fiction

Setting the Family Free, by Eric D. Goodman

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This latest novel by my friend Eric Goodman, author of Tracks and other stories, takes us to Chillicothe, Ohio where Bobbie Anne Thompson looks out of her kitchen window and sees a tiger attacking her horses, killing and eating one even as she calls 911.

She knows where it came from: her neighbor Sammy Johnson has been collecting exotic animals for years. As much of a hoarder as he is with his guns and cars, Sammy has collected 60 or 70 animals (reports differ), including lions, cougars, bears, tigers, leopards, panthers, wolves, komodo dragons, monkeys. And now he has turned them all loose.

One of the things I love about this novel is the compassionate insight Goodman brings to Sammy, the animals themselves, and the various men who must hunt them down before they kill any more people. Though the female characters are all secondary, I was disappointed that they are not presented with the same insight as the men.

Another thing I admire about this book is the unusual format. Chapters with traditional scenes alternate with sections made up of snippets of quotes from various people, and sometimes with news articles. This combination speeds up the pace of the story and plunges us into the terrible race to save the citizens of central Ohio. The hunters are rural police officers, aided by a couple of animal experts. Already horrified at what they must do, they are hampered by the questioning and accusing voices of those sitting safely far away. Their job is also complicated by the obliviousness of those who continue hiking and walking to work and taking children to playgrounds despite the urgent warnings to stay inside.

Though the prose is not difficult to read, the content—human and animal killings—is probably too upsetting for middle grade level. However, this book would be appropriate for a Young Adult (YA) audience, and would be a great starting point for a discussion of our relationship with animals.

It’s a fascinating premise for a story, contrasting the way Sammy and his wife view the animals—as family, as their children—with the way others view them, including the animal experts, the citizens who’ve lost family and pets to them, the animal lovers who aren’t actually being threatened by them, and the first responders caught in the middle.

There is not a clear protagonist for this story. We dip in and out of a number of points of view, including various members of the responding officers, Sammy and his wife, and several of the animals.

Equally, no human antagonist has been identified. The closest is an ambitious reporter who takes the low road: inciting anger at those taking on the difficult—physically and emotionally—task of killing the animals. This reporter whips up the public with opinionated pieces using words like “massacre” and unrealistic claims that the animals could have been tranquilized instead of killed, all of this in the hopes of furthering their career, and maybe leading to a high-level job in New York.

You’ll notice I used gender-neutral terms. One concern I have with this novel is that the author makes this reporter, who is putting their own career ahead of the safety of citizens and first responders, a woman, thus joining in on the way our society attacks women for behavior that is considered normal for men. In our society, ambitious and powerful women are derided and demonized. I know the author and I know that he is not misogynistic, but I wish he had not chosen to egg on the misogynists by perpetuating this negative stereotype.

I’m not advocating censorship. But I do believe that authors should take responsibility for the effect their work may have on our culture. They should think carefully before employing negative stereotypes.

We all should be rethinking how we view others, questioning stereotypes, not leaping to conclusions based on inaccurate and emotional reporting, just as we should be rethinking how we view animals. As we learn more about animal intelligence, we begin to question the idea that we should have dominion over them. This book is a valuable step in opening that conversation.

Have you read a novel that made you question a long-held opinion?

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a copy of this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Meet Me in Monaco, by Hazel Gaynor and Heather Webb

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What a delightful summer read! Whether you’re at the beach, on a plane, or—like me—glued to a fan, weathering a heat wave in town, this Novel of Grace Kelly’s Royal Wedding, as the subtitle says, is the perfect read.

The story opens in May of 1955 as Grace Kelly arrives in Cannes for the film festival, trailed by a horde of paparazzi. Among them is James Henderson—“Jim to my friends”—an English photographer more interested in landscapes than celebrities, but needing to make a living to help support his divorced wife and beloved daughter Emily.

Despite her sunglasses and headscarf, Grace is spotted by Jim and takes refuge in a small perfume boutique. The shop and the perfumerie in Grasse where the perfumes are produced are owned by Sophie Duval. Her home in Grasse, “a stone farmhouse surrounded by sunflower and lavender fields”, is where Sophie prefers to spend her time, creating new scents and experimenting with different blends, but she needs to maintain the shop in Cannes. Luckily she has her and her father’s longterm employee Natalie to run it, but Sophie must be present during the festival.

