Fear Nothing, by Lisa Gardner

D.D. Warren is injured returning to a murder scene on her own late at night. Still off work and in great pain weeks after the injury, she agrees to see a pain therapist, Dr. Adeline Glen. Ironically, Glen herself has a rare genetic condition that prevents her from feeling any pain, an ailment that causes her to be extremely cautious in the way she lives her life. She is the daughter of a notorious serial killer who stripped skin from his victims and stored it in Mason jars; her sister Shana Day is also a convicted serial killer whom she visits monthly. And, coincidentally, the cases D.D.'s squad is working also involve strips of skin being cut from the victims postmortem.

The theme of this book (to the extent that mysteries have themes) is nature vs. nurture--Adeline was raised by a loving adoptive father, Shana spent her youth in a series of foster homes. The exploration of this theme is not very satisfying and the descriptions of the many crimes that occur in the course of the investigation are a bit too graphic. I was listening to a recorded version of the book and I occasionally felt slightly nauseous during skin-stripping activities.

Definitely not the best in the D.D. Warren series, but if you like your mysteries gory, Fear Nothing may be right up your alley.

Girl with Glasses: My Optic History, by Marissa Walsh

For Valentine's Day, Audible offered several free downloads from which subscribers could choose. I picked Girl with Glasses because I am one (though an old girl transitioning after cataract surgery to being a girl with glasses part-time) and because the reviews said the brief memoir was funny. Sorry to say I didn't laugh once while listening to the book. I guess I never felt sufficiently put-upon for having to wear glasses and prefer not to fall prey to stereotypes about us or about our supposed cute-girl rivals. Many of the vignettes that Walsh relates reminded me of pointless stories about my younger days that my children greet with a perplexed look that suggests they're still waiting for the punchline. I certainly don't imagine that those stories are interesting enough to be published!

After I'm Gone, by Laura Lippman

Felix Brewer's illegal gambling operation provides a good living for his family--wife Bambi and daughters Linda, Rachel, and Michelle. Then, when he is convicted of racketeering charges, he disappears, leaving his family and his mistress Julie behind. Julie, to whom he has signed over a coffee shop (his one legitimate business), does well financially. Bambi and her girls, to whom he has apparently left nothing, struggle financially. Many in Bambi's circle assume that either Felix abandoned his family in every sense or Julie somehow stole the money intended for Bambi and her daughters. Then, ten years after Felix's disappearance, Julie disappears, too, sparking more rumors, this time that she has gone to be with Felix. Fifteen years later, Julie's body is found in a nearby park, but her murder is never solved. Fast forward to 2012--Roberto "Sandy" Sanchez, widower,  retired police officer, and failed restaurateur, is now a consultant to the Baltimore Police Department, working on cold cases. Based on a picture in the file, he chooses Julie's case to investigate.

Sandy's investigation provides the narrative glue for the story, which bounces back and forth in time, between 1959 (when Felix and Bambi, a Bryn Mawr dropout, met) and 2012. The narrator also changes, with Sandy and all the women left behind by Felix given their own voices. Through the chapters narrated by Bambi, Linda, Rachel, Michelle, and Julie, we see how they dealt with his disappearance--and continued dealing with it nearly 40 years later. While all three of the Brewer daughters struggle at some point in their growing up, they all manage to elicit the reader's sympathy. The two adult women once again illustrate how hard it is to understand sexual/romantic attraction--why does Bambi put up with Felix's infidelities before his disappearance (yes, I know it was a different era and women like her didn't have many options)? Why is Julie still waiting for Felix ten years later and why is she still fascinated with Bambi? These are larger mysteries to me than who killed Julie.

n fact, while I enjoyed following Sandy's investigation, the mystery seemed less central to the book than the examination of the Brewer family dynamics--the secrets they kept from each other, the sacrifices they made for each other. The family's friendship with Bert and Lorraine, Felix's old buddy/lawyer and his wife, is also fascinating, as Bambi and Lorraine work hard to maintain the friendship, even when changes in their economic status pose challenges (and they judge each others' tastes and behaviors).

The mystery was slightly marred by Lippman's red herrings that so obviously pointed to one or another suspect that you felt pretty confident that person would not end up being the murderer. Fans of the Tess Monaghan series will enjoy a brief appearance by Tess's husband Crow and her daughter Scout. I'm curious whether Sandy may become a recurring character--I'd definitely read another book featuring the character, but I hope we'll get a Tess book first!

All in all, an enjoyable read with more depth than your average mystery.

