several books
Oct. 11th, 2023 11:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
porticoAfter what has felt like an eternity of struggling with reading, and reading fiction in particular, I have ripped through a bunch of books in the past month and change, several of which were excellent. Here's a little sum-up.
The Benevent Treasure by Patricia Wentworth. Picked this up from one of my favourite paperback spots in Portland (Melville Books) purely on the strength of the cover, and found it to be a delightful mystery gothic mashup, much as if the author had plopped Miss Marple into what was otherwise a pretty cookie cutter gothic. The story follows Candida, your typical innocent orphaned miss who finds herself alone in the world after the death of her aunt. She is invited to stay with her two elderly great-aunts in the family pile, delightfully called Underhill, where something is clearly afoot. Miss Silver, Wentworth's sleuth, is very capable and no-nonsense and I enjoyed her presence immensely. That said, the character I loved the most was the evil great-aunt, mostly because aside from Miss Silver she was the most fully realized on the page. Great stuff for fans of creepy old houses and strong-willed old ladies. Also a treat to discover a Golden Age detective writer I'd never heard of before.
In the Winter Woods by Isabelle Adler. At some point I added this to my to-read list on GR and after rediscovering it and learning that my library had it, decided a wintry queer whodunnit was just what I wanted to read. Wish it had been better! Looking for inspiration, mystery writer Declan decamps to the woods of Vermont and a cabin he hasn't visited since he was a child and shortly discovers his neighbor has been murdered. His love interest is the local cop (or "Public Safety Commissioner," rather, which was also refreshing in its way) and I liked Curtis' role in the story a lot. I didn't much care for Declan, however. Or maybe I just couldn't figure him out. After discovering the body, he's entirely uninterested in involving himself in the investigation until, suddenly, he is? And he manages it by claiming he's going to write a true crime book about the case? Why did he do that? I still don't understand. I just wanted him to figure out what he wanted, or at the least be consistent in not knowing what he wanted. My other major complaint was the editing. Isabelle Adler doesn't have any info about her nationality online, but a lot of the dialogue suffered from stuff I run into when I Brit-pick fics for friends, so I suspect she is a Brit who needs an American editor.
Knockout by Sarah MacLean. Picked this up on fahye's rec, and because I like antagonistic romance very much. I found it fine! Main complaint was not antagonistic enough. This was third in MacLean's series about a group of aristocratic women in 1840s England who are feminist vigilantes, essentially. They're based on a real crime ring, although those women were not ladies or married to dukes. Knockout's pairing is between Imogen, a chemist and explosions expert, and Thomas, a detective. I liked the chaos/bore pairing but to my disappointment Imogen was not terribly chaotic (she doesn't make a single bomb in this book) and Thomas could have been more boring. I realized partway through that what I really wanted was the dynamic in Miss Scarlet and the Duke, so I went and watched that instead.
Return to Satterthwaite Court by Mimi Matthews. For chaos/bore, this one was much more up my alley. Mimi Matthews was a historian before she was a writer of fiction, and it shows. Rather than bomb-making, the chaotic risk which our heroine Kate takes is showing up at the hero's family home and lying about their having a pre-existing acquaintance. What I loved about Kate and Charles in this book is the way they communicated with each other. Kate likes him, and she does not make a secret of it (scandalous!). Charles finds himself reluctantly charmed by her, and when that reluctance gives way to affection, he lets her know. Refreshing, in a historical romance! There's also a mystery happening here, so. Big plus for me, personally.
The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna. I picked this up on a whim last year and then forgot I had it until I saw it on the romance shelf at B&N and decided to go home and read it. It follows Mika, who is one of the small number of witches in Britain, and being part of that number means being alone. Because of a rumored curse, all witches end up orphaned. Mika was plucked from her native India by a white British witch and raised in near isolation, tended to by a series of tutors and nannies, each of which were let go as soon as they began to suspect that Mika had magic. This has understandably fucked Mika up in the head a bit. Despite this, she ends up at a place called Nowhere House, acting as a tutor herself to a trio of young witches (all girls of color) who were themselves orphaned and then adopted by a white British witch. Unlike Mika, however, they have been lovingly raised by a cadre of nonmagical folk who have found themselves out of their depth.
