Points to Lockhart for making you feel sorry for the narrator right off the bat. She’s a poor little rich girl, but her inner pain is vividly portrayed as physical: imaginary knives sink into her skin, objects cleave open her brain, and as blood and viscera pour over her clothes her mother tells her to stand straight and look calm… so she pulls herself together, and does as she is told. As the book goes on, it’s hard to distinguish reality from internal metaphor, but as the clues pile up you begin to understand the origins of her mental disturbance, as well as the ghosts that haunt her wealthy family. The writing style was full of sentence fragments and occasional mid-sentence line breaks; it could have been awkward, but settled quite nicely into the rhythm of stream-of-consciousness narration. Pretty bravely experimental for YA, all things considered.
Tag: genre-mystery
A Molecule Away from Madness: Tales of the Hijacked Brain, by Sara Manning Peskin
Through a selection of case studies written like medical mysteries, neurologist Peskin illustrates the terrifying effects of the tiniest changes: from the gene-directed protein synthesis that results in Huntington’s chorea, to a woman whose own immune system flooded her brain with hallucinogens, to a patient whose grip on reality was threatened by what turned out to be a simple vitamin deficiency, this book left me amazed both at the delicate balance our bodies must tread to maintain our brains.
The Cartographers, by Peng Shepherd
I’m not a cartography nerd but I do appreciate a well-crafted map. Nell Young, the heroine of this book, is an extremely Nancy Drew type who can’t leave well enough alone; her discovery of a seemingly worthless old map upends her life and suddenly she’s running from a shadowy cabal of creepy map enthusiasts. Her investigations uncover deep secrets in her parents’ past, and uses the idea of copyright traps as a jumping-off point. I thought the plot got a little forced here and there, and the writing was a little amateurish in places, but I loved the ideas.
Paladin’s Grace, by T. Kingfisher
First of the Saint of Steel series, which I’m characterizing as “cutesy fantasy romances with a background of macabre murders.” The Saint of Steel (a god, even though he’s called a saint) abruptly dies, which has the unfortunate effect of sending his beserker paladins into sudden mental breakdown. Years later, Stephen and a few of his surviving fellow paladins have found refuge in the Temple of the Rat, acting as bodyguards for the order of do-gooder lawyers, doctors, and other public servants. He has a meet-cute with Grace, a perfumer who finds herself embroiled in a scheme of political intrigue. Grace’s awkwardness and Stephen’s determined morality, along with the practicality of the people of the Rat, make this a very enjoyable book to read.
Gallant, by V.E. Schwab
Spooky and atmospheric. Olivia, who cannot make sounds and has to communicate through sign language, is being raised at an orphanage for girls; she has nothing of her parents except her mother’s old diary. Unexpectedly, a letter arrives inviting her to her ancestral home of Gallant, a place her mother’s diary explicitly warns her against visiting. Of course she goes anyway, and uncovers deep dark family secrets. Although the writing is beautiful and creepy, the plot itself is fairly straightforward and predictable; the one little twist was the identity of Olivia’s father, which I thought was a nice touch. None of the characters grow or change much as they march through this gothic tale; the point is to defeat the monster, not to explore anyone’s inner development.
The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, by Theodora Goss
Riffs on the fact that a lot of classic monster stories involve the creation, and subsequent destruction / abandonment, of a monstrous woman. After the death of her parents, Mary Jekyll digs into her late father’s affairs and discovers not just a previously unknown sister named Diana Hyde, but other women who were brought into being by famous fictional mad scientists. The women band together to make their way in the world, helping Sherlock Holmes and Watson solve a string of murders along the way. The writing was perfectly decent, but the plot felt really more like a way to string together all these related stories, and there were so many characters that none of them felt particularly fully-realized.
A Study in Scarlet Women, by Sherry Thomas
Nominally a take on the Sherlock story: under pressure to behave as a young woman of society, brilliant Charlotte Holmes uses the persona of Sherlock to solve mysteries and investigate suspicious deaths. I liked the pointed critique of the gender imbalance of the era, and how a woman would have had to jump through many more hoops to get the same kind of automatic respect and freedom that Holmes and Watson had; however, I found the rest of the plot rather contrived and thought it was unfortunate that for all her brilliance, Charlotte’s intuition was not essential to the resolution of the conflict.
Love-in-a-Mist, by Victoria Goddard
Book 5 of the Greenwing and Dart series finds our heroes forced to take shelter from the storm in a creepy old mansion, where the family of the local lord have gathered to compete for the inheritance, excuse me, I mean demonstrate their love and respect for their aging relative. Polite, barbed discussion of class and noblesse oblige ensue, and the reader will not be surprised when a dead body appears…. but there is also magic, mischief, young love, family secrets, and a baby unicorn. There’s one more in the series (so far), and Goddard has set up plot points so beautifully that someday I will have to go back and read them all again.
The Verifiers, by Jane Pek
I finally listened to an audiobook all the way through without falling asleep! I think this is actually due more to the strength of the narrator, Eunice Wong, who did an amazing job and colored the characters beautifully, than to the book itself which dragged a bit in parts. The protagonist is Claudia Lin, a lesbian Chinese-American New Yorker who works for a detective agency dedicated exclusively to verifying claims that people make on dating apps. She keeps a lot of secrets herself, namely from her mom (who is impatiently waiting for her to find a nice Chinese boy) and her siblings (who think she is still working at the finance job that her brother found for her). Claudia’s narration is peppered with literary and pop culture references, but that doesn’t save her from coming across as annoyingly naive; the mystery that should drive the book is confused and not terribly interesting. There’s a running theme of interrogating the lies we tell ourselves to attract the people we think we need, which gets a bit lost in the unnecessarily complicated plot. What really animated the story for me was Claudia’s interactions with her family; all the characters, as well as their simmering frustrations with one another, come alive in Eunice Wong’s reading, and I liked how their unique inputs ended up meshing with the mystery-solving plotline in the end.
The Anomaly, by Hervé Le Tellier
This book, about a planeload of passengers caught up in an anomalous event, took forever to get started. I swear the entire first half of the book was taken up in introducing a large variety of characters, each so different that it felt almost as if they were starring in a different style of book: the noir contract killer, the entertainment mag pop star, the family of a hair-trigger veteran, the depressed author, the couple growing apart, etc, etc; none of these had anything to do with the others except that they had all been on the same plane, and eventually FBI or Interpol or someone shows up to collect them. The second half segues into what happens with that plane, and how the event changes each of the lives of the passengers. It felt less like a novel than a philosophical thought experiment; even though Le Tellier did a good job bringing life to each of the characters, there were so very many of them that you really didn’t grow to care about any of them in particular.