Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich

Posted on November 14, 2011 by pagesofjulia

I enjoyed this book, but I finished it still unsure of what actually happened in the story.

This was my first experience with the acclaimed Louise Erdrich, and she writes beautifully. I easily got lost in each chapter’s character and events; she creates a world, a culture, seemingly without effort and so completely. It was a lovely experience. This book is a series of vignettes, or character studies. Each chapter is told in first person by a different character, or even several different characters within a chapter, which to some extent added to my confusion; but they had pretty distinct voices. All the characters are related by blood, marriage, and/or life events, so there is a cohesion to the book as a whole; it’s not a collection or anything. But I’ll be honest. I sometimes lost track of how the characters were connected & who was who, exactly. Sometimes I flipped around trying to resolve things but mostly (especially as I moved further into the book) I just let myself float around a little bit confused. It worked for me this way. If you do a better job than I did of keeping things straight, I’m sure you’ll find a very enjoyable sum of all parts; but even if you take it in as I did, I think you’ll find a string of remarkable evocative stories.

The characters come from several families of Native Americans (American Indians? I’m not sure what’s correct) in North Dakota. The families overlap and merge, through marriage, the production of children both in and out of (and across) marriages; and in local politics and interactions. Their culture – as Native Americans on “the rez” as well as in each distinct, and indistinct, family unit – is one of the framing elements of the book, and I found the cultural examination very interesting. Their relationship with the “outside world” of white Americans was an important feature, too. Mostly, though, the stories feature relationships between our characters: mothers & children, spouses, lovers, aunts & uncles and neighbors. Love is a theme, and sex, and the question of parentage comes up rather frequently. There is lots of heavy drinking and battling with alcohol.

There is sadness in most of the stories, and death, but there is hope and such a great deal of humor, too. Erdrich succeeds in placing me in a place and a culture and making me feel what her characters are feeling. Her writing is beautiful, musical. And so often funny! I pulled a few passages for you that describe one of our matriarchs:

She agreed, taking alert nips of her perfectly covered slice. She had sprinkled a teaspoon of sugar over it, carefully distributing the grains. That was how she was. Even with eights boys her house was neat as a pin. The candy bowl on the table sat precisely on its doily. All her furniture was brushed and straightened. Her coffee table held a neat stack of Fate and True Adventure magazines. On her walls she’d hung matching framed portraits of poodles, kittens, and an elaborate embroidered portrait of Chief Joseph. Her windowsills were decorated with pincushions in the shapes of plump little hats and shoes.

“I make these.” She cupped a tiny blue sequined pump in her hand. “You have a girlfriend? I’ll give it to you. Here.”

…several pages later, still talking about the same woman:

Lulu was bustling about the kitchen in a calm, automatic frenzy. She seemed to fill pots with food by pointing at them and take things from the oven that she’d never put in. The table jumped to set itself. The pop foamed into glasses, and the milk sighed to the lip. The youngest boy, crushed in a high chair, watched eagerly while things placed themselves around him. Everyone sat down. Then the boys began to stuff themselves with a savage and astonishing efficient. Before Bev had cleaned his plate once, they’d had thirds, and by the time he looked up from dessert, they had melted through the walls. The youngest had levitated from his high chair and was sleeping out of sight.

See, isn’t that funny and evocative?

I found Love Medicine a unique and enjoyable read, if unorthodox in its structure. I recommend it.

For those who have read this book: did I space out somewhere, or did anyone else have trouble holding the family trees together? Does it matter?

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The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood (audio)

Posted on November 12, 2011 by pagesofjulia

Margaret Atwood is a master of world-building. This was a great experience: disturbing, thought-provoking, funny, frightening, and completely real.

In The Year of the Flood, we check in with Toby and with Ren, both weathering out the aftermath of the “waterless flood” that seems to have almost entirely wiped out humankind. We’re also treated to a series of flashbacks to their lives before the flood. In that dystopic world, the CorpSeCorps rule a sinister corporate/business/police state, and the Gardeners preach the gospel of the flood to come and their own brand of “green,” vegetarian, wacky Christianity. Toby was an Eve in the Gardeners, and Ren, a former Gardener, was a sex worker in a high-end club. I don’t want to say much more about plot; the constant discovering of new surprises was very special and I want to preserve that for you.