I have seen this described as a book in which nothing happens, which I think is selling it short. It's a book in which Mika, the girls, and their caretakers come to love one another quite a lot. Mika in particular wrestles with her bone-deep loneliness, a struggle which felt so real and painful and good. I loved this book. The vibes are exquisite, but more than that I loved the way the author approached the question of how to love and be loved when what you are and/or how you love are considered dangerous.
A Nobleman's Guide to Seducing a Scoundrel by KJ Charles. I didn't set out to read multiple books with mysteries set in deeply old manors rife with family secrets, but I did do that. This takes place 13 years following the previous book in the series (duology? think it's just the two), at the end of which Luke Doomsday, aged 13, is maimed. I loved that he shows up here acting like a man with a plan and then as soon as the plan goes awry he just. falls apart. KJ Charles has written a lot of sneaky amoral characters in her day but this is the first one I can recall who realizes immediately that he's fucked up and declares his life to be over. Great stuff. Also loved Rufus, a simple square of a man who reacts to things honestly and loudly. Just an A+ pairing. Loved the cousins, would read spinoffs about all of them (but especially Berengaria).
Time to Shine by Rachel Reid. Discovered Reid had a new hockey romance out the morning I'd decided to take a mental health day, which seemed meant to be. Spent the whole day reading it. This is no Heated Rivalry (what is!) but what it is, is Bert & Ernie if they were hockey players. You think I'm kidding, but Landon is an anxious, serious beanpole on the ace spectrum and Casey is a short bright king who's afraid of the dark, makes friends wherever he goes, and loves to have sex. If that's not Bert & Ernie I don't know what is (okay I'm extrapolating the sex stuff but you can't deny it feels right). Landon is a goalie on an NHL farm team who gets called up when one of Calgary's two goalies is injured, and Casey is the favored son of a hockey legacy. They live together while Landon is playing for the team, and the rest is history. I found these characters really refreshing and on the whole had a great time with them. If you're looking for hints of Reid's other hockey books (I see you because I am you, Ilya stans), however, look elsewhere--this exists in a separate fictional hockey universe.
The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy by Megan Bannen. I think maybe I came across this looking for more books like Irregular Witches, which it is not, but I still liked it quite a lot. This starts out as a beat-for-beat take on The Shop Around the Corner/You've Got Mail set in a truly original fantasy world. Tanria is a region where the world's old gods were once imprisoned by the new gods. They've since been released, but the region remains a magical wild with a population of drudges--loose human souls which will try to kill any living creature in order to take up residence and escape. For this reason, marshals patrol the region, and everyone who enters Tanria have to have a prepaid arrangement with an undertaker. Our corresponding protagonists are Hart, a marshal, and Mercy, an undertaker. That storyline takes you through roughly half of the book, after which things get much bigger.
I had a great time with this book, and a big part of that was the inventiveness of the setting. It felt sort of wild west, sort of mid-century, and fully small town. I liked Hart and Mercy a whole lot, as people. My one qualm was that, because the animosity between them at the start of the book grew out of them meeting on a bad day rather than anything external (working at rival bookstores, for example), they say things to one another in anger which are very hurtful and then never address them, even when they seemed to me to potentially be based in underlying biases. Would have liked to see that conversation before the ending kicked off.
All the Horses of Iceland by Sarah Tolmie. Like reviewers before me, I adored the writing voice in this book, and was delighted by the ghostliness of it, as I had not planned it as a spooky read. Tolmie writes with a sparseness of language that nevertheless feels very rich. I loved the storyteller-within-a-storyteller format, as well as the just-some-guyness of Eyvind.
Rose/House by Arkady Martine. This was a deliberate spooky read. I love haunted houses, so house-haunted-by-an-AI caught my interest right away. It turned out to be even more up my alley than I'd realized, as the house was the greatest work and final resting place of a widely worshipped architect, and the one person who is permitted to access it his designated archivist. This definitely felt like Martine doing her version of Hill House, and I found that it worked until it didn't. I loved how she used the unnaturalness of the architecture to lean into the unnaturalness of the house, and the capriciousness of Rose House the AI was truly creepy. However, the ending didn't entirely work for me. I wanted a little more from the murder mystery aspect of the story than I got, which could very well be a me problem. Still enjoyed the reading of it very much.