With Sophie and Natalie’s help, Grace avoids Jim, but he’s not disappointed. He tries out his terrible French on Sophie and snaps a parting shot of her, capturing her angry response. Even in the scrum of the film festival, the two will run into each other again, as Jim struggles for the perfect photo of the film star while Sophie attends events with her wealthy fiancé Lucien.

I loved this story. (Full disclosure: I’m acquainted with one of the authors.) The time period is beautifully evoked, pulling the curtain to reveal more of the reality behind the glamour. The characters, including Grace herself, come fully alive, even minor characters like Natalie, Jim’s daughter Emily and his friend Teddy. They linger long after the story is brought to a satisfying conclusion, like the ghost of a scent.

The perfume business is what most intrigued me in this novel. Sophie’s father taught her that “A parfumeur is to be a keeper of memories.” The scents she creates conjure up memories of people and places. It’s what she thinks of when she meets someone for the first time: what combination of ingredients capture this person’s essence? The descriptions of these blends are enchanting: verbena, vanilla and ginger for young women; violet, oakmoss and cinnamon for an older woman; lime and jasmine for someone who sparkles. Caught up as I was in the story, I still was happy to absorb some information about how perfumes are produced and the way the scents are layered.

It can be risky to write historical fiction set in a time that is still within living memory of many readers, disconcerting as it is to realise that what seems to vivid to some is considered history by younger generations. It can also be risky to include real people as characters. But Gaynor and Webb meet both these challenges effortlessly. Or so it seems; it is only in retrospect that I can appreciate the amount of research that must have gone into this novel and the care taken to keep it from intruding on the story.

If you’re looking for a read that will carry you off to destinations such as Provence and the French Riviera, a story that will fill your senses and your heart, you can’t go wrong with this novel.

Have you been surprised by a novel that appeared to be pure entertainment, but turned out to be something much more substantial?

Fruits of the Poisonous Tree, by Archer Mayor

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I’m continuing to read Mayor’s mystery series featuring Vermont detective Joe Gunther. In this fifth book someone close to Joe is the victim of a terrible crime, and he quickly realises that the best thing he can do to help—indeed, the only thing—is to find the perpetrator as quickly as possible.

However, that’s not so easy when police protocol calls for him to stay out of the investigation. His boss strikes a deal with States Attorney James Dunn, involved in a tight reelection race, that allows Joe to participate while his second-in-command runs the investigation. Also, Joe must be babysat, i.e., accompanied by another cop wherever he goes.

This is one of the most exciting of the Mayor novels I’ve read so far, with several nail-biting chases and standoffs in surprising locations, phsyical danger for Joe and others, and plenty of personal conflict for Joe as he examines his own motives and capabilities.

But what I most enjoyed were the descriptions of the town of Brattleboro itself. Often what draws me to a mystery series is the use of location as a character: Boston for Robert B. Parker, Baltimore for Laura Lippman, Paris for Cara Black, Venice for Donna Leon. Even fictional locations work, such as Three Pines in Louise Penny’s series.

Mayor’s descriptions of Brattleboro are brief but capture its personality. Here, for example:

Brattleboro is an unusually mixed bag of a town. An icon of the previous century’s industrial might, it has an imposing downtown of stolid red-brick buildings, a few obligatory tree-lined neighborhoods of impressive Victorian showpieces, and a vast number of standard, modest, updated nineteenth-century homes—in good or poor shape depending on the locale. The whole thing rests on a broken-backed, topsy-turvy, creek- and river-creased patch of land . . .

Sprinkled throughout, however, just off the well-traveled thoroughfares, Brattleboro has a contrasting scattering of neighborhoods unique into themselves. They are poor or middle class or shyly redolent of old money, but they all share a separateness from the whole, as if, during the town’s early evolution, hidden genetic strains of other far-distant communities were subversively introduced.

Now that I’ve gotten to know the town a bit better, I can recognise some of the neighborhoods and follow Joe’s slippery race through falling snow to a street near where I live. As with Boston and Baltimore, my own knowledge of the place makes me nod with recognition at Mayor’s descriptions of the town’s character.