Favorite passage:
Did you know the more we tell a story, the more degraded it becomes? Factually, I mean. It’s like taking a beloved but fragile object out of a box and turning it over in your hands. You damage it every time. 

The Valley of Amazement, by Amy Tan

Violet Minturn is an American girl growing up in early 20th-century Shanghai. Her home is the only first class courtesan house owned by an American madam--her mother Lulu. Violet is a bit of a brat--she is furious because she feels neglected and unloved by her mother who is too busy with her business to pay much attention to Violent, and she takes out that fury on the "flowers" (the courtesans). She spies on them with their customers and generally makes herself a pest.

Then, as Violet is about to enter her teen years, her life is thrown into chaos. She discovers that she is half Chinese (there have been hints about this before, but she thought they were the taunts of people jealous of her) and has a brother. Lulu decides to pack up and head for San Francisco to reunite with her son. She entrusts part of the preparations for the trip to one of her longstanding customers, and she ends up on the boat while Violet is sold to a courtesan house as a "Virgin Courtesan." By coincidence, a courtesan her mother fired years ago is in the same house, and she takes Violet under her wing. A lengthy section is taken up with this woman, Magic Gourd, providing advice to Violet about how to be a successful courtesan.

And Violet does become a successful courtesan. Her personal life is less successful as she stumbles through a series of relationships that all--even a love match with a wealthy American--end badly. She makes a series of terrible decisions that seem to parallel some decisions in her mother's early life. Then, about two-thirds of the way through the lengthy book, Tan takes us back to the late 1800s, to her mother's childhood in San Francisco, and we see how similar the two women's lives truly are. Lulu was a headstrong girl who felt neglected by her parents and made bad decisions about men that eventually led her to her life in Shanghai. Near the end of the book, we meet Violet's daughter Flora and see how--was it inevitable?--her life is replicating some of the same experiences in the same generation.

Amy Tan returns to the theme of mother-daughter relationships that began her career in The Joy Luck Club, but here the generations are reversed--the mother grew up in the United States, the daughter in China.  Despite the length of The Valley of Amazement, the treatment of the relationship seems shallow--essentially, Tan seems to be saying "No matter how much you resent your mother, you are doomed to repeat her mistakes." For me, one of the challenges of reading this book was not judging the characters--especially their parenting decisions--by 21st-century American standards. Many of their decisions strained credulity, but I had to remember that transportation was difficult then, women's choices were severely constricted, they were living in a different culture, there was a world war going on for part of the time, etc., etc.

Tan obviously did an incredible amount of research for the book and, if you are interested in the world of the courtesan in early 20th-century Shanghai, this is the book for you. For someone only mildly curious about that world, there is perhaps too much detail. Not unexpectedly perhaps, that detail includes many descriptions of sexual experiences ranging from the hideously violent to the mildly unpleasant to (occasionally) the ecstatic. (I am quite positive I have never read a book that used the word pudenda so frequently.)

I finished the book, but I wouldn't recommend it unless you do want to learn about courtesans and sexual politics in Shanghai 100 years ago. If you haven't read Tan's earlier works, I'd definitely recommend picking up one of them rather than The Valley of Amazement.

Favorite passage:
“I was returning with myself whole and unbroken—limbs, mind, and spirit. I had discarded pride, that useless burden of self-importance” 

(My favorite passage was actually a Whitman quote that Violet sometimes repeated: Rebel much. Obey little.)

Plain and Simple: A Woman's Journey to the Amish, by Sue Bender

I first read this book more than 20 years ago, at a very different time in my life. I was 40, getting divorced, working really hard, and raising two sons. Sue Bender's quest to find a simpler, more focused, and calmer way of living resonated deeply with me. Although I didn't go to stay with the Amish or even change my life after reading the book, I appreciated Bender's hard-won acceptance that fragility and strength, order and chaos, freedom and limits, independence and communality all exist simultaneously and that we find the best balance we can.

I decided to reread the book this weekend after completing a brutal slog through a project that was financially rewarding but an intellectual and physical grind. I again enjoyed reading of how Bender first became fascinated with traditional Amish quilts in her thirties, returning day after day to a shop where they were on display to soak them in. A few years later, she became interested in the simple faceless dolls that Amish mothers make for their children. Finally, 15 years after her interest began, she left her Berkeley home to spend several weeks with an Amish family in Iowa. Although there was much about the simple ordered life of the Amish she admired, she was also disturbed by the severe limitations on the Amish women's lives (and by their diet). When she returned to Berkeley, she was uncomfortable in her own life, though she knew the Amish lifestyle was not for her. Two years later, she spent time with another Amish family in Ohio--a much larger family in which the women had found ways to express their individuality within the confines of their culture (they also ate much healthier food). Again, when she returned to Berkeley, she longed to be able to recreate some aspects of the communality she experienced and was frustrated until she finally began to write about her journey.

