A Fatal Fiction by Kaitlyn Dunnett

 

Reviewed by Jeanne

Mikki Lincoln is a strong willed seventy year old who supplements her retirement income by working as a freelance book editor. Passionate about grammar and the use of words, Mikki has a few choice ones for Greg Onslow, an obnoxious entrepreneur who accuses her of trying to sabotage his latest project.  Their heated public confrontation goes viral thanks to someone with a handy cell phone, which creates problems later when Onslow turns up dead.

Despite a detective’s thoughts to the contrary, Mikki isn’t the only one with a motive. There’s a whole cast of characters who had reason to wish the man ill. For example, Mikki’s cousin Luke is in love with Onslow’s widow; Sunny Feldman, whose memoir Mikki is editing, was upset that Onslow wanted to raze her family’s old resort hotel; and Giselle, the aforementioned widow, doesn’t seem to be too deeply in mourning for her departed husband.  There’s also the matter of Onslow’s less than ethical business dealings, some of which end with investors paying the price while he got away unscathed.

Mikki sets out to find the real murderer, despite family interference.

This is Dunnett’s second series, following her Liss MacCrimmon Mysteries which features a young woman who owns a Scottish-themed shop. I’d read some of those and liked them, but I felt a more immediate connection with Mikki.  I don’t think it’s totally an age thing—more of an attitude admiration society.  Mikki is very independent in the best sense of the term, so she’s not best pleased when one of her nephews is sent to check up on her—er, visit for no particular reason for an unspecified amount of time.  I like that while Mikki is aging she’s still physically vigorous but practical enough to know her limitations.  She’s level-headed (well, most of the time) and thoughtful, but not one to be pushed around.  Some of her observations made me smile; calling herself a BMW was one of them.  (Big Maine Woman, though she has now moved to New York state.)

I found this to be a very enjoyable cozy mystery, and will definitely be reading more in the series. I’ll probably back up and read the first, but I had no problem following any of the story and feel it could be read as a standalone.

The other books in the series are:

Crime and Punctuation

Clause and Effect

A Fatal Fiction

Murder, She Edited

Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw

 

 

Reviewed by Christy

            A group of twenty somethings gathers at an abandoned mansion, purportedly haunted. They're there to celebrate the wedding of two of their friends but tensions between the entire group threaten to spoil the weekend. That is, if the ghosts don't get to them first.

            The legend goes that many years ago, a bride was abandoned by her groom and in her grief, asked to be buried alive beneath the house. As the years passed, she got lonely. Each year thereafter, a new girl was buried with her to keep her company. The present day bride is thrilled at the idea of having a make shift wedding in such a spooky location. Everyone else is just kind of along for the ride.

            I listened to this as an audio book from READS. The narrator, Suehyla El-Attar, does a fantastic job of bringing Khaw's prose to life. Though a little too flowery here and there, overall I really liked Khaw's vivid writing style. The audio book is short, under three hours, and I'll admit that was a draw for me. Though I favor too short stories over too long ones, I do think this particular book could've benefitted from some filling out. I felt as though I was plopped down in the middle of the story and had to play catch up. The characters clearly had rich histories with one another but we as readers weren't given much time to sit with any of it. Most of them didn't even seem to like each other all that much – to the point where they came across as nasty and unlikeable. Khaw touches on backstories briefly, but I may have felt more sympathy if the book had explored their motivations more.

            Nothing But Blackened Teeth did have some genuinely unsettling imagery, and I do think Khaw is a talented writer. However, I was left a little underwhelmed by this particular work.

Nevermore: Waking Up White, Cloud Cuckoo Land, State of Terror, The Last Romantics

 

Reported by Garry

Waking Up White, and Finding Myself in the Story of Race by Debby Irving was the first book mentioned this week, getting a conditional “thumbs up” from our reviewer. Our reader felt that while Irving was certainly honest about her experiences, her writing was on the “polite” side and never really delved deeply into the damage that racist thinking and processes do to society as a whole, and Black Americans in particular. Raised in a mainly White community in New England, Irving learned to avoid anything unpleasant, which included discussions of race and its socioeconomic effects on people of color. Our reader felt that Irving has done an admirable job of beginning to come to terms with her privilege and blind-spots, but still has a way to go.  SC

 

The latest novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land, encompasses three intertwined timelines spanning over five hundred years. The strings are tied together by the story of Aethon, a young man who wishes to become a bird to fly to a utopian paradise in the sky. Starting in Constantinople during the 15^th century with Anna, who lives in a house of women who embroider robes for priests; continuing with Zeno, an octogenarian in present time who is teaching children in Idaho the story of Aethon; and then Konstance, a young lady on a futuristic interstellar ship who is copying down the story of Aethon as told to her by her father. Our reader (who doesn’t usually like stories that jump around in time,) enjoyed this book immensely and found the writing to be especially notable for its clarity and imagination.  MH

 

