Who Is Maud Dixon? - Alexandra Andrews

The soon-to-be-published Who Is Maud Dixon? is Alexandra Andrews’s debut novel. Andrews sets her novel inside the publishing worlds of New York and Paris, a setting she is familiar with from having herself worked in publishing in both cities in the past. The setting is, in fact, what first caught my attention about Who Is Maud Dixon?.

The novel’s two main characters are Florence Darrow, an entry-level editorial assistant, and Helen Wilcox, an author who’s recent pseudonymous (as Maud Dixon) novel has been a bestseller all over the world. Florence is too ambitious to put in the time required to rise through the ranks of publishing, so when she is offered a job as Helen Wilcox’s personal assistant, she jumps at it. Florence is always looking for an angle that will jump her to the front of the line, and now she is hoping that Helen will do just that by becoming both her friend and her mentor. However, that bit of naiveté is snatched from Florence as soon as she learns what a conniving and egocentric woman the real Maud Dixon really is. And that’s where it begins to get very complicated for both Helen and Florence. 

While on a sudden trip to Morocco with Helen to help research the second Maud Dixon novel, Florence wakes up in a hospital bed after an automobile accident she cannot remember. She is told by the policeman investigating the accident that she drove her car off the clifftop highway and into the sea below. She is only alive, he tells her, because a lone fisherman witnessed the accident and plucked her from the car before it sank to the bottom. But Florence is still confused. Where is Helen, and why is everyone in the hospital calling her Ms. Wilcox instead of by her own name?

So, is this Florence’s chance to jump not only to the front of the line but all the way into the life she has dreamed of living since she was a child? After all, Helen, despite the fact that her body has not been found inside the recovered car, is certainly dead. The only purse recovered from the vehicle belonged to Helen, and now authorities are assuming that it, along with Helen’s passport and driver’s license, are hers. If she doesn’t tell them that Helen was in the car with her that night, how will they ever know? Florence’s uncanny physical resemblance to the dead author makes it all the more likely that passing for Helen Wilcox/Maude Dixon will not be a problem. Hardly believing her good fortune, Florence steps into Helen’s shoes immediately - and she doesn’t intend to give them up despite the suspicious Moroccan copy who won’t go away. What could possibly go wrong?

Bottom Line: Who Is Maud Dixon? has so many twists and turns that at least border on the farfetched that the reader is required to have a significant willingness to suspend disbelief in order to make this one work. If the plot is good enough, or I enjoy the characters and setting enough, that is not necessarily a problem for me. But, frankly, both the main characters in this one are such high-level sociopaths that I was left with no one to root for. Think Patricia Highsmith’s Mr. Ripley character, and you will have some idea of what Florence and Helen are like. Highsmith, though, kept it real - and that makes all the difference in the world.

Review Copy provided by Publisher

The Book Chase February 2021 Reading Plan

 I surprised myself a little this month by sticking to my reading plan a lot closer than I normally do. Even though a whole lot of new books caught my attention, as they always do, this month I managed to hold most of them off for February reading. So of the eight books I highlighted coming into January, I read and reviewed six. One of the eight is being moved to February and one is being dropped for the moment. In addition, I did read four others not on the list, bringing me to a total of ten for the month. 

This is how February is shaping up:

Who Is Maud Dixon is an ARC that I'm reading right now. The basic story is that a young entry-level publishing house employee, unhappy with her life, manages to get a job as personal assistant to a famous author whose real identity is a well-kept secret. After the writer seems to disappear, the assistant decides to assume her life by becoming her. Intriguing, right? Well so far, I'm mostly bored by this "psychological thriller," and still hoping it gets better soon.

Scottish crime writer Denise Mina has been a favorite of mine for several years despite the fact that her prose style always seems to slow me down a little. It takes me longer to get into her rhythm than it does for many authors. This one is about a doctor who finds her birth family only to learn that her mother was murdered years earlier by what appears to be a serial killer. Now she has to decide whether or not she wants to work with her aunt - because the police won't do anything - to identify the killer.

