TROUBLING A STAR

In Madeleine L’Engle’s final Austin family book (which takes place during the school year directly following the momentous summer of A Ring of Endless Light but was published 14 years later), Vicky travels to Antarctica to visit Adam Eddington, who is working at a research station, and becomes embroiled in international intrigue. The setting is interesting and I especially like that L’Engle makes use of the fictional South American nation of Vespugia that she created for A Swiftly Tilting Planet, but overall I found it a bit dull. The story is mostly travelogue, without either the excitement of Arm of the Starfish or the coming-of-age introspection of The Moon by Night. The good-vs.-evil struggle feels low-stakes and tacked on, the conclusion unsatisfying, probably because Vicky has very little agency; she’s just on a tour, and the big climax is that she gets stranded on an iceberg by the bad guys and then…waits to be rescued by the good guys? I didn’t see much continuity between this Vicky and the passionate dreamer of A Ring of Endless Light, and it seemed especially weird that there was absolutely no reference whatsoever to recent discovery that she can communicate telepathically with dolphins. I’m just saying, if I discover I can talk to dolphins one summer, and I find myself on a boat in the Antarctic a few months later, I might try conversing with a seal or a whale or something, especially when in peril, but it doesn’t even cross Vicky’s mind. Devoid of that mystical wacky awesomeness, Troubling a Star feels flat.

MRS. AMES

Another one of the fab Bloomsbury Group vintage reprints, and this one by E.F. Benson, author of the fab Mapp & Lucia series. A match made in heaven? I think so! Mrs. Ames starts out seeming very familiar, set as it is in the small town of Riseborough, which the reader may be forgiven for confusing with Riseholme, the setting of the first two Lucia books. In Riseborough, as in Riseholme and Tilling, dwell a great many upper-middle-class people with too much time on their hands, and thus nothing better to do than to pry into the business of their neighbors and endlessly jockey for social supremacy. As always, Benson documents their infighting with affectionate but wicked wit; here’s my favorite line, the initial description of Mrs. Ames herself, the town’s queen bee:

In appearance she was like a small, good-looking toad in half-mourning; or, to state the comparison with greater precision, she was small for a woman, but good-looking for a toad.

In grand Luciaesque fashion, Mrs. Ames soon faces a contender to her throne, her younger, new-to-town cousin Mrs. Evans, and a series of competitive parties and other social maneuvers ensues. But in the Mapp & Lucia books, feelings (except perhaps jealousy and pride) rarely run very deeply, with romantic relationships absent, irrelevant, or considered downright gauche. Mrs. Ames ventures into more emotional territory when Mr. Ames becomes increasingly infatuated with Mrs. Evans, and Mrs. Ames finds she minds this very much. At first, the situation seems comical and harmless, as Mr. Ames makes a mild fool of himself and Mrs. Ames makes failed attempts to recapture his attention by dying her hair and using anti-wrinkle creams; there is nothing Benson does better than exploit the foibles of his characters to hilarious if uncomfortable effect, like an early-1900s version of The Office. But as the relationship between Mr. Ames and Mrs. Evans (who is bored and unfulfilled, “an unexploded shell, liable to blow to bits both itself and any who handled her”) grows more serious, Mrs. Ames finds herself reassessing both her marriage and her life. All comes right in the end, but there’s much more poignancy and self-discovery in this story (as well as an interesting semi-sympathetic, but occasionally derisive portrayal of the women’s suffrage movement) than the cover blurb led me to expect. (“A clever, laughable little satire in the author’s lightest and happiest mood,” said the Time Literary Supplement on its publication in 1912, which is either a severe case of missing the point completely or a reflection of the fact that Benson was best known for writing ghost stories, in comparison to which this is no doubt light and happy, before he started the Mapp & Lucia series 10 years later.)

There is more pathos and a sharper edge to the humor here, and I found the story moving, even sad. It’s not as charming and lovable as Mapp & Lucia, but it’s just as clever and entertaining, and a good demonstration of Benson’s range as a writer. I just wish I could find more books by him! My library only has some collections of his ghost stories, a few of his nonfiction works, and Dodo, the book that apparently first made him a sensation (it seems to be a darker satire about a ruthless social climber). I may have to check out Dodo by default, though I’d prefer something more cheerful.

