Category Archives: feminist fiction

Mother-Daughter Murder Night, by Nina Simon****

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Nina Simon’s debut novel, Mother-Daughter Murder Night, marks a fine beginning to an auspicious career. My thanks go to Net Galley and William Morrow for the review copy. This book is for sale now.

The story unfolds with three generations of women—Lana, Beth, and Jack—solving a murder mystery together. Lana, the grandmother, has just received dreadful news from her doctor, and she’s forced to rely upon Beth, her estranged daughter, for help to and from chemo appointments. Jack is her granddaughter, Beth’s daughter. Although all three are important characters, Lana is the protagonist.

Lana doesn’t deal well with helplessness.

No sooner has she moved into the little beach house in central California where the other two reside, than Jack, a teenager with a job as a kayak tour guide when not in school, finds a dead body while she is working. Suspicion initially falls on Jack, and so Beth and Lana dive in, first seeking to prove that Jack is innocent, and then, led by Lana, to find out who actually did it.

Amateur sleuth books come with an inherent challenge to the author, because obviously, civilians that have never worked in law enforcement are badly outmatched by actual cops. They don’t have the tools, the connections, or the experience to carry it off, and so such mystery novels sometimes end up looking ridiculous. Simon holds her own here nicely.  Another issue I see frequently is with characters that are children. Jack is a teen, and she’s a bright girl, but Simon doesn’t fall into the trap of creating an unbelievably smart teen in order to justify making her walk and talk exactly like an adult. Jack has the naivete and occasional bad judgement common to kids her age, and because of this, the story rings true.

There are a couple of things that I’d change if I could. First, the whole “fiercely independent” and “tiny firecracker” personas are badly overused and becoming a cliché. The second may be partially due to my own false assumptions. Between the cover and the title, I initially thought this would be a comic caper, with the women planning to mete out some vigilante justice with hilarious missteps and hijinks along the way. Although the book has its moments, it’s not as funny as I anticipated.

Nonetheless, this is a fun read, easily followed, and with more character development than one usually sees in a novel of this nature. The chemo occasionally seems a little too easy on Lana, but it’s not beyond the pale; after all, different people tolerate these things at different levels. There’s never a moment where I slam down the book due to disbelief. I appreciate the working class realism in Beth and Jack’s lives.  

I recommend Mother-Daughter Murder Night  to those that enjoy the genre, and I look forward to seeing what Simon writes next.

Lucky Red, by Claudia Cravens*****

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Larry McMurtry, eat your heart out. There’s a fine new word-slinger come to town, and her name is Claudia Cravens.

My thanks go to Random House and Net Galley for the invitation to read and review Lucky Red. This book is for sale now, and you should get it and read it.

Bridget lives a life of hardscrabble deprivation; her mother died in childbirth, and all she has is her pa. He loves her, but he’s worthless; when he finally gets a bit of money, he invariably drinks and gambles till it’s nearly gone. During one such episode, he gambles away their little house, and then buys a homestead, sight unseen and many miles away. What they find instead is a tar paper shack; there are no crops or tilled acreage, no tools or even a decent place to live. They crawl into the miserable hovel to get out of the elements, at least, and get some sleep; a rattler has the same notion, but when pa thrashes in his sleep, the rattler bites him in the neck, and then there is only teenage Bridget.

Bridget makes her way to Dodge City, and in no time, she is stone cold broke. She’s recruited to work in a brothel, the only one in town owned and run by women. She doesn’t mind the work and makes friends among the other “sporting women,” and is curiously removed from the process for which she is paid; slide prong A into slot V; moan a little, gush, and collect your pay. But later, she finds herself obsessed with a new sex worker; a lovely blonde woman named Sallie. Everyone around her understands the significance of this fascination, but Bridget herself doesn’t get it. She’s young, and she’s naïve. But when Spartan Lee, a female bounty hunter, comes to town and asks to hire Bridget, the sun shines and the angels sing.

This story is epic, and in many ways reminds me of Little Big Man, but with a female protagonist. And in many ways, what makes it so successful is its restraint. At the book’s outset, there’s a slimy man that wants to buy Bridget’s hand in marriage, which would give her father a nice chunk of change, but she hates the man, and her father doesn’t push it. A less capable writer would have done it the other way, but here, and in every instance where I predict what will happen because it’s so obvious, Cravens does something else. And the lesbian sex is brief and almost free of physical details—a sad thing for anyone looking for soft porn, but it serves to keep the story moving forward—with the emotion behind it carrying the internal narrative.

