The Brutal Telling - Louise Penny

Louise Penny’s 2009 novel The Brutal Telling is the fifth in her popular sixteen-book Inspector Gamache series. And precisely because I’ve already read what are currently the last seven books in the series, The Brutal Telling is the one that has most surprised me. Readers who are reading the Gamache series in the order in which it is being published will not experience that level of surprise. Nor will they have to reconsider their understanding of a major series character they probably thought they knew well. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. What I do know, is that The Brutal Telling is a different novel for readers who are reading the series the way I am than it is for readers who are reading the books in order. 

     “For Armand Gamache knew what not-nice was. He knew what cruelty, despair, horror were. And he knew what a forgotten, and precious, quality “nice” was.”

It is the end of summer, and the permanent residents in the little village of Three Pines are looking forward to the end of the tourist season. They are down to the final weekend of the season now, and a few of the families with school-aged children are already packing up to get an early start back to the city. And then it happens: a dead body is found inside the little bistro that is really the beating heart of Three Pines, the one owned and run by Gabri and Olivier. 

After Inspector Gamache and his team, all of them well-familiar with Three Pines and its core residents, are called in to investigate the victim’s murder, the first thing they learn is that no one seems to know who the dead man is. He is a stranger to all of them, and what he may have been doing inside the bistro after it was locked up for the night is as big a part of the mystery as who he is. So, Gamache - being Gamache - starts asking questions…lots of questions. And the answers he gets all seem to point the finger at one man. As potential suspects are eliminated one-by-one, only one suspect is left standing: Olivier. But could the beloved bistro owner, a personal friend of Gamache’s, really be capable of a crime like this one?

Bottom Line: The Brutal Telling is, as is every book in the Gamache series, a well-planned and well-executed mystery. The Three Pines setting is as much fun as ever, and the main characters are beginning to feel like old friends by this point in the series, but Penny still has some surprises for readers starting to feel too comfortable with it all. One of those surprises takes place on the book’s next-to-last page, and while it has nothing at all to do with the mystery and Olivier’s predicament, it packs quite the punch. The title of this one is prophetic. 

Louise Penny (Book Jacket Photo)

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain - George Saunders (First Pass)

 I mentioned a few days ago that I've gotten back into the habit of juggling seven books at a time in an attempt to keep any one or two of them from unnecessarily going stale on me. I'm relieved that that is still working well, but a little irritated to find my rotation through the books more controlled by library due dates than by anything else. I know it's my fault for requesting so many books at the same time, but it's causing me at times to neglect the books from my own shelves that are already in progress.

And now a new wrinkle to contend with. I came across short story writer George Saunders's new book (can't recall what first brought it to my attention) and immediately put it on my library hold list because I am a big fan of the man's stories. I fully expected this to be the author's new collection of short fiction, but it turns out to be something else entirely. The title of the book certainly sounds like a fiction title: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, but I never noticed that there was a subtitle. And what a subtitle it is: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life.

Even with that, the book's content is still a bit of a head-scratcher, so let me tell you a bit more. In addition to being a very gifted author, George Saunders teaches creative writing at Syracuse University, and what he has done here is to boil down one of his classes into a single volume in which seven short stories written by four Russian masters of the genre are read, discussed, and deconstructed in an attempt to teach his students how it is all done. So we get seven stories, seven essays regarding the stories, and seven short "Afterthoughts" following the essays. 

According to the book jacket, Saunders intends the book "for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it's more relevant than ever in these turbulent times." And, having now worked my way through two of the stories and two of the essays,  I'm finding that it delivers exactly as promised. But now, the squeeze is on because A Swim in a Pond in the Rain seems to be a lot more popular with the reading crowd in Harris County, Texas, than the librarians here anticipated it would be. That means not nearly enough copies to meet reader demand, and only a single two-week window to finish it before it needs to be carried back to the library. 

I don't know about you guys, but nonfiction reading is always slower going for me than reading a novel or a short story - in particular for a book like this one that requires careful consideration and reflection upon what I've just read before I can move on to the next chapter. So a slight change to my March reading plan is in order - and it's probably only the first of others to come.

