RIP Sharon Kay Penman

I just heard the awful news that historical novelist Sharon Kay Penman passed away on January 22, 2021 from pneumonia. I have read every one of her books and loved them all.  She will be sorely missed.  Ms. Penman published her first book in 1982 and her last novel was published last year. Her stories took place in the 12th and 13th centuries and were meticulously researched. The medieval period is my favorite era so I am going to miss her greatly.  She was 75.

Book of the Month for January, 2021

My favorite book this month is The Midnight Library.  It made me think hard about what I want most in life and the need to be active in trying to obtain it. Keeping decisions on hold because you can't decide what to do is fatal to a good life.  The Midnight Library is a fable about being inbetween life and death. There are an infinite number of shelves inside the library where every book is a chance to live your life differently.  All you need to do is change the decisions you made in life so that you have no regrets.

14th Annual Graphic Novel/Manga Reading Challenge Sign-Up

I got hooked on comics about 6 years ago and just love this challenge. Of course, I will be rejoining it in 2021. It was unclear whether the challenge would continue until now. We post our reviews on a private Facebook group that was formed 2 years ago. The administrator never said if she would keep it going but 2021 posts are already being published there. I will rejoin the challenge at a 12 book level. While I read much more last year, I never know if I will find a book that I am interested in. I tend to read graphic novels on serious topics.

A Yellow House

It took me quite awhile to become interested in A Yellow House.  I did not know what the book was about before I began reading and could not see any plot.  All I saw was a whiny child protagonist with no friends who hated her life. After realizing that the book was about migrant domestic workers I became more interested in the story.  I believe, however, that the first third of the book could have been paced more quickly.

The publisher's summary:

"Ten-year-old Singaporean Maya is lonely:  her grandmother is dead, her mother is focused on her career and her best friend has become a bully.  When Aunty M, a domestic worker from Indonesia, joins the family to take care of Maya and her baby sister, Maya is ready to hate her. Aunty M smiles a lot, but says little.  However, after Aunty M rescues a fellow maid living in the same building and beaten by her employer, Maya discovers a side of Singapore hitherto unknown to her.  She and Aunty M grow closer as they meet more and more women in need. What will happen when Mama finds out about Maya and Aunty M's growing involvement with the aunties?  Will Maya lose Aunty M too?  After all, Mama did say she hates busybodies. This poignant coming-of-age story, told in the voice of the inquisitive Maya, explores the plight of migrant domestic workers in Singapore and the relationships they form with the families they work for."

Women will enjoy reading this sisterhood novel.  Almost all of the characters are female. Maya's father is the only man in the book and his role is limited. Maya's interest in the domestic workers was a hard sell for me. At first, I thought she was only interested in their stories because she was bored and had nothing else to do. Later it becomes clear that she is beginning to form opinions about the world. 

I am unsure what to think about the writing. In the beginning of the story many characters are being introduced with no serious connection with Maya. There wasn't much plot movement but this is a character driven novel. Unfortunately, that was not evident to me until the midway point and it affected my view of the book.  I did, however, expect a mystery of some sort to be solved. There is no mystery here. The author's intention in writing this novel was to highlight the lives of the workers.  Her bio states that she grew up as an expat child in Asia with migrant domestic workers hired to take care of her.  She did not realize at the time that these women left their home countries to work for her family.  Later in life she asked why and in 2012 she joined a charity that supports these workers in Singapore.  The stories that she heard were the inspiration for this book.  

3 out of 5 stars.

The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergil Sisters

I loved author Balli Kaur Jaswal's Erotic Stories for Punjabi Women. Ms. Jaswal is now one of my favorite authors.  This Adventures book has more of a suspenseful plot than Erotic Stories and follows the three Shergill sisters as they navigate a trip to India together.

British sisters Rajni, Jezmeen, and Shirina must take a trip to their homeland to satisfy the wishes of their recently deceased mother. Their mother wants her ashes to be disbursed at the Golden Temple in Amritsar. Before her death she wrote down a daily itinerary of what she wanted her daughters to do when they arrived in India.  The sisters are at odds with each other and always have been. Rajni is the oldest and has previously been on a pilgrimage to India with her mother. However, she had vowed to herself that she would never return there.  Jezmeen is a struggling actress and cannot afford to spend time traveling as she has an appointment for an important audition for a part that could catapult her to stardom. Shirina is married but is always pressured by her in laws to do something she does not want to do. They have given her an assignment to do while she is in India. The question is whether she will stand up for herself or cater to their wishes once more.

