Deanna Raybourn | On a Clear Day I Can Read Forever

Posts Tagged ‘Deanna Raybourn’

Reading in place

Posted in Fiction, Reviews, Uncategorized, tagged A False Value, A Murderous Relation, Ben Aaronovitch, Chris Bojalian, crime fiction, Deanna Raybourn, Emily St. John Mandel, In the Dark Corners of Night, Lily King, literary fiction, Louise Erdrich, Meg Gardiner, The Glass Hotel, The Night Watchman, The Red Lotus, Writers & Lovers on April 1, 2020| 4 Comments »

Yes, I know I’m a little late with a March post. Ok, a lot late. But I’ve been busy social distancing, washing my hands, playing with the cats, streaming BritBox and reading in place. Not that much difference from my real life, truth be told. I was a stay-at-home person even before I was told to stay home. I miss friends and lunch out and even running errands, but I’m high-risk. Thankfully, there’s no risk of me running out of anything to read.

My favorite new book is Lily King’s witty and hopeful new novel, Writers & Lovers (Grove Atlantic, digital galley), which was the book I didn’t know I needed until I read it in one sitting a few weeks ago, and the reread it a couple days back. Casey is a 30ish writer and waitress in Boston, dealing with her grief at her mother’s recent death and struggling to finish her first novel. Two men complicate her life’s plot. Oscar is an older, well-known writer, a widower with two winsome little boys. Silas is younger, a student of Oscar’s, and still improvising his life and work. I went back and forth between the two, but in the end, I rooted for Casey.

Emily St. John Mandel’s last novel, Station Eleven, was about a global pandemic and life afterward, and it’s another favorite, although perhaps not the best choice for rereading just now. So I read her new novel, The Glass Hotel (Knopf/Doubleday, digital galley) which differs in subject, following several people afloat in the “kingdom of money,” but which is also moody and haunted. Both Vincent ad her half-brother Paul work at the isolated Vancouver Island resort of the title, but then go in different directions, he as a troubled video performance artist and she as the trophy wife of the hotel’s owner, Jonathan. He’s running a giant international Ponzi scheme, which ensnares a number of people, including a couple of characters from Station Eleven, when it collapses. The story of choice and guilt plays with the idea of parallel/alternate lives, and it is full of ghosts. I liked it, but trying to explain why is like grasping at clouds.

Rats! Chris Bohjalian’s clever thriller The Red Lotus (Knopf/Doubleday, review hardcover) is full of them, all carrying dread and disease and death. Not a comfort read in these times, but it’s tense and diverting, moving between the Vietnamese countryside and a New York research hospital. Alexis is an ER doctor whose boyfriend Austin disappears while they are on a bike vacation in Vietnam. Austin, it turns out, is a first-class liar, and Alexis, wounded and betrayed, is compelled to investigate all the things he never told her. Bohjalian carefully parcels out critical information — about Austin’s darts-playing friend Douglas, an unnamed higher-up in cahoots with Douglas, a former Vietnam vet now a private detective, and antibiotic-resistant pathogens. Rats, too.

Louise Erdrich drew on the life of her grandfather in writing The Night Watchman (HarperCollins, digital galley), an involving story set in 1953 on the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. Thomas Wazhashk, a night watchman at a jewel bearing factory, is also a Chippewa Council member who is fighting against a bill winding its way before Congress that would terminate the rights of Native Americans to their land as spelled out in long-standing treaties. Thomas’ activism will reach to Washington, D.C., but it also affects the lives of others, including Patrice Parenteau, a high-school valedictorian and factory worker worried about the disappearance of her older sister Vera in Minneapolis; the boxer Wood Mountain; and white high school teacher and coach Stack Barnes. I vaguely remember studying termination in a college anthropology class — dry, distant facts, nowhere near as fascinating and real as Erdrich’s vividly realized novel.

