The Mighty Red
Louise Erdrich

The Mighty Red is the Red River of the North, which flows northward along the North Dakota Minnesota border to Lake Winnipeg. The Red River valley includes incredibly fertile farmlands and is prone to devastating floods. The fictional town of Argus North Dakota in the Red River Valley is the setting for Louise Erdrich’s newest book, The Mighty Red.

The book is set primarily during the financial crisis of 2008. Erdrich focuses on a number of ordinary people, connected in a variety of ways, and doing their best to deal with everyday life, as well as with a few extraordinary circumstances.
Kismet is a high school student who doesn’t fit in until Gary Geist, the son of a prosperous farm family, falls in love with her. Kismet’s mother Crystal, who is opposed to their relationship, drives a truck hauling sugar beets from the Geist farm. Kismet’s father is Martin, a failed actor who is a traveling arts teacher, who squanders his money on such things as expensive silk ties. When Kismet agrees to marry Gary, the other boy who loves her, Hugo, decides to get a job in the oil boom in North Dakota and earn enough money to steal Kismet from Gary. As if this weren’t complicated enough, there’s some sort of scandal around an accident Gary was as part of and Martin disappears with the money from the renovation fund of the Catholic church.

The intertwined stories of these folks and a number of others, play out against the backdrop of the farming crisis, the effects of the oil boom, the results of pesticides and other farming practices. Their lives, loves, and yearnings for the future are impacted by circumstances and powerful occurrences they can’t control.
The book is also filled with tenderness, hope, and Erdrich’s trademark humor.
This is a book you’ll want to savor.

Leaf, Cloud, Crow
Margaret Renkl

A companion, Leaf, Cloud, Crow, was released in late September. The Comfort of Crows contains Renkl’s observations of her backyard over a year. Leaf, Cloud, Crow is a journal for you to record your observations over a year. It’s not just any journal, though. Week by week, there are writing prompts from Margaret, artwork by her brother, Billy Renkl, and plenty of room for your notes and sketches. It’s a wonderful companion, and I think the two together would be a fabulous gift for certain people, including yourself!

A Lovecraftian creature descends on New York City in an attempt to stop it from being "born." This is the crazy premise for a book and I found it to be endlessly fascinating. In this fantasy version of our world, large cities become living entities once they are established but the process of a city being born is a violent one for all the parallel universes surrounding it, causing one such universe to send beings to kill these burgeoning cities. Cities are encapsulated in human "avatars" and these chosen humans must fight off the terrors that try to destroy them. NYC's primary avatar is grievously wounded so the avatars of the five boroughs must come together to revive him and save the city. This is a wholly unique, character-driven sci-fi novel written by one of my favorite authors and I cannot wait to dig into the sequel.

The Last Devil to Die
Richard Osman

The Last Devil to Die, newly out in paperback, is the most recent book in the Thursday Murder Club series. As usual, there are plots and counter plots, murders, drugs and antiquities, to name a few. But it is the relationship between Stephan and Elizabeth that makes this one my favorite of the series so far.

As usual, Osman starts us out with a murder. A friend of Stephan’s, it turns out, and the team activates. But for some reason, Elizabeth doesn’t seem as engaged, so we see Joyce step up to lead the investigation (not as daft as she appears).

The humanity in these books shines through, the humor, the love the group has for each other and the bittersweet of the end.

Word up is that Osman is taking a break from the Thursday Murder Club to work on his next series, We Solve Murders. In the meantime, check out Netflix; the cast is amazing.

We Solve Murders
Richard Osman

We Solve Murders is the flagship in a new series by Richard Osman. Amy Wheeler is the adrenaline seeking heroine guarding a famous mystery author, Rosie, on a private island on South Carolina’s coast. Things heat up in a hurry when three Platinum clients of the private security company she works for are murdered, and she is always in the vicinity. Coincidence or is she being set up?

