The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield

The Thirteenth Tale drew me in almost from the first page.  The narrator, Margaret Lea, is a young woman who works with her father selling rare books, and who lives herself more in the world of books than the world of people.  Her life has been shadowed by a family tragedy that she discovered only by accident, a secret that her mother refuses to ever speak of.  But she is drawn out of her own world and into another, even more troubled life, when highly acclaimed writer Vida Winter hires Margaret to listen to, and write, the true story of Winter’s life — the one story Winter, a master of self-invention, has never told anyone.

The story the aged writer tells Margaret could come straight off the pages of a nineteenth-century Gothic novel — and, in fact, a copy of Jane Eyre keeps floating around the story, turning up here and there to remind the reader exactly what kind of tale we’re being told.  In terms of novels I’ve read recently, The Thirteenth Tale is most remeniscent of Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger (and, interestingly, The Little Stranger would have been another good title for this book). It lacks The Little Stranger’s strong sense of being rooted in a particular historical era, though; the time setting of The Thirteenth Tale seems intentionally vague, as if this is a nineteenth-century story drawn into the modern world, but  not pinned down to any particular decade.

Vida Winter unveils, episode by episode, a chilling tale of madness, incest, child abuse and neglect, and really just about every tragic thing you could think of, all taking place in a huge, decaying English manor house.  When Margaret goes to Winter’s childhood home to investigate for herself, she discovers not answers but more questions.

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, by Rhoda Janzen

My first thought upon randomly picking up this book in a bookstore was that the title is a (presumably deliberate) echo of Susan Jane Gilman’s Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress, and that you shouldn’t invite comparisons to a writer as gifted as Gilman unless you are prepared to throw down in the humour department. Fortunately, Rhoda Janzen is well able to hold her own in that league.  In the vast and ever-growing genre of funny, self-deprecating, slightly neurotic women’s memoirs (which is definitely my favourite nonfiction genre to read), Mennonite in a Little Black Dress is definitely a contender.

Mennonite is Janzen’s reflection on growing up Mennonite, leaving that community, then returning to her family and faith community to recover from the double whammies of a car accident, and the messy end of a messy marriage.  Janzen’s observations about life in a conservative religious community are spot-on and will be easy for many readers from similar backgrounds to relate to.  I could relate because although the specific ways in which Adventists and Mennonites are different from “the world” also differ from each other, that same sense of being “in the world but not of the world” permeates both communities — for better and for worse.

Aunt Dimity’s Death, by Nancy Atherton

So, remember how I said in my last review that “mystery novels” run the gamut from hard-core crime fiction complete with graphic details, to cozy little tales where the focus is all on solving the puzzle without any real sense of threat or danger? And how The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo wasn’t the right book for me because it was a little too hardcore? Apparently I’m difficult to please, because Aunt Dimity’s Death, which is billed as a mystery, was nice and innocuous enough, but a little too “soft-core” to engage me.

The premise is cute: a young woman who finds herself stalled in her personal life and career is mourning the death of her mother when she discovers that her mother’s best friend, a woman she never knew in real life and believed was only a character in the stories her mother told her, has died and left a job for her to do.  Lori leaves the U.S. for England in care of a friendly lawyer and moves into Aunt Dimity’s cottage in the English countryside, which is inhabited by what must be the least frightening, most easy-going ghost in all of fiction. The “mystery” doesn’t even involve a crime, just an investigation into the truth of Aunt Dimity’s past, while a romance between Lori and Lawyer Bill often takes centre stage.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Steig Larsson

I’ve heard so many raves about this book and its two sequels that I had to pick it up and give it a try.  It’s a mystery, or perhaps the better term would be “crime novel,” set in modern-day Sweden (and translated from the original Swedish).  Mikael Blomqvist, a discredited journalist who has spent his career bringing down the powerful, is hired to investigate a long-buried mystery — the disappearance of a young woman 40 years earlier.  When Blomqvist meets up with Lisbeth Salander, a wildly dysfunctional young woman whose secret skills include hacking into other people’s computers, they work together to uncover an incredibly sordid crime in the world of Swedish high finance.

I found this book took a long time for me to get into, because there were so many characters intertwined in such a complex plot, and not only did the plot have to do with the business world which normally confuses and bores me, but all the characters had Swedish names (as well they should) so I had a hard time remembering who was who.  Neither of those are flaws in the book; they’re simply a matter of my reading preferences and shortcomings.

Sacred Hearts, by Sarah Dunant

I’ve read Sarah Dunant’s two previous novels about women in the Italian Renaissance — The Birth of Venus and In the Company of the Courtesan.  Both are good novels, but I found Sacred Hearts brilliant, my favourite of the three by far.

This could be because it’s set in a world that’s always fascinated me: a convent.  In medieval and renaissance times, convents were a lot of things — a dumping ground for unwanted or unmarriageable women; a prison for women who didn’t want to be there, but also a haven where at least some women could experience the freedom to exercise skills (artistic, administrative, or other) that they would have no scope for in the outside world.

