reading lately: July roundup

My July reads are a bit lopsided in genre, with so much mystery/thriller (could even put one of my literary/contemporary fiction books partly in that category) - partly as these can be good beach reading, and partly as library holds came in all in a row. Might have affected my opinion of a couple to have read them so close together, as they were a bit hit-or-miss, but a couple of them are worth adding to your beach bag... Best books of the month though are all about England - a novella about the Queen getting into reading, and a Pride & Prejudice retelling centered on the overlooked sister, Mary.

Literary/contemporary fiction

The Uncommon Reader: Chasing down her misbehaving corgis on a walk around the Buckingham Palace grounds one day, the Queen encounters a mobile library parked nearby, and when she steps aboard to apologize for the dogs' barking, she feels obliged to check out a book, despite not being much of a reader. This starts a whole new relationship with literature as she discovers the joys of reading, both for pleasure and for educating herself in new ways. But much as she loves her new hobby, the way it takes her attention (not to mention the way it changes her outlook on her role as monarch and develops a new sort of empathy she hadn't known before given her rarified role) starts to be rather a nuisance for the palace staff, the Prime Minister, and her husband... This is a book (novella, actually) for bookish people - people who would delight in coming across a mobile library, people who enjoy the various real-world figure literary references and nods (both classic and contemporary) sprinkled throughout a narrative, people who buy into the power of reading. These are people who will also be amused by the premise of the Queen starting to shirk her duties because all she wants to do is get back to her book - and these are people who will be completely charmed by this version of the queen and will close the book with a little chuckle after that most *excellent* final line. In terms of wit and charm and observations about the power of literature and the impetus to share it, this reading experience reminded me a lot of Parnassus on Wheels, the little volume that inspired the name of Ann Patchett's Nashville bookstore. It is also a delight, and also short enough to read in one sitting like this one, so pick that up too if you haven't yet! Alan Bennett is a well-known literary figure in England, I'm sure, but I was not really familiar with him until reading the delightful memoir-in-letters Love, Nina, in which the author recounts her time working as a nanny for the deputy editor of the London Review of Books - which puts her into such interesting literary circles (my review here). One of their neighbors is Alan Bennett, and she often mentions his coming over for dinner or other occasions, and he comes off as such an interesting figure. I pictured a bit of David Sedaris in my head (whether that is anywhere remotely true) with his droll comments and diverting observations and various quirks. So when I came across this little novella with his name on it while browsing Blackwell's during a work trip to England earlier this summer, I had to bring it home - and what a perfect little souvenir it turned out to be! Will be passing along to all of my bookish life loving friends and family now. ★★★★★

Night Objects: I went into this book pretty blind – I had put it on my to-read list as a mystery, but I didn’t know much beyond that. In some ways a book like this is best without knowing too much, so you can see how it will unfold, but I will pass along two crucial things that would have set my expectations appropriately: (1) Lenny, the main character, who narrates the story looking back as an adult on this time during her teens, is a girl. This somehow took me a good 10% of the book to realize (I must have missed something), and that threw me off. (2) There is a mystery element, but this is not the driver of the plot. I’d characterize this as dark academia, as the main setting is a boarding school where Lenny starts in her junior year of high school, and though she is a “nobody” with none of the wealth and family connections of most of her classmates, and one of the few brown students at that, she is tapped to join the school’s chapter of a secret society. We know through the occasional chapters labeled as “after” that are interspersed throughout the book that something tragic has occurred, and in the “before” we gradually build up to this throughout the first semester and a half of the school year. The dark academia part and secret society definitely gave me If We Were Villains and Secret History vibes, but there’s also a strong coming-of-age thread as well as a fish-out-of-water element with how Lenny doesn’t fit in well at the school, which made me think of Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep. Overall well written and definitely engaging, though maybe a better moody fall read than a beach read when you go on vibes. The decisions of these teenagers made me crazy at times; I think that’s kind of the point, seeing how lack of experience, wanting to fit in, social pressures, grief, adults turning blind eyes, etc. can wreak havoc. But still it made me a bit squirmy at times that stuff they were getting into, and the initiation type stuff, so even though well written I just couldn’t quite connect with the characters and fully immerse – that’s a me thing, and I think people who like the above mentioned books should definitely check this one out. ★★★.75

