The Trespasser and The Secret Place, both by Tana French
In most of Tana French’s “Dublin Murder Squad” books, the characters, i.e. the detectives, overlap only loosely because she switches up her lead characters, unlike most murder series books which maintain a core group of investigators. In the case of these two books, however, we follow the same pair of detectives through two murder cases, only changing who is narrating (this had me struggling in the second book I read, as I kept forgetting who the actual narrator was). My mistake here was reading the two books in reverse order, because I am apparently incapable of deducing the order of publication by simply looking up the copyright date on the edition notice page. So, instead, I just treated The Secret Place (sequentially the first book) as a flashback. Good enough!
What I loved about these two books (point 1) is French’s portrayal of Antoinette Conway, the senior partner to Murder Team rookie Stephen Moran. For reasons she doesn’t understand, Conway has become a target for bullying by her fellow (male) officers, who accuse her of sleeping her way to the top and of generally being a bitch because she can’t play nice with their offensively sexist joking and clowning around. As a result, she becomes pathologically mistrustful, suspecting everyone of plotting to undermine or sabotage her. The more she starts to trust someone, the more paranoid she becomes that they are actually playing her for a fool. As someone who experienced my fair share of this kind of inexplicable bullying in high school, I can testify to French’s portrayal of Conway. I too have lived through a stage in my life where nobody was to be trusted, where I felt it was worse to be found to be gullible (again) than to have a close friend to whom I could share my deepest secrets. I am still reluctant to share things that could be used to mock and humiliate me.
What I loved about these books (point 2) is that in The Trespasser Conway manages to find the courage to trust again, starting with her partner Moran. Eventually she finds the strength to extend a level of trust to the rest of the Murder Team as she starts to recognize camaraderie over malice. For me, it felt like a happy ending, like there was a path to joy in her future, which is very, very unusual for Tana French and her characters. I felt this woman in my soul.
Black Swan Green, by David Mitchell
In keeping with the bullying theme, Black Swan Green is kind of a 1980’s coming-of-age story, which follows a year-long period in the life of 13 year old Jason Taylor. Jason suffers from a stammer and carefully navigates his way through middle school trying to avoid the attention of the school yard bullies while trying to be noticed by and accepted into the cool gang. What I really related to was the way Jason would avoid directly answering questions that could result in major bullying, or would wait to hear what everyone else said and then just go with the flow. I remember a time in high school when we were all asked to share what our favourite TV show was. Well, I’ll just say there was no way in hell I was going to answer this truthfully. Luckily, since we always got seated in alphabetical order, I was called on last and was able to just give the same answer as the majority – Saturday Night Live. Never mind that at this point I had never watched one single minute of this show, ever, in my life. I could hear the whispering around the room … “no way that’s her favourite show” … and bonus points to the bullies for being right. Extra bonus points to me that they would never find out.*
Anyway, back to the book. The storytelling also features an uncomfortably frequent use of the word “gay”, in the context of “wearing the wrong shoes is gay” or “carrying school bags is gay” but let’s face it, if you grew up in the 80’s this is how everyone talked. And if I’m being honest, “that’s gay” gets used so often that it genuinely becomes humourous.
Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman, by Lindy West
Lindy West is effing amazing. She is bold, outspoken, unapologetic, and unafraid. Right off the bat, on page 3, she had me laughing/crying at her “complete list of fat female role models” that were available to her as a youth, and which included such confidence-boosting icons as Miss Piggy, The Queen of Hearts, Ursula the Sea Witch, and Auntie Shrew. (The complete list is 12 names long.) And it just gets better after that. She gets into a fight with Dan Savage (who is not as impressive as I once thought), confronts her on-line trolling bully, and shares her disheartening experiences flying as a fat person who no longer fits in the ever-shrinking airplane seats. All while laughing! It’s just soooo good.
A Dance of Cranes, by Steve Burrows
As you’ve probably guessed, I’m really enjoying this entire series of Steve Burrows’, the “Birder Murder Mysteries”. He does a bang-up job of incorporating the birding theme into a gripping murder mystery, and in this case two mysteries that will eventually cross paths in a not far-fetched way. And we actually got some forward moment on a couple of character portrayals that were starting to get stale. Like honestly, how long can a man not notice that a woman is agonizingly attracted to him, when *everyone* around can tell??? I hope book 7 brings continued growth for our cast of characters and, frankly, some closure to a couple of through-lines that have been lingering for a few too many books.
This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
Whether you love time travel stories or hate them, I think we can probably all agree that they are fraught with danger in the form of paradoxes, broken causality, and general confusion. Take 1 hour and 17 minutes of your precious time on Earth and watch the movie Primer if you want a prime (haha) example of this. That said, however, This Is How You Lose the Time War manages to avoid all of these traps through its clever use of parallel timelines (universes, if you prefer) and disconnected points in “time”. The book is written as a series of letters delivered creatively in time between two rival warring agents – Red, who represents technology and Blue, who represents nature. The letters start of as taunts and challenges, as the agents undertake to defeat each other in a wars by winning battles that take place during moments of historical significance. However, the letters quickly evolve into mutual respect over battle and letter-delivery tactics, and eventually into love. Most delightfully, the narrators, Red and Blue, are characterized as female, although the parts they play in this time war change gender and make-up to suit each individual battle.
*I’m pretty sure at this point my favourite show was either The Love Boat or Columbo.