Author: trudyj65

The Scent of Oranges, by Kathy George

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Like the last book I read/reviewed, The Scent of Oranges is another in the genre of novels that take a well-known story featuring a man, and re-tell it from a woman’s point of view. I love reading these types of books and many writers do a great job of it. The danger from a reader’s perspective is that I might also have, in my own mind, an idea of how that story might go from that woman’s point of view, which may conflict with the author’s.

Such is the case with The Scent of Oranges, a very good re-telling of Charles Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist from the perspective of the young prostitute Nancy. It’s quite an enjoyable novel; I didn’t feel like the author always nailed Nancy’s voice, which she attempts to render in dialect that sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t, and a subplot that’s not in the original novel is initially intriguing but doesn’t, for me, pay off in an interesting way. But these are not major criticisms.

My only real reservation in reading this book was that several years ago, I also had the idea of writing about Oliver Twist as Nancy’s story, only I wrote a never-performed (and likely never-to-be-performed) play about her. It was my first foray into play writing and not very strong, but I liked my version better (especially the ending) and kept wishing The Scene of Oranges would nudge the story in that direction. That’s not, of course, fair at all to the author or the novel, so it’s not really a critique at all. But I sat down and re-read my own play the day after I finished this, and I still like my own version best!

No Friend to this House, by Natalie Haynes

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Once again, Natalie Haynes has taken on one of the classic tales of Greek mythology and retold it from the point of view, not just of a woman, but of many women. The central character is Medea, who marries Jason of Argonaut/Golden-Fleece fame, then murders their children when he marries someone else — like many of the women in mythology, a hard character to make sympathetic. Haynes manages it of course, but she also, as in A Thousand Ships (my favourite of her books) gives voice not just to Medea but to many, many other women mentioned peripherally in the tales of Jason and the Argonauts. While I didn’t find this as absolutely compelling as A Thousand Ships, I do continue to love how she finds the women’s voices within these myths and makes them feel fresh and believable.

Innocent Blood, by P.D. James

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This was the very odd case of a book I genuinely enjoyed reading — I read it quickly and was engrossed in it the whole time –while disliking pretty much every character intensely (with a few minor exceptions).

The book is set in the 1970s, when a change in UK law has allowed adoptive children to find out information about their birth families. Philippa, who has been raised as the daughter of university professor Maurice and his ineffectual wife Hilda, has just turned 18 and learned the names of her birth parents. Worse, she has learned that the reason she was given up for adoption is that her parents committed and covered up a heinous crime. Her father has died in prison and her mother is nearing the end of a long jail sentence. Philippa is accustomed a comfortable life and a comforting backstory about her birth parents, none of which is true. Though grateful to Maurice and Hilda, she seems very detached from them (in fact I would say she seems almost incapable of warm feelings towards anyone, at least as the book opens) and immediately decides to find and make contact with her birth mother, soon to be released from prison.

The way in which Philippa goes about doing this is so incredibly ill-conceived that it made me lose any degree of sympathy I had for her. Everything that happens as a result feels increasingly wrong and weird, especially Philippa’s attitude towards her mother’s crime. I couldn’t stop reading to find out how it all worked out, but I felt like I’d had an awful time in the company of bad people when I finished the book.

Everyone in this Bank is a Thief, by Benjamin Stevenson

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Once again, Benjamin Stevenson brings us into a situation where a whole lot of people — previously, everyone in his family and everyone on a train — could be suspected of a crime. This time it’s ostensibly a bank robbery, but if you don’t think there’s going to be murder, you really aren’t prepared for what you’re reading.

The hapless yet somehow crime-solving Ernest Cunningham is at the wrong place, wrong time, when the bank where he is trying to obtain a loan for his detective agency is held up and everyone in the building is held hostage. There’s already been a mystery even before the bank robber arrives — the co-owner of the bank has mysteriously gone missing, taking the combination to the vault with him — and things only get more tangly and complicated from there. It’s a fun ride, as always, and I did not foresee any of the twists coming. Stevenson’s/Cunningham’s fourth-wall breaking habit of confiding in the reader about the rules of mystery writing and how his story will rigidly adhere to those rules continues, and I find that entertaining, even if the premise of how he’s actually writing the story, in this one, stretches even the most generous suspension of disbelief. It was a fun read.

Missing Sister, by Joshilyn Jackson

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Of all the books Joshilyn Jackson has written since taking a turn towards thrillers, this is my favourite. Even though the danger, the thrills, the dark crime stuff is all there – intensely! – it also has the warmth of her earliest books, the strong sense of family, of self-discovery that threads through her novels.

