Reading List by Jennie for July through September 2022

JennieBook Reviewsclassic literature / English historical romance / Memoirs / New Adult / noir / psychological thriller / Reading lists / serial killers10 Comments

After a couple of quarters of light reading, I somehow managed to have nine books in my “What I’ve been reading for July through September.” It didn’t mean my slump was over, but I do have a few good books to talk about! (Also read and reviewed Storm Echo and The Golden Enclaves, both with Janine.)

Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Seamus O’Reilly

O’Reilly grew up the eighth of 11 children in a rambling house on the edge of Derry, Northern Ireland. This memoir recounts his upbringing, marked always by the loss of his mother to cancer when he was five. I have sort of an affinity for orphan stories – my maternal grandmother died when my mother was ten (like O’Reilly’s mother, of breast cancer). While I won’t pretend to know what it’s like to grow up without a mother, I feel like I’ve been a witness to the lifelong grief the loss engenders.

O’Reilly’s story is told with a lot of humor, which leavens the sadness. It’s often broad but very funny. He discusses growing up in an area that was at the center of “the Troubles” in the 1980s, and refers to the INLA – an organization I’m only vaguely aware of – as “the Andrew Ridgeley of Irish republicanism”, which told me all I need to know.

O’Reilly’s siblings are sketched in broad outlines – understandable given their number. His father comes off as an original character, eccentric but loving. My grade for this was a B+.

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Mother of All Secrets by Kathleen Willett

This was a surprisingly good and sharp thriller. Jenn is a new mother in New York City, feeling isolated, overwhelmed and inadequate. I wasn’t sure about the “new mother” angle because I feel like often books featuring this trope lean into cliches about exhaustion and neurosis. Not that exhaustion and neurosis aren’t perfectly reasonable for a new first-time mother, but I’ve read it all before, many times.

Anyway, Jenn joins a new mothers group that meets to unwind, vent and bond. She’s not sure how she fits in with the group – all but one of the mothers seem to have it more together than Jenn, she thinks. But she perseveres nonetheless. Then Isabel, the mom who organized the group, disappears, leaving behind ominous clues – jewelry and blood found on the streets near her home – that suggest that something very bad happened to her.

Mother of All Secrets was well written and satisfyingly twisty, and I ended up liking Jenn and (most of) the other mothers in the group. The women share a secret bond that they themselves aren’t at first aware of. I could see some of the twists coming but others came as a surprise to me. It got a little crazy towards the end, which is par for the course for the suspense and thrillers that I read – there often seems to be several twists in such books that make sense, and then at the end there’s just something kind of batshit. I’ver gotten used to it, and it didn’t affect my enjoyment of this book too much. My grade was a B+.

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Cousin Phillis by Elizabeth Gaskell

Having finished reading all of Elizabeth Gaskell’s novels (sadly!), I’ve moved onto her novellas and short stories. Cousin Phillis is a pretty simple tale that I enjoyed, though it didn’t wow me.

The narrator is a very young man – 18 or so – named Paul Manning. He moves away from his family to apprentice as an engineer and is charged by his mother with visiting nearby (though heretofore unknown) relatives, the Holmans. Hesitant at first, Paul makes himself at home with the family: the Reverend, his wife, and their daughter Phillis (who is a year or two older than Paul). At first I thought Paul would fall in love with Phillis, whose virtues he extols at length. But they settle into a sibling-like relationship. It’s instead his friend and supervisor, Holdsworth, whom Paul introduces to the Holmans, who forms an attachment with Phillis. When Holdsworth leaves to take a job in Canada, Paul’s well-meaning attempts to console Phillis inadvertently go awry.

As I said, Cousin Phillis is a simple, understated and subtle tale, partly focused on the vanishing ways of life in mid-19th century England, and partly on the way that human foibles and good intentions can have unexpectedly outsized consequences. I am torn between giving it a B and a B+, but I think it’s deserving of the latter for Gaskell’s fine prose and deep understanding of human behavior.

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Bad Girl Reputation by Elle Kennedy

Kaetrin did her usual excellent job reviewing this. I noted in the comments that I had similar problems to the ones she detailed in her review. This was one of those fairly rare romances where I genuinely questioned whether the hero and heroine really did belong together at the end. A romance has fundamentally failed if that’s the impression I’m left with.

Evan was such a man-child and selfishly insistent on dragging Gen back into their old self-destructive patterns. Sure, in the course of the story he kind of, FINALLY learned his lesson, but by then the damage had been done.

I had initially graded this a bit higher because it was readable and as I’ve mentioned a million times “readable” is high on my grading criteria. But I’m bumping it down because months after reading it I’m still left with a sense of irritation at the characters, particularly the hero. This was a C for me.

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A Dark Night’s Work by Elizabeth Gaskell

This one started slow for me but ended up being really very moving. Some spoilers follow – I always feel a little silly noting spoilers on classics, particularly ones that I don’t expect anyone is going to run out and read on the basis of my review, but…better safe than sorry.

One of the things that made A Dark Night’s Work so compelling is that the central event is unusually dramatic for Gaskell – murder – but the consequences are dealt with in a manner that was so realistic that I genuinely felt the heroine’s horror and sense of being haunted by one night.

The story starts with Edward Wilkins, a lawyer who inherits his practice from his father. Edward marries and has a daughter, Ellinor, and things are going well until his wife dies and Edward’s less savory qualities come to the fore. He’s not a terrible person, but he’s weak and lazy. His only virtue is his devotion to his daughter, a feeling that is returned. Edward eventually makes his punctilious clerk Dunster a partner. He dislikes Dunster, but both the money from the partnership and the fact that Dunster does the majority of the work means he can’t be without him.

