Breaking Dawn, by Stephanie Meyer

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. I didn't give this Twilight series a terribly good review. So, why did I read the last one? Even worse, why did I BUY the last one? So sue me, I was curious. Go Team Jacob!

At least I didn't stay up to midnight to get it the first minute it was available. I waited almost a whole week, and only bought it after I picked up a copy and read the first 5 pages. There was SOME discrimination involved here!

For the very few of you who have zero contact with teenage girls or popular culture, Breaking Dawn is the fourth and final book in the saga of Bella Swan, disaffected high school student who finds herself in love with the most gorgeous boy in the school--who turns out to be a 90 year old vampire. After three volumes of danger and yearning, Bella finds herself between two supernatural beings, both of whom love her: Edward, the vampire and Jacob the werewolf. Which will she choose? What will happen?

Like I said, I was curious.

Well, early on, Bella marries Edward, which breaks Jacob's heart. They go off on a honeymoon, where Bella gets pregnant. Yeah, I know--hasn't he been dead for 90 years? I guess he's been a most proper dead guy--he's been completely abstinent for that entire time, and given his cold body temperature, his sperm has been frozen for that entire time. Because she gets pregnant the first time they have sex.

We know this because he refuses to touch her again after the first time, appalled by the bruises he left on her, as well as the damage he did to the furniture in the room. Anyway, the baby is a hybrid, and grows to term in about a month. There is a lot of drama about how the baby is killing Bella, up until they figure out that the baby needs blood. So Bella starts drinking Red Cross collected blood that the Cullens keep in the freezer, and she likes it! So there goes that problem.

Baby gets born, turns out to be a reverse mind reader--puts pictures in peoples heads when she touches them to communicate. Everybody falls for her, and Jacob (poor dear sweet boy, aching with love for Bella, who will never love him back) imprints on the baby. So hey! He'll be her son-in-law some day!

We get a tense climax--the Biggest, Baddest Vampires show up, planning on killing the baby (because there is a law against making vampires out of infants--and they have never seen a hybrid before). There is a face-down, where it is clear that the Volturi fear the Cullens are going to attempt to seize power, so the baby is just an excuse to destroy this threat to the Volturi. Bella discovers her unique vampire talent is to be a shield, and war is averted through clever diplomacy, coupled with Bella's shield incapacitating the usual Volturi weapons.

Happily ever after, with a vague threat that the Volturi may someday return. Vampires and werewolves are now in an alliance, Bella is able to keep her father in her life, Jacob can once again be her best friend, and she has her perfect Edward again.

Based on reading Amazon reviews, this book is not as well beloved as the first three. I can see why--there is no longer that fatally addictive yearning, the unconsummated love between Bella and Edward that was the primary feature of the first books. Happy families are famously not interesting. Once Bella marries Edward and becomes a vampire herself, she's no longer a tragic heroine.

Plus, Breaking Dawn takes the characters out of high school and into a world where they function as adults, with adult concerns. Pregnancy, childbirth, parenting--not as interesting to 13 year old girls I think. The final confrontation with the Volturi was not primarily physical either--there was no battle so much as there was a showdown and the Volturi retreated with as much grace as was possible. So, with the romance and violence of the first books removed, with the adult themes added, it's no wonder that a lot of people were disappointed.

Since I am not a teenage girl, (surprise!) I was actually charmed by Meyer's approach to this book. She took some big risks, and did a very good job with them. Nearly a third of the book is narrated by Jacob, as he suffers through Bella's pregnancy and the birth of the baby. Meyer does a lovely job with the changed perspective, adding dimension to the story by getting us inside the head of the werewolves. This gives an interesting insight into why they are such enemies of the vampires, and why the treaty with the Cullens is so fragile.

Her understated approach to sex is also well done. Given the story she is telling, Meyer does have to confront it, but she does so without descending into soft-core porn. Instead, she focusses on the emotional aftermath, the joy Bella feels in her new experiences, both as a human and as a vampire. Delightfully, once Bella is a vampire, with all her newly enhanced senses and powers, she realizes something. With no human need to sleep, eat, or go to the bathroom, there is no reason to ever stop!

In fact, if on eis a homebody, there seems to be no reason NOT to be a vampire. Bella has true love--forever--all the money she would ever need, a loving and extended family, a beautiful daughter, her best friend, her father--so maybe she can't go out in public in the sun--she hasn't seemed to have lost anything.

I was surprised by the length of this book--over 750 pages--as well as the confidence with which Meyer handled it. The change to Jacob's narration, Bella's adjustment to her new life, the introduction of motherhood. . .these changed the nature of the book in a way that is true to what mature, married love is. Bella moves through this book as a different person than she was as a teen--a choice by Meyer that was not universally accepted.

So, a satisfying read, and less disturbing than the first three--no longer does Edward seem like a creepy stalker, who is literally cold and hard to the touch. Once Bella becomes a vampire, their body temperatures match, and he is no longer marble like. The two of them are now well matched--Bella is even slightly stronger, as a "newborn"--and they work together to raise their child and to deal with threats to their lives. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the least popular, as it goes far beyond the understanding and interest of the younger readers--but as an adult, I thought it did a good job of wrapping up the series.

The Alchemyst, by Michael Scott

This is one for the mother-daughter book club for Bunny's 7th grade friends. This particular title was selected by one of the daughters, rather than one of the mothers, and it shows. Unlike some other magic books (*cough* Harry Potter *cough*), this one simply does not hold up to adult reading.

Fifteen year old twins Josh and Sophie are spending a summer in San Francisco while there parents are on an archaeological dig. Hoping to save up enough money to buy a car, the twins have landed summer jobs across the street from each other. Josh works at a bookstore run by Nick and Perry Fleming; Sophie works at the coffee shop.

One day (specifically May 31), a small gray man enters the bookshop followed by two VERY large overcoated body guards. The gray man is Dr. John Dee, and he is searching for the book that holds all the secrets of all magic, and he knows it is in the bookshop.

Soon, mad magic breaks out: the Flemings are revealed to be Nicholas and Perenelle Flamel, who have been guarding the Book of Abraham the Mage for over 500 years, using the knowledge inside to brew an immortality potion, and to create gold and diamonds for their financial needs. Dee wants the book for nefarious purposes involving something called "the Dark Elders." In only a few pages, Dee has grabbed the book, Josh has managed to retain the final two (and most important) pages of it, Perenelle is captured by Dee, and Nicholas, Josh and Sophie are on the run.

The rest of the book is more or less what I call a "run and gun." Dee poses a threat, the kids run, they find a temporary refuge, Dee finds them again, the kids run, ad infinitum. At least, it felt infinitum--it's a remarkably turgid book that runs on for 369 pages, and yet fails to generate any suspense or character development. You could summarize the book like this:

Part One: "Oh no! Golems! Run! " Magical battle ensues, and book store is destroyed.

Part Two: "Oh no! Rats! Run!" Magical battle ensues, dojo is destroyed.

Part Three: "Oh no! Crows! Run!" Crows attack our heroes on the Golden Gate bridge, SUV is destroyed.

Part Four: "Oh no! Crows AND cats! Run!" Magical battle ensues, gigantic Tree of the World is destroyed.

Part Five: "Oh no! Animated skeletons! Run!" Magical battle ensues, quaint antique store is destroyed.

The book ends with the twins and Flamel escaping to France through use of ley lines and a mirror. There is no resolution at all, merely a set up to the next of what is promised to be a six book series.

While on the run, the kids and Flamel run into mythic beings from all over the world: Golems, Hekate (Greece), Scathach (Ireland), the Morrigan (Scotland); the Witch of Endor (Bible), Bastet (Egypt), Yggdrisil (Norse legend), and probably some more I have forgotten. Few of these are explained or given any real context--Scott seems to be operating on the principle that YA readers will already recognize all these characters. If I had already been familiar with these, I think the story might have had more depth or resonance. As it is, why are Hekate, Scathach and the Witch of Endor "good" guys, while Bastet and the Morrigan are "bad?" How do they end up on the sides they end up on? Scott doesn't tell us, nor is there much help in myth either.

There is one moment of some suspense near the end of the book. Sophia has had her magical powers Awakened, but a magical battle erupted before Josh could do the same. Dee spots this as a vulnerability, and he approaches Josh and tells a plausible story that casts himself as the good guy and Flamel as the criminal. Josh doesn't know quite what to believe, but then Sophie shows up and grabs him by the hand and the decision is made. Way to spoil any sense of ambiguity and foreboding!

There are inconsistencies in the storytelling as well. The Flamels have to drink the immortality potion each month, or they begin aging--one year for every day they don't have the potion. Presumably, they would have taken the potion on June 1, but can't because Dee intruded. So how come by the end of that day, both the Flamels are visibly gaining wrinkles, losing hair, and becoming more frail? One year doesn't do that!

