Mid-summer post...

This is the middle of my fourth week off, which means I have another four weeks to go before I head back to work, so for me it’s the middle of summer, even if I’m off by a week or so on the actual calendar.  I’ve got so many Silver Birch books to read now that this may be my last post for a couple of weeks, as I can’t talk about those books and the pressure’s on to finish them and make my final lists.  But I wanted to talk about the book we read for our Friends Book Club last week. 

The Last Party by Clare Macintosh opens with Detective Ffion Morgan waking up on New Years Day and slipping out of the arms and bed of a guy she met at a bar the night before.  She rushes home, only to be called in to investigate a suspicious death.  The body of washed up singer-turned-land developer Rhys Lloyd is found in an icy lake by some villagers in North Wales taking a New Years Day plunge, and Ffion is assigned to the case, but she’s to have a partner in this investigation:  Detective Leo Brady from the Chester Major Crimes division is also assigned to the case, as Rhys’ home, and the likely crime scene, is on the opposite shore of the lake, which is in England.  When Leo arrives at the scene, it turns out that he is the very man from whose flat Ffion was fleeing just hours earlier.  Despite these tensions, they must figure out a way to work together to solve this crime.  It appears that Rhys had no shortage of people who wanted him dead.  As owner of The Shore, a series of upscale resort-style cottages on the English side of the lake, Rhys was the target of hatred by all the residents of North Wales’ village of Cwm Coed, who opposed this destruction of the pristine land surrounding “their” lake.  They also saw this as a desecration of the land on which Rhys’ father lived, land that was meant to stay in the family but remain intact.  You see, Rhys’ family grew up in Cwm Coed and he was their big success story, a singer who acquired international fame but whose career had pretty much ended by the time of his death.  The residents of the other cottages in The Shore are also suspects, each with their own motives for killing him.  Which of these suspects (and there are a lot of them!) did it?  Will Ffion and Leo find a way to work together to solve this crime before more people are hurt?  You’ll have to read the book to find out!  This book was a bit dense, with a lot of back story and so many characters that it may at first seem difficult to keep track of them.  I actually started this book some time ago, as I enjoy Macintosh’s books, but found it to have way too much detail for me to stick with it.  But then it was selected for our book club so I had to get back to it and get to the end, and I’m so glad I did.  It was complex yet credible, with interesting characters and storylines, and so many suspects that it really kept all of us guessing to the very end.  And none of our group saw one of the “big reveals” coming, which put yet another twist into the tale.  We all agreed that there was a bit too much detail at the beginning of the book but that it was worth the effort to get to the heart of the story, and felt that it was a satisfying conclusion.  We're even considering reading the next book in the “DC Morgan” series for a future meeting (there are three in the series at this time).  If you like complex mystery/thrillers with interesting characters, lots of suspects and webs of deceit, this could be the book for you! 

That’s all for today.  Get outside and enjoy the fabulous summer day! 

Bye for now… Julie

Quick post about book club...

While my cat is contentedly watching the birdies and squirrelies at the patio door this morning, I thought I’d take a minute to write a quick post about last Saturday’s book club discussion. 

We read and discussed the YA novel The Winnowing by Canadian author Vikki Vansickle, a dystopian story set in Darby, New Mexico in 1989.  A fertility crisis happened after WWII, and with no babies being conceived anywhere in the few years after the end of the war, scientists were getting desperate.  Then a group of scientists known as the Barton Five created SuperGen, a hormone drug that was given to women wanting to get pregnant… and it worked!  But there’s something a bit unusual about these children:  when they reach adolescence, they start to have strange experiences, like vivid dreams which they refer to as “going ACES”, and they develop nearly super-human abilities, or “imps”, such as the ability to run quickly when you weren’t able to run at all before.  When this happens, these children are sent to the Barton Clinic to undergo a surgery called “winnowing”, which basically cuts these dreams and abilities from the individual’s brain, leaving them with no memory of the surgery but basically normal.  When our main character, twelve-year-old Marivic, experiences her first vivid dream, she asks her grandfather, Gumps, to bring her to Barton to join her friend Saren, who went there the night before, but he seems reluctant and has her dropped off there that night by a friend.  Marivic and Saren, along with a couple of other youths, begin to question this whole process, and what begins as a routine admission for assessment and surgery turns into the uncovering of a huge governmental conspiracy.  I’ve read this before on my own and with my student book club, but I forgot many of the details, so I was blown away once again by the excellence of this novel, especially considering Vansickle usually writes coming-of-age stories and romantic teen books.  Not all of my members loved the book, but they all finished it and we had a great discussion about so many topics.  One of the main things we discussed was how our response to things we don’t know about is often fear, when it should be curiosity, and how that’s so applicable today, especially in the US.  We compared this novel to others that we’ve read, but which I can’t tell you about for fear of giving away the big secret, and we discussed the characters of Marivic, Saren, Abbot, Ren, and others, and what roles they played in the novel.  It was a great book, and I would highly recommend this to anyone if you’re in the mood for an easy read that has a lasting impact on the way you see things. 

