Review: Women Discoverers: Top Women in Science by Marie Moinard and Christelle Pecout

Graphic novels, memoirs, and biographies are good inital ways to introduce readers to people, places, and things. This particular book, written by Marie Moinard and illustrated by Christelle Pecout is a nice introduction to a diverse set of women in science, both well known and a quite a few whose accomplishments should be better remembered or acknowledged than they are. The women in the collection are from all over the world and are from varied scientific disciplines. Some are still living while others are long since dead. The more well known women, Marie Curie, Ada Lovelace, Hedy Lamarr, Rosalind Franklin, and Mae Jemison, are given full comics, several pages long, depicting their lives while the less well known are given very brief one page biographies. The information on each woman is simple and easy to understand. The art is in the realistic style and shows not only a head shot of each woman but also each woman at work with her notable discovery. This is very much an introductory book, one that will hopefully inspire interested girls and women (and boys and men) to dive deeper into these impressive women.

Review: This Is Not a Game by Kelly Mullen

When I saw that Kelly Mullen's debut novel, This Is Not a Game, was a locked room mystery set on Mackinac Island, I couldn't hand over my credit card fast enough. I spend my summers on an island near Mackinac, have visited every summer, and have friends who live there year round. It is a beautiful and unique place and the perfect setting for a mystery so I was disappointed that this didn't really land for me.

Addie has not only been dumped by her fiance but he is taking full credit for the wildly successful, both in terms of popularity and monetarily, video game that they developed together (although Addie really did the lion's share of the work). Addie is unhappy and flailing, suing Brian and searching for proof that the game is at least as much hers as his when her widowed grandmother Mimi, who lives on Mackinac Island, a small, quaint island in Lake Huron, calls to request that Addie come to visit. Mimi and Addie have had a bit of a strained relationship over the ex-fiance so the request is unusual. It turns out that Mimi has been invited to the island socialite's charity auction and commanded, via a blackmail letter, to bid on and win a particular piece of memorabilia. Mimi needs Addie's support at the gala, although she doesn't want to tell Addie she's being blackmailed, and certainly doesn't want to reveal what she's done to warrant said blackmail. At the event itself, there's a large cast of characters, all of whom seem uncomfortable and unhappy. Strange atmosphere for a party. When a fierce winter storm comes through, trapping them all in the mansion, the hostess is murdered and almost everyone there had a motive. She is not the last to die though. With the weather forcing the police to stay on the mainland rather than risk coming to the island, Mimi and Addie decide to do some sleuthing of their own.

The plot itself is fairly complex with not only the murders, the blackmail mystery, but also with what is going on with Addie's video game dispute. The characters are quirky but only a small handful are fleshed out enough to be actual suspects. Mimi is meant to be an irrascible but fun character but just misses the mark and Addie is rather colorless as her grandmother's sidekick. Not connecting with either main character didn't help when I also wanted (and didn't get) more of Mackinac island itself. There was a distinct lack of the flavor of the island, perhaps due to the timing of the book (it is difficult for outsiders to get to the island in the off season, as so many of the auction guests must do), or perhaps because the island seems chosen only because it can be cut off from the mainland, not for its unique characteristics, or perhaps because the majority of the story takes place inside an elaborate mansion that could have been built anywhere (incidentally, the geology of the island is all wrong for the deep and forbidding moat around the house). Then, despite the title declaring this not a game, uncovering the mysteries, murders and blackmail, is in fact treated as a game, with references to Murderscape, Addie's game, helping to make sense of the clues rather often. All of this added up to me being disappointed and I wish I had enjoyed this more than I ultimately did.

Review: In Castle and Court House: Being Reminiscences of 30 Years in Ireland by Ramsay Colles

I like to buy books about the places I've traveled and if I can do so while in that place, at a local bookshop, even better. So I picked up this reprint of Ramsay Colles' work while in Dublin, thinking that it would be an interesting read about a long disappeared Ireland and of Colles' experiences there. Clearly I didn't examine the book closely enough before I brought it home because this was quite possibly the driest and most boring thing I've ever read about this fascinating and beautiful country full of a million stories worth telling.

