Radio Girls

Radio Girls is Sarah-Jane Stratford's first historical novel. It covers the period of time between 1926 and 1932 when the BBC radio station was just beginning.

American Maisie Musgrave lands herself a job in London as a secretary at the BBC.  She is intimidated by her bosses and smart co-workers.  She has difficulty adjusting to the hectic pace of the job but is captivated by this new technology called radio and is thrilled to have this job.  Her insecurities are apparent to her primary supervisor Hilda Matheson who manages the groundbreaking Talks broadcasts where famous people are interviewed for 15 minutes. Everyone expects that Maisie will end up working solely for Hilda as she is doing well assisting with the Talks.

Hilda Matheson was a real person who worked for MI5 during WW1 and received the OBE later in life.  This book seems to be about her contributions to the broadcasting industry and the book has merit for presenting this history.

However, I can't say whether Maisie did or did not end up working for Hilda Matheson because I stopped reading. I have a rule that if a book does not capture my attention within the first 50 pages, I put it down. I gave Radio Girls a 70 page chance but could not get interested in the book.

The writing style was directed toward a British audience.  The dialogue between the characters reflected the slang terminology of the era and some of the words I did not understand. In addition, I did not understand what was meant by a number of sentences.  The way I defined words in some of the sentences could not be what the author intended as the result was nonsensical.

I was disappointed with Radio Girls.  I had high expectations for it based on the back cover blurb as well as other reviews that I read about the book. 

City of Masks

City of Masks is S. D. Sykes' 3rd Somershill Manor Mystery novel.  This novel does not take place in England as the first two books in the series did but rather takes place in Venice in 1358.

The story opens with a Prologue where the main character, Oswald de Lacy, finds the dead body of the grandson of his Venetian host, John Bearpark, an English ex-pat in Venice.  In the next 40 pages not much happens as de Lacy and his mother socialize with their host John Bearpark and his other guests.  Here de Lacy is coerced into nights of drinking and gambling with grandson Enrico and his friends, spending time with boring religious pilgrims Bernard and Margery Jagger, secretly staring at Bearpark's non-speaking young wife Filomena and dealing with the staff at Casa Bearpark. It is after these 40 pages that the body of grandson, Enrico, is found and the story continues with de Lacy being asked to investigate Enrico's death.

The excitement in the book begins with de Lacy's investigation but the author interspersed a few chapters about de Lacy's past from the earlier books in the series. These chapters have no bearing on the plot and I don't know why they were added.  De Lacy gets his first clue from his host who tells him that Enrico sexually preferred men over women. This confused de Lacy as Enrico had tried to get him to go to brothels with him. However, he trusts his gut and begins the investigation with the home's security guard who was not on duty the night of the murder and has since disappeared.

The author displayed her knowledge of medieval Venice in this novel. She portrayed the history of Venice at a time when it was at war with Hungary and how it affected commerce as well as everyday life for Venetians. The political powerhouses of the day were also depicted in realistic terms with their ability to put to death homosexuals upon only hearing an accusation, deciding which families could use the best ships for transport of goods as well as people, and deciding what crimes were worthy of investigation.

I feel that the setting should have stayed in England. This installment of the series was not as exciting as the earlier two, Plague Land and The Butcher Bird.  De Lacy's sleuthing skills were hampered by being in a foreign country.  He not only was unfamiliar with the physical layout of Venice but he did not understand the culture of the city and its people.  Part of what made his sleuthing skills superior in his homeland was his understanding of how his own people's minds worked.  Also, it is difficult to view this as a Somershill Manor mystery when the events taking place are not at Somershill Manor.

I would rate this book 3 stars of of 5.

Story of a Sociopath

Julia Navarro wrote one gripping story in her 2016 psychological thriller Story of a Sociopath.  The book is a character study of sociopath Thomas Spencer, a fictional character. The author writes about events in Thomas' life that took him down a wrong path, beginning when he was a boy, and then in italics she writes a section about what he would have done if he had not been a sociopath.  All of this is written from Thomas' viewpoint, first person.  This is a chunky book with 864 pages.

In the prologue Thomas Spencer muses over his life as he mulls his impending death.  He admits "I am scum...I was born without a conscience, or at least I never knew where to find one, but perhaps one will knock on my door tonight."

