Book review: Nancy and Plum by Betty MacDonald

The thirty-sixth book I read in 2016 was Nancy and Plum, a children's book by Betty MacDonald, author of the classic Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle series.  Unlike that series, this book hasn't stayed in print since its original publication in 1952.  This is a reissue apparently inspired by a few of the biggest names in modern children's literature: Jeanne Birdsall of The Penderwicks, who wrote the introduction to this edition, and Mary GrandPré, illustrator of the U.S. editions of the Harry Potter series, who provided new illustrations.

It is, in my opinion, a travesty that this book was allowed to fall out of print. It is a delight, if tropey as all get-out.  Nancy and Plum are orphaned sisters who live in a boarding house run by the evil Mrs. Monday.  (Are there any good people who run orphanages in children's literature?  They're neck-and-neck with stepmothers in the evil sweepstakes.)  Mrs. Monday mistreats the two, knowing that she'll never have to answer for it, going so far as to steal the Christmas gifts sent by their only distant relative to give to her spoiled niece Mirabelle.  Nancy and Plum are, in the tradition of mistreated orphan girls everywhere, both good and clever and well-liked by all their non-evil peers.

Discovering the existence and vague benevolence of their Uncle John, Nancy and Plum attempt to contact him secretly and tell him how they are being mistreated.  When Mrs. Monday and Mirabelle conspire not only to keep them from him but also to persuade him that Nancy and Plum are spoiled, ungrateful liars, the sisters run away and find sanctuary with a childless farm couple.  When Mrs. Monday, with the deceived Uncle John, tracks them down to force them to return (both for the money Uncle John pays for their board and just for the continued pleasure of being mean to them), it's up the farmer and his wife, the town librarian (as guaranteed to be good in a children's story as a stepmother is to be evil), and a school teacher to reveal the truth and expose Mrs. Monday's perfidy.

Everything turns out exactly as you expect it to, which is both a feature and a bug in a story of this type: It makes you feel all warm and fuzzy to see virtue rewarded and evil punished, but an adult reader can't help but feel the loss of any complexity to the narrative.  In addition, GrandPré's illustrations fail to match the text.  Like Quentin Blake, her pictures are notable for their lived-in messiness, but when the book mentions on more than one occasion how tightly the girls' hair is braided so that no loose strands can escape and yet every picture shows them with loose and messy braids and hair falling in their face, it's on the illustrator to convey what the author intended, not just to draw stuff the way she wants to.

Book review: Full Dark House by Christopher Fowler

The thirty-fifth book I read in 2016 was a birthday gift from my friend Leslie, Full Dark House, the first in a series of Peculiar Crimes Unit mysteries by Christopher Fowler.  In the present day, Detectives Bryant and May are octogenarians with a long and successful partnership investigating "peculiar crimes" behind them.  When an explosion rips apart their office, the surviving Detective May must pore through his memories to determine which of their old investigations may have left a loose end which resulted in violent revenge, served decades cold.

I did not particularly like this book.  Too much about it failed to ring true to me, beginning with the very first page, in which the explosion is said to recall the London Blitz.  Really?  Intervening decades of terrorist blasts, first from the Irish Republican Army and then from radical Islamists, and a sixty-year-old war is the first thought of a Londoner when a bomb goes off?  I grant the author that it makes a neat segue to his extended flashback to WWII, but he had me on the defensive from that point on.

The blurbs on the cover refer to the series as "deadpan, sly," "madcap," "completely crazy and great fun," descriptions that led me to expect a series akin to Jasper Fforde or Douglas Adams, but I never got the "comedy" in the mystery; rather, the tone seemed uneven, with the eccentric office politics of the Peculiar Crimes Unit jostling uncomfortably next to gruesome deaths and characters who seem designed to evoke sympathy or pathos.  While most of the victims of the killer in the novel seem portrayed to "deserve it," one man in particular is a mere innocent bystander, and his death is the longest, most-drawn-out, and most bloodily and brutally portrayed in the book.  How the reader is meant to retain any sympathy for the killer's point of view after that episode escapes me.

And now I have to leave some space for spoilers, because I can't fully express my dissatisfaction with the book without discussing the solution to the crime:

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Okay, so Elspeth has sex one time (she is raped) and gets pregnant.  Biologically possible, but very unlikely.  Elspeth goes through nine months of pregnancy, gives birth, and hides a baby/toddler/child/grown man in her workplace for almost twenty years, and no one ever notices.  I call shenanigans.  Can we declare a moratorium on the magical symptomless Hollywood pregnancy for a while, particularly when employed by male writers?  And the Emma Geller-Green syndrome wherein small children only exist when they are plot-relevant but never interfere with their parents going out, traveling, working, or engaging in child-non-centric activities?

That hoary saw in the flashback investigation, combined with the author actually employing amnesia (amnesia!) as a plot device to explain the present-day mystery, really precludes me from having any respect for his work as anything beyond the shallowest melodrama.

