NOT YOUR NORMAL SENIOR CITIZENS: HOW TO AGE DISGRACEFULLY

I have to confess: I want to grow up to be Daphne “Smith” in How to Age Disgracefully, by Clare Pooley, though I suspect I’m already too late to achieve her style and her panache (not to mention her backstory).  While there are other wonderful characters in this book, from Lydia, the middle aged woman who’s “running” the local senior center (“running” in quotes because she’s far from in charge for most of the book), to Art, the former actor and current kleptomaniac, to Ziggy, the teenage single father, it’s really Daphne who’s the heart and soul of the book, who makes things happen, and what a fabulous person she is!

The book is tremendous fun, even more fun than the description of the plot might suggest.  In fact, you might read the summary of the plot and think you’ve read this story before, or seen it in a dozen Hallmark movies, but trust me, you haven’t. Sure, there’s a building that’s a combined senior citizen center and day care (already you’re thinking it’s too cute for words, but stay with me here), and the building is in imminent danger of being sold by the city to a private buyer who’s interested in making condominiums from it, and sure, the senior citizens join forces and work with the children in the day care (not to mention a dog who’s passed around among three characters) to save the building, and that all feels like a cliche, but what lifts this plot above the banal is the characters and the unique way they interact to make this happen.

The building is in bad shape to begin with. When the ceiling falls in on one of the senior citizens, one who’s in a wheelchair, no less, and she subsequently dies (not, as it turns out, from the impact with the ceiling, though that hardly matters), the local council decides the building has to go, never mind how many different groups need and depend on it.  It’s possible that the council had already made a deal with a developer to sell the building, but the disaster just makes it easier for them to justify it.

While the rest of the oddball group of seniors, and Lydia, who’s only just started running the program and is seriously lacking in self-esteem, seem resigned to the thought that this place is going to be sold out from under them, Daphne is not about to stand by and be resigned to anything.  She has just turned 70 and has just started to emerge from her self-imposed isolation, and she has her goal of making friends written on her whiteboard at home, and she is determined that she’s not going to have her best chance of integrating into society ripped out from under her.  

When you first meet Daphne, you could be excused for thinking she’s the equivalent of one of Fredrik Backman’s irascible old ladies (a la Britt Marie), someone who’s shut herself away from the world and needs to warm up and discover love and friendship again. She is, after all, irascible, blunt to a fault, and wildly opinionated.  She has no family, no friends, and no connections to anyone outside of her beautiful home.  And I have to say that she does change over the course of the book, opening up to other people, getting involved in their problems and solving them in her own unique way (and I wouldn’t dream of spoiling the fun by describing what her unique way involves), but do not expect her to turn into a sweet old lady no matter how much she becomes entangled in other people’s lives.

Her energy pervades the book and provides a lot of the humor and liveliness of the plot.  Yes, the seniors work with the day care kids to perform a nativity play that the council members come to watch, in the hopes that they’ll be sufficiently charmed or shamed that they’ll keep the building, but this goes sideways in a hilarious and painful way. And yes, there is a television show with a prize that’s large enough to pay for the needed repairs and maintenance of the building, and Art trains Maggie, the dog (also known as Margaret Thatcher, Margaret and M, depending on who’s taking care of her), so they can perform in this show and hopefully win, but this doesn’t quite go the way anyone expects either.  And yes, Lydia gets revenge on her patronizing and philandering husband with the help of the group, but that, too – engineered by Daphne – is unlike any other kind of wifely revenge you’ve seen before.

You know a book like this is going to have a happy ending, but you don’t know exactly how you’re going to get there, given the characters involved.  That’s also part of the fun.  Once you put yourself in Daphne’s all too capable hands and launch yourself into this book, you’ll be in for a great time, lots of laughs and twists and turns before you reach the satisfying climax.  You’ll probably want to age as disgracefully as these characters yourself, especially Daphne. 

I CAN’T WAIT!

I am so lucky to be the person ordering fiction at my library!  It’s one of my favorite parts of the job (actually, I have a lot of favorite parts of the job, as anyone who’s worked with me will attest), and one reason is that I get the big picture of what’s coming out and when, and I get that information almost before anyone else.  I try to use my powers for good and not for evil (no guarantees on that, though), though I do make a point of putting things on hold as soon as they’re in the system (being in the system has some privileges, after all).