I do have to admit that, this time around, I found it somewhat surprising that she spent five years agonizing as she wrote and rewrote this rather brief book. I don't mean to sound condescending, although I'm sure I do, but at this phase in my life, the lessons learned feel, in essence, commonsensical. They are elegantly presented, with the metaphor of the Amish nine-patch quilt used to advantage, and I respect the deep self-examination from which they grew. But they don't resonate quite as much.

Favorite passage:
Miracles come after a lot of hard work.

Ten Years in the Tub, by Nick Hornby

Anyone who reads book review blogs will love this book by British novelist Nick Hornby. Subtitled A Decade of Soaking in Great Books, it is a collection of columns he wrote for an arts journal called The Believer (if you have heard of this journal, you are way ahead of me, but interestingly they do not allow negative writing to enter their pages; ergo, if Hornby doesn't like a book, he has to talk about it obliquely, without mentioning author or title--but I'm getting ahead of myself). Hornby's column is titled "Stuff I've Been Reading," and it is as informal as that name might suggest. He starts each column with a list of the books he bought that month, as well as a list of what he read. Then he proceeds to talk about those books. He is funny and often insightful, but not in a "Oh, I'm a postmodernist who's going to confuse you with my brilliance" way. In fact, despite being a successful writer and obviously very knowledgeable about all manner of literary stuff, he doesn't write like a critic at all; rather, he writes like a reader, and that's what makes the book so great.

Hornby's reading is diverse--he reads literary fiction and mysteries, collections of letters by eminent personages and books about quitting smoking, poetry, history, biography, philosophy, and a bit of science here and there.  When, half way through the decade, he discovers YA literature, it's both fun and funny to read about his delight. Whatever genre you partake of, he's probably read and talked about some examples. There are bound to be titles familiar to you and discussions that will convince you to pick up a book you would never have glanced twice at without Hornby. And Hornby will give you permission to quit reading books you don't like (not that you need permission, but I always feel slightly better when a respected author backs me up).

One quibble with the book is that the humor becomes a little wearing when you're reading column after column; I doubt it has that effect when you are reading a column once a month.  Even with humor that wears thin (and a snipe at book group members who complain about not caring about any of the characters--ouch! that stings), I wish I'd written this book!

Favorite passages

. . . all the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal.

I am not particularly interested in language. Or rather, I am interested in what languages can do for me, and I spend many hours each day trying to ensure that my prose is as simple as it can possible be. But I do not wish to produce prose that draws attention to itself, rather than the world it describes . . .

Stupidity is, despite all appearances to the contrary, a complicated state of mind.

And many more.

The Cricket on the Hearth, by Charles Dickens

Turns out I am quite a Dickens ignoramus. I had never heard of The Cricket on the Hearth until Audible offered a recorded version free for Christmas. Then I learned that it was one of Dickens's five Christmas novellas--never knew there were others besides A Christmas Carol.  It has a few passing resemblances to that better-known work: there's a character with a physical disability ("the blind girl"), poverty, a slightly magical element (the cricket of the title is a guardian angel of sorts), and a curmudgeon who is converted to cheerfulness. Overall, however, it's more of a romantic comedy, complete with a disguised lover and a mistaken assumption about who is in love with the young man pretending to be an old vagabond. I hate that kind of plot device meant to create suspense and comedy but only (for me) sparking irritation. I realize Shakespeare used such ploys often in his comedies, but I don't care . . . I remain unmoved.

The only part of the story that I found at all interesting was the dilemma faced by Caleb Plummer, an impoverished toymaker who loves his daughter Bertha  (the blind girl) so much that he paints their world and the people in it in glowing terms. To his horror, his prevarications cause her to fall in love with his boss, the mean-spirited Mr. Tackleton. He faces the dilemma of whether to allow her to pine for an unworthy man or to tell her the truth. Of course, everything is resolved pleasantly, in this conflict and the entire story.

The Cricket on the Hearth was evidently quite popular (and ergo profitable) at the time of its publication in 1845. It didn't work for me, but it and a Nick Hornby book I'm reading in which he goes into raptures about Dickens are making me think I ought to read some of the more substantial novels--I'm actually not sure if I've read anything other than Tale of Two Cities. Such a philistine!