The titular Missing Sister is Nix, Penny’s twin, who isn’t really missing but dead, five years earlier. Penny has become a cop, as if she can somehow right the injustice of the world that led to her sister’s death. There’s also a brother, who has gone the opposite direction from Penny, living an apparently carefree lifestyle travelling around in his van and doing vaguely wellness-y stuff on Instagram, while his and Penny’s parents raise his teenage daughter. So, there’s a lot going on in Penny’s world.

Everything comes together when Penny is called to a crime scene and find that the victim is one of the men she believes is responsible for Nix’s death. Then she finds … maybe? … the person who killed him, and things get a lot more complicated.

There are a couple of great twists to this plot that I did not see coming, and it kept me turning pages from the minute I picked it up till I put it down, with brief breaks for sleep and life. I think I read it in a day. Highly recommend this one.

The Safekeep, by Yael Van Der Wouden

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This is a beautifully written, quiet but very intense novel, set in the Netherlands in 1961. The main character is Isabel, a young woman of about thirty living alone in her family home. Her parents are dead and both her brothers are off living their lives, but Isabel seems stuck in place, unable to move forward. There were times in the first part of the book when I wondered whether disliking Isabel as a character (she can be pretty awful to other people) would keep me from being immersed in the book, but that didn’t happen — I’m not sure I ever liked her, though I grew to understand her better, but most importantly I was interested in her and what happened to her.

Isabel’s narrow life becomes complicated when a series of events (most of which are not clear to the reader until later) lead her brother’s girlfriend Eva, whom Isabel can’t stand, to stay with her at her house while the brother is out of the country.

(Interesting side note: for a novel that is about as far on the other end of the literary spectrum as possible from Heated Rivalry, my same caveat applies to this book: there are quite explicit intimate scenes that not every reader is going to be comfortable reading. Here, the effect is definitely more unsettling than titillating even for people who enjoy “spice” in their fiction).

Two thirds of the way through the book, there’s an unexpected twist and some revelations that cast a new light on everything that’s gone before. The one really major critique I have of this novel is of nothing between the pages: it’s that the blurb accompanying the novel in online bookstores and Goodreads (which I assume is also the backcover or inside-flap blurb on the actual book; I’m not sure because I read an e-book copy) gives far too much away. It doesn’t explicitly spoil the twist, but it gives a lot of information that is revealed more subtly in the book, so that I knew there would be a twist, knew what clues to pay attention to, and saw the twist coming in advance — thus, I lost the surprise of discovery and revelation that should be there. If I were the author I’d have complained to the publisher about the blurb and made them rewrite it.

Genocide Bad, by Sim Kern

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This book was thought-provoking and sometimes difficult, even though the audiobook (read by the author) was easy to listen to. It took me awhile because I kept pausing for a few days between listens to absorb and think, not just about the book but my reactions to it.

Sim Kern is a Jewish anti-Zionist, pro-Palestine activist who became well-known on TikTok for videos condemning Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Kern’s premise is simple, and it’s all in the title: Genocide is bad, no matter who is committing it or for what reasons, and it can never be justified.

I’m definitely in agreement with this premise, and absolutely in agreement that, while the Hamas terrorist attacks of October 7, 2023, were horrific crimes, the Israeli government response has been brutal and disproportionate. Kern dives deeply into history that goes back long before October 7, to the roots of the Zionist movement. Their basic premise is that the statement “Israel has a right to exist” is incorrect: no nation has a right to exist as an ethno-state that only offers full citizenship and human rights to one group of people.

Again, so far, so good. However, I think Kern’s speculations about what “Free Palestine” might mean in practice are unrealistic and oversimplified. Kern is an anti-capitalist and an anarchist who believes in the dismantling of all empires and all oppressive systems, and urgers their readers to imagine broader possible futures than capitalism and neo-liberalism allow. While I’m not an anarchist, I definitely agree that there are better ways to imagine and organize human societies than what we’re currently doing, and imagining and exploring such possibilities could lead us to a more peaceful and sustainable world.

But I think you also have to be a realist and recognize that often (many times just in my lifetime), well-intentioned revolutionary movements calling for freedom have been co-opted by totalitarians, so that people wanting freedom end up just living under a different type of authoritarianism. I absolutely believe that the horrific and genocidal attacks on the people of Gaza by the current Israeli government need to stop, and that anything Canadian government, institutions, and business can do to stop funding this is essential. I also believe that all Israelis and all Palestinians deserve to live in peace and freedom. But the path to getting there is hardly straightforward, and ignoring the possibility that a “free Palestine” could become a puppet state for another power, posing the threat of another genocide against Israeli Jews, is naive.

This book definitely opened my eyes to some history and some present reality that I was previously unaware of, and confirmed my belief that, yes, “genocide bad” in any and every situation. I just think the path out of the current situation that Kern proposes is, like most proposals put forward by anarchists, a utopian dream that doesn’t honestly wrestle with geopolitical realities. So on that ground, it left me with mixed feelings.