These are the books I’m most looking forward to reading during the month of May.  They’re all over the place (as is my taste), but if any of these possibilities strikes you as interesting, too, I’m happy to share them.  They’re all by people I’ve read and enjoyed before (one is even a sequel to a book I loved), so they get to the top of my TBR list if for those reasons alone.

First in time is Blood on the Tide by Katee Robert, coming out on May 14.  I read one of her Neon Gods books and enjoyed it, but the real reason I want to read this one is because of the plot (and characters).  We have a vampire who’s out to get back some priceless family heirlooms, but she can’t get them by herself for reasons (already a female vampire is intriguing to me), so she rescues a selkie who’s being held captive, and the selkie needs help getting back her skin which was stolen from her (and we have a selkie, one of my favorite mythological creatures, another reason for my enthusiasm).  There’s a relationship between the two of them, though it’s not necessarily an easy one, the vampire being more likely to kill than kiss, and the selkie being kind of afraid of the vampire.  And then add to the mix that the two of them are chasing a ship belonging to the spectral hounds of the otherworld, and you now have another group of characters that fascinates me.  Obviously, since the book hasn’t come out yet, I don’t know how well Robert will pull it off, but I have faith in her writing from the last outing.  Stay tuned to see if it’s as much fun as it sounds.

Then we have two books coming out on May 21.  The first is a mystery by an author whose mysteries are genre-benders and brain teasers.  I refer, of course, to Stuart Turton, whose books The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle  and The Devil and Dark Water were terrific reads (albeit very different in settings).  His newest one, which I am eager to jump into, is called The Last Murder at the End of the World, and if his name on the cover weren’t enough to get me interested, the title would.  But (of course) it gets better: all the world has been destroyed by this mysterious fog, except for this one island, populated by normal people and three scientists.  Everything is okay until one of the scientists is brutally murdered AND the murder triggered a lowering of the security system that was keeping the fog at bay, so the characters have 107 hours to solve the murder before the fog kills them all AND the security system wiped everybody’s memories, so one of the people is a murderer, and doesn’t even know it.  Now I ask you: does this or does this not sound like a book you dive into and follow wherever it leads?  I know Turton is going to make this a nail-biter and a twisted read, and I am totally there for it.

And the last of the three is a book that’s breaking my usual rule about sequels to perfectly wonderful books that don’t need a sequel (my rule is: they’re usually a bad idea).  The book is The Guncle Abroad, by Steven Rowley.  I absolutely loved The Guncle (and honestly I have trouble imagining how anyone could NOT love it), which would ordinarily make me a little more wary about a sequel, except that Patrick O’Hara (the Guncle of the title) is such a wonderful character that I just want to spend more time with him no matter what. The story starts five years after The Guncle, and once again Patrick is called into the family fray, when his brother is about to remarry and Patrick’s nephew and niece are not happy about the new member of the family, even though the wedding is going to take place in Italy.  Patrick shepherds them through Europe on their way to the wedding, trying to teach them about love the way he taught them about grief in the first book, and then of course, when you get to the wedding itself, there are all sorts of complications, familial and otherwise.  I’m trusting this book to be the one that breaks the curse of unnecessary sequels, but we will have to check it out and see.

If these possibilities intrigue you, by all means go to the library and put them on hold (but be warned : you’ll be getting them after I do, because I’ve already got these three on hold), and have fun.

NONFICTION FOR FUN AND BOOK GROUPS

There are some book groups that will never even consider reading nonfiction.  Groups with a specific focus, like the Field of Mystery book group, or the Contemporary Fiction book group, will of course stick to their focus area, and nonfiction isn’t likely to be part of that.  But for other book groups, like my Field Notes or the book group for the Drum Hill senior citizens, it would be a mistake to limit themselves to fiction alone, when there’s so much fascinating and discussion-worthy nonfiction out there.  If your whole experience of book groups is reading novels, or if your group has tried nonfiction without much success, let me share what’s worked for us when we read nonfiction rather than novels.

The first thing is choosing the right nonfiction. The whole point of choosing books for book group is making sure the book gives you plenty of room for discussion.  Look for a subject that’s going to interest your particular group.  Memoir is often popular (I’m not particularly a fan of memoir as a genre, but I can be enchanted by a particularly well-written memoir or a memoir of an unusual experience) and can be discussed the way a novel can, a lot of the time.  Or you might want to look into a biography of a person who’s done something extraordinary, or a history that touches on something your group doesn’t know a lot about, or sheds light on a different aspect of something you are familiar with.  There are all kinds of excellent books of popular science, which aren’t dumbed down but also aren’t too detailed or intimidating (the book Field Notes is reading for March, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, by Ed Yong, is a great example of that).  Propose a selection to your group and see which topics appeal to them.