Flamel variously claims that he has spent 500 years studying the magic book, and also claims that he hasn't studied anything but the potion and gold-making parts. Despite having been on the run from Dee for most of those 500, Flamel hasn't tried to learn any magic or defensive spells, while Dee has apparently spent most of those same 500 years doing just that. Why would Nicholas Flamel be so unconcerned with the threat Dee poses, and yet spend 500 years hiding from him?

Finally--because I have to stop some time--despite being called "The Alchemyst," there is no alchemy in the book. There is a great deal of using the power of one's aura to do magic, and some brief discussion of "elemental magic," but no science of alchemy. In fact, Nicholas Flamel is so generic that he could be any Hollywood blockbuster hero, rather than the learned and scholarly man one would suppose him to be. I keep seeing him as Nicholas Cage--perhaps from the National Treasure movies--smart, yes. Capable of great physical effort? Yes. Demonstrating one iota of intellectual curiosity? Not so much. Really, there is no way you could believe that he had spent hundreds of years reading and studying--he's really no smarter than the dopey twins he's running around with.

Some reviews and press tout this series as a fit successor to the Harry Potter books. I disagree. And the proof of that? Despite the complete lack of any resolution what so ever at the end of this book, I have absolutely NO desire to pick up the second one.

After the Funeral, by Agatha Christie

Gah! Sometimes I wonder why I even keep this blog--I started it to keep track of what I had read, so that when I came up with some little fact, like "what was that book I read where the car started speaking in haiku?" I had a place to look for the answer.

By the way, the car/haiku book was Good Omens, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett.

But why bother, when there are even Wikipedia entries about specific books. I found the entry for After the Funeral when I went looking for a list of characters. See, I listened to this book, and was curious about how one character's name was spelled, as the reader pronounced it with a decided French accent, and I kept getting two characters confused as a result.

Wikipedia not only gave me the characters' names, but also the entire plot of the story, including the trivial little point on which the whole thing turns. I tried not to read anything but the list of characters, but somehow my uncooperative peripheral vision spotted it, and so I knew who dun it.

It's a silly little point too--"how could he have known they served pinot noir with the beefsteak on Tuesday, when he said he hadn't arrived at the club until the cheese course?" sort of detail. In fact, the actual point is that someone mentioned wax flowers, which had been put away before she arrived, so she must have been there before!

At any rate, not one of Christie's best. After the funeral of Richard Abernathy, a wealthy ailing man, Cora Lansquenet (one of the beneficiaries) says "He was murdered, wasn't he?" The next day, she is found dead in her home, victim of an axe murder. All the numerous relatives are questioned, and they are as featureless a group of characters as a collection of chess pawns. While they all have reasons to have killed the old man, and are conveniently alibi-less at the time of the second death, it is hard to care about any of them.

In the end, it turns out that it was Cora's companion Miss Gilchrist, who was the murderer. She arrived at the funeral disguised as Cora solely for the purpose of planting the idea of murder. She then went home, and killed Cora, thus "disguising" the axe murder by creating the presumption of a link between the two deaths.

Why did she do it? Poor Cora had stumbled on a Vermeer that she bought at a jumble sale, and psycho Miss Gilchrist recognized it and wanted it. She was going to sell it and open a tea shop. Okay, say what you will, but that is about the stupidest murder plot I have come across in about 30 years of reading mysteries.

I mean, ignore the storytelling, and reconstruct what happened chronologically. Cora goes jumble sale-ing, and buys this picture. (This is a hobby of hers, and she is always hoping to find something valuable.) Miss Gilchrist recognizes it, but has to keep Cora from having it identified. So the first thing she does is. . .go to the funeral of a relative, disguised as Cora? Oh, not that, because she has to practice acting enough like Cora to fool all her relatives. Then she goes to the funeral solely to plant the suggestion that Richard Abernathy was murdered.

At this point, Cora is still alive. Miss Gilchrist hasn't murdered her yet. So she goes about this elaborate disguise and pathetic attempt to camouflage a murder that hasn't even happened yet! She rushes home, patiently waits until 2:30 to go return Cora's library books (this is her alibi), doubles back, murders her housemate wtih an axe (!), quickly paints over the Vermeer so nobody will recognize it, then re-enters the house two hours later and "finds" the body a half hour after that.

WHAT?

It's just ridiculous. There is no reason that such a goofy plan should ever have worked. It has far too many parts, and requires both significant advance preparation (impersonating Cora) and improvisation (Richard Abernathy died suddenly and unexpectedly). I mean, really! "Oh, Cora found a Vermeer and she has no idea what it is. I do recognize it, and I want it. So I'm going to practice acting like Cora, just in case one of her relatives dies unexpectedly, so I can go to the funeral and make people think he was murdered. Then I'll go home and murder Cora too, and paint over the Vermeer so that when the appraiser arrives, he doesn't see the real painting. But what if no relative dies conveniently--before the appraiser shows up?"

Why not just paint a copy of the Vermeer and substitute it. Cora has no artistic sense--she won't notice. The appraiser won't see a Vermeer--he'll see an amateurish copy of one. Slip away and sell the real one, tell Cora that you received an unexpected inheritance, and go open the damn tea shop!

But this is Agatha Christie, and you have to have dead bodies. Foolish. Silly. I'm glad I got this one from the library and paid no money for it!

Bitter Is The New Black, by Jen Lancaster

I picked this one up on recommendation of a member of the MomSquad. (Hi Britt!) I can tell you it wasn't easy to find--Barnes & Noble had it in Biography. Sure, snarky and entitled Jen Lancaster next to thoughtful and in depth historical treatises by David McCollugh and Doris Lessing. No wonder I couldn't find it.

Jen Lancaster is about one economic cycle behind my life, and she was lucky beyond belief at the start of her professional career. After taking eleven years to graduate from college (or so she says), she entered the workforce during the dot com bubble when venture capital was flowing freely and it took tow people and a Power Point presentation to start a new company. Remember when people used to say insane things like "Profit doesn't matter--this is the New Economy"? That was Jen Lancaster's life, and she lived it to the limit. She was apparently a really good salesperson, made a lot in commissions, and spent it all. She had a very expensive rental apartment, dozens of designer clothes, bags, shoes, the absolute top shelf in liquor, perfume, cosmetics. She used her money to play and pamper herself and apparently believed that she deserved it all.

And the the bubble burst.

To be fair, it must be heady to be young and contextless, living in a big city with what feels like unending financial success. I am risk averse, and so I would never have made the kind of money she made (what if I didn't make any sales? Then I wouldn't get paid? No thank you sir!), but I also can't imagine living from paycheck to paycheck at that level either. Reading the first part of the book is like peeking into a world that I thought only existed on television. Who buys these $400 handbags? Who wears these $500 shoes? How can you actually justify those kind of expenditures--don't you have anything better to do with your time and money than just shop and spa?

Well, there is eating out and drinking too, I guess.

So the first third of the book lovingly details Jen at the top of her world, drinking wildly, treating people like crap, acting exactly like an obnoxious and entitled 20-something. She is hard to like. Sure, she has a smart mouth and is occasionally very funny, but man did I pity the people around her.

So, when the dot com bubble burst, she lost her position. While it's slightly less damaging on the ego to lose a job in an economic meltdown like that, it makes future job prospects that much more dim--she found herself competing with hundreds and hundreds of equally qualified people. And guess what? You know that saying "Be nice to other people on the way up, because you will meet them again on the way down"? Jen wasn't very nice.

But she's not worried, because she is as fabulous as she thinks she is, right? It's just a matter of hours before somebody else hires her! So she makes some great decisions, like canceling her COBRA coverage to buy new boots, because they were so cute she just had to have them. And she figured she could get coverage on her live-in boyfriend's insurance as a domestic partner, right? Wrong. "Domestic partner" benefits are for same sex couples who CAN'T get married. Heterosexual couples have to be married to qualify.

Well, she can't reinstate the coverage once she canceled it, so she keeps the boots. Until her dog eats them.

Things continue to get worse and worse, as she cannot find work anywhere. After about a year, her boyfriend gets laid off too. Two unemployed people, an EXPENSIVE rental apartment, expensive tastes and an unrealistic relationship to money. And still Jen continues to refuse to live in reality. Things get bad enough that they have to leave their apartment because they can no longer afford it. They find a real estate broker and Jen finds something wrong with Every. Single. Place. She vetoed one place because the kitchen had an electric stove, and she doesn't even cook. Really, at some point I wasn't sure which I wanted to do more: slap her silly, or shake her boyfriend until his teeth rattled for being such an enabler.

Jen doesn't step into the real world until she finds her now-husband unable to get out of bed. They didn't have enough money to buy both food and his anti-depressants, so he stopped taking his medication. And Jen realizes that he has sacrificed his mental health to keep her from realizing how bad things were. And we finally see her start to grow up.

