Summer Solstice 2010 (belated)

I'm still here!

I didn't mean to take a bloggy-break, but as usual, this time of year is pretty busy for me. We were out of town the second weekend in May (hanging out with good friends in Missouri), followed by a lovely visit from my mom and stepdad the day after we returned. The following week we escaped to beautiful San Diego to spend four glorious days with my brother and his family over Memorial Day Weekend. Throw in a several birthday celebrations, a high school graduation party, book club meetings, sleepless nights (thanks to Mother Nature and some pretty intense storms), and many, many hours of gardening and you have a picture of my life for the past month of so. But amazingly enough, I've found time to read! I just haven't had much time for blogging (posting on mine or visiting yours!). I have three reviews to post write and hope to get to them before another week disappears. My dad and stepmom arrive next week and before I know it, it'll be July and I'll be heading back to California for my 30th high school reunion. And then we'll be off to Virginia Beach to play in the sand & ocean with our granddaughter!

But for now, I'll leave you with some images from our trip to San Diego. Beautiful, beautiful, wish I were there!

:: From Mark & Ana's avocado grove!!


:: More from the Jackson estate!


:: Fruit from Ana's garden. Delicious!


:: Mine, mine, mine! ;) Great beer in Seaport Village.


:: Beautiful view of the San Diego Harbor (and the Coronado Bay Bridge) from the top deck of the U.S.S. Midway.

And now it's time to head to work! Happy Summer!!

Noah's Compass

Noah's Compass by Anne Tyler
Fiction
2010 Knopf
Finished on 6/2/10
Rating: 3/5 (so-so)





Product Description

From the incomparable Anne Tyler, a wise, gently humorous, and deeply compassionate novel about a schoolteacher, who has been forced to retire at sixty-one, coming to terms with the final phase of his life.

Liam Pennywell, who set out to be a philosopher and ended up teaching fifth grade, never much liked the job at that run-down private school, so early retirement doesn’t bother him. But he is troubled by his inability to remember anything about the first night that he moved into his new, spare, and efficient condominium on the outskirts of Baltimore. All he knows when he wakes up the next day in the hospital is that his head is sore and bandaged.

His effort to recover the moments of his life that have been stolen from him leads him on an unexpected detour. What he needs is someone who can do the remembering for him. What he gets is—well, something quite different.

We all know a Liam. In fact, there may be a little of Liam in each of us. Which is why Anne Tyler’s lovely novel resonates so deeply.

When Noah's Compass first came out, I read the opening paragraphs and thought it sounded like something I'd enjoy, so when I saw it on the New Release table at my library, I was excited to give it a try.

In the sixty-first year of his life, Liam Pennwell lost his job. It wasn't such a good job, anyhow. He'd been teaching fifth grade in a second-rate private boys' school. Fifth grade wasn't even what he'd been trained for. Teaching wasn't what he'd been trained for. His degree was in philosophy. Oh, don't ask. Things seemed to have taken a downward turn a long, long time ago, and perhaps it was just as well that he had seen the last of St. Dyfrig's dusty, scuffed corridors and those interminable after-school meetings and the reams of niggling paperwork.

In fact, this might be a sign. It could be just the nudge he needed to push him on to the next stage—the final stage, the summing-up stage. The stage where he sat in his rocking chair and reflected on what it all meant, in the end.

Tyler's characters tend to be on the quirky side. Even the names are a bit unusual. (One of Liam's daughter's is called Xanthe and another character is named Eunice.) While likeable, I never felt a connection to any of the characters and I especially had a hard time believing Liam was only 61. My husband is only three years younger than Tyler's main character and yet I never once felt they were contemporaries. Liam came across as an elderly old man, ready to spend his days in a rocking chair—certainly not one to climb on a motorcycle and go out for an afternoon ride when the mood strikes, as my husband often does.

Noah's Compass is a quiet story. A slice of life, one might say. It was an easy, light read, but as I finished, I felt disappointed, hoping for more. I was mildly annoyed that the mystery behind the attack on Liam was never revealed, but I suppose that's life. We don't always get all the answers we are looking for.