Colles spends an inordinate amount of time recounting his own (and his family's) importance by name dropping and patting himself on the back for his own intelligence. He talks of his role in the politics of the day, diving into minutia that has not stood the test of time, extolls his connections and details his letter writing. Colles writes of people he has known, many of whom have since become much more obscure than they must have been in his day, and he feels compelled to share any actual or quasi-notable thing that relations, no matter how distant, of his have accomplished not only in Ireland but around the globe. He may well have been an important figure in Ireland's history (this ignorant American had never heard of him before) but even after reading this reminiscence of his own, I still couldn't say whether he was actually important or merely puffed up by a feeling of his own importance. I can, however, say unreservedly that he is an insufferable bore, as is this book. Did I miss kernels of interesting things? Perhaps. But when your eyes are so glazed over that you can hardly see the words, you might be forgiven for this possible failing.

Review: Daughters of Shandong by Eve J. Chung

There is so much history in the world that we often aren't familiar with unless it is the history of our own country or of our own family, the former taught in schools and the latter passed down through the generations, often incomplete. I did learn a bit about the Chinese Civil War between Communist Mao Zedong and Nationalist Chiang Kai-shek in school but certainly didn't learn it in depth, especially the atrocities that accompanied this brutal war. Author Eve J. Chung was also unaware of the whole of this history and of the extent of the suffering that her own grandmother faced during this period in her life. Daughters of Shandong is Chung's attempt at giving a fictionalized voice to the grandmother who survived so much and never shared the full extent of the trauma that marked her life.

Hai Ang is a child, the oldest daughter of the Ang heir. That she is a daughter makes her less than in the eyes of the family, especially her cruel grandmother. She tries hard to be a dutiful daughter, even as she watches her mother be cruelly abused and denigrated for not producing a male heir for the next generation, birthing only daughter after daughter. Although her family is wealthy and land-owning, Hai, her younger sisters, and their mother are treated poorly, akin to the peasants who work the Ang land. Hai suffers throughout much of the story, first as a "worthless" daughter in a family that only valued sons, then at the hands of the Communists intent on punishing this young girl for the landowner sins of her father and grandfather since the men had disappeared and couldn't be tried in person, and finally as a refugee fleeing almost certain death and enduring extreme hardship with her mother and sisters as they sought to find and be reunited in Taiwan with the family who left them behind without a second thought. The trials and tribulations that these women endure over the years are almost unbelievable; they move from harrowing experience to harrowing experience with only small tokens of hope or kindness between them. Hai is a fully sympathetic character, her mother is part downtrodden and submissive and part strength. Younger sister Di is the least likeable of the women (aside from the truly evil grandmother), retaining her selfishness despite the unceasing love and care she receives from Hai and their mother.

The story of the women's experiences and journey is a compelling one, at least until they are reunited with the family that discarded them. It is at this point that the narrative timeline compresses and wraps up each of the women's fates quickly and incompletely. I'd speculate that this is where the fictional Hai's story converges with what Chung knows for certain about her grandmother's story. It certainly feels like she had full creative control over the first three quarters of the novel but felt constrained to stay within the bounds of reality for the last quarter, making it impossible to fully flesh out a satisfying ending. Despite this shortcoming, this is an interesting tale of survival and the resilience of women and one that the majority of my book club thoroughly enjoyed.

Review: The Princess by Wendy Holden

When I was ten, Prince Charles and Princess Diana got married. There was very little that was more romantic to a ten year old me than what appeared to be a fairy tale marriage happening. That it later went so very wrong was quite sad and the rest of the world has never stopped speculating about everything that happened, even though we all know (or think we know) all of the mitigating factors and where the bulk of the blame lies. In Wendy Holden’s novel, The Princess, she looks at Diana’s life through the eyes of a fictional childhood friend and then allows Diana to tell this friend the story of her courtship with the Prince.