At some point, I will be reviewing A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, so I hope I haven't just told you more about it than you ever wanted to know.  Keep in mind that the book was published on January 21, 2021, and that it has already been reviewed on Amazon 385 times, with 80% of the ratings coming in at five stars. That kind of response to a book like this one does my heart good; it gives me hope that the dumbing down of America is not yet a done deal. 

Good Morning, Midnight - Lily Brooks-Dalton

At only 253 numbered-pages, Lily Brooks-Dalton’s Good Morning, Midnight is a deceptively complex novel with a whole lot going on, so pay attention. If you do, I think that you are pretty likely to appreciate the ride as much as I did. 

Good Morning, Midnight begins as a relatively straightforward tale about the forced evacuation and ultimate abandonment of an isolated Arctic observatory. One man, Augustine Lofthouse, who is in his late seventies refuses to be carried out with the rest of his colleagues despite being warned that there will be “no return trip,” No return trip means no second chance to go home - ever. Not long after everyone leaves, Augustine discovers that he has company: a little girl who tells him her name is Iris. He knows that no one is coming back for her either. 

While all this is going on at the observatory, a sophisticated space ship manned by a crew of international astronauts is drawing closer and closer to Earth after having spent two years on a scientific mission to Jupiter and that planet’s moons. Those aboard the ship lost communication with everyone on Earth months earlier, including NASA’s mission control specialists. The closer they get to their home planet, the more obvious it becomes that something has gone catastrophically wrong for everyone they hoped to return to someday. 

In alternating chapters, Brooks-Dalton explores the struggles of both groups to make sense of what has happened to them. They have questions, but there is no one around to give them any answers, so the six astronauts and the two people abandoned at the observatory are left to deal with the situation on their own. Tough decisions are going to have to be made, and soon.

Different as they are, each of the scenarios is very atmospherically presented, and as a reader, I never found myself prematurely wishing that one segment would end so that I could revisit the other. The isolation faced by Augustine and Iris is very different from the lack of privacy felt by the astronauts in their confined living space, but all of the adults are faced with making sense of the lives they have lived, and the concept that they may now be among the last handful of humans still alive. The little girl, on the other hand, is content to take life one day at a time, and to enjoy the great adventure she and Augustine are experiencing. 

Bottom Line: The ending of Good Morning, Midnight is almost certain to surprise its readers. It will also confuse them to the point that they have to reevaluate everything they’ve just read. However, Brooks-Dalton, I believe, does play fair with the reader by providing hints along the way that will lead them to some relatively solid retrospective conclusions about the story. This is a solid debut novel about love, regrets, guilt, optimism, and bravery, and I would love to hear what others think of it.

Lily Brooks-Dalton

Summerwater - Sarah Moss

Sarah Moss’s Summerwater is one of those novels that has drawn praise from professional critics on both the U.S. and the U.K. All that I knew about it going in was that it was short (201 numbered pages) and that it was supposed to have some kind of tragic/impactful/heartbreaking ending that kind of sneaks up on the reader. I can verify that the page-count is accurate, but the ending is more like getting blindsided by a freight train than having something surprise you by slowly sneaking up on you. 

And that makes this a tricky novel to review. One slip and the freight train is derailed before it even reaches the neighborhood.

Summerwater is the story of a group of strangers who happen to be staying in a Scottish holiday camp during the same week, a week during which it seems mostly to be raining so often that the various families are largely confined to their cabins where they surreptitiously spy on each other through slatted windows. With one exception, everyone pretty much seems to be from either Scotland or England. The outsiders are from Eastern Europe - the others think - and depending on whom you ask that family is characterized as Bulgarian, Polish, Russian, or Romanian. Everyone is so certain that they know the family’s origin that no one makes an effort to verify any of the assumptions. They don’t speak to the foreigners at all, but for that matter, they barely speak to each other either.

