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. 

Hamnet (2020) - Maggie O'Farrell

 

“History gives you the facts, and fiction gives you the truth of the facts.” (Unattributed quote from Nancy Pearl in The Writer’s Library)

I bought Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet a couple of years ago but forgot I had a copy until reminded of it by the recent release of the book's movie version. That’s a problem I often have with e-books: “out of sight, out of mind.” But I suppose that’s story for a another time.

Hamnet impressed me in several ways, but what really surprised me most about O’Farrell’s construction of the novel is how secondary a character William Shakespeare turns out to be. Too, O’Farrell's central character, despite the novel’s title, is Agnes, Shakespeare’s wife, not Hamnet, his son. And unless I missed a particular reference or two, even when the author or one of the book’s characters refer to Shakespeare, it is never by name, always only as “the husband” or “the tutor,” etc. It is Agnes who holds this family together in the roughest of times, and everything of consequence that happens in Hamnet either happens directly to her or the focus shifts to how she reacts to the event.

Hamnet is the story of a young man, eager to get away from his domineering and abusive father, who falls in love with a slightly older woman, herself living under the thumb of a stepmother whom she intensely dislikes. Despite the disapproval of both their families, the two find a way to marry, and they live for several years with the man’s parents while having three children of their own. Shakespeare, though, finally reaches the breaking point with his father and leaves for London - supposedly to extend the family glove business into that market. Instead, he finds work in the London theater, and only returns to Stratford three or four times a year. He is, in fact, in London in 1596 when his twins, Judith and Hamnet, fall ill with the plague. Hamnet would not survive. 

Hamnet is a touching story, but it is not nearly the tearjerker I expected it would be. I was far more impressed by how fully immersed I became in the late sixteenth century environment created by O’Farrell. The daily doings of the village, the relationships between the townspeople, the superstitions, and the general humanity of the characters all felt so authentic to me that I completely lost myself in that world for hours at a time. Hamnet is the kind of historical fiction I enjoy most, and it is my favorite read of 2026 to this point in the year. 

The Exorcist (1971) - William Peter Blatty

 

I still remember standing in line outside in the dark back in 1973 for a couple of hours waiting for my chance to see the movie version of The Exorcist - and how you couldn’t finally walk inside to your seat without feeling at least a little sense of dread. I had read William Peter Blatty’s novel the previous year, so I knew what to expect, but the buzz around this movie was so hyped up that everyone wanted to see it as soon as they could. And the movie lived up to its publicity: people were fainting in their seats, running out of the theaters in shock, and even using the barf bags that some theaters were handing out at the door. 

I was pleased to find that my re-reading of The Exorcist last week did nothing to cheapen my appreciation for the effect that the novel has had on so many people over the years. (I haven’t seen the more recent remake of the movie, and can’t compare the two versions, but now I’m curious.)

It all starts innocently enough.

Chris MacNeil is done with her own work on a movie being shot in Washington D.C. but decides that she and her daughter, Reagan, will stay on in their rented Georgetown home until everything is formally shut down on the movie. Chris and Reagan have made friends both on and off the set, and living in Georgetown has been a good experience for both of them. But after twelve-year-old Reagan is possessed by an ancient demon, their world turns into a nightmare. Numerous doctors fail to help her daughter, so Chris straps Reagan down in her bed and watches her turn into an unimaginable monster - one filled with superhuman strength and  rage - while she searches for another solution.

Desperate for help, and even though she is an atheist, Chris finally turns to a Jesuit priest she’s befriended, a man who is himself skeptical about the legitimacy of demonic possession. And the battle is on.

Blatty’s novel is a well researched one based partially on a 1949 Maryland exorcism he heard about while in college. Too, Blatty was Jesuit educated, and he quotes extensively from books on the subject, including the Rituale Romanum, the 1614 Catholic book of rites that details the exorcism procedure that has been followed for centuries. My one criticism of the novel, in fact, is that the pacing of the exorcism section gets a bit bogged down by all of the historical explanation offered in the midst of the horror being described. 

Because The Exorcist so explicitly details the horrors being inflicted on the body of a child, it is not an easy novel to read. The novel is far more appalling than the movie for that reason - and the movie is most certainly a gut-punch. So, beware of this one.

Lawn Boy (2018) - Jonathan Evison

 

I didn’t realize what a can of worms I was opening up when I decided to read Jonathan Evison’s Lawn Boy. I don’t remember running across it at all when it was published in 2018, and it really only caught my eye now because of its unusual cover art. Only after finishing Lawn Boy, did I learn (in the author’s short essay at the end of the novel) that it is largely autobiographical. This is a book the author poured his heart and soul into, but it came back to bite him in a serious way.

The premise of the novel is this:  23-year-old Mike Muñoz, half Mexican, half white, lives with his single-parent mother and grossly overweight autistic brother in a dump they can barely afford to pay the rent on. It takes every penny Mike and his mother can earn just to keep the family sheltered, fed, and clothed even at the low standards they are forced to accept. Mike’s mother is a waitress who often works two jobs; Mike cuts grass and trims hedges for a landscaping company. Mike, though, despite barely making it through high school, is capable of more, and he knows it. But he can’t stop working his low-paying job long enough to better himself without causing his entire family to crash and burn.

“I read at least two books a week, sometimes as many as four. Call it self-improvement. You see, old Mike Muñoz would like to figure out who the hell he actually is, what he’d actually like to do with his life. He aches to be a winner. I’d like nothing more than to spread my proverbial wings and fly…"

Mike is largely self-educated because he spent so much time in a library while taking care of his autistic brother during the summers before he went to work full time to help support the family.  He wants more for himself and his family, but he doesn’t see a way out of the poverty trap he’s in. And he’s angry about it.