You probably don’t want to choose something that’s really dense or aimed at experts in the field. For instance, while A Brief History of Time is relatively short, it’s a book I’ve attempted to read several times and never managed to get deeper into than the first chapter. Some people feel the need to read every single footnote (I’m often in that group), while others freak out at the sight of any footnotes at all. The presence or absence of footnotes doesn’t prove something’s too dense or too difficult to get into, but if there seem to be more footnotes than text, you might be getting in over your head.

It’s probably not a good idea to choose something too topical (which might have been written quickly to cash in on a hot subject) or something that’s likely to polarize your group (unless you’re quite sure your group can handle disagreeing with each other without animosity or heat).  Which doesn’t mean your book can’t be controversial: Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania, by Erik Larson, talks about events that happened a hundred years ago, but it still roused people in the Field Notes group to vigorously discuss their opinions of the behavior of Winston Churchill (who does not come across, in this account, as much of a hero).

When you’ve chosen your book (and of course you will make sure there are enough copies in the library system to make it possible for all the members to get a copy without buying it), the next thing to consider is how to read it for a book group.  Most people’s experience of nonfiction goes back to their school days, when you would read a book for information that’s likely to be covered on the next test.  The book group will not (necessarily) be talking about details brought up in the book; they’ll be talking about the big picture, the book’s themes, the arguments the author is making, or the positions the author takes.  You don’t need to get bogged down in minutiae just because you’re reading nonfiction.  You can read a good nonfiction book the way you’d read a novel: looking at the way the author presents the material, the choices of topics and their organization, the quality of the writing itself (some nonfiction books are positively lyrical and poetic), looking for things that particularly caught your eye (an anecdote, perhaps, a humorous interlude, a fact that surprised you).

A discussion of nonfiction can jump into the personal as easily as a novel can (this is especially true of memoirs, in my experience), and that’s to be encouraged.  Discovering how your book group mates feel about a nonfiction topic can be fascinating, especially when you discover (and this happens more frequently than you would expect) that people in the group have some direct experience that connects to the topic.  You find yourselves discussing different kinds of questions than you do with fiction, which can only make the book group more interesting to all concerned.

If your group has been in a sort of reading rut, where you find yourselves reading the same kinds of novels repeatedly, with the same themes and similar plots and characters, do yourselves a favor and look into nonfiction as an alternative.  Who knows, you might find your group really likes the change.

MODERN AGATHA CHRISTIE MURDER ON A TRAIN: EVERYONE ON THIS TRAIN IS A SUSPECT

For those of us in the Field of Mystery Book Group, the name of the author, Benjamin Stevenson, brings to mind an entertaining mystery we just read, Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone.  It’s my pleasure to announce that Stevenson has just published a sequel (of sorts) to that fun book, and The Field Library has it.  The book is Everyone On This Train Is A Suspect, and it’s likely to be as enjoyable as his first book.

We have the return of the narrator and main character from Everyone In My Family, Ern Cunningham, to be our eyes and ears in this mystery.  Hot off the events of the last book, Ern has turned his attention from writing guides for mystery writers (his previous area of expertise) to writing a mystery novel himself, which, he discovers, is harder than he’d thought.  Writing about true events is straightforward enough, but coming up with a murder plot and all the requisite clues and red herrings makes him struggle.  So he is pleased to be invited to the Australian Mystery Writers Association’s 50th anniversary celebration aboard this train heading from Darwin to Adelaide.  He’ll get to meet with all kinds of other authors, publicists, agents, publishers’ representatives and the like, and he hopes this will help him write his own book.

Unfortunately, one of those authors is murdered aboard the train (if you’re thinking of Murder on the Orient Express, you can rest assured that Stevenson was as well).  All the other authors, considering themselves experts on murder (how to commit one and how to keep from being caught for committing one), decide they can figure out who killed the one author.  Of course, the fact that these people all know – at least theoretically – the ins and outs of murder investigations means any of them could be skilled at evading the law for this murder.  Everyone’s a suspect, and Ern is happy to use his skills, including his witty and sarcastic views of everyone else (one of the great pleasures of the previous book, in my opinion), to solve this one.

If you’re in the mood for a cleverly constructed and funny murder mystery (if you don’t think those two things can exist together, you haven’t read Benjamin Stevenson yet), be sure to check out Everyone On This Train Is a Suspect, and prepare for a fun trip.