Things become more apparent when Amy is targeted, and she and Rosie set out to find out what’s going on. Although she has the skills to kill someone, she’s never actually solved a mystery. She calls on her widowed father-in-law Steve, a retired cop, to help. He’d rather stay home with his familiar routine; pub quizzes, talks on the bench with his deceased wife, and reading with his cat. But he does adore Amy, so he joins forces with her and Rosie to get to the bottom of this complicated tangle of intrigue and dead bodies before Amy is killed.

We get a peek at Amy’s husband Adam, whom neither Amy nor Steve have much to say to. But to say it is a unique marriage is an understatement. I look forward to learning more about him.

This is a funny, easy read with likeable characters. It will fill the gap that the Thursday Murder Club leaves quite nicely.

Are romance novels your guilty pleasure?* Do you find them delicious but never tell anyone? Well, you can come out of the closet. The genre has now become mainstream. There are even bookstores that proudly identify as strictly carrying only the genre. And there’s the wildly popular Bridgerton series based on Quinn’s best-selling romance novels.

I picked up Romancing Mister Bridgerton out of curiosity. If you watched the series, this is the book about Penelope and Colin. It’s another case study about differences between films and the literature they’re based on. The characters in Romancing Mister Bridgerton are exactly the same (although the blind color casting in the Netflix version isn’t hinted at.) However, the plots are completely different! The same person is Lady Whistledown, but who learns about her identity, and when, are not. There are sexy scenes with one classic dialog retained but… there is not one mention of the Queen! 

The book is not challenging, but I did enjoy it. Give a Quinn novel a try. If you think romance novels are beneath you, you might be pleasantly, if still guiltily, surprised.

*Movie critic Roger Ebert coined the phrase “guilty pleasures” to describe things that you know are not approved by cultured people, and you can’t logically defend them, but you just enjoy them anyway.

A Refiner’s Fire
Donna Leon

If you haven’t read any of Leon’s Commissario Guido Brunetti mysteries, do pick up this or any of the earlier books in her series. Her characters are wonderful (I keep wishing she and Louise Penny would co-author a book with their heroes working together), but I love even more the way she brings the reader into Venice. It’s not the Venice tourists see, but the incredible world of the local citizens. It’s fascinating.

I don’t understand the title “A Refiner’s Fire.” It sounds like there’s a fire in a refinery, but while there are two important fires in the book, they are unrelated to refineries. The theme this time is adolescents (including “baby gangs”) and the glory of heroism, earned or not.

The King Must Die
Mary Renault

Novelized versions of the classics seem to be thriving (see my review of Troy in Youth Yak). Perhaps it’s because these stories speak to such basic human characteristics. Or perhaps it’s because they are universal, at least to Western audiences. 

Renault has been writing these since she began to travel in Greece after WWII, and I think hers are among the best. The King Must Die is about Theseus, best known for fighting the Minotaur, a man with a bull’s head, and for finding his way out of the labyrinth by leaving a string trail. Theseus was a real king, although probably not actually a son of Poseidon. His tale was considered apocryphal until evidence was found that there actually were “bull dancers” who did the dangerous acrobatics. Renault has novelized the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur, whose image also exists in ancient sites, finding fanciful but plausible explanations of the events.

The Grand Babylon Hotel
Arnold Bennett

If one wishes to see the progress society has made, one of the best windows from which to view the parade of change is by reading the popular fiction of a previous period of time. Arnold Bennett’s, The Grand Babylon Hotel, published in 1902, is an excellent example. It's an old-fashioned pot boiler of popular fiction that exhibits the accepted truisms (sometimes prejudices) of its time. The modern reader may wince at what passes as accepted "fact" in the story.... say: reverence for monarchy and its social standing, unquestioned fascination with the power of money, subjugation of women, rampant racism, and unbridled colonialism. None (or few) of these attitudes would meet with the modern reader's approval, and by reading only modern fiction, we're in essence missing the changes we might otherwise see. This story was written 122 years ago, and in it we bump up against a whole series of assumptions we no longer believe to be true. The contrast between then and now, feels immense and is the perfect antidote to one of today's accepted truisms, that being, 'nothing ever changes'. It's just not true! Things do change, and we're the better for it.