I only found a couple of passages to mark, and, coincidentally, Nan noted one of the same in her review! But, unlike me, Nan loved this book. I wonder if I would've enjoyed it more had I listened to the audio rather than reading the printed version?

It had been years since he had had any sort of romantic life. He'd more or less given up on that side of things, it seemed. But now he remembered the significance that a love affair could lend to the most ordinary moments. The simplest activities could take on extra color and intensity. Days had a purpose to them—an element of suspense, even. He missed that.

and

He leaned back against the cushions with a contented sigh. ... Socrates said ... What was it he had said? Something about the fewer his wants, the closer he was to the gods. And Liam really wanted nothing. He had an okay place to live, a good enough job, a book to read, a chicken in the oven. He was solvent, if not rich, and healthy.

Final thoughts: I'm not sure why I keep reading Anne Tyler. I've yet to fall in love with anything she's written, but every time she writes something new, I feel compelled to give it a try. I've read (and liked) Ladder of Years, A Patchwork Planet, Back When We Were Grownups, The Amateur Marriage, and Digging To America, but I really can't say I loved any one of those. And, I still have Morgan's Passing, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Clock Winder, Celestial Navigation, and Breathing Lessons all in my stacks! What's your favorite Anne Tyler book?

Be sure to pop over and read Nan's glowing review here.

Damaged

Damaged by Alex Kava
Thriller
2010 Doubleday
Finished 6/1/10
Rating: 3.5/5 (Good)
ARC - Due out on July 13, 2010
FTC Disclosure: Received ARC from a friend



Product Description

On Pensacola Beach, the Coast Guard prepares for a Category 5 hurricane that has entered the Gulf of Mexico. When the air crew patrols the waterways, they spot a huge fishing cooler about a mile offshore. Drug traffickers have been known to dump coolers with smuggled product to avoid detection and pay fishermen to retrieve them. But when the crew open this cooler, they’re shocked by what they find: body parts tightly wrapped in plastic.

Though she is putting herself in the projected path of the hurricane, Special Agent Maggie O’Dell is sent to investigate. Eventually, she’s able to trace the torso in the cooler back to a man who mysteriously disappeared weeks earlier after a hurricane hit Port St. Lucie, Florida. Only Port St. Lucie is on the Atlantic side. How did his body end up six hundred miles away in the Gulf of Mexico?

Cliffhanger chapters, behind-the-scenes forensic details, colorful characters, and satisfying twists have become the trademarks of Kava’s psychological thrillers. In Damaged, she ratchets up the suspense a notch by sending Maggie into the eye of an impending monster hurricane to track down a killer.

A voracious reader and a knowledgeable fan of well-crafted thrillers and mysteries, my sister-in-law has been talking about Alex Kava for almost a decade. The author divides her time between Omaha and Pensacola, so she's known as one of our local authors. I'm not sure why I haven't followed Jen's advice to give Kava's Maggie O'Dell novels a chance, but after reading her upcoming release (#8 in the series), I'm ready to dive into the backlist.

My husband and I flew out to San Diego for Memorial Day weekend and I started in on my ARC of Damaged as soon as we boarded our flight. This is the perfect kind of book for traveling--short chapters, snappy dialogue, and enough suspense to keep me reading even during take-off and landing. In Damaged, Kava refers to previous cases involving FBI special agent and profiler, Maggie O'Dell, yet it didn't bother me to start with the last in this series. I read it knowing I might discover a spoiler or two, but since I have several other books lined up to read this summer, those details will probably be forgotten by the time I get around to reading the very first Maggie O'Dell novel, A Perfect Evil. However, knowing how quickly I was engrossed in this book, I may want to get a couple more in the series for my travels in July. While not quite as gritty as John Sandford's Prey series, Damaged has piqued my interest and I look forward to working my way through Kava's backlist. Thanks for the recommendation, Jen!

About the author (from her website):

ALEX KAVA GREW UP IN THE COUNTRY just outside of Silver Creek, Nebraska, and earned a bachelor’s degree in art and English from College of Saint Mary in Omaha, Nebraska. She has done a variety of jobs, from working as a hospital tech, cleaning and sterilizing utensils from surgery, pathology and the morgue; to running her own graphic design firm, designing national food labels and directing television and radio commercials.

