On a Clear Day I Can Read Forever

What do you mean school starts this week?! Not that I’m going, but summer’s not over, and I have a towering TBR list to prove it. But before I can get to Marisha Pessl’s Night Film, which is as twisted as Twin Peaks, or to Samantha Shannon’s futuristic The Bone Season, which she wrote when she was a 19-year-old Oxford student, I need to catch up on assorted other books read but not yet blogged.
Love and revenge play out in Chris Bohjalian’s absorbing The Light in the Ruins (Knopf/Doubleday, digital galley), part WWII saga, part police procedural. In 1943 Tuscany, the aristocratic Rosatis are coerced into welcoming a German archaelogist and Nazi soldiers to the family villa. But that’s just the half of it. Ten years later, Florence police detective Seraphina Bettini follows a serial killer targeting the surviving Rosatis, and the trail leads her back to the war and her own past as a young partisan. I’m not much on the interspersed short chapters from the bloodthirsty killer’s point-of-view. Not only are they redundant, but they also give away the assassin’s identity.
Amy Gail Hansen spins an intriguing, coincidence-studded first novel, The Butterfly Sister (Morrow, digital galley). Ruby Rousseau mistakenly receives a suitcase belonging to her former Tarble College classmate Beth Richards, then learns that Beth has gone missing. A copy of a Virginia Woolf book among Beth’s possessions suggests to Ruby that Beth was entangled with campus lothario and professor Mark Suter, who broke Ruby’s heart and led to her attempting suicide. Returning to the women’s college near Chicago for a convenient reunion, Ruby, supposedly on assignment for a small newspaper, finds that another student has been hospitalized because of an aborted suicide. Complications ensue, encompassing campus politics, plagiarism and sexual harassment, as well as the shades of Woolf, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Sylvia Plath. Then again, Ruby may not be the most reliable narrator.
Jessica Brockmole skirts sentimentality with Letters from Skye (Random House, digital galley), a novel of love and war told entirely in letters. The first correspondents are Scottish poet Elspeth Grant and American student David Graham. He sends her a fan letter in 1912, and the ensuing exchange charts their relationship through the first World War, as Elspeth’s young husband goes off to the front lines and David becomes an ambulance driver in France. Do their paths ever intersect? Years later, Elspeth’s daughter Margaret writes to her estranged uncle and her fiance about her quest to find out more about her father, whom Elspeth wouldn’t talk about. You might think you know where the story is going, but Brockmole surprises with her missives, scattering clues here and there. Read between the lines.
What are the chances of two authors, each taking a break from an established series, setting their new novels in the same exotic locale? We’re off to 1920s Kenya with disgraced socialite Delilah Drummond in Deanna Raybourn’s A Spear of Summer Grass (Harlequin, digital galley). The dissolute expat milieu would seem to be the perfect place for vain Delilah, but her romance with the dashing Ryder White and her experiences with the Kikuyu tribe show her to made of stronger stuff as she pursues a new life.
There’s also romance, adventure and scandal in Lauren Willig’s The Ashford Affair (St. Martin’s, review ARC), which intertwines the story of Manhattan attorney Clemmie with that of her 99-year-old grandmother Addie. Addie’s tale, which reaches back to World War I London and then post-war Kenya, is the more interesting, tied as it is to her rich cousin Bea’s exploits and affairs. Clemmie’s research of the family tree yields secrets and surprises.