Thomas was the black sheep of his family, a wealthy family in the upper echelons of New York society.  He disliked every member of his family and each of them responded by showering love on him because they could not understand why he was different.  He had all the advantages that wealth can give a person including education and the need to not even work if he chose not to.

However, as the oldest son in the family he was expected to follow in his father and grandfather's footsteps and become a lawyer in their law firm. He could not do that for 2 reasons.  One, he despised them and wanted to hurt them and two, he floundered in school.

Thomas ended up at an unheard of advertising school run by a former ad executive who fell from grace.  This educational credential was not expected to help any graduate in the job market but Thomas made it work by moving to London.  There he gave up life of privilege and over a lifetime forced his way to the top working in media for politicians.

It has been a long time since I have been truly interested in reading a novel.  This book gripped me from the first page and kept me reading.  The author, Julia Navarro, is a favorite of mine but I have struggled getting through the books of my old favorite authors.  Perhaps I am simply not interested in the political, spy and treasure hunt mystery subgenres that I have traditionally read and Ms. Navarro wrote a few great mysteries that I enjoyed.  Story of a Sociopath is a different type of novel for both her and me and I loved it.

Nasty characters are fun to read about and Thomas Spencer delivers here.  There are many dark plot twists as you would expect with a character study on a sociopath as well as with someone involved in political campaign management. Thomas accidentally stumbled into this career but he got lucky because it perfectly fit his personality.

This was a great read.

My Kind of Mystery 2018 Reading Challenge

I am rejoining this reading challenge which began at the beginning of this month and will end on January 31, 2019. There are no requirements concerning the number of books you need to read or concerning the sub-genres of the mystery genre.  I like not having rules in a challenge and I think I will read more mysteries without having them.

March - Book 3

The final book in the March series won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature in 2016.  As with Books 1 and 2 it was written by GA Congressman John Lewis and it is about the civil rights movement of the 1960s.  Book 3 covers the period of time from September, 1963 when 4 girls were killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, AL to August, 1965 when the Voting Rights Act was signed into law.

The danger that has surrounded the marchers since the beginning of the movement gets pretty violent in book 3, violent enough to get the nation's attention.

The book opens with African American citizens being asked to count the correct number of jelly beans in a jar or the number of bubbles in a bar of soap in order to be eligible to register to vote.  Many voter registrars required literacy tests be taken by only African American applicants.  If they were able to pass these tests and actually get registered to vote their names were printed in the newspaper which made them targets for violence and to be fired by their employers.

There was some nasty politics between the movement and President Johnson who wanted total control over the movement so that he could have his moment being nominated by his party for president as well as trying to get votes in Congress for a voting rights act.  In the end, the Act was passed by Congress and signed into law.

The March books are incredibly powerful graphic novels.  They present the civil rights movement with extraordinary storytelling. While the movement began the year I was born, I remember watching many of these events unfold on tv when I was a child.  The book is just as gripping as watching the events as they happened.  Congressman Lewis did a great job at capturing the spirit of the times, a story he told from his memory.

More than highly recommended!

The Vineyard Victims

The Vineyard Victims is Ellen Crosby's 8th Wine Country Mystery and it is a wonderful addition to the series.  The story opens with the main character, Lucie Montgomery, swerving her car to avoid crashing into a car driven by former presidential nominee and billionaire Jamison (Jamie) Vaughn.  Vaughn crashes his car into the stone pillar that is the entrance to Lucie's vineyard.  Lucie does not hear him trying to stop his car and after he refuses her help to get out of his car she believes that he was suicidal. The car caught fire and Lucie heard his screams as the fire consumed his body.  Vaughn, however, told Lucie before he died that he wanted her to "tell Rick to forgive me."

Lucie soon discovers that there might be a connection to Vaughn's desire to die and a 30 year old murder that occurred when he was at college with his wife, campaign manager and a deceased friend.    A handyman, Taurique Youngblood, was convicted of the murder but a civil rights group, the St. Leonard Project, has taken on his case as they believe that he is innocent of this crime.