IN 1996 SHE QUIT HER JOB as a public relations director to dedicate herself to writing a novel and getting published. To pay the bills, she refinanced her home, maxed out her credit cards and even took on a newspaper delivery route.

A YEAR AND A HALF LATER A PERFECT EVIL WAS FINISHED. In July 1998 she landed an agent and in February 1999, she signed a three-book contract with MIRA Books. In June 2000 she was in Chicago, sitting next to Barbara Kingsolver at BookExpo America, and signing advanced reader copies.

TODAY, ALEX IS A NEW YORK TIMES BEST-SELLING AUTHOR of psychological suspense novels. Her Maggie O’Dell series, comprised of A Perfect Evil, Split Second, The Soul Catcher, At the Stroke of Madness, A Necessary Evil, Exposed and Black Friday along with her stand-alone novels, One False Move and Whitewash, have been widely praised by critics and fans. They have appeared on the New York Times and USA Today bestseller lists. Her books have been published in twenty-four countries and have hit the bestseller lists in Australia, Germany, Poland, Italy and the UK. She is also one of the featured writers in the anthology Thriller: Stories to Keep You Up All Night, edited by James Patterson.

ONE FALSE MOVE WAS SELECTED AS Nebraska’s 2006 One Book One Nebraska. (My Antonia by Willa Cather was the 2005 selection). In 2007 Alex was awarded the Mari Sandoz Award by the Nebraska Library Association. Whitewash made January Magazine’s list of best thrillers for 2007. Both Exposed and Black Friday received starred reviews by Publishers Weekly.

2010 marks Alex’s ten year anniversary as an author with the publication of her tenth novel, Damaged (Doubleday, July 13th). She also has co-authored two short stories in anthologies to be published in June and August: First Thrills, edited by Lee Child (After Dark, co-authored with Deb Carlin) and Florida Heat Wave, edited by Michael Lister (A Breath of Hot Air, co-authored with Patricia Bremmer).

ALEX WRITES FULL-TIME AND LIVES IN Omaha, Nebraska and Pensacola, Florida (where her new book, Damaged is set). She is a member of the Mystery Writers of America and the International Thrillers Writers.

Looks like Kava and her dog are both Husker fans. Go Big Red! :)



More information about Alex Kava can be found here. Be sure to check out this link to Behind the Scenes of Damaged.

Horns

Horns by Joe Hill
Fiction - Horror/Fantasy
2010 William Morrow
Finished on 5/19/10
Rating: 4/5 (Very Good)
FTC Disclosure: Received ARC from publisher





Product Description

Joe Hill has been hailed as "a major player in 21st-century fantastic fiction" (Washington Post); "a new master in the field of suspense" (James Rollins); "one of the most confident and assured new voices in horror and dark fantasy to emerge in recent years (Publishers Weekly); a writer who "builds character invitingly and plants an otherworldly surprise around every corner" (New York Times).

This gifted and brilliantly imaginative author catapulted to bestsellerdom with the chilling Heart-Shaped Box and cemented his reputation with the prizewinning volume of short fiction 20th Century Ghosts. At last, the New York Times bestselling author returns with a relentless supernatural thriller that runs like Hell on wheels. . . .

Ignatius Perrish spent the night drunk and doing terrible things. He woke up the next morning with a thunderous hangover, a raging headache . . . and a pair of horns growing from his temples.

At first Ig thought the horns were a hallucination, the product of a mind damaged by rage and grief. He had spent the last year in a lonely, private purgatory, following the death of his beloved, Merrin Williams, who was raped and murdered under inexplicable circumstances. A mental breakdown would have been the most natural thing in the world. But there was nothing natural about the horns, which were all too real.

Once the righteous Ig had enjoyed the life of the blessed: born into privilege, the second son of a renowned musician and younger brother of a rising late-night TV star, he had security, wealth, and a place in his community. Ig had it all, and more—he had Merrin and a love founded on shared daydreams, mutual daring, and unlikely midsummer magic.