She looks in her closet and recognizes that a designer purse represents the monetary equivalent of two months of their utilities--and she only used the purse twice. Her collection of shoes for summer would have paid for a summer's worth of groceries. All the things they can't afford now could have been paid for if she had saved that money instead of spending it so profligately.

It is when they are about to be evicted from their cheaper apartment and have to go live with her parents that things start to get better. Fletch gets a job. Jen's blog rants have captured an editor's attention and she gets a book contract. At the end, she feels like she can do better, now that she has a second chance, and the book ends with a ring of maturity.

Since that time, Jen Lancaster has written two more books and is working on her fourth. I have picked up her most recent one, Such a Pretty Fat, which I am willing to read to see if the Sadder But Wiser Jen can be funny without being so damned irritating.

Lord John and the Private Matter, by Diana Gabaldon

Okay, I admit it. Once I find an author I like, I read a lot of his/her work. Right now, I am immersed in the 18th century of Gabaldon's books. This is the first of a few books--maybe three?--featuring Lord John Grey, who is a minor and recurrent character in the Outlander series.

Unlike that series, however, these books are quite short--Private Matter taking only about 300 pages. It is also more straightforwardly a mystery--a death, a dilemma, an investigation, and a resolution.

Lord John is an aristocrat, the second son of naable, and thus left with a courtesy title, family connections, and the obligation of finding his own way through life. He is a soldier, and we first met him in Dragonfly in Amber just prior to the Battle of Culloden which climaxes that book. His Outlander history informs this book as well, but it is not strictly necessary to have read all those mighty works to enjoy this one.

The time is 1750-something, and Lord John is living in London. He remains discretely homosexual, and conflicted about it. While using the privy facilities at his London club, he notices a lesion on the private part of Lord Trevelyan, a rich and powerful man who is engaged to marry Grey's cousin. It appears to be the pox--syphilis.

Naturally, Grey cannot allow the marriage to take place and doom his cousin, but there is not much he can do to end the engagement without sacrificing his cousin's reputation.

Soon after, a dead body turns up, Grey is assigned to investigate, as the victim was a soldier. Clue leads to clue, implicating Lord Trevelyan in a number of potential scandals. THe mystery is solved, after encounters with all levels of society. Most interesting is Gabaldon's venture into the homosexual community of 18th century London. "Molly walks" is the phrase that describes the parks and streets where men would meet, dressed extravagantly, often masked, even posing as women. Curiously enough, Gabaldon's reseach turned up the tidbit that the phrase "Miss Thing" dates back at least 200 years.

This was an absorbing read, and I would definitely pick up the next in the series.

Outlander Series, by Diana Gabaldon (continued)

I have now listened to the first three books in this series: Outlander, Dragonfly in Amber, and Voyager. These novels don't get any shorter--Gabaldon (pronounced "gabbled-on," ironically enough) packs a lot of pages between her covers. Sadly, they also don't get better.

Outlander was itself an oddity--several hundred pages before we get to anything resembling an actual plot. Claire Beauchamp Randall, a former combat nurse on her second honeymoon in Scotland, stumbles through some standing stones, and finds herself back in 1742. The book wanders through a number of incidents, a cultural tour of 18th century Scottish highlands--clan allegiances, feudal government, hunting, dietary habits, medical knowledge, what Scotsmen wear under their kilts. In the best romance novel tradition, there is a forced marriage for ostensibly "practical" reasons, a villain who threatens the heroine, and some historical events. There is a fair share of unbelievable events--Claire bluffs her way into a heavily fortified prison, finds her imprisoned husband, kills a wolf with her bare hands, storms the prison with a herd of kine and frees her husband and several dozen other prisoners.

Okay, it's not believable, but there is some point where you must say "I can suspend disbelief, but not that much." The second book finds our heroes in France, trying to prevent Bonnie Prince Charlie from attempting to reclaim a Stuart crown and thus avert the devastating Battle of Culloden and the subsequent brutal destruction of the people and crops of the Highlands. Okay, but can I really believe that a Scottish farmer, son of an illegitimate son, an outlaw wanted for murder--can really just land in Paris and personally befriend all the luminaries of that age? Why would Bonnie Prince Charlie make such a man a close personal friend?

And how is it that everybody is forever dying of a single gunshot wound, or a single sword fight, while Our Hero suffers unimaginable injury and is rarely even slowed down? In Outlander, Jamie Fraser is subjected to unimaginable savagery while in prison, and it takes him months to recover, both physically and mentally. As the series goes on, however, he loses this vulnerability and devolves into a less interesting, more "typical" romantic hero. He has many long and involved adventures, at the cost of losing his vulnerability.

I think it is that vulnerability that makes the first book so much more interesting. Jamie is a powerful man, but he is also rather young and unworldly. Claire is older than he, and has the dubious advantage of knowing how history comes out, but she is also completely unfamiliar with how to live as an 18^th century highlander. The two of them complement each other, and their weaknesses give one just enough doubt about how well things will turn out. Of course, we know Jamie doesn’t die at the end of Outlander, as there would not be any more books. However the cost to him of what has happened is real and painful.

By Voyager, however, he has become more or less invulnerable, and possessed of a bizarre knowledge of the customs and geography of the Caribbean. I’m not sure what in his Scottish military training taught him all about navigation in the Western Hemisphere, but he is never at a loss about what to do or how get what he wants. Which results in a much less interesting character, and the odd authorial problem of having to separate the two, because as soon as Claire finds Jamie, he solves whatever jam she is in.

Will I continue the series? Well, even in the absence of a story or character arc, the stories are rather beguiling. And frankly, I must admit to being a wee bit addicted to the Scottish brogue being whispered into my ear. So, as a unbeatable audio bargain, measures as words per dollar, I will probably download some others of this series.

Great Idea for Book Clubs

This is clever--The St. Paul library now has "Book Club in a Bag." There are 25 titles to choose from, and you literally check out a bag for the book club. There are 10 copies of a single title, a six week long check out period, even discussion questions and background materials.

At the very least, it gives you a list of books to consider for your next meeting!

Outlander, by Diana Gabaldon

Apparently, this book kick started a genre called "time-traveling romance novels." Gabaldon decided she wanted to write a novel, and somewhat arbitrarily chose 18th century Scotland as her location. One of her characters, however, didn't behave like an 18th century lady. Instead she stomped around refusing to be left behind when anything interesting happened, swearing like the 20th century emancipated female she was. With a character this vivid, Gabaldon had to explain her presence, and thus a new genre was born.

In brief, Claire Randall has finally rejoined her husband Frank at the end of World War II. Claire has been serving as a military nurse, and Frank had also been in service. After six years of separation, they are finally coming together, and have a second honeymoon in Scotland. While exploring an ancient stone circle, she slips into a crack in the stone and finds herself back 200 years.

The first person she meets is Black Jack Randall, an ancestor of her husbands and a vicious English officer battling uppity Scots. She is soon discovered by a small party of MacKenzies, and taken to their castle stronghold. For plot related reasons, she finds herself forced to marry one of the clansman, a tall redhead named Jamie Fraser, and the book chronicles her life trying to adjust to 18th century life while trying to get back to her own time.

Life in the Scottish Highlands is depicted as incredibly physical. Clans raid each others' territories, stealing cattle and provoking fights. The men are portrayed as intensely loyal to their clan, and deeply concerned with their honor, which means they end up fighting each others' enemies and sleeping on the run quite a bit.

Jamie Fraser has been labeled an outlaw, and so cannot return to his home or be picked up by the English. Unfortunately, he is betrayed, and turned over to Black Jack Randall for a scene of rather gruesome torture and a rather fantastical rescue mission that frees Jamie from prison.
Claire and Jamie end up in France as he heals, and the story ends as they ponder where they should go.

At heart, this is a classic romance novel--Gabaldon dispenses with some of the standard cliches, but retains the basic plot arc: two people forced together by circumstances come to love each other and in the end chose to stay. Layered over this is interesting Scottish history and landscape writing, but the plot is meandering to say the least. It works well if you are content with diverting storytelling with no appreciable narrative drive, and have the free time to enjoy the wandering.

I have been listening to this as an audiobook, which has the advantage of letting me bypass the written Scottish accents and just listen to the rolling vowels. The performer, Davina Porter, trips across the Gaelic words, which makes the whole book easier to slip into because I was not constantly tripping over words that had no vowels and a lot of extra consonants.

It is a monster of a book--nearly 34 hours of narration, which is certainly value for the money, but perhaps a bit disruptive to normal daily life--it was hard to me to discard my earbuds to actually talk to my family while listening, and I find the sounds of Porter's Scottish accents echo in my ears.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd probably rate this book about a 6, but that doesn't explain quite why I've already downloaded the next two volumes onto my iPod, and why I brought the companion book home from the library.

Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman

I listened to this book on my iPod, which I love to do. When I am being read to, I can listen while I drive and wait in the pick-up line to get the kidlets after school. I can listen while I am grocery shopping, or walking the dog, or folding laundry, or anything that is too hopelessly boring to do without a book--without having to carry around a book!

I do think the fact that this was read to me does alter my experience, however--characters are voiced by the reader in ways that I might not have imagined if I just read their words on the page. On the other hand, having this novel of "underground" London read with an English accent might have improved the experience. It is hard to tell.

This is an odd book--it was originally written as a television series, which Neil Gaiman wrote with some other people, and afterward he went back and novelized it. As such, there are a lot of ideas just bumping around, but not fully integrated into the story. This may also be because it is an early Gaiman work, and so suffers in comparison to more recent works, like and The Anansi Boys and American Gods which are both more fully realized.

The story is told largely from the viewpoint of an "ordinary" Londoner named Richard Mayhew, who finds an injured girl lying on the pavement, and feels a moral obligation to assist her. As a result, he finds he has been "erased" from his own life--as he stands in his flat, an estate agent shows it to an older couple who agree to lease it, for example. His fiancee doesn't remember him, his co-workers can't recall him. In the end, he finds himself in "London Below," a quasi-magical place of fiefdoms, animal totems, and an entire society based on barter of goods and favors. Haunting London Below are two thugs of "The Old Firm," named Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar, who are unfunny versions of Mr. Tulip and Mr. Pin from Terry Pratchett's The Truth.

One of the strengths of this book is the inventive inversion Gaiman gives to London Below, often based on the names of London tube stops. Knightsbridge is transformed into the Night Bridge, where the inky blackness of night can actually snatch up pedestrians, and they are never seen again. Earl's Court is actually the court of an earl, whose palace is contained inside a darkened train car. Ordinary people see only that the car is dark and closed: it takes the special powers of London Below to actually enter it and find it contains multiple rooms and grand hallways, much larger than the volume visible from outside it.

There is an angel called Islington, who is responsible for watching over London Below--apparently a demotion, after he failed to protect Atlantis, and may even have caused it to sink into the ocean. Richard Mayhew finds the girl he assisted in the London Above--a member of a aristocratic family named Door. Her family has the ability to "open" things that are closed; even to move between dimensions it appears. She is the last of her family; the rest were recently murdered, and Door is determined to avoid the same fate and to find out why they were killed.

The character of Richard Mayhew serves the obvious purpose of failing to understand all the aspects of this new world, so that the other characters have a reason to explain how things work. After a bit, he gets more than a little annoying, as he absolutely fails to learn anything about how to survive in this dangerous world. He repeatedly asserts things like "there is no bridge at Knightsbridge" and "there is no earl's court at E arl's Court." After about the fifth time he does this--and is proved wrong ONCE AGAIN--I found myself wanting to slap him.

To be honest, I listened to this book a month ago or so, and I have already forgotten a lot of it. It is interesting, but far from Gaiman's better work. Read it if you want to read his entire oeuvre; otherwise, spend your time more profitably with Anansi Boys and American Gods.

The Rossetti Letter, by Chrsti Phillips

I picked this up on from a "Buy one, get one half price" table while on vacation in Palm Springs, and only got around to it now. It's a great book for a vacation: interesting, not too taxing, paperback and inexpensive so you could leave it behind to save room in your bag.

The plot unfolds in parallel: in 1618, a Venetian courtesan becomes aware of a plot to overthrow the Republic and make Venice part of Spain. This is an actual historical event--of some controversy--known as the "Spanish Conspiracy." The second plot takes place in modern times, as a graduate student works on her dissertation about he Spanish Conspiracy. The core of her work is the letter, allegedly written by the 17th century courtesan, Alessandra Rossetti, warning the government of the conspiracy and naming the traitors.

The graduate student, Claire Donovan, manages to make her way to Venice to find out about a book that is soon to be published by an Oxford historian on the same topic. The publication of this book could render her entire dissertation moot, and it is important that she find out what the author intends to disclose.

Of course, it turns out that the author is an unpleasant man that Claire met and disliked before she knew who he was. As she finds out at the conference she is attending, the thesis of his book is that the "Spanish Conspiracy" was invented by a Venetian senator to advance his political career, and the "Rossetti Letter" was written by a woman who was a mere pawn in a larger game. Of course, Claire's thesis is the exact opposite, and she wants to prove her point.

So there is a lot of wrangling between these academic, although no actual romance blooms between them. In the end, they manage to work together to translate Rossetti's letters, which they discover are actually coded messages. The key to breaking the code is discovered rather conveniently, mere minutes after they have decided there must be a code--which feels a bit too pat, but since the puzzle is clearly presented and worked out for the reader, it's a small quibble. As a result of their combined research, Claire and Andrew conclude that they were both right--there was a Spanish conspiracy, but in the absence of enough evidence to prove it, the Venetian senator forced Rossetti to write the letter "revealing" it. Andrew turns his last lecture at the conference to Claire (which is a bizarre thing to do, but since this is fiction, just let it go) and Claire outlines their theories as to what happened back in 1618.

At this point (since their research certainly doesn't bear this out at all), the book shifts us back in time to see Alessandra Rossetti attempting to escape Venice with her compromised lover, her capture and her deal with the senator--she will write the letter as he dictates it to her, and he will let her lover go free. Claire wraps up her lecture, she and Andrew part on amicable terms, and the book sets up the sequel, where Claire will take a one year post at Oxford, and she and Andrew will solve another mystery.

There are a few annoying scenes that place this book solidly into genre fiction. Alessandra Rossetti--of course!--has to be a courtesan, who is the "most beautiful woman in Venice" and we are dragged through a couple of sex scenes that are both gratuitous and not very well written either Similarly, the bad, evil, nasty Venetian senator is not only ambitious, but ugly, misshapen, and enjoys torturing people for information. Characters are generally painted with the broadest of strokes, and tend to be rather unbelievable.

On the other hand, Phillips does take on a number of subplots, which are more ambitious than effective, but do expand the scope of the novel. For example, Andrew is involved with a beautiful, cultured and famous woman, and any possible romance between him and Claire is stifled as a result. There is a long subplot about Claire's relationship with the 14 year old girl she is chaperoning in Venice, which gives another dimension to her character. There is a romantic possibility with a "drop dead gorgeous" Italian, who turns out to be an architect from a wealthy family--and she also manages to not have a romance with him either. Alessandra Rossetti doesn't get the happiest of ending herself--although on the whole, everyone in the book gets what they wanted, so it's not entirely free from convention.

This is a book which wades in the same waters as The Da Vinci Code, although better written and with fewer puzzles in it. The prose is deft, and Phillips obviously loves Venice for all its faults. Phillips has written a book that avoids the pitfalls that so crippled The Birth of Venus, which also took place in Renaissance Italy, but managed to clumsily cram in every famous Italian who could possibly be force into the story.

This is by no means a "must read" book, but it is a pleasant and diverting story, about a historical event I had never even heard of before reading it.

The Ten Year Nap, by Meg Wolitzer

I read The Wife by Meg Wolitzer a few years ago, and was impressed by her careful observation and precise language. I spotted the "twist" ending well before it happened, even without knowing that there was a twist. So, when The Ten Year Nap came out, it seemed like a Must Read.

The title refers to the fact that women spend an average of 11 years out of the workforce while raising their children--the women of this book are facing their children's 10th year, and are confronting where they have been and where they are going after having been out of the world of work for so long. There is Amy, a former trusts and estates lawyer who never went back after her son was born; Jill, who had her graduate dissertation rejected and never really recovered; Karen, a brilliant statistical analyst who used numbers like other people use words; and Roberta, an artist and puppeteer who gave up art for craft while raising her kids.

Things happen, though this is not a book to read for the plot. Jill moves out of New York City to a suburb, and while there finds her adopted daughter has significant learning deficits. Jill fears she is an inadequate mother and struggles to find the easy love she thinks she should have for her daughter. Amy meets and befriends a new woman, Penny, who is the curator of a small museum. At first, Amy idolizes Penny as a woman who did not make compromises when her children were born, but kept her pre-child identity in a way Amy did not. Inevitably, Penny reveals herself as flawed, and the friendship does not survive.

Roberta was a talented artist, but never got out of the ghetto of "women artists." She moved into puppetry, where she met her husband. When the children arrived, he took a regular job as a news cameraman, and continued to perform with his puppets on weekends. Toward the end of the book, he is launching a network children's television show, and Roberta has to struggle with her resentment of his success and her failure to continue to paint over the decade she was raising the children.

Karen Woo is the most amorphous of the four main characters: while she lives and thinks in numbers, she does not seem to regret being at home. Her husband is happy with his job, he makes enough money to keep them happy, she continues to go on job interviews but refuses them. There is some attempt to contrast her current life with her mother's life in a restaurant in Chinatown, but it never really comes into focus.

