Chapman’s STONECHILD AND ROULEAU series moves from one strength to another!
Jane Thompson was a dedicated and successful English teacher and a loving wChapman’s STONECHILD AND ROULEAU series moves from one strength to another!
Jane Thompson was a dedicated and successful English teacher and a loving wife and mother. Now she’s an ex-con, a mother whose children are in the sole custody of their father, a divorced wife, and a child predator convicted of the sexual assault of one of her grade seven male students. Shortly after her release on parole, the boy whom she was found guilty of molesting (now a young man) was found brutally beaten to death on the shores of Lake Ontario. Kala Stonechild and Paul Gundersund, assigned as leads on the case by Jacques Rouleau, head of Kingston’s Criminal Investigation Division, don’t take very long to place Jane Thompson in the #1 slot on their suspect list.
For much of the novel, SHALLOW END is a gripping, character driven police procedural that wends its way with single-minded compulsion through the murder investigation and the continuing development of the personal lives of the returning cast members of the series – Jacques Rouleau, the kind-hearted, recently promoted detective still in recovery from the death of his wife and worried about the health of his aging father; Kala Stonechild, an aboriginal female torn by her feelings for Paul Gundersund and deeply concerned for the welfare of her troubled niece who was recently removed from her care by the municipal government and placed in a foster home with a family that just doesn’t seem to care; Paul Gundersund, (Stonechild’s partner) with the inability to walk away from his marriage to a conniving and very practiced philandering wife; and Zack Woodhouse, the narcissistic, bullying and crudely misogynistic member of the police team who just can’t seem to figure out the meaning of the word teamwork!
Then there is the list of newly created characters who form the core of the current story SHALLOW END! It simply blows me away at the extent to which these characters can be developed so meaningfully and so completely in the course of a single novel. You might love them or you might hate them but – make no mistake – they will definitely interest you, they will delight you, they will surprise and astonish you, and you will care about the resolution of the murder case and its effect on their lives.
For 80% of the novel, Chapman meticulously and deliciously unfolds a masterful description of a slow and steady police investigation intended to ensure that the evidence is irrefutable before any charges are placed. But then, but then … the pedal goes to the floor, the story goes into overdrive, and SHALLOW END enters the realm of high speed suspense thriller. The climax, the dénouement, and the closing twist are engaging and there isn’t a reader on the globe who won’t walk away with a pleased smile on their face ready to pick up the next entry in the series, TURNING SECRETS.
Definitely recommended and already on the list of one of my favourites for 2022!
“This is a goddamn nuclear war!” … “We don’t know who fired first, but once the missiles started flying, it doesn’t “There’s been a nuclear exchange.”
“This is a goddamn nuclear war!” … “We don’t know who fired first, but once the missiles started flying, it doesn’t look like there was much in the way of restraint.”
And just like that, Mars Endeavour Mission and its 130 crew members and commanders, scientists, doctors, and technical specialists were abandoned by NASA mission control in Houston with no hope of rescue, return to earth, or resupply! Colonists from a lengthy list of earth’s nations are struggling to figure out what has happened on earth, whether their friends and families have been annihilated in what appears to be an out of control launching of WW III, and whether their loyalty and camaraderie belongs to their countries on earth or to continued exploration, to the advancement of science, to their mission and to their fellow scientists.
Then things started to REALLY go wrong!
RETROGRADE is a brilliant blend of both the hard and soft sides of contemporary sci-fi. On the hard side, consider for example this brief exposition on Martian dust which Cawdron manages to insert in the narrative, informing its readers without interrupting the high speed flow of his story in the slightest:
“I climb up into the cab of R4. A fine coating of dust covers the controls. Most of the electronics are sealed in plastic to protect them from various corrosives and volatiles in the Martian environment, but inevitably the dust gets everywhere. Dust on Mars is different from anything I’ve experienced on Earth. Back home, dust is soft and more of a nuisance than a problem. Up here, it’s as fine as cigarette smoke. Roll some between your fingers and you’d swear it was oily, with the consistency of graphene.”
“Dust represents a serious health concern for us, … Perchlorates in the dust are highly reactive when they come in contact with moisture – they’re chemical time bombs waiting to go off in our lungs, and on returning to base it’s important not to handle the outside of the suit until the techs have given it a chemical shower. Some of the dust is akin to glass particles ground up so find they hang in the air for up to several minutes. This dust can be easily sucked into our lungs when breathing. Ingesting sandpaper would do less tissue damage than Martian dust, as the fines are so small they can breach cell membranes. Back on earth, similar fine-grain particulate material, like cigarette smoke and asbestos fibers, can cause cancer, and the general view is there’s no safe level of exposure.”
