Frieda McFadden (2024). The Boyfriend. [Kindle]. Poisoned Pen Press.
Just when I thought I was on to her game, McFadden does it again. It's another psychological thriller with enough red herrings to sink a fishing trawler--and that's all I can say, because, well, spoilers!
Okay, one line. But only to give you a sample of why I enjoy this writer so much.
"Arlene's hatha yoga class in the late afternoon can get pretty crowded, but I got there early enough to snag a spot next to my friends. I mean, I get that yoga is about pranayama and shatkarma, but it's also about shooting your friends agonizing looks when the teacher suggests a ridiculously difficult pose and keeps telling you to breathe when all you want to do is freaking collapse" (42). Just the right amount of snark, amiright?
John Stott (1964).The Letters of John: An Introduction and Commentary (Volume 19) (Tyndale New Testament Commentaries). IVP Academic; Reprint edition (August 14, 2009).
I recently completed a five-month study through the letters of John. Stott was my primary outside resource. He applies a depth to his research that led me to scholars I didn't know (e.g. Westcott) and helped me when I found a passage too puzzling for my background. Stott is well-respected among Bible scholars, and I will look for more of his work the next time I do a deep dive into a particular New Testament book.
Notable quotes:
Jesus Christ, the true light, is the light of love, and therefore to be, or to live, or to walk in the light is to walk in love (98).
While the origin of love is in the being of God, the manifestation of love is in the coming of Christ (162).
Our love for one another is evidence of God's indwelling presence (164).
It is as impossible to love the children of God (as such) without loving God as it is to love God without loving his children…If we truly love God, we not only love his children, but also find ourselves carrying out his commands" (173, emphasis in original).
Dreda Say Mitchell & Ryan Carter (2024) Girl, Missing. [Audible]. Narrated by Sophie Roberts. Brilliance Audio
This is a book for listening to during exercise, housework, or mundane tasks. It doesn't require a lot of attention, but it keeps the "whodunit" moving and twisting enough to be entertaining.
The opening chapter begins in medias res, the middle of the story. Gem is arrested, covered in blood with a dead body in the room behind her. Without any transition or explanation, the story flashes back 15 years when Gem's daughter, Sara-Jane and her best friend, Abby, are snatched while truant from school. Abby wanders back home, having escaped, but her trauma causes memory loss that prevents her from providing information about the kidnapping or her escape. In the years between the kidnapping and the arrest, Gem grew a successful bicycle business, beginning with repairing classic bikes to custom builds. Gem never stopped searching for information about Sara-Jane's disappearance, but she fled the town and moved to London to escape the memories and accusations that she must have had a hand in her daughter's disappearance.
Fifteen years after the kidnapping, a body is found in the school chapel where the girls went missing. Gem returns to the flat she had kept, just in case Sara-Jane found her way home, while hoping that the discovery will lead to some kind of closure. It doesn't.
What works:
Surprisingly, the first person present tense form that the author uses for Gem in the present keeps the reader/listener engaged without sounding forced.
The descriptions of trauma are believable.
There are just enough clues to almost figure out the mystery, although it took me until chapter 39 to get there. And still I didn't guess the ending in its entirety.
Gem's character as a grieving mother whom no one believed was well done. As a parent who wasn't believed myself (nothing nearly so traumatic as kidnapping), I understood her cycles of frustration, hope, devastation, and less-than-stellar decisions.
What doesn't work:
The ending. I didn't figure it out because it was utterly ridiculous.
One villain was overdone and unbelievable. The other villains (yes, multiple antagonists) were predictable, but not terrible.
Redundancy. Maybe Mitchell thought readers needed reminding of things like scarves and vans, but a good editor probably could have cut the book by ten percent by reducing repetitive statements.
The "love" story. No purpose whatsoever.
Not a book that elicits any great quotes. Still, not a terrible listen.
Women and C.S. Lewis (2015) Carolyn Curtis and Mary Pomroy Key [Eds]. Lion Books
For many people, C.S. Lewis was brilliant in most things, except women. They focus on a romantic relationship with the mother of his friend (Mrs. Moore) whom he brought into his home after the first World War, a promise made in the trenches that Lewis kept. (In my mind, there's plenty of "ick" about their relationship, but the sexual part of the relationship was over by Lewis's conversion and may be attributable to youth and secularity.) At the end of her life, she was universally disliked, yet Lewis continued his financial support of her and visited her regularly in the depths of dementia. His early attraction was replaced by duty and fidelity to his promise.
Others question Lewis's attitude toward women as intellectually beneath him and subordinate to men. This book dispels the notion of Lewis as misogynist and chauvinist. Without question, Lewis held to a strong complementarian hierarchy of men and women; he was a product of his time. However, to say that Lewis disparaged women is inaccurate. Lewis sought intellectual friends, and he counted women as well as men among his peers, particularly Dorothy L. Sayers, Ruth Pitter, and, of course, his beloved Helen Joy Davidman, whose intellect was established long before she and Lewis met.
Contributions to this text come from 27 different men and women, even some who disagree with Lewis's positions on women's roles in the church. From Alistair McGrath to Kathy Keller, each writer adds a dimension to how Lewis viewed women, and how his opinions evolved the more time he spent with the brilliant women in his life. Some of Lewis's most loved characters are women: Lucy from the Narnia series and Orual from Till We Have Faces among the strongest, smartest, and most complicated of all his characters.