In what could pass for a collection of interconnected short stories as much as anything else, Moss introduces the families to the readers one at a time. Each “story,” of course has the same setting and sometimes the characters do have the kind of interaction that requires a little more from them than staring at, and wondering about, each other. The characters run the gamut from the elderly to toddlers, and their lives from contentment to despair. Some of what is going on behind closed doors is laugh-out-loud funny, and some of it will bring a tear to your eye. Moss truly is a good writer, and the structure works well. For the most part, her adult characters are witty and observant, if more than a little standoffish, such as one wife who is  desperate for a little alone-time because all the rain. She thinks:

“…setting aside the violent and deranged, getting married is like voting in that whatever you choose the outcome will be at best mildly unsatisfactory four years down the line.”

My favorite chapter of them all is “Zanzibar,” a snippet during which Moss places the reader inside the minds of Josh and Millie, who are on the verge of marriage, during the sex act itself. The contrast between what each is thinking, as opposed to what each believes the other must be thinking and experiencing is hysterical at times. Let’s just say it is a very good thing that neither of them is a mindreader.

But that freight train is still out there somewhere.

Bottom Line: Summerwater is as enjoyable as it is memorable, but for entirely different reasons. However, the ending left me a bit confused because of something that is only hinted at about one of the characters. I’m still not sure exactly why what happens at the end actually happens; perhaps, that’s what Moss was going for, perhaps not. And, too, maybe I just missed something. It wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened. 

Sarah Moss

I do not particularly enjoy endings that leave me guessing even after the last page has been turned, so I would love to hear what others think. A spoiler-alert warning has been added to make such a discussion, I hope, acceptable. 

Comments may include spoilers, especially as to the novel’s ending.

The Widows - Jess Montgomery

The Widows is the first novel in what has now become known as Jess Montgomery’s Kinship Series. The series, set in rural Ohio, begins in the mid-1920s and features two very strong female characters, Lily Ross and Marvena Whitcomb, who only reluctantly team up together to fight for the welfare of their coal-mining community. By the end of The Widows, Lily and Marvena have become much more than two women forced to work together; they have become family. 

The story begins before the women have met for the first time. In fact, it begins before Lily even knows of Marvena’s existence. Lily, the mother of two small children, lives in the small town she has known all her life, a town in which Daniel, her husband, is the well respected sheriff. Lily helps out in the town’s small jailhouse by cleaning the cells, providing meals, and doing all the paperwork that Daniel is so bad about keeping up with. Her world falls apart on the day that someone appears at her front door to tell her that Daniel has been “found.” As in found dead.

It appears that Daniel has been killed by a prisoner he was transporting to the jail. But Lily wants the details that no one but her much seems to care about. And after she has been asked to take on the role of acting sheriff until the next election to select the permanent new sheriff, she has the power and authority to do a little digging on her own. Marvena Whitcomb, unaware of the sheriff’s death, shows up at Lily’s door the day of Daniel’s funeral. She has come to Daniel for the answers he’s promised her about her missing sixteen-year-old daughter, answers that now she will never get from Sheriff Ross. The two women are suspicious about the motives of the other, especially especially after Lily figures out how much have in common, but they need each other - and given enough time - the mutual trust will come.

Now, working as a team, they become a threat to the powerful family that owns the local coal mining company, a company headed up by a man so ruthless that he will do whatever it takes to maximize the profits of his mines. If that means that people have to die, in or outside the mines, so be it. That kind of thing matters little to him.

Bottom Line: The Widows, being the first book in the Kinship Series, works very well as a standalone novel because, if you stop with this one, that’s what it is. But, given the storytelling skills of Jess Montgomery and the memorable characters she creates, I suspect that most readers will want to keep reading. I’m looking forward to the next two books in the series: The Hollows and The Stills - along with any that follow those. 

Jess Montgomery

The Book Chase March 2021 Reading Plan

I've slipped back into my old habit of reading multiple books at the same time, and now I wonder why I ever quit doing that in the first place. Having more than one going at a time (7 seems to work best for me) ensures that a single book won't go so stale on me that my reading slows down. In the long run, it probably will also result in me abandoning fewer books. As long as the books are different enough from each other that I don't begin to confuse plots, and as long as I have them in multiple stages of completion, I enjoy reading more than ever - and that says a lot. 

