Mar 2023 books – Quiet, Tranquil, Delicious, and Deadly

An eclectic month, in which I surprise myself by reading four books, all very different!

Such a Quiet Place, by Megan Miranda

Megan Miranda has a style. Her stories often (or even always?) take place in an isolated, sort-of-close-knit community where one of their own dies/disappears/reappears and another of their own is suspected/arrested/runs off. In Such A Quiet Place, it’s all of the above. A year after one of the neighbour couples dies in a tragic murder (or accident?) and another neighbour is arrested and imprisoned for the crime, the convicted woman is released from prison on appeal and returns to hang out with all her old frenemies. Megan has a crafty way of making you continually rethink “who dunnit”, Wheel-Of-Fortune style, until the end of the book, where you find out maybe the wheel stopped on the right wedge or maybe it didn’t. I like her books but I’m starting to find that I need some space between the “I am a major mental case” story-telling style of her narrators.

Killers of a Certain Age, by Deanna Raybourn

Four women go on a vacation cruise to celebrate their upcoming retirement. Pretty normal! I’m thinking of doing that myself! Except these four are trained assassins for a secret British organization known only as “The Museum”. And unfortunately, someone at the organization has decided they are a liability and need to be eliminated, which kind of ruins the party. And ruins the retirement, frankly, because they now have to eliminate the elimination-order-giver in order to save themselves. So it’s back to work! A recurring and, frankly, satisfying theme is that because they are lucky enough to be women, it’s pretty easy to be underestimated and to go unnoticed (or to be noticed for the wrong reasons). This all leads to a fun and murderous romp that is totally worth the read.

Briefly, A Delicious Life, by Nell Stevens

If you like stories that take factual history events and fill in the blanks to create a narrative, then this might be a book for you. Think “Zelda” by Nancy Milford which fictionalizes an account of what Zelda Fitzgerald’s life may have been like, based on research of letters, interviews, writings, and so forth. I personally am not a fan of this type of book. I think I just dislike made up versions of people who actually existed. Or something. Whatever. However, I didn’t hate this book, which similarly fills the gaps in an essentially true story. In this case, the story is about George Sand, her two children, and her lover Frederic Chopin during a winter stay in a drafty monastery in Mallorca. What makes the book readable (to me) is that it is narrated by the ghost of a 14 year old girl who died 400 years ago and has been incorporeally hanging around the monastery ever since. The brilliance of this seemingly random narrative choice is that the ghost can inhabit the bodies of the characters and not only feel/hear/taste/smell what they experience, but also “see” into their past and their future. It’s extremely clever.

I would be remiss, however, if I didn’t mention a couple of points made by one of the ladies in my neighbourhood book club: none of the characters in this story, except for the ghost, are compelling, likeable, or sympathetic in any way. Sand is selfish and unaware of the strain the drafty monastery (in winter!) is putting on Chopin’s health, Chopin does nothing but whine about his missing piano and cough up blood, and the children dislike everyone including each other. And all of the villagers and servants of Sand and Chopin hate them. Fun! As far as a recommendation goes, if wonderful writing is enough for you, then borrow this one. But if characters you are bound to dislike is a turn-off, then just give this a pass.

Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St. John Mandel

Emily is back and I love her so much! She has such a talent for telling stories that intertwine unexpectedly and ultimately come full circle to tie the ending back up to the beginning. Sea of Tranquility is her latest and it has added an extra surprise – she has picked back up with characters from The Glass Hotel and references the pandemic that takes place in Station Eleven. Similar in execution to Cloud Atlas, events take place forward and then backward through time: in pre-war 1900s, somewhere around the present day, the early 2200s, and the early 2400s, all linked together by a strange anomaly. This is definitely worth reading, but I would recommend reading The Glass Hotel and Station Eleven first.

And once again, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that my very good friend just finished reading One Night In Montreal and strongly suggests skipping that one. I happened to notice that it is not in my Emily collection, so I suspect I felt the same. I guess not all books can be 10/10!