Peachy Reads

Look at maps of pre-Napoleonic Europe and while Germany looks like a meatlover's pizza-- a fantastic creation full of bits of sausagelike city-states, pepperoni principalities, and prociutto protectorates, all on a sea of Hapsburgian mozzarella; France in comparison looks like a homogenous white pizza with not a speck of Speck, a leaf of oregano, or a drop of tomato sauce; it's one color from east to west, north to south. The Discovery of France proves that the reality behind this cartographic representation was a bit different. Even though France was technically one unified kingdom, later one republic ruled from Paris, the reality was quite different. Regional dialects made it nearly impossible for even very near-lying towns to understand each other. Mapmakers who were sent out by royal decree to chart the hinterlands were regarded with such suspicion that on occasion they were captured by village mobs and at least on one occasion executed. Areas of France were so isolated th...

Bill Bryson is definitely one of those people you’d want to be seated next to at a dinner party. His latest nonfiction book At Home: A Short History of Private Life is just chock-full of interesting anecdotes and factoids that would make you lean in closer at the dinner table and say, “do tell me more”. In fact, I dog-eared so many pages of things I found interesting or wanted to go back to that I knew I was a huge violator of library book etiquette (though I did go back and smooth out the creases before I returned it). Bryson uses the floor plan of his Norfolk house, a former vicarage or parsonage (I can’t remember which, and there is a difference which he explains) to group historic information related to each of the rooms in the house—kitchen, drawing room, dining room, attic, etc. The historical insights are thematically grouped to the rooms—somehow his digressions on a myriad of topics only remotely linked to the room in focus don’t derail his narrative. It’s all fascinating. And...

The musical Wicked has taken the world by storm. It has a clever story, is endearing, and is filled with roles rich in character. Having seen it performed on stage twice and listened to its signature tunes dozens of times, my curiosity was piqued by certain aspects of the story that I thought certainly must be better explicated in the novel—like, just what was going on with Dr. Dillamond?, what was the spark that brought Elfie and Fiyero together? and what made people call Elphaba wicked? (And yes, don't be confused, this is most definitely an adult novel. You won't want to be reading it to Little Tommy and Suzie at bedtime.) Let’s just say that the musical is very loosely based on the novel, taking a few ideas and concepts and throwing most of the story out. The reluctant friendship of Glinda and Elphaba is the most compelling element of the novel, and the creators of the musical took that nugget and out of it crafted a heartwarming story for their blockbuster Broadway hit. T...

After six-year-old Maja tragically and mysteriously disappears on a family winter hike to a nearby lighthouse, her father Anders falls into a pattern of drunken depression. Eventually returning to the island where it happened, he suddenly feels an eerie connection with his lost daughter and senses that she is not gone. Other strange and inexplicable occurrences begin to happen, villagers act as if they are possessed, houses are burnt down, and mysterious and frightening things happen after nightfall. Everything seems to be linked to an ominous presence inhabiting the sea surrounding the island, centered at the lighthouse at Gåvasten where Maja disappeared. Harbor takes place mostly on the fictional island of Domarö in the sea of Åland east of Stockholm. The story spans several generations, so the reader is offered a historical and social context for the strange happenings that have taken place and continue to take place on the island. There are some flashbacks that offer an almost nos...

My detective novel tour of Scandinavia continues to Iceland where we meet Inspector Erlendur, a gritty individual who is married to his job, doesn’t take good care of himself, frequently falls asleep and wakes in the morning in an easy chair in his living room, worries about his daughter... Sound familiar? He's really not so unlike Kurt Wallander for those who may be pining for the Swedish gumshoe after the series concluded with The Troubled Man . In Jar City an old man has his head bashed in with a large ash tray, and a mysterious note left near the body and a cryptic photo of a grave site offer clues to the mystery surrounding his death. The circumstances of his murder are rooted in events that happened forty years ago and it is ingenious how Erlendur teases out the details of the connections between people and events that gradually reveal the identity of the murderer. The key to linking perpetrator to victim is a marker of an unusual genetic disease recorded in Iceland’s geneti...

Sarah’s Key charts two parallel stories—one from Nazi-occupied Paris and the other sixty years later. The common element is an apartment on the rue de Saintonge and its horrible secret that links two families a generation apart. The story begins with events set in motion by the horrific roundup of Parisian Jews during an initiative known as the Vel’ d’Hiv, (named for the Vélodrome d’hiver) in which Jewish families were warehoused in an indoor stadium under the most inhumane conditions by the French police (not the occupying German Nazis) until they were shipped off to internment camps and, in most cases, their eventual deaths. Julia is a journalist who uncovers the details linking 1942 and 2002, a link that involves her immediate family. The tragic secrets of rue de Saintonge are gradually revealed until the end of the novel where a tidy, but nevertheless quite plausible resolution, pulls all the narrative strands together. This is a powerful book, full of emotion, full of grief. The c...

Okay, so I wanted to find out more about Aimée Leduc, the Parisian gumshoe I was introduced to in Murder in Passy , which was the eleventh in the bestselling series. I rewound to the debut novel, Murder in the Marais . The plot is an interesting (but perhaps overly complicated) tangle of events centered on the Parisian Jewish community involving several murders, two in contemporary times, others dating to World War II. There are Nazi collaborators, a secret contemporary German organization called the Werewolves, French neonazis, corrupt politicians, and more. I was a little bewildered by language issues— Cara Black liberally sprinkles her dialogue with French interjections, and it all seems a bit faux . French Neonazis spout German catchphrases in a meeting in Paris. I suppose this is possible, though I’m not sure why German would be the lingua franca of skinheads just because the Third Reich was German. (I would find it similarly remarkable that German would be used much in mee...