On the soft side of the spectrum, RETROGRADE deals with issues such as off-planet continuations of earth-side nationalism; love and romance in a space colony; abiogenesis (the investigation of methods by which life could arise from inorganic material); scientific methodology; cross-cultural communication and understanding; how people in a fledgling colony in a hostile environment such as Mars would react to a life-threatening disaster back on earth; artificial intelligence, consciousness, sentience, and cognitive upload; and more!
SPOILER: (view spoiler)[ In an author’s note at the end of the story, Peter Cawdron acknowledges his debt to his predecessors,
“The recent success of Andy Weir’s THE MARTIAN has stirred public imagination about life on the fourth planet. In this novel, I wanted to show a little of what life would be like in a Martian colony. This story was heavily influenced by Kim Stanley Robinson’s RED MARS. I enjoyed his take on the clash of national interests and cultures that inexplicably follows in the wake of a single hominid species spreading out into new habits.”
But I would suggest to Mr Cawdron that he also owes a great deal to Arthur C Clarke's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, and HAL’s surprising sentience driving his (her? its?) decision to override the demands of the human crew members. All of that said, I rush to add that there wasn’t a moment during my entire reading of this absolutely gripping novel, that the word “derivative” crossed my mind. (hide spoiler)] END SPOILER
Peter Cawdron is definitely on my list of favourite contemporary sci-fi authors and RETROGRADE is highly recommended to fans of the genre.
An awesome dramatic tale of the clash of three cultures – white colonial government, Roman Catholic arrogance, and stone age Coppermine Inuit!
In 1913,An awesome dramatic tale of the clash of three cultures – white colonial government, Roman Catholic arrogance, and stone age Coppermine Inuit!
In 1913, two Roman Catholic priests, driven by the unseemly presumption of the supremacy of their religious beliefs and its demand that all on the planet must subscribe to that religion to reach salvation, depart from the northern outpost community of Fort Norman with the goal of establishing the first church on the Coronation Gulf at the mouth of the Coppermine River.
“There were rumors they were violent savages, witches and cannibals, but to the Bishop they were the children of God yet to be claimed.”
When two years pass by without word from the priests, Royal North West Mounted Police officer Jack Creed and a young Inuit interpreter, Angituk McAndrew, are sent north to investigate and determine their fate. COPPERMINE is the extraordinary story of the discovery of the priests’ mutilated remains, the investigation of their deaths, the apprehension and arrest of their murderers, and the perilous return to Edmonton where the two Inuit will face trial for murder. The likely outcome of their conviction under white justice – a system that they had never before encountered and of which they had absolutely no understanding – is execution.
There are many words which can be used to describe COPPERMINE and every last one of them must be ranked as a superlative in its use – gripping, compelling, heartwarming, heartbreaking, informative, disgusting, brilliant, turbulent, romantic, swashbuckling, dramatic, and many, many more. It is certainly one of the very best books that I’ve read this year and ranks very highly on my list of lifetime favourites. What a find!!
But it is so much more than “merely” exciting!
It is a sociological and anthropological study of the endemic xenophobia and racism that informed the Canadian government’s mistreatment of our aboriginal people through the entire 20th century. Sadly, the struggle to improve that relationship persists into the 21st century.
“Their world is now our world, and they better damn well adapt to it just like the Indians have and like all the Aboriginals have in all the territories of the Empire. We made them … The civilizing process is what the Empire does. It is the price Natives have to pay for peace, prosperity, and security … ‘Tolerance and respect’ gets you nowhere. They must be shown the new order. They must be taught who’s boss!”
COPPERMINE is also an exposition on the mythological and cultural underpinnings of the Inuit’s “religious” beliefs and a condemnation of the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches’ efforts to supplant, suppress and eliminate those beliefs entirely – only recently accepted by the Canadian government as attempted cultural genocide:
“But heaven? No. the afterlife for us is not a good place. We do not like to think about it. We think about surviving each day. Our beliefs are about life now, while your religion seems to be about death and what comes after. I’ve never understood that.”
“When we kill animals, we must do so with respect … you must avoid needless pain. We believe the spirit of the animal we kill goes into the next animal we hunt. We will meet him again, so we must treat him with respect and maybe he will give himself to us again … And when a boy makes his first kill, his mother will weep over the animal and apologize to it for what her son has done.”
“Despite himself, there were cracks forming in Creed’s skepticism about the Copper beliefs. Here on the land they made as much sense as the tenets of any religion he knew. More than most.”
(Amen to that from an atheist reader whose opinion of the monotheistic Abrahamic religions could hardly be any lower!)
Author Keith Ross Leckie’s closing comment in an afterword interview is worth repeating:
“Our task as creators is to make these stories relevant to this generation and the issues it faces. In COPPERMINE, I deal with issues such as the futility of war, new approaches to the environment, religious fundamentalism, and even gender shifting. These are contemporary, universal topics that make COPPERMINE relevant to a modern audience.”