One of the unique aspects of this audiobook was the songs that accompanied the sermons preached by Adam One, the Gardeners’ leader. For one thing, various narrators are employed, which is always interesting; Adam One has his own narrator, so we hear his sermons in his own voice. I found them creepy, but the hymns were creepier still. Music on an audiobook is a great use of the format, and one I’m mostly unfamiliar with. In this case, they helped set a tone that I found overwhelmingly… disturbing. I’m a little alarmed by organized religion to begin with, and pretty sympathetic to vegetarian-hippie-feel-good systems of thought; but this combination of the two was definitely a little bit cultish and perverse. There is an eerie other-worldly feeling to the pre-flood dystopia. And then of course, our flashbacks to that world are interspliced with tidbits of the lonely experiences of Toby and Ren in the frightening new world, where liobams (lion-lambs) and rackunks (raccoon-skunks) run wild.

And speaking of creepiness, can I mention this? One character is a refugee from Texas, which was made unliveable by a hurricane, which of course wins prizes for believability but the flip side of that coin is it’s a little close to home, Ms. Atwood! She does paint an alarming picture of the-world-as-we-know-it, but different.

There are several qualities that make this book special and remarkable. Toby, Ren, Zeb, and Amanda are all such real and fully-developed characters; they live and breathe. The pre-flood world of the CorpSeCorps and the Gardeners is both fantastic and wild and foreign and also startlingly close to home; this may very well be what we’re headed towards, you’ll think as you read/listen. It, too, is well-developed, fully-realized, frighteningly realistic and possible. The pacing of the story builds the tension perfectly; new tidbits are discovered at just the right moments; the tension grows. At the start of the story, we meet both Toby and Ren, each in her respective hiding place and suspecting she’s the last living human on earth; as the flashbacks unfurl, we learn how each ended up where she is. The jumpy chronology adds to the disjointed feeling the book inspires. It’s really just masterfully done. And the audio was extremely well done, too.

I don’t feel I’ve done this book justice. I don’t want to say too much; but maybe too I’m just not up to the task. I recommend Atwood and, as Valerie pointed out, you should read Oryx and Crake before this one as it is a sequel of sorts; although I think it is very satisfying on its own, too. (I did read the former but have mostly forgotten it…) I also want to direct you to Kerry’s review, also of the audiobook, as she did a great job. (Maybe I’m just having trouble following her!)

This is a creepy-crawly, perfectly executed story about the dystopian future we might be headed towards, and the audio is A+.

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The Broker by John Grisham (audio)

Posted on November 10, 2011 by pagesofjulia

It’s been a few years since I read any Grisham. (As a kid I remember repeatedly rereading The Client and loving it.) He may not be a genius of proper “high” literature but he can be relied upon for a solid legal thriller every once in a while. In fact this one was rather short on the legal part, more of a proper thriller with elements of international intrigue. It made for a great road trip “read” for Husband and I.

Joel Backman was known as “The Broker” in his former life as high-powered Washington, D.C. attorney, lobbyist and power broker. He had connections, he had the big firm, he had the BIG money, and he was known to be rather unscrupulous in the pursuit of the mighty dollar and his clients’ victory. But when the story opens, he’s six years into a prison sentence, serving in isolation. The outgoing president is convinced by the CIA in the final moments of his presidency to pardon Backman – but not for his own good. The CIA is still trying to answer all the questions relating to the Backman case, and they hope that upon his release, they’ll get to sit back and watch who assassinates him, thus resolving a question of national security.

I’ll leave the international espionage parts vague for now – I could spend all day trying to detail this fairly complicated case. If you go check out this book yourself it will all be explained. For now you should know this: Backman is shipped overseas by the CIA and set up with a new identity as Marco Lazare, an Italian raised in Canada and thus just now furiously studying the Italian language. He eventually ends up going on the run, escaping his CIA handlers, dodging possible assassins of a variety of nationalities, and fleeing back to the US to blow the cover off the security concern involving spy satellites and jamming software.

The techies among us will, I daresay, be dissatisfied with the tech details of the case; I think it’s fairly simplistic and a little dated by now. But if you can put this aside (it’s not sci fi, after all), it’s a fun story of intrigue. We have to wonder along with Backman/Marco where the threat is coming from, who he can trust, and what he should do with the information he carries. What he once hoped to make a fortune off of now endangers his life, and The Broker for the first time is concerned with Doing The Right Thing rather than Making The Buck. The greatest sort of plot development is in Backman/Marco’s growth from The Broker into a decent human being.

Husband was disappointed that there wasn’t more blow-em-up gore and bad-ass action (in other words, Backman is no Jack Reacher). But this is just a slightly different kind of book, that’s all. I found it engrossing and entertaining; it did its job. It’s light reading but as such, I thought it was successful.