Notable quote (only one, but there are dozens)
"We conclude that both Lewis' life choice and his writings take a high view of women, noting that the directions of his attitudes about women continue higher as his life goes on. Said differently, as he aged and matured, he grew in faith. Likewise, as he aged and matured, his views of women grew 'higher' " (Carolyn Curtis, p. 269).
C.S. Lewis (1953, 1981 ) The Silver Chair [Audible] Narrated by Jeremy Northam. HarperCollins Publishers 2004.
As a child, this was my least favorite of the Narnia books. As an adult, same. There are great characters in the book; Puddleglum the Marshwiggle is a favorite, and the Lady in the Green Kirtle is an apt villain. Still, Eustace is almost too reformed from his time on the Dawn Treader and I don’t find Jill all that likeable. Prince Rilian is an unknown, I don’t find his rescue particularly compelling, even though Lewis does keep the action moving.
Lewis’ prose is as magnificent as ever, and the message of obedience comes through clearly.
Notable quotes:
“It was the Lion speaking. Anyways he had seen its lips move this time, and the voice was not like a man’s. It was deeper, wilder, and stronger; a sort of heavy, golden voice” (16).
“The signs which you have learned here will not look at all as you expect them to look, when you meet them there. That is why it is so important to learn them all by heart and pay no attention to appearances” (21).
“And the lesson of it all is, your Highness…that those Northern Witches always mean the same thing, but in every age they have a different plan for getting it” (201).
“After that, the Head’s friends saw that the Head was no use as a Head, so they got her made an Inspector to interfere with other Heads. And when they found out she wasn’t much good even at that, they got her into Parliament where she lived happily ever after” (216).
Albert Camus (1947) The Plague. [Audible, 2006] Narrated by James Jenner. Recorded Books.
It's amazing how people really haven't changed. Camus wrote this book just after World War II, yet most of it sounds like early 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic. The plague he wrote about remained contained to a single walled city, but many of the political and medical protocols were eerily familiar. The setting is a port town, Oran, in French-controlled Algeria. When the rats begin to die, followed shortly by some of the town's better known citizens. Drs. Rieux and Castel examine the victims and are convinced that bubonic plague is the culprit. The local government, not wanting to cause panic, refused to act until everyone knew exactly what was happening. Then the government quarantined the entire town, leaving people without access to basic necessities and wondering when they, too, would die a painful death.
A number of the dominant characters in the book were separated from family, and the forced quarantine seemed to exacerbate their misery. Rambert, a journalist, tried to write an article about the plague-infested town once his attempts to evacuate were thwarted. Grand spent the entire book trying to perfect the opening line of a novel, providing much of the humor in the grim tale. Father Paneloux offered two major sermons to the town, one calling the plague God's judgment and one, shortly before he died, about the need to embrace all of Christianity or none of it.
What made the book a Nobel Prize winner was the normalcy of the town. It wasn't particularly good or wicked. No famous artists or politicians or warriors called the place home. It was just a plain town filled with plain people going about their plain business. Plague came anyway. As a novel of absurdity, the text emphasized the extremes of human reaction from paranoia to nonchalance. In the end, age, social standing, philosophy, or religion made no difference. Plague served as the great equalizer, with bodies at one point thrown into mass graves, rich and poor together in death, if never in life.
There's no point in creating a "what works" and "what doesn't work" with a book nearly 80 years old. People still read it, and the last few years of COVID19 illustrates its current relevance.
Notable Quotes (no page numbers):
“The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.”
“stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves”
“Without memories, without hope, they lived for the moment only. Indeed, the here and now had come to mean everything to them. For there is no denying that the plague had gradually killed off in all of us the faculty not of love only but even of friendship."
“Each of us has the plague within him; no one, no one on earth is free from it. And i know, too, that we must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in a careless moment we breathe in someone's face and fasten the infection on him. What's natural is the microbe. All the rest – health, integrity, purity (if you like) – is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter.”
“At the beginning of a pestilence and when it ends, there's always a propensity for rhetoric. In the first case, habits have not yet been lost; in the second, they're returning. It is in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth - in other words, to silence.”
Claire Keegan (2021). Small Things Like These. Grove Press; First Edition/ Also [Audible] Narrated by Aiden Kelly. HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books
Keegan is brilliant. She tells a powerful story without beating the reader over the head with her message. There's a reason she wins awards (Orwell Prize, Booker Prize) and is favorably compared to O'Henry and Chekhov; she uses words so masterfully to draw the reader into her worlds that the end of the book comes as a surprise.
This novella explores the heart of one man whose quiet generosity is tested by a need far greater than he had experienced before. Times are hard in the little town, but not so hard as at the "school" run by the local convent. What can one man do in the face of what he sees there?
The book is short enough to read in an afternoon, so I'll say no more.
What works:
Keegan's prose
Keegan's characters--flawed, yet heroic
What doesn't work
Nothing, except maybe a tendency to over-villainize all nuns.
Notable Quotes:
"The people, for the most part, unhappily endured the weather" (p. 1).
" 'This road?' The man put down the hook, leant on the handle, and stared in at him. 'This road will take you wherever you want to go, son' " ( p. 31).
"He found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another?" (p. 66).