Mystery/thriller

Three Reasons for Revenge: Sydney detective Judith Lee usually works on murder cases, but a young woman who comes into the station to report an assault requests to speak with Judith specifically, and Judith is brought back to years earlier when she interviewed a young woman with an extremely similar accusation. Judith feels compelled to bring the perpetrator to justice, but when she goes to follow up, the young woman has disappeared without a trace. Meanwhile, 3 different people, apparently unconnected, receive identical unmarked packages to their homes - a psychologist married to a prominent television presenter, a wealthy socialite designer, and a struggling single father - each with a cryptic note and contents that will blow up their lives and relationships. Judith has to use all of her smarts, and convince the powers-that-be of her seemingly wild theories, to connect all the dots among all of these things and make sure that the right person is brought to justice. I first came to Dervla McTiernan through her Cormac Reilly detective series, which I would say are good comps for fans of Jane Harper and Tana French; her more recent books have read as more psychological mysteries/thrillers, still with that depth of character, not a run-of-the-mill thriller, so this new release feels like a bit of a departure, going more toward that standard thriller category. Not a category that often works great for me - but this one did, because it combines detective procedural with psychological thriller. I really like the structure and investigative aspect that a detective book brings, and drawing me in even more, this one had a sympathetic main female detective, who is dealing with the prejudices of her workplace along with some baggage from her past - not to mention a secret she's keeping from her boss about her past experience with someone involved in the current case. Classic self-destructive streak for a fictional detective... and though the characterization in this way, along with the descriptive writing style, can feel pretty "genre", McTiernan mixes it up with chapters that look at the various regular people who are drawn into this case and the psychological effects on them. They are seemingly unconnected at first, but the threads start to come together for Judith and the reader at the same time. The twist comes a bit early as Judith figures out the culprit, but then it gets a bit more page turner-y as she has to figure out how to actually track that person down. Going into it with the right genre expectations, I came out quite satisfied with my reading experience - good summer selection! ★★★★

The Secret Lives of Murderers' Wives: I'd call this a (fictional) true-crime + historical fiction mashup: In 1960s California, Beverley, Elsie, and Margot are not women who likely would have crossed paths and become friends, but they are united by their particular life experiences - all were married to now-convicted serial killers. They all have their own ways of dealing with the public + personal life fallout and the feelings of betrayal/self-doubt that come with finding out such horrible things about their husbands, but they figure out a way to channel it: when they hear news of multiple young women ending up as murder victims, in ways that seem to indicate different MOs, their lived experience and understanding of the mind of a serial killer leads them to connect the dots before the police do. The police of course won't listen to a trio of housewives, so they decide that it's time to do some amateur sleuthing... Reading this reminded me a bit of Meet the Newmans - albeit not my favorite read, and doesn't have the crime element, but it has the setting similarity, and the plot/theme similarities of a woman finding her way in a man's world when her husband is no longer there as the one "in charge", along with the theme of the power of female friendship and/or cooperation to empower and make stuff happen. And though I wouldn't compare it in terms of overall quality, I made similar mental comparisons to Lessons in Chemistry for those reasons, and also for how it dealt with a serious issue in a tone that overall made the reading feel light. I'd say if you liked those reads, this could be a good fit. I definitely had some quibbles - some of the attitudes/comments seemed a bit anachronistic, and I'm not sure there was a single male character who was portrayed as a normal human (if not murderers, the rest are sleazes or misogynists, etc.) But if you want to lean into a bit of feminine rage in women taking matters into their own hands to keep themselves safe from both predators and society's restrictions on their abilities and autonomy - and if you're willing to go along with the idea of soooo many serial killers operating at ones, and the idea of 3 housewives coming up with criminal profiling several years before this was a real FBI thing, I found overall it was an enjoyable, easy reading experience for something a bit different in terms of the era and the framing of a crime novel, centering on the families of the killers. ★★★.25