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Stationary Bike by Stephen King (audio)

Posted on November 9, 2011 by pagesofjulia

I’m going to call this one a short story, at only an hour and a half, unabridged. It made for a nice short entertaining story during our drive up for a bike race a few weeks ago.

Richard Siftkitz is a freelance commercial artist, making his living by drawing and painting commissioned works for advertisements, pamphlets, movies posters, record covers, and the like. He’s 38 years old when the story opens, and his doctor is concerned about his cholesterol level (Richard likes to eat a lot of fast food). The doctor explains the issue with a metaphor: he tells Richard that there is a little team of workmen, of the hardhat-and-work-boots variety, living inside his body, working hard to keep his arteries clear of the junk Richard is putting into them. If they are made to work too hard for too many years, they’ll get tired, start doing sloppy work, and eventually quit or be overcome.

Richard takes this concern to heart, and goes out and buys… that’s right, a stationary bike. He sets it up in the basement of his apartment building and paints a mural on the wall, of a road through a forest. This road represents both the road he pretends he’s riding down, and one of the roads that his little tiny interior metaphorical workmen are keeping cleared for him. He pins up maps on the wall and considers himself to be riding down real roads in upstate New York, eventually achieving the Canadian border and riding onward deep into the Canadian forests. Richard’s very active imagination simultaneously creates full lives for the team of four men he envisions working inside his body. He gives them names and backgrounds and families.

Without ruining too much for you, I will say that Richard’s imagined workmen take on lives of their own, and his imaginary ride through the Canadian woods takes on proportions larger than he meant for it to have. He finds himself in danger.

I found this short audiobook entertaining and spooky. The tension built nicely. There were little clips of music that played in between chapters; it started off sort of Musak-ish, but as the story got creepier, the music got creepier, growing with the mood. It was well done. Luckily (since I’m not real good with horror!) it wasn’t unbearably scary but it did give us some creeps. I liked it.

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Black Sun by Edward Abbey

Posted on November 7, 2011 by pagesofjulia

I love Edward Abbey for Desert Solitaire, and for his reputation (compounded of course by my love of Fire Season too). My Pops has gotten into him this year, and has brought me quite a few of his books, and I’ve been excited to pick them up. I confess I chose this one for its setting as I’m now working on completing the Where Are You Reading? Challenge, and it covers Arizona for me. But oh! this book has value all on its own. Those 3-4 other Abbey books that are sitting on my shelf right now just moved up the list a little bit. He wrote more nonfiction than fiction, and his best-known novel is The Monkey Wrench Gang; this lesser-known novel involves a fire lookout, which was my attraction (see again Fire Season).

The story is this. Will Gatlin has abandoned his life as college professor and husband to become a reclusive fire lookout in the Grand Canyon National Park. He is mostly alone up there, but does get a few visits and letters from his friend Art Ballantine, who still teaches college but expends more energy on chasing women. To say he is obsessed with sex, breasts, the female anatomy (he uses the c-word), young girls in every application, would be putting it mildly; his letters are raving and silly and self-deprecatingly intellectual. And very funny. In between Ballantine missives Will does his fire-lookout work, observes nature – these parts are poetic, loving and appreciative – and carries on a love affair with a girl named Sandy. I’m not sure we ever learn Will’s age, but he is probably old enough to be nineteen-year-old Sandy’s father. She is a virgin when they meet, and engaged to another man, but none of this stops them from cavorting the wilds (desert, river, canyon and forest) in the nude, wittily teasing one another and having wonderful sex. Here Abbey falls into that lamentable and oh-so-distinctive habit that older male writers sometimes fall into (Papa included!) of creating nubile young beauties who want nothing more than to have endless sex with old men. It’s unfortunate in that it seems to give away the author’s own dirty-old-man fantasies (I don’t know this about Abbey in particular but it is my reaction to the cliché). But if we can move past this issue, Will and Sandy have a great time running around the wilderness, la dee da. That is, until Sandy disappears and her fiancé shows up to accuse Will of disappearing her and punches him in the face.

Abbey writes beautifully, lyrically about nature and about love or at least attraction. The letters from Ballantine (and others) are amusing. The story is tragic, but it requires a certain overlooking of the older man’s fantasy before we could really sympathize with Will’s sense of loss. If you can move past this, it’s a beautiful little story with flora and fauna of the Grand Canyon painting the background. I was only partly successful in that requisite overlooking, but enjoyed it all the same. I have great hope for the other Abbey books waiting on my shelves.

