Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 43

Lord Edgware Dies AKA Thirteen at Dinner, by Agatha Christie

Poirot is approached by a beautiful but less-than-bright actress, Jane Wilkerson, who wants him to get rid of her husband, Lord Edgware, who is refusing to divorce her. She's a little vague on what exactly she thinks Poirot can do, but is very clear, in front of multiple witnesses, that she'd like a divorce but would prefer him dead.

Poirot does go to see Lord Edgware, and is thunderstruck when the lord says he's already agreed to divorce her. He tells Jane, who is puzzled as it's the first she's heard of it. Then Lord Edgware turns up murdered. Jane has a perfect alibi, and her motive is now questionable due to the divorce. Does anyone else want him dead...?

The most interesting thing about this book is very spoilery. ( Read more... )

Otherwise my favorite thing about the book is that if you add one letter, you get a gentle satire on wellness trends, Lord Edgware Diets.

Though there's a couple clever bits and the end is good, this is overall not one of Christie's better books. Jane is a good character but the rest of the cast doesn't have Christie's usual deft touch with supporting characters. Also, even by Christie standards, it is HORRENDOUSLY bigoted. Skip it.

Christie scale: MEDIUM levels of HOMOPHOBIA. HIGH levels of RACISM. EXTREME levels of ANTI-SEMITISM.

[image error] [image error]

comments

Hawaii

Once upon a time, my parents and I were going to take a relaxing trip to Hawaii, in March 2020.

Yeah.

It turns out that my ticket is still valid so long as I make my reservation by the end of this year and it's for a date in 2023. (Or 2022, but I'm not going in the next two months.)

You can click on the link and see me asking some of the same questions, but obviously a lot has changed, and also probably new people are reading. So I'm asking again.

I like: hiking, natural wonders, and great food (not fancy food, just tasty and cool).

I do not like: giant crowds of tourists, doing nothing but lying on a beach all day.

I prefer: Pleasant weather. (Warm but not very hot, not raining all day.)

I require: Being able to eat outdoors, due to covid. This is part of the issue with rain. But if a place has an awning, that's fine.

I intend to stay in an AirBnB and rent a car.

1) I can go for about a week. I will be traveling alone. I'd prefer to go in late March or early April, if possible; are those good times? Late February and mid-April are also possible. Wild card: What's the ideal month to go?

2) Which island should I go to?

3) Any general recs, tips, etc.

comments

Zombie Wolf of Piston, by T. S. Joyce

Reaper (formerly known as Stryker) is a werewolf whose life was destroyed when he was killed and resurrected. Now he's in charge of a pack he hates, he's haunted by the ghost of the pack's evil alpha who he replaced, and he feels dead inside.

Zombies didn't have sexy hair, but Reaper absolutely did. And also, zombies ate raw meat, and she'd definitely split a plate of nachos and fried cheese curds with Reaper last night, so all of the things that turned her off about zombies weren't an issue with him.

Isa is a werewolf matchmaker for shifters, but she's never found a mate for herself. When a desperate member of Reaper's pack hires her to find a mate for Reaper on the theory that love will make him chill out, she starts falling for him herself, very much against her intentions.

Isa turned up the volume, and cringed when the relaxing sound of frogs in a rainforest belted out. She'd forgotten she'd put her music app on a relaxing soundtrack to help her sleep last night.

Despite being first in a series, this book has a lot of backstory as it's a spinoff from a different series. But Joyce is good at catching up the reader and making the "previously..." characters distinguishable.

Isa and Reaper had absolutely delightful interactions in this - their dialogue was charming and their chemistry was great. I was also really into the subplot of Reaper being haunted by the asshole alpha of the pack he reluctantly inherited. The ghost alpha appears bloody, hanging from the ceiling, and in other horrific ways, urges Reaper to kill everyone, and makes him seem crazy because no one else can see him.