Ian Rankin once said he began writing his enormously successful Rebus series in order to get to know Edinburgh, his then-new home. As in reading Rankin’s books, Mayor’s series rewards the reader with a cornucopia of pleasures. You can read them for the puzzle or the excitement of the chase; you can read them to immerse yourself in a unique location; or you can read them for the satisfaction of watching a character like Joe Gunther grow and develop. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

What mystery series do you enjoy? What do you like best about it?

An American Marriage, by Tayari Jones

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That this novel addresses one of the most important social issues of our time, one that has rarely been explored in fiction, is enough to make it a must-read book. Add to that a smooth prose style, lashings of tension, and well-rounded characters and it’s no wonder this book is a mega-hit.

At first it seems like a fairly mundane domestic drama. Rob and Celestial’s new marriage is already beginning to show some cracks. Their different backgrounds lead to disagreements about money and ambition, while Rob’s wandering eye creates even more tension between the two.

Then the police knock at the door. Oh, by the way, Rob and Celestial are African-American.

A woman whom Rob helped earlier in the day has been raped and identified Rob as the perpetrator. Unexpectedly, the author speeds through the details of the trial and Rob’s subsequent imprisonment; this is no polemic, even though it’s obvious that Rob is not guilty.

Instead, Jones explores the effect of this violent and unjust separation on the couple. Our expectations continue to be upended, as the narrative shifts from Rob to Celestial and back again before moving to include letters exchanged between the two. We are brought into their marriage and the marriages of their parents in a surprisingly intimate way. I found my sympathies wavering between Rob and Celestial without ever settling on one or the other.

I have been thinking about sacrifice a lot lately, in particular the sacrifices women make as daughters, wives, and mothers. Here, tension swirls around the issue of how much Celestial should be willing to sacrifice to support her husband who has been sentenced to 12 years in prison. The question of what loyalty or duty she owes him is complicated by their being part of a minority that has in certain ways pulled together to survive the discrimination and abuse they suffer.

As one of my friends pointed out in a discussion of this book, one of the strengths of this novel is that it does not take bother to give the white view of the story. For example, we don’t learn much about the woman who falsely accused Rob. My friend compared this book to To Kill a Mockingbird with its similar story, but told almost entirely from a white point of view.

Another friend nailed an aspect of the novel that I both liked and disliked. The author’s voice seemed to come through nearly all of the characters, making them sound much the same. While that made the book read more easily and one character’s point of view transition to another more smoothly, it also made it more difficult to distinguish the characters, to feel I’d really gotten to know them.

In fact, when I came to the discussion three weeks after I finished the book, I had trouble remembering much about it beyond the initial premise of the effect of Rob’s unjust imprisonment on their marriage. I think part of my slight disengagement came from the use of the letters that by their nature relate events that happened in the past. Much of the narrative, too, tells of things that have already happened.

But this is a minor concern. The story quickly came back to me as we discussed it, and my appreciation for it deepened as I began to understand better Jones’s subtle interweaving of theme and story. An American Marriage deserves all the praise that’s been heaped on it.

What bestseller have you read that was even better than you expected?

The Postmistress, by Sarah Blake

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We don’t often reflect on just how amazing it is that we can put a letter in the post and know that it will arrive at its destination in a timely way. Iris James is the sole employee of the post office in Franklin, Massachusetts, a small town on the tip of Cape Cod. It is the fall of 1940, and the U.S. is holding off from entering the war. Meanwhile, Iris and her neighbors listen to the news coming out of London where the Blitz is flattening buildings and posters urging Londoners to Keep Calm and Carry On abound.

Many of the newscasts come from Edward R. Murrow but some people in Franklin are being drawn in by the voice of Murrow’s protégé Frankie Bard. She talks about the little moments that bring to life the horrors happening in London for the inhabitants of Franklin.

One of those inhabitants is Emma, new wife of the town’s doctor, Will Fitch. Orphaned during the flu epidemic of 1918, Emma has grown up feeling invisible, untethered as she is by human bonds. Meeting Will has changed all that, but Will has his own demons.

