cyphomandra

All the rest of February. And, hopefully, the last day of lockdown today.

Calendar Girl, Georgia Beers. Workaholic Addison will take over the family business even if it costs her her health; that is, until her family organise a personal assistant, Katie, who is struggling to look after her father as he slips deeper into dementia. Opposites attract, valuable lessons are learnt, etc. Competently handled but the workplace dynamics felt off - opening scene is Addison telling two employees having a consensual relationship that the workplace sexual harassment laws mean one of them will have to be sacked (?!) but then the whole dating your PA is apparently okay when someone else pays her salary.

Unexpected Lessons in Love, Lucy Dillon. Jeannie is on her way to her whirlwind wedding when she realises she can’t go through with it; unfortunately, when she tries to contact the groom, he is distracted by his phone, hit by a bus, and ends up in a coma. While waiting for him to come round and not knowing how to tell anyone else of her doubts, Jeannie gets entangled in the village dog rescue. Lots of good dogs, solid characters with believable emotions; enjoyed this more than I expected.

Roll for Initiative, Alex Silver. Gui is a video game creator on crunch; his new roommate Paz, is a baker, who leaves passive-aggressive notes about people coming home late and not doing the dishes. It’s unclear why Paz doesn’t realise Gui is working or why Gui doesn’t tell him; they bicker, have a bunch of sex (including with food, never my favourite trope and doubly so if Paz is supposed to be baking brownies at home that he’s going to sell in his coffee shop!) and get together. Picked this up as a freebie and it didn’t inspire me to read more.

A Lady’s Code of Conduct, Meredith Duran. Jane Mason (a name that gave me Jane Eyre/Bertha Mason vibes) is a rich heiress held captive by her evil uncle, who is bent on marrying her to her cousin and taking her fortune. Jane seizes the chance to escape when Crispin Burke, an unscrupulous politician on the make, comes to visit and - oddly - appears to show some sympathy for her. This has one of my favourite tropes in it - Crispin is beaten and left for dead, and when he recovers, he can’t remember the last five years, and is horrified when he begins to find out who he became. Meanwhile, Jane is claiming she and Crispin are married, which Crispin is much less unhappy about… I liked this a lot, actually; they’re both great characters, and the political shenanigans (evil Crispin was trying to force through a punitive Penal Reform Bill) were a entertainingly different backdrop.

Shadow of the Moon, MM Kaye. I pulled The Far Pavilions off my parents’ bookcase when I was a teenager and totally fell into it - such a compelling beginning. Eventually I resurfaced after a few re-reads and found Shadow of the Moon, which I read but didn’t like nearly as much. Re-reading it now, and knowing it was written earlier, it works much better - the characters aren’t as strong as the latter book (although Winter’s doomed determination to follow through on her marriage despite the increasing obviousness that her husband is a dissipated and incompetent drunk), but what it’s great at is portraying the inevitable historical tragedy that happened in India in 1857 (a contested title, as per wiki, ranging from Sepoy Mutiny to the 1857 Indian Rebellion to the First War of Independence). Kaye empathises with people on all sides, although perhaps without as much class range as, say, Victor Hugo; but what she also has is a deep love for India, its flora and fauna, that really comes through. I have her memoirs out from the library and am working through these.

The Unteachables, Gordon Korman. Zachary Kermit gave up on caring about teaching when he took the fall for a test cheating scandal; now, only a few months away from retirement, he’s been given the Unteachables, the worse class in the school. At the same time, Kiara, a talented student, ends up in the class by mistake while temporarily visiting the town, and decides to stay. Fun and satisfying middle school romp.

Beware of Dogs, Elizabeth Flann. As mentioned earlier, and unfortunately the ending was a damp squib with a predictable “you thought you were safe - but just as you closed the door…” twist. Deeply annoying as there’d been all these earlier hints (the sharks, the snakes) at a much more confrontational ending. Similarly, the dealing with the lead character’s family memories also petered out. I would read another book by the author because the first 2/3rds were so strong, though.

Jill and the Lost Ponies, Jane Badger. Sequel to the Jill books, in which Jill is battling with secretarial school and then - disaster - finds out that by mistake her two ponies have been sold. I have only read some of the Jill books but this is an excellently done continuation that gets the voice without my feeling that I’m being clubbed over the head with the author’s little quirks, and also isn’t afraid to advance character arcs. I hope she does another one.

