Peachy Reads

Not since Jeanette Walls's The Glass Castle has a memoir of a hard-scrabble childhood taken the literary world so by storm.  Tara is "home-schooled" by her fundamentalist Mormon parents in the hinterlands of Idaho.  Never entering a formal educational setting until she is 17, it becomes the turning point in her life.  But her childhood was a education in its own right, and this memoir lays it bare-- the end-of-days cult of her father, the rejection not only of public schooling but also the medical profession, the isolation from relatives, the cruel inter-sibling abuse she suffers.  Nevertheless, it's a beautifully written story.

French-Moroccan author Leila Slimani has crafted a plot that is every working couple’s worst nightmare—a nanny who walks into the life of their family and seems to make everything perfect… until it all goes so utterly wrong.   The novel is not for the faint-hearted, but it is skillfully written and a suspenseful, horrifying tale that the reader will not soon forget. The Perfect Nanny  has become something of an international publishing sensation and won the Prix Goncourt,a big literary prize in France which is sort of the equivalent of the National Book Award.   

Juliet is a young woman in war time London.   She is recruited by the secret service, at first to transcribe recorded conversations of Nazi sympathizers, but then bit by bit she becomes more involved in the game of counterespionage, which eventually escalates with an unplanned murder.    Atkinson bookends the story with some timeshifts, which seems to be her signature.   I liked the story well enough, but the characters were a bit one-dimensional, in my opinion.   Well written and plotted, but maybe not her best.

I never saw the movie, but I saw the trailer enough times that it piqued my curiosity.   I’ve given up on edge-of-your-seat movies for many years now, but intense books I can still handle.   So when this title was available for download from my library’s ebook service, I was ready to read it.   Apparently the movie took many liberties with the book, seems like really only the concept survived the translation.   Anyway, here’s the gist of the novel—an exploratory team of several women researchers goes into the mysterious Area X where strange goings-on hint that nature is becoming monstrous, and humans are unwelcome intruders.   There is some pretty weird stuff going on, and when the biologist inhales some suspect spores, she begins to leave the human world behind.  Part of a trilogy.

In The Fleur de Sel Murders a local journalist is murdered after she stumbles upon some mysterious goings-on in the salt basins where salt has been commercially produced for centuries.  There is another murder before Dupin and his colleague capture the perpetrator in a suspenseful conclusion. This is yet another installment in the enjoyable Inspector Dupin mysteries, set in Brittany.  I love the travelogue aspect of these books and if anything, it has made me want to travel to Brittany and discover some of its natural beauty and proud culture.  Interesting to note that the writer is actually a German named J ö rg Bong, and the series is immensely popular in his native country.

In this period piece, which takes place in London just after the Great War, Frances and her mother grapple to make ends meet   in their once-respectable home in a well-heeled neighborhood.   Their struggle in “keeping up appearances” is made worse by the war deaths of the two sons of the family and the demise of the father, who left them with more debts than investment income.   In order to hold onto the house they take in a married couple as “paying guests”.   Frances falls in love with Lilian and then Lilian’s husband Leonard is murdered.   Will their love survive the police investigation and the trial at the Old Bailey, which becomes the talk of the town? I downloaded this for free from the library’s subscription to Overdrive.

A mysterious robed figure appears in the sleepy Quebecois town of Three Pines, where Chief Inspector Gamache has his primary residence.   The dark figure stands and waits on the town green, bringing dishonor, in the tradition of a Spanish medieval custom, to an as-yet unnamed inhabitant who has a shameful secret to be revealed.   When the figure abruptly vanishes and a body is found, Gamache begins to pursue lines of inquiry that lead him to a drug smuggling ring.   During the course of a legal trial, elements of the back story emerge, and Gamache’s gamble with bringing justice in a decidedly unorthodox manner teeters on the brink of failure. I downloaded this for free from the library’s subscription to Overdrive.