HAPPY EVER AFTER ON SKIS: FOUR WEDDINGS AND A PUPPY

You’ve got to love a book that opens with a scene in which an out of control (but goodhearted) golden retriever is running head on toward an elaborate wedding cake with destruction on his mind, and the main character rushes to stop the dog from destroying the cake and the whole wedding.  Not only dramatic, but funny, and a great introduction to the main characters, Kendall (a wedding planner, not necessarily by choice) and Brody, the hunk who intercepts the dog moments before he destroys the cake and any chances Kendall has of establishing her family’s resort as a wedding destination.  Four Weddings and a Puppy, by Lizzie Shane, gets points from me for a great opening scene.  And, unlike some rom coms which start with great funny characters misbehaving and then forget about the funny characters for most of the book, in this one the dog, Banner (whom Kendall is “fostering”, though you know from the outset that she’s going to end up keeping him), repeatedly appears and causes havoc of one kind or another.

Kendall and Brody have known each other their whole lives.  They practically grew up together on this mountain in Vermont where Kendall’s family has been running a ski resort for generations.  Kendall was always the daredevil of the two, constantly challenging Brody to ski faster and better, and even though he was her brother’s best friend, Kendall always had a crush on Brody, which she never acted on.

The two of them both became Olympic-hopeful skiers, until a tragic accident ended Kendall’s career.  Brody, by contrast, has continued his quest for gold, winning all kinds of medals in the meantime and becoming something of a minor god in the world of ski aficionados. Kendall has watched his exploits from afar, while she struggles to keep her family’s resort going after her father (her first coach) spent a ridiculous amount of money on her medical bills and physical therapy after the accident.  She feels she owes her father a debt she can’t repay, which is why she’s working so hard even though running a resort and especially doing wedding planning for people at the resort, is not her forte at all.

Brody appears at the first of the four weddings in the book (and no, in case you’re wondering, the fourth is NOT Brody and Kendall’s), that of his cousin, where he is fortuitously placed to intercept Banner and save the day.  What he hasn’t told anyone is that he’s dropped out of the world of Olympic skiing with a dumb excuse about his knee, and he has no idea what he’s going to do with his life, beyond wanting to prove to his family and friends that he isn’t married to skiing and he can be relied upon.

One of the things I like about this book is the way the two main characters are struggling with something other than their attraction to each other (though of course they are attracted to each other however much they may try to pretend otherwise).  Kendall has issues of grief and guilt and loss to deal with, facing the death of her dreams of what her life would be like, which is especially difficult when she sees Brody, who, as far as she knows, is living her dream.  Brody is dealing with an early mid-life crisis – maybe it’s a mid-career crisis – where he looks at everything he’s been doing and realizes that none of it matters that much to him anymore, and now he has to come up with a self-image that’s not built on his success as a skier.  They both have family expectations to confront, and it takes each of them a while to do that (Kendall’s comes practically at the end of the book, in fact), and because they have some of the same issues, they’re able to help each other ask the right questions and face the people and expectations they’ve been avoiding.  Don’t get me wrong, I love a little sexual and romantic tension between the main characters (isn’t that half of what romantic comedies are all about?), but it’s refreshing to see the characters connecting on another level as well.

The supporting characters, at least on Kendall’s side, are her best friends, who are there for her and for each other.  They’re distinctive and sweet, and Charlotte, one of the people getting married over the course of the book, is responsible for a funny disaster of a bachelorette party (orchestrated by Kendall) that leads to Kendall and Brody getting closer to each other in the aftermath.  Brody has a sister who’s sort of a character (another of the people getting married in the course of the book), but she doesn’t spend much time with him and is more of a walk-on. That’s a shame because Steph comes across, when we do see her, as a character who could probably carry a book all by herself.  I do wish female writers of rom coms would give the male leads as strong a friend group as they give the female leads, or at least give them interesting and rounded supporting characters.  This isn’t the first rom com I’ve read this year where the heroine has friends and family who have lives of their own and the hero has at most a couple of people who could be switched for each other without any readers noticing. 

Of course there’s a happy ever after, which resolves the characters’ life choice issues (and thankfully their problems with identity and self-worth are not resolved by their romance but by their working on those issues with the help of their romance) and feels satisfying and earned.  Even Banner ends up where he belongs, which of course we expected from the outset, no matter how many times Kendall said she was just fostering him. 