The Benevent Treasure by Patricia Wentworth. Picked this up from one of my favourite paperback spots in Portland (Melville Books) purely on the strength of the cover, and found it to be a delightful mystery gothic mashup, much as if the author had plopped Miss Marple into what was otherwise a pretty cookie cutter gothic. The story follows Candida, your typical innocent orphaned miss who finds herself alone in the world after the death of her aunt. She is invited to stay with her two elderly great-aunts in the family pile, delightfully called Underhill, where something is clearly afoot. Miss Silver, Wentworth's sleuth, is very capable and no-nonsense and I enjoyed her presence immensely. That said, the character I loved the most was the evil great-aunt, mostly because aside from Miss Silver she was the most fully realized on the page. Great stuff for fans of creepy old houses and strong-willed old ladies. Also a treat to discover a Golden Age detective writer I'd never heard of before.
In the Winter Woods by Isabelle Adler. At some point I added this to my to-read list on GR and after rediscovering it and learning that my library had it, decided a wintry queer whodunnit was just what I wanted to read. Wish it had been better! Looking for inspiration, mystery writer Declan decamps to the woods of Vermont and a cabin he hasn't visited since he was a child and shortly discovers his neighbor has been murdered. His love interest is the local cop (or "Public Safety Commissioner," rather, which was also refreshing in its way) and I liked Curtis' role in the story a lot. I didn't much care for Declan, however. Or maybe I just couldn't figure him out. After discovering the body, he's entirely uninterested in involving himself in the investigation until, suddenly, he is? And he manages it by claiming he's going to write a true crime book about the case? Why did he do that? I still don't understand. I just wanted him to figure out what he wanted, or at the least be consistent in not knowing what he wanted. My other major complaint was the editing. Isabelle Adler doesn't have any info about her nationality online, but a lot of the dialogue suffered from stuff I run into when I Brit-pick fics for friends, so I suspect she is a Brit who needs an American editor.
Knockout by Sarah MacLean. Picked this up on fahye's rec, and because I like antagonistic romance very much. I found it fine! Main complaint was not antagonistic enough. This was third in MacLean's series about a group of aristocratic women in 1840s England who are feminist vigilantes, essentially. They're based on a real crime ring, although those women were not ladies or married to dukes. Knockout's pairing is between Imogen, a chemist and explosions expert, and Thomas, a detective. I liked the chaos/bore pairing but to my disappointment Imogen was not terribly chaotic (she doesn't make a single bomb in this book) and Thomas could have been more boring. I realized partway through that what I really wanted was the dynamic in Miss Scarlet and the Duke, so I went and watched that instead.
Return to Satterthwaite Court by Mimi Matthews. For chaos/bore, this one was much more up my alley. Mimi Matthews was a historian before she was a writer of fiction, and it shows. Rather than bomb-making, the chaotic risk which our heroine Kate takes is showing up at the hero's family home and lying about their having a pre-existing acquaintance. What I loved about Kate and Charles in this book is the way they communicated with each other. Kate likes him, and she does not make a secret of it (scandalous!). Charles finds himself reluctantly charmed by her, and when that reluctance gives way to affection, he lets her know. Refreshing, in a historical romance! There's also a mystery happening here, so. Big plus for me, personally.
The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna. I picked this up on a whim last year and then forgot I had it until I saw it on the romance shelf at B&N and decided to go home and read it. It follows Mika, who is one of the small number of witches in Britain, and being part of that number means being alone. Because of a rumored curse, all witches end up orphaned. Mika was plucked from her native India by a white British witch and raised in near isolation, tended to by a series of tutors and nannies, each of which were let go as soon as they began to suspect that Mika had magic. This has understandably fucked Mika up in the head a bit. Despite this, she ends up at a place called Nowhere House, acting as a tutor herself to a trio of young witches (all girls of color) who were themselves orphaned and then adopted by a white British witch. Unlike Mika, however, they have been lovingly raised by a cadre of nonmagical folk who have found themselves out of their depth.