Franklin seems far away from the war and the U.S., like Franklin’s mob of summer tourists, is too busy being entertained to pay much attention to what is happening in Europe. “How easily the face of the world turns away,” Frankie thinks at one point. Yet the war’s reach is long.

Blake’s evocation of wartime London is brilliant; equally vivid is her portrait of quiet Franklin, where Iris takes comfort in the routine and order and consistency she can bring to her work in the tiny post office, holding the secrets of the town in her hands, as one neighbor tells her. I found Iris fascinating, yet for once didn’t mind moving between protagonists as the story shifted between the three women, because Emma and Frankie are equally fascinating.

I didn’t expect to like this book, despite (or perhaps because of) the effusive praise on the cover. One Thanksgiving when I was eight or nine, my cousin Bobby piled a lot of sauerkraut on my plate, and my mother made me eat it all. I’ve never been able to eat sauerkraut since.

That’s how I feel about novels set in WWII. I find it hard to read yet another one. My perception of the outsized number of WWII novels may be a function of my age. As the central event in the lives of my parents’ generation (along with the Depression), it was obviously a subject that stirred many writers and readers during the decades when I was growing up. And then there’s the aftermath of the war that I experienced. After my mother’s sentimental stories of the boys she danced with before they shipped out, no tragic wartime romance could seem anything but old hat. After the Eichmann trial, no Holocaust novel could shock me.

Yet Blake has found what for me is a previously unexplored corner of that war—twelve months while London is being bombed and the U.S. is trying to stay neutral—and used it to pose important questions.

How do we cope with our world being destroyed? You don’t know where the next bomb is going to fall; if you put a loved one on a train or ship to safety it may itself be destroyed. Is it better to keep them near? What do you do when you lose your home? Your neighbor? Your mother?

More importantly, how do we live our ordinary lives knowing other people are suffering these horrors? Frankie’s colleague Harriet has been collecting the brief reports and hints coming out of Germany describing what is being done to the Jews, but no one wants to hear about it. Iris’s friend Harry keeps a lonely vigil every night, convinced that a German submarine may be headed for Cape Cod, but others in town make fun of him. As Frankie asks Murrow:

“What are we doing back home, Ed? What are people doing, for Christ’s sake?”

“Living their lives.”

“How can they be?”

Yet we do, even now.

Questions like these lurk in the background of this engrossing novel, while we follow the trajectories set in motion by the characters’ decisions and twisted by outside events, including an undelivered letter. Blake’s unsentimental yet compassionate tone makes us care about these characters even as she avoids the all-too-common pitfall of romaticising the war. I fell into the world of this novel and stayed there right to its satisfying conclusion.

Have you read a novel that you found both absorbing and thought-provoking?

Storm Track, by Margaret Maron

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Although I like mysteries and I like to read a series in order, I avoided Maron’s Judge Deborah Knott books at first. Mostly this was because of their being set in North Carolina, a place familiar to me but paling in comparison to other mysteries set in Yorkshire, Quebec, Venice, etc. However, the idea of a woman judge as the main character intrigued me, so I dove in. As this is the seventh in the series, you can tell that I’m enjoying them.

In this book, a series of hurricanes are bearing down on Colleton County, far enough inland that they don’t usually suffer much damage. Deborah’s ruling in a divorce case comes back to haunt her when a woman’s body is found at the Orchid Motel, clad in black lace underwear. Lynn Bullock, wife of an up-and-coming attorney was known for having many affairs, so suspicion focuses on her former (and current?) lovers. Among the suspects are Deborah’s own cousin.

As the threat of Hurricane Fran increases, various liaisons come to light for Deborah. Remarkably, they are treated without judgment, but rather a sympathy for all parties. Suspense ratchets up along with the storm. Then the killer strikes again.

One of the things I like about these books is the equal real estate given to African-American characters. Unlike so many books that depict only white characters, Maron’s stories matter-of-factly present the diversity found in real life. And as in reality, while there are friendships and collegial relationships between the races, there are also tensions and distrust.

Another thing I like about this series is Deborah’s family. Her father, the patriarch of the family, was notorious as a bootlegger and political insider, grows in complexity with each book in the series. She is the youngest, with twelve older brothers and half-brothers, some old enough that their children are her contemporaries.

