Caroline lives with her father, Samuel, a writer and educator whose career and reputation have been sullied by a younger man that Samuel mentored many years ago. But Samuel is determined to revive his career by starting a school for girls. Girls can think. Girls can learn. They needn’t be limited to the traditional lessons that make young ladies into gracious hostesses. They can rise in this world, as long as he is there to guide them.
I read this book free and early thanks to Doubleday and Net Galley. It’s for sale now.
As the story opens, just a few ladies are signed up for the boarding school that will be run by Samuel and Caroline from their home. A former protegee, David, comes to join them also, and will teach the sciences. Running errands in town, however, Caroline and David run into Eliza, the daughter of the man that ruined Samuel’s career. Her father is now deceased; Eliza wants to attend the school. In a moment of mischievous rebellion that she will come to regret, Caroline accepts her.
At the outset, The Illness Lesson seems to be feminist fiction, and as school begins and I see Samuel mansplaining to his female charges about the things that women can and cannot do, should learn to do, should want to do, I lean in, ready for a rapier-sharp tale in which—I hope—the father and teacher that believes himself to be an educational gift to womankind will learn a powerful lesson.
Alas, not so much.
Before the halfway mark is reached, the story has wandered in various directions and has lost its cohesion and focus. I check my notes and change the genre for it over and over again; feminist fiction becomes historical fiction becomes romance becomes magical realism becomes horror and what the heck is this author trying to achieve? If the plan is to keep the reader guessing, I can honestly say that I am genuinely surprised (in the second half) by what Caroline finds in the woods. However, I am not a fan of surprise elements that fragment the plot. It almost feels as if it was written by a half dozen writers drunkenly passing a story around late at night. “Okay, now YOU write a chapter! Surprise me.”
I might not have been so disappointed if I hadn’t expected such great things. The premise is a wonderful one. Beams could have done so much with it, and I can’t figure out why she didn’t.
Perhaps if you read it, you’ll come away with a more charitable viewpoint. My advice, however, is to get it free or cheap, or else give it a miss entirely.
“It’s the admirals, sir, playing with us like this is their own big-assed bathtub and we’re just toys.”
Jeff Shaara has written some of the best war stories ever published, and he’s done so for almost 25 years. I have read every last one of them. When I was invited to read and review his new novel about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor by Random House Ballantine and Net Galley, I was delighted, but also slightly apprehensive, because even after all these years, the subject remains an incendiary one; I needn’t have worried. This may be Shaara’s best book, and that’s saying a lot.
I’ll share a brief note about my own biases going in. My father was among the last men called to serve during World War II; he never left the U.S., however, where he was tasked with training new recruits to the still-new U.S. Air Force. But I grew up hearing about Japanese atrocities, and many of the bizarre stereotypes and misconceptions based on pseudoscience were told to me as fact. When as an adult I announced that I was about to marry a Japanese citizen, I sounded the waters with my family to see if there was resistance. I was told that my parents “still remember Pearl Harbor.” Meanwhile, my husband’s father also served during World War II—in the Japanese army. The topic was never raised by his parents around me, or at all as far as I know; but I asked my spouse a few questions to help me understand the Japanese perspective about this horrific conflict, and then I understood exactly how erroneous most of what I’d been raised to believe actually was.
So I was primed to read this book, and also a little afraid of what I might find. My internal map of Pearl Harbor was studded with emotional landmines, and at the book’s conclusion, none of them had been tripped.
Shaara tells this story primarily through the eyes of three people: Cordell Hull, U.S. Secretary of State under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt; Admiral Yamamoto, the Japanese architect of the invasion; and Tommy Biggs, a 19-year-old naval recruit from an impoverished Caucasian family in rural Florida.
Shaara faithfully incorporates a character from the rank and file in every story; he does this even if there is nobody on record that he can report on, and so often, he is forced to create a fictional character based on experiences and characteristics from several people. When I saw no such disclaimer in any of his notes, I grew curious and wrote and asked him whether this is the case with Biggs. He replied that this time there is a Tommy Biggs (though the name is not the same), but that he did add the experiences of others in order to flesh him out. So this time, each of the three chief characters is based on an historical figure.