But Merrin's death damned all that. The only suspect in the crime, Ig was never charged or tried. And he was never cleared. In the court of public opinion in Gideon, New Hampshire, Ig is and always will be guilty because his rich and connected parents pulled strings to make the investigation go away. Nothing Ig can do, nothing he can say, matters. Everyone, it seems, including God, has abandoned him. Everyone, that is, but the devil inside. . . .

Now Ig is possessed of a terrible new power to go with his terrible new look—a macabre talent he intends to use to find the monster who killed Merrin and destroyed his life. Being good and praying for the best got him nowhere. It's time for a little revenge. . . . It's time the devil had his due. . . .

While not as terrifying as the opening scenes in Heart-Shaped Box, this supernatural thriller is laced with black humor and proves once again that Joe Hill is a masterful storyteller of suspense and horror. I was immediately drawn into the tight narrative and found myself rooting for Ig. I think I even dreamed about the power of his horns!

Maybe, he thought, it would be different with his family. Maybe they would be immune to him, and their secrets would stay secrets. They loved him, and he loved them. Love had to count for something. Maybe he could learn to control it, to turn it off, whatever "it" was. Maybe the horns would go away. They had come without warning, why shouldn't they go the same way?

He pushed a hand back through his limp and thinning hair—thinning at twenty-six!—then squeezed his head between his palms. He hated the frantic scurry of his thoughts, how desperately one idea chased after another. His fingertips brushed the horns, and he cried out in fright. It was on his lips to say, God, please God, make them go away...but then he caught himself and said nothing.

A crawly sensation worked its way up his forearms. If he was a devil now, could he still speak of God? Would lightning strike him, shatter him in a white flash? Would he burn?

Hill's dialogue and use of flashbacks paints a believable tableau that illustrates the ongoing tension between good and evil -- and points out that sometimes it's difficult to tell which is which -- and I was thoroughly enraged with the villain. His evil acts made Ig look like an angel, not a devil. Although a bit ambiguous, the ending was was completely satisfying. Hill is one imaginative dude! I can't wait to see what he comes up with next!

Check out Joe's website and interview for Horns here.

Remembering Peachoo

Rachel Elizabeth Scher
February 17, 1981 - May 28, 2005

Remember

Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you plann’d:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
~ Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830 – 1894)

For more pictures of our beautiful daughter, go here.

The Art of Racing in the Rain

The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein
Fiction
2009 HarperAudio; Unabridged edition
Reader: Christopher Welch
Finished 4/29/10
Rating: 4.75/5 (Terrific!)



Your car goes where your eyes go. Simply another way of saying that which you manifest is before you.

I know it's true; racing doesn't lie.

Product Description

Enzo knows he is different from other dogs: a philosopher with a nearly human soul, he has educated himself by listening to the words of his master, Denny Swift, an up-and-coming race car driver. Through Denny, Enzo has gained tremendous insight into the human condition, and he sees that life, like racing, isn't simply about going fast.

On the eve of his death, Enzo takes stock of his life, recalling all that he and his family have been through: the sacrifices Denny has made to succeed professionally; the unexpected loss of Denny's wife; the three-year custody battle with his in-laws over their daughter, Zoë. In the end, Enzo comes through heroically to preserve the Swift family, holding in his heart the dream that Denny will become a racing champion with Zoë at his side. Having learned what it takes to be a compassionate and successful person, this wise canine can barely wait until his next lifetime, when he is sure he will return as a man.

A heart-wrenching but deeply funny and ultimately uplifting story of family, love, loyalty, and hope, The Art of Racing in the Rain is a beautifully crafted and captivating look at the wonders and absurdities of human life . . . as only a dog could tell it.

As I've mentioned in previous posts, I'm really becoming quite a fan of audio books. I have one book on my iPod (for listening while walking or during the first two hours of my shift at work—before the store is open to customers) and one in my car—in spite of my short commute! I especially like being able to give a book a second chance, as was the case with The Art of Racing in the Rain. After reading numerous reviews praising Stein's creative novel after it hit the shelves, I decided to give the book a try. I didn't get very far. I don't even think I posted a DNF blog entry for the book. It wasn't the premise of a story narrated by a dog that bothered me, but rather the auto racing aspect, which early on appeared to be a large part of the novel rather than the backdrop I had hoped for. Having never had an interest in auto racing, it was easy to call it quits and read something else.