Speaking of favorite authors, Elmer Kelton is my favorite western writer of them all. I didn't really plan to read Shadow of a Star right now, but my grandson was looking for a book report book, and I pulled this one off the shelf for him. It's a 1959 book of Kelton's I never got around to reading, but after flipping through it while telling my grandson what to expect, I decided to read it along with him. It's more a YA-level book, but I'm loving it already. Kelton has never disappointed me, so I'm not really surprised.

Chuck Wendig's Wanderers is one of those rare books that I learned about by browsing randomly on Amazon one day. That hardly ever happens because I don't usually "browse" Amazon, only going to the site to purchase something specific. Anyway, it's a 2019 pandemic book (I know...just what we need to be reading right now) that is really well-written. But I grabbed a library copy before noticing that the book is 800 pages long. Now the race is on to finish it before the library snags my electronic copy back for the next person on hold.

Anyone who has read my reviews for very long knows that I'm a huge fan of the Akashic Books noir series. So when I found out that the publisher was starting a new series of "speculative fiction," I was thrilled. And then I got really lucky by being offered an ARC of the very first volume of the new series, Speculative Los Angeles. As in the noir series, these short story collections will be set in various cities around the world. I'm hoping that by "speculative" the publisher means "alternate history" at least a little bit. This one will be published on February 2. 

As so much of my reading is, this one is the recommendation of another book blogger (Cathy at Kittling: Books this time) who reviewed another of the books in this eight-book series. It seems that the books are set in 1960s Texas, my own coming-of-age decade here, so I'm curious to see how Wortham handles that time period. This is the first book in the series, and it's a library copy, so the clock is ticking on this one, too. It features a "bald-headed pot-bellied" hero called Ned Parker. It sounds like fun, and I'm hoping it hooks me on the series.

This is the one I'm carrying over from my January list. It's an ARC for a book that won't be published until June 8, so there's really know hurry, meaning I probably won't be posting a review for a while. But it sound good, and I'm curious, so I do hope to read it in February.It's about triplet sisters, all very different people, who grew up in a little town whose water supply was declared "unfit" about the time they were born. Their mother wanted answers, but never got them Now the three sisters are determined to get them.

The Music of Bees is another ARC, this one set to be published in April. It is said to be "uplifting," and since we all need to be uplifted right now, it sounds pretty good to me. It tells the story of three grieving strangers, one woman and two men, who find their way to a local honeybee farm where they surprise themselves by becoming friends. The blurb says it's about finding a second-chance when you least expect it. It's the kind of book that can easily go off the rails by becoming too sentimental, so we'll see. Hoping for the best.

I'm going to stop with eight titles because I want to leave a little wiggle-room for the surprises that always come along. In addition to these eight, I already have eight books set aside to choose from at the end of February - and that stack will probably double by then. I haven't even mentioned the nine books I acquired in January, only one of which I've read so far. Really, my goal is only to give all of them a chance, and to enjoy eight or ten of them a month. It's not like I don't have enough to choose from, so the odds are with me.

The Queen's Gambit - Walter Tevis

I still find it hard to believe that until a few weeks ago I had never heard of Walter Tevis. After all, two of Tevis’s six novels, The Man Who Fell to Earth and The Hustler, were turned into two of the more memorable films from the seventies, and late last year Netflix released a wonderful mini-series based on his 1983 novel The Queen’s Gambit. It didn’t help, I suppose, that Tevis died at the relatively young age of 56 in 1984 or that his body of work consists entirely of six novels and a collection of short stories, but still I wonder how I missed him for so long. 

The Queen’s Gambit is Beth Harmon’s story. Beth spends her childhood years in an orphanage after the tragic death of her mother. If that were not sad enough already, this is the kind of orphanage that feeds tranquilizers to the children every day because that makes them easier for staff to handle. Beth is one of the unfortunate children who develops a lifelong addiction to the pills, and who suffers terribly after the orphanage is forced by authorities to stop illegally drugging it wards. The same pills, however, allow Beth to focus her mind in a dramatic new way, an ability that changes her life after she learns the game of chess from the orphanage janitor, a gruff man who only reluctantly begins to teach her the game after she starts coming  down to the basement to clean classroom erasers. 