I have seen this described as a book in which nothing happens, which I think is selling it short. It's a book in which Mika, the girls, and their caretakers come to love one another quite a lot. Mika in particular wrestles with her bone-deep loneliness, a struggle which felt so real and painful and good. I loved this book. The vibes are exquisite, but more than that I loved the way the author approached the question of how to love and be loved when what you are and/or how you love are considered dangerous.
A Nobleman's Guide to Seducing a Scoundrel by KJ Charles. I didn't set out to read multiple books with mysteries set in deeply old manors rife with family secrets, but I did do that. This takes place 13 years following the previous book in the series (duology? think it's just the two), at the end of which Luke Doomsday, aged 13, is maimed. I loved that he shows up here acting like a man with a plan and then as soon as the plan goes awry he just. falls apart. KJ Charles has written a lot of sneaky amoral characters in her day but this is the first one I can recall who realizes immediately that he's fucked up and declares his life to be over. Great stuff. Also loved Rufus, a simple square of a man who reacts to things honestly and loudly. Just an A+ pairing. Loved the cousins, would read spinoffs about all of them (but especially Berengaria).
Time to Shine by Rachel Reid. Discovered Reid had a new hockey romance out the morning I'd decided to take a mental health day, which seemed meant to be. Spent the whole day reading it. This is no Heated Rivalry (what is!) but what it is, is Bert & Ernie if they were hockey players. You think I'm kidding, but Landon is an anxious, serious beanpole on the ace spectrum and Casey is a short bright king who's afraid of the dark, makes friends wherever he goes, and loves to have sex. If that's not Bert & Ernie I don't know what is (okay I'm extrapolating the sex stuff but you can't deny it feels right). Landon is a goalie on an NHL farm team who gets called up when one of Calgary's two goalies is injured, and Casey is the favored son of a hockey legacy. They live together while Landon is playing for the team, and the rest is history. I found these characters really refreshing and on the whole had a great time with them. If you're looking for hints of Reid's other hockey books (I see you because I am you, Ilya stans), however, look elsewhere--this exists in a separate fictional hockey universe.
The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy by Megan Bannen. I think maybe I came across this looking for more books like Irregular Witches, which it is not, but I still liked it quite a lot. This starts out as a beat-for-beat take on The Shop Around the Corner/You've Got Mail set in a truly original fantasy world. Tanria is a region where the world's old gods were once imprisoned by the new gods. They've since been released, but the region remains a magical wild with a population of drudges--loose human souls which will try to kill any living creature in order to take up residence and escape. For this reason, marshals patrol the region, and everyone who enters Tanria have to have a prepaid arrangement with an undertaker. Our corresponding protagonists are Hart, a marshal, and Mercy, an undertaker. That storyline takes you through roughly half of the book, after which things get much bigger.
I had a great time with this book, and a big part of that was the inventiveness of the setting. It felt sort of wild west, sort of mid-century, and fully small town. I liked Hart and Mercy a whole lot, as people. My one qualm was that, because the animosity between them at the start of the book grew out of them meeting on a bad day rather than anything external (working at rival bookstores, for example), they say things to one another in anger which are very hurtful and then never address them, even when they seemed to me to potentially be based in underlying biases. Would have liked to see that conversation before the ending kicked off.
All the Horses of Iceland by Sarah Tolmie. Like reviewers before me, I adored the writing voice in this book, and was delighted by the ghostliness of it, as I had not planned it as a spooky read. Tolmie writes with a sparseness of language that nevertheless feels very rich. I loved the storyteller-within-a-storyteller format, as well as the just-some-guyness of Eyvind.
Rose/House by Arkady Martine. This was a deliberate spooky read. I love haunted houses, so house-haunted-by-an-AI caught my interest right away. It turned out to be even more up my alley than I'd realized, as the house was the greatest work and final resting place of a widely worshipped architect, and the one person who is permitted to access it his designated archivist. This definitely felt like Martine doing her version of Hill House, and I found that it worked until it didn't. I loved how she used the unnaturalness of the architecture to lean into the unnaturalness of the house, and the capriciousness of Rose House the AI was truly creepy. However, the ending didn't entirely work for me. I wanted a little more from the murder mystery aspect of the story than I got, which could very well be a me problem. Still enjoyed the reading of it very much.