Review: The Old Man and Me

Written by Elaine Dundy
New York Review Books, 2009; 231 pages
This review refers to an advance uncorrected proof of the novel.

From the publisher's description:

In The Dud Avocado, Elaine Dundy laid bare the life of the young expatriate in 1950s Paris in all its hilarious and heartbreaking drama. With The Old Man and Me, Dundy tackles the American Girl in 1960s London, a bit older, but certainly no wiser. Honey Flood (if that's her real name) is determined to make the Soho scene, and she'll know she's arrived when she snags its greatest prize, the literary star C.D. McKee.

Set in an early sixties London just beginning to swing, The Old Man and Me is populated by hipsters, pill-poppers, literary upstarts, would-be bohemians, and titled divorcees matching wits in smoky nightclubs and Mayfair flats. By the time Honey gets what she thinks she's after, she may find that the world she was hell bent on conquering has gotten the better of her.

My Thoughts

I read this novel some months ago, and almost decided not to review it. But as it was an advance readers copy, from Library Thing's Early Reviewer program, I did a short review for the LT site. And I'm just now getting it posted here. Yes, I know – disgracefully tardy. Well, it's been that kind of year, folks.

I was really hoping to love this book; the publisher's synopsis about "an early sixties London just beginning to swing" made it sound so attractive. But in the end, I thought the tale of Honey Flood and her quest to meet and win the affections of famous man-about-town C.D. McKee just fell flat. Dundy was a talented writer, but it seems to me she was trying a bit too hard to be cute and outrageous here. I think much of the problem might be that Dundy just made the mistake of not following that old rule: write about what you know. Honey/Betsy Lou is supposed to be roughly my own generation, but Dundy herself was almost exactly the same age as my mother. Now there's really no reason why authors shouldn't be able to write convincingly about those younger or older than themselves, but in this case, I think Dundy just didn't get the era or mind set of the early 1960s quite right.

The basic story is interesting and has a mystery from out of the past at its heart. But it unfolds so slowly and circuitously that by the time I found out just why Honey is dead set on marrying (and/or murdering) C.D. McKee, I was so bored with the whole endeavor, I had to force myself to keep turning the pages. I wasn't charmed by Honey/Betsy Lou, or any of the other characters – except maybe C.D. himself. As a matter of fact, I really didn't find a single admirable or sympathetic character in the novel, with the possible exception of Pauly, Honey's young stepmother who's already dead when the story begins. In general, although the book is well-written and a relatively fast easy read, I thought it hit just short of the mark.

Review: Grave Goods

Written by Ariana Franklin
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2009; 337 pages

From the publisher's description:

England, 1176. Beautiful, tranquil Glastonbury Abbey – one of England’s holiest sites, and believed by some to be King Arthur’s sacred Isle of Avalon – has been burned almost to the ground. The arsonist remains at large, but the fire has uncovered something even more shocking: two hidden skeletons, a man and a woman. The skeletons’ height and age send rumors flying – are the remains those of Arthur and Guinevere?

King Henry II hopes so. Struggling to put down a rebellion in Wales, where the legend of Celtic savior Arthur is particularly strong, Henry wants definitive proof that the bones are Arthur’s. If the rebels are sure that the Once and Future King will not be coming to their aid, Henry can stamp out the insurgence for good. He calls on Adelia Aguilar, Mistress of the Art of Death, to examine the bones.

Henry’s summons comes not a moment too soon, for Adelia has worn out her welcome in Cambridge. As word of her healing powers has spread, so have rumors of witchcraft. So Adelia and her household ride to Glastonbury, where the investigation into the abbey fire will be overseen by the Church authorities – in this case, the Bishop of St. Albans, who happens also to be the father of Adelia’s daughter.

