Where Rupert Gets No Support

The Stranger Prince by Margaret Irwin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I saw a five-star review of this and a one-star review of this and I agreed with them both. I'm going with four stars, because the book pissed me off over and over and yet I liked it quite a bit.

It's a great story, and though she will try your patience, the author writes many amazing scenes, demonstrating a solid grasp of history, politics, the tactics and strategies of war, and the personalities of the various characters (real people) involved. Her writing tends toward the literary at all times, but when she's telling about a cavalry charge in a complex battle scene, the writing is remarkable.

The difficulty, the one that almost made me DNF about 1/3 in, is how her attention jumps from page to page, paragraph to paragraph, and even sentence to sentence. The focus is so scattered and diffuse that the reader has to scramble to keep up with the current topic. It sometimes feels like the novel is restarting again and again, as if everything before was prelude and throat-clearing, and now she's at last talking about the thing she really wanted to get to.

The thing is, I wanted to like it. So rather than DNF, I intentionally, consciously chose to let her tell the story in her distracted, shiny-object, ADHD, mind-wandering way, and though it was a challenge, the storytelling is so complete and satisfying in other ways I found myself really enjoying it.

Prince Rupert was the nephew of Charles I, and grew up on the continent, taking part in the unending wars there during the 17th century even as a teenager. He was well-liked, tall, capable, energetic, and war-like, literally raised to be a leader of men, and when he went to England, his aunt and uncle really took to him. When Parliament, with Puritan support, opposed the king and openly rebelled, Rupert was the king's best general. The story, as told here, was how Rupert was having great success and could have--and should have--won the war for him if only the king would have listened to him and not his detractors. There's a lot of useful history in here, though it feels like Margaret Irwin wanted to tell about Rupert more than what he did or what happened. Hard to say, TBH.

All in all--the author tells a great story and pens a fantastic novel despite having a sometimes frustrating style. I feel like that's fair. YMMV.

Recommended for readers looking to take a chance on books they've never heard of. You never know.

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Where Some People Do Some Stuff in a Place

Decipher by Stel Pavlou
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It was okay.

There are a thousand ideas in this book, from ancient civilizations to gravity wave science, from corporate greed to international diplomacy, from golems to ghosts, but they don't hold together all that well. Even though I happily read lots of fantasy and science fiction and pulp, I found the suspension of disbelief while reading this increasingly hard to maintain. Bunches of it--the parts under the pyramids in Giza and under the ice in Antarctica especially--seem a lot like the monumental ancient history stuff out of H.P. Lovecraft stories, and it just never really seems to work.

It's reasonably fun to read. It breezes along pretty well, not hard to digest, though there's just way too many scenes with people sitting around and talking about stuff they know about ancient civilizations and weird things in science, piecing together what's happening all over the world like Robert Langdon figuring out the Da Vinci code. It's meant to be useful exposition, but it's mostly nonsensical. They translate 12,000 year old writing by assuming it's Sumerian, and it works. That's kinda silly. In the end, I found it impossible to care very much about anyone in the story. I learned literally zero of the names involved. I just read what they said and did and didn't worry who was saying it, because it didn't really matter.

This sounds like a 2-star review, and that's slightly unfair. I gave it 3, because it had enough movement and "what's gonna happen?" interest for me to finish it. It was okay. It aimed for big ideas like Jurassic Park and fell short, IMO, but some readers will enjoy it.

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Where Joliffe Plays Detective

A Play of Isaac by Margaret Frazer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

My first book by this author, and I really liked it. Went back and forth on a score--4 or 5--because I bet I'll like others in the series even more, but why be cheap? It was a fun book, a pleasure to read, so let's give it all the points.

I've read more than a few mysteries set in medieval or renaissance times, and I find most of them are so dreary I can hardly get through them. I think that's intentional--the dreary part, not the "hardly get through them" part--but I don't like it. Maybe life was mostly dreary then, and this is, after all, a murder mystery, but it's not supposed to be a bad experience for the reader, IMO. It's supposed to be fun to read. And this one is.

Fun why, you ask. First, I generally liked the main characters, which include Joliffe and the others in the troupe. (I found the minor characters interesting and well drawn, too, FWIW.) They're not totally best buds, and so they bicker and annoy each other part of the time, but it's friendly enough, and they all look out for each other. They're pretty good people, too, or so it seems to me, with engaging backstories, though I didn't read the previous series where they showed up. In other words, I like to side with them and cheer for them. Second, the setting is well done, with the land, the town, the society, the economy, and pretty much all the details seemingly accurate. Anything out of place is beyond my knowledge. The story inhabits that setting in a way that I enjoy, kinda like when you have a really good diagram of a ship or something and you can say "Oh, that's how that fits together..." Scratches a brain itch. And third, it's a good mystery.