I enjoyed this book a lot and only wished it was longer. I wanted more, and it feels somewhat rushed in parts. But it's overall extremely enjoyable and funny.

[image error] [image error]

comments

By the Pricking of My Thumbs, by Agatha Christie

Tommy and Tuppence, a delightful middle-aged married couple, solved mysteries when they were young. Now they have nothing to do with that world except for Tommy's yearly conference on national security issues, where he meets with other aging former espionage agents.

When they go to visit Tommy's disagreeable elderly aunt in a nursing home, she promptly kicks Tuppence out for being a scarlet woman; Tuppence, amused, goes to the common room and sits by a sweet old lady drinking milk, who tells her it's not poisoned today and asks if it's her dead child who's walled up behind the fireplace.

The aunt dies soon after, and Tuppence inherits a painting of a house that she recognizes, though she's not sure why. She also finds that the sweet old lady, who gave the aunt the painting, has mysteriously vanished. While Tommy is at the conference, Tuppence sets out to solve a mystery that may not even be one, sifting for clues in her own memory, the memories of various people with memory loss and dementia, old crimes, urban legends, and garbled accounts of things that may or may not have happened. There's women who may be witches, dead birds and old dolls that fall down the chimney, a beautiful house with exactly one half of it falling into ruin, and far too many murdered children, some of whom may be imaginary.

Agatha Christie started writing about Tommy and Tuppence when they were young, and aged them in real time. Their books are pastiches of various genres, from specific Golden Age mystery writers to espionage. sovay reviewed this book as folk horror, and I can't disagree.

There are elements of traditional mystery, an unexpected element of organized crime, and it does have a mystery with a solution. But it doesn't feel and isn't structured anything like a traditional mystery. It's instead a swirl of thematic elements and creeping dread; the reliability and unreliability of memory and intuition are major themes, and the plot reflects that. You don't know exactly what's going on, but you can feel that it's something bad.

( Read more... )

Christie scale: VERY LOW levels of ANYTHING OBJECTIONABLE.

[image error] [image error]

comments

Best Book by a Bad Author

View Poll: #27823

Comment with your favorite!

comments

The Awesomely Bad Book Poll

If you vote, please note which book you mean in comments.

View Poll: #27820

comments

Random Bookshelf Book Discussion

Here are some random photos of my bookshelves. Please click to enlarge. (If you tell me how to make it larger within the post, I will do so.)

ETA: I added more!

[image error]

[image error]

[image error]

[image error]

Please comment to say what you think of any of these books that you've read, or with your osmosis idea of what you think they're like if you haven't read them, or name some titles that you'd like me to give a thumbnail review or osmosis opinion of them. You are 100% free to say you hate something!

Please talk amongst yourselves!

Click on the tag to see why I'm doing this.

comments

Election Respite Poll

Today, throughout the day, I will be putting up posts tagged "election respite" which will be things that are not about politics. Please come, read, and comment if that sounds good to you!

(I have already posted a review of Worrals of the WAAF which you should all read. She kicks Nazi ass, it's great.)

Let's start by telling me what you'd like me to put here.

View Poll: #27816

comments

Worrals of the WAAF, by W. E. Johns

"The guns fired just as well for me as if a noble Wing Commander had pressed the button."

If you like Biggles, you have GOT to read Worrals.

During WWII, the Air Ministry asked Johns to write some books to inspire girls to join the WAAF (Women's Auxiliary Air Force). He obligingly wrote eleven of them, basing his heroine on two WAAF pilots he knew. The books are now even harder to find that Biggles, which is too bad, because this one, at least, is terrific.

Joan Worralson (aka Worrals) is frustrated with only being allowed to ferry planes back and forth, as women aren't allowed in combat. Her best friend Betty Lovell (aka Frecks because she has freckles) is frustrated because, at seventeen, she's too young to officially be a pilot. I should note that Worrals is a pilot at all of just-turned-eighteen. At one point a male pilot calls Worrals "kid," she asks him if he's twenty yet, and he replies, "Almost!" There are definite shades of the WWI Biggles books here, though thankfully casualty rates aren't as high.