Perhaps I should have expected a bit of a hagiography, given that the narrator of the novel remembers the youthful Diana with love, and recognizing that this is fictionalized (albeit based on books written by others who had access to Diana and to existing interviews), it was still disappointing to have such a saintly picture of the princess, rather than a picture of a fully human, flawed, but still much loved woman who lived every little girl’s dream once upon a time, even if that dream didn’t turn out to be the reality. In addition to the young, naive, and sainted Diana, there are chapters from the Queen Mums perspective as she plots to marry Charles off to someone suitable, and from Charles' own perspective as he initially tries to avoid this marriage and later capitulates to his duty. Charles does not come off as sympathetic as Diana but he is also drawn as a pawn to a large extent. Diana's unrealistic expectations and her deep desire to be loved the way she saw in romance novels (in spite of witnessing her own parents' terrible marriage) make her seem much younger than her 19 years. This is probably only a novel for diehard royal fans as it is quite frothy and light but it also doesn't add much dimension to Diana or truly imagine what this doomed marriage was like so fans might also feel as if they already know this fictionalized story from primary sources.

Review: Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks

Geraldine Brooks is an award winning journalist and Pulitzer Prize winning novelist. She had a many decades long, happy marriage to author and celebrated journalist Tony Horwitz with whom she had two sons. Her beautiful and moving memoir, Memorial Days, is her account of Horwitz’s sudden, unexpected death while he was on book tour, her days of shock navigating ridiculous bureaucracy immediately following his death, and then four years later on the sparsely populated island of Flinders off the coast of Australia when she finally took the time and space to go and be fully immersed in her grief.

She weaves her narrative back and forth between that terrible Memorial Day weekend in 2019 and her 2023 remote sojourn in a couple of small cottages far from people and civilization to reflect back on her shared life and love with Horwitz. She recounts the news of her husband’s death and the aftermath in a straightforward, objective way, reporting her reactions, the logistics of a last minute flight from their home in Martha’s Vineyard to DC on a holiday weekend, trying the convince medical professionals she wants and needs to see her husband’s body, telling her sons about their father’s death—preferably before they heard about it thanks to the speed of our current news cycle, having to face and/or learn the marital tasks that were always Horwitz’s purview, and more, all while trying to finish the novel that would become Horse. The 2023 chapters are more contemplative and emotional, examining her deep loss, finding solace in nature and aloneness, and allowing herself to stop trying to move forward and just to feel whatever it is she needs to feel. Brooks is a gorgeous writer and this is an intimate, honest, and personal look into what it is to lose a beloved spouse.

Review: Barking Up the Right Tree by Leigh Russell

I have only recently started reading mysteries and since I’m a complete and total coward, I tend to gravitate to those that won’t scare me or give me nightmares. Usually that means golden age mysteries (or current iterations) or ones that are more caper than mystery. It sounds like cozy mysteries should work well for me but somehow they don’t. There’s something just a little light weight about them that turns me off. That doesn’t stop me from trying them periodically though. Unfortunately, Leigh Russell’s Barking Up the Right Tree, the first in a new cozy series, didn’t change my opinion on these types of mysteries.

When Emily loses her job and then gets dumped by her boyfriend, she has no idea what to do with her life. Then Emily discovers her long lost great aunt has died and left her a picturesque cottage in rural Ashton Mead. In order to properly inherit, she must take care of any pets that her great aunt pre-deceased and so after thinking that she’d only be taking care of a goldfish, she agrees to the terms. But in fact the pet is a loveable dog named Poppy. Poppy wants desperately to dig under the metal fence between the cottage and the garden next door, the owner of whom is not friendly at all. This escalates quickly into Emily deciding that next door’s daughter is missing. And it’s a short step from there for her to decide that her great aunt’s fatal fall was not an accident.

Emily is a completely insipid, and rather stupid character who doesn’t understand why her new friends think she’s over the top and can’t see that her boyfriend’s reappearance after she inherits the cottage is a huge issue. She makes snap judgments about people but then flip flops on her unearned judgments like she's going pro at it. The mystery itself stutters along until the very end, when it makes such a sharp left turn that it leaves the reader wondering if 2/3 of a cozy mystery was uncomfortably grafted onto 1/3 of a horror story with obviously visible Frankenstein stitches. The meshing of the two pieces of the plot is not well done, the main character is annoying, and the writing is unfortunately repetitious. I won't be reading further in this series.