For a fun read that will make you want to learn how to ski (or almost make you want to; I have long ago resolved that nothing in the world will get me to attempt to ski down any kind of sloping surface, and even the most charming book in the world isn’t going to change my mind) and will give you some smiles and giggles, check out Four Weddings and a Puppy.

FIELD NOTES BOOK GROUP GOES TO THE 7TH CONTINENT FOR DECEMBER: WHERE’D YOU GO, BERNADETTE?

On Saturday the Field Notes Book Group met to discuss our November book, Age of Vice.  Early in the meeting we discovered that the author of this book, which is 500 + pages long, is writing a sequel.  No, wait, not just a sequel, but TWO more books in the series.  Presumably each of those will be as long as this one.

Knowledge like this changes your perspective on what you just read. I personally loathe getting to the end of a book, especially a long one, and only then discovering that it’s going to have a sequel.  Though Age of Vice isn’t as bad as some books in terms of leaving you hanging at the end, it still had a somewhat ambiguous ending, and when I think that the author may have done that deliberately to make sure people would want to read the sequel, I am not a happy reader.

If I had known when I first offered this book to the group that it was book 1 in an unfinished series, I probably wouldn’t have offered it as an option.  I feel a bit cheated, frankly.  

However, we did manage to have a good discussion of the book we actually read (most of us actually read it, at least), even while being annoyed with the possibility of sequels to this behemoth.  

When I offered choices for the next book to the group, I specifically set out to offer something lighter and more fun than Age of Vice, if only to keep us reading, so three out of the four books offered were books I’d read and loved in the past (two were books I’ve written about here), and I’m delighted to report that the one we chose for December is Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple, which, some of you may remember, I wrote a glowing review of a while ago. 

But, for those who don’t remember, it’s a great fun book that’s at once a modern epistolary novel, a funny satire, and a great story of the mother-daughter relationship. Bee, our protagonist, is the 8th grade daughter of the brilliant but very quirky Bernadette and the brilliant, feted and admired Elgin, who works at a place very much like Microsoft and does little to take care of household events.  Bee got her parents to agree that if she got perfect grades through middle school, they would do what she asked them, and, upon her getting those perfect grades, she asks for a family trip to Antarctica.  Bernadette, who’s become somewhat agoraphobic and who has probably always been somewhat misanthropic, is horrified at thought of spending time on a cruise ship with hundreds of other people for as long as it takes to get to Antarctica, more because of those other people and the thought of interacting with them than because she doesn’t want to reward Bee as she deserves.  Bernadette has issues with the other mothers of kids in Bee’s exclusive and expensive private school, and over a relatively short time manages to get in major trouble with them and especially her neighbor and ringleader of a certain faction of the school  One thing leads to another and Elgin ends up jumping to the conclusion that Bernadette is having a mental breakdown and she needs an intervention, and instead of going along with this, Bernadette disappears altogether. Bee sets out to figure out where her mother went, and along the way discovers a lot more about her mother and her family in general. And yes, there’s a happy ending, where everyone gets what they deserved, and along the way there’s a lot of slapstick and humor and satire. It’s the sort of book you read in a couple of sittings because you don’t want to put it down.

Copies of the book are already available at the library, so come in and get yours.  And then prepare for December 16, when we’ll discuss Bernadette at the Field Notes group, and go over our books for 2023 and choose the best and worst of the lot.

THE IRRESISTIBLE STARTER VILLAIN

When I first saw John Scalzi’s new book, Starter Villain, I fought with myself to keep from grabbing it immediately.  I mean, just look at that cover!  How could anyone resist?  And it’s John Scalzi, who has never yet let me down (unlike some authors I have loved in the not too distant past)!  But I reminded myself that I’m 250 pages into a 500 + page book which I have to read for a book group which I’m leading on November 18, and haven’t even started the 352 page book for the other book group which I’m leading on November 21.  I reminded myself that I absolutely shouldn’t interrupt my mandatory reading just because of a cover . . . and an author. . .  Someone else checked Starter Villain out so the temptation was decreased, but then they returned it, and it was just sitting on the shelf, facing me, tempting me, begging me  –

So of course I took it out, and devoured it in two days, and let me say, even if this means I’m going to have to read fast to get my other books read in time, it was entirely worth interrupting my required reading.

First of all, believe it or not, that cover does accurately convey part of the novel (we all know that sometimes what’s on the cover has little or nothing to do with what’s inside the book), though perhaps the gender isn’t quite accurate.