A year passed and Stein's book (now in paperback) was still selling very well and I wondered if I had been too quick to dismiss the novel. While browsing the shelves of audio books at the library, I noticed a copy of The Art of Racing in the Rain and decided to give it a second chance. I am so glad I did!! I fell in love with Enzo and found myself looking into my own dog's eyes, wondering if she understands me more than I think she does. I know dogs are intelligent, but I couldn't help but wonder if she, like Enzo, feels almost human.

I've always felt almost human. I've always known that there's something about me that's different than other dogs. Sure, I'm stuffed into a dog's body, but that's just the shell. It's what's inside that's important. The soul. And my soul is very human.

Does Annie wish to communicate with me and Rod in a more sophisticated manner than simple gestures?

Gestures are all that I have; sometimes they must be grand in nature. And while I occasionally step over the line and into the world of the melodramatic, it is what I must do in order to communicate clearly and effectively. In order to make my point understood without question. I have no words I can rely on because, much to my dismay, my tongue was designed long and flat and loose, and therefore, is a horribly ineffective tool for pushing food around my mouth while chewing, and an even less effective tool for making clever and complicated polysyllabic sounds that can be linked together to form sentences.

I found myself laughing out loud as I drove around town, listening to Enzo's story. There's an entire chapter about his hatred of crows and I kept wishing my husband were in the car so he could enjoy the humorous anecdote along with me. Christopher Welch does a remarkable job as the reader of this audio book. At first, I thought he was too dramatic, over-emphasizing the end of each sentence, but I quickly grew to enjoy his voice—Enzo's voice, actually—and now as I reread passages (yes, I bought a copy as soon as I finished listening to the audio), searching for quotes, I hear Enzo's voice in my head. There are so many beautiful passages I wish I had taken the time to note as I listened. Stein's writing is exquisite! I can't wait to reread this book.

This is what I love to do: I love to run through a field of wet grass that has not been mowed recently, I love to run, keeping my snout low to the ground so the grass and the sparkles of water cover my face. I imagine myself as a vacuum cleaner, sucking in all the smells, all the life, a spear of summer grass. It reminds me of my childhood, back on the farm in Spangle, where there was no rain, but there was grass, there were fields, and I ran.

and

Here's why I will be a good person. Because I listen. I cannot speak, so I listen very well. I never interrupt, I never deflect the course of the conversation with a comment of my own. People, if you pay attention to them, change the direction of one another's conversations constantly. It's like having a passenger in your car who suddenly grabs the steering wheel and turns you down a side street. For instance, if we met at a party and I wanted to tell you a story about the time I needed to get a soccer ball in my neighbor's yard but his dog chased me and I had to jump into a swimming pool to escape, and I began telling the story, you, hearing the words "soccer" and "neighbor" in the same sentence, might interrupt and mention that your childhood neighbor was Pelé, the famous soccer player, and I might be courteous and say, Didn't he play for the Cosmos of New York? Did you grow up in New York? And you might reply that, no, you grew up in Brazil on the streets of Três Corações with Pelé, and I might say, I thought you were from Tennessee, and you might say not originally, and then go on to outline your genealogy at length. So my initial conversational gambit—that I had a funny story about being chased by my neighbor's dog—would be totally lost, and only because you had to tell me all about Pelé. Learn to listen! I beg of you. Pretend you are a dog like me and listen to other people rather than steal their stories.

The Art of Racing in the Rain is so much more than simply a story about a family and its dog. While I enjoyed Marley and Me (click on the title to see pics of my first dog, Sidney), Stein has taken the run-of-the-mill dog tale to the highest level. I can't imagine any dog-lover not finding pleasure in this insightful story of man's best friend. Sara Gruen, author of Water for Elephants, said, "The Art of Racing in the Rain has everything: love, tragedy, redemption, danger, and—most especially—the canine narrator Enzo. This old soul of a dog has much to teach us about being human. I loved this book." Perhaps that's why I fell in love with Enzo. He's an old soul... just like my Annie-dog.