My Thoughts

Grave Goods is the third book in the Mistress of the Art of Death series by British author and journalist Diana Norman, writing under her Ariana Franklin pseudonym; it was published in Britain as Relics of the Dead. (Not sure why they changed the title for the American market – it seems to me that Relics of the Dead is a much neater and more descriptive title.) But when I saw the book in the library, it reached out and grabbed me, and I had to take it home and read it, even though I hadn't read any of the earlier novels in the series. I worried about that at first, but once I got into the story I didn't really have any trouble figuring out relationships and the histories of the various characters.

And there are quite a roster of characters, both new and returning from the earlier novels, including Adelia's young daughter Allie; Gyltha, Adelia's faithful companion and Allie's nurse; Adelia's friend, the aristocratic Emma, Lady Wolvercote, the subject of the book's main subplot; and Mansur, the Muslim protector who also masquerades as Adelia's "employer," so that she can pursue her investigations without being accused of witchcraft. Then there are the monks and townspeople living in and around the Abbey, as well as a band of nasty ruffians led by the sadistic Wolf – a sort of evil twin version of Robin Hood and his merry men. Oh, and King Henry is a character, too.

So there's a lot going on, but Franklin handles it all very adroitly. And it's obvious she's done a great deal of homework on the period. She's always coming up with obscure historical tidbits like this one:

Rabbits were comparatively new to England, having been introduced by Norman lords for their fur and meat, but, thanks to the escapees from the warrens in which they were kept, they were rapidly becoming a pest to gardeners everywhere. [p. 161]

And Adelia is quite an attractive character – intelligent, quick-witted, and spunky. You do have to suspend quite a bit of disbelief to accept the idea of a woman trained as a physician, and functioning as a forensic investigator for the crown, in 12th Century England – even if that woman was educated in the distant (and presumably more advanced) city of Salerno. And every now and then, the story takes on an almost science fiction feel, even for readers like myself who are willing to accept just about anything for a good read. Such as:

They laid him on the sweetgrass. He wasn't breathing. Adelia fell on him, picking soil from his nostrils. She cleared his mouth and then puffed her own breath into it. [p. 137]

Mouth-to-mouth in 1176? Well, maybe, but I have my doubts.

However, taken altogether, it's a ripping good yarn – well written, with engaging characters, and plenty of suspense, local color, and humor along the way. And when the mystery is finally solved, the answer is one I really didn't see coming, which is always something I appreciate. I'd recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a good whodunit, and I'm looking forward to going back and starting the series at the beginning – as I should have done in the first place!

Booking Through Thursday: Recent Informative

This week's Booking Through Thursday question (What’s the most informative book you’ve read recently?) is a little hard for me to answer. I mean, all books are informative in one way or another, aren't they? And even though I don't read much nonfiction, I feel that I learn something from most of the books I do read.

Several of the books I've read this year showed that their authors had done quite a lot of solid research on their subjects before writing. I'm thinking especially of The Longshot by Katie Kitamura, The Book of God and Physics by Enrique Joven, Angels & Insects by A.S. Byatt, and The Master by Colm Toibin; all of these were explorations of subjects I knew very little about when I started reading.











Recently, though, one of the books that impressed me the most was Sacred Hearts by Sarah Dunant. Her descriptions of life in a 16th Century Italian convent were fascinating and seemed chillingly real. I had never really given much thought to what that life must have been like, particularly if you were a young woman sentenced to a life shut up behind convent walls, against your will. It's a great story that really kept me turning the pages, but also taught me a lot. And isn't that what a good historical novel should do?

Teaser Tuesdays: Family Secrets

This week my teaser comes from Ellen Gilchrist's short story collection Victory Over Japan. It's one of the books I've been reading for the Battle of the Prizes Challenge. And although the challenge actually ended yesterday, I'm still reading this book and haven't quite made it to this section yet. So I'm not quite sure what the context is, but it's from the story "Crazy, Crazy, Now Showing Everywhere," and it sounds interesting:

"That's the trouble with getting drunk with your cousins," Sandor said. "They tell everything you did. We called Diane the Duchess because she always tried to boss everyone around." [p. 105]

Yes, cousins can be hard to handle – drunk or sober. Not that I ever made a habit of getting drunk with any of mine. Of course, in my family I was usually the cousin bossing all the others around! And I'm pretty sure "Duchess" would have been tame compared to some of the names they had for me.


Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by mizB17 at Should Be Reading. If you'd like to read more teasers, or participate yourself, head on over to her blog. And these are the rules: Grab your current read; Let the book fall open to a random page. Share with us two (2) "teaser" sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12. You also need to share the title of the book that you're getting your "teaser" from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given! Please avoid spoilers!

From Me To You Award

I've been awarded!!!

Ryan G at Wordsmithonia has very kindly given my blog the From Me to You Award. I'm extremely pleased and I'm very grateful to Ryan, especially as his blog is one I read on a regular basis – if you haven't checked it out, you should head on over there right away!

Isn't that an adorable button? Fits right in with my teddy bear collection, too!

There are plenty of bloggers I'd like to pass this one on to, so I'll have to give it a little thought and narrow down the field!

Booking Through Thursday: Recent Big

This week's Booking Through Thursday topic is big books: What’s the biggest book you’ve read recently? (Feel free to think “big” as size, or as popularity, or in any other way you care to interpret.)

I suppose the "biggest" book I've read recently, in just about any way you can think of, would be the book I just finished – John Updike's Rabbit Is Rich. At 467 pages of text, it rivals Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Angel's Game, which I read earlier this summer; although I believe that one is officially over 500 pages in length, the ARC I read was about 470 pages long.

Rabbit Is Rich spent 23 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list when it was first published back in 1981 – so you could say it was pretty popular. And it won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1982 (one of only half a dozen books ever to win both awards), as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award for 1981. So it's definitely had its share of honors.

Hope to get a review of the book posted today or tomorrow. I was nudged into reading it by the Battle of the Prizes reading challenge, and it's been something of a stunner for me – I hadn't expected to like it at all, but I've been very pleasantly surprised. And I've become very fond of the book's main character, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, even though he cheats on his wife and is really hard on his son. He represents a sort of Everyman (or, make that Everyperson) I find quite annoyingly easy to sympathize with. Especially when he comes up with thoughts like these:

There always comes in September a parched brightness to the air that hits Rabbit two ways, smelling of apples and blackboard dust and marking the return to school and work in earnest, but then again reminding him he's suffered another promotion, taken another step up the stairs that has darkness at the head. (p. 171)

and:

The thing about those Rotarians, if you knew them as kids you can't stop seeing the kid in them, dressed up in fat and baldness and money like a cardboard tuxedo in a play for high-school assembly. How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old? (p. 275)

Teaser Tuesdays: Happy Families

Wow, was that summer that just zipped by? Can you believe it's September already? I say this every year, but this summer really seemed very short. And I could definitely use another couple weeks of August right now. Of course, if I had small kiddoes going back to school, I probably wouldn't feel the same way!

Ah, well. Back to the subject at hand. This week I'm starting The Horned Man by James Lasdun, one of the books I've picked for the R.I.P. IV Challenge. Or at least I think I've picked it – it hasn't passed the first-fifty-pages-test yet, but it's been on my TBR list for a while now. This snippet is a bit more than two lines (sorry about that):

The next morning my stepfather took me to the Royal Aldersbury. It was a fine spring day: the May was flowering in the hedges and the apple orchards were in bloom. We drove in silence: by tacit agreement we never spoke to each other when my mother wasn't around. [p. 85]

Hmmm. Well, that just makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, now doesn't it?


Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by mizB17 at Should Be Reading. If you'd like to read more teasers, or participate yourself, head on over to her blog. And these are the rules: Grab your current read; Let the book fall open to a random page. Share with us two (2) "teaser" sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12. You also need to share the title of the book that you're getting your "teaser" from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given! Please avoid spoilers!