What movement there is in these women's lives comes in the last quarter of the book, if not later. Amy felt herself increasingly distant from her husband, feeling that her life was of no interest to him. Eventually, she discovers her husband passing off personal purchases as business receipts, which forces her to confront the scope of their debt. She finds a job in a small law firm, not because she loves the work, but because they need the income. However, her marriage seems the most honest of the four womens'--at the end, her husband confesses his fears and failures, and the two of them seem to re-commit to each other.

Jill was an academic over-achiever until the failure of her thesis, and she never quite finds something she loves to do. However, she finds herself very busy managing the appointments and therapies for her daughter, and settles into that life--recognizing that it is only for a limited number of years.

Roberta and her family move out of their tiny apartment and buy a house in Harlem, where she can have a studio, but she finds it hard to paint--the studio remains, though largely unused.

We are also treated to vignettes of the generation before theirs--their fathers and mothers, and their dreams and disappointments, as well as cameos of the lives of other women who are peripheral to these four.

On the whole? I'm not certain that it says much at all about where women and work shake out in this new millennium. These women are very privileged, in that they have the option to work or not. We see women who love their jobs, who retain those jobs even while raising children; we see women who have no choice but to work; we see women who did not want to work while their children were small, reaching a point in their lives where the question of work becomes inevitable. Amy is the only one who does return to work, largely because she doesn't have a choice any more. The other women just keep on as they had before.

Furthermore, I kept expecting that the book had reached its natural end, but then it went on for another eight chapters. The writing is cool and distant, and I felt as if Wolitzer was reporting on these women, rather than developing them as characters. There is a lot of self-inflicted angst, as these women seem to take it as given that failing to achieve great success in your 20s means you have failed at life. The book ends up giving everybody a little bit of success by the end--so the reader is left with the distinct sense that things can be really really hard for a long time, but then they get easier, so lighten up.

Perhaps it is the title of this book that raises such expectations that it will illuminate the state of American society and address head on the realities that women face while raising small children. Frankly, the book does not show anyone who manages parenthood without any regrets, whether they stay at work or stay at home. It's really a fairly bleak book, and while interesting, is not a book I would actually recommend that anyone read.

Then We Came To The End, by Joshua Ferris

This first novel has been astoundingly successful, and it addresses an issue not often found in contemporary literature--corporate work life. The story takes place in an advertising agency in Chicago, which began during the tech boom of the 1990s, but began to run out of steam at the end of 2000.

Written in the unusual first person plural, the book is narrated by the aggregate "we" of the agency. "We" drink our first cup of coffee, or "we" stopped by someone's office to get the latest gossip. There are plenty of individual characters, but those characters are sometimes subsumed into the amorphous "we."

By the time the novel gets underway, the agency is under serious financial pressure, and layoffs have begun. No one actually likes their job, it seems, but none of them want to be let go either. Each layoff is met with a "why'd they let him/her go" and a "thank God it wasn't me." The awkward leave taking, the sad scavenging of office furniture--all the mundane and nasty gossip of a workplace is represented, made toxic by the slow squeeze of financial failure.

For most of the book, there is only one project in the entire office, and it's pro bono at that. A possibly fictitious client, The Alliance Against Breast Cancer, wants the firm to develop a fundraising campaign. Two days later, the project changes--develop something that would make a breast cancer patient laugh. Everyone is absolutely stumped: what the hell is funny about breast cancer? And if I can't find something funny about breast cancer, will I be the next person laid off?

Meanwhile, the rumor circulates that the partner in charge of their team has breast cancer herself. She has never told anyone, yet everybody knows. Until the day comes when her surgery was scheduled, and she spends the entire day in the office. "We" can't tolerate this: does she have cancer or not? Who told us she had cancer if she didn't? Who is to blame? How can we not know? We need to know.

The center part of the book is the heart and soul of the story. Lynn Mason does in fact have breast cancer, and she is having a hell of a time dealing with it. Written in third person, it follows Lynn as she leaves the office the night before her surgery and struggles to find the right place to be, the one right thing to do this last night before the operation. In the end, it is her paralyzing fear that leads her back to her office at one in the morning, and she simply refuses to leave. There are two new business proposals, and if the agency can land these accounts, the firm will be saved. She simply doesn't have time for an operation--it is the work that is important.

"We" reappear after this interlude, and "we" resort to the most ridiculous strategems to find out if Lynn really has cancer. Two of the employees confront her in her office, and she tells them that no, she does not have breast cancer and she has no idea why they think she does.

Meanwhile, we see the odd behaviors of the people who have been laid off. One man returns to dismantle an office chair, smuggles it out of the building, and then throws each piece as far as he can into Lake Michigan. Another man returns, dressed as a clown, carrying a gun. He starts shooting those people with whom he had disagreements, working his way through the building reciting quotations from Emerson and causing panic and fear. "We" are forced to confront our horror of dying while at work, but when the gun is revealed to be a paint gun, only one person actually resigns and changes his career to something that makes him happier.

This review in no way captures the power of this book. Ferris has caught the all consuming bitterness of competition in a supposedly collegial workplace, made worse by the inexorable squeezing of failure: one can almost feel the walls closing in and the ceiling lowering as time passes and the business continues to fail. Ferris also captures the odd scurrying panic such a time engenders--"we" are afraid to stop and enjoy a cup of coffee, because being seen enjoying a cup of coffee would indicate that "we" weren't working and thus were expendable. Even though the only "work" there was to do was pro bono, and so wasn't remunerative anyway.

This is definitely a book worth reading.

The Murders of Richard III, by Elizabeth Peters

Another audio book by the prolific writer of the Amelia Peabody series. This one is set in the present day--or the time that was present when the book was written in 1975--and features a different detective. Jacqueline Kirby is a middle-aged reference librarian from the US, who is visiting London and meets up with her old friend Thomas, who is a Ricardian--a person who believes that the real Richard III was not the monster depicted by Sir Thomas Moore and William Shakespeare, but was instead a decent and honorable king unfairly slandered by the Tudors who defeated him at Bosworth Field in 1485.

History, as we know, is written by the winners, and the legend of the malevolent crook-backed king persists to this day. The most heinous of his alleged crimes is the murder of the two young princes in the Tower of London, his nephews Edward V and the Duke of York, who were 12 and 10 at the time they disappeared. Thomas tells Jacqueline that a letter has appeared that seems to clear Richard of his crimes, and it is to be reviewed by his Ricardian Society over the weekend, and then revealed to the press on Sunday. Would she please join him at the house party and authenticate the document?

Admittedly, this is a hard book to get through for a light read. Jacqueline goes to the house party, which in good old Agatha Christie fashion has one each of everybody staying the weekend: the wealthy homeowner, the enormous and overbearing dowager, the scrawny drunken lady novelist, the army colonel recently back from the Middle East, the ingenue and her fiancee, the Harley Street doctor, and the obnoxious small boy. This crew has gathered for the weekend and each has adopted the persona of a character from Ricardian history. The story gets complicated at this point, since so many of the characters from this time have the same names, and some of those names overlap with the names of the people playing those characters. It becomes no small feat to remember who is whom, both their contemporary selves and their assumed roles.

Things begin to get ghoulish as a series of "pranks" occur. One character, portraying Richard's brother George, the Duke of Clarence, is hit over the head and comes to bound and stuffed into an empty wine barrel--mimicking the alleged murder of the duke in a "butt of malmsey." Another guest, portraying the unfortunate Duke of Buckingham (who was beheaded by Richard) is found unconscious on the floor, his head covered by a cloth the color of the carpet and a mannequin head placed some distance away.

Various characters are drugged, poisoned, and before long it becomes apparent that pranks are being pulled by an insider. Who? and why? Are these recreations of the murders of Richard III supposed to be funny, or are they going to turn fatal?

Personally, as a fan of the era, I enjoyed the role playing by the characters, as well as the earnest discussions about the relative morality of Richard III versus Henry VII. Heavily salted with what I can only assume is real historical scholarship, the book offers a pleasant history lesson about a period that is not well known. It also ably adapts the conventions of Agatha Christie to a more skeptical age: why would so many different people gather at a country home, and why would they not leave as soon as things got grisly? And who, except a psychopath, would try to kill people according to a theme?

Certainly, the characters are paper thin, and I found them difficult to keep them distinct from each other. Which one was the doctor? Or was he the military man? confusion can be distracting. On the other hand, Peters delivered some real chills, as well as an interesting exploration of the end of the Wars of the Roses.

Peters acknowledges Josephine Tey's book "The Daughter of Time," which is an altogether better book on the subject of Richard III's innocence, but if you have the time, why not read them both?