If you have any hope that current global government efforts to improve national relationships with local aboriginal populations will succeed, then you need to read COPPERMINE. Recommended well beyond 5-stars. Reading it was an unexpected honour and privilege.
“A bold course for winning the fair and caring world we want and need.”
Naomi Klein characterized Donald Trump’s 2016 dubious electoral college ena“A bold course for winning the fair and caring world we want and need.”
Naomi Klein characterized Donald Trump’s 2016 dubious electoral college enabled takeover of the presidency as a “dangerous escalation in a world of cascading crises.” In 2017, in the immediate afternmath of the election, she suggested that “his reckless agenda – including a corporate takeover of government, aggressive scapegoating and warmongering, and sweeping aside climate science to set off a fossil fuel frenzy – will generate waves of disasters and shocks to the economy, national security, and the environment.” In short, not to put too fine a point on it, she saw his election as an existential threat to the USA and to mankind’s very existence on the planet.
Her title choice, NO IS NOT ENOUGH, exemplified her conviction that ensuring Trump’s loss in the 2020 election was a necessary condition to the continued existence of the USA as a democratic country ruled by the rule of law. BUT it also clearly pointed out that Trump was not the problem per se. He was nothing more than a symptom of an underlying disease in American culture.
As the USA, in its never ending state of electioneering and campaigning, approaches the 2022 mid-term elections, the NO in Naomi Klein’s title can now arguably be expanded to a more comprehensive list of mandatory rock-bottom achievements necessary for Americans to give themselves a fighting chance to step back from the brink of self-destruction:
1) retention of the Democrat majority in the House 2) increase the Democrat majority in the Senate to AT LEAST 52-48 to eliminate the perennial obstruction of Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema 3) eliminate the filibuster PERMANENTLY 4) impeach and convict Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and Neil Gorsuch for perjury and remove them from the Supreme Court 5) increase SCOTUS to 13 judges to recognize the overwhelming workload and to accommodate the increase in the number of federal circuits 6) appoint Democrat judges to SCOTUS to fill the new seats in spite of the anticipated negativity and obstruction from Republican senators 7) indict, charge, try, convict and imprison Trump for the remainder of his life
And, make no mistake! These events if they come to pass only allow the USA to BEGIN the process of recognizing and defining their underlying diseases and to attempt to repair them. They are necessary conditions, not sufficient conditions. The failure to complete even a single one of these conditions will be the death knell of the USA, its probable dissolution, and the devolution of whatever remains into a neo-Nazi oligarchic theocratic authoritarian dictatorship that threatens the entire world.
NO IS NOT ENOUGH is an informative, gripping, shocking, compulsively readable, scholarly book-length essay explaining how the basic elements of society around the world “– race, gender, class, economics, history, culture – have intersected with one another to produce the current crisis.” It is cautiously optimistic (and why wouldn’t it be? The alternative is ultimately the failure of mankind as a species on the planet … that is to say, common sense, rationality and optimism are the only choices in which we allow ourselves the opportunity to see the results of our own work). “Politics hates a vacuum; if it isn’t filled with hope, someone will fill it with fear.”
To those who suggest that Naomi Klein’s optimistic prognostications are impossible, she responds, “If what is considered politically possible today consigns us to a future of [] chaos the day after tomorrow, then we have to change what’s politically possible.” I agree. The USA needs to face the reality that nothing less than an awesome paradigm shift and a complete rewrite of its society and cultural values will save it from itself.
NO IS NOT ENOUGH is a book that everyone needs to read.
“Did you know there are two hundred and sixteen single stitches in a Major League baseball?”
The line is obvious but it must be said. Stephen Roth “Did you know there are two hundred and sixteen single stitches in a Major League baseball?”
The line is obvious but it must be said. Stephen Roth hit this one right out of the ball park! THE PERFECT SEASON is a brilliantly crafted, positively delicious literary cocktail that will defy genre classification.
As you sip, slurp, slug, or splash your way through Roth’s savory creation, (trust me on this!) you’re going to wonder what Roth was smoking when he sought to juxtapose such a wild concatenation of bizarre ingredients – a high-functioning autistic savant with a baseball IQ that’s in the stratosphere; a budding black female soccer star fleeing murderous persecution by the French majority against an uprising of English nationals in Cameroons; the science of sliders and curve balls and the finely tuned mechanics of the art of hitting and fielding in professional baseball; racism; bullying; young love; friendship; parenting; genetics, cancer, death, and dying; the struggle of a budding young scientist to decide between atheism and the belief in a god that appears heartless, capricious, and cruel; peaceful protests, boycotting, and human rights; adoption and privacy legislation; the smell of freshly cut grass (the word is “novertdortis” … bet you didn’t know that!); and obesity. There’s more but I think you get the idea!
