When I review novels here, I fight with myself over wanting to write something deep with observations on the rich parts of the book vs. saying too much and spoiling it for new readers. Since it’s easier to go light, I usually do, so I doubt you expect to read great, thoughtful posts from me. No, no. It’s my fault. I’ve already given you a positive, light-handed review of J. Mark Bertrand’s Back on Murder (A Roland March Mystery)
Category Archives: Reviews
“Ward” wows “World”
Colin Cutler’s The Ward of Heaven and the Wyrm in the Sea, for which I wrote the Foreword, has gotten a favorable review at World Magazine.
Herman Melville didn’t do Norse mythology, orthodox Christianity, or short books. But other than that, he could have written The Ward of Heaven and the Wyrm in the Sea. The deep currents of the language, swelling and moving in great cataracts of imagery, clearly hark back to Melville, even as the surface churns with the kenning and alliteration of old Germanic poetry.
Thanks to Loren Eaton of I Saw Lightning Fall for letting me know about this.
Graveyard Special, by James Lileks
…Two people + their problems < hill of beans. Not an equation we understood. And he shot the guy, too: the soundtrack seemed extra sharp – it echoed in the bare room, and I felt Tatiana jump when roscoe barked, saw her smile when Claude Raines threw in with justice and liberty. I wanted a cigarette. I wanted to snap a match and smoke and sneer at a dying Nazi and make a remark he’d carry down to hell. But the Minnesota Clean Air Act forbade these things.
For some time, James Lileks of lileks.com (I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned this, but I did a half hour of radio with him once) has been telling us about a series of interconnected mystery novels set in Minneapolis he’s been working on. Graveyard Special, the first of these, is out at last, for Kindle users. Other formats will be forthcoming.
Graveyard Special is a semi-autobiographical book, loosely based on Lileks’ student days, when he worked at the Valli Restaurant (dubbed the Trattoria here). There are lots of familiar landmarks in this story for me, because although I didn’t live in the University neighborhood of Dinkytown myself, my friends and I used to head over there quite often to eat in our own college days, a few years earlier. We liked to dine at Bridgeman’s or Best Steak House, but we never patronized the Valli. I know exactly where I was when this story is supposed to have happened too (fall of 1980). I was a few miles away, in south Minneapolis, attending Brown Institute of Broadcasting on Lake Street.
Robert Thompson, the narrator, is an art student from Motley, Minnesota (a real town, I swear to you) whose life at this point revolves around his shifts at the “Trat,” where most of his housemates also work, and where they love to hang out in their off hours to play the arcade machines. He’s waiting tables one night when the night manager takes a break to huff some propellant from a Redi-Whip can and dies, shot by a bullet coming through the restaurant window. Being a witness gives Robert the chance to meet a very attractive reporter for the University student newspaper, and when he begins to notice suspicious behavior on the part of some of his housemates and some denizens of the Trat, he brings them to her, just as an excuse to get to know her better. Which eventually gets him in over his head, and involves him in bombings and a bloody Zamboni ride at a Gophers hockey game. Continue reading Graveyard Special, by James Lileks
Solomon vs. Lord, by Paul Levine
I found much to like in Paul Levine’s light legal thriller, Solomon vs. Lord, first in a series. I also found elements that creeped me out. I’ll give you my reaction; judge for yourself.
Like most male readers, I don’t actually hate romance in a story. I just don’t care for stories that are only romance. I want some swords or some guns, or stuff getting blown up. If you’re going to have romance, the best kind is the Benedick and Beatrice sort (as in Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing”), where the man and the woman fight like a dog and a cat, and everyone but they can see that it’s because they have unusual sexual chemistry.
That’s what we have in Solomon vs. Lord. Steve Solomon is a talented, not-overly-ethical Miami lawyer, who at the beginning is defending a man charged with importing exotic animals illegally. Arguing for the prosecution is Victoria Lord, scion of a wealthy family that’s fallen on hard times. Her life plan calls for her to pay her dues in the DA’s office, then get a job with a respectable law firm. She’s also going to marry Bruce Bigby, a handsome and wealthy avocado grower and real estate tycoon. Continue reading Solomon vs. Lord, by Paul Levine
Jesus, My Father, the CIA, and Me, by Ian Morgan Cron
Ian Morgan Cron grew up with a deep, unsatisfied hunger for the love of his father. He tells the story of his struggle to understand and forgive in the memoir, Jesus, My Father, the CIA, and Me, A Memoir… Of Sorts. His father was, when Ian was young, an executive with a motion picture company. The family lived in Europe and hobnobbed with movie stars and political figures.