The Curse of the Pharoahs by Elizabeth Peters

I have been listening to several of these mysteries, narrated by Barbara Rosenblatt, and they are an odd lot of books. Like the Martha Grimes series, these are not easily read in order, because the titles are all over the place. (Unlike Sue Grafton's Kinsey Milhone series, which are alphabetized, or Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum stories, which are numbered in their titles.) As a result, I have listened to the first two books in the series, and the last two. I can report that from that sampling, they remain very consistent in quality and tone.

The heroine of these books is a woman named Amelia Peabody Emerson, who was a spinster in England until at the age of 32 inherited a sizable fortune and used it to travel. She found herself in Egypt and fell in love with the land and its history, as well as an Egyptologist named Radcliffe Emerson. They meet, solve a murder, and fall in love in the first book of the series, "The Crocodile on the Sandbank." "The Curse of the Pharoahs" is the second book, and finds them married for 5 years, parents of a four year old boy they call Ramses, and back in Egypt for the first time at the request of a Lady Baskerville. Her husband, Lord Baskerville, has died and left a bequest to complete the excavation of a royal tomb in the Valley of the Kings. The Emersons are hired to complete the work, which has been disrupted by Baskerville's death and the rumor of a pharoah's curse at work.

These books are an odd treat--Amelia Peabody is by no means an immediately likable character. She is tart, self-satisfied, convinced of her ability to do anything to which she turns her hand--and do it better than anyone else could. Her first person narration is quite wordy, always using eight words where one would do, and full of self-congratulation. Emerson is described as a bull, both in his physical appearance and his terrible temper and tendency to bellow at everyone in his orbit. I am not at all certain I would want to meet either of these people in real life. Yet it is hard to stop listening to these stories. The experience is equivalent to drinking cranberry juice--rather bitter, not very quenching, but satisfying nonetheless.

The Curse of the Pharoahs starts with the death of Lord Baskerville, and the disappearance of his right hand man, after the first hole is made into the sealed wall of the newly discovered tomb. Amelia (or "Peabody," as her husband calls her) is immediately convinced that he was killed by his now missing assistant. Once in Luxor, more bodies turn up, along with a number of suspects, interspersed with descriptions of the process of excavation during the Victorian era. We are also treated to moonlight landscapes, natives both noble and villainous, tales of the ancient gods and kings, Brits of all classes and professions, ghosts and thieves. It is a heady mix, and one I find hard to resist.

Throughout the series is the eternal question of whether there are any more royal tombs to be found. Of course, as the series starts in the 1880s we know that the greatest find of all--Tutankhamun's tomb--has yet to be discovered. There are sly hints scattered throughout the four books I have finished. In the first one, the excavations take place in Amarna, the city of Tutankhamun's father, Ahkenaten, the heretic. In this second book, the tomb the Emersons excavate has been defaced in ancient times--the name of the occupant and his face have been roughly obliterated. The Emersons don't know why, but the reader can speculate that the tomb belongs to an Amarna heretic.

As they start the excavation, Amelia asks her husband where he wants the rubble to be dumped. He pauses for a moment, looking over the landscape and then points to the southwest. "There, by the entrance to the tomb of Ramses VI. Those ruins are only of workmen's huts, there is nothing of interest there."* Of course, as we now know (and as the Emersons discover in the most recent book, "The Tomb of the Golden Bird") those workmen's huts sit atop the entrance to Tutankhamun's tomb. At the end of the book, the Emersons speculate as to the meaning of a pectoral found on the remains of an ancient robber in the tomb they have finished for Lord Baskerville.

"You remember that pectoral we found on the body of the grave robber, Peabody?"
"Of course, Emerson."
"We deciphered the cartouche to be the name of Tutankhamun."
"We thought that might be the name of the occupant."
"Yes, well, it couldn't have been, given what we found there. But do you think, Peabody, that a thief could have robbed two graves in one night?"
"Only if they were very close together, Emerson." And they laugh at such an absurd thought. Although we know better, don't we, reader, even if Tut's tomb isn't discovered until 1922.

*All quotes are approximations, at best, based on my recollection and not intended to be taken as actually from the book.

The Old Wine Shades, by Martha Grimes

Martha Grimes has long been one of those detective series writers who is one of my guilty pleasure. Her series centers on detective Richard Jury, who is a sort of Byronic/Heathcliffian hero--tall, lean, ineffably sad for no apparent reason, and hopelessly attractive to females of all ages. (Seriously. Even the six year olds like him.) His good friend is a peer from a small town named Melrose Plant, who has a puckish sense of humor, enough money to be a man of leisure, and a secret over his own past. The two men form a friendship that evolves into near side-kickery over the various books, as each begins to show the other their secret hearts.

One of the difficulties of this series, however is that Grimes names each book after a whimsically named British pub, and it becomes a mental challenge to get the books read in the right order. Does "The Man With a Load of Mischief" come before or after "I Am The Only Running Footman?" Although, given the interesting names she has uncovered, I am willing to do that work.

Although I am making an exception for "The Old Wine Shades, " which should have been called "Hastily Produced Contractual Obligation," or more succinctly "WTF?"

The book starts with Richard Jury on a semi-informal leave from his post. He has apparently solved a previous mystery by breaking into the suspects' premises and removing several children who were in jeopardy, but without a warrant. His superior, D.C. Racer, hates Jury anyway, and uses the opportunity to lecture him at every turn, while neither suspending nor clearing him. As a result, Jury finds himself in employment limbo, unable to work on any cases, but not truly free. Entering "The Old Wine Shades," a wine bar in London, he meets a man named Harry Johnson, who has a story about a friend of his. The friend is named Hugh Gault, and Gault's wife was looking at property in the country with her eight year old autistic son and their dog. Between the first and second property, all three of them disappeared. Nine months later, the dog came back.

Jury is caught up in this tale, and finds himself doing some discrete checking up on the facts. He also returns to the Old Wine Shades to hear the tale unfold. In the course of the conversation, we are treated to a fairly clunky and pedantic treatise on quantum physics, especially the paradox of Schrodinger's cat. The "mystery" is an attempt to illustrate a version of the paradox of physics--that something can be true, but not provable.

Of course, in a crime novel, this is hardly new. After all, there are plenty of books in which the detective knows the solution but cannot prove it. Back in the old days of Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, the criminal feels such remorse that he takes "the gentleman's solution" and kills himself before his family can be humiliated. Nearly the entire catalog of 1970s cop shows involve cops who "know" who the perpetrator is, and use unorthodox (read, illegal) methods of catching the bad guys. And Jessica Fletcher ended every hour of detection describing a bizarre set of facts that are completely unprovable unless the suspect confesses.

In this case, the facts seem to line up--Hugh Gault really exists, living as reported in a sanatorium. The real estate agent supports the event--the woman, her son and dog did take the keys to two different properties, saw the first one and called the office, then was never heard from again. The keys were never returned. The dog, who came back, is now sitting under the barstool of the man telling the tale.

Then, the body of "Mrs. Gault" turns up, except she isn't. When Jury goes to the sanatorium to ask Hugh Gault to come identify his wife's body, his wife is actually there visiting him. The real Mrs. Gault had been in the south of France dealing with her grief over the death of their eight year old autistic son in a sailing accident nearly a year before. Nothing is as it appeared.

In fact, it seems that Harry Johnson is some sort of a sociopath who set up the scenario, using his Italian girlfriend to play the wife, borrowing a boy from a badly run special school to portray the son, and using his own dog. The girlfriend represents herself as "Mrs. Gault" and does in fact go to look at the first property, then drives away from the second without making any further contact with the rental agent. The boy is dropped back at the school, and nothing happens for nine months, until Johnson meets Jury in the bar.

The boy from the school is subsequently kidnapped, along with a little girl, and stashed in Harry Johnson's basement. Why? Was he going to keep them there for a while? Was he going to kill them? He has already killed his girlfriend--so why has he saddled himself with these two kids, taking risks to keep them unharmed?

Why does Grimes drag Melrose Plant into the story only to force him to get a make-over to impersonate Niels Bohr? Why does she have the dog narrate at least two chapters? Who knows?

In the end, Jury becomes convinced that Harry Johnson has set this all up and that Jury will never be able to prove it. Did Johnson know who Jury was when he started telling the story? Had he set the whole thing up for a reason? The answer is unknowable--like the fate of Schrodinger's cat, and unprovable.

In a series as long lasting as this one, there are bound to be one or two clunkers. This is one of those clunkers. Don't judge the series on this book--in fact, don't read this one at all.

We Need To Talk About Kevin, by Lionel Shriver

My book club picked this book to discuss in April, and someone described it as "haunting." I have just finished it, and can only echo that description. It is "haunting," our very own Modern American Turn of the Screw.

The outline of the plot is a bit misleading. The book is a series of letters written by a woman in her fifties, Eva Katchadourian, to her husband Franklin. Their son Kevin is in prison for killing eight students, a teacher and a cafeteria worker in a Columbine like school shooting. This horrible act is revealed early in the book, and Eva continues to write while visiting her son twice a month in prison--all she is allowed to see him.