I LOVE IT WHEN YOU TALK RETRO

As I predicted, I checked out another Ralph Keyes book on language, and also as predicted, it quickly verged on language-book exhaustion—or, possibly, this one wasn’t quite as good a read as Euphemania. Subtitled Hoochie Coochie, Double Whammy, Drop a Dime, and the Forgotten Origins of American Speech, this one deals with what Keyes calls “retrotalk”: allusions to past phenomena that still exist as artifacts in our language today. It’s an interesting concept, one that was first introduced to me as a teenager when my much-younger cousin asked me why we say “roll down the window” and I realized he’d never seen a car without automatic windows (!), and which is increasingly a topic among my peers as we get older, especially for my friends who are college professors and repeatedly shocked by the pop-culture references their students don’t understand. And I certainly learned a lot from this book (although I can’t remember any examples off the top of my head), particularly about older and more obscure phrase origins.

However, my problem with it was twofold: (1) The book doesn’t flow as well as Euphemania; it contains less high-level analysis and so often reads like lists of words and their origins organized in paragraph form. Admittedly, Keyes acknowledges this in his introduction, noting that it can be dipped into rather than read straight through, but I was reading it straight through, and at times it felt scattershot and tedious. Part of the tedium also stemmed from the fact that (2) the book is so broad-focused that at times it laps over into simply being an elementary history of the United States. I know there are plenty of people who don’t know what Watergate or the Cuban missile crisis are, but couldn’t they just look it up online or in an encyclopedia? Do we really need to explain them here? Isn’t anything considered common knowledge anymore? I wish Keyes had focused on some of the more obscure concepts and left the basic ones alone. Keyes does argue that there are plenty of people who don’t know the basic ones, and that someday most people won’t remember them, the way there are already many people who don’t remember pay phones, but that doesn’t make it any less dull to read sections that amount to “once upon a time, there were these things called record players, and here is the associated terminology.” This book would make an excellent primer on cultural references for non-Americans, the young, and anyone else who’d like to brush up them (I know post-WWII history always got serious short shrift in my schooling; I happened to learn most of it from a childhood spent reading Doonesbury, my former job as an editor of middle-grade history books, and a personal fascination with the era), but to me it was only of mild interest.

THE BONESHAKER

This should have been such a slam dunk: a YA novel set in small-town Missouri in 1913, featuring a mechanically-minded tomboy protagonist who must beat the devil at his game, plus the titular bicycle, an ominous traveling medicine show, a blues guitarist reminiscent of Robert Johnson (with a similar Faustian story attached), steampunky automata, and a healthy dose of American folklore. But it just didn’t do it for me. I hesitate to place too much judgment on Kate Milford’s writing because I listened to this as an audiobook—which I plucked semi-randomly off the shelf at the library for my commuting entertainment, perhaps having confused it with Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker, which, confusingly coincidentally, is another YA novel published at around the same time, with harder-core steampunk elements and zombies to boot. I’m not a committed audiobook fan, so it’s possible something about this just didn’t translate from page to voice (I do know the book featured plentiful illustrations, which of course I missed out on), and maybe I’d have enjoyed this more if I actually read it (it’s gotten a lot of good reviews, strengthening the It’s Just Me theory).

I really did like the idea of the book, just not the execution. The characters, particularly Natalie, the heroine, felt flat and wooden; the pacing was often ponderous; there were lots of descriptive passages that seemed like they were supposed to be lyrical but didn’t sing; too much of the plot seemed to be contrived around Natalie having inexplicable visions at convenient moments; and in the end some narrative threads were unresolved—I think because Milford is planning a sequel, but it felt unsatisfying. Would it be insulting to say that I’d like to see someone adapt this into a movie? With the action at the forefront and some awesome visuals (I’m thinking Tim Burton would be perfect for this), it would make a damn cool and creepy Southern Gothic fantasy film. As an audiobook, however…meh.

THE DAUGHTER OF TIME

This was the first Josephine Tey book I ever read, way back in 1996; my father handed it to me during my freshman year of college because I had just read (and loved) Shakespeare’s Richard III. (I was also primed to read it because it gets a shout out in my beloved Tam Lin.) It’s an Inspector Grant mystery, but with a novelty twist: Grant is laid up in the hospital with a broken leg and, bored silly, he ends up investigating the murders of the princes in the Tower. I’ve said before how ridiculously seductive I find books that involve a lot of suspenseful historical researching (Possession is another), so of course this one grabbed me: I reread it in one sitting, on a flight from L.A. to Minneapolis, and was enthralled the whole time, even though I already knew the outcome: Grant proves, quite convincingly in my opinion, that Richard had no motive to commit the crime, whereas Henry Tudor did and certainly had reason to try to pin it on Richard (pro-Tudor historians such as Thomas More are definitely responsible for Richard’s portrayal, in Shakespeare and popular culture, as an evil hunchback).