Second of all, this is one funny book, as only Scalzi could write.  It does for James Bond villain-types what his Kaiju Preservation Society does for giant monster movies (this is a high compliment).  If you’re a Scalzi fan, you can stop reading right here, and just go and grab the book and enjoy yourself.

If I have to persuade you, though, I’m more than ready to do so. 

Charlie Fitzer is a classic Scalzi hero, in that he’s kind of a schlub, but a goodhearted one.  As the book opens, he’s divorced, laid off from his journalism job, living in his parents’ house which is owned by a trust for him and his three half-siblings, all of whom want to sell the house and kick him out.  He’s working as a substitute teacher, and the only real pleasure he has in his life is his cat, Hera, and the new kitten who adopts him, Persephone. He’s in a pretty low place, but just wait, things will in fact get worse.

He discovers that his maternal uncle, Jake, who has been alienated from his family since he was very young, has just died of pancreatic cancer.  This doesn’t mean much to him until he’s visited by Jake’s assistant, Matilda, who offers him a substantial payout if he’ll just stand up for his uncle at the upcoming memorial service.  Charlie is in no position to refuse, and the money is tempting, but he really has no idea what he’s getting himself into.

At the memorial, which is unlike any I have ever seen, in literature or in life (and no, I wouldn’t dream of spoiling the fun of your discovering what it’s like for yourself), he finds out more about his uncle’s business (he thought Jake was the kind of a parking garage empire), and is invited to take over Jake’s real business, which involves being a Bond-type supervillain.

Shortly thereafter, his house and everything he owns (with the exception of the clothes he’s wearing and his two cats) is blown up.   Oh, and there was someone in the house when it was blown up, and that person might or might not be a CIA agent.

It’s unusual to have what Joseph Campbell and thousands of writing teachers would call the “protagonist’s low point/dark night of the soul” this early in a book, but yes, Charlie has, at that moment, hit rock bottom, and that’s when the fun begins.

As Charlie starts to explore what his uncle really left him, he encounters a volcanic island hideaway, hyperintelligent cats, talking (profanely talking) dolphins, high tech wonders, and, of course, the secret society of supervillains, who try to blackmail him into joining them and paying them a lot of money to join (billions of dollars, in fact).

Charlie is horrified at the idea of being a villain, and he reacts to various developments the way a smart but decent human being would (his labor negotiations with the dolphins are worth the price of admission all by themselves).  The other villains underestimate him, and even though he’s new to this whole business, he does have a good head on his shoulders, and the ability (with the help of his new employees) to roll with the punches and even throw some of his own.  There’s a sequence in which he’s negotiating with another villain via zoom that made me laugh out loud.

Along the way, you find yourself wondering about two things: first, is Charlie going to survive all the attempts on his life and the attempts to get him charged with murder and worse, and second, is Charlie going to change in a fundamental way, perhaps discovering his inner Ernst Blofeld (the notion that Ian Fleming based his characters and Spectre on these real life villains is amusing in itself) and becoming a great villain himself.  Again, I don’t want to spoil any of the fun of this book by giving answers to these questions, but I can promise you that you’ll be pleased with the way Charlie deals with his newfound status, and the ending is extremely satisfying.

So if you’re looking at this book and wondering whether you should take the time from everything else you’re doing so you can read it, my answer is an enthusiastic yes.  It’s a fast read, it’s lighthearted and very funny, it has characters you want to see succeed, it has a twisty and clever plot, and it’s just fun.

Now I really do have to read my other books quickly.  There’s a new Murderbot book coming out on Tuesday and I KNOW I won’t be able to resist that one!

THE PLEASURE OF A GREAT CHARACTER IN A MYSTERY: VERA WONG’S UNSOLICITED ADVICE FOR MURDERERS

Generally when people think about mysteries, they talk about the plot, and of course plot is important in a mystery (and a number of mysteries have earned my wrath by screwing around with the plot one way or another, but that’s a rant for another time), but sometimes in a good mystery I find I’m less interested in the plot than in the characters, and if the characters are vivid and interesting enough, the plot is less important to my reading pleasure.  Such a book, with such characters, is Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, by Jesse Sutanto, which was our selection for October in the Field of Mystery Book Group.

The chief character here is Vera Wong herself, and if none of the other characters were remotely interesting, the book would still be a hoot because of Vera.  As it happens, the other characters are fun, too (including the victim, who’s quite real to the reader despite being dead the whole book), and that only adds to the fun.