The author did a good job of weaving in characters and facts from earlier books in the series and anyone would be able to follow the plot without reading the earlier 7 books.  Facts about wine abound in the book which made the book fun to read.  The Vaughn's own a nearby vineyard and were planning to host a fundraiser to eliminate Vaughn's campaign debt by featuring a wine from the 1890s.  They had several bottles of the wine and only a select few people at the fundraiser, $20,000 per ticket, were going to have the pleasure of drinking the wine.  Lucie's winemaker, Quinn Santoro, believed that the Vaughn's tampered with this wine as it should have tasted like vinegar due to its age but that is a secondary story.  Most of the wine lore surrounded this wine, called the Norton wine, instead of Lucie's wines which is a little unusual.  However, it did not affect the enjoyability of this book.

Cozy lovers should take note of this series if they haven't already!

March - Book 2

The 2nd book in Congressman John Lewis's trilogy on the civil rights movement focuses on the period of time from November, 1960 to August 28, 1963 when Dr. Martin Luther King made his famous "I Have a Dream" at the March on Washington, DC.  Rep. Lewis also spoke at that event.  As with Book 1, the story alternated between the 1960s and the Obama inauguration.

Book 2 did not seem to me to be as dramatic as Book 1.  However, some pretty dramatic events took place here.  The Freedom Rides, the killing of 3 Freedom Riders by law enforcement officers/KKK and the beginning of the push for a Voting Rights Act are depicted.  For the uninitiated the freedom rides were organized to protest a U.S. Supreme Court opinion in Boynton vs. Virginia where segregation on buses was upheld by the Court.

I am looking forward to reading Book 3 which won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature in 2016.

Burma Chronicles

Somehow I missed reading one of Guy Delisle's travelogues, his 2008 Burma Chronicles. DeLisle has traveled throughout Asia with his wife who works for Doctors Without Borders.  He has written 4 travelogues from his travels with her.

In Burma Chronicles DeLisle manages to describe the daily struggles of life in a dictatorship without being political with his use of minimalist black and white drawings and his affiliative type of humor.  Each chapter addresses a different experience DeLisle had.  Some of these experiences include discovering a Time magazine that had been censored by articles being cut out of pages, finding the Rangoon neighborhood where the Army officers live and the supply of electricity and water is plentiful, and being prevented by armed soldiers from walking past Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi's home.

This is a serious book written in a humorous fashion but the author gets his point across.  If you haven't read any of the travelogues, Pyongyang, Jerusalem, Shenzen, and Burma Chronicles, I encourage you to read them.  For most of these places, society has not changed since the books were published so they should still be timely. 

March - Book 1

Georgia Congressman John Lewis wrote this book in 2013 with one of his staffers Andrew Aydin.  Nate Powell was the illustrator.  The book presents the beginning of Lewis's life as well as the beginning of the civil rights movement in the U. S.

Lewis grew up in Troy, Alabama hoping to be a preacher.  A trip one summer with an uncle to visit relatives in Ohio opened his eyes to the inequalities between the white and black races in the American South.  He was shocked to find his Ohio relatives living in a home in between 2 white families.  When he returned home he had some trouble concentrating on his studies and in his free time was pouring over newspapers and listening to radio reports.  It was on one of these radio stations that he first heard a sermon by MLK, Jr. that hit him like a bolt of lightening.  MLK had applied the principles of the church to what was happening in the world at that time.  It was called the social gospel.

Lewis wanted to attend Troy State University near his home but blacks were not admitted there.  He wrote MLK about it and after being invited to meet with him, Lewis traveled to meet MLK where they discussed his parents  suing the school on his behalf because he was a minor.  His parents declined due to the threats and terror the family and neighbors would have to endure if they sued.

After beginning college Lewis participated in sit-ins at lunch counters in Nashville, TN. At first the sit-ins involved  a group of blacks entering a white only store and asking to be served. They would leave when told that colored people were not served there. Later the group decided to not leave until they were arrested upon which another group took their place. The groups prepared themselves for abuse to be heaped upon them by practising being "insulted" by white people.  They wanted to be able to handle the abuse with dignity.

Folks.  This is history being told in an easy way for the younger generation to learn about how the civil rights movement got started.  Whoever came up with the idea to write this as a graphic novel is a genius.  No kid wants to read a political tome but a comic is another story.