Several ongoing crime series have new entries that offer escapism from the world’s woes. Detective and apprentice wizard Peter Grant takes on corporate crime in False Value (DAW, digital galley), the eighth book in the always entertaining Rivers of London series. Here, he goes undercover at the Serious Cybernetics Company to investigate tycoon Terrence Skinner and his connection to a fabled machine built by Ada Lovelace. In Meg Gardiner’s third volume in the UNSUB series, In the Dark Corners of the Night (Blackstone, digital galley), FBI behavioral analyst Caitlin Hendrix is trailing the Midnight Man. The serial killer terrorizes family homes in Los Angeles, killing the parents but letting their kids live — at least so far. Deanna Raybourn’s high-spirited Victorian mystery, A Murderous Relation (Berkley, digital galley), is the welcome fifth in a clever, sexy series. Victoria Speedwell and Stoker Templeton-Vane team to resolve a royal scandal featuring a certain relative of Veronica’s, even as a serial killer stalks London’s streets.

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Spring break

Posted in Fiction, Reviews, Thoughts on Books, Uncategorized, Writing and Reading, tagged A Dangerous Collaboration, Alice Quinn, Anissa Grey, censorship, Deanna Raybourn, Donna Leon, Elly Griffiths, family life, Fiction, Little Faith, mysteries, Nickolas Butler, Tara Conklin, The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls, The Huntress, The Last Romantics, The Stranger Diaries, Unto Us a Son Is Given, World War II on March 18, 2019| 2 Comments »

I need a break. Not from school or work or even the large orange cat determined to share my lap with the laptop. (Please move, Peach). No, I need a break from the willful ignorance and hypocrisy floating this way from Tallahassee, where the Florida Legislature is being lobbied by a conservative group that wants to ban certain books from public school readers. Again. Y’know, the books they find objectionable, ones by Toni Morrison, Frank McCourt, Anthony Burgess, Kate Chopin, among others. Yes, that’s the stench of censorship wafting across the Sunshine State. Where oh where are the orange blossoms of yesteryear? Like I said, I need a break, so I’m not going into my standard rant. Instead, I’m going to read some lovely books of my own choosing. I suggest you do the same, right after you read this story from the Tampa Bay Times, “Bills may foster bans on books.” http://tinyurl.com/yypzeapk

There’s nothing like a good Gothic to make me forget my woes. An island castle, a missing bride, a hidden passage, a rare butterfly. It’s the latter that lures intrepid lepidopterist Veronica Speedwell to Cornwall in Deanna Raybourn’s witty A Dangerous Collaboration (Penguin Berkley, digital galley). She’s posing as the fiance of Tiberious, Viscount Templeton-Vane, who just happens to be the brother of Veronica’s fellow adventurer, Stoker. Her feelings for the dashing Stoker are as deliciously complicated as the secrets awaiting the three of them on St. Maddern’s Isle, where the beautiful Rosamund disappeared on her wedding day three years ago. Maybe a seance will reveal her whereabouts.

In The Stranger Diaries (Houghton Mifflin, digital galley), Elly Griffiths takes a break from her Ruth Galloway series to craft a modern Gothic that includes a classic ghost story. English teacher Clare Cassidy’s work on a biography of Victorian writer R.M. Holland is interrupted by the violent deaths of several of her colleagues in ways suggested by Holland’s most famous story, “The Stranger.” If that’s not weird enough, Clare finds someone has been leaving her messages in her diary. Add her teenage daughter’s new circle of friends, and you’ve got a chilly puzzle enhanced by excerpts from Holland’s horror tale.

Although Venetians love to gossip, Commissario Guido Brunetti usually pays no attention to the constant chatter. But in Donna Leon’s absorbing Unto Us a Son Is Given (Grove Atlantic. digital galley), Brunetti’s wealthy father-in-law asks him to investigate when he hears that his elderly art dealer friend Gonzalo plans to adopt a younger man as his sole heir. Gonzalo has said it’s his business and to stay out of it, but then the old man dies suddenly and a visiting friend organizing a memorial service is murdered in a Venetian hotel room. As usual, the procedural atmospherics complement Brunetti’s reflections on human nature, doubt and justice.

