BOOK REVIEW: The Case of the Curate by Mary Lancaster

 I received this book for free from Netgalley. That did not influence this review.

Mary Lancaster has a new Regency Mystery series, The Irreverent Clergyman. And while I’ll miss the previous series, Silver and Grey, I’m excited for this one. Book 1 is off to an excellent start.

The Case of the Curate introduces the intrepid Lady Ambrose (Kate) and a more-or-less reformed rake, now a curate, Mr. Rupert Grande. Kate is married to Sir Gilbert Ambrose, an up-and-coming Member of Parliament. She has been sent by him to the country-house party of Lord Chadbon, which is not so much a party as a gathering of politically active men, to use her charm to further his cause and that of her host. (He is unable to attend.) While there, she is surprised and delighted to discover her childhood friend, Rupert, in attendance. (He is only a substitute curate while the local vicar is ill.)

There is another woman present, an exceptionally pretty housemaid, who once had a fling with Rupert back in London. She’s in trouble, pregnant by a man who is too far above her to even consider marrying her. Rupert has promised to help her. But before he can, the maid is brutally murdered. Rupert is a relative stranger in town, whose aristocratic connections are not known. (He’s the son of a marquis, serving incognito.) So he rapidly becomes the prime suspect and is promptly arrested. Only Kate knows he could not possibly be guilty. She sets out to find the true murderer, which is much riskier than she anticipates.

These are two appealing protagonists, whose relationship is affectionate, nostalgic, and perhaps more. Lancaster brings them to life with her careful character development and credible relationship. The mystery is engrossing. I look forward to more in this series!

BOOK REVIEW: Switzy by Emma Cline

I received this book for free from Netgalley. That did not influence this review.

Switzy by Emma Cline is a gripping novel by the author of The Guest. Like The Guest, Switzy is unsettling. Readers with loved ones who suffer or suffered from dementia may find it triggering.

Cline is able to get inside the failing brain of David, a wealthy businessman who was once highly respected and an asset to an unnamed company. He was an important person. But now, he is necessarily accompanied everywhere by a hired male companion/keeper who navigates his memory lapses, wandering, and irrational flashes of irritability, anger, and paranoia with patience and understanding.

The pain in this extraordinary novel comes from David’s awareness of his advancing dementia and his efforts to say his last goodbyes to people to whom he was once close. But he finds he may not have been as significant to them as he thought. Did he lead a worthwhile life–this important person? Or not?

Cline does a remarkably empathetic job exploring the broken thoughts of a dementia sufferer in a way that is believable, beautifully written, heart-breaking, and terrifying. Highly recommended.

BOOK REVIEW: Whistler by Ann Patchett

I love it when a book lives up to the hype. I just finished Whistler by Ann Patchett and my heart was thoroughly warmed. This is a novel about a messy modern family, and people who are very good at life.

The protagonist, Daphne Fuller, is a high-school English teacher with a complicated backstory that includes an often-absent father (divorced from her mother when Daphne was young, and now deceased) and two stepfathers. She is very close to her sister Leda, but not so much to her much younger stepbrothers. She’s married to a wonderful, supportive older man. In her own middle-age, life is good. She experienced a significant, traumatic event in her childhood but is not traumatized. Her sister, a family therapist who now writes an advice column in the local paper, has unpacked her own trauma and is also happily married and well adjusted.

What throws them for a loop is the reappearance in their lives of stepfather #1, Eddie. Who is an editor for a big name publishing company. Daphne hasn’t seen him since she was nine. She had packed away the memory of him, despite the fact that they experienced a pivotal event together all those years ago. And despite the fact that he had been, for a very short period of time, the most stabilizing influence in her young life, and something of a soul mate.

The novel takes the reader back and forth in time to experience the modern day lives of the family as well as to circle around the pivotal event, yielding up the story little by little. No one has ever really talked about it, and everyone has a somewhat different view of what happened. Daphne and Eddie know best, but even they had no opportunity to discuss it afterward. And now, as they process it, all the feelings come out. It is remarkably healing.

And the story of Whistler the horse ties it all together.

Patchett writes people who are so interesting and so real that you wish you knew them. At one point, Eddie explains to young Daphne that the vast majority of people are inherently good. And when you read this, you can believe it.

BOOK REVIEW: Miss Morton Takes the Waters by Catherine Lloyd

 I received this book for free from Netgalley. That did not influence this review.

Miss Morton Takes the Waters is the fifth book in the Miss Morton Mysteries series. If you like cozy historical mysteries, or think you might, these novels are must reads. Although the mysteries stand alone, you should start with book one, Miss Morton and the English House Party Murder, to fully appreciate the relationships between the characters.

Miss Caroline Morton is a gentlewoman by birth, but upon her father’s death, she was shocked to learn of his financial misdealings which left her penniless. Her fiancé dropped her. Aristocratic friends turned their backs. Caroline, very practically, went to work. She found employment as a companion to a very wealthy but lowborn woman in trade, Mrs. Frogerton. Mrs. Frogerton is a courageous, nosy, businesswoman who appreciates Caroline’s good sense. In each of the novels, they come across murders and solve them.

The relationship between the two sets the tone. However, as Caroline is a young, unmarried, pretty woman, she attracts male attention, and by this novel, she has collected two suitors. One is a gruff physician who has helped with her solving cases in the past. The other is a highborn second son who works as an inspector, who has joined in the detecting from the professional side.

However, in this novel, Mrs. Frogerton is recuperating from the frightening and disheartening events of book 4. Concerned for her health, Caroline accompanies her to Bath, where they are to take the waters. They soon meet Bath regulars who are eager for new people and who are great gossips. While some are pleasant, there are also two older women who treat their servants badly and cause a good deal of general misery. At one get together, one of these women brings up “poisoned pen letters.” These are letters written to various members of their social circle threatening to expose something scandalous in their past. This is disturbing enough. Then, shortly, one of these women is found dead.