I learned a great deal. Though it’s well known that this attack profoundly crippled the U.S. Navy, sinking or badly damaging most of the fleet, I had never considered it from the Japanese perspective. Looked at in that way, it was not only audacious, it was immaculately planned and wildly successful. I also had never considered what a blunder it was on the part of the U.S. military to leave its equipment, ships, planes, and more so unguarded. In the fallout after the attack, we learn that the Navy considered security to be the job of the U.S. Army and vice-versa. What a colossal bungle.
Japan had emerged victorious from the Russo-Japanese War, and its leadership was suffused with overwhelming confidence. Japanese racial superiority would lead to Japanese dominance throughout the China, Indochina, and across all of Asia, they claimed, because they were meant to dominate their portion of the globe. Japanese leaders were convinced that the U.S. would not seek retribution following an attack on its soil because American isolationist sentiment was so strong. They genuinely hoped that this attack would result in an end of the U.S. embargo that crippled Japan, and which existed in order to halt Japanese expansion and force Japan to withdraw from its alliance with the Axis powers. Americans, the Japanese brass told one another, were too big, too slow, too lazy to retaliate. There were voices of dissent, however:
“For any of you who believe the Americans are not worthy of a fight, that they do not have the stomach for blood, perhaps you are familiar with the American Civil War? In the 1860s, they divided and fought each other in the bloodiest war in their history. They did not require any enemy to inspire them. They fought each other. Are you familiar with football?”
Meanwhile the U.S. military, press and popular culture treated the Japanese as a bad joke. One myth dressed up as science suggested that Japan would never be able to build an air force because of an inherent defect in the inner ear of all Japanese. It was physically impossible for them to become pilots! The condescension was rife, everywhere one turned. Hollywood depicted the Japanese as ridiculous, rodent-like creatures with minds that didn’t function properly. The Chicago Tribune stated that for Japan to attack the U.S. was “a military impossibility.” Japanese were said to be too myopic to be effective against a military target. And it goes on.
There’s all sorts of blame to spread around. Nobody in Washington, D.C. had told the top brass at Pearl Harbor, Admiral Kimmel and Lieutenant General Short, about the project named Magic, which intercepted and broke Japanese code. They had no idea that Japan was rattling its sabers to such a degree. And these two men appear to have been lazy, bureaucratic fools that ignored what little intelligence came their way. For example, shortly before the attack, the man on watch sees a Japanese sub in the water. Kimmel immediately assumes that the guard has seen a whale, and he goes back to bed.
There are three aspects of this novel that keep the pages turning for me. The first, of course, is my interest in military history. Shaara’s research is meticulous. The book is historical fiction at its best, which is when the contours of the story, even fairly detailed aspects of it, are correct, but the fictional genre is chosen so that dialogue and inner monologue can be added. Second is Shaara’s perceptive nature, and it’s this that permits him to choose the best details to include and cut what is inessential so that pacing never flags. And finally, his capacity to develop a character so that we feel we know him is matchless; in particular I bond to poor Tommy Biggs, a guy that can’t catch a break, until he can.
Nothing I can say will serve as well as what Shaara says himself. Get this book, even if you have to pony up full cover price. This is hands down the best fictional representation of Pearl Harbor on sale today. Believe it.
Emma Copley Eisenberg is a journalist who researched the murders of young women headed for the Rainbow Gathering, a music festival in Pocahontas County, West Virginia. Thanks go to Net Galley and Hachette Books for the review copy, which I received early in exchange for an honest review.
What I was expecting from this book is not at all what I got. The cover suggests something spooky, and the topic also tells me this is a true crime story. The promotional blurb says it’s
Part “Serial”-like investigation, part Joan Didion-like meditation, the book follows the threads of this crime through the history of West Virginia, the Back-to-the-Land movement, and the complex reality contemporary Appalachia, forming a searing portrait of America and its divisions of gender and class, and its violence.
Instead, it’s a strange mishmash of genres that don’t blend well, and the result is a wandering narrative entirely devoid of suspense or even focus of any kind, and though I tried reading it multiple times, then checked out the audio book from Seattle Bibliocommons, I could not push myself all the way through this thing. I resolved to finish it and get it reviewed, and I wouldn’t let myself read anything else till it was done; the result was that I found excuses not to read or listen to anything at all. I finally let myself off the hook, but not until I had skipped to several parts of the second half, just to make sure there was no shining epiphany at the end.