A Seattle Times Best Book of the Year

A Pacific Northwest Book Award Winner

A Publishers Weekly Listen Up! Award Winner for Fiction

An AudioFile Magazine Best Fiction Book of the Year

An IndieBound Bestseller

A Hudson Bookseller's Best Book of the Year

An Amazon Customer Favorite

and...

soon to be on Lesley's Top Ten List for 2010. This is a great book, folks!

Annie's Photo Gallery

Mother's Day

My beautiful daughter
and
my wonderful mom.
(1986)

I love both of you beyond words.

Giveaway!

And the winner is... Beachreader! Congratulations!

I would like to offer my beautiful hardcover copy of Wench to one of my visitors. You don't have to have a blog to win. Just leave me a comment, telling me what your favorite book is so far for 2010. Since this is a hardcover book (and, thus, more expensive to ship), I'm going to limit the contest to residents of the United States. Be sure to include your email address! I will select the lucky winner on May 16th.

Wench

Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Fiction
2010 Amisted
Finished on 4/28/10
Rating: 3/5 (Good)
FTC Disclosure: Received final book from publisher



Product Description

An ambitious and startling debut novel that follows the lives of four women at a resort popular among slaveholders who bring their enslaved mistresses

wench \'wench\ n. from Middle English "wenchel," 1 a: a girl, maid, young woman; a female child.

Tawawa House in many respects is like any other American resort before the Civil War. Situated in Ohio, this idyllic retreat is particularly nice in the summer when the Southern humidity is too much to bear. The main building, with its luxurious finishes, is loftier than the white cottages that flank it, but then again, the smaller structures are better positioned to catch any breeze that may come off the pond. And they provide more privacy, which best suits the needs of the Southern white men who vacation there every summer with their black, enslaved mistresses. It's their open secret.

Lizzie, Reenie, and Sweet are regulars at Tawawa House. They have become friends over the years as they reunite and share developments in their own lives and on their respective plantations. They don't bother too much with questions of freedom, though the resort is situated in free territory–but when truth-telling Mawu comes to the resort and starts talking of running away, things change.

To run is to leave behind everything these women value most–friends and families still down South–and for some it also means escaping from the emotional and psychological bonds that bind them to their masters. When a fire on the resort sets off a string of tragedies, the women of Tawawa House soon learn that triumph and dehumanization are inseparable and that love exists even in the most inhuman, brutal of circumstances–all while they are bearing witness to the end of an era.

An engaging, page-turning, and wholly original novel, Wench explores, with an unflinching eye, the moral complexities of slavery.

Just as with recipes, I'm always searching for something better. I loved The Book Thief and continue to look for another Holocaust book that will wow me as Zusak's novel did. I can't praise Kathyrn Stockett's amazing debut novel, The Help, highly enough. And yet I continue to reach for other books set in the South, dealing with racial injustice, hoping to come across another stellar read. I wish I could tell you that Wench is that book. Unfortunately, it only just barely kept my interest. It took quite a few pages to draw me in, and while I liked it well enough to complete, it never hit that sweet spot.

I sympathized with Lizzie's situation as slave and mistress:

She was just a slave like any other—beaten, used, and made to feel no different than a cow or a goat or a chicken.

However, I never felt a strong emotional pull toward her or any of the other characters. My sister-in-law read the book before me and said it was a quick read, but I wound up spending over two weeks with the book.

On the desire to learn versus the power of a slave-owner:

He brought her books. The first word she learned to read and write was "she" and it delighted her so much she wrote it everywhere she could. She wrote it in the biscuit batter with her spoon. She dug it in the dirt out back with a stick. She sketched it in the steamy windows when it rained. When she pricked her palm with a kitchen knife, she squeezed the skin until she could write her new word out with blood on a scrap of cloth. She traced the word with her fingers on the smooth parts of his body while they lay together in the storeroom at night.

She was afraid of him, but with each reading lesson she allowed him to take one more step with her. At first, he told her he just wanted to touch her tiny breast. Then he said he just wanted to place his hand on her hip. At first, he asked to touch her. Later, he did not. Each touch was like a payment for his kindness.

and

She gathered a stockpile of books, precious gifts from him, and hid them behind the flour sacks in the storeroom. She couldn't read most of them yet, but she enjoyed turning the pages, fingering each book's binding, making out the page numbers as she learned to count and figure.