The theme of the story is, obviously, family, including what it means to be a second generation immigrant. Current topics such as assisted suicide are also addressed. There is another important topic discussed that relates solely to Shirina but I don't want to be a spoiler. 

I highly recommend this funny and heartwarming story, particularly for women, as the bonds of sisterhood are what this book is all about.

5 out of 5 stars.

The Girls in the Snow

The Girls in the Snow is the first book in a new detective series featuring FBI agent Nikki Hunt as the detective.  The second book in the series will be published next month and I am looking forward to getting a copy of it as this novel was fantastic.  This tight psychological thriller begins in 1995 with Nikki coming home from a high school party and finding her murdered parents in their Stillwater, MN home. Fast forward 20 years and Nikki is a FBI agent who has been dispatched back to Stillwater to investigate the deaths of two girls.  There are two mysteries to be solved in the book. The first one is who killed the girls. The second mystery deals with whether the right person was convicted and jailed for killing Nikki's parents.

The Nikki Hunt character is mysterious and makes a great protagonist for a series. Her job as a detective in the FBI's Behavior Analysis Unit will make a great backdrop to the investigations that she will be involved with in the future.  In addition, being familiar with violent crime in her personal life is always going to be an issue for her. I expect that this family history is going to be a part of all the investigations that she heads in future books. 

The weather is the main setting in the novel. The ice cold temperatures in Minnesota during winter works well with finding two dead girls whose bodies were staged by the killer frozen in the snow. Winter is what comes to people's minds when they think of Minnesota so this was a bonus for the setting. 

Nikki's reunions with friends and neighbors help move the plot along.  For example, her former boyfriend John is a local police officer who is supposedly assisting her but there is a hint that he is hiding something. It seems that everyone in Stillwater is hiding something, which only adds to the suspense.

The advertisement for the book says that it is unputdownable. I agree with that assessment. I read it in one sitting. One Perfect Grave is the next book in the series. It will be published on February 25, 2021 and I have already pre-ordered a copy. 

5 out of 5 stars.

The Midnight Library

The Midnight Library is the most thought provoking book I have ever read. The story concerns the decisions every person makes in their life and how each decision impacts the outcome of your life. Written as a mystery, main character Nora Seed wants to die. She loses her job, her cat dies, her boyfriend leaves her, she loses her one and only piano student and the elderly neighbor she has been assisting no longer needs her help.  She finds all these things out in the span of a day. 

Nora is planning to kill herself but while she is considering suicide she is taken to a new plain where there is a library with an infinite number of bookshelves filled with an infinite number of green books and the prospect of living an infinite number of lives. Then she sees a woman at a desk, her elementary school librarian Mrs. Elm.  Mrs. Elm explains that Nora is neither alive nor dead. She is inbetween, perhaps in a coma. Nora is told that each book is a life that she can have. All she has to do is pick a book and she will begin living the story in the book.  If Nora has doubts about the life, she will automatically return to the library and can select another book. The library gives Nora the opportunity to work out her regrets in her life. However, there is a catch. These opportunities will stop at some point. Neither Mrs. Elm nor Nora won't know when that time frame is up. It is possible that Nora will lose the opportunity to be in the library and subsequently die if she does not choose a life to live before that time comes to an end. It's a risk Nora must take.

The Midnight Library shows that a stagnant life is no life. Nora had many options to choose for herself. She could have been a glaciologist, Olympic swimmer, rock star, pub owner, wife and mother, or a philosopher. Nora was indecisive and couldn't pick which goal to pursue. So, she did nothing. As one character told Nora, she has life fright.  It is worth considering what makes your life worth living and which life dreams are what you really want. 

Plaid and Plagiarism

Plaid and Plagiarism was a disconnect for me.  There were too many descriptive phrases per page instead of action. For instance, Obsessive Outlanders and Born Again Braveheart were one of 10 descriptions on a page.  "Janet and Christine made comforting bookends for the young women in between them." "You didn'task Rab why he rabbited off the harborwall." " I didn't want to ask about his Nessie boxers." "Ooh, is that one of those fancy instant-hot, instant-cold, instant ooh-la-la taps?"  "Let's put the unsavory bits to bed." What the heck do these descriptions mean? I guess the book was written for a UK audience as the author has used many words that only the British use.

