Ally Condie kills it
(+2 more)
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097) The Unwedding by Ally Condie, finished September 13
A popular YA novelist decides to write a mystery for grown-ups. I feel like we've heard this story before. And it sounds like a crass moneygrab, no matter how well done.
And, you know, maybe.
But don't say that about this novel.
I'll admit that for most of its runtime, it seemed like a pretty typical pop mystery. A middle-aged woman is slapped into mysterious circumstances as she finds one body then someone finds another. She and her two quirky friends start asking questions. Etc etc.
And the flashbacks of a previous happenstance seem, at best, par deepening.
But then the novel ends and we get a long explanation of how the figuring out happens.
But: that is not the end of the novel.
In fact, to this point, our author has been building up her stacks of items only to now turn them and we realize what else is in front of us.
About half way through the novel I read one of the backcover blurbs and rolled my eyes at the book being, besides a thriller, "an exquisite meditation on grief and loss." I mean. Some thematically relevant flashbacks aren't making that so.
But that was before the novel stood and turned itself, revealing the hummingbird that was there all along.
It's quite the moving achievement.
a week
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098) Enola Holmes: The Case of the Missing Marquess by Nancy Springer, finished September 18
I found this in a Little Free Library and grabbed it because I keep hearing about how great the movies are. If I had Netflix, I wager I would have watched them by now. So I figured, why not try the book?
And it was great. It's now one of my favorites mysteries-for-kids. Which is terrible timing because I was planning on cutting myself off from the library I can focus on the books we own . . . but now I want the second Enola book!
One thing I like, as a Holmes fan, is how Enola is quite her own person yet she is very much of her family. She has things in common with Mycroft and Sherlock, but the age difference, the lack of contact, and society's sexual structures have resulted in her being very, very apart. It's great.
From the couple stills I had seen of the movies, I'd assumed Enola and Sherlock would be on grand adventures. And maybe that is true in the movies or the later books, but in book one? Ah ah ah! Not at all. I wouldn't go so far as to call them antagonists, but their goals certainly are. There is one moment that gives us hope they may later share adventures but that day is not today.
Anyway. Springer did a great job adding to the mythology. Loved it.
maybe a week or two
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099) Helaman: A Brief Theological Introduction by Kimberly Matheson Berkey, finished September 21
"Our reading of the book of Helaman leaves us with an inescapable conclusion: you and I are wrong. Profoundly, devastatingly wrong about a great many things—many of them quite important."
This is perhaps the most straightforward summary of this book's theme. And it says it and demonstrates it over and over again as it explores Helaman.
And I'll tell you: I am convinced.
We are, almost certainly, profoundly and devastatingly wrong about a great many things.
Let's find some humility and try harder to be Christians.
a month