Then having wondered why Roth would juxtapose this wild list of topics and themes, you’ll almost certainly go on to wonder how in the world he crafted a sensible path through a story that connected this list. All I can tell you is that the answer has to come down to the simple notion of creativity and artistic genius. THE PERFECT SEASON was far more than a mere pleasure to read. It was a rare privilege.
On literacy: “I wasn’t aware that words could hold so much. I didn’t know a sentence could be so full”.
If Kya had grown up in the mountains of AppalacOn literacy: “I wasn’t aware that words could hold so much. I didn’t know a sentence could be so full”.
If Kya had grown up in the mountains of Appalachia, townies might have looked down their noses and scoffed at her as a “redneck”, “hillbilly”, or perhaps “white trash” and “trailer trash”. But since she lived deep in the Atlantic coastal tidal marshes of North Carolina, the vogue term of disparagement was “marsh girl” or “marsh trash”. Demonstrating sensitivity and an innate intelligence that was clearly off the charts to an empty audience, Kya raised herself living alone and completely isolated for years in a shack with only her ever-growing collection of biological artifacts to love:
“Her collections matured, categorized methodically by order, genus, and species; by age according to bone wear; by size in millimeters of feathers; or by the most fragile hues of greens. The science and art entwined in each other’s strengths; the colors, the light, the species, the life; weaving a masterpiece of knowledge and beauty that filled every corner of her shack. Her world. She grew with them – the trunk of the vine – alone, but holding all the wonders together. But just as her collection grew, so did her loneliness … months passed into a year. Then another.”
… until she encountered Tate Walker, a young man, whose yearning for her companionship, her mind, and her beauty, blossomed into a love that would not and could not be requited in the wilderness of Kya’s beloved marsh. Kya’s world slowly began to open to new possibilities as he patiently taught her to read and write. Despite his promises to return to her and stay in touch, Tate’s departure to attend university left open the possibility for Kya’s marginal encounters with civilization to take her down a different and tortuous Byzantine path. Having encountered Chase Andrews, a second young man who offered the possibility of entry into a larger world of possible friends, family and love, Kya’s world collapses when Andrew’s broken body is found at the foot of a decrepit fire tower in the marsh and she is charged with his murder.
No doubt there are those that would dismiss WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING as romantic chick-lit and, to be sure, it definitely has some of that flavour that might incline readers to momentarily assign such a label. But to do so would unfairly weaken an extraordinary novel that is so much more – a murder mystery, a legal thriller, a coming-of-age narrative, a celebration of nature, science and outdoors writing, and an awesome, gut-wrenching, cautionary tale on the human frailties of racism, bigotry, xenophobia, rejection, exclusion, snobbery, and our propensity to make unwarranted judgments and draw conclusions on the basis of appearances and incomplete knowledge and information.
The author herself characterized her novel in the following way:
“WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING is a mystery, a love story, and a courtroom drama, but it is primarily about self-reliance, survival, and how isolation affects human behavior. Since our specises is a social mammal, we have strong genetic tendencies to belong to a group of tightly bonded family and friends. But what happens if a young girl … finds herself alone without a group? Of course, she feels lonely, threatened, insecure, and incompetent. [She] also behaves strangely, hiding behind trees when she sees others on the beach and avoiding the village. She ventures deeper into the wilds of the marsh, away from people, and in so doing begins to learn life’s lessons directly from the natural world.”
WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING is a heart-warming, compelling, gut-wrenching, awesome novel that will definitely be on my TOP TEN list for 2022. Beyond that, a jaw-dropping ending inclines me to add it to that much more atmospheric list of my personal lifetime favourites. Regardless of what genre might press your buttons, I can definitely recommend WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING as an awesome read. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
“From this day forward … you are all mentally deficient.”
The historical underpinnings of Joanna Goodman’s first novel THE HOME FOR UNWANTED GIRLS“From this day forward … you are all mentally deficient.”
The historical underpinnings of Joanna Goodman’s first novel THE HOME FOR UNWANTED GIRLS bears repeating.
It is the heartbreaking, shocking, gripping, disgusting (and yet, somehow, still heartwarming and touching) tale of one woman’s search for the illegitimate daughter that she was forced by her parents, her society, her government and the misogynistic religious demands of her church to abandon to the ministrations of an orphanage system run by the nuns. And, if that wasn’t bad enough, Duplessis, during what is now called La Grande Noirceur (the Grand Darkness), arbitrarily designated these orphanages as homes for the mentally ill, locked down asylums if you will, in order to defraud the federal government of a higher level of per capita funding. For many children in these orphanages, that change simply meant the doors were locked, the key was thrown away and adoption was moved from a remote likelihood to an impossibility.