I thought I could clearly see connections in Abbey’s writing style and subject matter to Keruoac, as well as Philip Connors, who in Fire Season acknowledges the debt. I recommend Black Sun, unless of course you’ve had too much euphoric losing of teenage virginities to much older men, in which case perhaps start with Desert Solitaire and I’ll let you know how the rest of them go, too!

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Into the Silence by Wade Davis

Posted on November 6, 2011 by pagesofjulia

An epic history of adventure and adversity, of one man and a nation’s quest for redemption.

In Into the Silence, Wade Davis (The Wayfinders, The Serpent and the Rainbow) portrays several attempts to climb Mount Everest during the 1920s within the context of the state of the British Empire after the First World War. With the benefit of new access to primary sources, he begins with visceral descriptions of the Great War in all its horrifying violence, as seen through the eyes of several players in the later Everest drama, and then follows these men through the postwar numbness of a Britain that had lost the bulk of a generation. Davis makes a convincing argument that the assault on Everest was “the ultimate gesture of imperial redemption.”

George Mallory was the star of three successive attempts to summit a mountain that was at the time a complete mystery–its weather patterns and geography entirely unknown, the cultures that surrounded it viewed by the British with a misguided paternalism. Along with a host of fellow climbers, adventurers and scientists, Mallory was driven toward an accomplishment that the nation came to grasp as an outlet for its frustrations and a hopeful liberating triumph. While he was the principal character in the eyes of his contemporaries and in history, the other explorers also receive well-deserved and detailed attention in Davis’s account.

Into the Silence is a book about mountaineering and a respectable adventure epic with all the alpinist details, but it’s also so much more: a heartbreaking portrayal of war; the story of more than a dozen individuals whose lives were rocked by a war and a mountain; and finally, a history of a nation watching its own imperial era come to an end.

This review originally ran in the November 4, 2011 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

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Definitely Dead by Charlaine Harris (audio)

Posted on November 5, 2011 by pagesofjulia

Definitely Dead is a Sookie Stackhouse book from the Southern Vampire Mystery series. Yes. Southern Vampire Mystery Series. The television series True Blood is based on these books. This is not my standard reading material, but (this is becoming a theme) I picked it to cover Louisiana for the Where Are You Reading? Challenge, on rhapsodyinbooks‘s recommendation. I like James Lee Burke for Louisiana normally, but took this opportunity to expand my knowledge (if not my reading loves) – for professional reasons as a librarian, if for no other reason. One of my first pleasant surprises was the narration; Johanna Parker’s southern accent is fun. (Her Irish accent, for Father Riordan, on the other hand, is a travesty. Luckily we don’t hear too much from him.) The redeeming features didn’t end there; Sookie is a pleasant, likeable enough protagonist. She’s a little bumbling, and she struggles a little bit with her sense of self-worth, but she’s not whiny; she’s just human. Ha – that’s a joke, as her being human makes her fairly unique in Bon Temps, Louisiana, a world full of supernatural beings: were-wolves, were-panthers, were-tigers, vampires, goblins, and sundry shape-shifters.

In this book, Sookie is being attacked by various enemies: one, the family of the Pelt girl that she apparently killed in an earlier book, and two, okay I won’t give it away just yet… The vampire Queen of Louisiana (what a funny phrase, it made me smile every time) marries the King of Arkansas (even funnier!) in a political match, but Sophie’s cousin Hadley is the Queen’s real love. Hadley has just died, and when Sookie goes into New Orleans to clean out her apartment she finds a dead werewolf in the closet – and the intrigue just increases from there. Meanwhile, Sookie begins to date a sexy were-tiger, Quinn; he’s there with her when she’s attacked on several occasions, so they bond while fighting various supernatural beings. There is an unusual sex scene between the two of them that I am still contemplating and finding unlikely, but I’ll let you discover that one on your own.

It’s an odd world that Harris builds here; a number of phrases got me giggling just for their oddity (I wish I’d taken better notes here). It was strange enough to me that the novelty was rather amusing, although I guess regular readers of paranormal whatnot are beyond this. Sookie is relatively charming, and Quinn is an attractive character; I found myself entertained once I got into things. But this book is no literary feat. The dialog can be awkward, and I found enough grammatical errors to be distracting.

In the end, this wasn’t a painfully bad book to listen to. (Well, the cd’s in my audio copy were badly scratched and sometimes that got a little painful, but I don’t hold Harris or Sookie responsible for that.) It had its moments, but it failed to make me care deeply; the world Harris built was more silly than interesting. Unfortunately I don’t care what happens to Sookie next, although I wish her well.