The book definitely stands on its own enough that fans of historical mysteries can enjoy it without having read the rest of the Grant series (obviously, I existed quite happily for 14 years after reading this without feeling compelled to check out another), but this time around, after having read all the books in order, it was even more fun—I had a better sense of Grant’s personality and could recognize recurring characters like Sergeant Williams and Marta Hallard. This is one of Tey’s best works and definitely my favorite Grant book…at least so far; I still have one more to go.

BOSSYPANTS

Once in a generation a woman comes along who changes everything. Tina Fey is not that woman, but she met that woman once and acted weird around her.

See, even the back cover is funny! I don’t normally gravitate toward large-print, wide-spaced, photo-on-the-cover celebrity/entertainment/humor books, but I love Tina Fey and think she’s a great comedy writer as well as a seemingly swell person, so not surprisingly, I acquired (as a thoughtful birthday gift from Friend M), read, and enjoyed her book. This collection of short, mostly biographical essays is a quick read; it’s full of Fey’s wry, self-deprecating humor, but also thoughtful and honest about her experiences as a nerd, woman, actor, writer, and mom. It was especially interesting to read the last chapter, in which she explores her indecision about having a second child—she wants one, but knows it could perilously interrupt her career at its peak (or as she calls it, her “last five minutes of fame”) and put her TV show’s staff of 200 people out of work (“I thought 30 Rock would be canceled by now”)—given that since its writing, she had obviously made up her mind; she recently announced her pregnancy, and 30 Rock will return midseason to give her a maternity break, which seems to work out well for everyone—except possibly me, who will miss it in the meantime.

But it’s Fey’s smart, snarky feminism I love the best, as in the piece where she responds to fictional (but obviously based on reality) Internet hate mail. Here’s her answer to the complaint that she ruined SNL, is only famous because she’s a woman and a liberal, and isn’t funny:

Huzzah for the Truth Teller! Women in this country have been over-celebrated for too long. Just last night there was a story on my local news about a “missing girl,” and they must have dedicated seven or eight minutes to “where she was last seen” and “how she might have been abducted by a close family friend,” and I thought, “What is this, the News for Chicks?” Then there was some story about Hillary Clinton flying to some country because she’s secretary of state. Why do we keep talking about these dumdums? We are a society that constantly celebrates no one but women and it must stop! I want to hear what the men of the world have been up to. What fun new guns have they invented? What are they raping these days? What’s Michael Bay’s next film going to be?

UNFAMILIAR FISHES

Sarah Vowell’s latest explores the history of Hawaii, about which I knew absolutely nothing (I’ve never even been there), so I can attest that it is definitely informative, at least for the newbie. It’s also, of course, entertaining—tongue-in-cheek but affectionate, funny but often poignant. It doesn’t have quite the offbeat passion and sharp focus of good old Assassination Vacation (a book I am apparently invoking often these days), but it’s less uneven and rambly than her previous effort, The Wordy Shipmates (which, despite some good wisecracks and a sound premise, I didn’t end up loving)—although in a lot of ways, it’s a natural extension of that book’s insights into American Christianity and imperialism. I think Vowell has pretty much guaranteed at this point that whatever she writes about, I will read.

MISS HARGREAVES

In this 1940 novel by Frank Baker (another of the awesome Bloomsbury Group reprints), after a young man invents an eccentric octogenarian friend named Miss Hargreaves as a joke, his world is turned upside down when she turns up on his doorstep, exactly as he described her. I’m a great fan of books where imagination becomes reality (Pamela Dean’s Secret Country trilogy, for instance), so this concept was right up my alley, and for the most part I loved the story, which is a nice blend of silly comedy-of-manners and darker musings on the godlike creator’s power over and responsibility toward his creation.