Independent and strong-willed, Deborah occasionally chafes at their casual assumption of care for her—turning up with a kerosene lantern for her, as if she hadn’t laid in her own supplies, for example. Yet, they are there with a tractor when needed, or hosting a family get-together. I love when they turn up, each so different yet a comfortable and enduring presence.

An exciting mystery that plumbs the secrets of a small town, this book really shines in its sensitive depiction of relationships—between friends or lovers, between races, between parents and children. Plus it has an outstanding description of living through a hurricane. I’m thrilled that there are many more books in this series for me to explore.

Have you read any of Maron’s books? Which is your favorite?

The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula Le Guin

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If you haven’t read this classic, stop right now and go read it. Came out in 1969? No problem: it couldn’t be more relevant to today. Don’t like science fiction? Won’t matter; there aren’t any space battles or robots; just beings you will recognise going about their lives. And any initial questions you might have about the culture you’re reading about are exactly the point.

Genly Ai, who is from Terra, has been sent as an envoy to the far-away planet of Gethen. He is there to invite the inhabitants to join the federation of planets, one that makes trade possible and mediates disputes but does not rule its members. Gethen has no space travel capability, so its people initially cannot believe that Genly comes from another planet, despite his vehicle and slightly different appearance. The federation has sent only one person as an envoy to reassure the people that it is not an invading force.

Gethen’s climate is so harsh that the planet is known as Winter. It is divided into two major nations: Karhide and Orgota. It is to Karhide that Genly goes first.

What is most baffling to Genly is that Gethen’s inhabitants are androgynous. They only take on gender characteristics for a few days once a month, a time they call kemmer, when sexual interactions are taken for granted. They could be female one month, male the next. The rest of the time, they have no gender. Genly keeps trying to overlay his gender preconceptions on the people he meets, for example, distrusting what he sees as the feminine side of Estraven, the prime minister of Karhide who has done the most to validate Genly’s story and promote his work.

As the story opens, Genly is at last about to have an audience with the king of Karhide, said to be mad. However, the night before the audience, Estraven invites Genly to dinner and afterwards tells him he can no longer assist Genly and has not recommended his cause to the king. Feeling betrayed and angry, Genly leaves, but at his audience the next day he learns something that makes him see the evening in a new light.

It is this that is most fascinating to me in this story. Confronted with a foreign culture and despite all of his diplomatic training, Genly constantly misunderstands or guesses blindly at meaning, distracted and misled by his own cultural frameworks.

What could be more relevant to today’s fractured and polarised world? How do we learn to set aside our preconceptions and see each other?

And on top of this is what Genly perceives as gender confusion. Having taken the power politics inherent in gender roles out of the equation, the difference in the resulting cultures is fascinating. And promising for the world many of us would like to see.

For one thing, there have been no wars. Disagreements, skirmishes, certainly. But that’s all. However, now a border dispute between Karhide and Orgota threatens to change that, as power-hungry politicians try to cultivate a previously-unknown sense of nationalism. Brexit, anyone?

With all these fascinating themes, you’d think this would be a dense story, a slow read. It is anything but! Le Guin spins the tension so tightly you barely have time to catch your breath, culminating in a thrilling escape that touches some of our own near-mythical stories.

All I can say is: Read it now! Let’s talk about it.

Dusk and Ember, by Robert Jacoby

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Jacoby’s latest novel is a deep dive into the tumultuous and incandescent mind of nineteen-year-old Richard Issych. Though set in Cleveland in 1980 and 1981, Richard could be any young man today, spat out from the ugly and boring, but known, world of high school into a baffling world of choices he’s not prepared to make.

College doesn’t seem to be one of those choices, despite his grades. For a working class boy, college was not an automatic possibility in 1980 and isn’t today. His parents, a fireman and homemaker, had never been to college and didn’t push it, but they are quick to inform Richard the day after graduation that he has to get a job and pay rent. He has no idea how to look for a job or what he might want to do.

