Annie Smart

usual entertaining Thursday M Club stuff

Reviewed: 03-01-25

I guess a mystery focused on crypto currency and VAT scams is inevitably sedentary and stuffed with exposition but . . . . I suspect the writer set himself the task of making financial (fiduciary?) crime entertaining, and nearly managed it. Nearly.
But Fiona Shaw's irritating insistence on whispering the whole book had me screaming at my laptop - For chrissake speak up! You're a narrator not a mumblecore movie character! Ghastly. Unnecessary. Affected. I give her 2 stars because she does make some attempt at character differentiation, tho not much. Favorite fun quote: "Crypto currency is more fun than premium bonds." Courtesy of Joyce of course,

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This may be the last Gamache book I read

Reviewed: 11-09-24

I'm kind of shocked how completely mediocre I thought this book was.
This story never took hold of me. All was exposition, and for a book using intrigue and hidden information as its driver, that is not a good thing. Penny has been good in the past at drawing one in through particular and evocative characters, their relationships and contexts. But here everything is merely plot, all elements equally weighted and most of the time only thinly sketched in. I got entirely muddled by a plethora of characters and places, none of which engaged me fully. Seriously, would Gamache not answer his phone?! Who were these singing monks and nun? Cannot tell you. What genuine relevance do wolves, Chartreuse liqueur or arsenic have? None!
It's all terribly convoluted and very abstract, so when the plot was 'explained' at the end I really did not care. Nothing convinced
In the past I think Penny might have successfully taken her main theme, in this case Canadian water and its great supply centers, and drawn us in with evocative word pictures of the locations, with meditations on what water is, both practically and metaphorically. But here the water could just as easily have been replaced with trash, or climate problems or whatever. It's only another plot device, one element in an equation.
Then the new narrator made things much worse by giving so little individualization to the many characters. Voices all sounded the same, all slightly pompous with individuality ignored.
And the pace of the reading was mostly monotonous, rarely varied.
Yes it is a good thing for a Quebecois to read these books but that asset alone is not enough.
I nearly put the book down for good half way through and I never do that. I forced myself to persist and was not rewarded.

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Not Atkinson's best

Reviewed: 09-30-24

As a huge fan of Kate Atkinson, and especially her Jackson Brodie series, I was very excited about this new novel. It's still better than many detective novels but nothing like as assured and witty as the other books in the series. At a wild guess, and without wanting to know any of the details, I'd say the writer had some hefty personal problems to overcome while trying to write this book.
I think she originally tempted herself with the idea of tackling familiar, cliche'ed 'mystery' tropes - the Agatha Christie collection of characters, all verging on caricature, and all holed up together in a stately country home; murder room puzzles; Cluedo; the psychopath at large during a snowy night of black-outs; etc. But unfortunately she failed to paint the various pictures well or weave the plot threads together successfully. I'm still not sure why the murders happened!
And Jackson himself is only faintly and roughly sketched in, somewhat bent out of shape in order to make the plot lines work.
The best passages are those where she movingly evokes the Yorkshire countryside, similar to those I admire (adore!) in Dickens, particularly the opening section of Martin Chuzzlewit.
So I've just returned to Big Sky, a really brilliant book, where she does what few others can do: be witty, ruthlessly truthful and laugh-out-loud funny, while mourning for some of the awful things humans (especially men) do to other humans. Crystal is one of my favorite book characters ever.
Someone here said listen to Sign of the Rook at 80% speed and they were right. I listen to most books at 90% just to be sure of really hearing everything properly. I guess younger ears at Audible now expect things to rattle along like speeding trains. Jason Issacs obliges and does a grand job, but it's way too fast for me. Some of the good stuff needs to be contemplated, mentally explored, in order to be fully appreciated.

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1 person found this helpful

preposterous and very badly written

Reviewed: 09-23-24

perhaps this reads better in the original Icelandic but i doubt it. an unbelievably convoluted story very clumsily told. and it doesn't help matters that the central detective Elma displays the inarticulacy and stupidity of a teenager - truly aggravating. no more of this series for me.

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a muddled listen

Reviewed: 09-11-24

Perhaps the printed page, or a different translation, or a different audio production could have helped here, but this was the most confusing of listens I've ever experienced - and I listen to dozens and dozens of books.
Whether intentionally or not (impossible to know in this format), I was never sure which mother and child's flashback story was being referenced at any point. Realizing belatedly that all the back story for character A is in fact that of character B inevitably leaves one cold and uninvolved with the whole thing.
Clearly the author wanted these characters intertwined but the classic crime 'withholding information' technique was a terrible and lazy choice.
Plus there are so many important themes regarding the sexuality of young women and the development of children that the author attempts but only scratches the surface of.
Given the over-all story arc this could have been a fascinating read but it was very much NOT!
I really do not recommend.

