Where Emily Saw Something Nasty in the West Chamber

The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I found this entertaining and interesting, even surprising, and the language is often striking and sometimes beautiful. As a big fan of old timey Romantic poetry, I can get behind the descriptions of waterfalls and mountains and raging rivers hidden away on trails frequented by bandits. (I couldn't make myself read the poems scattered here, though, where she rhapsodizes on wind and nightfall or whatever.) And the gothic stuff, with many towers and dangerous castles and the like, has got a great vibe. I'd say the vibe was the heart of the book and probably the best reason to read it still.

I won't say that it's generally fun like a modern mystery or bestseller type novel. It is sometimes, but most of the time it is slower than that, and needs to be approached differently (if you want to enjoy it, I mean). This is like if Jane Austen had a baby book with Bram Stoker, or George Eliot with Sir Walter Scott, where we have both action of a sort and a novel of manners. It's like a roller coaster that goes really slow, or a slow-burn romance that spends most of the middle on a different story, one that's all gothic and no romance. : ) It's not a rollicking read, but it does supply some decent action, some maybe-ghosts, a couple dollops of romance, and a bunch of intrigue. I'm okay with the mix.

It could, however, be about half as long without missing anything. We get virtually the same scene over and over--the same reflections, the same conversations, the same fainting spells. This is why I think it's rather like a really, really, really long song. It has a bunch of verses that are pretty similar, with about a dozen choruses that repeat every few pages. (Valancourt asks if he has any hope with her; she tells him he must go. Over and over.)

To sum up the plot--Emily is sent to live with an uncaring aunt when her parents die, where she falls in love with Valancourt, and soon the aunt marries a very scary Italian guy, Mantano. Then Emily is dragged away with them, first to Venice and then to the famous Castle of Udolpho, where much of the spooky, frightening stuff happens. All along, her aunt's new husband is terrifying, and we eventually realize he's hooked up with bandits and criminals and is probably a murderer. Emily's aunt dies, leaving her totally alone in a castle in the wilderness, and Mantano presses her to sign over all of her inherited lands and holdings, threatening her. Emily fears he will kill her either way, but she does eventually sign the papers. All of these actions happen over hundreds of pages of repeated conversations, repeated threats, and nearly identical inner monologues. If the author could have cut out the repeated stuff, we could have had a much trimmer book. Alas.

There's a lot of Scooby Doo type mysteries with non-supernatural explanations, but there are also many genuine life-threatening dangers, so the stakes are real here even if the ghosts aren't. There are also wild, long-held family secrets that get squeezed out over the course of the novel. And the love story is a good model for a lot of later novels, with misunderstandings and rash judgments, and--spoiler... skip ahead a few lines if you don't want to see... still a spoiler coming... here it is--the happy ending that we got was almost a surprise to me. I liked it.

I found this well worth reading. I was disappointed I couldn't find a hardcover copy for a reasonable price (like on eBay) and finally had to read it from a paperback. I wonder if there's a movie.

If you read Jane Austen and are curious about the various horrid books and overwrought gothic novels they talk about in Northanger Abbey, take a look at this one. You might enjoy it. I liked it enough to go track down some of the others.

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Where Tobie Sees Bad People

The Babylonian Codex by C.S. Graham
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I'm bummed there are only three of these. I guess they didn't totally catch on, but I found these mysteries very entertaining, and I like the characters. Some other reviewers didn't love them; that's fine. They worked for me. And the pacing is great, especially compared to the other books I'm slowly working my way through. The author (by whichever name she's using at the moment) is very good at making a thriller with exciting action that keeps you reading.

The hook in the series is the "remote viewing" that October can do, seeing things at a distance, maybe even out of time. It's not quite reliable, giving hints of nefarious activities going on without giving every detail needed to put a stop to it. It takes Jax and a few of his buddies to do the sleuthing and world traveling to track down the people doing the bad thing (here, it's political assassinations) before they get away with it. I'm enjoying how Jax is coming around on the ability Tobie has, starting to trust her more. A fourth book would have been awesome.

Sometimes when I read airport thrillers/beach reads/ bestsellers, I don't care too much about the characters, and the "exciting" part just falls flat. That happens even with big names, even when I'm actively trying to enjoy them. But I always connect with Candace Proctor's characters and want to know what's going on, what's in the next chapter. She's written a bunch of books, but I wish she could write twice as many. Alas.

Anyway, I came here from the regency mystery series she wrote. I still like those more, but these were almost as good, IMO. Recommended.