Meanwhile, Ellinor forms an attachment to Ralph Corbet, a gentleman who is studying law and is very ambitious. His family disapproves of his relationship with Ellinor, but Ralph doesn’t care. But while Ralph is away, Wilkins and Dunster argue in Wilkins’ study. Enraged, Wilkins hits Dunster, who falls, strikes his head, and dies. Ellinor happens to come in moments later and discovers the body. Wilkins has gone to fetch his devoted childhood companion, the family groom Dixon. It’s Dixon who takes the lead in deciding that they should bury the body in the flower garden.

From here, the story sinks inexorably into tragedy. Ellinor is horrified by what she has been part of, and it affects her relationship with Ralph. She all but confesses to him; though the locals have assumed that Dunster ran off (and stole money from Wilkins as well), Ralph has definitely noticed the change in her. When he speaks to her father, Wilkins attacks him verbally, and Ralph leaves, never to return, and cuts Ellinor off in a letter.

Things get worse from there and the body in the garden hangs over the story the whole time. Again, what moved me in this story was that it took an unlikely situation and made the consequences feel very real. I’ve had nightmares about this very thing – being involved in a killing and trying to cover it up (is that weird?) – and I can feel *viscerally* Ellinor’s sense of shame and guilt and fear.

I will spoil it a bit more and say that the story has a relatively happy ending after all the bad stuff, and I was relieved because it would have been too dark otherwise. My grade for A Dark Night’s Work was an A-.

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No One Crosses the Wolf by Lisa Nikolidakis

I rarely pick up memoirs from Amazon First Reads, but this one sounded interesting. The author grew up in New Jersey with an immigrant Greek father, a man who was physically, sexually and psychologically abusive. When she was in her 20s, and long estranged from him, her father killed himself after murdering his current girlfriend and her teenaged daughter. This book details both Nikolidakis’ experiences growing up and her attempts as an adult to process the trauma she went through.

This was a tough read – the childhood abuse was horrific, and the author’s understandable attempts to numb the pain with alcohol and bad relationships as an adult were grim. There is a somewhat hopeful ending, after a trip to Greece to visit her father’s relatives seems to bring her some peace. I gave this a B – it was a worthwhile read but not really a fun one.

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Angel in Devil’s Arms by Julie Ann Long

This is book two in the Palace of Rogues series – I’ve now read all five books except book three. I was looking forward to seeing how Angelique Breedlove, the prickly ex-courtesan, fell in love. Her suitor ends up being Lucien Durand, the notorious Lord Bolt, who has been presumed dead for years after falling (or being pushed?) into the Thames. Lord Bolt is the bastard son of a duke, once the apple of his father’s eye but later set aside when his father marries and has a legitimate son. It’s fair to say that Lucien returns to London with some scores to settle.

The romance here ends up being pretty routine – insta-attraction followed by resistance (on Angelique’s part) and then acquiescence, but there are still barriers for the h/h in being together, and the hero screw ups at the end and needs to fix it (I think? I confess I don’t remember much even though I only finished this a few months ago). Angel in Devil’s Arms isn’t bad but it wasn’t terribly interesting or fresh. I gave it a B-.

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The Lucky One by Jessica Payne

I read this a while back and some of the details escape me. Norah is an MMA trainer living in Los Angeles. She returns to her small hometown after 10 years because her friend is getting married. Norah fled home after high school; she had been the survivor of a serial killer but her best friend wasn’t so lucky. Now she’s back and bad things start to happen; bodies turn up and Norah can feel that she’s being watched.

There was nothing about The Lucky One that really stood out for me – the ultimate resolution was just sort of eh in retrospect. One thing I’ve noticed about serial killers in suspense novels (including this one) is that they do not seem to follow the script common for real life serial killers. I believe in real life serial killers are mostly sexually motivated (or there is a sexual component to their killings, at least). But in the fiction I read, rape or sexual abuse is much rarer. It’s not like I *want* to read about rape, but I find the omission interesting – it’s like rape is a bridge too far, is too lurid, but murder isn’t. The motive of the killer in this book wasn’t very clear to me. I gave this a B- when I read it but I’m bumping it down to a C+.

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Velvet Was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

I read this at Janine’s suggestion – she has a great review here.

My reactions to the story were similar to Janine’s, though I think I had a harder time getting into it, in part because Maite was such an unlikable protagonist. I understood why she was so unhappy and could sympathize with her in a distant way, but wow, was she unpleasant. I liked Elvis more, but I don’t think I quite warmed up to him as quickly as Janine did. The background, setting and story were very good, and definitely something different for me. And though Velvet Was the Night is emphatically *not* a romance, I couldn’t help but be heartened by the hint of a potential happy ending for the protagonists. I gave this a B.

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Jennie

has been an avid if often frustrated romance reader for the past 15 years. In that time she's read a lot of good romances, a few great ones, and, unfortunately, a whole lot of dreck. Many of her favorite authors (Ivory, Kinsale, Gaffney, Williamson, Ibbotson) have moved onto other genres or produce new books only rarely, so she's had to expand her horizons a bit. Newer authors she enjoys include Julie Ann Long, Megan Hart and J.R. Ward, and she eagerly anticipates each new Sookie Stackhouse novel. Strong prose and characterization go a long way with her, though if they are combined with an unusual plot or setting, all the better. When she's not reading romance she can usually be found reading historical non-fiction.

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