So, coming into March, these are the ones I'm already reading - or looking forward to reading soon:

This turned out to be the first book in Jess Montgomery's now three-book "Kinship Series." It tells the fictional story of the first female sheriff in the state of Ohio who was given that job after the assassination of the prior sheriff, her husband. The story is advanced through the alternating points-of-view of Sheriff Lily Ross and Marvena Whitcomb, a unionizer who lost her own husband in a coal mine explosion. The book is set in the 1920s and is very good.

I discovered this one via Netflix because it is the basis of a 2020 movie starring George Clooney called The Midnight Sky. The movie was good, but the book is fantastic. The basic plot is that the world is coming to a rapid end that cannot be stopped. One man and an eight-year-old girl are alone in an Arctic observatory and a space mission is returning from a close look at Jupiter with its six astronauts. The chapters alternate between the two scenarios, as each group struggles with the more and more obvious reality of the situation.

The Brutal Telling is Louise Penny's fifth Inspector Gamache book, and one of only three of the sixteen books in the series I haven't read. This one is really Olivier's story, a character that fans of the series by now know quite well, but in this 2009 book, Olivier is a prime suspect in the murder that brings Gamache and his team to Three Pines. This one is part of the project I started last year to catch up on as many of my favorite detective series as I could - but now I'm dreading the withdrawal period that will result when I've done that.

Summerwater has been named a best book of the year by two of the U.K.'s newspapers, so I grabbed a library-copy even before I knew much about it. It is short, only 190 pages, but even though I've only just finished the first chapter, I'm hooked. It all takes place in a Scottish vacation park during a day in which the weather is miserable. No one really knows anyone else, and they seem to like it that way right up until one family starts to seem different from the rest and "tragedy sneaks into their lives." 

I'm about 40 pages into this one now, and just noticed that it is "book 2 of Between Us." I had noticed that a previous book of this author's had a very similar title and wondered why. Now I know. So far, though, The Secrets Between Us is reading just fine as a standalone, and I'm confident that it will continue to do so. The two main characters have now been introduced in alternating chapters, and I'm enthralled by the horrible lives these women are being forced to live because of their utter poverty. 

Luster got all kinds of attention after it was published in August 2020, and it ended up making too many "best books of the year" list to count. I have literally read less than ten pages so far, but I am totally taken by what is going on in the head of the book's narrator, a twenty-three old black woman with a slightly off-kilter take on the world. It looks like it's going to be one of those stream-of-consciousness books that can end up being very funny, very dark, or both. Reader-reviews have run the spectrum; some love it, some hate it.

And then there's Lonesome Dove. This one will almost definitely not be finished in March because I'm limiting myself to a chapter or two per day at most. It's a story I know so well from my two previous reads of the novel, and the great television series, that there are really no surprises left for me to discover. Yet, I find myself laughing in the same places I always laugh, and falling in love with the same characters I always favor. I really don't want this one to end - and that's nothing new either.

Others books I'm looking forward to in March, or perhaps April, include several ARCs. Among those are James Lee Burke's latest book (part of his Holland family saga) Another Kind of Eden; Nick McDonnell's The Council of Animals, an Animal Farm-kind of take on what happens when humans begin to die off; Laurie Frankel's One Two Three, a book I've mentioned before; and You Belong Here Now by Dianna Rostad, an "orphan train" book that takes place in 1925 Montana.

Potential library surprises include Nothing More Dangerous by Allen Eskens, The Good Girls by Sonia Faleiro, The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman, Blood Grove by Walter Mosley, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain by George Saunders, and The Searcher by Tana French. Depending on how long I can check these out for, they may move directly up to the top of the reading list. 

So there you have it: book choices in abundance. Life is good...considering.

Edit: Change of plans after reading a few more pages of Luster. I've decided that I'm among the "hate it" crowd on this one because it all seems kind of pointless and an overreach to be snarky. Luster becomes my third abandoned book of 2021.