Louise Penny Made Me Do It - And Now I’m Sad

 

Louise Penny made me do something today, I never dreamed I would be doing in a million years: abandon her latest novel, The Black Wolf, at the eighty-page mark with no intention of ever picking it up again. Now I only wish I could get my $30 back.

I have been reading Penny for years, and have read eighteen of the nineteen novels she’s published prior to The Black Wolf, enjoying them so much that she became one of my go-to authors a long time ago. But maybe I should have seen this coming because I did struggle at times with The Grey Wolf, the novel preceding this one. I hoped, however, that since I read that one during a period in which I was struggling to concentrate on just about everything I read, that the problem was with me and not with the book.

Penny quickly nipped those hopes in the bud by kicking off The Black Wolf with a fifty-page rehash of The Grey Wolf plot - a plot that tended to bore me the first time I was exposed to it. It’s all a too fantastical conspiracy theory in which those at the top of Canadian politics conspire with American businesses to allow millions of Canadians to be poisoned for corporate profit. In the process, Canada’s pristine forests and lakes will also be destroyed, and it is only a “Hail Mary” moment from Inspector Gamache that saves the day. Making it all read even worse, the tone is at times overly preachy and condescending, and the book’s pacing is dreadfully slow. But I made it through, and kind of dreaded the promised sequel.

Well, that sequel is The Black Wolf. And this one doubles down on everything wrong with The Grey Wolf.

I made it through the fifty-page Grey Wolf recap, albeit all the while getting grumpier and grumpier as I read on. And now I’ve waited another thirty pages for something new to happen, only to read numerous times that “something bad is coming.” Well enough of this. The last two books have made for such slow reading that now I’m not even sure that I’m willing to take a chance on book twenty-one in the series when it is eventually published. 

Penny has become so political in her messaging that her books are not fun for me anymore. The Black Wolf has just enough of an anti-American tone and global warming hysteria to it that I find it more irritating/boring than entertaining. And I spent my money to be entertained, not preached at. From what I understand, Penny even canceled her American book tour launch of The Grey Wolf after Trump was elected, effectively, I imagine, sacrificing a few thousand book sales in the process. While I may admire her dedication to her principles, this is not the kind of “escapism" that I want to spend my time or money on.

And that makes me sad, because Inspector Gamache has been one of my favorite fictional characters for twenty years - and Three Pines one of my favorite fictional settings.