The store where he bags groceries has no full-time work for him, so he quits. At his mother’s suggestion, he drives around to factories and fills out applications. Eventually he gets hired to work third shift at a tool and die factory. It is there that he meets and comes to know the men who fill this story, a heterogeneous collection of men drawn to work through the night. Some are cocky and brash, while others are damaged or careful, yet all are independent, the way you can be in the darkness.

As the story opens, Richard is about to go to the funeral of Melvin, the man he worked with most closely, shot by Dale, another co-worker. His mind is in turmoil as he struggles to grasp the reality of the death, of his role in it, and the motives of the two men he thought he knew. So much of our lives is hidden from each other, something Richard is well aware of.

In school he mostly kept to himself, with two friends who drift away after graduation. Inside, though, he boiled with questions and still does. He cannot see his life. On graduation day, “Richard woke with despair and dread, with the sensation of being disemboweled, reckoning the day.” He knows he doesn’t want a life with his parents. He sees other boys with girlfriends, but has no idea how to have that for himself.

Thoughts of suicide, escape from the pain of a life without meaning, curl around his brain, as they have for years. Death to him is a rest. Except that now he must look it in the face, in Melvin’s face.

We have many stories of the plight of young men of color who see few opportunities before them, armed only with the shreds of a poor education, surrounded by drugs and the crime they bring, burying their young friends. Recently, though, in the wake of school shootings, we have begun to probe the minds of young white men, often working class like Richard, with even fewer opportunities than he had in 1980, now that most of the factories have closed or automated or moved overseas.

In the memoir Hillbilly Elegy, Vance rails against some of his contemporaries for being violent and unwilling to work, and instead embracing welfare dependency and drug addiction. The young men in this book—Melvin is only 26 when killed—do show up for work, but most rely on drugs of one kind or another to make it through the night. With his job, Richard has stepped into another world, one where he envies the self-assurance of his new friends, but is disgusted and scared by the violence of their lives and the shabbiness of their relationships.

While there are lyrical moments, sometimes the stream-of-consciousness of Richard’s fractured and repetitive thoughts is hard to read and allows the tension that keeps us reading to leak away. I enjoyed most the scenes that make up the bulk of the book, either Richard alone or with others. The characters are well-drawn, and there is just enough of the settings—the factory, Richard’s bedroom, party houses, etc.—to create effective atmospheres.

I met the author years ago at a writing conference and have followed his career ever since. I reviewed Jacoby’s first two books. Here, he has done what writers are encouraged to do: “to peel our own layers back until we reach that tender, raw, voiceless place” where the strongest stories come from. This powerful story of a young man wrestling with the most essential and existential questions will touch anyone who remembers that terrible time when the world opens up in front of you and—paralyzed—you have no idea what to do.

What story have you read that brought back long-buried memories of your youth?

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a copy of this book free from the author. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

The Mapping of Love and Death, by Jacqueline Winspear

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Like many readers, I enjoy books that are part of a series. The initial plunge into the story is easy because the main characters are familiar, as is the world of the story. Winspear’s series featuring Maisie Dobbs starts in 1929 when Maisie sets up in business as an inquiry agent in London.

I find her a a delightful person to spend time with: calm, resourceful, full of common sense. She, like most of her generation, bears wounds from the Great War even ten years after the Armistice, at the start of the series. Her physical scars from the bombing of the medical station in France where she served as a nurse have healed. But her beloved Simon, a doctor who was more seriously injured in the same bombing, remains alive in a nursing home but brain-dead.

The other effects of the trauma she endured in France are heightened by the evidence of the war’s damage around her: the veterans who litter the streets, maimed in mind or body or both, often unable to find work; the women left without prospect of marriage after the decimation of a generation of men; the economic hardship and social uncertainty of a nation still measuring the cost of what’s more a cessation than a victory.

She also occupies a peculiar spot in England’s class structure, which at the time is still rigid if beginning to fray. Born to working class, she was placed in domestic service at 13, not uncommon at the time. However, once her employer Lady Rowan discovered Maisie’s yearning for education, she began supporting the girl’s education, roping in Maurice Blanche, a family friend who eventually trained her as a detective. Equally at home downstairs and upstairs, Maisie went on to enter Girton College, before leaving to enlist as a nurse.