With a mystery to solve, Mrs. Frogerton perks up. This time, without the help of either Dr. Harris or Inspector Ross, Caroline and Mrs. Frogerton set to work.

These novels are well-paced, well-plotted murder mysteries. I look forward to each new release. Highly recommended!

BOOK REVIEW: Excellent Women by Barbara Pym

I love older books. My toppling-over TBR pile is crowded with new releases and books that were new releases but haven’t been read yet, but that doesn’t stop me from reaching for something timeless.

Which brings me to Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women. I’ve read a couple of her books in the past. They are quiet, charming, and funny. 

Excellent Women focuses narrowly on the first-person narrator, Mildred Lathbury. It is early in the post-WWII period. (The novel was written in 1952.) Mildred is a clergyman’s daughter who kept house for her father after her mother’s death. After his death, she moved to a small flat in Pimlico and attached herself to the Anglican church parish there. She is close friends with her neighbors, Father Julian Malory and his sister, Winifred, and very involved with the church. She also has a part-time job with the Society for Distressed Gentlewomen (or something like that.) She has an old school chum who she sees from time to time, who lives outside the city. And she is content with her peaceful yet busy life.

This is upended when new people intrude. First, Mrs. Napier moves into the empty flat in Mildred’s building. Mrs. Napier is the wife of a lieutenant currently stationed in Italy who is expected back in London soon. But Mrs. Napier is also an anthropologist who is enamored of another anthropologist, Everard Bone. The man comes and goes from her flat at odd hours, and Mildred hears sounds of argument that are unsettling. Even more unsettling is the husband’s return. Rockingham (Rocky) is handsome and charming, and turns Mildred’s head even as she recognizes that his charm is superficial and a weapon he uses on everyone. Everard is sincere but not at all charming. Mildred is drawn into the messy lives of this trio.

At the same time, the Malorys take a border, Mrs. Gray, a clergyman’s widow. She is a beautiful, take-charge type of woman who quickly catches Julian’s heart. When they become engaged, Mildred discovers herself pitied by the other church members as a rejected woman, even though she insists she’d never considered a match between her and Julian. It’s even worse for Winifred, who it appears will be relegated to an unwelcome third wheel.

As lives grow more complicated around her, Mildred considers the mysteries of love and attraction, but from a detached, lightly ironic perspective. She’s tired of being the person always relied upon to tidy the dishes of others and stand by with a ready cup of hot tea. On the other hand, this is who she is. She can’t help herself.

In the end, she misses her comfortable solitude. Spinsterhood is apparently not the tragedy it’s made out to be.

The novel is a delight.

BOOK REVIEW: Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

On a recent vacation, I finally got around to reading Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt. It is every bit as charming as its hype claims.

There are multiple points of view in the novel, one of which belongs to an octopus, Marcellus, who has spent most of his life in a tank in an aquarium. Being observant and very intelligent, Marcellus is aware that he is reaching the end of his lifespan. He approaches the end with a great deal of dignity. Drawn in as a reader, it was impossible not to empathize with this kind, sad, lonely creature.

But there were human viewpoints as well. Primarily, we meet Tova Sullivan, a widow who cleans the aquarium in the evenings and strikes up a relationship of sorts with Marcellus. Tova is meticulous in her work. She is also lonely, although she does have concerned friends. Tova is not only a widow, but she lost her only son many years earlier when he was just 18. He disappeared at work on a pier, and was eventually declared dead, likely a suicide. Tova is certain he did not kill himself. She accepts that he is dead. She just wishes she knew what really happened.

Another viewpoint is that of Cameron Cassmore. A lost young man, not quite so young anymore, Cameron is a classic case of failure to launch. He can’t hold a job and his closest friends are getting a bit tired of his impositions. He drinks too much and takes no responsibility for his failures. He blames it all on the fact that he never knew his father, and his mother, a drug addict, abandoned him, leaving him with his aunt. He is good-looking and can be charming, but I had a hard time warming to this character. I preferred the octopus.

At any rate, it is a lovely story of complicated relationships and a remarkably bright octopus determined to help a friend before he dies. (The octopus dies, not the friend.)

Now that I’ve read it and loved it, I may have to see the movie, despite my bias that the movies are never as good as the books.

Book Review: Before I Knew I Loved You by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Before I Knew I Loved You by Toshikazu Kawaguchi is the sixth book in the author’s series of stories about a magical coffeehouse where a person might be given the chance to go back (or, rarely, forward) in time. The series begins with Before the Coffee Gets Cold, but the books can stand alone.

There are very specific rules to this time travel. The travelers must sit in a special seat in the café, and while in the past, they cannot leave the seat. The voyage begins with a sip of specially prepared coffee and, most critically, before the coffee gets cold, they must drink it all and return to the present. Or else, ominously, they will not be able to fully return to the present.

Other rules include the conditions that they can only meet up with a person who had been in the coffeehouse at that particular time. And they have to accept that the visit will not change anything in the present. So who makes these journeys? Generally, it is people with specific regrets involving a particular person.

In this collection, the travelers are: 1) a young woman who treated her stepmother cruelly and wants to apologize, 2) a man waiting for the return of a junior high crush who could have been a sweetheart, 3) a woman with a cancer diagnosis who wants to travel to the future–to see if she’s still alive, and 4) a 14-year-old boy struggling with his father’s sudden death, who wants to see him one more time.

The stories are all bittersweet. What stands out is the kindness and concern shown by each of the café workers, customers, and time travelers. In a time of incivility, the civility of the characters may be the most magical ingredient of all.