I have to admit that had I not received the book from the publisher, I still would have been inclined to give it a read. Who could resist that gorgeous cover?!

Final Thoughts: Good, but not of the same caliber as The Help, Mudbound or Beloved. Maybe I should try The Kitchen House. I hear that's quite good!

Listen to (or read) an interview with the author on NPR.

Visit Diane's blog to read a more glowing review of this book.

Pardonable Lies

Pardonable Lies by Jacqueline Winspear
Mystery - Third in Maisie Dobbs Series
2005 Macmillan Audio, Unabridged Edition
Reader: Orlagh Cassidy
Finished on 4/25/10
Rating: 4/5 (Very Good)



Product Description

In the third novel of this bestselling series, London investigator Maisie Dobbs faces grave danger as she returns to the site of her most painful WWI memories to resolve the mystery of a pilot’s death.

Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple. Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone. Alexander McCall Smith’s Precious Ramotswe. Every once in a while, a detective bursts on the scene who captures readers’ hearts—and imaginations—and doesn’t let go. And so it was with Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs, who made her debut just two years ago in the eponymously titled first book of the series, and is already on her way to becoming a household name.

A deathbed plea from his wife leads Sir Cecil Lawton to seek the aid of Maisie Dobbs, psychologist and investigator. As Maisie soon learns, Agnes Lawton never accepted that her aviator son was killed in the Great War, a torment that led her not only to the edge of madness but to the doors of those who practice the dark arts and commune with the spirit world. In accepting the assignment, Maisie finds her spiritual strength tested, as well as her regard for her mentor, Maurice Blanche. The mission also brings her together once again with her college friend Priscilla Evernden, who served in France and who lost three brothers to the war—one of whom, it turns out, had an intriguing connection to the missing Ralph Lawton.

Following on the heels of the triumphant Birds of a Feather, PARDONABLE LIES is the most compelling installment yet in the chronicles of Maisie Dobbs, “a heroine to cherish” (Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review).

Another winner!

As with most mystery series, it's less about the whodunit and more about the characters that so appeal to me. After just three books, I've grown to care about Maisie and find myself thinking of her, Billy Beale, Maurice, and Pris as I go about my day. The audio format of these books is perfect for listening in my car. I don't have to concentrate on who is speaking, as the reader does such a fine job differentiating between each character. I had planned to take a break between books, not wanting to blur the lines between each story, but I'm already anxious to get on with the fourth (Messenger of Truth) and have placed a request for it at my library. I can hardly wait!

See what other bloggers are saying about Pardonable Lies:

Part of the magic of this series is that you feel like you are in the same time period while you are reading. Winspear captures the mood of the age through her description of fashion, decor, and through the dialogue spoken between the characters. You really get a sense of what is 'proper'. (Booklogged, of A Reader's Journal)

Winspear does an excellent job relating the devastating effects of WWI on the British and, in this novel, the French. Both countries are still, 13 years later, dealing with the suffering and loss inflicted by the war. (Jenclair, of A Garden Carried In the Pocket)

I'm not a frequent mystery reader but I really enjoy these books, particularly for the setting and the heroine. Maisie uses unique methods to solve her crimes and I found that this book helped me understand why and how she is able to do this. Maisie finds herself in danger in this episode which added to the pace of this novel. All in all, a solid addition to the Maisie Dobbs series which left me wanting more - fortunately I have the next two installments waiting. (Tara, of Books and Cooks)

Like the other books in the series this is as much the mystery stories as it is a portrayal of the time and place. England and France between the World Wars were in the process of healing while at the same time hints of future trouble are coming out of Germany. They’re not action packed adventures, but are slower paced period pieces as much as they are mysteries. I’m looking forward to continuing the series. (SuziQOregon, of Whimpulsive)

Winspear has created a truly unique character and one that has become more complex with each new book. (Iliana, of Bookgirl's Nightstand)

What I do enjoy about this series is Winspear's creation of a realistic setting and atmosphere of the late 1930's in England and France. Every book has transported me there without fail. (Joy, of Thoughts of Joy)