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Where Witgood Tricks Everybody

A Trick to Catch the Old One by Thomas Middleton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the first Thomas Middleton play I've read, and it's okay. A little up and down. Parts of it are quite entertaining, and it's not too hard to understand (comparatively speaking), but a lot of the action is annoying and hard to get behind, so started off by giving it a 3. However, I'm talking myself into a 4 as I review the story and realize it's pretty good, actually. :)

A young man--Witgood--has been messing around, wasting money gambling and paying for prostitutes, and just generally being irresponsible. His rich uncle (Uncle Lucre) has taken advantage of him when he needed a loan instead of helping him out and has taken control of his property. (Before the play, even.) I'm not sure how he did that, but it's part of the setup. But through the course of the play, Witgood gets his property back, has his debts wiped out, marries a good girl, and foists his prostitute/mistress off on his uncle's worst enemy, another usurer named Hoard. It's all tricks; they make everyone think that the courtesan is actually a rich heiress, and from that point just let all the greedy gold-diggers drive the action.

I was put off by the attitude everyone took toward the poor woman who had been Witgood's mistress. She's clearly a decent person, seems very kind, and yet she's spoken of as if she's monstrous. Witgood, who we are meant to be very sympathetic to, helps her out by setting her up with a husband, but Lucre is a horrible person. It's treated like a great joke on the greedy old man, but I'm imagining the poor girl having to be stuck with him. Witgood, meanwhile, has moved on from her to another girl who he marries, because you don't marry your mistress, right? One of Lucre's friends, invited to his wedding feast, is furious when he recognizes his wife and starts to leave like everyone else. As he's going, he says to Lucre:

"Fie, fie! A man of your repute and name!
You'll feast your friends, but cloy 'em first with shame."

Anyway, I get it. That's the attitude of the time. Can't really blame the author. But their hate toward one of the few sympathetic characters in the play was kinda shocking. (She very carefully never lies to Lucre. She says she has no money or property. He just thinks she's being secretive and doesn't believe her. In the end, it's his greed, not her statements, that makes the scheme work.)

The tricks were good, getting revenge on greedy money guys, getting Witgood out of trouble and setting his mistress up for life (hoping, I suppose, that the rich old guy she tricked into marriage doesn't last long). There are happy endings all around. Pretty solid story, all told.

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Where Gideon Tracks Down the Villain

Gideon Smith and the Mechanical Girl by David Barnett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I liked this quite a bit. Good fun. Great plot. Almost a 5 star for me. 4 for sure--making me wish we could give half-points.

I've tried and been soured on a lot of steampunk, and this one works much better than most of the ones I've read. Some steampunk is so quirky and outlandish it feels like it's a satire on the genre and a reaction to it rather than an actual example of the genre, and I was glad not to feel that with this book. The main character, Gideon Smith, is very real, very natural, an excellent protagonist with both strengths and weaknesses who wants to be heroic but has doubts. He's neither too incompetent nor too amazing, making it easier to see him as a plausible main character. He isn't a cartoon or caricature like so many other steampunk heroes seem to be.

Same with the genre stuff--the science and weird inventions are fun but not over the top. They are important to the plot and the action, but it doesn't feel like the author is trying to up the ante all the time, as if weirder is better.

In other words, the author uses his steampunk setting and steampunk hero and steampunk conventions to tell a story that emerges naturally enough that I don't have to accept weirder and weirder stuff as real. It feels like we're taking all of it seriously starting at page one and then just enjoying an imaginative story.

Gideon is a fun hero. He's not super and he's not perfect and he starts a little naive, but he's also not an idiot or a loser. He's a pretty regular person who happens to have more interest in helping people than most others. In this story, some people in his town, including his dad, are killed by supernatural creatures, and Gideon takes it on himself to figure out what's happening and stop it. He brings other adventurers along, mostly people a little bit jaded and tired who are galvanized by his attitude and his determination to make a difference. He falls in love with the mechanical girl in the title, and when she's kidnapped and taken to Egypt, he has to follow, and his fellow adventurers all come along. (Yes, it's an airship. And yes, there's a perky pilot running it, and there's a vampire, and there's a grumpy journalist. This is still steampunk, after all.) It's an adventure with genuine heart.

I felt like it was well done. I liked it and hope to like the sequels even more. We'll see.

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Where Mars Almost Wins

The Martian by Andy Weir
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is just about as good as a book can be. All the stars.

This is a funny, realistic, exciting adventure, and it's a great example of hard science fiction being made accessible and appealing to wide audiences. Sure, he could have written this without getting all of the chemistry and physics and biology right, and it could have still been a fun, entertaining read, but he wasn't satisfied with just telling a good story--he got the science right. (Or if he got it wrong, he did it so brilliantly that it seemed right. I am not the one to catch him in an error.) Some people who can write well don't know enough science to do this. Some who know enough science can't write. It's a pretty select group of writers who can tell a good science fiction story that also is right on the science. Even fewer can make it appealing to those outside the relatively small group of hard science fiction readers. Andy Weir is in a pretty elite group.