The Wives, Tarryn Fisher. Thursday loves her husband Seth so much that she is happy to share him with his two other wives, whom she has never met, see him for only one day a week (I’ll let you guess which), and tell no-one else about their arrangement. But one of the other wives is pregnant, and Thursday can’t stop wanting to know more. Unfortunately what she finds out ( SPOILER )

I need to start keeping better track of these. Anyway. List of those I can remember at the moment, and subsequent commentary:

Edmund de Waal, The hare with amber eyes
Gordon Korman, The War with Mr Wizzle (re-read)
Mandy Hager, The Crossing
Josh Lanyon, The Dark Horse
Josh Lanyon, The Dickens with Love
Josh Lanyon, Don't Look Back
Housuke Nojiri, Rocket Girls

The Hare With Amber Eyes was brilliant - nonfiction, family memoir, a book about objects (of art) and collections, the connections between them and their people, and what we lose and what we keep. I will attempt to go on about it again in more detail once I have my own copy and am not doing it from a week-old memory of a library book. The Gordon Korman is a cheerfully comforting re-read, although the degree of personal manipulation it involves always makes me worry more about what would happen if in the future Bruno decided to take a job with pretty much any branch of the government. The Josh Lanyons are all enjoyable but slight, and not as good as his two series, although I approve strongly of his taste in fiction (Dickens, obviously, but The Dark Horse involves a film version of Mary Renault's The Charioteer). Don't Look Back is the possibly obligatory amnesia story, which treats amnesia as a kind of extreme personality reboot (there's a fair bit in the text to suggest this is all psychological rather than organic, but the disconnect feels too easy as opposed to, in a slightly odd counter-example, William Monk's amnesia in the Anne Perry books, where his previous self is much more of a character).

The Mandy Hager is first in a trilogy - post-apocalyptic Pacific Island (Cook Islands based, I think) story in which strong female lead rebels against all her society's constraints. So, some of the same problems as Juno of Taris (lead shares contemporary mores and is positioned as correct by the text for this, despite conflict with all of her upbringing), but much less irritating - no secret psychic powers and some interesting stuff going on with race and religion, although there is the feeling in the text that everybody good has been waiting for Maryam (the lead) to show up to start acting on their secret rebellious feelings. I am also irked that the blurb indicates who will form the core group at the end of the book, but that's not the author's fault - I do want to read the next one, and will comment more then.

( Housuke Nojiri, Rocket Girls. )

Back to some semblance of a normal life (or, at least, no deadlines before Thursday). These are all old books, and there are two more that I wanted to spend a bit more time on, and then two more that I've read over the last week. And then there's the manga post...

Gordon Korman, Everest 3: The Summit. The trouble with this sort of series is that there’s a predictability to book 3 that’s very hard to rise above. ( Someone has to die (to justify the nameless funeral scene at the beginning) and at least one someone has to get to the summit (hence the title), and both these identities are pretty clear at the start of the book. )

The only previous Vivian Van Velde book I’ve read (or started) was one I found in a home furniture store some years ago, on a display bookcase with a bunch of other blue hardbacked books, all with dustjackets removed. Most of the rest were stats texts. I read the first fifty pages or so and liked it but had to go, so I took it up to the counter and asked the staff if I could buy it. I probably would have got a better reception if I’d held up my pyjamas and said I was going to nap in one of the display beds. They sounded absolutely horrified at the thought of considering a book as a reading object rather than a form of décor, and took the book away from me to stash it behind the desk rather than risk my sullying its pages further. I’d be less irked by this if I could remember the title.

I don’t think it was this one, although I liked this and if you find it in a home furniture store it probably also deserves to be liberated. ( Vivian Van Velde, Heir Apparent. )

( Zilpha Keatley Snyder, The Unseen. )

Atul Gawande, Better: a surgeon’s notes on performance. ( Not as good as Complications (his previous book), but that’s largely because a) I loved Complications and b) I’ve read half a dozen of these essays before on the New Yorker website or in the New England Medical Journal. )

Mary Stewart, My brother Michael. ( Spoilers for ending. )

CP Snow, The Affair. The title refers to the Dreyfus affair, which prompted one of those conversations between myself and my boss where both of us were aware of the existence of this notorious scandal, but completely vague as to details.( Anyway, this scandal involves a Cambridge college where one of the Fellows is accused of scientific fraud and forced out; and then evidence appears suggesting that he may not be guilty. )

And two re-reads: ( Eva Ibbotson and Mary Cadogan & Patricia Craig. )

I have three more in-depth reviews that are waiting for me to do some quote-checking and decide that I'm happy with, but these were easier.

New to me:

( Growing up weightless, John M Ford. )

( Two Joans at the Abbey, Elsie J Oxenham. )

( Jean at Jo’s Hospital, Doreen Swinburn. )

Re-reads:

( The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn, John Bellairs. )

( Son of Interflux, Gordon Korman. )

( The Turbulence of Tony, Phyllis Matthewman. )

( Catherine, Head of House, Joanna Lloyd. )