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The Story of Beautiful Girl by Rachel Simon

Posted on November 2, 2011 by pagesofjulia

I have a lovely book to tell you about today. I’m sorry I took so long to read The Story of Beautiful Girl.

We follow three characters for the course of the book. Lynnie is a beautiful young woman at the beginning, living at “the School” (that is, the School for the Incurable and Feebleminded in Pennsylvania) because she is mentally retarded. No one knows that Number Forty-Two’s name is actually Homan; he is deaf and no one around him understands his brand of sign language, so he has landed at the School as well (he thinks of it as the Snare). And Martha is in her seventies, widowed and living alone in the opening scene in which all three lives coincide.

Martha opens the door in a rainstorm to find Lynnie and Homan standing on her stoop cradling a new-born babe. As Lynnie and her baby are both white and Homan is black, Martha assumes he is not its father; but while these questions of race are clear at a glance, it takes her a little longer to observe that her guests are differently abled. She clothes them and they hide their small charge in her attic just as the authorities arrive; Lynnie is tied up and taken back to the School, and Homan disappears into the woods.

Now we follow the three as they lead independent lives. Martha had a baby many years ago who turned out to be “defective” – we never learn the details – and never left the hospital with her; now she gets to start fresh with the newborn that has been entrusted to her. Lynnie goes back to a miserable institution. Homan runs, intending to return and rescue Lynnie but being thwarted, victimized, blown around the country like a leaf; being unable to communicate cripples him at least as surely as any physical disability. Martha leaves her home to hide the baby whose provenance she can’t explain; she moves around, fleeing the possibility of discovery. Eventually she takes on the identity of grandmother to the child she names Julia, and eventually she is able to start a new life and find new joy and happiness with Julia’s help. She finds a way to turn a spotlight on Lynnie’s plight, and the School is closed down. Lynnie gradually grows as a person; with the help of a School caretaker who becomes and remains a friends, she learns to speak again, learns to read and write and carry on a life. But she always looks for Homan, who never stops thinking of her either – his Beautiful Girl.

This is a beautiful love story, and a story of families and parents trying their best. Several relationships are rekindled after years apart (romantic and otherwise). There is also an exposé of institutions like the School, which is heartbreaking and true-to-life. Simon’s bestselling memoir, Riding the Bus with My Sister, chronicles her experience reconnecting with her sister Beth, a mentally retarded woman as well, and her Author’s Note explains her connection to the subject matter and how she went about her research. I enjoyed this brief look into the process.

This is a lovely book. Sad, yes, but also redemptive. I recommend it highly. (And, it fulfills Pennsylvania for me in the ever-present-these-days Where Are You Reading? Challenge. :))

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Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson

Posted on October 31, 2011 by pagesofjulia

Winesburg, Ohio is a collection of short stories that is more than the sum of its parts; the short stories are connected, all being set in the fictional town of Winesburg and concerning overlapping characters. We are most interested in George Willard, a town native who we most often see as a young man working as a reporter at the town paper (or, “the” reporter). Several of the stories give us Willard’s experiences (always in third person), but a number of them concern other inhabitants of the town. These men and women usually have some small personal tragedy that has thrown off the rhythm or intentions of their lives.

The work as a whole has a very quiet, contemplative tone and mood. Very little of great import goes on; but simple, sad lives are carried out, and hearts are broken quietly. It is moving. Anderson excels at bringing a character to life for a brief moment; and then he moves on.

I came to this book through Hemingway’s recommendation (and was finally motivated to get it off the bookshelf for the Where Are You Reading? Challenge‘s Ohio requirement). It has been a little while since I’ve read a biography of Hemingway so I’m a little rusty on the details, but I recall that Anderson played a role in his early writing career – encouraged him to write, gave him tips, maybe recommended him for publication. I think he pushed Hem to move to Paris as a youngster, which he did with his first wife Hadley, with results that I think we can safely say influenced his career as a writer. Anderson definitely influenced his style; I got this out of Malcolm Cowley’s excellent introduction, but it’s readily evident even without that clue. The same short, simple sentences that say so much with so few words are recognizable in Anderson’s stories; see my book beginnings post, or:

The Presbyterian Church held itself somewhat aloof from the other churches of Winesburg. It was larger and more imposing and its minister was better paid. He even had a carriage of his own and on summer evenings sometimes drove about town with his wife. Through Main Street and up and down Buckeye Street he went, bowing gravely to the people, while his wife, afire with secret pride, looked at him out of the corners of her eyes and worried lest the horse become frightened and run away.