Although Bridget has no complaint about the work she does, and the management is more benign than in houses owned and run by men, Cravens keeps it real. One night, Sallie is attacked by a client, and Bridget bursts in to rescue her. It doesn’t go well. Sallie berates her for her naivete:

“You don’t see the first thing about this, though, do you. They all have a knife, Bridget. They all have a gun, and they were all born with two fists on the ends of their arms. You think you’ve got this all figured out, but any single one of ‘em could take a swipe at you some night and you’d be dead before you hit the ground.”

To tell you more would be to spoil it for you, so I’ll leave you with this: Lucky Red is the best debut novel of 2023, and one of the best books I’ve seen this year, period. Don’t miss it.

The Wind Knows My Name, by Isabel Allende****

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Isabel Allende is a living legend, a literary genius and fierce defender of human rights, foremost of women and immigrants. The Wind Knows My Name is a novel that features the struggle of two generations of immigrants, those that came to the U.S. during the Holocaust, and those that are coming here now from Latin America. Allende moves us seamlessly from one set of characters to the next, and then back again.

My thanks go to Net Galley and Random House Ballantine for the review copy. This book is for sale now.

I have been reading Allende’s work for decades. To read her stories is to be transported. In this case, the protagonists include two small people designed to possess the human heart. Samuel is a Jewish violin prodigy, still quite small as this story unfolds; his parents send him to safety when the Nazi occupation of Vienna takes hold, thinking that they will square things away and join him later. Of course, they are never able to do that. Our present-day protagonist is Anita, a Guatemalan immigrant child that is nearly blind. She is separated from her family at the U.S. border, and does her best to stave off loneliness by talking to her sister, Claudia, who is dead.

On the one hand, Allende is, to my way of thinking, on the side of the angels here politically. She always is. But if this feels a bit lecture-like to me, a diehard fan, it seems unlikely that she will reach a lot of newer readers. Usually I bond with her characters and carry them around with me for some time after I have turned the last page, but this time I find I am watching the page numbers go by. The person I feel most affinity for is Samuel, the tiny child clinging to his precious violin, but he disappears quickly and when he returns, he is an old man. Another reviewer commented that too much is told here, and too little shown, and that sounds right to me. And as much as I love Samuel, I also am burned out on historical fiction set during World War II. I hope in her next project, the author will turn in another direction.

To Allende’s many devoted readers, this book is recommended with the above caveats.

No Mistaking Death, by Shelley Costa*****

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I love a wry mystery series, especially when it features a wry female sleuth. Kinsey Millhone is done and there’s nothing I can do about it, but Marian Warner is here, and this series is just getting off the ground. My thanks go to Net Galley, Level Best Books, and Shelley Costa for the review copy.  This book is for sale now.

Marian is a private eye, mostly; when there isn’t enough custom to pay the landlord, she does other things on the side. But now, her sister Joan is sending her to investigate whether a former Jesuit Mission house in Carthage, Ohio qualifies for National Landmark status. Carthage is a tiny little hamlet in the middle of nowhere, but it contains Marian’s old flame, Charlie. She goes.

The first book of a mystery series poses extra challenges to its author, who must simultaneously spin out the mystery itself while also introducing and developing its protagonist and any repeating secondary characters, all without slowing the pace. Costa does both splendidly.

By the time Marian hits town, things have grown more complicated; you see, the possibly-historical mission house now sports its own murdered corpse. From here, the story builds in a way that is undeniable, and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. In particular, there is quirky figurative language sprinkled throughout, and it jumps at the reader unexpectedly.

By the story’s conclusion, I feel as if I’ve just stuffed myself with something delicious. Nothing here is predictable, and I can’t wait to see more of Marian Warner. Highly recommended to those that like a cozy mystery with a bit of an edge.  

Zero Days, by Ruth Ware****-*****

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What would spring be like without another Ruth Ware mystery?  I hope never to find out. My thanks go to Net Galley and Gallery Books for the review copy.  This book goes up for sale Tuesday, June 20, and those that love a fast-paced, high octane read should order a copy.

One of the finest things about Zero Days is the premise. Our protagonist is Jacintha “Jack” Cross, and she and her husband, Gabe, run a pen testing business. I had never heard of pen testers before; these are people that are hired by corporations to hack into their systems and then report their areas of vulnerability so that they can be corrected before unfriendly hackers find them. Jack is the physical penetrator, and so while Gabe is home worming his way into the client’s network, Jack is on site, physically breaking into the business’s building.

This reviewer has two immediate family members that are fairly high on the IT food chain, so I asked both of them whether this is a real thing; they assured me that it is, although they had never heard the abbreviation. Most penetration testers don’t physically breach the physical building; usually it’s a tech breach only.