What the book is really about, though, is an examination of motherhood. Eva was a successful businesswoman, who had started a series of travel books on how to travel for the least amount of money. It had become very successful with the backpacking crowd, and she was satisfied with her life. She also was married to a wonderful man who she loved absolutely, although he was her opposite in almost every way. They had a wonderful marriage, from Eva's perspective, but the question of children kept arising as Eva entered her late thirties.

Eva is, at best, unsettled about whether she wants to have children. Franklin, her husband, is not. He is thoroughly happy about the prospect, and Eva allows herself to be persuaded: she describes the situation:

You wanted a child. I, on balance, did not. Between the two, we were ambivalent.

(N.B.--all quotes are paraphrases in this review. I can't seem to find the right pages to give actual quotes. I will flag any actual quotes from the novel, but you'd almost certainly pick them out, and Lionel Shriver is a very different writer than I am.)

She also confesses her fear of having a child. Despite making lists of the pros and cons, despite looking to her friends who already had children, despite arguing both sides of the question with Franklin, Eva is not fully convinced that she wants a child. But, she sees that Franklin has a hole in his soul that she does not fill. In the end, isn't this how those decisions get made--at least some of the time? He wanted a child, and she could give him one. All her reservations aside, she did it for him.

And it was bad--she hated being pregnant, she hated labor, she hated childbirth, and even after Kevin was born she could not find the magical bonding emotions she had heard about. She did not "fall in love" with her son, not at the hospital, not back at home. It was no easier that Kevin was a difficult baby--he screamed for hours without end, he refused to nurse, or eat. Eva ended up with mastitis on both sides, which hurts. Furthermore, she found herself falling--or more accurately pushed--into leaving her job to stay home with him.

I found this last part truly enraging: both Eva and Franklin were employed, although Eva's job with her travel publishing company was more lucrative and well-established. Franklin had a free-lance job where he scouted out locations for commercial shoots. His logic was that she could take time away from her job and it would still be there for her to go back to. She suspects, however, that if their positions were reversed, he's argue that he should keep working as the better earner and she would have still ended up staying at home.

Yet, it's not clear that she hates that result. She doesn't love it, that's for certain, but she doesn't seem to blame Franklin for seeing the world the way he does--that may be why she loves him. But she does not love being at home with Kevin. She sees malevolence in his beady eyes, opposition in his posture. To Eva it seems that even as an infant, Kevin is disappointed in the world and has no desire to be born at all.

This is a hard time to live through, the transition from being an adult to being a parent. An infant requires so much attention, so much care. Physical recovery from childbirth is slowed by sleep deprivation, and the entire experience is further disorienting by the loss of your former identity. Eva used to be a traveller, a writer, a businesswoman, a wife. Now she is a diaper changer, a prisoner in a screaming baby, a social recluse without adult interaction until her husband comes home. Yet, when he comes home, he is absorbed by the baby and mostly ignores Eva.

And we see the poison seep into the picture. Eva has her experiences of Kevin, which are irreconcilably the opposite of Franklin's. Kevin does not scream when Franklin is home, to start with, and as Kevin gets older the pattern continues. Franklin sees a normal, if testy, child, where Eva sees an opponent. And the wedge starts to separate the adults from one another. Franklin cannot accept Eva's experiences as real, and before long, the family has devolved into Franklin and Kevin against Eva.

These scenes are written with an aching understanding of the sadness of such a divide. Parents are famously cliched for announcing that they will not let their children come between them, but that they will stand united for the child's own good. And yet--imagine the scene through Franklin's eyes. He comes home to a quiet child and a hysterical wife. The baby is asleep in the crib, and the wife is wild-eyed with pent-up grievances which she blames on the obviously helpless infant. The consequence of taking Eva's word for what has happened is to abandon a defenseless creature to the rage and hate of an angry woman. Who could leave their child unprotected in those circumstances? So Franklin tries to soothe Eva, to give her some perspective, to downplay her drama.

But isn't this one of reasons having children is so hard on a marriage? Sure, as two educated adults, you and your spouse may have different opinions on any number of topics: you can agree to disagree on politics, music, religion, any number of things. But a child is so important: you simply cannot have two different ways of raising a child--it's just wrong. And so the baby drives a wedge between the two parents, and that wedge never closes for Eva and Franklin. It just gets larger and deeper.

Things deteriorate further when Franklin buys a new house. Eva, of course, loved living in New York, and had no desire to move to the suburbs. Franklin overruled her; she saw the logic in such a move, although she still didn't want to move. Then he bought a house while she was out of the country, and she hated it on sight. It was the opposite of everything she wanted in a house. What she wanted was an old, rambly Victorian, with a large porch, and cozy and slightly overcrowded rooms. What Franklin bought was a stark, modern, open plan house--Eva was horrified that there seemed to be no doors. None of the rooms was square, but all were canted, or slightly raised or lowered from the ones around them. She wanted a home in which she could be cocooned with her family--impossible with the enormous windows that seemed to bring the whole world inside. Again, Eva's reality is dismissed, unacknowledged, unaccepted. Yet, she still claims that she loves Franklin, even as her letters again and again document how he silenced her in so many ways throughout their lives together.

When Kevin is eight, Eva realizes that she wants another child. Franklin is adamantly opposed: she already has complained and hated everything about having Kevin. Why in God's name would she want to do it again? But Eva needs to answer a question about herself, about her own soul. She believes that she is capable of loving a child, just not the specific child she has: just not Kevin.

So Celia is born, the opposite of her brother--she is small, timid, desperate to please. She clings to her mother, is self-effacing to the point of being vulnerable to any number of injuries. And she adores her brother, who is growing into a sociopath, if his mother is to be believed. Either Celia is perfectly made to be her brother's prey, or she is a whiny and clingy phobic child who is irritating beyond belief to her brother. But Eva is happy with her daughter, and the family is now "even"--the two males against the two females. Which is no way to be a family, really.

Then came Celia's "accident." Eva bought her an elephant shrew for Christmas, and one evening after dinner it mysteriously escaped when the door to the cage was left open. Celia blamed herself because Kevin told her it was her fault. Eva had her doubts. Two days later, a mysterious clog in the bathroom drain--which Eva treated with Liquid Plumbr. Two days after that, while Kevin was being taught responsibility by babysitting his sister, she ended up in the emergency room with acid burns on her face. The doctors could not save her eye. Kevin had flushed her eye and face with water and then called for an ambulance before calling his parents.

Celia had to stay in the hospital for several days. Franklin couldn't keep silent. "Eva," (I'm paraphrasing again) "how could you leave that drain cleaner out where Celia could reach it?" Eva is certain she didn't--she distinctly remembers returning the bottle to the highest shelf on the locked cupboard. Celia couldn't reach it herself; Celia couldn't open the childproof lock; Celia was scared of the bathroom and would never have gone in by herself to play.

Franklin is appalled; Eva is supposed to be an adult, a parent, for God's sake, and she can't take responsibility for her actions? She blames Kevin? He's the one who flushed out the acid, who called for help and got her to the hospital. He was a hero--remaining calm in a crisis and behaving admirably. Eva has got to take responsibility here! Plus, she needs to reassure Kevin that the accident was not his fault.

Again, Shriver crafts a scene of almost unbearable marital discomfort. How can Eva still believe in her marriage when Franklin treats her like a misbehaving nine year old? "There was something you wanted to say to Kevin, right Eva? The thing you told me in the car?" "There was something more--that Kevin shouldn't feel. . .?" But Eva certainly does feel that Kevin is at fault, and that he should feel guilty because he is guilty.

Things come to a head when one of Kevin's teachers is accused of an unspecified "impropriety." Franklin asks Kevin about it, and Kevin maneuvers to talk to his father outside Eva's earshot. In the end, the teacher loses her position, but cannot be fired because nothing was substantiated. Eva confronts Franklin with her conviction that Kevin lied about the entire thing, and Franklin suddenly collapses. Even he can see the marriage is over. They no longer inhabit the same reality, and there is no longer any way to bridge the gap. They will try to survive until the end of the school year, and then make arrangements over the summer. They both know there will be no difficulty about custody--Franklin will get Kevin, and Eva will get Celia.

Things don't end up that way, because Kevin starts the shooting on April 8, three days before his 16th birthday. We are not surprised by this--the leitmotif of school shootings has shot through the last third of the book, and we know that Kevin has killed the students. There is never any question of the fact that he had done it--Eva doesn't once deny his guilt. We have seen bits of the criminal trial, of Eva's visits to Kevin in prison, of the civil suit against Eva for parental neglect, brought by the parents of one of the murdered students. We learn that she has had to sell her business and now works as a travel agent, most often taking phone calls in the back room, disguising her notoriety.

It is only in the last fifty pages or so that we learn the true facts. STOP READING RIGHT NOW IF YOU HAVE NOT FINISHED THIS BOOK!!