Book review: Honeymoon with Murder by Carolyn G. Hart

The thirty-fourth book I read in 2016 was the fourth book in the Death on Demand series by Carolyn G. Hart, my semi-nemesis from The Village.  In Honeymoon with Murder, Annie and Max's wedding has come off (thankfully between books so we don't get a blow-by-blow à la Jan Karon, an author for whom I have a much higher tolerance for self-indulgence), but their departure for their honeymoon is postponed when (this time) Annie's friend and employee Ingrid Jones telephones in a panic and then vanishes from the line.  When the pair investigate, they find a dead body on Ingrid's floor and no sign of Ingrid.

Unfortunately, this installment features the return of Brice Posey, who insists that Ingrid is the murderer and a fugitive from justice.  Yeah, it meets my requested criteria of Max and Annie investigating when it's not their neck on the line, but just barely.  Mrs. Brawley, still in her mentally-worrying habit of taking on the personae of different fictional detectives, is left to organize a volunteer search for Ingrid, whom the locals are convinced has been kidnapped, and Laurel Darling teams up with a self-proclaimed psychic to try to solve the crime herself.

Hart gets all activist-y about battered women, insisting that an abused woman with a police witness to her injuries doesn't have a chance of winning in court.  No one even bothers to argue the point (including the police officer); instead, it's Max's money to the rescue once again, providing round-the-clock security for the poor woman whom the system has failed!  The author's constant harping on the theme that rich people are evil oppressors, except for her rich protagonists, is getting old.

The denouement of the mystery revolves around a character with a certain almost-unbelievable talent that was used in the course of the crime, yet which the same character smugly flaunted in public for no real reason.  So the perp is smart enough to plot the crime but dumb enough to demonstrate how it was done to the very people trying to solve it.

Faith asked me why I keep buying these books when they annoy me so much.  I think I'm partly doing so to vindicate my poor opinion of Carolyn G. Hart from more than twenty years ago.

The world's most incompetent scammers?

I am delighted by the subject line of an email in my Junk Mail folder:

"Not a Spam,Kindly Treat as Urgent."

The fact that it's from "UNITED NATIONS" is just icing on the cake at this point.

The body is even more delightful.  I am to be sent a Visa card pre-loaded with 9.25 million dollars. The "Contact Information Officer" has a Yahoo email address.  You know, as UN officials do.  And it's signed by Mr. Ban Ki-Moon, secretary general, himself!  

I only have to pay $235 for postage.  What a deal!

Chalk talk

Faith drew Squirtle, Bulbasaur, and Charmander on our driveway in chalk...

...and Jigglypuff, Butterfree, and Psyduck on our front porch.

Book review: Beyond the Pool of Stars by Howard Andrew Jones

The thirty-third book I read in 2016 was Beyond the Pool of Stars by Howard Andrew Jones.  It's campaign setting fiction in Paizo Publishing's Golarion setting for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.  Campaign setting fiction, as exemplified by the novels set in the Forgotten Realms, has a pretty terrible reputation and, from the limited examples I've read, usually earns it.  I was surprised, therefore, to find a positive mention of this book in World Magazine's book review section and intrigued enough to pick up a copy.

The story is set in Sargava, a colony of Avistani (read: European) people on the continent of Garund (read; Africa).  The main character is the mixed-race daughter of a white man and his black wife who has returned home for the funeral of her father.  Discovering that the family business, a salvaging operation recovering valuables from sunken ships, is on shaky financial footing, Mirian Raas agrees to take on One Last Job to honor her father's last contract and save her mother and brother from ruin. Of course, the father's death, which appeared to be accidental, turns out to have been not an accident at all, as there are powerful enemies eager to see that this One Last Job not succeed.

This novel presents a diverse set of characters without bludgeoning one over the head with it politically.  In addition to The Race Thing, one of the members of Mirian's expedition is gay, and the author goes beyond human-ish issues with the clients for the One Last Job, the remains of a once-populous tribe of lizardfolk, dwindled to only three individuals.  The lizardfolk have petitioned the government of Sargava for help in retrieving artifacts from the ruins of their ancestral city, in exchange for a percentage of the valuables.  Agents in service to Cheliax, the mother country against which the colony rebelled and declared its independence, were behind the elder Raas's death and now threaten the members of Mirian's expedition, in order to weaken the colonial government, which is on no firmer financial footing than the Raas family.

The characters are well-developed, avoiding the missteps of stereotypes, and genuinely engaging the reader's affection while leaving him on tenterhooks wondering how many of the expedition will survive.  Each death, rather than coming across as the inevitable winnowing of the redshirts, leaves the reader feeling sorry both for the victim and because he is deprived of their further company.  Up until the last chapter, I thought that this would be a five-star rating.  Unfortunately, the end of the novel falls a bit flat.  It feels like the author got rushed, ran long on word-count, or merely settled for quickly setting up the next adventure rather than taking the time to give the characters the time and space to react as realistically and emotionally to the events of the denouement as they did to the earlier action.

Still, I'm pleased to note that a sequel to this book is in the works and look forward to reading more of the advetures of Mirian Raas and her crew.

Words mean things, Part Deux

4-foot-8 Simone Biles poses next to Olympian nearly twice her size

David Lee of USA Volleyball is 6-foot-8.  That's two feet taller than Simone Biles.  Two feet is not really "nearly" four feet, eight inches.  But, hey, it wouldn't be the internet without an inaccurate and misleading click-bait headline, right, Yahoo Sports?