ReadingChallenge – The Writing Life of a Tadpole

Bear by Marian Engel (BR00162)

Posted on July 11, 2019 by PolyWoggJuly 11, 2019

PLOT OR PREMISE:

A historical librarian gets a chance to catalog the books at a remote island home for a summer in Northern Ontario, and encounters locals, free time to figure out her life, and a pet bear.

WHAT I LIKED

This book was given to me back in my teens, a gift of quality literature as it had just won the Governor General’s Award for fiction. I knew nothing about it as I started to read it. And I was relatively shocked to see “high literature” include bestiality and graphic descriptions of oral sex performed by the bear on the main character. The historical parts were awesome, as was the descriptions of the island and the passage of the summer.

WHAT I DIDN’T LIKE

I found the romanticization of the relationship with the bear a bit odd, as was the depersonalization of her other sexual partners during the summer. I also felt there were gaps in the ending — we saw what she intended to do, not what she would do once she was back in Toronto.

MY RATING

Legend: 1/5 Finished 2/5 Not bad 3/5 Good 4/5 Enjoyable 5/5 Excellent

THE BOTTOM LINE

Bestiality is a strange theme for an award-winner

See more details –> goodreads

Book Review Index
Intro Approach Review # Title Author Year Series Rating

The Burglar by Thomas Perry (BR00161)

Posted on July 10, 2019 by PolyWoggJuly 11, 2019

PLOT OR PREMISE:

Elle is an old-fashioned cat burglar with updated methods to tell her when houses with valuables are likely to be sitting empty. And she happily liberates them, feeling no remorse because the people are rich and she mainly takes things that are insured. Cash, jewels, guns. Which is all fun and games until she walks into the master bedroom at an empty house and finds three dead people sharing a bed after sharing each other.

WHAT I LIKED

The initial premise is strong, and watching her case, enter and rob houses is exciting. The initial twist is that the murders were accidentally recorded on a nearby camera, and Elle has to steal it to wipe the memory of her entrance. Her sense of ethics requires her to edit the footage to remove herself and then return the camera before the police find the bodies. But somehow the killers are looking for her, they know she was there and maybe saw too much.

WHAT I DIDN’T LIKE

Elle is supposed to be young, hip, and in the criminal underworld…and then spends more than half the book thinking the rough crowd in suits following her are probably cops, even after it is clear there is only one group looking for her, not two, and somebody killed her friend and the friend’s boyfriend. Everything about them screams mercenaries / ex-military even down to their office location, but nope, she keeps thinking they might be cops. Right up until she sees them shoot two people. A little slow on the uptake. In the middle of the “case”, a hit man comes after her, but rather than kill her as he is supposed to do, he plays with her for days trying to get her alone. Which he could have done by force ANY day and moved on. Whatever. She then turns into super sleuth to ferret out who they are, document all the evidence she’ll need to turn over to the police (i.e., days of surveillance and note-taking). At the end, the entire motive for everything is revealed in page after page of exposition, just dumped on the page by the bad guy which she conveniently records. And then it ends with only the barest of explanations of what happens to people, and her looking for work after getting out of the burglary game. Like maybe being a private investigator in a sequel, perhaps? While dating a new boyfriend she didn’t even really like.

MY RATING

Legend: 1/5 Finished 2/5 Not bad 3/5 Good 4/5 Enjoyable 5/5 Excellent

THE BOTTOM LINE

Love Perry but this is not his best work

See more details –> goodreads

Book Review Index
Intro Approach Review # Title Author Year Series Rating

The Lolly-Madonna War by Sue Grafton (BR00160)

Posted on May 22, 2019 by PolyWoggMay 22, 2019

PLOT OR PREMISE:

I loved Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone series, and since I’m a bit of a “completist”, once I like an author’s books, I try to read everything by them. Although it was made into a movie, the book has been long out of print. Which made no real sense…how could a book written by an author as prolific and popular as Sue Grafton, and that was made into a movie, not be available ANYWHERE? Now that I’ve read it, I can see why. Like Keziah Dane, one of her earlier books, the characters are dirt poor backwoods families. Isolated from town, this story takes place entirely on the properties between two neighbouring families. If you have ever heard of the old Hatfields and McCoys feud of two warring families, fighting for reasons they no longer remember, you have the Lolly Madonna War.

WHAT I LIKED

The book picks up mid-war with the latest skirmish. The one family, the Gutshalls, has let slip to the other family that there is a girl coming to their house, a girl named Lolly-Madonna who will be a potential mate for one of the sons. Except it is entirely fictitious. Until the second family, the Feathers, sees a girl hiking along the road and decides it must be Lolly-Madonna and therefore kidnap her to get back at the Gutshalls, depriving them of their prize. The girl protests, but to no avail. The war escalates with incursions on each other’s territory, shots fired, stills overturned, pigs slaughtered. And a budding romance with the girl.

WHAT I DIDN’T LIKE

The story is incredibly depressing from start to finish. With a giant plot-hole right in the middle…three of the kids are still friendly and talk occasionally, pretending to fight when they need to but not doing any real harm to each other. And when the Feathers tell their Gutshall friend that they have Lolly-Madonna, he doesn’t say, “But we made it up”. It would have ended the story. Instead, he decides to say nothing, tell his parents, and they get it in their head to say nothing but maybe they should rescue her. Just as an excuse to keep the feud going…if one does something, even in retaliation, the other has to respond. And the ending is beyond depressing, not to mention you don’t really “see” the ending, you just turn the page and find out how it all ended.