In THE FORGOTTEN DAUGHTER, Elodie Phénix, now an adult woman and a survivor of the horrific physical and mental abuse doled out every day by the doctors, nuns, and priests who staffed these houses of horror, seeks to bring the Catholic Church, the doctors, and the Quebec provincial government to task and to force them to offer an apology and financial retribution for their crimes. And make no mistake, these were definitely crimes. In the waning years of the 20th century, Elodie considered herself fortunate, “We’re lucky we’re alive … not like the ones who were killed and tossed down the incinerator, or out in the fields behind the hospitals. Apparently there’s a whole cemetery of dead orphans behind St Nazarius.”
Joanna Goodman also puts this heart-rending search for justice in the context of Quebec French-English head-butting and the second referendum engineered by the Parti Québecois and Les Separatistes that came within a hair’s breadth of breaking the country into two. James Phénix, Elodie’s younger brother is an English-speaking journalist working for the Canadian News Association. That the love of his life, Véronique Fortin, a career criminal, a smuggler of cigarettes, booze, stolen CDs, and ultimately drugs, is the daughter of Léo Fortin, a fictional fifth member of the team of FLQ terrorists who kidnapped and murdered Pierre Laporte, and herself an unrepentant rabid separatist is an absolutely brilliant piece of fictional literary licence that allows the story of the Duplessis orphans to come to its conclusion in a real Quebec, torn apart by Pierre Trudeau's implementation of the War Measures Act, the Charlottetown Accord, and the conflict between Hugh MacLennan’s TWO SOLITUDES.
I will repeat the conclusion with which I closed my review of THE HOME FOR UNWANTED GIRLS and that is to suggest that ANY person who attends a Roman Catholic Church and makes a contribution to their coffers via the collection plate must accept complicity in these ugly crimes. The Roman Catholic Church MUST be made to answer for them. If you are a Canadian who enjoys wonderfully well-written, absorbing historical fiction, you MUST read THE HOME FOR UNWANTED GIRLS and THE FORGOTTEN DAUGHTER. Brava to Joanna Goodman.
Lisa Gardner takes a swing at the “revenge” theme and hits it out of the park!
FBI profiler Pierce Quincy’s daughter was an alcoholic. Two years ago, Lisa Gardner takes a swing at the “revenge” theme and hits it out of the park!
FBI profiler Pierce Quincy’s daughter was an alcoholic. Two years ago, she left an AA meeting, fell hard off the wagon, and killed herself and a passing pedestrian when she drove her car off the road. At least, that was how the final police report read at the time but Quincy’s investigative instincts were not convinced. To put the matter finally (and objectively) to rest, one way or the other, he asked his friend (and possible lover? … but I digress!), ex-cop and now PI Rainie Conner, to re-open the case. Just as she starts to unearth some details and solid evidence that the death was something other than a simple DUI accident, Quincy’s ex-wife is brutally murdered. It would appear that there is a psychopath on the revenge warpath with Quincy and all of his loved ones on his target list.
Revenge, blood lust, and brutal serial murder are hardly innovative, original ideas for a suspense thriller plot but, omigod, Lisa Gardner has done this one up right, from first page to last. The culprit is brilliant. The character development is completely engaging – Quincy, his ex-wife, his second daughter (currently enrolled in a university psychology program with sights on a career in the FBI following in Dad’s footsteps), Conner, his FBI colleagues – all of them are fleshed out in absolutely convincing fashion and lifted off the page into a stark reality. Dialogue is realistic. The romantic byplay between Conner and Quincy is heartwarming, never salubrious or saccharine, and certainly not intrusive to the main plot-line. The final reveal is a complete and totally shocking surprise!
Just be warned, fellow readers, THE NEXT ACCIDENT should NOT be read out of order. For maximum enjoyment, take the time to build up the back story in the previous two installments in the series, THE PERFECT HUSBAND and THE THIRD VICTIM. And don’t be discouraged, I enjoyed both but THE NEXT ACCIDENT is far and away the best of the three. It’s worth your time.
It’s been a long, long time since I was so totally thrilled by a thriller.
In which Data’s positronic pathways “conk out” over another idiosyncratic human linguistic gem!
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes, lovingIn which Data’s positronic pathways “conk out” over another idiosyncratic human linguistic gem!