My only quibble is that I wanted more Miss Hargreaves! Norman finds her so mortifying that he spends a lot of time being quite rude to her and trying to change her or get rid of her entirely, even though he admits that deep down he likes her, and that frustrated me at times, because I thought she was pretty awesome. I found myself wishing Norman would just relax and enjoy himself—probably unfair, I know, because that’s not what the book is about, but it was just one of those cases where the protagonist’s awkward handling of the situation seemed to cause more trouble and embarrassment than the situation itself. I felt more sympathy for Miss Hargreaves than for Norman most of the time, which amplified the more tragic aspects of the plot and made it feel a bit less like pure madcap fun than some of the other books I’ve read in this genre. Still, it’s definitely a unique book, and highly recommended for those who like their charming WWII-era British fiction tinged with the surreal.

THE WILDER LIFE

This book is like Assassination Vacation, but with Laura Ingalls Wilder instead of dead presidents. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a compliment; Assassination Vacation is one of my favorite nonfiction books. The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie achieves a similar balance of nerdy personal obsession, entertaining travelogue, snarky commentary, and hard historical fact. I was suspicious when I first heard about it; it so easily might have been one of those trendy I-did-one-crazy-activity-for-a-year-and-then-got-a-book-deal gimmicks, or a shallow, remedial “Oh, hey, did you know you can visit the actual Little House sites?” play-by-play, the thought of which made me bristle—I feel a fairly strong sense of ownership toward Little House, having grown up in Ingalls country, read the books over and over as a kid, and visited both Pepin (Big Woods) and Walnut Grove (Plum Creek) multiple times. I even refused to watch the TV show when I was little because it was too unfaithful to the books (actually, I still refuse to watch it, although I have met Dean Butler). But The Wilder Life is written by Wendy McClure, author of the stellar bygone blog Pound and a famously hilarious online feature, Weight Watchers Recipe Cards circa 1974 (later published as a book, The Amazing Mackerel Pudding Plan, which I own), as well as a memoir called I’m Not the New Me, which I have read but rather embarrassingly don’t remember anything about. McClure won me over to The Wilder Life after revealing herself as the author of the HalfPintIngalls Twitter feed, which I had been enjoying for the past several years for its spot-on blend of clever humor and encyclopedic knowledge of Little House minutiae; e.g.:

Wash on Monday, iron on Tuesday, mend on Wednesday, churn on Thursday, ROCK ON FRIDAY.

Why don't wise old Indians ever come to town to tell us we're going to have an FUN AWESOME winter?

You can always tell it'll be a long winter from the way the muskrats build their houses. And from their tiny hats and scarves.

McClure brings the same wit to The Wilder Life, and I wholeheartedly enjoyed it. Having read all the books and a LIW biography (Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder) I’d thought it would mostly be old hat, but either I didn’t retain very much information from the bio or McClure had some new insights to share, because I learned some stuff as well as being amused and, in parts, moved by McClure’s exploration of her obsession with the blurred line between the historical reality, the fictionalized book versions, and the pop-culture TV version: What exactly is it that we’re responding to when we love these books so deeply and yearn to be absorbed in that world—a world that is long gone and, in some ways, never existed? McClure delves more deeply into her emotional journey than Vowell does in Assassination Vacation, but both perfectly capture that wonderful feeling of being so enthusiastic about something that you can adore it and—well, not make fun of it, but make informed in-jokes about it—and the same time. I highly recommend this book to Little House fans, but it’s also got enough going for it to interest newbies as well. Here’s a sample (a passage I heartily nodded along with, given my feelings about the TV show):

More than once, a friend or acquaintance has gushed, “you mean you’re a Little House fan, too?” only to discover that we have two very different sets of memories. One of us is thinking of the time Laura taught a calf to drink from a bucket. The other is thinking about the Very Special Episode when some kid named Albert got hooked on morphine. The ensuing conversation often ends awkwardly, with one of us a bit disappointed that the real Laura Ingalls did not have an opiate-crazed adopted brother and the other feeling, well, just depressed.

TO LOVE AND BE WISE

The third of Josephine Tey’s Inspector Grant mysteries, and my favorite so far (mostly because it featured the small-town-where-all-the-eccentric-characters-are-suspects trope). It’s still only a fraction as awesome as Brat Farrar or Miss Pym Disposes, but it was an absorbing train read and gets bonus points for a very interesting twist ending.

P.S. Although a lot of the selections are pretty bonkers, I was happy to see Grant included, and decently ranked, on this list of bangable male characters in British literature. I’ve got a bit of a crush on him.