Vera is a Chinese American widow in her 60’s.  She does not think of herself as old, and her daily routine is enough to tire out much younger people.  She has few inhibitions, especially when it comes to sharing her advice and wisdom with other people, from her son, Tilly, who never seems to listen to her, to people she’s just met, like the police officers investigating the dead body found in her tea shop. Vera has very strong opinions, gathered from a life of experience and also from watching television (one of the funny moments in the book is when she’s telling the investigating police officers how they should be looking for DNA, a la CSI, and the officer in question rolls her eyes and says she hates that show).  At the beginning of the book, she’s frustrated: her shop is barely staying in business, her son never returns her calls or texts (and when you see how often she texts him and what she’s telling him in those texts, you can sympathize with the hapless young man), and she’s sort of stuck in a rut.

How fortunate for her that the body of a man she’s never seen before is found on the floor of her tea shop!  Now she has some excitement in her life, and, because she has grave doubts that the police know what they’re doing (they’re not listening to her, for a start) and because she has supreme self-confidence, she notices that the dead man was holding a flash drive and she takes it for herself, neglecting to mention it to the police.  She’s sure that the murderer will show up at her shop to get the flash drive, and then she will figure out who the murderer is and turn them over to the police.

We all can see flaws in this plan, beginning with the possibility that the murderer will burn the place down or attack Vera to get the thing back, but Vera has no such qualms.  Four people do show up at her tea shop, all of them with a connection to the dead man, Marshall, and all of them with guilty consciences for one reason or another, so Vera feels vindicated.  Even when the police tell her that the cause of death was an allergic reaction to duck dander (no, really), Vera knows they’re wrong and it was murder and not an accident.  

The real problem is that Vera injects herself into the lives of the four people, going so far as to move in with Marshall’s widow and child, and matchmaking two of the other suspects (suspects mostly in her mind, it must be added; the police are not looking too closely into any of these people), and generally setting their lives straight with copious amounts of (lusciously described) food (she even goes to the police station with bags and bags of homemade food), and advice of various kinds, mostly unsolicited but also mostly on the mark.  She’s starting to feel sympathy for these people.  She doesn’t want any of them to be the murderer, even as it becomes clear that Marshall was a horrible person, an emotionally abusive spouse, a rotten brother, a rip off artist taking advantage of others’ trust.  She continues to investigate, even after her shop is broken into, stubbornly (and bravely) pushing forward in the interests of justice as she sees it.

Frankly, Vera is so much fun that I want to grow up to be her (she’s actually a little younger than I am, but that doesn’t matter), and I absolutely rooted for her throughout the book.  Even when she did some questionable things (her lawyer son almost has a heart attack when she tells him about the flash drive, and he’s right), her heart was in the right place and you just trust that things will turn out right in the end.  The other characters (with the exception of the odious Marshall – and isn’t it a good thing to have an unlikeable victim?) are also warmly drawn, flawed but trying hard to straighten things out. 

Did I mention how funny the book is?  Is it bad taste to giggle so much over a book about what turns out to be a murder (you didn’t think she was going to be wrong on such a fundamental point, did you?)?  One of the reasons I wanted to read this book, and encouraged the group to read it, is because I love Jesse Sutanto and laughed a lot over her last two books, Dial A for Aunties and Four Aunties and a Wedding.  While the cast of characters here isn’t as outrageous as those aunties, Sutanto’s sense of humor, her ability to create characters whose logic leads to absurd and funny situations is still strong, and I can’t remember the last time I laughed so much at a mystery.

Oh, yeah, and the plot?  The murder plot is resolved, and the author plays fair (mostly) with you, setting things up at the beginning for the final payoff (even if Vera’s attempt at a Poirot-like gathering of the suspects at a dinner party goes wildly off the rails).  It’s believable and makes sense with these characters.  

But you’re not reading this one for the plot.  Read this book for the delight of making the acquaintance of Vera Wong, and you won’t be sorry you did.

FIELD OF MYSTERY FOR OCTOBER: VERA WONG’S UNSOLICITED ADVICE FOR MURDERERS

The Field of Mystery Book Group no longer needs to feel ashamed for not having ever read any Agatha Christie.  Given that she’s one of the founding mothers of the mystery genre, it seemed appropriate for us to read her The Murder of Roger Ackroyd at long last.  And, on the whole, we enjoyed the book, enjoying Hercule Poirot’s idiosyncratic approach to solving mysteries, the numerous clever red herrings and distractions that made it harder for (most of) us to figure out the solution before Poirot did.  True, she’s old-fashioned (to be expected of someone writing a hundred years ago), but we could see the influence her work has had on modern mysteries (The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, which we read earlier this year, clearly owed a debt to her structure and setup).  We may even read another of her works later this year.