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes, lovingly crafted his character, and re-created the atmosphere of Victorian London in which he solved his mysteries. So, when an author chooses to extend the Holmes canon in any fashion, it is inevitable that Conan Doyle’s work is the standard against which it will be judged. So it is with Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek creation and the star-studded cast of actors – Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, Brent Spiner, Michael Dorn, et al – who made the characters come to life on both the big and the small screens. If the reader of any book that purports to be in The Next Generation universe doesn’t bring these actors, their foibles, their mannerisms, their strengths, their weaknesses, and their very manner of thinking to the mind of a Star Trek TNG fan, then that book can be written off as a failure.
For my money, REUNION succeeds in spades and is most definitely not that failure. I could easily picture myself back in front of the tube watching what has to qualify as one of my all-time favourite television programs.
PLOT #1: Picard’s former first officer is returning to his home planet to be installed as the ruler of the Daa’Vit empire. The political protocol of the “coronation” calls for the incoming emperor to be accompanied by an “honour guard” of trusted friends. But, as many of the officer’s of Picard’s first starship, the USS Stargazer, are re-united on the Enterprise for the trip to Daa’Vit, that erstwhile reunion turns deadly. One of those friends is obviously an assassin with a rather more violent agenda in mind. Readers are treated to a typical Star Trek soft sci-fi plot line (that, in literary terms, is a high tech sci-fi locked room mystery) showcasing dialogue, character, and personality driven action and decision-making – Data’s cocked head and puzzled blinking as he attempts to decipher the meaning of Geordi Laforge’s use of the idiom, “conk out”; Worf’s Klingon-based perceptions of duty and honour and his over-the-top notions of challenging himself with extreme “exercise” on the holodeck; Beverly Crusher’s continued mourning over the death of her husband, Jack; Number One’s innate attraction to the fairer sex (well, there HAD to be a replacement for Captain Kirk when William Shatner went into retirement … right?). In short, there is no question that REUNION could be seen as a screenplay for a television TNG episode without a single change being necessary.
PLOT #2: The hard sci-fi complement to PLOT #1. While the murder mystery unfolds inside the Enterprise, outside the ship there is a definite problem. The Enterprise is a caught in a sub-space slip-stream and despite Mr LaForge’s best engineering solutions to prod the engines into propelling the Enterprise out of the grip of the relentless current, the Enterprise ultimately finds itself driven beyond the Neutral Zone and deep into Romulan space. Oh, oh … and now Picard, looking down the barrels of fully-charged disruptors, is having a less than friendly, terse chat with the irate captain of a threatening Romulan War Bird. Diplomacy, of course, is the tactic of first resort, but prospects are not looking good!
I'm the first to admit that it's unlikely that anyone but a Trekkie will derive much enjoyment from REUNION, but THIS Trekkie enjoyed it to the extent of a 5-star rating and I expect it will make it to my Top Ten Favourites list for 2022. Definitely recommended.
A brilliant introduction to well-deserved fame as a thriller author
It must be a seriously daunting proposition for a first-time author to dip a toe inA brilliant introduction to well-deserved fame as a thriller author
It must be a seriously daunting proposition for a first-time author to dip a toe into an arena as crowded as the suspense thriller genre. But Karin Slaughter’s fame today is clear evidence that her debut effort, BLINDSIGHTED, was obviously a success and her writing chops as an outstanding and exciting author were established right out of the gate.
In many ways, BLINDSIGHTED is just one more graphic and outrageously violent thriller built around tropes that are a dime a dozen – serial rape; gruesome wet work; a villain who is clearly a psychopathic mental case on day release from the Hannibal Lecter Funny Farm Inc.; macabre details such as abdominal knife slashes in the shape of a cross and the victim’s actual crucifixion to a wooden floor; endemic police misogyny and inter-jurisdictional squabbling; details of forensic evidence; and, of course, dysfunctional romances.
But the devil is clearly in the details and, for my money, BLINDSIGHTED was a clear winner. The plot, the surprise revelation of the villain’s identity, the paralyzing uncertainty of Sara Linton’s continuing and constantly conflicted feelings about her ex-husband, police chief, Jeffrey Tolliver, and the accompanying dialogue were all absolutely convincing. But the hands down winner in the “what really put this novel over the top” category was character development. Sara Linton, the town pediatrician and coroner, Jeffrey Tolliver, the police chief, and Lena Adams, an up-and-coming positively driven female police officer, were jaw-dropping in their depth and credibility.
If you enjoy suspense thrillers and want to share the discovery of what kick-started Karin Slaughter’s rise to fame, find a copy of BLINDSIGHTED. You won’t be sorry.
“… it’s like a war zone, all drones and cameras and la migra just waiting over there like a gang of overpaid goalkeepers.”
Lydia Quixano Pérez runs a s“… it’s like a war zone, all drones and cameras and la migra just waiting over there like a gang of overpaid goalkeepers.”
