Book Round-Up: Belated Christmas Edition

 A Surprise for Christmas and other Seasonal Mysteries, ed. by Martin Edwards: Another collection of Golden Age mysteries put out by the British Library. I don't know why Christmas and cozy mysteries go together, but they do.

The Great Christmas Knit-Off by Alexandra Brown: It's your standard city-girl-whose-life-is-falling-apart-relocates-to-quirky-village tale. Done well, they can be fun and comforting, but this one was too slapstick for my tastes. Why do so many books (and movies) like this revel in humiliating the protagonist repeatedly, before she finally gets the man, new job, and new home? It did inspire me to crochet (not knit) a Christmas pudding, though:

 My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories, ed. by Stephanie Perkins: Some of these YA short stories were great (like Kelly Link's, one of my favorite authors, and Rainbow Rowell's). Some were ... not. For a genre that has a reputation for being inclusive and progressive, there were a whole lot of stereotypes.

Christmas with L.M. Montgomery and Christmas with Louisa May Alcott: These were adorable chapbooks collecting 2-3 short stories by the authors in question. I preferred the Montgomery stories, because they seemed intended for adults. Next year I want to pick up the others in the series -- Dickens, O'Henry, and Hans Christian Anderson.

I finished all of these before the end of the Christmas season, I swear.

Book Round-Up

Darned if You Do by Monica Ferris: the latest but one of the Crewel World series, this novel had some sloppy editing, but it was made up by a genuinely interesting mystery.  Ferris's character development continues to shine.

Rose Cottage by Mary Stewart: A quiet, gentle story set in post-war England, this novel is part mystery, part family drama, and part romance, but is mostly a pleasant diversion.

The Strawberry Hearts Diner by Carolyn Brown: This was ... kind of awful.  I'm all for cozy novels set in cute small towns, but this was too unrealistic.  The small-town superiority was too ridiculous, the characters' relationships developed far too quickly, the alleged conflicts were too minor (or just petered out instead of being resolved). I ended up skimming through to the anti-climactic ending, and it wasn't worth it.

The Mystery of the Yellow Room by Gaston Leroux: Published in 1907, it's one of the first locked room mysteries, and well constructed; I was able to accurately guess the perpetrator of the crime and his motive, but the way he did it confounded me. It's also a product of its time; the success of the crime hinged in part on two people deliberately impeding the investigation to protect someone's honor -- not an internal sense of honor that comes from integrity, but an external one based on reputation.  I have little patience for that sort of thing, and it kept me from appreciating the novel as much as I should have.

The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown

Brown's first novel, The Weird Sisters,is a smart, delightful book about three sisters who come home to their parents to lick their wounds and help their mother through a bout of cancer.  As tends to happen in these kinds of stories, each sister confronts a truth about herself and sets off on a new, hopefully better path.

At the start, the three sisters describe themselves as failures, which is not a term I would use.  Lost, certainly, and stuck in a rut, and having made some really bad decisions, but "failure" has a ring of finality to it that I don't think applies to them.  None of them has actually failed; for Rose and Cordy, an earlier stage of life has simply come to an end, and even in Bean's case the problem is not in her capabilities but in bad habits she needs to leave behind.

What makes this novel better than others of its ilk is how smart it is.  Brown does not make the mistake of thinking that a man will solve each of their problems, nor does she downplay the consequences of their behavior.  There is no false dichotomy between the city and the small hometown, between a career and a family, between academia and the real world.  While the end result for each of the family members is not surprising, it is not unearned, either.

What makes this book stylistically unusual is the choice of a first-person-plural narration.  The three sisters narrate the story together, as a "we," which does an excellent job of showing how these three people, as different as they are, have a shared history and love for each other.