Joliffe and the troupe he's part of have a gig in Oxford for the Corpus Christi festival, and when they're kind toward a mentally challenged theater-loving young man, they get invited to his rich family's home (well, barn) to stay a few days and perform a little for the family and their get-togethers. A body is found outside the barn where they are camping, and though they aren't explicitly named as suspects, they know how precarious their position is, and Joliffe takes it upon himself to solve the mystery.

It's good stuff: good pacing, plenty of intrigue, no dry patches. Now that I know the characters, I'm eager to see more of their stories, as well as others by this author. Fingers crossed.

Recommended for those historical mystery readers like me who haven't already discovered these books.

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Where the Dowager Countess Takes a Chance

Remember When: Clarissa's Story by Mary Balogh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Here's another book I'm not exactly the audience for, but I enjoyed reading it. Quite a bit, actually. It was an entertaining story with some genuinely touching scenes.

Romance is not really my genre, though Jane Austen led me to Georgette Heyer novels (on the recommendation of some other Austen fans), and the fact that I liked those let me take a chance on this. Similar setting; similar social milieu. I bought the book on a whim because I made myself a deal--anytime I had to go in a drug store (not a frequent thing) I would try a book off the shelf. Last book was a Jack Reacher novel. I liked that too. In any case, I probably still won't read any modern-day romances soon, but I dig a good Regency story.

Clarissa, a well behaved rich girl, and Matthew, a bit of a misfit from a good family, were well-born neighbors, close friends as kids and teenagers, and though they might have been more than friends, Clarissa accepted an offer from the young Earl of Stratton that separated them and set the course of both their lives. Matthew wandered Europe and South Asia for a decade before returning to England to take up woodworking out of a rented room; Clarissa and her husband raised a family. Thirty years after they parted, with Matthew making tables and cribs and carving on the side, he's more working class than gentry, quietly content with his life, and she's a well-off widow with grown kids. But they take a chance on reconnecting, seeing if there's still some friendship to be had, and seeing how they both have changed.

With an understated conflict--there is one, but it's not that stressful--and fairly low stakes overall, it's a cozy romance (if I can use that term). However, there's still lots of interest, and a big part of the conflict is between Matthew and his estranged family. It becomes clear he has to sort that out before he can pursue a real romance. The scenes with his older brother and his family are very sweet, very touching, with a surprising emotional payoff. Nicely done.

It's romance. There is a happily ever after. It's not gonna fail you there. But it's a nice story getting to that point. Now I'm curious about this author's giant back catalog. Sheesh! I thought the prose was effective and appealing, usually signs of a thoughtful, careful writer, but she clearly writes at a freakish pace... Anyway, it works, so I'll try another.

This one is recommended.

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Where Wednesday Faces Darkness and Light

Wednesday: A Novelization of Season One by Tehlor Kay Mejia
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was very fun.

I'm not naturally a fan of dark-themed shows or the macabre, and I didn't really watch the show back in the day. (A little. The Munsters, too, a little. Wasn't a big thing for me.) But I felt like the TV did a good job of threading the needle between humor, macabre, camp, and mystery, creating a solid, entertaining show that honored its roots. I enjoyed the whole first season. And I think the novelization is, in some ways, even better.

Tehlor Kay Mejia does an excellent job of turning the shows and scripts into punchy prose with great pacing, and some of that can be attributed to the source material, for sure. But he also gives us Wednesday's interior monologue as the narrator, and her voice is perfectly captured, IMO. She's dark and funny and sardonic and brutal and just just barely caring. We get a perfect dead black rose with just a sprig of green, and I thought it was [chef's kiss]. The only thing I miss much is the cello and the dancing, which are hard to do in prose, but I think it was well-balanced by the revelations in Wednesday's own voice, page by page.

If you haven't seen the show, it's about Wednesday getting sent to Nevermore Academy, home to outcasts of all kinds, the school her parents attended. She doesn't care about fitting in, and makes friends and enemies without really trying--or allies and enemies, probably. There is a monster in the woods, randomly killing people in the area, and Wednesday gets involved, trying to solve the murders. She has to do this while navigating school, gossiping classmates, strange people in town, teachers and administrators who are split between helping her and controlling her, and Nevermore's own strange secrets. It's still a bit like a 60's sitcom, but it's a little more like modern dark academia.

The writer (adapter?) is primarily a YA author, and I would say that the book is aimed at a YA audience the most, but I'm an old, and I really enjoyed it. Highly recommended for fun people.