Someone Else's Husband: I've enjoyed Kimberly McCreight's previous work for the legal procedural aspects (she's a former lawyer); she has scratched that itch I sometimes have for a smart mystery/thriller, so I'm always interested to see what she has out next. This latest one was a great read to breeze through on a long flight and pass the time quite satisfactorily, but admittedly not super memorable in that when I arrived home and went to write this review I had to look back at what the book is actually about... so if you're in the market for vacation reading, this could be it, but if you're in the mood for legal thriller that feels like it has a bit more depth/makes you really think about issues like marriages/relationships, I'd go back to earlier work by McCreight, especially A Good Marriage. In this book, we have Gretchen, a wealthy New Yorker in her 50s who devoted her life to raising her family and supporting her husband's investment banker career; in contrast, we have Frankie, an artist in her 30s who is about to launch a career-making exhibition. The "someone else's husband" is Gretchen's husband of decades, Richard, who by all accounts seemed devoted and loyal, until shockingly the police show up at his door with questions and accusations related to Frankie's murder. Richard and Frankie met on a recent climbing expedition to Mt. Kilimanjaro, where the group bonded over a tragedy that occurred - but did something more than bonding happen between the two of them? And in the midst of all of this, can Gretchen maintain her belief that she's the only woman Richard has ever loved, and that he would never hurt anyone? I appreciated that the wealthy "good wife" scenario, the "good old boys" scenario and the "other, younger woman" scenario weren't entirely same-old, but were used to look a bit at these types of situations and assumptions that come with them. It's not super fast-paced, though it has some domestic thriller elements, but relies a bit more on the character development, as well as the mystery of what exactly was the tragedy that occurred on the Kilimanjaro climb and how that relates to what might have happened to Frankie after arriving home. It has some nuance, but it's still pretty commercial type fiction, more about the suspense and possible love triangle tension than real depth in characters and themes. Still, a good thriller-lite type of beach read that has some twists but nothing bonkers that will give you the ick or the eye-rolls. ★★★.5

Summer's Never Over: A dual-timeline thriller set at a summer camp where secrets are being peeled back sounded promising for beach reading - like a more fast-paced God of the Woods, one would hope. But unfortunately it turned out to be one of those books that I was kind of mad I finished... If you see this new release around, you should know going in: the pacing is a bit spotty, none of the characters feel very real or sympathetic, and one of the twists relies on a total personality about-face in one of the peripheral characters, which feels a bit of a cheat to me. But what was even more of a struggle is that the main character is around 21 years old when tragedy strikes at the well-regarded Georgia summer camp that her family runs, leading to the death of a fellow counselor and close friend - so she is unsurprisingly kind of immature and selfish in her actions and decisions in this timeline. But then the "now" timeline is only 5 years later, when the camp is about to re-open and she comes back to her old home for the first time for the kickoff weekend. - and she comes off as just as immature and selfish. I found it hard to care about the twists and turns as I had no investment in the protagonist. ★★