In this outing, the seventh in the series, Maisie is hired by a wealthy couple from Boston whose son was killed in the war. His remains have just been found, a farmer having accidentally uncovered the bunker where Michael’s unit died under bombardment. Letters that he had on him, safely wrapped against the elements, indicate that he’d been having an affair with a nurse, and Michael’s parents are eager to find her to learn anything more about their son.

Taking on the task, Maisie must navigate the past, calling forth echoes of her own ordeals, as well as the present, with all of its dangers. Someone does not want her to succeed. She and her assistant Billy Beale are kept busy tracing out the various tentacles of the investigation while dealing with their own personal challenges.

The challenge for the writer of a series is that each book must show development of the main characters while at the same time ensure it can stand alone. There must be enough information from past books so the new reader is not lost, but little enough that the dedicated reader is not bored.

Winspear is adept at working in nuggets of explanation just when they are needed. I’m also becoming more appreciative of the character arc of Maisie across the series, as well as that of other characters, such as Billy Beale and his family, Lady Rowan and her family, Maurice Blanche, Maisie’s contacts at the police, and her one close friend Priscilla Partridge.

I started reading the series when it first came out, but lost track of it for awhile. Now I’ve started at the beginning and am reading straight through: a writer’s worst nightmare! Reading them in quick succession instead of waiting a year or more between them should make me quick to spot inconsistencies and be bored by duplicated information.

Instead, I have to marvel at the author’s artistry. I find Maisie’s development as a person even more fascinating than the cases she’s investigating—though there’s no lack of suspense and puzzles there. The real puzzle lies in us, the way each of us navigates our lives. This book, like the others in the series, demonstrates deep psychological insight combined with thorough research into the time period.

I admit it was my fascination with the Great War that first led me to these books, and they continue to add color to my own studies. But it is Maisie Dobbs who keeps me coming back.

Is there a series of books that you’ve particularly enjoyed?

The Bear and the Nightingale, by Katherine Arden

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The story opens on a March evening, which in northern Rus’ (an earlier portion of what eventually became Russia) means winter has not loosened its grip. The three children of Pyotr Vladimirovich, the local landowner, beg their nurse Dunya for a story. Prompted by their mother, Dunya tells the story of Morozko, the Frost King, who was much feared by the people.

The stepmother of a peasant’s beautiful daughter decides to rid herself of the child by marrying her off to Morozko. Left alone deep in the forest, the girl does indeed meet Morozko who tests her courage with his power over the cold winds.

This is a marvelous way to start the story of Vasya, a fourth child born soon after this scene. Dunya’s story lets us know that this story is going to e a tale, one that draws on myths and legends of Rus’. It also sets up the story to follow.

Even as a child, Vasya—an independent scamp if ever there was one—demonstrates a power that no one else has: she can actually see the chyerti, the spirits that protect the household and horses, that live in the woods and ponds. Others believe in them and leave offerings for them, but only Vasya sees them and talks with them.

When Pyotr brings back a new wife—the children’s mother had died at Vasya’s birth—things begin to change. Anna forbids any recognition of these spirits and brings a beautiful and arrogant priest to their household to preach against this heresy, not just to the family but also to the village.

As crops fail and winter’s cold grows harsher, it becomes apparent that an ancient evil has awakened. Vasya is caught up in its rivalry with his opposite, though he appears to be as ruthless as the evil one and his goodness questionable. Vasya must draw on all of her gifts if she is to protect her family and her village.

It’s an exciting story, graced with vivid characters and stunning descriptions. I particularly liked the way real myths and legends are woven into Vasya’s story, and the sometimes astonishingly original depictions of mystical happenings.

The only thing I missed was Vasya’s internal life. True we get her thoughts and fears, but all her battles are with external forces; she never has to wrestle with herself. She is the same person at the end of the story as she is at the beginning. Though her circumstances have changed, she herself has not. Perhaps this is simply a given of the fairy tale genre, even one aimed at adults.

I had a couple of other minor quibbles—the title did not reflect the story, and some of the minor characters who loom large in early chapters then disappear—but overall I thought it a remarkable achievement, especially for a first novel. I look forward to reading the rest of the trilogy.

Have you read a fantasy novel that incorporated myths and legends in an unusual way?