Like some of the best science fiction right now, he also got the tone right, making this a very funny, very engaging book. Mark Watney is hilarious, IMO, and he's also a complete, round character. Some of the other characters are somewhat fleshed out, enough for the purposes of the book, but really only Mark is fully made real. And that's fine; it works.

The pacing is great. The lulls were few, and generally that's when we got a different POV character for a few pages. It's very well done. (How well?) My judgment is partly based on a kind of Marie Condo moment. When I look at the six or seven books I'm reading out of, and I asked myself which one I wanted to pick up and read right then, this was the one bringing me joy. Every time. And I'm reading some other really good books that are lots of fun. This one was just the best.

It struck me as I read how very similar the book and movie were. In terms of tone, pacing, humor, quality, overall fun, they come out just about tied by my count. Usually I feel like there are more differences between a book and the movie based on it, and I generally like one more than the other. (By way of contrast, four episodes in, I'm finding the video version or Murderbot much less entertaining and much less satisfying than the books. I hope it picks up a lot.)

(The other direction? People may come for me after saying this, but even though I rather like Mansfield Park the book, I like the Frances O'Connor 1999 movie more. Her version of Fanny is much more appealing and empathetic than the book version of her. In my opinion, I hasten to add.)

Back to The Martian. I knew this was good from the reviews, so it was goofy to put off reading it. I guess I sometimes doubt the reading world's consensus opinions. This one they got right. Highly recommended.

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It's a No From Me

Devil's Army by Don Pendleton
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I sometimes enjoy these old-fashioned super-violent books, but this one is just dumb.

North Koreans and Iraqis (this was written in the early 2000's, apparently while some people still believed Iraq had WMDs) are teaming up to do something in the US. The reason they're working together makes no sense and really doesn't work. At one point, a bunch of bad guys (the North Koreans) are killing the other bad guys (some jihadist Iraqis who were supposedly their partners in the plot) somewhere in NY, and Bolan is going in behind them, attacking both sets of guys. It's a very unsatisfying scene, and it goes on. The overall plot doesn't really make sense, except for kidnapping scientists and their families. The story should have followed that stuff.

The last 20 pages, Mack Bolan invades the bad guys' lair, and then it reads like other Executioner books I've enjoyed.

They're a lot like Rambo or John Wick when they're written well, and more like random pages of several comic books jammed together when they're written badly. The first 200 pages of this book were bad.

It's the first in a trilogy, and I kept reading in case I'd feel like getting the other two books. I'm not gonna.

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Where Anne Wins Over Another Generation

Anne of Avonlea by L.M. Montgomery
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Almost as affecting and entertaining as the first book, Anne of Avonlea is a solid sequel to a genuine classic. It isn't possible to be quite the same thing; in the first book, Anne was an orphan, and misunderstood, and an outsider, and she does most of her growing up in that book. The original story carries her through some awkward times, from struggling to succeeding, from unreliable to reliable, from putting people off to winning them over, and from beaten down to joyful. In this second book, she's older and more established, and though she's still growing up a bit here and is facing real challenges, her triumphs have to come in a slightly different form.

I thought this book would be a lot about her success teaching, and there's some of that in there, but I'm relieved the book didn't spend too much time on that. Instead, it focuses more on new neighbors and friends, including a crotchety guy next door, a couple orphans who need a home, some tough students, and an old unmarried woman that Anne meets when she takes a wrong turn. It's their stories, and Anne's impact on them, naturally, that give this book its charm. The old guy next door makes up with his wife; the orphans find a home with Anne and Marilla, including a rowdy boy who needs a lot of training; difficult students warm up to her; and disappointed lovers, long separated by foolishness, make up and start over.

There is a fair amount of loss and heartbreak and disappointment in the book, and it seems that the author's personal experience of losing parents and being moved around emerges in many different forms in the story. Both the first book and this one are filled with found families, people making unique households by choice, taking in those who need a home. The whole ethos of these novels is to lament loss and then make the best choices left, finding as much joy in the new arrangement as possible. Death can't be defeated, but sometimes separation can, and loneliness. There's always hope.

I guess that's what these books are selling, the hope for happiness, and it makes sense that so many of us are buying. Anne is kind of the guide who shows us how to navigate disappointments, by being open to change, seeing beauty in nature and friendship and art, seeking forgiveness and reconciliation and connection, and doing it all while being a bit silly and kind of fearless.

I think it's a beautiful vision. Recommended.

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