Are you still here? Have you finished the book? No?

GO AWAY!!


Okay, now that only us book-finishers are left, let's talk about the ending. Kevin didn't just kill 10 people at school; he didn't just show up one day and start shooting haphazardly. He systematically assembled the people who most annoyed him, as well as the one teacher who had some insight into him and hope for his future. He had forged letters on school letterhead, inviting these particular people to a meeting the gym to plan for an assembly presentation for the new "Bright and Shining" award to be presented to these "very special" students, and Ms. Rocco was to be their advisor. The meeting was set for inside the school gym, a stand alone building at the school, a three minute walk from the main building. Once his victims were inside, he systematically locked all the doors with Kryptonite bicycle locks, then opened fire with a crossbow his father had given him for Christmas. Only two of the victims were killed by the arrows; the rest bled to death. It took almost three hours for anyone to discover the scene and then to break through the Kryptonite locks. Kevin just waited.

Eva learns about the shooting at work--her employees had seen the early news on the internet, and knew Kevin went to that school. She arrived to see an endless parade of gurneys being rolled out to ambulances, and her son being lead, handcuffed, to the police car.

The story got worse. She returned to a dark and empty house, with Franklin's truck in the garage. When she turned on the floodlights to the backyard, she found poor little Celia pinned to the archery target--dead with five arrows stuck into her. Franklin was also dead, an arrow through his neck, never having made it all the way to the ridge where Celia stood.

In the entirety of the book--in all her writing to him--Eva never let on that Franklin was dead. I certainly assumed that he had left after the shooting, taking Celia with him, leaving Eva to wear her hair shirt and visit Kevin alone. In the snippets of trial we see throughout the book, and even in the hatred directed at her by the parents of the victims, Eva never stoops to curry sympathy by reminding anyone that she is also one of Kevin's victims. He killed her daughter too, and her husband. That fact sometimes "got lost in the shuffle," as Eva says.

There is something that rings true to her, though, when people blame the child's violence on the mother. Perhaps, she fears, she had something to do with creating the horror that was Kevin. She went through the motions of being a devoted mother--she made the cookies, as she says--but she never really wanted to, and perhaps it was that coldness, that falseness, that made Kevin what he was. Why did Kevin kill Franklin and not her? Perhaps he admired her as an adversary after all, and despised Franklin for being duped into believing Kevin was as normal as he pretended to be.

In the end, there is a small movement out of the horror. On Kevin's 18th birthday, Eva is allowed to see him. He knows he will be transferred out of the juvenile facility, and he seems somehow more childlike than ever before, even when he was a child. He seems unsure of himself, and perhaps a little frightened. Eva steels herself to finally ask him "Why?" Why did he do it? Was it her fault? In the past, he has mocked her sense of guilt: "Why should you get all the credit." This time, he is different. He is tired. He says "I used to think I knew why, but now I am not so sure."

There is no way to know what the next 5 years of adult prison will do to him; no way to know who will come out at the end of that sentence. There is a small ray of hope that he will become somebody different than who he has been. Perhaps there is a future for Kevin Katchadourian. Perhaps there is a future for Eva, who realizes that after everything, she is just to tired to keep fighting--that she will love her son because she no longer has the strength not to. This ending gave me the chills.

One has to wonder, however, how much we can trust Eva as a narrator of the facts. I called this an American Turn of the Screw and I meant it. Eva does make mistakes--there was an incident where Kevin was brought home by the cops for throwing rocks at cars off an overpass. He admitted it to the police, but "explained" to his father that it was really his creepy friend who threw the rocks. Kevin just admitted to it because his friend had already been busted for something else and would have been arrested, but Kevin's record was clear so he took the blame. Eva refused to believe Kevin wasn't guilty, until subsequent events made it clear that in this case he had told the truth.

There is a strong hint of displaced anger as well. Time after time, Eva is subsumed--overridden, really--by Franklin. He gets her to stop travelling, to leave her job, to move to the suburbs, to live in a house she hates, to have the child she is unwilling to have. Yet Eva never blames Franklin--in fact, several times she goes out of her way to be understanding. I am certain a Freudian would have a field day dissecting how her legitimate anger at her husband might be twisted into resentment against her son. How trustworthy a narrator is she, after all? How many of the "facts" she relates are her own twisted understanding--informed by her resentment at having a child at all? Who can ever know?

This book was beautifully written, and carefully and precisely observed. Eva Katchadourian is not an entirely likable character, but she is certainly human, and did not "deserve" what happened to her. As such, she is a compelling character, illustrating how we are all vulnerable to things that we never expected to happen.

I highly recommend this book--it is an excellent read, although a dark one that should probably be avoided by anyone not willing to face human failings. This is easily one of the best books I have read in the last year, and would certainly be on my own Top Ten Reads for 2008.

ON EDIT: After posting this, I have been unable to shake a comment my daughters (formidable middle school neuropsychologists that they are) have repeated--that brain development continues past puberty, up to an average age of 21 for females, and 25 for males. Given Kevin's confusion as he turns 18 about why he did what he did, perhaps the book again fools us into asking the wrong question. It is not "How did he become a person who could do that?" because that requires us to assume that is personality had formed. Instead, we are offered a tantalizing glimpse into what happens when a brain develops erratically--too slowly in some areas, and too quickly in others. Perhaps a better question should be "can we try someone as an adult whose brain has not fully developed?"

If Kevin still has the same brain he had as an infant--angry, uncontrolled, incapable of empathy--then maybe his talents outran his emotional maturity, and he is only now--after 2 years in juvenile detention and turning 18--beginning to develop new parts of his brain. Sadly, this maturation will happen in a far from nurturing setting. It is not a case of nature vs. nurture alone, but nature + nuture + brain development delay.

Writ large, and melodramatically, this is the same problem as "Doogie Howser, M.D." The intellect outstrips the emotional and social development, leading to anomalous outcomes. It makes the book yet more intriguing for me to contemplate.

How Starbucks Saved My Life, by Michael Gates Gill

Two word review: Don't bother.

Ostensibly the story of a high-flying advertising exec who lost his job and his family at 50, but found redemption in work and service, this is actually the most cynical and saccharine of "self help" books.

The author is the son of a quasi-famous editor of the New Yorker, and as such lived a live of insulated privilege with access to other famous people. Sent to Yale, upon graduation he is tipped to the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency by a school chum, and then hired by a Yale alum. Fired by the company once in his fifties, he forgoes an age discrimination suit in return for favorable references and job feeds for his own consulting company. Ten years later, the work has dried up, and he finds himself at 64 working at Starbucks.

To say this guy is arrogant and a gasbag is only the start. He is a hopelessly gauche name dropper, wedging in anecdotes of his encounters with famous people wherever he can, despite their being utterly disconnected with the story. Sure, you met Jackie Onassis, and Ernest Hemingway, etc. etc. You are still a bore. A boor, as well.

Next, the "lessons" he learns are at least 50 years behind the zeitgeist. Black people can be articulate! Walmart is a retail store! Some people graduate from college, but don't get cushy jobs through the Old Boys' Network! Did you know that your salary at Starbucks doesn't really mean you can charge all your dinners at the Oyster Bar? Who knew?

The aura of privilege is never convincingly eliminated either. One of the first questions Gill addresses is whether he could work for a African-American woman manager. Of course he can! Didn't he love his Old Black Mammy who was the family cook back in the day? Just like those old days back at the plantation--he was all but raised by Hattie McDaniel, until his parents fired her for being too old to get up the stairs of the four story townhouse. So, he's no racist!

He offers a number of war stories about his days as a Creative Director for J. Walter Thompson (oh, did he mention that he worked at J. Walter Thompson? Only about a million times), and frankly one leaves with the impression that he was fired because he wasn't very good or creative. When introducing a meeting with a client over changing the name of a company, he brings along a bat and a ball. While mouthing some pablum along the lines of "This new name will be a home run!" (I know--cliched at best), he tosses up the ball and swings. And the elderly owner of the company has to throw himself out of his chair to avoid being brained.

And this is presented as a GOOD idea.

The book is subtitled "A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everybody Else." We are treated to a lot about being born to privilege, and having lived most of his live in privilege, and at the end of the book, we discover that he remains privileged. In the acknowledgements at the end, he thanks someone for getting him a literary agent on the title of the book alone. School ties, anyone? It looks like he got the book deal before writing the book, and then sold the movie rights to Tom Hanks, while being represented by CAA. Sure--"everybody else" gets a CAA brokered movie deal before writing their book, don't they?

Oh, you mean they don't?

I guess Gill is just to privileged to know about that.

This is not a man made more human through suffering--this is a man still riding on the crest of the wave of privilege, proving once again, it's not what you know, it's who you know, and the "whos" that Michael Gates Gill knows are powerful enough for him to coast back into prosperity while other, better writers don't.