Both aspects of convent life are clearly presented in Sacred Hearts, the story of an unwilling teenager, Serafina, sent to the convent after she disgraces herself by falling in love with her music master.  Serafina longs for freedom, a chance to escape and run away with her beloved, but as she slowly and reluctantly becomes part of convent life she becomes much more than a reluctant novice — she becomes a pawn in power games that are being played out within the convent, reflecting even greater power struggles in the world beyond.

The Winterhouse, by Robin McGrath

The Winterhouse is a jewel of a historical novel, focusing on two rarely-explored threads of Newfoundland heritage. One concerns the Jewish presence in Newfoundland, the other the tradition in some outport communities of spending the harsh winter months in a “tilt” or “winterhouse” in the woods, protected from the more severe weather by the ocean.

These two threads come together in a small, quiet and intensely personal story. It’s the tale of Rosehanna Quint, a teenage girl abandoned after her mother’s death and her father’s hasty remarriage.  Her father, who is the merchant’s agent in their small community, turns over management of the merchant’s store to a newly-arrived European stranger.

The slowly-growing relationship between the quiet, reserved, but resilient Rosehanna and the man she calls “the mister” turns from a chilly marriage of convenience to something much more like friendship when the busy months of summer end and they find themselves in the enforced idleness and closeness of the winterhouses.

This budding relationship forms the plot of this novel — a simple and understated story in which every word and glance takes on significance.  The sense of time and place is so vividly created you can almost smell every smell.  McGrath is a powerful and evocative writer, and this novel deserves to be widely read by everyone who enjoys historical fiction, especially those who like Newfoundland history and want to explore some of the lesser-known corners of our past.

A Few Kinds of Wrong, by Tina Chaulk

Before I even review this book, I want to tell you about a great contest with a chance to win the book. Go to author Tina Chaulk’s website to find out all about it and enter the contest!

I read this book back when it was a manuscript, and it’s been exciting to see it come to fruition.  It’s a contemporary, down-to-earth story about Jennifer Collins, a young woman who works as a mechanic in the garage her father once owned.  Jennifer’s always been a daddy’s girl, and when her dad dies unexpectedly, her world falls apart.  Her relationship with her mom has always been a little more complicated, and in the aftermath of Jennifer’s complicated grief, she and her mom find themselves farther apart rather than closer together.  As for Jennifer’s relationship with her husband Jamie, that falls apart completely as Jennifer retreats further and further into a private world of loss. The only person she’s comfortable with is her grandmother, confined to a nursing home in the last stages of dementia.  Jennifer finds Nan’s room a refuge, because Nan is so often lost in the past and it’s as if the whole last painful year hasn’t happened.

Quaker Summer, by Lisa Samson

I’ve read and reviewed a couple of previous books by Lisa Samson and stand by my conviction that she is one of the best, freshest voices in Christian women’s fiction today.  Quaker Summer is probably my favourite of her books so far. It combines the strong characterization of a novel like The Passion of Mary-Margaret with the concern for Christian social justice found in the book Justice in the Burbs, which Samson co-authored with her husband.

Heather Curridge is the wife of a wealthy doctor and the mother of a sweet and precocious fifteen-year-old boy. Though she loves her husband and son, Heather’s life is empty as she has no career and no strong interests of her own — even her spiritual life and her connection to her church is waning.  She fills her days by compulsively spending her husband’s money on more additions to, and toys for, their luxurious suburban home, and on volunteer duties at her son’s school that have begun to seem petty and pointless.

The Magicians, by Lev Grossman

It’s impossible to talk about Lev Grossman’s The Magicians without referencing both Harry Potter and the Chronicles of Narnia (seriously, go look for a review of the book that doesn’t mention either of those two fantasy classics).  But I doubt Grossman would mind, because the parallels are obviously intentional.  Grossman’s main character, Quentin Coldwater, is a brilliant but unhappy New York teenager who grew up reading a series of books about English children who find their way into a magical land called Fillory — an obvious Narnia parallel (though there are echoes here of other children’s fantasy classics, right down to Alice in Wonderland).  Preparing to leave high school for university, Quentin finds himself transported instead to a top-secret school for magicians.

But Brakebills is very far from being an upstate-New-York version of Hogwarts.  Magic is hard work and sometimes boring rather than being charming or picturesque, and the darkly sinister undercurrent of this story comes not from an evil Dark Lord but from the teenage and young-adult magicians themselves, who have all the hangups and personality disorders of unhappy young people everywhere — but who also have the ability to use magic.

The Day the School Blew Up and Camporee of Doom, by Seth Pierce

When I was growing up, Seventh-day Adventist kids’ books were characterized by a kind of didactic earnestness.  Bad deeds were punished, good deeds were rewarded, and lessons were always learned.  Adults and other authority figures were always right and trustworthy.

Times have changed.  Seth Pierce’s new series, The Misadventures of Peter Paul Pappenfuss, features a ten-year-old hero — or perhaps anti-hero — who is not likely to feature in any of Uncle Arthur’s bedtime stories (except maybe as the bad kid who gets his come-uppance in the end).  But Peter Paul is not really a bad kid — he’s a mischievous, troublesome, and painfully honest kid with a good heart.  He’s sometimes bored in school or in church (his dad’s the pastor); he doesn’t like selling chocolate bars to raise money to go to Pathfinder Camporee, and even when he tries to do the right thing, trouble seems to ensue.