Historical fiction

The Other Bennet Sister: I have read quite a variety of Pride & Prejudice retellings/adaptations - with a  modern rom-com setting, with a mystery element, an Afro-Latino YA twist, and more. The only one I've read before with a new framework for the same Austen-ian setting was Longbourn by Jo Baker, which retells the story with a focus on the household staff; while I liked it, I admit that I've been a bit partial to the "fun" versions, until my mom handed me this selection. The first section of The Other Bennet Sister reframes Mary's story within the well-known P&P plot, showing how being the "ugly duckling" compared to her sisters might have affected her confidence and self-regard, and how the lonely life of being constantly verbally torn down by her mother and virtually ignored by her father, of being in the middle of two peas-in-a-pod sets of sisters, could have led her to trying to find her place in music practice or in books, leading to our perceptions of her as pedantic and a total social-misfit. Mary knows her prospects for marriage are slim to none, while her sisters are all in the process of achieving their mother's and society's definition of life success in this regard, and she has an understandably low estimation of her own worth in this world. With a new, more empathetic perspective on Mary in place for the reader, the next sections of the book occur in the years after P&P, when the oft-discussed but never quite expected death of Mr. Bennet arrives and the estate is indeed entailed away to Mr. Collins. Mary has to contend with her status in a world where a woman can only make her own way via marriage; without a parental home to live in, her situation feels precarious and dependent on others. As she spends time in the households of various sisters and relations, she sees varying examples of married relationships and for the first time as an adult disconnects from the rational side she has forced herself into and examines her feeling side, imagining a life and a relationship that she yearns for. It's so very human - this desire to be seen and known and valued - and portrayed compellingly through this usually overlooked character. Another thing this reframing made me think about was how in stories written both past and present, we expect our heroines to be beautiful, or if not, have charm and wit to make them shine; I appreciated putting Mary at the center without trying to "improve" her in either of these ways, but instead to help the reader consider how we make our own happiness, and how we can use the "story" we tell ourselves about our worth to build a life (even in the constraints of society). Mary feels like such a real and nuanced character, with the conflicting feelings and behaviors we all have, and I rooted hard for her. Naturally this book best suited for fans of P&P given the setting and the pace of the narrative, and of course the references to the original; the characters we know well feel like the Austen ones, even when they're given new lines/scenarios, and since we don't know Mary as well from the original, her character development in this book doesn't feel incongruous. Could be quite enjoyable for people who like historical fiction though even if they don't know P&P well - the setting feels really rich. It's fairly slow-paced and quite character driven, and I sometimes felt the length of the almost 500 pages, but overall what an enjoyable read. ★★★★.5

The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion, vol. 2: Vol. 2 of this historical fiction/diary/period rom-com/quirky magical realism mashup series was even more delightful than Vol. 1, now that I am fully immersed in this world - the returning characters are like old friends now (even if some of them are Emma's nemeses, like ridiculous cousin Archibald and drill sergeant Aunt Eugenia), and I loved the new characters too. For someone who is trying to figure out how to make it in life as an independent woman in 1883, Emma sure has some potential love interests, from the slightly enigmatic local vicar to the broody lodger who moves into Lapus Lazuli Minor to the young duke who has an unexpectedly interesting personality (and some friction with Emma that sure could turn out to be flirtation) to the gentleman who was a childhood tormenter but who in adulthood has turned out to be devastatingly handsome and a real friend. Can't wait to see how things develop with all of them, not to mention Emma's finances after cousin Archibald frittered away her inheritance, and Emma now has to scheme how to keep the household afloat if she doesn't want to get stuck living with dreadful relations for the rest of her life. This series is for fans of Bridgerton and/or Masterpiece period dramedies, but think the *cozy* version of these (cozy as in being complete comfort reading/listening and quite PG; however, they've still got enough cheek and charm and even emotional depth to keep from being too light or pedestrian). Admittedly, the covers put me off when I first saw the books showing up in my Goodreads feed - even if they do fit the Victorian era setting, they don't scream "quality writing" to me, so I'm so glad I heard a couple of specific recommendations for these and decided to try. Dove right into Vol. 3 after finishing, and still going with audio as the most delightful method. The narrator is great. ★★★★★

The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion, vol. 3: Again, these (fictional) journals of a young lady living in a quirky neighborhood in 1880s London prove to be delightful. In this two months of her life, Emma writes about some comedically frustrating things in her neighborhood (a hunt, in which she has to pair up with her horrible old cousin Archibald, for clues to win exclusive tickets to the neighborhood’s annual Julius Caesar production), she shows her bookish side even more (the whole caper to rescue a bootleg copy of Jane Eyre from the locked desk of the headmistress at Emma’s alma mater, so that the girls at the school can continue to have clandestine access to it, plus discussions of Emerson with the “tenant”), she continues to attract the attention of several young men, to the chagrin of crochety Aunt Eugenia, who see her for who she is in all of her clever and cheeky and charming personality. And we even get more depth of character, as she reveals more about her love who was lost to war, and learns more about the realities of war from the war photography of her tenant, leading to some truly poignant moments. I found a couple of the plots a little mad-cap, but overall am still so charmed that I didn’t mind, especially because the author did a good job of mixing up the emotions from the capers and witticisms to the developing emotional depth of Emma’s friendships. ★★★★.5