On this occasion, Jack meets up with a security guard that doesn’t believe she’s there legitimately, and by the time she straightens things out and gets home, her husband is dead.

When I read my notes, I can find plenty to criticize. At the outset, as Jack is breaking into the site, she has her earbuds in and Gabe is talking to her, and there is some conversation about the sex they’re looking forward to after the job that I find jarring and out of place. Yes, the purpose is to let the reader know that their marriage is strong, but I would have preferred greater subtlety. Then the cops decide Jack is their number one suspect, and when I see that Jack is going to investigate in order to clear her own name and find Gabe’s killer, I actually groan, because this is such a tired, overused trope. And the vast majority of this novel is Jack being chased, Jack running, Jack hiding, Jack running some more.

However, when it’s time to read–and I have several books going at a time, some galleys, some not–I find myself reaching for this one every time. Ware’s pacing never flags, and there’s creativity in the choices Jack makes that are reminiscent of Thomas Perry’s legendary Jane Whitefield series, but with technology added. I love that it’s the woman in this pen business doing all of the physical work, and Jack is a genuine badass, which makes my feminist heart beat harder. She is injured badly in one escape, and I fret over her and even wonder how she’s carrying it off, given the severity, but Ware convinces me that Jack is propelled by adrenaline and a complete indifference to her own safety and health, now that Gabe is gone. There is a small twist thrown in at the end that I find annoyingly predictable, but it’s almost an afterthought, and so it doesn’t impact the main body of the story. And there are occasional brilliant, original bits of figurative language that I love.

In point of fact, I wouldn’t mind seeing Jack Cross again.

For those that love an adrenaline rush, this book is recommended.

When Women Were Dragons, by Kelly Barnhill*****

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I read Kelly Barnhill’s The Ogress and the Orphans, and I loved everything about it, so I was pumped when I saw she’d published another book last fall. I was disappointed not to get the galley, but I pulled my socks up and got in line at Seattle Bibliocommons. I was able to get the audio version, and narrators Kimberly Farr and Mark Bramhall do an outstanding job, so perhaps it was for the best. This book is for sale now, and it is a true delight.

The story is set in the American Midwest during the 1950s, a time known for its stifling repression of women. Some women can take it; others turn into dragons. It’s not always by conscious choice; when you’ve had enough, you’ve had enough.

The tale centers on one family, with a mother, father, daughter Alex, and the devoted Aunt Marla, who visits frequently with her adorable baby, Beatrice. Marla is a physically strong and imposing woman, and she raises eyebrows by sometimes showing up in overalls instead of a dress or skirt. The most important person in her life is her sister, a gifted mathematician whose talents are withering away while she focuses on making the perfect pot roast, getting tough stains out of the laundry, and creating endless patterns in her knitting.

Alex is the narrator for most of the story, with the occasional change to the points of view of various bewildered men that live locally. It is the characters here that make this an outstanding story rather than a manifesto. Alex has so many questions as a child, and as she grows up, she struggles to absorb the predominant values of the time, which seem unfair to her. She wants to be a good daughter and play by the rules, but so many of them baffle her, and we feel that struggle with her. For reasons that I won’t share, little Bea comes to live with Alex’s family, and we see Alex try to help raise Bea to be responsible and obey all of the requirements of the time, whether written or unwritten, but Bea struggles with them even more than Alex has, and because of this, Alex is forced to think critically about the things she’s been sweeping under the rug in order to get along. And ultimately, Alex learns the lesson that all parents and older siblings face to some degree, that to help a child grow, we must let go.

Teachers and librarians must especially love this book.

I have read a few unfriendly reviews that insist that this message has already been conveyed by The Stepford Wives. I loved the Stepford Wives, too, but seriously, are we saying that once a novelist drives home a point, that’s it, and nobody else can have a go at it? If it comes down to it, I’d take this novel over the other anyway, for nuance and character development. My favorite grumpy review asks why a dragon needs a purse! I ask you, would you be the one to take that dragon’s purse from her?

I love this book with all my fiery heart, and I highly recommend it to feminists, and to those that love us.

The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece, by Tom Hanks*****

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Tom Hanks has more than one talent, that’s for sure; or perhaps he is an artist that’s ridiculously talented at telling stories, whether they be on the page or screen. One thing I’ll tell you now: I am completely convinced that he did indeed write this book himself, and it’s damn good, too.

My thanks go to Net Galley and Alfred A. Knopf Publishing for the review copy. This book is for sale now.

