FOLIE A DEUX, LIBRARY STYLE: HOW CAN I HELP YOU

I will admit right off the bat that my tastes are a little – odd?  What I like isn’t necessarily what other people will like, and what I find funny sometimes causes other people to look at me oddly and start inching away.

With that in mind, I have to confess that I had great fun reading How Can I Help You, by Laura Sims, a book that checks a lot of my preferences at once: it’s about a serial killer who’s hiding out with a new identity as a library assistant, and her relationship with the new reference librarian who has a pretty good idea of who she is and what she’s done in the past.  It’s incredibly dark, it’s funny (in an incredibly dark way), and clearly, VERY clearly, the author has worked in a library and knows what it’s like.

Back in the day, Margo was Jane. Jane was a nurse who killed a number of people at a number of different hospitals until she almost got caught and had to high-tail it out of her latest hospital and recreate herself.  She chose the persona of Margo, a middle aged, jolly, extremely competent library assistant, and found a job in a small town library, where she’s been working happily for the last two years.  She hasn’t killed anyone or even come close. She’s a model library employee.

Enter Patricia, a failed writer who, in despair over her multiply-rejected novel, has given up on writing and settled on a job as a librarian in the very library where Margo works.  Naturally, Patricia has no more idea than anyone else in the library about Margo’s background, but once we have the two of them in the same building, things start to change.

After an incident with a particularly obnoxious patron (the kind who’s lost 44 books and who insists she dropped them off and it’s the library’s fault they’re missing, the kind who then rants about how, as a taxpayer, she’s paying the library staff’s salaries), Margo loses it.  And then, lo and behold, that obnoxious patron is found dead in the public bathroom.  Margo “finds” her, and Patricia discovers Margo there.

Patricia figures out who Margo was, but, instead of doing what an upstanding citizen should do and turning her in to the police, Patricia discovers that the Margo/Jane story has fired her imagination and now she’s writing again, the words flowing beautifully.  

You might call this a game of cat and mouse, but Margo is far from a mouse, and if Patricia were a cat, she would be a cat who’s following the mouse around, trying to figure out what’s going on in the mouse’s head, rather than trying to kill the mouse.  The situation is brilliantly set up, the suspense is masterful, and the book is a page-turner.

Along the way, we get hints of Margo’s past, including a particularly chilling hint about her childhood (she got started early), and a few judiciously chosen details about her activities in the hospitals where she worked.  We also get some background of Patricia’s, but frankly she’s not as interesting as Margo, and what keeps us reading her story is the ongoing question of what she’s going to do about what she knows.

It might be that this would not be as entertaining to someone who doesn’t work in a library, but for those of us with an intimate knowledge of how things work, all the details are perfect, from the layout of the place to the kinds of questions Patricia fields as a reference librarian, to the other staff members and the director, to the patrons and their relationships with the main characters.

The story is told alternately from Margo’s and Patricia’s viewpoints, and you find yourself seeing the same incident from two different perspectives, which is far from being repetitive.  In fact, I found myself reading Margo’s version of events and eagerly anticipating the spin Patricia would put on them, and vice versa.

I did think Patricia figured Margo out a little more quickly than seemed entirely likely, and the police involvement in the plot was a bit questionable (did they suspect Margo or not?  The author doesn’t seem to have made up her mind), but these are small nit-picks in an overall wild and absorbing book.

 This is the kind of book where you find yourself rooting for deeply morally compromised people.   I, a fan of the early Dexter books, am accustomed to being in this position, but it is something to keep in mind, especially if you feel uncomfortable rooting for the bad guys. 

The ending, by which I often judge books, is just right.  I won’t spoil it by telling you more, just that even though I didn’t anticipate its ending this way, I found it very satisfying.

So check out How Can I Help You for a twisted look at library life.  

Oh, and just to set the record straight, of COURSE I would never behave the way Margo does.  I love my library.  Seriously.