Young Adult

The Hazel Wood: Somewhere along the way this book ended up on my to-read list, I think because I had heard it suggested as a good fantasy selection for someone who doesn't typically read fantasy (?) - and I was intrigued because of the bookish angle, being about a young woman, Alice, whose mother is the estranged daughter of reclusive author who published a cult-classic book of dark fairytales that's so difficult to find a copy of now that Alice hasn't even read it. And I liked that it was grounded in a real-world setting, with a fantasy element hidden in the real world that the protagonist discovers and learns about right along with the reader - that's the way for me to read fantasy. However, this book is really more for people who like fairy tales or fairy tale retellings. As someone who doesn't really care about fairy tales, I had trouble being interested in this story, and honestly I felt kind of lost with the "hinterland" supernatural world where the stories are set (but turns out to be a real thing). The style felt pretty YA, which is fine, but the teenage angst combined with the convoluted fairy tale world made this one not for me. Also, afterward I realized that it's kind of an Alice in Wonderland retelling; I don't know that much about the original, but it might have set a better expectation for me in knowing that. (Or maybe I wouldn't have picked it up at all... not exactly a devotee of Alice in Wonderland type settings or stories.) ★★.75

DNFs

The Adults: I picked up the debut novel from Alison Espach after loving her more recent two books. This looked to have elements that made me love her 2nd book - Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance - the coming of age of a teenage girl amidst family upheaval, written with wry, observational humor, with a nostalgic 90s setting. But after getting about 20% of the way into this one, all I could think is that I was glad I hadn't started my relationship with this author with this book, because then I might not have wanted to pick up her others... I just didn't find the warmth here that goes along with the sarcasm/depression/coping of the characters in Espach's other books. Teenager Emily's narrative voice is snarky and bored and does not match the whimsicality of the cover at all. Was liking, not loving it, and waiting for some improvement as Emily got older, but when when an inappropriate relationship started between her and her teacher, I was out. This was disappointing, but I definitely still stand by my recommendations of Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance and The Wedding People.

So Old, So Young: At first I thought it was kind of like the excellent Netflix series The Four Seasons in being a window into the life of a group of college friends at a few different points throughout their relationships (in the series, different trips they take together, in this book, different parties they are at throughout the years - a college party, a wedding, etc.). I guess it was kind of like it in format, but not at all in charm or humor. It was hard to keep track of the characters, for one thing - I think side characters got too much attention, so it was hard to keep track of who was actually the core group whose story I was supposed to be invested in - and there seemed to be so much animosity at times, or just veneer of friendship rather than actual relationship. Then the drinking and casual drug use. I could see it in their college and early 20s years, but when they didn't put it away as they aged it made characters I already didn't really like feel like they weren't maturing, and I couldn't bring myself to really care about them enough to continue beyond about 30% of the book.

The Lowe Job: this sounded like it would be a fun and fresh family dramedy satirizing the way people use social media and/or scandal to manufacture personal celebrity, and providing snappy social commentary on expectations of women, double standards, etc. The characters were maybe written to be dislikeable - they are taking an inappropriate sexual relationship and purposefully exploiting it to their own gain, so manipulation is built in to the premise, after all - but I did not like the voice at all. Cannot understand why it had a comparison to Margot's Got Money Troubles in the publisher's blurb (something that admittedly drew me in) because the characters here are all spikes and hard edges where the characters in Margo have quirk and warmth. That lack of heart to offset the snark meant I didn't make it far in. Another Book-of-the-Month selection that was a total miss, in my opinion - really glad I tried it from the library rather than making it my June choice!