Gin, Turpentine, Pennyroyal, Rue, by Christine Higdon

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This book is such a good example of why I generally think it’s a bad idea to DNF (Do Not Finish, for those of you not over-immersed in online booktalk) a book. I made two stabs at getting into this book, could not get into it either time, and each time put it aside for something more urgent, like a library hold coming due or a book I was just more excited about reading. But I gave it a third chance, and on the third try I got past those first few chapters, got to know the characters, and I was hooked.

The novel tells the story of four young women, sisters — Georgina, Morag, Isla and Harriet — in early 1920s Vancouver. Some of the ground trodden here is familiar — the aftermath of the First World War and the flu pandemic (which killed the sisters’ only brother); the frustration of women making their way in a male-dominated world. But there are subjects explored here that don’t make it into a lot of historical fiction — as the title (four traditional abortifacents) suggests, the inciting incident for the story is a botched back-alley abortion. Gender and sexual orientation come into question as well, with gender-nonconforming and gay/lesbian characters trying to carve out a space to live and love how they want in a world that has no room for them.

The writing is beautiful, often lyrical, and I came to love all the characters (including the family dog, from whose point of view a few chapters are narrated). Very glad I gave this novel three chances!

Heated Rivalry (and others in the series), by Rachel Reid

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Well well, what to say about the unexpectedly hottest Canadian book series of the year? I have not read the whole series, but I read the first two books, Game Changer and Heated Rivalry, and then jumped ahead to The Long Game, which continues the story of Shane and Ilya from Heated Rivalry. Also, I watched the TV series, which is surprisingly much, much better than you’d think a miniseries based on a smutty gay hockey romance to be. (Or than you’d usually expect a Canadian TV series to be, honestly — we’ve had a few big hits but Canadian TV often feels low-budget in a way this definitely does not).

First, let’s address the “smut” factor. Some might call this smut; some might call it a very spicy romance. (The author herself uses the term “cute smut” for her writing). In other words, there a sexually explicit scenes. It’s not porn or erotica because the explicit scenes are not the only thing going on; there’s a strong storyline and great, well-drawn characters. But there are explicit sex scenes, between two men, and if explicit scenes are not your thing you may want to skip this series.

Or, as I do (and do in pretty much any book with explicit scenes), just skip those scenes. I have absolutely no judgement on anyone else for what they want to read, but I do not enjoy reading detailed descriptions of anyone having sex, whether they’re gay, lesbian, straight, or any other combo you might be able to think up. It just doesn’t interest me and always makes me feel a little icky, like I’ve violated someone’s privacy, even though I know they’re fictional characters. So this was always going to be an unlikely read for me.

And yet, once the cultural buzz around it got loud enough, I picked up the first book out of curiosity and genuinely liked it. The premise of all these books is “there are gay hockey players in the NHL who can’t come out because of the extremely homophobic subculture of hockey players and fans” and though the characters differ, the conflict is basically the same in every book. The TV series focuses on the couple at the centre of the second and sixth books, Canadian Shane Hollander and Russian Ilya Rosanov, the two greatest players of their generation, whose on-ice rivalry runs parallel (for like TEN YEARS!) with a spicy but completely secret off-ice affair. First it’s “just” sex, with intense but only very occasional hookups when they happen to be in the same city (usually because their teams are playing against each other; they play for lightly fictionalized versions of Montreal and Boston, two teams with a long and storied rivalry). But eventually, hot secret hookups turn to true love, and Shane and Ilya must decide if they can risk their careers to be together openly.

The thing with this series is, as Stephen Fry once said about the music of ABBA: it’s so much better than it needs to be. Yes, all the romance tropes, the archetypes, the predictable outcomes are here — but, as in the very best romance, the fun is in getting to know the characters and seeing how they get to their happy ending. A good romance writer can make us feel like there’s real stakes to the outcome, even though we know going in that there has to be some version of happily ever after. Another skill with great romance writing is making the setting feel real, vivid, and believable, rather than feeling like it’s a Hallmark movie that takes place in “Anytown, USA” and this is another area where Rachel Reid shines. Not only is Shane Hollander’s Montreal a real and recognizable version of that city (as are Ottawa and Boston, not to mention Shane’s cottage-country Ontario summer place, all key locations in the books), but the on- and off-ice atmosphere of professional hockey feels vivid and engrossing and believable. In fact I’m probably the only reader to feel that both books and TV series would be even better if there were less on-page/on-screen sex and more hockey, but that’s me!

I probably won’t read every book in this series (the NHL is littered with out gay players by the time you get through it all) but I will read Unrivaled, the conclusion to Shane and Ilya’s story, when it comes out this fall, because I really enjoy those characters and their world.