Then his father’s career crashed on the rock of his alcoholism. The family moved home to Greenwich, Connecticut, to a life of marginal poverty (sure, it wasn’t Harlem, but the contrast of their own lives with those of their wealthy neighbors just made it harder for the kids). His mother made a new career in time that gave them some financial stability, but his father’s continuing blackouts and rages left wounds Ian couldn’t deal with.
In his religious life, Ian went from an innocent, youthful love of Jesus to bitterness and atheism, when Jesus failed to give him the one thing he asked for—a sober father. He experimented with drinking, was scared by his own reaction, and settled into drugs for a while before taking up drinking again.
It was only after many years that Ian learned his father’s great secret—he’d been a CIA agent. Many spies are alcoholics and narcissists, he learned. They’re suited to the life.
Only the realization that he was himself turning into his father drove Ian to seek counseling, and finally to reconcile with God.
Ian Cron writes with a light touch and the kind of mordant humor you’re familiar with if you’ve read authors who suffered child abuse (and believe me, you have). His account of his journey back to faith is in many places touching and moving. The personal revelation that reconciles him to Christ at one point is one that some Christians may have trouble with. I’m not sure about it myself, but I generally try not to judge another Christian’s deepest confidence.
Hints in the course of the story suggest to me that Cron’s final faith road brings him closer to Tony Campolo than to James Dobson, but those hints are lightly touched on and need not spoil the story for those of us who trust the Bible more than our hearts.
Recommended, especially for Christians who come from dysfunctional homes. Or those who want to understand them better.
Come and Get It, by Edna Ferber
When I read We, the Drowned, which I reviewed the other day, I was making one of my attempts to connect with the lives of my ancestors, in that case my Danish forebears.
I’ve written before in this space about my mother’s mother’s family, who lived in Hurley, Wisconsin, generally considered the wickedest town in the north. So when I learned that a novel had been written (at least in part) about Hurley (renamed “Iron Ridge”) by an estimable American novelist, I had to read that too.
Come and Get It is one of Edna Ferber’s big American books. In novels like Showboat, So Big, and Cimarron, she attempted to capture the essence of her own country as expressed in the life of various regions. Come and Get It is her northern novel. It’s worth reading, though it hasn’t kept as well as its early fans hoped it would (it was even made into a movie with Edward Arnold, Walter Brennan, Joel McCrae, and Frances Farmer, but judging by the clips I’ve seen they made major alterations). Continue reading Come and Get It, by Edna Ferber
Netflix review: “Foyle’s War”
Since the Foyle’s War mystery series has been broadcast in this country on PBS, all of you probably enjoyed it long before I did. But in case I’m not the last person in America to catch this excellent program, I’ll give my own viewer’s response here.
Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle (splendidly underplayed by Michael Kitchen) is chief detective in Hastings, England, during World War II. A sort of running joke in the series is that he desperately wants to do something “more important” for the war effort, but again and again is denied the chance, sometimes because there’s a case he feels he needs to see through to the end, and sometimes because his stubborn integrity makes him enemies in high places. Later on, when the war is winding down, he just wants to retire, but keeps getting pulled back in.
Foyle is a smallish, unprepossessing man, but steely in his character. He’s the kind of superior officer who can flay a subordinate alive without raising his voice. Nevertheless he’s very popular with his underlings, and has a sly, dry, sense of humor.
He is assisted in his inquiries by two regular supporting characters—Samantha “Sam” Stuart, his military driver (played by an actress actually named Honeysuckle Weeks, who’s not conventionally pretty but is nevertheless entirely adorable), and Detective Sergeant Paul Milner (Anthony Howell), an early war casualty with an artificial leg. Together they investigate at least one murder each episode, often connected to war profiteering, espionage, and military secrets. Foyle isn’t always able to arrest the sometimes well-protected culprits, but he does all he can and never gives up under any pressure less than direct orders. In such cases, he never leaves the stage without laying out the moral case. Continue reading Netflix review: “Foyle’s War”
We, the Drowned, by Carsten Jensen
We said goodbye to our mothers. They’d been around all our lives, but we’d never properly seen them. They’d been bent over washing tubs or cooking pots, their faces red and swollen from heat and steam, holding everything together while our fathers were away at sea, and nodding off every night in the kitchen chair, with a darning needle in hand. It was their endurance and exhaustion we knew, rather than them. And we never asked them for anything because we didn’t want to bother them.