“After all, most of us are mowing someone else's lawn, one way or another, and most of us can’t afford to travel the world or live in New York City. Most of us feel like the world is giving us a big fat middle finger when it’s not kicking us in the face with a steel-toed boot. And most of us feel powerless."

Lawn Boy is Mike’s coming-of-age story, and it’s a fun one filled both with little victories and major setbacks along the way. Eventually, the little victories begin to add up, and Mike starts hanging on to some of the gains he makes.  

Mike’s story, ultimately, is a satisfying one, but I was often distracted by just how super- educated Mike appears to be. One minute he’s quoting Camus while trimming hedges, the next he’s explaining capitalism’s faults to the reader. It’s as if he’s read every philosopher, economist, and historian who has ever put pen to paper. He’s read it all, and he remembers it all. It was a matter of degree for me. I was willing to suspend my disbelief right up to the point that I just couldn’t go any farther and began being distracted by Mike’s amazing breath of knowledge. Then, that was all I could think about every time he opened his mouth.

Lawn Boy, as it turns out, had a rough debut, even being banned in the school libraries of several states because of its sexual content (none of which is really all that explicit). Because one sexual incident took place between two 10-year-old boys, the novel was banned as “pedophilic" by some, “pornographic” by others, and even called “grooming” by a few. The sensationalist Tucker Carlson labelled it as graphic child sex on one of his on-air rants, and from what I understand, Evison even received a few death threats at the height of the hysteria over Lawn Boy.

Having read it eight years after all the stink others attached to it, I find all of this both disturbing and surprising because my only complaint about the novel is how I reacted to Mike’s general brilliance despite him being entirely, randomly self-taught. That distraction led me to experience Lawn Boy as just a pretty good novel, and not a particularly realistic one at that. Evison is a good writer (I’ve read two others of his novels), so I don’t really think he was going for realism. This is more a fable-like story than anything else. And unlike me, you might love it for exactly that reason.

The Reading Week Ahead - March 23, 2026

 Despite having seven books going last week, I still found myself in a bit of a reading slump because even though I finished one of the seven, Ben Bova’s Mars Life, I found it tough to get much into any of the other six at all. The only other one that I found consistently engaging was Ron Chernow’s 1100-page biography of Mark Twain - and I’m going to be reading that one for a few more weeks before it’s done. I find it ironic, too, that the title of the one book I abandoned for good was A Passion for Books, the essay compilation edited by Harold Rabinowitz and Rob Kaplan. 

And, I added these two:

Lawn Boy (2018) is the third novel by Jonathan Evison that I’ve read, having previously read The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving and This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance. I’m near ninety percent of the way through Lawn Boy, but this one is not grabbing me quite the way the previous two did. I’m finding it hard (for reasons I’ll get into later) to buy-into the lawn boy character, and since he’s the main character (as well as narrator) of the book, that tiny bit of disbelief is present on every single page. That’s been a problem.

I expect that just about everyone out there is familiar with the plot of William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, but it’s been more than 50 years since I’ve read it or seen the movie version. While the plot is not exactly new to me, I find it interesting to see how Blatty builds the book’s tension so effectively by dropping numerous hints along the way of all the dark evilness to follow; and how explicitly he describes all the horrible things that end up happening to the young victim. I turned up my 1971 Book Club edition a couple of days ago and started turning pages. I’m still turning them.

I stalled on Sherman Alexi’s short story collection, Blasphemy, for a while after reading the fourth story in the book, one so sexually explicit that it managed to offend me even at this age. But I knew I couldn’t give up on Alexi, he’s just too good a writer to make that mistake with. I’ve since read three of the longer of the thirty-two stories in the collection, and they are all truly excellent.

I haven’t read much lately of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis or The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie but I still consider them as active reads. And then there’s Chernow’s Mark Twain - that one is starting to seem eternal.

Shy Girl, an AI Generated Novel, Is Being Yanked from British Bookstore Shelves

 

Big Five publisher Hatchette has decided to pull Mia Ballard’s Shy Girl from British bookstore shelves, and will not be publishing the novel in the United States at all because the publisher is now convinced that Shy Girl is largely AI generated. This is a first, but it will almost certainly not be a last unless publishers get more serious about vetting the manuscripts they take on for publication. 

According to accepted AI-detection software, the novel is approximately 78% “machine made.”

According to The Sunday Times (London):

"Hachette picked up the rights to Shy Girl, attributed to an author called Mia Ballard, after it rose up Amazon’s sales chart of horror-fiction after being self-published in February last year. (emphasis mine)

At the time the publisher said it had worked with Ballard on “refining her brilliant novel’, describing it as a “gory horror and razor-sharp revenge thriller”.

 …

According to The New York Times, she said that it was an acquaintance she had hired to edit her original, self-published version who had used the technology."

So there we have it. A self-published novel starts climbing the Amazon charts rapidly enough to get the attention of a major publisher; that publisher fails to do its due diligence and publishes the novel as legitimate; the author blames the scam on an “acquaintance” who helped her out with the book’s editing; the “author” is prepared now to sue everyone involved. 

This is no little thing. This was allowed to happen by a major publisher, and that publisher only took action after the internet was already full of rumors about the novel being an illegitimate one. 

We all know that this is just the barest tip of the coming iceberg of scam writing. Amazon has been terrible for avid readers in so many ways; this is the latest, but it probably won’t be the last.