Also, the run-up to the murder itself made no sense.  Our two main characters were searching someone's house because it had been trashed. The body was found elsewhere, in a shed, and I did not see the connection between spending 20 pages on searching the house and one sentence on the shed. In addition, when they were peeking into the windows of the house?  Why did they call the police for an emergency when they saw a person move inside the house?  Perhaps the person lived there. Afterward they entered the house to see if more than the kitchen was trashed. Why? This was not connected to the body in the shed and there didn't seem to be any reason why they could enter this house.

What is the book supposed to be about? The publisher's blurb refers to two friends opening a bookshop and they are going to be amateur sleuths solving a murder. Nothing else is written about the plot in the blurb and I can only assume that even the publisher doesn't see any plot action. 

It seems to me that this book is all setting descriptions and no plot. Perhaps the author was trying to set some groundwork for a new cozy mystery series. However, the book was too dull for me to even consider reading any future books in the series.

Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows

I loved this story of older women breaking their societal rules on how women should behave.   I especially loved how they treated the young 22-year-old writing teacher who thought she knew much more than them. These ladies exposed her youthful assumption that she was superior to them.  This is something I have to deal with myself on my job. I don't know why the young assume they know more than the old, but they do. This aspect of the story was funny.

The story opens with Nikki accepting a job teaching women how to write at the Sikh Community Center located in London's Southall neighborhood.  When the women, primarily widows, refuse to learn the alphabet they begin to tell stories about meeting men. These stories have an erotic sense to them. The women tell their fantasies about preludes to sexual encounters with strangers.  Nikki is totally shocked that senior women have these kind of thoughts. The women initially believe that Nikki cannot help them write their stories because she has never been married.  Nikki fears that she will be fired if her supervisor find out what is happening in class and wants to make them learn to write.  However, the women are not interested in the a, b, c's but rather storytelling.  Needing the paycheck, Nikki agrees to help them and hopes to compile enough stories to publish in an anthology.

Part of the fun reading this book is being introduced to many interesting older Punjabi women characters. While they all live traditional Indian lives, their imaginations run wild. In addition, the reader gets to know their life stories both in England as well as in India. Indian customs are prominent in the book, including the customs of Nikki's own family, and how these customs affect their daily lives.  You feel like you are at afternoon tea with these ladies while they gossip and tantalize each other with their fantasies.  The widows stretch themselves by continuing to meet even though the community would react strongly against them writing sexy stories. Later in the novel they stretch themselves again by agreeing to have class in the pub where Nikki also works. Punjabi women are not supposed to drink, let alone sit in a pub.

The erotic stories were not too sexy until the midway point in the novel when the action becomes more explicit.  I guess I am prudish enough that I had to skip over a few pages here and there.  The women's lives were compelling enough to keep me reading.  I wanted to discover what happened with Nikki's relationship with her boyfriend as well as her sister's efforts to obtain an arranged marriage.  There is also a mystery playing out in the plot. Did a woman from Southall really kill herself or did someone kill her. 

This was an enjoyable read.  4 out of 5 stars.

Death and the Maiden

Ariana Franklin's daughter Samantha Norman wrote this book. Franklin had no input in the writing. The book that Franklin was writing when she died in 2011 was The Siege Winter, which her daughter finished. Norman is a chip off the old block. Her writing is superb and as a lover of medieval mysteries I am glad that she wrote this final installment in Franklin's Mistress of the Art of Death series.  This historical mystery is set in Norman England during the year 1911.

With this installment of the series, Adelia Aguilar has just lost her friend and patron, King Henry II.  Adelia is living comfortably in retirement and training her 19 year old daughter Allie to carry on her healing craft.  Allie is already a skilled healer and has a particular gift for treating animals. Being of marriageable age, Allie's father, Rowley, the Bishop of St. Albans, and his patron, Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, have plans to marry  Allie to an influential husband. 

When Adelia's lifelong friend in Cambridge, Gyltha, falls ill, Allie is sent to Ely to help her.  There she crosses paths with Lord Peveril, a young aristocrat who would make a most suitable match for Allie. However, when Allie arrives in Ely, all is chaos.  A village girl has disappeared and she is not the first.  Over the past few months, several girls from the villages surrounding Ely have vanished.  When the body of one is discovered, Allie manages to examine the remains before burial. The results lead her to suspect that a murderer is on the loose. The question remains, will Allie be able to help find the killer before becoming the next victim?

