Slacks for Ella Funt

This seemed less like a book than a script for a teen movie, something in the Superbad or American Pie genre. It’s more or less a classic teen movie scenario—graduation night, nerd has just confessed his love to his longtime cheerleader crush, a long night of hijinks ensues. It would probably do ok as a movie, but it wasn’t a very good book.

Atkinson’s narrator, Ruby Lennox, is the real star here. The first line of the book is a brash declaration of her conception: “I exist!” She tells her story from conception to old age. Atkinson does a great job of matching the narrative voice and the level of knowledge consistent with Ruby’s age. As a baby and child, Ruby doesn’t completely understand what’s going on, and neither does the reader. As Ruby gets older, her understanding of past events fills in the gaps for the reader.
The history of five generations of Ruby’s family is brought in as footnotes to items in the main narrative, leading to a non-linear structure that I really enjoyed.
I didn’t like this quite as well as Atkinson’s recent literary mysteries, but it’s interesting to see what she was doing before she started with the mysteries.

I think I’ve only read one of Elizabeth George’s other books, which I don’t remember being very impressed by. So I think I picked this one up only because I thought it was a good title. It seems like she was going out on a limb here. As it pertains to her ongoing series, this book is about the murder of the detective’s wife. Instead of starting with the murder and proceeding with solving it, per usual mystery format, she starts with Joel, the young boy who shoots the victim, and tells the events that led to the murder.
Joel is a poor black kid living in the London projects with his aunt, sister, and brother. They all have issues. I’m sure the author was trying to be gritty and authentic in writing about the lives of these characters, but it doesn’t work. All of the black characters are somewhat offensive stereotypes. Even worse, the third person omniscient voice seems condescending to both the characters and the readers.

It seems like the “novel in stories” format has become more popular lately, and publishers don’t quite know how to sell them. Novels sell better than short stories, so they don’t want to label the books as stories. However, they don’t have the sustained narrative of a novel, even if characters do overlap from story to story. I don’t mind when a book is subtitled “a novel in stories” or something like that so at least you know what you’re getting. I don’t like when a publisher just calls it a novel.
For Adverbs, nothing on the cover says anything about it being stories rather than a cohesive novel. Since I’m not really a short story fan, I was disappointed as soon as I realized that it wasn’t a real novel. Handler has a lot of quirky wit, but the stories were just too short and spastic for me to really get into any of them and I usually couldn’t remember which characters were which when they came up again. Some of them did remind me a bit of Kelly Link, who does write short stories that I like, though hers tend to be longer.

This is a fairly standard Victorian mystery/thriller. Taylor equips his book with the usual cast of characters: a crazy woman in the attic, a mysterious country house, a precocious chambermaid, etc. So many characters and plotlines that it took me a while to sort out who was who, especially because I was reading it in small chunks on the train. One section, set in a cabin in Canada, I never managed to connect with anything else in the book. It’s beginning to seem like these imitation-Victorian novels that have been coming out lately are more interested in getting the form right than in being very interesting to read.

This is a charming little book about a girl who wants to be a pianist, but ends up playing the electric organ instead. The narrator’s voice is very appealing. It would probably be a great pick for a middle grade reader, but it was a little to simple for the adult reader.

Like Ian Rankin’s books set in Edinburgh, Lehane’s series is one where the city itself is the starring character. Lehane’s Boston is a place of poverty, bitterness, and desperation, where crime is rampant and no one is safe. Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro grew up in a working class area of Boston. Many of the kids they grew up with became criminals, drunks, etc. They became private detectives. There’s a lot of violence in these, and they really come up against the scum of humanity, and almost lose themselves in the process. Sometimes the violence crosses the line of being believable, particularly the number of people Kenzie and Gennaro manage to kill without any serious legal repercussions. Overall though, a good series, well written with interesting plots and characters. One of the better American series that I’ve read.

I have always been not just a reader, but a rereader. I read fast, so I don’t have the feeling that time spent rereading is wasted because it will prevent me from reading as many new books.
When I was younger, I had to reread. I could never get enough new books to keep up with how fast I’d plow through them. We’d go to the library and I’d check out a stack of books, only to finish them all after two or three days, with nothing else new until our next visit. So anything I liked would get read a few times.
Now, I reread because when I read, it’s almost entirely for pleasure. So by picking up a book that I already know I like, I know that I’ll enjoy reading it. It doesn’t feel repetitive because generally some time has passed between readings of a book. Even with a book I really loved, I will remember probably 30% of the details two years later. If I reread it, I’ll pick up more. By the fourth or fifth reading, which only happens with books I really love, I know most of the book. Obviously, some books are worth knowing this well, and some aren’t.

A somewhat more interesting mystery/psychological thriller. The twists and turns of this one actually were surprising. And the dysfunctional family is so disturbing that it keeps things interesting. Ultimately, though, this book mostly frustrated me. The narrator is just as screwed up as the rest of her family, and I just wanted her to pull herself together, at least a little bit.

I think I saw this on a best mysteries of the year list somewhere, so I added it to my library hold list. For a book billing itself as a mystery, everything that went on seemed pretty obvious from the very beginning of the book. Unreliably narrator has a probably crazy sister who thinks her husband killed their son. Not so surprising when she does turn out the be crazy and the husband probably did kill the son. I guess it was supposed to also be a psychological thriller, but everything about it seemed so obvious that it was mostly boring.