That was how we showed our love. With silence.
…Our mother sticks a knife in our heart when we say goodbye on the wharf. And we stick a knife in hers when we go. And that’s how we’re connected: through the hurt we inflict on one another.
I really didn’t have much choice about buying Danish author Carsten Jensen’s We, the Drowned. I’ve been telling you how much I like sea stories, and this is a sea epic. One quarter of my ancestors were Danes, and this is the story of a small maritime village on a Danish island, not all that far from where my people came from (though mine were farmers, as far as I know. My sailing ancestors were Norwegian. Close enough).
We, the Drowned is a long book, and strange. It starts out in an almost whimsical faction, telling us of Lauritz Madsen of the town of Marstal, who started a war with Germany singlehanded, and was blown up over the mainsail, saw St. Peter’s backside, and landed on his feet back on deck to tell the tale.
But that’s pretty much the end of the whimsy. Author Jensen quickly falls into the fatalistic tone so common in Scandinavian literature. Things get grim, and they stay grim by and large. There are fantastical, magical realism elements to the book, but they mostly follow sailors’ superstitions—visions and omens and objects carrying bad luck. Continue reading We, the Drowned, by Carsten Jensen
Marshal of Medicine Lodge, by Stan Lynde
There are many stories of American artists, in various disciplines, who have not achieved the public acclaim they deserve. Chief among them, of course, is me. But another is Stan Lynde, best known for a long-running western comic strip called Rick O’Shay. I was vaguely aware of Rick O’Shay when I was a kid, but I had the opportunity to follow it closely toward the end of Lynde’s run with it, when he was turning it away from what the syndicate had asked him for—a gag-a-day strip—to what he’d always wanted it to be—a serious adventure strip with continuing stories. The strip gained new depth (at least in my view) when Lynde experienced a Christian conversion and started working in religious themes.
But he quarreled with the syndicate, and quit (the strip went on for a while without him) to draw another—a post-Civil War adventure strip called Latigo. Sadly, those were not the times for westerns, and Latigo languished and died.
Today, Stan Lynde writes western novels. As a fan of his comic work I bought one to see how it was, and I’m happy to report it’s very good indeed.
Marshal of Medicine Lodge is one of a continuing series starring Merlin Fanshaw, a Montana deputy US Marshal in the 1880s. He’s a lot like Rick O’Shay—a decent fellow whose instincts are good, though he’s young enough to still need some seasoning. He gets the chance to grow up a lot in this story. Continue reading Marshal of Medicine Lodge, by Stan Lynde
The Cross and the Cosmos Anthology: Year One
Full disclosure: I received a free copy of The Cross and the Cosmos Anthology: Year One, from Frank Luke, a friend of this blog who is also an editor and contributor to the volume.
The Cross and the Cosmos: Year One is a collection of Christian science fiction and fantasy stories from the Cross and the Cosmos e-zine. As you would expect from such a publication, the quality of the stories varies considerably.
I was most impressed by a couple time travel stories by Kersley Fitzgerald. The stories, both about a single family, deal in very fresh ways with the old problems of temporal transport. The first story, “Saving Grase,” in particular, combined time travel conundrums with the kinds of mundane frustrations any mother who has tried to manage small children on an airline flight must be familiar with.
I also liked a couple supernatural westerns by Cathrine Bonham, “Souls Are Wild” and “Black Hat Magic.” They were pretty effective evangelical takes, I thought, on the old “he sold his soul to the devil” theme.
Frank Luke contributed three very good fantasies, set in a universe that seems part Norse and part Tolkien, but in which the Christian religion is practiced pretty much as it is in our world (how that works isn’t explained). Frank needs to tighten up his stories a little and watch for neologisms like “quite the woman,” but I got caught up in the narrative and wanted to know what else happened to the characters.
The bulk of the stories, I have to say, aren’t quite as good. Some of them were frankly preachy and simplistic, and most were weak on wordsmithing. One story seems to have been published before the author was done with it, because she inserted “[RUSSIAN PHRASE]” in the dialogue a couple time, apparently planning to look the phrases up but never getting around to it (unless that was a glitch in my electronic version).
I must confess I found it irritating that every single fantasy that involved warriors included female warriors as a given, as if ours is the only world in the universe where men’s greater strength leads societies, in general, to reserve the role of fighter for them. I suppose egalitarianism is so ingrained in our younger generation of Christians that they can’t conceive of anything else.
There’s some good stuff in The Cross and the Cosmos: One, and some disappointing stuff. Suitable for teens and up.