I am Half-Sick of Shadows: A Flavia de Luce Novel / Alan Bradley

A film crew and a cast of characters from the local village are marooned at Flavia de Luce’s tired old family mansion Buckshaw near Christmastime after a blizzard cuts them off from civilization. A murder occurs (surprise, surprise) and Flavia is once again racing ahead of (and running circles around) the inspector, finding clues that he never even knew to look for. It all sounds a little like a game of Clue (Was it Mrs. Peacock in the Library with the rope?) or a plot borrowed straight from Agatha Christie's playbook, in fact one of the characters comments on this very thing, saying something like “This is like an Agatha Christie novel.” As clichéd as the plotline is, it doesn’t really have a very satisfactory resolution, and I found myself less concerned with the murder and more interested in Flavia’s attempts to capture Father Christmas and set off a secret fireworks show from the roof of the treasure home for the enjoyment and edification of the local villagers. I still find the main fascination with this series to be the character of Flavia. She’s just such an interesting creation. I didn’t mind so much this time that the plot was a little lame, but one wonders if the steam is running out on this franchise. Would someone please make a Masterpiece Mystery! series out of this? Someone in Norway seems to have given it a go (but mistakenly filmed it in France???)
This series has potential interest for tweens and teens.

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And the Mountains Echoed / Khaled Hosseini

The latest book by the author of The Kite Runner reads like a collection of short stories, but they are all interconnected. The link between stories isn’t always immediately apparent and there are some diversions that take the reader far from Kabul, and sometimes confusingly so (the detour to Greece was interesting, but a bit disconnected from the rest of the storyline, I thought). There were some great narratives—one in particular that I think was worth the whole of the book— a story about Afghani-American cousins, Idris and Timur, who return to Kabul to attempt to regain an ancestral home, abandoned after the Soviet invasion. While Timur goes out and carouses and flaunts his American wealth, Idris spends most of his time showing charity to a young girl in hospital, a victim of an unspeakable act of violence which leaves her in need of surgery in a western nation. Idris, himself a doctor, promises to arrange the needed medical intervention, but when he returns to the US, the...

Here we are / Graham Swift

This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.

Wide Sargasso Sea / Jean Rhys

The mysterious figure of Bertha Mason provides much of the tension in Jane Eyre , but what does the reader really know about her? Rochester provides some details of her past, but is his account reliable? Caribbean author Jean Rhys attempted to tell the story of Rochester's insane (and perhaps misunderstood) wife in her 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea . It's a sort of prequel to Jane Eyre . I'm afraid Rochester doesn't come out looking good, though we always knew he had a bit of a wild side with his continental dalliances. Anyway, there's a lot of interesting backstory about Bertha's origins in Jamaica, her real name, the tragic circumstances of her upbringing, and how she was established at Thornfield Hall. Gosh, if Jane had only known all these details about Rochester, she might have taken St. John up on his offer of marriage. All in all, Wide Sargasso Sea is pretty credible, but I missed Charlotte Bronte's flowery language, and of course th...

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