readers to the Wodehouse oeuvre.  Within reason, he succeeds admirably.

He does very well at recreating Bertie's distinctive narrative voice, full of '20's slang, abbreviations, and laugh-out-loud metaphors.  The plot, as per usual, involves Bertie's romantic entanglements, but in a sharp departure from Wodehouse, in this book, Jeeves schemes to make sure his employer makes it down the aisle rather than masterminding an honorable way out of an engagement.  As Wodehouse's modus operandi in the Jeeves stories was to preserve the status quo, whereas this follow-up is intended as a capstone on the series, it's not a terrible idea to give the protagonist a happy ending, but the tone shift is jarring.  The problem isn't that Georgiana Meadowes is Honoria Glossop; instead, she's likeable enough that the prospect of her spending several decades wed to eternal boy-child Bertie Wooster makes you feel a little queasy for her.

In addition, while Jeeves's methods have put Bertie in a tight spot with an aunt or two before, I don't believe he would put his employer up to such clearly dangerous and illegal acts as he does in this installment.  Moreover, I categorically deny that Jeeves would ever countenance misrepresenting himself as an aristocrat to innocent outsiders (i.e., not aunts or Drones) for days on end to gain another man's hospitality under false pretences.  It's simply not cricket.

In the end, while Faulks succeeds in writing a perfectly amiable book, it suffers from the same defect which afflicts Jill Paton Walsh's pseudoWimsey books: the desire to pair everyone off.  If Lord Peter marries Harriet Vane, well, then, Bunter must obtain a wife of his own.  Paton Walsh's books suffer from numerous other flaws which make them unbearable; I certainly don't mean to equate Faulks's book with them.  But the concept of Bertie and Jeeves having a double wedding and then living happily ever after in a country house with their wives is a curiously flat ending to their story.  I prefer to imagine the ageless Bertie ever-bumbling and the inimitable Jeeves living only to serve.