Soon enough, eight-year-old Beth is outplaying her chess tutor and anyone else she gets a chance to compete against, including the local high school’s entire chess team - which she defeats in simultaneous matches. Everyone is astounded by the little girl’s talent except the orphanage director, a woman who delights in punishing Beth by refusing to let her play the game. That all changes finally when Beth, at age 13, is adopted. Chess becomes her life, although it is a life she will spend battling her addictions, and in a few years Beth Harmon may just become the most famous chess player not only in the United States, but in the entire world.

With The Queen’s Gambit, Walter Tevis does the seemingly impossible for non-chess players. He makes the life of tournament chess come alive in a way that makes it all as exciting as the Super Bowl, the World Series, or March Madness can be for rabid sports fans. Tevis’s revelations concerning “inside chess,” along with his explanations of the various offenses and defenses used by the masters of the game are fascinating enough. But Tevis tops himself by making his move-by-move descriptions of key matches so interesting that even a non-chess-playing reader ends up holding his breath to see which player will finally be caught in an inescapable trap. 

Bottom Line: The Queen’s Gambit is great fun on several levels. The side story of who Beth Harmon is and how she got to be the young woman she becomes by the end of the novel is both entertaining and, at times, heartbreaking. The chess tournament scenes, dry as the subject may at first sound, are equally fascinating because Tevis begins them with all the preparation, strategy, and gamesmanship involved. But the biggest surprise of all, is that the non-player comes away from The Queen’s Gambit with an above average sense of how how the game really works - and why some people are able to play it a such a high level at such an early age. If you haven’t read this one yet, you need to fix that. It’s really very, very good. 

Walter Tevis

Apple Tree Yard - Louise Doughty

Seldom has it happened that a television production I watch ends up leading me back to the novel adapted for that video presentation. Although this is happening more than ever right now because of the semi-isolated lifestyles so many of us have been forced to adopt in recent months, it still comes as a pleasant surprise to me when it does. I recently came across Louise Doughty’s 2013 Apple Tree Yard as a four-part television series that was originally broadcast by the BBC in early 2017, and I didn’t notice the book-credit until I began the second episode. The series stars Emily Watson, Ben Chaplin, and Mark Bonnar, among other familiar faces. I noticed, too, that Doughty was not the screenplay writer, and that made me more curious about how the book and the television adaptation would compare.

I enjoyed the BBC production, but I’ve found that despite their overall plot similarity, Doughty’s novel is much the better of the two. In the BBC version, most everything unfolds in its natural, chronological order. One thing happens, and that leads, to the next, etc., and the viewer is right there to see it all happen. In the novel itself, things only happen as they cross the mind of the book’s narrator and central character, Yvonne Carmichael, as she holds an internal conversation with the book’s other central character. As Yvonne ponders something that has happened, or she wonders what would have happened if she had done “this” instead of “that,” everything is slowly revealed in the manner of jigsaw puzzle pieces falling into place. The novel, in fact, begins near the end of the story, so as Yvonne thinks back about her life and reveals more to the reader, we already know that all of this is not going to end particularly well.

“And after the imagined drama that made our daily lives bearable, we got a real drama, more of a drama than we could handle, and then we wanted our daily lives back, but they didn’t exist anymore. We discovered that safety and security are commodities you can sell in return for excitement, but you can never get them back.”

Note: Anything that follows is also revealed by the novel’s book jacket - no spoilers.

As Apple Tree Yard begins, Yvonne Carmichael and a man she hardly knows have been charged with murder and their trial is reaching its climax. The wonder of the story is how someone of Yvonne’s stature could have ended up where we find her in the novel’s prologue. She, after all, is a middle-aged woman who has been married for decades to the man who fathered their two adult children. She is a well-respected geneticist who at one point was involved in some groundbreaking work regarding the mapping of DNA. She is so good at what she does that she is often called in as an expert to advise special Parliament committees on ethics matters and potential legislative fixes. 

But now, her reputation, her future, and her very life hinge on one disastrous moment of sexual attraction and reckless behavior that led her to do something so out of character in a London alley called Apple Tree Yard that she can’t explain what happened even to herself. Or can she? She certainly tries hard enough to rationalize everything that happened before and after that encounter, but can we trust her to tell us the truth? 