The period details of the era were beautifully described. One detail that I have never read about before was the level of power a bishop had over the communities he oversaw. In this case, an interdiction was issued that prevented a priest from performing mass, funerals and burials. Bodies that could not be buried were piling up outdoors with no where to be interred. The effect this had on individual people was aptly described; they were horrified.

The writing was good but there was one thing that bothered me. The murder to be investigated happened late in the story. While I was reading I was captivated by the background information but I kept expecting a crime to occur. It finally happened at the halfway point but, for me, the crime should occur early in the story. I prefer for it to be in the first two chapters but this doesn't always happen in a historical mystery.

4 out of 5 stars.

A Rising Man

Abir Mukherjee's first novel is a masterpiece. Taking place in the early 1900s Calcutta, a newly arrived Scotland Yard detective, Captain Sam Wyndham, is confronted with the murder of a British official. Desperately seeking a fresh start after his experiences during the Great War, Wyndham has been recruited to head up a new post in the police force. He is immediately overwhelmed by the heady vibrancy of the tropical city, but with barely a moment to acclimatize or to deal with the ghosts that still haunt him, Wyndham is caught up in a murder investigation that threatens to destabilize a city already teetering on the brink of political insurgency.

The body of a senior official has been found in a filthy sewer, and a note left in his mouth warns the British to quit India, or else. Under tremendous pressure to solve the case before it erupts into increased violence on the streets, Wyndham and his two new colleagues—arrogant Inspector Digby and Sergeant Banerjee, one of the few Indians to be recruited into the new CID—embark on an investigation that will take them from the opulent mansions of wealthy British traders to the seedy opium dens of the city.

I always love historical fiction set in India. This particular book focuses more on the local police department and its investigative methods than the usual partying done by the British. While I like those books too it was refreshing to read about a new aspect of life in India 100 years ago. The weather is a big issue for our detective. He has difficulty moving from a cold, rainy England to 110+ degrees India. It affects his ability to do his job and the author did a great job writing this setting into the story.

The men featured in the story were prominent characters. The women were important but the comeraderie, or lack thereof, among the men moved the plot forward.  Captain Wyndham cannot break through the tight group of male characters. He is considered persona non grata. Usually when a person lands themselves in India the British society welcomes that person with open arms. Wyndham's experience was atypical for the time period.

There is plenty of historical detail written into the story.  The characters need to navigate through a minefield of political pitfalls in order to do their jobs well. Wyndham and his Indian sidekick Surrender-Not Banerjee make a great crime fighting duo who can carry this fantastic new detective series forward. I am looking forward to reading the next book in the series.

5 out of 5 stars.

Chunkster Reading Challenge 2021

I used to participate in this challenge annually but think that it was discontinued for a few years.  I love the feel of a big book in my hands. In fact, I don't really feel like I am reading with a physical book in my hands.  It has made 2020 difficult to get used to reading ebooks.  I am happy to see that this challenge is back in 2021.   It is being hosted by Annette at the Impressions in Ink blog.

There are some requirements for the challenge.  

1)    All books must be at least 450 pages.

2)    The challenge runs the 2021 calendar year.

3)    All book formats are accepted for the challenge. Audio and ebooks are OK.

4)    There is no minimum number of books that you must read. 

4)    You don't need a blog to participate.

I have already purchased a few chunksters.  I will be reading Elizabeth George's With No One as Witness which she published in 2005.  It has 627 pages.  Stephanie Dray's My Dear Hamilton has 637 pages and her America's First Daughter has 587 pages.  I also plan on reading former President Obama's memoir A Promised Land.  It is over 700 pages but is just the first installment of his official memoir.  

What's in a Name 2021

I have participated in this challenge off and on over the years.  However, it was fun this year so I am rejoining the challenge in 2021.  The challenge is hosted once again by Carolina Book Nook. Of course, the challenge runs the calendar year.  Any format of books is acceptable.  However, you cannot use one book for more than one category. As usual, there are 6 categories of words that must in the title of every book you read for the challenge.  The 2021 categories are:  

1)      One/1

2)      Doubled word , ie, in a dark, dark wood

3)      Reference to outer space

4)      Possessive noun

5)      Botanical word

6)      Article of clothing 

The possessive noun category will be difficult for me as I will need to think what a possessive noun is.  Perhaps I should try to knock off that category ASAP so I don't have to think about it all year.