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skipping the endless salacious details helps

Reviewed: 09-27-23

I'm working my way through the series but this one is the most pulpy of them so far. Someone's likely told the writers that forensic detailing of sex and violence will sell. Well it probably does (!) but it's BORING as hell to wade through. I delight in the development of complex characters and their relationships under stressful situations. But this couple chose to jettison their character of Linna in (I'm guessing) a failed attempt to compete for Harry Hole fans? What a godawful mess. I actually managed more than half of the story then chucked it in. I never give up on books, but this one . . . Simply ridiculous trash. Ir you like your police procedurals to at least seem likely then avoid this book.

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2 people found this helpful

Not for me.

Reviewed: 09-11-23

Stream of consciousness from 2 characters spouting endlessly repetitive philosophical maunderings that provide little that is surprising or profound. And little actually happens. If the activities that caused the lengthy personal separations, and so the characters' mental pain, were actually described, that might have made for an interesting judgement call. Understanding the on-the-ground actions that infamous world events were causing fairly ordinary individuals to effect could have been very valuable. Instead literally everything is inferred, glossed over, bar one moment where a child is possibly threatened.
I haven't disliked a book quite so much in a long while. So why did I read it all? - I try always to finish any book I've started. Nothing more.

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Muddled and contrived

Reviewed: 06-20-23

I love a whodunnit. And I love a community of characters from a strange place brought to vibrant life. Both these things are here. But the whodunnit is more like - when oh when will the obvious truth become known to the 'central' character of Jess?
And the community is introduced in such a spotty and unstructured way it's really hard to understand who each person is. It's as if the author either knows the community so well she has forgotten to explain it, to lay it out effectively for us, or that she is in fact making it up from nothing, with no preparatory structure, as she goes along.
Right now I'm listening to Nora explaining to her anxious-ridden daughter Polly why an aunt-by-marriage's criminal actions of nearly 20 years ago must now prevent Polly from marrying the man she loves. What? Why? Simply 'shame'?! Such trashy and obvious plotting, crude and unbelievable.
The many and various different written evidences (authorial voice, diary, novel as document, newspaper stories, etc) that Morton employs only add to the confusion as all are written with the same god-as-author authority and voice/style. Post-modern deconstructed story-making of this type has been done so often and so successfully in recent decades that Morton had many brilliant models she might have followed/learned from.
What a mess.
I'm hating the bad writing that even Claire Foy cannot make convincing. And she reads it badly, at a speed (which I've had to lower a point) that's an unshaped gabble of no pauses, no noticeable emphases, sounding like she's attempting to just get through the annoying thing as fast as humanly possible.

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A version of this novel that succeeds in all ways

Reviewed: 06-15-23

I originally read this back in the early 80s and was intrigued of course. So many strands and styles and surrealist absurdities. And we were all obsessed back then with the political implications of 'madness'. But listening to this much better translation in the voices of Julian Rhind-Tutt has helped me better understand why the novel deserves such adoration in Russia.
The structure I think is maybe a result of the writer's terrible suffering under Stalin and I think he has maybe conflated 3 differently intended novels together - The Devil in Moscow, The Master, Margarita and Madness, and The Crucifixion of a Difficult Man.
But it does all hang together - just!
If Neil Gaiman's Good Omens was read by David Tennant I would likely experience the same delight and wonder as I did listening to M and M. It's almost a great and fabulist graphic novel without images!
And I agree with other writers here that the full novel about Pontius Pilate is longed for. Those sections are wonderful time tunnels.
Julian Rhind-Tutt was unknown to me before this, even tho I listen to (and read) 100s of books. And I much prefer British voices as I'm a Brit myself, despite having lived in the US for 27 years. I will now seek out anything and everything Julian has read. I would so love to hear him read Dickens or some other great juicy novels full of mad characters and wild imagery. Bravo!!

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Brilliant

Reviewed: 04-24-23

I love Anne Enright's work (except for the recent publication about Eliza Lynch that I wasn't able to finish). The Gathering is now my favorite. It's not an easy book but endlessly fascinating, twisting and turning. And yet there is no 'plot' as such, but a detailed emotional journey through a period of grieving a close family member, and how that process can force a painful review of everything you hold dear. It's also very much about the legacy of Catholicism in Irish culture and how sex was/is unavoidably loaded with failure and guilt. I love how flawed the central character is. I love how Enright pinpoints the events and moments when different generations must acknowledge the cultural continuities and disruptions between them.
I also LOVED the narration. It is perfectly attuned to all the nuances of the different characters, a reader who knows these people and this culture intimately. This is one I will listen to again.

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