I personally met John Lewis at a fundraiser that an attorney I worked for in Atlanta sponsored for him at the law firm we worked at during his campaign for his first term in Congress. I was quite impressed with Mr. Lewis.  He was incredibly grateful for the opportunity to speak at our firm.  I had never met a grateful politician before, and none since, and I have now been in politics for 42 years. He had something inside him that was compelling to me.  I now know that I recognized a moral rectitude in him.  He is truly a national treasure.

I already have purchased books 2 and 3 in the March series and will be reading them next.

Poppies of Iraq

Poppies of Iraq was written in 2017 by Brigitte Findakly and illustrated by her husband Lewis Trondheim is a memoir of Findakly's life growing up in Iraq.  Findakly had a better than average life in Iraq as her father was a dentist and they could afford private schools and vacations in France where her mother emigrated to Iraq from.  The family was unique because they were Orthodox Christians in a Muslim country.

With her father being asked to pay excessive taxes that he could not afford to pay, he decided to leave Iraq for France.  His cover story for the government was that he needed training on how to do dental implants.  The training was approved and the family left with no intention of returning until things improved in Iraq.  I believe the author was about 18 years old at this time.  However, this was 1979.  The Iran-Iraq War followed from 1980 until 1989, the Gulf War in 1990, and the second Gulf War in 2003.  Her father never expected his exile to be that long.

The family was not political unless they had to be and when her father could no longer support Saddam Hussein's government he willingly gave up his government pension and all hope of ever returning to Iraq.  The author, however, made several trips back to Iraq over the years and saw her relatives homes, possessions and dreams becoming more and more shattered.  Eventually they all left by 2016, their homeland no longer recognizable.

While the family did not suffer much religious prejudice while the author lived there, as Saddam Hussein's government took hold her cousins suffered persecution and developed Islamaphobia.  It seems to me though that the author's mother kept her indoors at certain times so perhaps there was some prejudice happening to them.

Poppies in Iraq is an informative graphic memoir on life in Iraq from 1950 through the present time.  The title comes from an archeological site in Nimrod where the author used to play as a child.  Poppies were prevalent there.

Brew Harder

Dan Dougherty's 2nd book in his Beardo series is Brew Harder. At this point Beardo, an art school graduate, has worked as a barista for 5 years.  He met his girlfriend at the coffee house and together with his  roommate all 3 of them live in Beardo's condo.  Struggling to make the mortgage payment with reduced hours at the coffeehouse, Beardo joins a cover band to earn a few extra bucks.  His girlfriend drops the not so occasional hint that she would like an engagement ring but Beardo has been resistant.  Or has he?  You will have to read the book to find out!

After reading The Art Degree Guarantee I knew that I would have to get the sequel.  Brew Harder does not disappoint.  It is hilarious.  From the wacky customers to the weird co-workers the characters provide a ton of humor. The comic strip panels are colorful which is always a plus for me. 

Beardo is my favorite comic series to date and I will be buying books 3 through 6 ASAP.  

New Comic Books From Amazon

I just received delivery of my January Amazon order this morning; all graphic novels this time.  Georgia Congressman John Lewis' 3 part March series on the civil rights movement came just in time for MLK Day today.  I should have started reading with that series given that I have the day off of work for the MLK holiday but I went straight for Beardo.  I love that series by Dan Dougherty.  Forgive my amateur photos of my new books with the Christmas afghan background.  Nothing formal today. I am feeling a little kitschy.

My Top 10 Books of 2017

Below is a list of the best books that I read in 2017.  Note that they may not have been published in 2017 but were my favorite reads of the year.

10.  The Empress of Bright Moon by Weina Dai Randel; historical fiction

9.  Butcher Bird by S. D. Sykes; historical fiction

8.  Shelter by Jung Yun; family saga

7.  Pachinko by Min Jin Lee; family saga, historical fiction

6.  A Game for Swallows by Zeina Abirached; graphic memoir, graphic novel

5.  I Remember Beirut by Zeina Abirached; graphic memoir, graphic novel

4.  Rolling Blackouts Dispatches From Turkey, Syria and Iraq by Sarah Glidden; reportage comic, graphic novel

3. Coffin Road by Peter May; mystery

2.  Dead Cold Brew by Cleo Coyle; cozy mystery

1.  The Scribe of Siena by Melodie Winawer; historical fiction