Lydia Quixano Pérez runs a successful bookstore in Acapulco, Mexico. Her husband, an investigative journalist, and her eight year old son, Luca, are the lights of a life that, up until then, was happy and fulfilled. That light is almost snuffed out in a single night when Javier Crespo Fuentes, the ruthless local drug lord, invades a birthday celebration and brutally assassinates her husband and fifteen other members of her family in retaliation for an exposé news article he had written for his newspaper. Knowing that Fuentes will not stop until he finishes the job and that his violent and sadistic grasp covers all of Mexico, Lydia and Luca are left with no alternative but to join the tsunami of migrants fleeing the country – to head to el norte, los Estados Unidos. AMERICAN DIRT is the poignant, terrifying, electric, heroic and utterly unpredictable story of their escape and it is a masterpiece that speaks to the world.
In John Grisham’s back-cover blurb, he is quoted as saying, “Its message is important and timely, but not political.” He’s right. It isn’t. But that’s because it doesn’t have to be. The title, AMERICAN DIRT, and the unvarnished simple objective facts of the story of the hate and racism that is compacted into the final stages of Lydia’s and Luca’s escape through the Sonoran Desert in southern Arizona speak volumes without making a single direct political comment. It is about the shocking and disturbing (disgusting, for my money) treatment that refugees fleeing Mexico and Central America in fear of their lives can expect at the hands of hateful Americans who simply don’t want them in their country. It is about the reality that even long-term US residents – people who have established roots, had children, contributed to their community and paid taxes - who are still undocumented immigrants may be rounded up and deported at the whim of US Border Control
AMERICAN DIRT is a riveting novel that you must read. I cannot recommend it highly enough!
“The gods rule us still … And they are no longer kind.”
“And we will rise up. Red as the dawn.”!
RED QUEEN is a timely and thrilling dystopian young adu“The gods rule us still … And they are no longer kind.”
“And we will rise up. Red as the dawn.”!
RED QUEEN is a timely and thrilling dystopian young adult tale of revolution in the face of authoritarian rule by a patriarchal royal family and a right-wing population that see privilege and rule as their right by virtue of their physical superiority (endowed, of course, by no more than the coincidence of their birth genes). Mare Barrow’s world is populated by two peoples separated by their DNA and their blood – red (effectively like yours and mine and our fellow normal and human readers) or silver, that comes with a bewildering variety of fantastic and near magical powers.
It isn’t difficult to guess that the themes such a novel would touch on would include coming of age and young love (including, of course, the almost mandatory love triangle); family; war and death; slavery, totalitarianism, and revolution; courage and heroism, loyalty, and friendship; compassion contrasted with anything that a reader might consider its opposites; government; hereditary royalty, and more.
While I saw RED QUEEN as located in the center of a square cornered by Suzanne Collins’ THE HUNGER GAMES, Kristin Cashore’s GRACELING, George RR Martin’s GAME OF THRONES, and (believe it or not!) John Wyndham’s perennial sci-fi classic, THE CHRYSALIDS, I would rush to assure potential readers that there is absolutely nothing in the least derivative about Aveyard's delightful novel! And it certainly isn’t difficult to imagine Mare Barrow’s plight; her mental outlook, emotions, and physical characteristics; her conduct; her decision making; and her trials and tribulations as being a thoroughly innovative construct that draws on pieces of Katniss Everdeen, Karsa, Daenerys Targaryen, and Petra Storm.
When I reviewed THE CHRYSALIDS, I closed with the following thought:
“Analytical readers will be mindful of the irony in the closing chapters as it is clear that the more advanced community is as repressive and intolerant as the community from which the children fled. Wyndham leaves us with the unresolved open question as to whether Man's evolution into a new species will perforce require the extinction of the remaining members of the previous species.”
RED QUEEN leaves us on a minor cliff-hanger pondering a similar question regarding the difficulties of co-existence of evolving hybrid species in the sequels that obviously follow!
Another shocking page from the Roman Catholic Church’s history of genocide!
One could argue that 17th century European colonialism and expansionism wasAnother shocking page from the Roman Catholic Church’s history of genocide!
One could argue that 17th century European colonialism and expansionism was also to blame for conduct of the fur traders, the French military, and the settlers towards the aboriginal people in the territory along the St Lawrence River (and it certainly was). But make no mistake. When it came to homophobia, misogyny, sexual assault, rape, pedophilia and cultural, linguistic and actual physical genocide, it was the Church that held the whipping hand of authority and dictated the behaviour of the settlers towards the aboriginal people. It is an open question as to whether the French government and its people would have formulated such disturbing policies in the New World if the Roman Catholic Church had not demanded them. The Roman Catholic Church has a great deal to answer for!