Bottom Line: Apple Tree Yard, the novel, is brilliant. Its pacing is so perfect that, even after already having watched the BBC series, I could hardly wait to get to the next chapter. There are differences in the endings of the BBC show and the novel, mainly, I suspect, because the television series needed more dramatic visuals than the novel provided at the point in the storyline, but the novel is still the hands-down winner of the two. In Yvonne Carmichael, Louise Doughty has created one of those fictional characters I don’t think I will ever forget. I highly recommend this one.

Louise Doughty

Book Chase Is 14 Years Old

Well, here's a Book Chase first for you. Book Chase turned fourteen years old five days ago, and the anniversary sailed right past me without making even a tiny ripple in my consciousness. Something like that has never happened to me. I've always been near-obsessed by numbers and statistics, but it looks like the Pandemic Year from Hell has somehow altered my brain. Anyway, I'll do a quick recap of the key cumulative numbers now because they really do still fascinate me:

• 1,349 Book and Short Story Reviews (99% books)
•    209 Posts about bookstores
•    331 Posts about specific authors
•      33 Author obituaries (very sadly)
•     581 Posts about book news
•     181 Posts about Libraries
•     110 Posts about readers who make the news

That's all well and good, I suppose, but the numbers are telling me that my focus has drifted a bit and that a significantly higher percentage of my 2020 posts than usual were devoted to book reviews or book discoveries. I guess I can blame it on the REAL pandemic and on the political pandemic, but I'm not taking the time anymore to seek out those book-related stories that I usually find so interesting. Too much of my time is being spent thinking about things that only lead to distress and/or a depressed mood. I hope I can change that in 2021, but I'm off to a slow start.

Anyway, thanks to everyone (Bloggers, readers, writers, publishers, librarians, and bookstores) for making me feel part of the book world during 2020, and for the hundreds of conversations we've shared in the last twelve months. You guys make it all worth it. Keep on reading...and talking about it.

The Mitford Murders - Jessica Fellowes

Jessica Fellowes’s The Mitford Murders is the first book in what is now a well-established four-book series involving the real-life Mitford family. This first book is set in and around London shortly after World War I, “the war to end all wars,” has failed miserably at doing anything remotely like that. 

The mystery novel’s central characters are Louisa Cannon, a young woman desperate to escape the poverty of her London life, and the teen-aged Nancy Mitford, eldest of the six Mitford sisters who would all go on to achieve some combination of fame and notoriety in the following decades. Nancy, in fact, became a successful novelist. Half (more than half?) the fun of The Mitford Murders is getting a look at what life in the household may have been like while Nancy was still somewhere between innocent teen and young woman. 

Louisa, running from her abusive uncle, makes her London escape by landing a position in the Oxfordshire home of the Mitfords as assistant to the children’s nanny. Nancy immediately sees Louisa as a confidante she can trust rather than as a chaperone, and their relationship turns into a strong friendship of two equals. Things go well for the pair, and will continue to do so as long as Louisa can keep her uncle from discovering her whereabouts. But then everything changes when nurse Florence Nightingale Shore (goddaughter of the famous Florence Nightingale) is murdered in a train and Nancy, who considers herself a first-rate amateur sleuth, and Louisa start pushing around the edges of the investigation. With some help from the young cop who is infatuated by Louisa, they start to make some dangerous people very uncomfortable, and that is never a good thing.

I experienced The Mitford Murders as an audiobook, and I’m glad I did it that way because I discovered one of my new favorite audiobook narrators in Rachel Atkins. Atkins is quite the storyteller, and her talent of seamlessly flipping from accent to accent, along with her voice inflection and flair, helped make the various characters seem real - and easily identifiable. 

Bottom Line: I am not a big fan of the cozy genre, and even though this one - perhaps because it is based on a real-life unsolved murder - is a little rougher around the edges than many cozies are, I almost certainly would not have enjoyed it as much if I had flipped its pages for myself. And that complicates my overall rating of The Mitford Murders a bit. Overall, I rate this a 4-star book, the average of 5 stars for its narration and 3 stars for its plot. 

Jessica Fellowes