2019 book 135

Agatha Christie's Three Act Tragedy
It's Halloween, I thought, the perfect time to read a Poirot mystery I've never read, full of actors and amateur detectives and house parties and whatnot. And it starts off very funny, but we're not even to the end of chapter two before this starts:

I guess at this point the rampant casual anti-Semitism in Christie's books should not catch me unawares, and yet it does, every time.
Anyway, this mystery is fine, not one of her standout works, but well plotted and funny. I think I'm back on another break from Christie though. B.

2019 book 134

Leigh Bardugo's Ninth House
I’ve enjoyed several of Bardugo's YA novels, so was looking forward to her much-hyped adult debut—a paranormal murder mystery! I will say that I had to wait a while for my library hold to come through so my anticipation was pretty high, but the book mostly lived up to it. Like I said, it’s a paranormal murder mystery, set at Yale, where the eight super fancy secret societies are actually full of magic and mysticism and the occult! Our protagonist is a  (Sephardic Jewish!) girl from the wrong side of the tracks (her backstory was the part that didn’t work well for me) who can SEE GHOSTS, so she's been admitted to Yale under somewhat false pretenses to be part of a group that monitors all the paranormal weirdness. And then her mentor disappears, and a girl is murdered, and things really start to go off the rails. The mystery element was pretty good, although slightly convoluted, but I loved the characters, especially the growing friendships between the protagonists and other women. I will give a mega content warning here for a lot of violence against women (sexual and otherwise) which was hard to read. But I liked where this ended up and will definitely read the next one in this series. A-/B+.

2019 book 133

Rainbow Rowell's Wayward Son
Yes, this just came out a month ago and I read it then, but we're discussing it for book club this week so I had to reread it! I like the details to be fresh. I wanted to reread it anyway, because my first read was just like "what!" as the plot unfolded, and now that I know where it's going, I can absorb more of the atmosphere and character work. Anyway, if you have not read this, it features the three main characters of Carry On heading to America for a ROAD TRIP! Definitely no issues with magical teens entering unknown territory and dealing with relationship problems! Plus there's a pretty bad-ass ending (ILU, Penelope and Agatha). Can't wait for the third book!

2019 book 132

Agatha Christie's Hallowe'en Party
This is clearly a later Christie work, as it spends a lot of time lamenting about current society and its travails (particularly KIDS THESE DAYS: murderous children, as well as children getting murdered bc they got a ride from a stranger), and several times mentions that things would be better if more people were institutionalized! Anyway, mystery-wise, this is pretty solid: a little girl is murdered at a Halloween party after bragging about having once /witnessed/ a murder, so one of the party guests--a mystery novelist (who apparently appears in several of Christie's books) calls in her friend Poirot to track down the killer! There are plenty of suspects, as Poirot has two murders to solve, and has no idea what the first one was. The solution is a mixture of "yeah, that's what I expected" and pure goofiness. This book in general is very goofy, though I think a lot of that is the very dated attitudes about . . . everything. I am curious to read the other Christie books featuring Ariadne, though. B.

2019 book 131

Josephine Tey's Brat Farrar
The only book I’ve read by Tey is the one where the bedridden guy is reading about Richard III, but I saw someone mention this and it looked interesting, so I figured I’d give it a go. It’s about a young man who poses as the long lost heir to a horse breeding family (it's England). But what happened to the little boy he's pretending to be? And will he be found out??? This was a solid story, and while it’s not too hard to solve the mystery parts, the satisfaction is seeing how everything comes together. I enjoyed this a lot, a classic sort of British mystery. A-.

2019 book 130

Allie Larkin's Why Can't I Be You
I needed something fluffy after reading a creepy book by Shirley Jackson, and Christina recommended this to me. It totally fit the bill! It's the story of a woman who's heading to a conference--and then her boyfriend dumps her at the airport. So when the organizer of a high school reunion at the conference hotel mistakes her for an old classmate, she just kind of goes with it. If you can get past this fairly ridiculous premise, the book is super cute. It's got a 90s romcom vibe for sure. That also gets at its slight cheesiness and how things work out at the end. Still, I'd watch that movie! B/B+.

2019 book 129

Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House
I feel like everyone is talking about this book right now, because of course it's the perfect time of year to read a spooky story! I've actually never read this, and didn't watch the Netflix series, so I went into this knowing almost nothing about it. And it was SO CREEPY. SOOOOO CREEPY. But also funny at times. Anyway, if you don't know anything about it, the gist is that a paranormal researcher rents a haunted house for the summer, and invites two young women (who maybe have psychic abilities) and the heir to the house to investigate.(Sidebar: Theo is definitely a lesbian, right? And Eleanor?) As is common with people hanging out in haunted houses, things don't go too well. Jackson excels at this sort of psychological ambiguous terror, perfect October reading. A-.

2019 book 128

Laura Ruby's Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All
Ruby's latest novel, after the great Bone Gap, is set in 1940s Chicago and is narrated by a ghost who likes to hang out and watch the girls at an orphanage. She is particularly interested in one Frankie, whose father left her and her siblings there during the Depression. I was personally more interested in the ghost than in Frankie (the ghost hangs out with a fox and befriends other ghosts and gradually remembers her own story), though Frankie is a very vivid and relatable character. I just felt like her story, while compelling, was not a particularly new one. Ruby is saying a lot here about being a girl and being a woman, as well as dealing a bit with racial tensions. A satisfying read for sure. B/B+.