WINNING THE LOTTERY: TWO DIFFERENT TAKES

Occasionally it happens that two books come out at the same time and start with the same idea.  In this case, two books were published on the same day, and both of them start with the same situation: a person wins a staggering amount of money in a lottery, and then things get complicated. Windfall, by Wendy Corsi Staub, goes in a very different direction from Play to Win, by Jodie Slaughter, and which you choose to read depends on whether you’re in the mood for a dark thriller or a romantic comedy.  Remember, both these books have a lottery win as their inciting incident.

In Windfall, a group of friends who once were very close but have drifted apart over the years get together in Vegas and, on a whim, buy a lottery ticket together.  To their amazement, that ticket turns out to be a billion dollar winner.  Talk about wish fulfillment!  Being mostly sensible women, they realize that they’re going to need some help adjusting to becoming so wealthy so quickly.  Being less than terribly sophisticated, they turn for help to one Shea Daniels, a “sudden wealth manager” (the very title should clue them in that something’s not quite kosher here), who promises to guide them through the dangers of sudden acquisition of tons of money.  They go to her retreat in a secluded California mansion (another red flag which they ignore), which is rumored to be cursed (really, haven’t these women ever seen any horror movies?), and at first everything seems wonderful, of course.  Then, however, they’re trapped in this mansion by quick moving wildfires.  Not only can’t they get out, but communications are down as well, so they’re really isolated now.  One of the women disappears, and she happens to be the one who had the lottery ticket in her possession.  What happened to her?  Has she betrayed them, or is there someone in the mansion who’s out to kill them?  Not having read the book yet, my money would be on the latter.  Will they all live to collect their money, or is this a situation where what at first appears to be a dream come true turns into a nightmare?

Not in the mood for something quite so dark but still intrigued by the concept of winning a ton of money in the lottery?  Then turn to Play to Win instead.   Our protagonist in this romantic comedy, Miriam, has seemingly hit bottom.  She’s separated from her husband, working in a job she hates, for which she’s paid very little, she’s living on a spare bed in her mother’s home, and there seems no possibility of her getting out of this rut, until she buys a lottery ticket and it turns out to be a Mega Millions winner.   Naturally, her former husband reappears now that there’s real money involved, and if you’re getting vibes from the movie, It Could Happen to You (which, if you haven’t seen it, you really should because it’s charming and wonderful despite Rosie Perez’ phenomenally annoying character), you’re on the right track.  Except that in this case, the husband isn’t just a leech (as was Stanley Tucci’s character in It Could Happen to You), but someone who genuinely regrets his separation from his wife and really wants to get back together with her and prove himself to her.  Is the money going to make Miriam’s life better, or is it just the spark for what’s really going to make her life better?

So if your fantasy is to win the lottery and become incredibly rich immediately (and why not?  As fantasies go, that’s pretty common and harmless), check out one or both of these books and consider what the result of such a windfall might actually be.

BACK TO SCHOOL FOR FIELD OF MYSTERY: THE RESEMBLANCE

One of the best experiences in a book group is discovering how people can disagree without being disagreeable, and on Saturday, when the Field of Mystery Book Group discussed Jane Harper’s Exiles, we definitely had that experience.  About half the group disliked the book and the other half liked it (weirdly, the dislikes were all sitting on one side of the room and the likes were all sitting on the other side of the room).  And yet, instead of causing anarchy, or at least acrimony, we had an excellent discussion in which I believe everybody saw something new in the book as a result.

As usual, we also chose our book for our August meeting, The Resemblance, by Lauren Nossett.  The books are already arriving at our circulation desk for people to pick up and read before our August 5 meeting.

The Resemblance is one of those books that caught my interest from the opening description on the cover: a young fraternity brother at the University of Georgia is struck and killed by a hit and run driver on campus.  All the numerous witnesses to the crime agree on two things: the driver looked exactly like the victim, and, when the driver hit the victim, the driver was smiling.