Hillary Rodham Clinton and Louise Penny have teamed up again to write another international thriller: State of Terror. Ellen Adams is the former head of a multinational media conglomerate who is appointed U.S. Secretary of State to a president whom she has harshly criticized. Anahita Dahir is a young Foreign Services Officer whose specialty is Pakistan and the Middle East. Dahir receives a coded warning via text of a series of imminent terrorist attacks. It is up to Dahir, Adams, and a dedicated journalist to unravel a web of nuclear bombs, terrorist organizations, and Russian mobsters. Our reader enjoyed this book and commented on not only how good the story was, but how easy it is to tell which author had written which parts, especially as she has been a Louise Penny fan for many years. ML

 

The Last Romantics by Tara Conklin is a novel about a family and the events that both tie them together and push them apart from one another. Renee, Caroline, Joe, and Fiona are all children when their father dies of a heart attack at the age of 30.  Their mother sinks into a three year long depression which the children call the “pause,” leaving the children to fend for themselves. The youngest, Fiona, grows up to be a world-renowned poet and writer, and this book is a “story within a story” of the four siblings and how their lives were shaped by their childhood traumas. Our reader explained that she was drawn into the book through the writing and premise, and strongly recommends this book to anyone who likes family dramas.  MR

 

Also mentioned:

The 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones

White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson

The Joy and Light Bus Company by Alexander McCall Smith

The Wartime Sisters by Lynda Cohen Loigman

Sarah, Plain and Tall by Patricia MacLachlan

Both/And: A Life in Many Worlds by Huma Abedin

The Overstory by Richard Powers

The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray

The Pure Land by Alan Spence

Watership Down by Richard Adams

Tuesdays with Ambrea: The Wolf and the Woodsman by Ava Reid

 

 

Reviewed by Ambrea

 

In a village where everyone woman is born with a special kind of magic, Évike is born powerless.  Worse, she’s the mixed blood child of a village wolf-girl and a Yehuli traveler, making her an outcast and a target.  When the king’s soldiers—known simply as the Woodsmen—arrive in her village, Évike expects the same tragedy as always:  a wolf-girl will be chosen to be sacrificed to the king.  Except this year, Évike is betrayed by her own village and surrendered to the Woodsmen without a fight.

Évike fully expects to die.  No wolf-girl has ever escaped the clutches of the Woodsmen and their blood-thirsty king.  But when monsters attack the Woodsmen in the forest, killing everyone but Évike and the captain, she discovers she may yet find a way to survive.  Her quest will take her far beyond the bounds of the world she once knew and show her the very beating heart of magic.

The Wolf and the Woodsman by Ava Reid hooked me with the discordantly bright cover and the intriguing premise.  It reminded me of all the old fairy tales—you know the ones, the stories with evil queens who cut out girls’ hearts and wolves that eat hapless travelers and red-hot dancing shoes and poisoned apples.  After reading the first few pages, I thought it had a lot of promise and I was excited to dive in; however, I eventually found myself disappointed by Reid’s novel.

The Wolf and the Woodsman is a bit of an odd duck.  I mean, it isn’t quite what I expected—not to say that it’s a bad story, rather, I think, it just wasn’t the story for me.  You see, I enjoyed the beautiful descriptions and the complex dynamics between characters and the magic.  I loved how the author was able to create such a lush story, filled with tiny details and carefully spun words to make the setting and the characters spring to life.  It’s vibrant and evocative and complicated. 

On the flipside, it’s also violent, bloody, grim, and grotesque.  Reid is merciless in her descriptions—all those lovingly selected words can paint a beautiful portrait, but it can also create a disturbing landscape that can make you ache.  Take her descriptions of the tundra, for example:  she crafts a beautiful picture filled with snowy pines and mountains capped with ice and flutters of snow, and then she describes the bitter cold and the ache of cold limbs, until you feel the ice down deep in your bones. 

Reid is a talented writer.  She also has an incredible skill for describing gore.  So much so, I found myself more than a little grossed out by the amount of sheer bloody violence depicted on the page.  More than once, I had to stop reading and put the book aside, because I felt a little green around the gills.  (You have been warned!) 

Besides the violence, I only had two real complaints:  I though the story seemed a little too long and disjointed; and, I really hated that the heroine seemed so ineffectual.  After a certain point, The Wolf and the Woodsman seems to drag, because it has too many twists and turns for me to properly enjoy it; likewise, I simply grew tired of seeing Évike being treated like the world’s punching bag. 

I also found myself disliking Évike, because she seemed to make the same mistakes over and over and over again.  Like, I can appreciate that Évike is bitter and vengeful and violent—she had to be, considering she’s powerless in a world where magical powers are valued above all else—but she’s also impulsive and injudicious.  She’s not cunning in her vengeance, she’s petty and imprudent.

I can get behind a character who won’t give up, who won’t bow to the cruelty of others, who snarls and snaps back at those who mistreat her; however, I don’t like characters who react for the sake of reacting, who don’t actually seem to learn anything—or, worse, don’t actually think through their decisions.  It’s frustrating to say the least.