Although the title of Alice Quinn’s rousing historical novel The Huntress (Morrow, digital galley) refers to a ruthless Nazi war criminal, it also applies to the fascinating Nina Markova, who survived her encounter with the Huntress in war-torn Poland and is now bent on revenge. After the war, she is joined in her search by British war correspondent Ian and his sidekick, former American soldier Tony, who are tracking Nazis wanted for war crimes. Eventually, their stories will intersect with aspiring photographer Jordan McBride, who lives in Boston with her Austrian stepmother. The story moves back and forth between time periods and continents, but it’s Nina who kept me flipping pages. Her fierceness owes much to her childhood in the wilds of Siberia, which she uses to her advantage to learn to fly and then talk her way into the infamous regiment of female Russian bomber pilots known as “the Night Witches.” Her flying exploits, and those of her comrades, are terrifying and adrenaline-fueled, and they scar her forever. As in her last best-seller The Alice Network, Quinn has done her research, and facts bolster her fiction.

Flashback to February when I read several engrossing family dramas. In Tara Conklin’s The Last Romantics (Morrow, digital galley), the four Skinner siblings are all marked by the three-year interval they refer to as “the Pause.” It occurs when they are children and their father suddenly dies and their mother abdicates her role as parent because of mental illness. At just 11, Renee assumes most of the burden of caring for Caroline, Joe and Fiona, who narrates the story from advanced old age. Still, demons follow them into adulthood, where they face another tragedy that illuminates family ties. Anissa Gray’s affecting first novel, The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls (Penguin/Berkley, digital galley), is told through the alternating voices of the three Butler sisters. When pillars of the community Althea and her husband Proctor go on trial for scamming a local charity, middle sister Viola returns from Chicago to help younger sister Lillian care for Althea’s troubled twin teenagers, Kim and Baby Vi. But these strong sisters, whose backstories artfully unfold, also need to learn to care for themselves. Right after I read Nickolas Butler’s Little Faith (HarperCollins, digital galley), I read a newspaper story about parents arrested for withholding medical treatment from their sick child because of religious reasons. In Butler’s book, which gracefully chronicles one year in the life of a rural Wisconsin family, grandparents Lyle and Peg become concerned when their adopted daughter Shiloh becomes involved with a charismatic evangelist who convinces her that her five-year-old son Isaac is a budding faith healer. There’s further conflict when Isaac is diagnosed with diabetes, and Shiloh chooses prayer over medicine. The ensuing drama plays out thoughtfully, unlike a TV medical show that wraps up everything in an hour episode.

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Spring mix

Posted in Fiction, Reviews, Thoughts on Books, Uncategorized, Writing and Reading, tagged Chestnut Street, City of Jasmine, Deanna Raybourn, Dublin, Fiction, Gabrielle Zevin, Jane Austen, Maeve Binchy, Meena van Praag, Northanger Abbey, romance, short stories, The House at the End of Hope Street, The Storied Life of A.J. Firkey, Val McDermid on April 24, 2014| Leave a Comment »

If bookstores attract you like magnets, you’ll find Gabrielle Zevin’s charming novel The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry (Algonquin, review ARC) absolutely irresistible. “No Man is an Island. Every Book is a World.” So says the sign over the door of Island Books, housed in a Victorian cottage on a fictional New England island. Alas, owner A.J. Fikry seems to have forgotten the sign since his young wife died in a car accident and his business took a nosedive. He fends off friends, like the police chief with a taste for crime fiction. He pushes away his sister-in-law, the disappointed wife of a philandering author. He even makes free-spirited Amelia, the new sales rep for Knightley Press, depart in tears. But just like in a storybook (!), A.J.’s pleasure in life, love and books will be renewed with the arrival of an unexpected package. Not all at once, though, and not without tears. Bittersweet proves sweet.

