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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Where Kit Outsmarts Everyone. For Awhile.

A Tip for the Hangman: A Novel by Allison Epstein
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a very well written book, with excellent research, a well-developed Elizabethan setting, memorable characters, and great pacing.

Yes, Christopher Marlowe probably was a spy. This is a fictional account of that, but it feels like it could be true. (The author lists in the back the ways she diverged from literal truth. I was not concerned.) It's gritty and tough, but there's also tenderness and genuine human emotion. Kit is a great character, and I loved rooting for him, but he didn't do himself any favors at times... He's super smart, a brilliant writer but also an amazing mind, capable of deciphering nearly unbreakable codes, and learns how to keep his secret life and his public life separate. He's a bit of a hothead, willing to antagonize people who he shouldn't, and I only wish he had been a little wiser. Still, it feels that the outcome (both in real life and in the novel) was in a way inevitable. Once the state sees potential in a spy, there's no way he could be free to just live his life. And no way could he ever be truly safe.

I had never looked at his history before, and I was surprised to see that he was from a working class family, attending Cambridge on a scholarship. That's pretty cool. I wonder if it explains the tone of his plays--though the author attributes that to his experience with religion and some other things. Now I want to reread them, see if I can see the poor man's son in his language.

This novel works as a straightforward historical spy novel, but the prose is special. I seldom notice language, but the writing here--the figurative language, sophisticate musings, and prose at the sentence level--are all first class. I enjoyed it a lot and highly recommend it.

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Where Jason Gets Everyone Else to Steal the Golden Fleece

The Voyage of Argo by Apollonius of Rhodes
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Like a lot of ancient books, this is more interesting as a cultural artifact or as a historical curiosity than as a fun rainy-day read. It's fairly interesting; it connects things you know from one place to things you know from another; it's an education on ancient Greek customs; and it's a box to check on the big Literature Checklist in my imagination.

I don't mind the style. I feel like the author, Apollonius of Rhodes, reads more modern than many ancient authors (though that could be due to the translation). He gives us a complete picture of action, dialogue, and inner thoughts and states, keeping these in better balance than I would have expected had I given it any thought. He keeps the plot moving forward while giving us a pretty good idea of what the main characters are feeling. The story isn't that great; it's primarily a bunch of dudes nearly getting killed as they try to steal a prized item, but they survive and succeed in their caper by getting helped out time and time again by the gods, by nymphs, by allies, and by anyone but themselves. It's deus ex machina all over the place.

But it comes from myth, and myths don't follow the rules of fiction.

Anyway, this is modestly entertaining and reasonably worth the effort it take to read it. It's not all that long or difficult. It ends with Jason returning home, before he betrays Medea and she kills their children. Maybe that all happens in the sequel.......

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Where Suleiman Can't Trust Anyone

Suleiman the Magnificent - Sultan of the East by Harold Lamb
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I love Lamb's historical retellings/novels/life stories/biographies, but this one is a little less dazzling. It starts great, but it gets less and less compelling through to the end. Still pretty good, still pretty easy and pleasant to read, and worth the time, but not as fun as others.

Lamb writes hybrid books, ones that could be novels or biographies or something else, and I like the novel type most. This starts that way and then slowly turns into a biography. The last 30 pages are about developments after Suleiman's death, which was the hardest and densest part to get through. but for that part, I would have probably given this a 4.

Lamb does an amazing job popularizing the history of figures and places that are usually given too little coverage in American history classes and media, and I give him a ton of credit. His research and writing are excellent. I definitely learned a lot about Suleiman and the way the Ottoman Empire expanded and threatened Europe during his lifetime. It answers a lot of questions I had about that time period. And, as always, it's a pretty good read.

I just feel like this book, if he had novelized it a bit more, made it a little more like some other biographical novels of his I've enjoyed more, it would have worked better. As a biography, it's fine.

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Where Ryland Goes Way Out of His Way

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

You've probably heard that this is a good book. Tons of Booktokers and Booktubers have all said so. They're so right. It's really good. I usually read a few pages a day from a book (well, 20--it's my normal chunk) but I read the whole thing in a couple days. It's the fastest I've read anything in ages, because it's too fun to set aside.

The world might be dying; a worldwide effort to crew a starship and find a solution sends our MC to one of the closer stars, where most of the story takes place. Like The Martian, this is both a hard science fiction book (with accurate physics and science in general) and very funny book (like a John Scalzi SF novel), but it's also about character and important themes and deep ideas.

And it's super fun.

No need for a synopsis with spoilers. You've probably either read the book or run across the spoilers already, but if not I'm not gonna mess with it. If you like reading books, especially science fiction, it's very unlikely you won't love this. Sweet, funny, tough, touching, exciting, terrifying--it's all in there. Too good a book not to give my highest recommendation.

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