February in Review

Only three books this month, but that's only because I'm strolling through Dan Simmons' Drood, and have been for a few weeks now. And, I suppose, I spent several days attempting to get hooked on Tiffany Baker's The Little Giant of Aberdeen County. I *wanted* to like it, but I just couldn't get there, and after more than 75 pages, when I still wasn't that interested, I just packed it in. There's too much already sitting around waiting on me to spend time on something that I'm ambivalent about!

First off, there was Ariana Franklin's Mistress of the Art of Death. A friend enjoys the series, so I thought I'd give it a try. It was okay - good enough for me to pick up the second book at some point, I imagine. The series is set in England under Henry II, and the "sleuth" is a woman sent upon the king's request from the medical school in Salerno. Children are disappearing, the Jews of Cambridge are being blamed, because they get blamed for everything, and the situation is so tenuous that they've had to move into the castle for protection from the general citizenry. Of course, the Jewish population also pays a lot of taxes, and as a result, Henry would like this resolved ASAP. I usually enjoy historical fiction, but sometimes I struggle with not having a sense of how much is fiction-fiction and how much is historically-based fiction. This was one of those cases, but no real complaints when I remember that it's just a light read.

After that, I read Stephanie Kallos' much-lauded Sing Them Home. She's very talented, especially at character renderings, and something about the matter-of-fact way she does it put me in the mind of Larry McMurtry. Odd as it sounds, for a comparison, I'd say she's Larry McMurtry's Evening Star meets Alice Hoffman's Practical Magic. Just a light touch of magic in this story about three modern-day siblings reunited after their father's sudden death and still struggling with the disappearance and presumed death of their mother in a tornado nearly 30 years ago. The Welsh community of Emlyn Springs becomes a character, too, with deep-seated Welsh traditions for honoring the dead. The tornado actually serves as a beautiful metaphor for any sudden, violent death in some ways - you leave home when things are normal and come back that evening to find your life completely wrecked and a loved one missing, in a sense never to be seen again. Odd sometimes, how you have revelations (not really revelations, perhaps, but an emotional understanding of something that you've cognitively understood for quite awhile) when reading that don't seem directly connected to the book, but I just realized during this that my mother would never have wanted to leave me. Beautiful and sad - but that realization and the book.

After that, another book about mothers and children - Kathleen Kent's The Heretic's Daughter about real-life mother and daughter Martha and Sarah Carrier who were imprisoned during the Salem witchcraft trials. I don't think I learned anything new about the trials, but the only other fictional work on the subject I'd read was Arthur Miller's The Crucible. The Crucible is a classic with good reason, but Miller's really more concerned with the politics and parallels, while Kent, as a Carrier descendent, is focused on relaying her family history and applying a very human face to the tragedy. It's one thing to read about the injustices and the discriminations in the abstract, but Kathleen Kent does a wonderful job of drawing you into the lives of these two women and making you see the frustrations in the first person. That women were so often accused, especially if they were smart enough or persistent enough to actually heal a person or a farm animal, just seemed horribly injust - if you were lazy, indifferent or unlucky, you might be many things, but you weren't likely to be a suspected witch!

And this month I picked up the new Deanna Raybourn, Kathryn Stockett's The Help, Asta in the Wings, and Linda Fairstein's Lethal Legacy. And I have holds at the library on Terminal Freeze, The Reader, The Seance and much more. Add that to what I already have lying around....