The story begins with a child prodigy, an artist living in Lone Butte, California, who as he matures, becomes a comic book illustrator. Fast forward about thirty years, and that comic becomes a movie.

Our story doesn’t have just one protagonist, and it is intentional, or so it appears to this reviewer. We have the big boss, Bill Johnson, his assistant, Candace, and the assistant she recruits in Georgia, Allicia. We learn something of their backgrounds and their personalities, but mostly, we see how important they are to the success of the movie. When the movie is finished with Atlanta, Allicia, who now goes by Al, comes along and is eventually promoted; she then finds someone to take her place. We learn more about other people that are working the production, and I am amazed by the sheer number of people involved, and how much must be done to keep everyone on an even keel. Eventually we meet the two big stars of this action movie; one is hardworking, cooperative, and comes up with a host of useful ideas; the other is an egotist, a Do-You-Know-Who-I-Am type, and everybody walks on eggshells in an effort to make him happy, and to make him want to show up and do his job.

In the hands of a less talented writer, this whole thing might feel list-like, but Hanks sculpts these characters so that I feel I know them, and I care about what happens to them.

There’s more than a little wry humor in this tale, and the copious footnotes at the end of each chapter are a part of that. I read them all, because some of them are hilarious, but readers that lack the patience for it can breeze right on by them without missing anything critically important. And here’s a nugget that cracked me up:

“Of late, Bill had been using military-style call words rather than expletives. Fuck was Foxtrot. Asshole was Alpha Hotel. Cocksucker? Charlie Oscar Charlie Kilo Sierra.”

As a bonus, artist Robert Sikoryak has written the comics themselves, and they are included in the book. Those that love comics should probably get this book in hard cover, because a lot of the detail is hard to see in the digital version that I read. As for me, I don’t give one single poo about comics, and I skipped them.

Movie buffs will be fascinated with the vast amount of movie making minutiae here. I am not a big movie viewer, but I eat it all up, anyway, because I had no idea of the amount of time, personnel, and materials necessary to creating a major movie, masterpiece or otherwise.

Although he doesn’t beat the drum hard enough to distract from the overall story, Hanks’s message is crystal clear: everyone involved in creating a movie is important. If the crew doesn’t have enough restrooms, it affects the movie. If nobody brings lunch to the set, some people will be miserable and perform below par, whereas others will slip away in search of food and not be available when needed. And if just one person is a horse’s ass and drags his feet, or if he blabs things to the press that aren’t supposed to be released yet, he can add millions of dollars to the cost of the production. Here’s a perfect quote:

“What advice can you give us to make it in Hollywood?” She talked about the great divide between solving problems and causing them, and the importance of being on time.”

Through all of this, I keep wondering when we will see the young artist that made the comic again. If we started with him, it makes sense we will see him again at some point, right? Yes. This detail—along with every other—is done beautifully.

There’s not one thing about this book that I don’t love, and the feel-good ending is icing on the cake. Highly recommended to those that love movies as well as excellent fiction.

Bad, Bad Seymour Brown, by Susan Isaacs*****

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Susan Isaacs has been writing bestsellers since the late 1970s, and she’s hilarious! I’ve been a fan since then. During that earlier time, a period of third wave feminism, her tales often featured rotten husbands and ex-husbands reaping what they’d sown. Her creativity and trademark snark have always kept me running back for more. Her new novel, Bad, Bad Seymour Brown is the second in the Corie Geller detective series, and it’s deeply satisfying. My thanks go to Net Galley and Grove Atlantic for the review copy. This book is for sale now.

Seymour Brown was an accountant for the Russian mob. “I’ve never heard of a violent accountant before,” my mom observed. “At worst, they’re a little pissy.” But by all accounts, Seymour was a rotten guy. “He made regular bad look good.” Bad to everyone, that is, except his five year old daughter April, his only child, for whom the sun rose and fell. But Seymour’s family was tucked away for the night when an unknown assailant came and burned the house to the ground with the Browns inside it. Happily, April made it out the window alive. The case was never solved.

Now April is an adult, a professor in film studies. She’s put her past behind her, and now, all of a sudden—someone is trying to kill her! She contacts the detective that was assigned to the murder investigation; he’s retired now, and he is Corie Geller’s father.

All of the things that I love about Isaacs’s work are here in abundance. The story is full of feminist moxie—Geller isn’t an assistant to her father, but rather retired from the FBI in order to raise her stepdaughter—she is his partner in this new investigation, and as it happens, in the new detective agency they’ve begun. But another thing I’ve always loved about Isaacs’s prose is her trademark snark, and I snickered and chortled all the way through this engaging novel. The pages flew by, and I found myself looking for extra reading time when I could sneak off to plunge in once more. Susan Isaacs writes the most creative figurative language I’ve seen anywhere. She’s funny as hell.

