Nevermore: Buried Angels, Heroes, Giants, Psychopaths, and More!

Come Saturday by Doris Musick came up again at Nevermore.  This novel by a local author is a fictionalized account of a true disaster that occurred at Saltville mill.  The local history and local color have made this book a real winner for our readers.

The audio version of Hero at Large by Janet Evanovich received a “Yuck!” from our reader who didn’t even finish it.  This was one of the screwball romance books that Evanovich wrote before coming up with the extremely popular Stephanie Plum series.  In fact, Stephanie is so popular that the publisher started re-releasing her older titles in hopes of enticing the Plum fans.  In this case, it didn’t work.

On the other hand, Getting Rid of Matthew by Jane Fallon was quite a hit!  Helen has been having an affair with her boss for quite some time when he does the unexpected:  he actually leaves his wife for Helen.  Unfortunately, Helen soon finds that there’s a vast difference between wanting and having, and is soon scheming to find a way to get Matthew go back to his wife.  This is a very funny debut novel.

Fall of Giants by Ken Follett was another “didn’t finish” for a reader.  It’s the story of five different families during the start of the 20^th century: Russian, English, Welsh, American, and German, all of whom have to cope with massive social and cultural changes.  There were just too many characters for our reader to keep up with.

A second book by Follett fared better: Whiteout is a thriller set in a wintery Scotland where some samples of a deadly virus have gone missing from a medical laboratory.  Ex-policewoman Toni Gallo is now head of security for the lab, and she’s desperate to find the missing samples.  A blizzard traps Gallo and the suspects, providing twists and turns and nail-biting suspense.

Another winner was Juliet by Anne Fortiner in which a young woman inherits a key which takes her on a journey to unravel an old mystery that extends back to the time of Romeo and Juilet.  Our reader said it was a wonderful blend of history, mystery, and romance, and she highly recommends it.

The first non-fiction title this time was Dirty Chick:  Adventures of an Unlikely Farmer by Antonia Murphy.   Murphy and her husband moved from San Francisco to New Zealand after their son developed some health problems.  The idea was to become farmers and get closer to nature.  It soon became apparent that farming was a lot harder and messier than they’d anticipated.  The book is mostly about the ways in which they overcame the various problems, according to our reader, and it was also funnier than she had expected.  She recommends it.

Next up was The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson, in which the author examines the diagnosis of psychopathy. Ronson, a British journalist and author of Men Who Stare at Goats, talks with psychologists, neurologists, and people identified as psychopaths.  Our reader found the book to be very interesting, but ended it feeling that psychopaths are largely defined by subjective means.  One person can be diagnosed as a psychopath by one doctor might be considered perfectly normal by another.  Our reader said that he concluded that this is not hard science, and there can be no reproducible results from any of the testing.

Finally, there was  Buried Angels  by Camilla Lackberg. In 1974, a family disappears from their home on an island, leaving behind a young daughter. Flash forward some decades and the child, now an adult, returns to the old home place and reopens the mystery.   Our reader enjoyed the book, saying that it held her interest and had a complex plot, but did bemoan the number of characters.  Lackberg is a Scandinavian mystery writer as is Karin Fossum.  The consensus was that Fossum’s books take a more direct tact, which most of our readers like a lot.

(Long time readers may remember the incomparable Nancy W.'s review of Ronson's previous book.  If not, click on the link above to enjoy!)

Nevermore: Oregon Trail, Come Saturday, Look Who's Back, Boston Corbett, Karin Fossum, Frightful's Mountain

 Reported by Jeanne

Nevermore hit the trail this week—the Oregon Trail, that is, with one member praising Rinker Buck’s The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey. Journalist Rinker set out with his brother and a dog to recreate as best he could, what it was like to travel on the Oregon Trail. They traveled in the time honored way using a covered wagon and a mule team for transportation.  Buck also recounts a history of the trail along with their present day adventures.  

For a view of the Trail it its heyday, the same reader tackled another book written by a journalist in 1846.  Francis Parkman was a twenty three year old when he took a two month trip through Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, and Kansas.  He wrote his adventures up as installments for Knickerbocker Magazine, then turned them into a book which was published in 1849. Some have noted that his views of the Native American tribes were generally negative, but Parkman still provides a vivid look at life at that time.  One thing that struck our reader was the many uses for dogs, including food.   Another member pointed out that travel along the Trail at that point was strongly dictated by nature:  travelers needed to leave by May or early June in order to reach the end of the trail before winter hit.  Those who failed to do so usually perished. Part of the problem was that on some parts of the Trail there was simply no way to turn around and go back.  The Donner Party was mentioned, but not so much as to spoil the fine Blackbird Bakery doughnuts the group was enjoying.

Another reader recommended Come Saturday by Doris Musick which is a novel based on a true incident.  In 1933, a group of men had gone to a gristmill near Lennon, Virginia when the boiler exploded. Several men were killed and several more were injured.  According to our reader, Musick does a good job with both the setting and with shedding some light on a bit of local history.

Look Who’s Back by Timur Vermes presents an intriguing scenario:  what if Adolf Hitler came back? In the book, he awakens in 2011.  He doesn’t realize that decades have passed and treats everything from a 1945 perspective. People believe he’s an actor or comedian pretending to be Hitler and find his outrageous comments to be “authentic.”  He becomes a TV personality with an avid following.  Our reviewer said she couldn’t decide if this was a satire or a farce but it was certainly entertaining.  

Most folks have heard of Jack Ruby, the man who killed Lee Harvey Oswald, but far fewer would recognize the name Thomas “Boston” Corbett.  He was the man who killed another presidential assassin, John Wilkes Booth and for a time his name was known far and wide.  For a while after the war ended, Corbett would earn money by giving lectures, styling himself “Lincoln’s Avenger.” An extremely religious man who had reprimanded his superior officer for profanity and taking the Lord’s name in vain, Corbett’s behavior became increasingly strange and he seemed beset by paranoid delusions. In The Madman and the Assassin, author Martelle Scott tells the intriguing story of this British immigrant who was court martialed for insubordination, who spent months in Andersonville prison, and who became a foot note in American history. Our Nevermore reader called it “fascinating.”

The next reviewer opened with, “Karin Fossum hasn’t let me down yet!” He’s reading When the Devil Holds the Candle, which he describes as being about what happens when young men get confused and become misguided: they can end up in more trouble than they’re ready for.  As usual, this Inspector Sejer novel is heavy on psychology and is darkly thrilling.

Finally, a reader said that when she needed to read something to fill her with joy, she turns to Jean Craighhead George’s juvenile novel, Frightful’s Mountain. Frightful is a peregrine falcon first introduced in the classic My Side of the Mountain. The book is told from the bird’s point of view and is beautifully written.  George was a naturalist, so her books are full of authentic detail as well as a deep respect for nature and the environment.  Our reviewer described this as both a “feel good” book and as a spiritual book.  She highly recommends it to everyone.  The depiction of migration is especially good, and it almost made her feel as if she were about to take wing.