Seriously, wouldn’t that make you want to find out what’s going on?  My mind, of course, immediately goes to the weird (thoughts of unholy cloning experiments, inspired, no doubt, by the excellent The Echo Wife, for instance), though I don’t expect this novel to go in that direction.

Instead, we have a detective, Marlitt Kaplan, who’s investigating the case.  She’s a native of Athens and daughter of a professor at the college. She thinks she knows all the dirty little secrets of the college, but she’s going to be proved wrong.  She has her own reasons for wanting justice from the college, and as she investigates, she begins to wonder if the corruption in the college extends into the police department as well, if not farther still.

It should be a fun read, and I look forward, as usual, to a fun and lively discussion when we all return to the scene of the crime in August.

On the Pleasures of Rereading

It seems almost ridiculous to talk about rereading anything nowadays.  There’s so much great new stuff coming out all the time, I could probably spend a whole week doing nothing but reading the new books, fiction and nonfiction, that have appeared on our shelves in the last couple of weeks, to say nothing of other books I’ve read or heard about, and never get tired.  I usually have the sense that I will never be able to get caught up with my To Be Read list.

And yet, sometimes you have to reread.  Perhaps you’re in a place where you’ve run out of new books to read and you don’t have the  battery power or the bandwidth to download something new, or you just don’t feel like reading an e-book.  Perhaps you’re in a book group that’s reading something you read in the past, and you feel you should reread the book to refresh your memory.  Perhaps you’re just in need of comfort reading, and you’d rather spend time with an old friend than take on something new.  

There are definite advantages to reading something for the first time. There’s that thrill of discovery, especially if it’s a new author or someone you’ve never encountered before.  There’s the delight of coming to a surprising yet inevitable twist that changes your view of everything that’s happened before. There’s the moment of breath-catching when you read a passage of exquisite beauty.  There’s the satisfaction of crossing off another book on your To Be Read List.

Rereading, though, offers different pleasures.

Sure, you know when that twist is coming, so you’re not surprised again (unless it’s really been a long time since you read the book last), but on rereading, you can pay attention to how the author sets up that twist, and you can read the part of the book before the twist with a different vision, knowing what’s going to happen.  You can admire the author’s skill in setting things up, paying more attention to all those almost unnoticed details that were always there but that you barely saw the first time through. 

You know the plot, you know how things are going to turn out, so you don’t need to rush through the pages, desperate to relieve the suspense.  You can allow yourself to savor the characters, observe the setting, all those little things that make the book’s world work, which you might not have seen in your initial rush.

And there’s the comfort factor.  I’ve read some books so often I can quote from them, and there’s a real pleasure in reading those books again, coming to those quotes in context, reliving the delights of the first time or the last time I read them.  The characters in those books are like old friends, and it’s always good to spend time with old friends.  Not to mention that even those old friends can take on new depths, new facets, when you come back to them at a different point in your life.  My opinions of different characters change as I return to them; my sympathies enlarge, my sense of who’s in the right and who’s in the wrong can shift, reading a book in my 60’s that I first read in my  teens is a very different experience.

When you reread a book, you bring all the other books you’ve read into your experience, and that deepens and changes your sense of that book.  For instance, I have read and reread and loved T. H. White’s The Once and Future King for decades, but once I read Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk, which talks about White in great detail, I found new insights into The Once and Future King, things which had never struck me before. 

And sometimes even a book you’ve read before can surprise you.  If the book was really complicated (and here I’m thinking about The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, which I recently reread for the Field of Mystery Book Group), you might remember some of the twists and turns, but not all of them, and even if you have a dim sense that something bad is about to happen here, you might not remember in detail what the bad thing is so you’re still surprised when it happens despite your premonition.  

If I weren’t a person who loves to reread old favorites, I wouldn’t have a house full of books.  They’re not here to be decorative.  They’re here to be reread. And re-reread.  They’re here to be savored, old friends ready to welcome me back, and maybe surprise me a little.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that you can’t dive into new books and new authors.  It just means you needn’t feel guilty about sometimes leaving the new behind and returning to books you know you love.