That’s all for today!  Enjoy this beautiful summer day! 

Bye for now…

Julie

Long overdue...

It’s official, my summer break has begun, which hopefully means more time for reading and blogging!  I didn’t really plan to write this morning, but I wanted to take advantage of this opportunity while my cat sits in front of the open patio door watching the birds and squirrels to tell you about two books I read recently. 

The first is the latest book by Lisa Jewell and a total departure from her usual domestic thrillers, Breaking the Dark, the first in the “Jessica Jones” series.  In case you, like me, have never heard of Jessica Jones, she’s a minor superhero in the Marvel comics.  In this novel, she’s been disgraced and is now living in New York as a private investigator, stumbling from one day to the next and one drunken night to the next.  When she’s contacted by a distraught mother who is convinced her twin teens, recently returned from a month in the English countryside with their father, have been replaced, Jessica nearly doesn’t take the case, but after looking at photos of the kids with their flawless skin and vacant eyes, she reluctantly accepts.  Jessica goes undercover and travels to the small village where their father lives, where she finds that all is not what it seems and she’s drawn into the dark, duplicitous world of an online influencer whose dirty little secret needs to be revealed before more people are killed in the name of perfection.  I don’t want to give anything away because, while this story is totally far-fetched, it’s actually not as unbelievable as it may at first seem, and the best part about the book is the slow reveal of each piece of the puzzle until it forms the whole picture.  It was not the kind of book I would normally read but it was so well-written that it had me gripped from the opening pages to the final paragraph. 

The next book I read was one I picked up from a Little Free Library in my neighbourhood, which had a really interesting cover. Self-Portrait with Boy by Rachel Lyon tells the story of an artist in New York trying to make it in the early ‘90s.  Lu Rile is a photographer who is literally a starving artist, as she works part-time at a Whole Foods and is just managing to survive by stealing food from her workplace so she can not spend money for food in order to pay her rent.  She lives in an old abandoned factory with a bunch of other artists, and while these are not official apartments, the owner of the building continues to charge rent but refuses to offer even the most basic maintenance.  She needs a big break, and has been taking self-portraits every day for over a year.  At the start of the novel, she’s setting up for Self-Portrait #399 in her run-down apartment, a photo of her leaping in front of her window to simulate flying, but what she also catches in the faintest image of a boy falling from the roof, the young son of the artist couple who lives on the floor above her.  It’s a brilliant photo, the kind of photo that could launch her career as an artist and get her taken seriously in the artistic community, but how can she exploit her neighbours’ grief and tragedy?  This dilemma is made more difficult as she becomes close to Kate, the boy’s mother, while she navigates her grief.  To complicate things even further, the owner of the building wants to sell and is trying to force everyone out, but some of the artists have been there for decades and feel they have legitimate squatters’ rights to remain.  And Lu needs money to help her elderly father with his cataract surgery.  Lu’s moral struggles are mirrored by the deterioration of the building in which she lives, and I as the reader was pulled down into the depths of this ethical dilemma. And even as I knew what the outcome would be, I travelled the winding road to reach this final decision along with Lu.  And while I may not agree with her choices, when considering her situation and putting myself in her shoes, it was a sobering moment when I realized that I may have made the same choice, too.  I found this book to be extremely engaging, the type of book I would certainly have enjoyed reading when I was in my twenties and trying to make a go of things in Toronto, but I was still able to relate to Lu even decades after moving on from those years of struggle.  It was a coming-of-age story and a look at the effects of gentrification, and offered real insight into the struggles that artists face when trying to break into the market, to get recognition for their work and make a living doing what they love instead of working menial jobs to make ends meet.  I really enjoyed it and would never have discovered this little gem if not for the Free Little Library, one of many in my neighbourhood.  So if you’re passing one of these little libraries, it’s always a good idea to check the contents… you never know what might be inside! 

That’s all for today!  Have a wonderful rest of the week and remember to keep reading!

Bye for now... Julie