After Worrals gets an unauthorized lesson in piloting a fighter plane, she's dispatched to deliver it to a base. She takes Frecks along as a passenger. When she tests out the radio, they hear a radio message about an unidentified plane that must be shot down at all costs, just as they see that same plane emerge from the clouds...

The action is absolutely nonstop from that point on. Worrals and Frecks uncover an extremely clever enemy plot, and the rest of the book is a wild ride of cat-and-mouse games, daring escapes, even more daring rescues, and thrilling flying. Johns' gifts for inventive plotting, exciting action, clever twists, and atmospheric settings really shine here.

Worrals has a Biggles-like gift for out-of-the-box thinking, and Frecks has a Ginger-like love for slang she learned from American movies. But they're really their own characters, and they have excellent camaraderie.

Worrals drives a car named Snooks and already had a private pilot's license before she joined the WAAF. (I'm not sure if that suggests she came from money.) She's extremely tough and forthright, and at one point is prepared to crash her plane and kill everyone onboard, including herself and Frecks, if that's what it takes to defeat the enemy.

Frecks is a bit naive (when someone suggests she try bleaching out her freckles, she responds that they don't hurt), admires Worrals for her courage, and gets flustered when faced with difficult decisions on her own. But when she needs to, she steps right up to the plate, and she gets an absolutely spectacular heroic bit in this book.

Unlike Biggles and his friends, Worrals and Frecks are viewed with doubt and suspicion because of their gender, aren't supposed to be in combat at all, and have to fight harder to prove themselves. Very refreshingly, Johns clearly has absolutely no difficulty believing that women can everything a man can do.

I really loved this and highly recommend it. You can download it and a couple other Worrals books here.

Content Notes: Literally no -isms whatsoever! That is, some sexism is expressed by some characters, but it's only there to be proved wrong by the author.

( Read more... )


[image error] [image error]

comments

Death on the Nile, by Agatha Christie

Poirot goes on a cruise along the Nile, where he sees a tragedy in the making but is unable to prevent it. After one of the passengers turns up murdered, he has a very short time in which to solve the mystery before the ship reaches the nearest port.

One of Christie's best books, with vivid, memorable characters, an excellent puzzle, and some real emotional heft.

The central characters, apart from Poirot, are introduced before the Nile cruise and some time earlier. Linnet Ridgeway is a beautiful, young, fabulously wealthy socialite who's generous and means well but is also high-handed and blinkered by privilege. Her best friend, Jacqueline, is poor, passionate, and quick-witted. Jacqueline's fiance, Simon, is also poor, not terribly bright or sophisticated, but very handsome. Jacqueline loves him with a consuming, somewhat scary passion.

When we meet them on the Nile Cruise, Linnet is married to Simon and Jacqueline is stalking them. Poirot tries to warn her off this path, to no avail. So when Linnet turns up dead with a bullet in her head, suspicion should point straight to Jacqueline (her enemy) or Simon (who will inherit her money). But at the time that Linnet was murdered, both Simon and Jacqueline were in the presence of multiple others for most of it... and then Jacqueline shot Simon in the leg! After that, he had a broken leg and she was sedated and watched by a nurse. So they (and some of the people who witnessed all this) have unimpeachable alibis. Is there anyone else onboard who might have wanted to kill Linnet?

This trio isn't just a set of Christie's best characters, but great characters in general. They feel very alive. They're joined by a very fun set of other characters, of whom my favorite was Cornelia, who's poor and plain and helping out her rich aunt and is in a Cinderella situation, but loves traveling and is actually having a wonderful time. Others include a young angry Communist, a has-been author of erotic novels, and a soup-slurping German doctor. Everyone has secrets.

( Read more... )

Christie scale: MEDIUM-HIGH levels of RACISM.

[image error] [image error]

comments