But in the meantime, we had to choose our book for October, and we went in a lighter direction this time, choosing Jesse Sutanto’s Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers.  If you’ve been reading this blog, you know I’m a fan of Jesse Sutanto, having loved her Dial A for Aunties and Four Aunties and a Wedding for their great characters and the laugh-out-loud humor of her writing.  While this book doesn’t involve the wonderful family of the Aunties books, she clearly has chosen another great main character in Vera Wong.

Vera is a Chinese American woman of a certain age, who has a tea shop in San Francisco’s Chinatown that’s just barely hanging on, and an adult son who just doesn’t seem to understand how to ask for advice from his mother.  Vera is dying to give him advice, whether he likes it or not, and his seeming obstinacy in not asking for her help annoys her, though she is not discouraged.

When a body is found in her tea shop, and the dead man was carrying a thumb drive, Vera grabs the thumb drive herself.  She knows she can do a better job of investigating the murder than the police can.  The murderer will, of course, come to her tea shop and she will recognize the person as the murderer immediately.  The only problem with this is that lots of people start coming to her tea shop, and Vera finds herself feeling motherly toward most of them.  How is she going to know which one is the murderer, and is she really going to be able to turn in someone she’s starting to care about?

This should be a fun read.  There are already copies available at the Circulation Desk, so come in and get yours and then join us for a lively discussion (our discussions are always lively, whether we like the book or not) on October 7.

INTERFERING GRANDFATHERS AND TRUE LOVE: IT’S NOT ROM-COMPLICATED

We had a fun discussion of our August selection at the It’s Not Rom-Complicated Book Group meeting.  Of course, that was fairly easy because the book in question was such a good one – The Flatshare had characters who were lovable and believable, supporting characters who felt real and vivid while they were causing or interfering with the main plot, and some great funny scenes, not to mention a few that had me, at least, sniffling a bit, and a happy ever after that was worth the wait.

With a smaller group, it’s sometimes harder to choose a book because there are so few people voting that you can easily end up with a couple of ties with a vote or two each.  Fortunately we were able to come to an agreement for our September book: A Proposal They Can’t Refuse, by Natalie Cana.  Copies are already available at the Circulation Desk.

I haven’t read the book – yet – but I did peek in and devoured the first chapter, and I have to say it starts out very promisingly.  Our female protagonist, Kamilah, is late on her way to work at her family’s restaurant because she’s been called to the senior living center to deal with the latest chaos her abuelo and his best friend have been causing there.  It’s clear that this is not the first time these two have gotten into trouble (this time it’s because they put caffeinated coffee in the residents’ decaf pot, but there are references to other mischief they’ve caused in the recent past), and it’s also clear that these two grandfathers are having a wonderful time together and have no regrets whatsoever about their behavior even if it gets their grandchildren in trouble.  Liam, the grandson of the other troublemaker, appears on the scene and Kamilah “accidentally” punches him in the groin (she did mean to punch the person, she didn’t realize it was Liam).  We have already established, in a few pages, the characters of the two grandfathers and Kamilah and Liam, and they’re all great fun to be around.

The plot of the book is that both Kamilah and Liam want something: Kamilah wants to expand her family’s Puerto Rican restaurant, and Liam wants to take his family’s whisky distillery to the next level.  However, their wily grandfathers refuse to help them unless Kamilah and Liam marry each other.  If the grandchildren don’t, the grandfathers threaten to sell the building in which the two enterprises take place.  Naturally, Kamilah and Liam want nothing to do with this marriage scheme and they’re both prickly about being blackmailed into it, so they decide to go ahead and pretend they’re going to get married, and fool the grandfathers into giving them what they want.  Obviously things will go wrong with this fake marriage scheme, and it may well be that the wily grandfathers know more about the two of them than they know about themselves.

What’s not to like?  Lively characters, a fun setup, interfering grandparents, a fake marriage and enemies to lovers, all leading (of course) to a happy ending – sign me up.  If it sounds good to you, come and join us.  Our next meeting is after Labor Day and that gives plenty of time to read a quick, entertaining book like this one.  Hope to see you there!