In my gradual, strictly chronological exploration of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, it’s always a treat when I get to one of the Big Ones. Equal Rites, which introduced the witches and specifically Granny Weatherwax, was the previous big ticket item in the series so far, but with Guards, Guards! I feel like I finally – eight books into the series – know what the hardcore fans are talking about.
Oh yeah. Sam Vimes has made his entrance, and I am not the same.
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“‘Isn’t it nice how we actually enjoy talking to each other now?’ I said to her once on a trip home from college, after the bulk of the damage done in my teenage years had been allayed.
‘It is,’ she said. ‘You know what I realized? I’ve just never met someone like you.’
I’ve just never met someone like you, as if I were a stranger from another town or an eccentric guest accompanying a mutual friend to a dinner party. It was a strange thought to hear from the mouth of a woman who had birthed and raised me, with whom I shared a home for eighteen years, someone who was half me. My mother had struggled to understand me just as I struggled to understand her. Thrown as we were on opposite sides of a fault line – generational, cultural, linguistic – we wandered lost without a reference point, each of us unintelligible to the other’s expectations, until these past few years when we had just begun to unlock the mystery, carve the psychic space to accommodate each other, appreciate the differences between us, linger in our refracted commonalities. Then, what would have been the most fruitful years of understanding were cut violently short, and I was left alone to decipher the secrets of inheritance without the key.”
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The Thursday Murder Club is back, baby, and Richard Osman knows exactly what the people want: more Elizabeth stuff!
Yes, sure, there’s plenty of great moments with Rob, Ibrahim, and Joyce; plus our favorite pair of local non-incompetent cops Chris and Donna (very American sidebar: England, what’s it like living in a country where cops don’t carry guns? I bet it’s nice.). But make no mistake: this is first and foremost an Elizabeth story. And if that doesn’t appeal to you, I can’t imagine what’s wrong with you.
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I’m sorry, guys.
I don’t get it!
At all!
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My one-sentence summary (and pitch for why you definitely should stick with this series if you’re hovering somewhere around Book 3) goes as follows: this is the installment where the Faceless Man gets a face.
Oh fuck yeah, guys, now we’re cooking with gas.
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After being absolutely charmed by the first installment in Mia P Manasala’s Tita Rosies’s Kitchen mystery series, I dove into the second installment excited for Lila’s next investigation.
The setup is fantastic – it’s a beauty pageant mystery! Lila’s hometown has an annual beauty pageant, the Miss Shady Pines Pageant. Lila, as a past winner, has been recruited as a judge, and before you can say Miss Congeniality, threatening letters are being sent to the pageant staff, and then one of the judges turns up dead in a park.
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“The shoes, the shoes. The shoes were everything.
Pink satin fantasies from afar, from the audience, enthralled. But if you moved too close, you’d see that they’d already been battered, scored, disemboweled.
Those shoes, so intimate, soaked with your sweat until they sealed themselves to your feet, until, soon after, they fell to pieces.
Pink satin fantasies we beat into submission so they can be used and discarded.
Pink satin fantasies created to give pleasure but destroyed in the process.
This, their mother had said when she held out Dara’s very first pointe shoe, is what we are.
This, she said, handing her the shoe, Dara’s stubby nine-year-old fingers touching it, feeling a static charge, is you.”
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One thing that stress-reading during the worst (lol we hope) of the pandemic taught me was the joy of the fluffy romance novel. I borrowed e-books from my library – hey did you know that you can rent e-books through your library, and also audiobooks? Audible is a scam, don’t do it! – and devoured any decently well-reviewed romance series I could get my hands on. Maybe one day I’ll get around to writing my own reviews of them, but the truth is that most of them went down like popcorn shrimp and I couldn’t tell you much about them in any compelling detail.
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Two stars, mainly for false advertising.
Anthony “LT” Menginie is the son of “Mangy” Menginie, the president of the Philadelphia chapter of the Pagans Motorcycle club. Anyone who’s seen Sons of Anarchy will go into this memoir with certain expectations of where they think this story is going to go, and the publishers were definitely banking on that association – most of the blurbs for this book that I found spent a lot of time playing up the fact that Anthony Menginie’s father was in prison for most of Anthony’s childhood and, once released, committed the ultimate betrayal by signing up with a rival club. To hear the publishers’ blurbs tell it, this is the story of a son being raised to take revenge on a father he never met, all in service of the club he betrayed.
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In the introduction to her anthology of detective stories, Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery, and Horror, Dorothy L. Sayers discusses the different varieties of crime solvers that are found in fiction, and then she writes that, “the really brilliant woman detective has yet to be created.” To explain her reasoning, she goes on to examine the (for her time) current crop of Lady Detectives and says,
“In order to justify their choice of sex, they are obliged to be so irritatingly intuitive as to destroy that quiet enjoyment of the logical which we look for in our detective reading. Or else they are active and courageous, and insist on walking into physical danger and hampering the men engaged on the job. Marriage, also, looms too large in their view of life; which is not surprising, for they are all young and beautiful. Why these charming creatures should be able to tackle abstruse problems at the age of twenty-one or thereabouts, while the male detectives are usually content to wait till their thirties or forties before setting up as experts, it is hard to say. Where do they pick up their worldly knowledge? Not from personal experience, for they are always immaculate as the driven snow. Presumably it is all intuition.”
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