It’s a tough spot to be in, journalistically speaking, because Eisenberg spent five years researching “these brutal crimes,” but she came up dry. How do you squeeze a story out of that? Instead of writing about the murders, she mostly writes about herself investigating the murders, making this story more of a journalistic memoir with a side serving of Pocahontas County history and culture.
If this is what the book is, then it should be sold as such. The title is deceptive, and the murky woodland illustration on the cover is deceptive as well. A journalistic retrospective should be billed as exactly that, so why wasn’t it? Possibly because nobody wants to buy a journalistic retrospective. Why not? Because it’s boring, boring, boring.
Ordinarily I would be gentler with a writer that’s published a debut, but I came away feeling resentful of the time I wasted reading and listening to a book that wasn’t what the reader was led to believe. I felt this way when I read it free; how might you feel if you ponied up the jacket price only to find that it’s not scary at all, and says little about the murders it’s supposed to be about?
David Ignatius writes reliably entertaining spy novels, and when I saw that this one was available, I hopped right on it. Big thanks go to Net Galley, Edelweiss, and W.W. Norton for the review copies. It’s for sale now.
Michael Dunne is a career operative for the CIA, and he’s sent to sniff out what appears to be an enemy intelligence service fronting as a news organization. This particular assignment is risky because it’s illegal to run surveillance on journalists, but his boss tells him that he’ll run interference for him, and like a good soldier, he goes. He does what he’s been told to do, and next thing he knows, he’s been arrested for spying on the press, and nobody at the CIA will go to bat for him. What the hell just happened? With his career in tatters, and his family torn asunder, Dunne’s only interest, upon emerging from the year he spends in prison, is vengeance. He wants to find the guy that set him up and ruin him. From there come multiple surprising twists that kept me on the edge of my seat.
My first David Ignatius book was The Director, which I won in a Goodreads giveaway in 2014. I liked it so well that I bought one of his older novels during my annual pilgrimage to Powell’s City of Books that summer. In 2018 I read and reviewed The Quantum Spy, a title perched on my favorites shelf not only for its brilliant pacing and suspense, but also for its insightful take on the challenges faced by Asian Americans within sensitive government positions. The strong impression I received reading it is likely to blame for my being slow on the uptake this time around. I realized when I finished reading The Paladin that it wasn’t as strong as his earlier novels, but I don’t think it’s fair to judge an excellent writer against himself when rating a novel. I initially rated this book five stars because there’s still no other spy novelist whose work I like better than his…except.
There’s a serious problem with his use of gender roles here, one I am surprised not to have noticed from the get-go, because it’s so obvious. Another reviewer opened my eyes and made me ashamed of myself for not homing in on the problem, because it’s not a small one.
There are two women that play important roles in our protagonist’s life. One is the virgin, and the other is the whore. Frankly it is so obnoxious that for any other writer, I would have given a negative rating and a scathing review. I am being measured in my response because I still see this as atypical of this author’s work, and I suspect it’s a slip rather than a true reflection of his own ideas. Then too, protagonist Dunne is portrayed as a hawk with regressive attitudes, and so the value he places on his wife’s virginity when he married her may have been a deliberate choice in developing this flawed character. I surely hope so.
The second female character is the seductress that lures Dunne into a “honeypot trap,” his sole but egregious infidelity that makes his overseas behavior all the more contemptible and costs him his family. Whereas this is a classic element of a great many spy stories, both old and new, it would have been more acceptable if Ignatius had included some other female roles that were more nuanced and that fell into neither category.
It is perhaps a measure of the author’s ability to write tense, believable tales of espionage that I had to have this major flaw pointed out to me. Because of his track record, I give this story 3.5 stars and round up. I will be interested to see what he writes next time.
If you read this one, I recommend doing so critically.
Firewatching is the first in the Adam Tyler detective series, and also the first novel written by Russ Thomas. It’s been praised by Lee Child, and published by Putnam Penguin, an auspicious sign. Thanks go to the publisher and Net Galley for the review copy.