Jane Austen had some fun writing Northanger Abbey, but Catherine Morland always struck me as a ninny. I like her much more as Cat Morland in Val McDermid’s clever update of Austen’s Gothic satire, Northanger Abbey (Grove Atlantic, digital galley). This home-schooled daughter of a Dorset minister loves novels, especially paranormal fiction like Twilight and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (wink wink). Cat’s horizons broaden when family friends invite her to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where she becomes BFF with socialite Bella Thorpe, who is crushing on Cat’s brother, and meets enigmatic Henry Tilney and his sister Eleanor. Gee, she’s awfully pale, and something weird is going on at the Tilney family estate, Northanger Abbey. McDermid, an award-winning crime novelist, sticks to the bones of Austen’s plot but fleshes it out with modern details. If it reads a bit like a YA novel, that’s ok; Cat is just 17. Still, I could have done without slang expressions like “Totes amazeballs.” So last year.

Fans of the late Irish writer Maeve Binchy will welcome Chestnut Street (Knopf Doubleday, digital), a collection of stories about the neighbors of a middle-class Dublin street. Binchy wrote the stories over a period of years, sticking them in a drawer with the idea of a book in mind. Approved by her husband, the writer Gordon Snell, the stories vary in length and complexity, but the characters are familiar types from previous Binchy books, ordinary folks facing domestic crises and misunderstandings. There’s the teenager who’s unexpectedly pregnant like an aunt before her, who went to America and visits once a year. There’s the divorced mum who minds her tongue and allows her grown daughter to make her own decisions. There’s the mistress who belatedly realizes her predicament, the stingy uncle and his estranged niece, the spiteful woman who resents her friendly new neighbor, the four strangers who meet in a takeaway on New Year’s Eve and reunite every year thereafter. Several stories beg to be longer. Oh, it would have been grand to have a Binchy novel about the visiting friend who becomes the street’s favorite fortune teller after picking up on the local gossip.

Not everyone can see the titular building in The House at the End of Hope Street (Viking Penguin, paperback review copy), a whimsical literary confection by Meena van Praag. But young Cambridge grad student Alba Ashby, overwhelmed by a stunning personal and academic betrayal, is welcomed to 11 Hope Street by landlady Peggy Abbot, who tells her she can stay 99 nights. As former residents whose portraits hang on the walls — Agatha Christie, Daphne du Maurier, Dorothy Parker, among them — can attest, the house will work its peculiar magic during this time. Van Praag reminds me of Alice Hoffman as she recounts Alba’s time at Hope Street, which overlaps with that of actress Greer, disappointed in love, and singer Carmen, who has buried a dark secret in the garden. Did I mention the portraits talk to one another and a pretty ghost hangs out in the kitchen?

Deanna Raybourn, author of the popular Lady Julia series, has another smart heroine in aviatrix Evangeline Starke, who narrates the winning City of Jasmine (Harlequin, digital galley). Five years after losing her husband with the sinking of the Lusitania, Evie is flying around the world in her plane The Jolly Roger, when she receives a recent photograph of the presumed-dead Gabriel Starke. She immediately heads for Damascus, with her eccentric aunt and a parrot in tow, to find Gabriel, who once worked an archaeological dig in the area. If he’s alive, she just might kill him — for abandoning her after four months of marriage. Action and adventure, romance and history, secrets and spies! Ah, good times.

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Novel mix

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged A Spear of Summer Grass, Amy Gail Hansen, Chris Bohjalian, Deanna Raybourn, historical fiction, Jessica Brockmole, Kenya, Lauren Willig, Letters from Skye, Light in the Ruins, The Ashford Affair, The Butterfly Sister, Tuscany, World War I, World War II on August 11, 2013| Leave a Comment »

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.