You can read this book as a stand-alone, but I’ll tell you right now, once you read the second, you’ll want to read the first one, Takes One to Know One also.

Highly recommended, particularly to feminist boomers.

Lone Women, by Victor LaValle*****

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“Queer folk, the Henrys.”

Adelaide Henry is “profoundly lonely,” growing up without siblings, with older parents that spurned the world around them. They had their reasons. And yet, in the opening chapter, as I see Adelaide pour kerosene over both of their lifeless forms and burn them, along with their house, I wonder…were they bad enough to deserve this?

But nothing is as it seems, and this is part of the magical spell that Victor LaValle weaves into this kickass novel, Lone Women. By the time I understand the why and the who and the what, I feel an intimate connection to Adelaide, as if I may be the only one trusted with her secrets.

My thanks go to Net Galley and Random House for the review copy. This is one of the finest novels to be published in 2023, and you should get it and read it.

Adelaide flees the California farm where she’s lived all of her life, and buys a homestead in Montana. Almost everything about her life changes; from the warmth of California to the frigid winters of the Northern Rockies, from life with her parents to one lived alone, and from an all-Black community to one that is almost entirely Caucasian. She brings very little with her, only what she can carry, but she is curiously possessive of her extremely heavy trunk, and though I initially assume that she keeps something of great monetary value inside it, I soon realize that isn’t it. My early notes ask the same thing over and again: “What is in that trunk?”

From there, our story unfolds and I can’t stop turning the pages. I’ve never read a novel of any genre that’s like this one, and I’m guessing that you haven’t, either.

Do yourself a favor. Don’t read the synopsis. Go into it blind. It’s a lot more fun if you learn of the characters and events at the times the author intends.

There’s a powerful message in play, but the story is so adroitly delivered that it never feels like a polemic.

I won’t say more, because I don’t want to ruin it for you, but believe me, the next time LaValle publishes a novel, I will be first in line to read it. Highly recommended, especially to feminists.

With My Little Eye, by Joshilyn Jackson*****

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Joshilyn Jackson is one of my favorite writers, first as an author of brilliant—and often hilarious—Southern fiction, with bestsellers such as Gods in Alabama and Almost Sisters, and now with acclaimed suspense novels. All of the latter have titles that use the names of children’s games to chilling effect. She began with Never Have I Ever, followed with Mother May I, and her current release, With My Little Eye. Jackson never disappoints.

My thanks go to Net Galley and William Morris for the review copy, though I’d have paid cold, hard cash if push came to shove. This book is for sale now.

Meribel Mills is an actor with a past and a problem. Years ago, she fled her hometown in Georgia and her marriage following a traumatic surgery, but she realized her dream of becoming a working actor. But a persistent stalker has caused her to flee Los Angeles with her adopted daughter, Honor, and now she’s back in Georgia, laying low, working locally, and stalking her ex-husband.

Wait. What?

This intrigues me, the notion that a stalker might also be stalked. Meribel’s intentions are benign, as she wistfully revisits the past, but she’s also over the line, obsessively following her ex’s social media accounts, mostly via his second wife, and at one point following them out to dinner. The heck? And so I wonder if that will be the focus of the story.

But Jackson never does anything predictable, and that’s part of what keeps me coming back.

Throughout the story, I am on the back foot, trying to ascertain which of her would-be swains is a genuinely nice guy, and which is the creepo. At one point I begin to wonder if she has multiple stalkers! And Jackson makes a strong point about the worthlessness of law enforcement when it comes to dealing with stalkers and women threatened with violence:

“Rape threats, abduction threats, death threats, and I got forms and tutting and sad jazz hands…I made copies [of the letters] and took them to the police, who filed them for just in case he killed me, later. Then it would be serious. Then someone would find his ass and get him into prison. It would make a great Lifetime movie, with a purely fictional, leggy lady cop as the necessary strong, female protagonist. And me? I’d be playing the dead girl, once again.”

But the best part of this novel isn’t Meribel or her stalker(s), it’s the children. Daughter Honor is Autistic, though very bright and relatively high functioning. Her new friend comes with baggage of her own; both of these girls is so well developed that I feel I would know them if I saw them on the street. They develop a friendship with a homeless teen who also has an important role here, and these girls are what make the story shine.

The resolution is believable and nothing comes from left field. This is an outstanding read, and I recommend it to you.