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Seventeenth Century Scammers

The ALCHEMIST by Ben Jonson "Classic Edition" by Ben Jonson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

With nothing but a few footnotes to help with the language, this is pretty tough going, but I still enjoyed it quite a bit. At 4 stars, I'm going a bit on a limb, with so many other people giving it a 3 or less while comparing it unfavorably with Shakespeare. But I found it witty and amusing. I would like to understand it better, for sure, but the scams and tricks are clever and the action tight enough to amuse a reader, considering always this is a 400 year old play, not a modern novel.

A wealthy homeowner is away for weeks, and while he's out, his servant is using the house to run several scams with a pair of partners: a man posing (pretty convincingly) as a competent alchemist, cooking up potions and pretending to know astrology, and a prostitute posing as a respectable woman. They've got a number of people on the hook, telling them they're getting closer all the time to finishing the long process of making a philosopher's stone, confusing them with fancy alchemical language, putting them off, while making them bring in fabrics, costly metal items (to turn to gold), tobacco, and actual money. The marks will want to get rich and do either good works (so they say) or sleep with lots of women. It's a long scam, and though they're pulling it off, the neighbors notice the strange comings and goings and at a couple people suspect they're being tricked. It looks like they might pull it off despite a whistleblower tricking them, but they get interrupted in their multiple scams when the homeowner comes back weeks early and learns what's happening from his neighbors.

There is a happy ending of sorts, on top of a pretty good skewering of scammers, puritans, ambitious men, and fools of all sorts. This is one I would like to reread with a study guide, and make more sense of it. (Also, I'd like a version that avoids my pet peeve--I hate books that only give the first three letters of character's name at every line. It doesn't work for my brain. I have to rehearse who is who over and over. Doll is 4 letters, but we print Dol? How much room does this save? How many pages? Can't we just put everybody's name?) A more thoroughly annotated copy would also help.

Still, as is, I liked it, and think people looking for other plays from Shakespeare's times would probably also enjoy it.

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Where Jane Saves Her Own Neck

Jane and the Barque of Frailty by Stephanie Barron
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I'm still on my second time through the Jane Austen mysteries, and I'm only loving them more.

I wasn't a mystery reader until I got hooked on this series, and I'm only now getting kinda good at it. There's a bit of genre savvy required to read them right, and I didn't have it at first. It's not just knowing that the first person pointed at probably isn't the murderer, like in a police procedural, or getting good at guessing who the culprit really is before it's revealed. (I'm not necessarily all that good at the latter, anyway.) There's also the ability to pay attention well enough that you know who people are, how they're related to each other, what their motivations are, which things they both know and which things only one of them knows, and where individuals were at different times during the course of the story. That stuff's hard once you have more than a tiny handful of characters. But you can get better at it, even if you have a notoriously faulty memory. (Also me.)

Agatha Christie takes this to extremes in some of her mysteries, especially the ones where the murder, the murderer, and all the suspects are isolated--and all the isolated people are suspects--on the Orient Express or at a summer home or on a ship down the Nile and it's Poirot's job to establish the movements of everyone involved down to the minute. (I guess people refer to these as closed circle mysteries or locked room mysteries.) That's more puzzle than story to me, and not as much my thing (though I have loved a few Agatha Christie novels), but it really does concentrate those analytical elements that a lot of mystery readers love. (I wonder if a modern detective in that sort of novel would benefit from using a spreadsheet...)

It's not quite that intense in this mystery or the series, and that's good IMO, because this is a lot closer to the feel I like, that of a Jane Austen novel of manners, with visits and balls and conversations over tea. There are family subplots and a larger, biographical arc stretched across all the books in the series, that give it more interest to me. In this novel, we have a little scandal among great lords and ladies in London, with a Russian princess making a spectacle of herself because of her apparent love for Lord Castlereagh just hours before she's found dead near his front door. The story involves other kept women and prostitutes of various degrees--here charmingly referred to, at times, as a "Barque of Frailty," (hence the title)--in a way unlike actual Austen novels. But it's refreshing more than anything else. The real Jane gave us a narrow worldview, the type allowed in novels at the time, but Stephanie Barron lets us see a broader cross-section of Regency England, a bit more of real people, and it's like having a brain itch scratched. I like it.

Jane herself (the character) becomes a suspect when she and her SIL are given some jewels to sell for a friend that turn out to come from the murdered princess. It becomes even more important that she solve this crime than others, because it's her neck this time, and for plot reasons they don't tell anyone about it.

Beautifully written. Well researched. Lots of interesting characters. It's still 5 stars to me, and if I kept better track of the characters and their movements this time, well, I guess I'm still learning. Recommended.

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