This quotation comes from “The Strength of God,” one of my favorite stories.

As character sketches, these short stories are outstanding. As a whole, though, this book failed to grasp me the way I’d hoped – certainly it failed to grasp me the way Hemingway does. While I saw Papa on these pages, unmistakably, I was also constantly reminded of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, another quiet, subdued story about everyday, small-town life and its quiet tragedies. Perhaps it is the repetition of that phrase, “Main Street,” that got me, but I kept seeing Lewis’s work in this one, and frankly Main Street is a more memorable book. Like happens to me sometime when I fail to deeply appreciate one of the “classics” (ahem The Picture of Dorian Gray), I worry that it’s me, not the book, that I’ve missed something beautiful that would be obvious to someone with just a little higher IQ. I have to shrug this off, though. This collection does have value; I don’t want to give an impression otherwise, it just might not be *my* ideal cup. Almost every story builds a character who is real and often sympathetic. The tone is unique and if nothing else, the view into small-town life of a certain era is fairly unique. We can’t all love the same books, and life is more colorful for it.

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The Affair by Lee Child (audio)

Posted on October 30, 2011 by pagesofjulia

The brand-newest Reacher, just out a few weeks now, is another flashback or prequel: it’s 1997, and Reacher is still in the army. He is sent out to Carter Crossing, Mississippi to do damage control on a murder case that threatens the army’s good reputation. There’s a lot of politics involved: the local army base is sending companies secretly into Kosovo, and one of the captains in question is the son of a senator in the Armed Services Committee. It develops that this very captain has some connections to the murdered woman – or maybe his father the senator does. Reacher breezes into town intending to remain under cover while investigating the case parallel to the above-board MP working from the base; but his cover is immediately blown by the local sheriff, a former Marine MP herself. The one murdered woman turns out to be the third in a series of similar killings – the first two having been ignored apparently because they were black. And then more people start dying. What exactly is going on here? And who can Reacher trust? He’s inclined to trust Elizabeth Devereaux, the sheriff, but he’s getting conflicting messages from various sources at the army.

The Affair is in several ways a standard Reacher production, and in several ways not. Reacher does his investigating; he’s a smart guy and he figures things out; he eventually will get the bad guy(s), no doubt about that. There is rather less ass-kicking in this book, though. Husband was disappointed, and I was just flat-out surprised at how easily and relatively bloodlessly the hooligans were taken down. There is rather more sex – Reacher does tend to get laid in many of the books, but the sex got a little more attention in this one. It was well done – I’m not complaining – but I was a little confused at the shifting focus. I wonder if Child has figured out that he has a number of female fans swooning over Reacher and decided to play up to them (us)? As a swooning Reacher fan myself, let me say: more ass-kicking please! I don’t begrudge him the sex but that was never the primary focus, and I’d rather stick with the classic model of ass-kicking with sex on the side, rather than the other way around.

This bit is very slightly spoilery… I had some trouble suspending disbelief as we discovered all the mistakes made by the illustrious Elizabeth Devereaux in investigating the murders before Reacher’s arrival. If she’s such a veteran hotshot MP herself, how did she miss that there was no blood on the white collar of the woman who had her THROAT CUT? Etc. She beats Neagley at the mind game at which the latter supposedly excels but makes all kinds of amateurish mistakes in the murder investigation. It just didn’t ring true for me. End spoiler. But hey, maybe I’m just mad at the whole Reacher camp right now because… have you heard? They’ve cast Tom Cruise, of all people, to play him in the movie they’re making of One Shot! Blasphemy, says I. Reacher is supposed to be 6’3″ and 230+ pounds, muscular, and blonde. Sigh. And I’m not alone – you should see the Reacher fans raising hell over at the facebook page.

But all in all, this was another satisfying edition of the Reacher adventure. I liked it. It just wasn’t my favorite. I wonder where Child is going to take Reacher from here? It occurs to me that he’s getting older (possibly a reason to keep writing prequels!) – but Child came up with another possible plot thread here: the younger version of Reacher, named Duncan Monroe, just a bit earlier in his career and otherwise apparently a spitting image. I guess we could always revisit Monroe as Reacher ages. What do you do with an aging hero? Realistically we could see him forced to accept some realities and calm down a bit; but action/adventure/thriller/hero/mysteries don’t always take the realistic route! At any rate I’m still hooked in. What’s next, Reacher?

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