DAUGHTERS OF THE DEER is the story of Marie Miteouamegoukoue, a young aboriginal woman, widowed as a result of the Algonquin’s perennial internecine war with the Iroquois, her subsequent forced marriage to a prosperous French farmer and landowner on a seigneury close to Trois Rivières, and the life of their mixed race “two spirit” lesbian daughter in the face of the community’s entrenched homophobia.
DAUGHTERS OF THE DEER is a touching, evocative story that is at once heartwarming and heartrending. It is a compelling story of heroism, bravery, and personal growth and a sad reminder that, notwithstanding what should have been 300 years of cultural growth for Canada and her people, one can still point to instances of this kind of hatred today. Joanna Goodman’s A HOME FOR UNWANTED CHILDREN comes quickly to mind. And any informed North American reader will be all too familiar with the deeply disturbing story of aboriginal residential schools.
Definitely recommended as a story that will move you to tears, that will hold your interest from first page to last, and that will leave you with a painful lump in your throat for quite some time after you turn that last page. DAUGHTERS OF THE DEER has a lock on ending up on my list of Top Ten Reads for 2022. And, a bonus for this reader, Danielle Daniel is an aboriginal Canadian author. Two thumbs up and an assurance that I'm looking for more of your work, Ms Daniel!
A biting critique of the court system and the legal profession by the Victorian master of social commentary
Many of the characters of BLEAK HOUSE – incA biting critique of the court system and the legal profession by the Victorian master of social commentary
Many of the characters of BLEAK HOUSE – including most notably but certainly not limited to John Jarndyce, and his wards Richard Carstone and Ada Clare – are legatees in some version of a will left by a previous scion of the wealthy Jarndyce family. The problem is that there was several versions of the will left behind at various times, in various places, and with varying degrees of approbation and legal authenticity. The interminable multi-generational dispute over which will holds sway and who will be the ultimate wealthy winner of the legal sweepstakes that is Jarndyce v Jarndyce is the core driver of the plot that sustains Dickens brilliant satire and social critique of the law, the legal system, and the legal profession.
But readers looking for themes and social commentary in other areas will find plenty of other cuts of meat to chew on in BLEAK HOUSE – a scathing criticism of the outrageous hypocrisy of organized religion and those who would claim to be organizers for so-called charitable causes; the desperate plight of the impoverished lower class in mid-city London; the struggle (nay, call it an embittered and hostile war) between progressive middle class entrepreneurs who welcomed the burgeoning Industrial Revolution and the traditionalist upper class who feared anything but the most rigid adherence to the status quo; and more.
Despite the presence of a catalogue of characters who clearly fall on the “bad guy” side of the virtue accounting ledger – Tulkinghorn, Krook, Skimpole, Mrs Pardiggle and Jellyby, Chadband, and more – most readers, on reflection will probably come to the conclusion that the main villains of the piece are more thematic in nature – the institution of Chancery court; the legal profession; hypocritical religion and institutional philanthropy’s gathering of charitable contributions; government insensitivity and the treatment of the poor, to note the most obvious examples.
Many readers may be unaware that Dickens’ brilliance broke new literary ground in two different ways.
First, his use of two different narrative styles – an omniscient, invisible narrator who spoke in the present tense, and Esther Summerson, a first person narrator speaking in the past tense who, as a matter of obvious necessity, was restricted to presenting her own view of events subject to her own emotions and opinions. This alternating style of narration was entirely unprecedented in Victorian literature and allowed for the interpretation of the same event from multiple perspectives.
The second (and I personally am eternally grateful for this) is the use of a detective as a front of stage leading character in the investigation of a murder mystery. Our enjoyment of Wilkie Collins, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Agatha Christie’s work is attributable to their standing on the proverbial shoulders of Charles Dickens, the giant.
Your personal opinion may vary, but I reckon BLEAK HOUSE ultimately to be a tragedy in which the personal affairs of many of the protagonists are, at least in the short term, resolved. But I think many of these resolutions are unsatisfactory and, well, (you guessed it!) bleak! And that death count, my goodness. BLEAK HOUSE, like Shakespeare’s HAMLET, leaves the proverbial stage fairly littered at the close of the curtain with the detritus of corpses who met their demise by an astonishing number of ways and in a bewildering variety of circumstances. (Our reading group reckoned the final tally to be, of course, lucky 13!!)
Whether you agree with my assessment and think of BLEAK HOUSE as tragedy or consider it to be a gritty example of a multi-generation family drama, I hope you’ll agree with me that BLEAK HOUSE is absolutely brilliant and one of the finest examples of classic English literature that you could ever hope to find. If you’re a potential newcomer to Dickens, take your time and don’t give up. Reading, understanding, absorbing, and enjoying Dickens is an acquired taste and a patiently acquired skill. The rewards are well worth the effort.
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