All of the right elements are here for a rip roaringly great tale, but the execution fell short. When I found myself drifting off while reading the digital review copy, I went to Seattle Bibliocommons and checked out the audio book. Sadly, I couldn’t bring myself to listen to all of it, either. I kept with it to the 45 percent mark; skipped to 75 percent in hopes there would be something tantalizing that would reel me back in; and when that didn’t work out, I listened to snippets from there to the end.
Here’s what I like. Conceptually, it sounds promising. Tales of crazed arsonists are generally irresistible, and there haven’t been a lot of them published lately. Fiction writing is as prone to fad and whim as is anything else, as any reviewer can see. This story steers clear of dead, sick, or disabled siblings; Paris; alternate past and present narratives, and struggling alcoholic detectives. Detective Tyler resists his boss’s impulse toward stereotypes. There are two elderly women side characters, one of whom struggles with dementia, and Tyler is told that old women in small towns always love gossip; he refers to them often as “the old dears.” I know I am not the only Boomer that wants to smack that obnoxious character, and so Tyler endears himself to me by not going there. And actually, I like the two older women in this story a great deal. I also like the brief—maybe too brief—passages where we are inside the head of the firebug.
But alas, the story’s protagonist isn’t the arsonist, and it isn’t either of the elderly women. It’s Tyler, and Tyler just bores the snot out of me. I want him to just do something. I don’t need to know what he is wearing, what he is thinking, what he is feeling, wearing, feeling some more, thinking….
During my teaching career, I recall one impatient girl that was sent home for a few days because of her tendency to walk up to a teacher that was standing in her way—tutoring, or speaking to another student—and barking at him, “MOVE!” And I found myself channeling this student as I read and/or listened to this story. I don’t care about your damn wardrobe, Tyler, just move! Move it! Do something, for the love of…
Fine. Whatever.
A possible silver lining occurs to me, and that is that with this first in a series, all of the personal details of wardrobe and emotion may be emphasized in order to introduce the protagonist, and perhaps with the second in the series, the pace will pick up and we’ll be on our way. I surely hope so.
But for now, I can only write about what I know, and I know it would be wrong of me to urge you to purchase this book at full jacket price. If you’re going to read it, get it cheap or free, because most of the joy I see here is in potential, and future maybe-joy makes a thin soup indeed.
There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of mystery writers whose work falls within the cozy subgenre, but none of them hits exactly the right note the way Alexander McCall Smith does. His feel-good vibe is engaging, but it’s never smarmy or cloying; the reader feels respected. Add to that a spot here and there that is straight-up hilarious; I can think of no better time to read his work. This is the second in the Detective Ulf Varg series, and it is every bit as delightful as the first. Can you read this book alone even if you missed the first? Yes and yes.
My thanks go to Edelweiss and Pantheon Books for the review copy. This book is for sale now.
Detective Ulf Varg leads a quiet sort of life; after all, he’s a cop, and this is Malmo, Sweden, hardly a hotbed of crime. He is the lead detective for a special bureau, one that was introduced to us in the first in the series, The Department of Sensitive Crimes. Often the matters under investigation involve misunderstandings, deceptions carried out to avoid embarrassment, and cultural miscues. Ulf spends his down time teaching his deaf dog, Martin, to read lips and taking him to therapy for his depression.
There’s a lot of that in Sweden, you know. Northern latitudes.
And so, it is from his dog’s psychiatrist that Ulf receives a tip of a possible counterfeit dog breeder. Someone out there is breeding husky/wolf mixed dogs, which are then sold to handlers that furnish trained wolves to appear in movies and television shows. Fraud! This could be Varg’s biggest case yet. But then, that wouldn’t be saying much.
Meanwhile, Varg longs for intimacy with his partner, Anna, but he mustn’t act on his feelings. There are departmental policies to be observed, and she is married. Oh, how he pines for her, quietly and in private. He dreams of a woman that will hold his hand as he falls asleep at night, a woman that will touch her toes to his under the covers and wiggle them. There are other women of course, but none like Anna. So when Anna needs a matter of her own investigated on the down-low, Ulf is ready and willing.
The most amusing thread here, as far as I’m concerned, involves Varg’s struggle with bureaucracy. You’ll have to find out the particulars for yourself.
Smith’s novels are my favorite bedtime material, subtle humor that unknots my twisted muscles and helps me gain perspective on whatever worries of the day have climbed in with me. I daresay he could do the same for you, too.
Seattle Book Mama 