2019 book 127

K. Eason's How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse
Ooh this book was SO FUN! It’s a really interesting fantasy-sci fi hybrid with court politics and fairy tales in outer space, lots of badass women, the friends we made along the way, etc. I will note that the title is a teensy bit misleading, as the multiverse here is not a bunch of alternate versions of reality, but just the general outer space area. But it didn’t even matter, because I enjoyed this so much. The narrative voice—a slightly snarky historian—is aces, I loved all the characters and action, and can’t wait to see what this series does next. A/A-.

2019 book 126

Diana Wynne Jones' The Lives of Christopher Chant
This Chrestomanci book is a prequel to the first, but I like it that way--it's fun to get the backstories of all the adults from the first book (especially Millie!). This is one of my favorites by Diana Wynne Jones--lots of good magic and adventure and magical adventures and humor and CATS. Such good cats.

2019 book 125

Elizabeth Strout's Olive, Again
This is the perfect fall book, with its crisp prose and evocative atmospheres. It's another of Strout's novels-in-stories about the titular Olive Kitteridge, but I had only vague memories of its predecessor and didn't feel lost at all. I really love the way Strout creates a whole town and its inhabitants, and how we catch little glimpses of them from one POV to another. This one focuses mostly on Olive growing older, though of course has lots to say about family and friendship and love and forgiveness. Another stellar work from Strout. A.

__
A review copy was provided by the publisher. This book will be released on October 15th.

2019 book 124

Diana Wynne Jones' Charmed Life
Fall weather finally rolling in made me want to read books about WITCHES! So why not start with one of the modern classics? This one skews a bit young to be completely satisfying for me (plus has some brief weird race stuff, maybe bc it was written in 1977?), but it's cute and funny and full of magic, so what's not to like?

2019 book 123

Naomi Kritzer's Catfishing on CatNet
Y’all, I LOVED THIS BOOK. I totally read it all in one sitting and enjoyed every single second. It’s about Steph, whose mother always moves her from place to place—to keep her away from her abusive father—and so Steph's only friends are her internet pals on the CatNet site. BUTTTTTT one of those pals is a sentient AI!! (I think the one from Kritzer's award winning story Cat Pictures Please.) I LOVE a sentient AI that loves its friends!! Soon danger catches up with them, and everyone has to band together to save the day, and each other. I just thought this was so sweet and funny and amazing. Internet friends rule! AIs rule! Cat pics rule. Read this book!!! A.

__
A review copy was provided by the publisher. This book will be released in November.

2019 book 122

Eva Ibbotson's A Song for Summer
I needed a palate cleanser after that last book, so decided to reread this classic Ibbotson novel, wherein a young woman raised by suffragist activists, being of a more practical nature, winds up studying the domestic arts and heading to Austria to work at a boarding school. But . . . it's Austria in 1937. Ibbotson crafts a story that’s bittersweet, funny, and full of heroic acts of all kinds. I like her perspective; Art is good and good food is good, even if artists are sometimes silly, and NAZIS ARE BAD. Just all around a satisfying and not very intense read.

2019 book 121

Philip Pullman's The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth
Normally I don't prioritize books by white cis male authors, but I'm still interested in the adventures of Lyra--now a twenty year old college student--so figured I'd make an exception. And then I got to page 187 and said "oh, no. Oh, gross" OUT LOUD. This is what I get for trusting male authors: a character who is "in love" with a girl he's known since she was a baby, who was attracted to her when she was a young teen WHO HE WAS TEACHING, but now it's okay because she's twenty????? And in mortal danger???? Pullman even has a sensible lady tell this dude "it's cool, you're both adults!" EWWWW no. And it’s not that the age difference is even that big, it’s just that Pullman presents all this in a very . . .  clueless manner (Lyra secretly enjoys being catcalled, if you were wondering more about the general vibe.) Lyra, of course, is also threatened with rape at one point.
The story here is kind of weird, too; Pullman is doing his usual railing against corrupt organized religion, and has now added rational intellectuals and skeptics (who hate imagination? it's all bizarre) to the mix. I just think it's weird that all these secret groups of powerful/evil men are still all after this one poor girl. And then everyone is just journeying around for the entire book. It doesn’t have a remotely satisfying conclusion, because the conclusion will be in the next book. Just all around not good. C-.

2019 book 120

T. Kingfisher's The Twisted Ones
I had a real quandary here, because I don’t like reading horror stories (I get creeped out super easily), but I read basically everything Ursula Vernon writes! So of course I had to give this a shot. I will say that it is apparently full of literary references to classic/pulp horror stories, but I have never read any of those and missed all of that. SHRUG. Anyway, this is about a woman from Pittsburgh (yay!), a copy editor, who has to head down to North Carolina to clean out her recently deceased hoarder grandmother's house. And then weird things start happening. This was definitely creepy, but full of Vernon's trademark down-to-earth characters, which I appreciated. I especially liked the bold lipstick wearing elderly neighbor and whenever the protagonist's inner editor took over. There is also a hound dog, clearly modeled on real hound dogs Vernon has known. Anyway, this wasn’t my favorite of her books, but it’s not really a genre I’m into. I still liked it a lot. And kind of regret reading it after dark. B+.

2019 book 119

Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin
I had a yen to reread some Atwood novels--it's been so long since I read this one that my blog didn't even exist yet! It was a bit slower than I remembered, but not in a bad way--more of a meditative way. It's the story of an elderly woman, who's writing her life story, interspersed with excerpts of the famous novel her sister wrote before killing herself. It's moving and compelling, with vibrant characters and a dry sense of humor, and gets at issues of feminism, and aging, and injustice, and families of all kinds. I'll definitely be revisiting more of Atwood's earlier works.