MY RATING

Legend: 1/5 Finished 2/5 Not bad 3/5 Good 4/5 Enjoyable 5/5 Excellent

THE BOTTOM LINE

There’s a reason this is out of print.

See more details –> goodreads

Book Review Index
Intro Approach Review # Title Author Year Series Rating

Unlucky in Law by Perri O’Shaugnessy (BR00159)

Posted on April 19, 2019 by PolyWoggApril 19, 2019

PLOT OR PREMISE:

Nina Reilly gets a call from her old mentor to sit second-chair on a murder case that started with a grave robbery.

WHAT I LIKED

The story that the client tells is surprisingly plausible…he was hired to rob a grave, which he did. Except when he’s caught, the cops go back and check the grave he robbed and find out that there’s now a fresh body in it and he’s charged with murder. It’s a simple twist but there is little doubt through the case that he’s not guilty and there is “something else” going on. And just to complicate things, her mentor is basically dumping the case on her, has done almost no prep, is showing early signs of dementia, and the PI he hired did almost no work either. Nina has her hands full just as Paul proposes.

WHAT I DIDN’T LIKE

There are two threads running through the story that are less than optimal. First, the premise of the mystery is that the dead body that is stolen is tied to a society of Russian conspiracy theorists who suspect he was tied to the Romanoffs (hey, he’s Russian, he must be, right?). This is about the fourth book I’ve read in the last two years that threw in a Romanoff angle, and it’s not handled that well, although most don’t anyway. Second, the marriage proposal from Paul leads to a bunch of emotional drama and angst, and detracts heavily from the story. It reads more like a bad romance novel than a mystery.

MY RATING

Legend: 1/5 Finished 2/5 Not bad 3/5 Good 4/5 Enjoyable 5/5 Excellent

THE BOTTOM LINE

Good story with the mentor, but the other stuff detracts

See more details –> goodreads

Book Review Index
Intro Approach Review # Title Author Year Series Rating

The Holland Suggestions by John Dunning (BR00158)

Posted on April 12, 2019 by PolyWoggApril 12, 2019

PLOT OR PREMISE:

A man receives a photograph in the mail and starts having weird dreams and compulsions to go to the spot in the photo, even though he has never been there.

WHAT I LIKED

The story has some interesting elements — a mysterious past dealing with hypnosis, suggestion, regression, etc. Equally, he’s a man trying to “recover” his life a bit, as his daughter starts to push back wanting to more about her absent mother. Finally, there are rumours of “gold in them there hills”, stories of old wars, native tribes, miners, and tunnels. He is searching for a treasure that he feels compelled to find, but he doesn’t know why.

WHAT I DIDN’T LIKE

There are hints in a few places that is partly about memory, or perhaps even past lives, and as such, it seems like they’re about to reveal that he’s the reincarnated version of someone. I probably would have thrown the book across the room for the cheesiness if it had, but there are other parts that are almost as bad — a finale with a series of weird action scenes that don’t fit the characters, interactions with individuals that should be more compelling and urgent yet instead come of as “wait and see”, and false and inaccurate tensions with snow storms.

MY RATING

Legend: 1/5 Finished 2/5 Not bad 3/5 Good 4/5 Enjoyable 5/5 Excellent

THE BOTTOM LINE

Love John Dunning’s prose, but not as good as his book mysteries

See more details –> goodreads

Book Review Index
Intro Approach Review # Title Author Year Series Rating

The Bookwoman’s Last Fling by John Dunning (BR00157)

Posted on April 8, 2019 by PolyWoggApril 8, 2019

PLOT OR PREMISE:

Janeway is hired to appraise part of an estate, a collection of first-edition children’s books amassed by a woman who died 20 years before. Now the husband has died, and his children want to distribute the money, but first, everything has to be totalled up.

WHAT I LIKED

Early on, the case has some interesting bits including discovery that someone has been slowly replacing some of the books with cheap duplicates, but not in any strategic way. Someone who knows something about value, but skipping some obvious choice books. It doesn’t take much for a daughter who also loves books to want Janeway to figure out if the mother was killed, and if so, by who. A bunch of brothers run around, and they’re all a little bit crazy, but who is the craziest? The dead husband was a horseman, and Janeway works for one of the brothers as a stable boy / horse walker to get in with the horse crowd. Reads a lot like a vintage Dick Francis book.

WHAT I DIDN’T LIKE

As with most Janeway novels, there are two mysteries interwoven — the death of the young wife 20 years before and the theft of the children’s books. Unfortunately, the story spends a LONG time with the horse crowd with not much happening. It read more like a personal diary than a mystery novel. Huge stretches of time with NOTHING RELEVANT to the mystery. Equally, neither of the mysteries are unraveled in an interesting way, just plodding in one case and almost happenstance in another. And so obvious for one ending, yet it takes forever to get there.

MY RATING

Legend: 1/5 Finished 2/5 Not bad 3/5 Good 4/5 Enjoyable 5/5 Excellent

THE BOTTOM LINE

Slow book, too much about horses and not enough detecting.

See more details –> goodreads

Book Review Index
Intro Approach Review # Title Author Year Series Rating

The Sign of the Book by John Dunning (BR00156)

Posted on April 8, 2019 by PolyWoggApril 8, 2019

PLOT OR PREMISE:

Cliff’s friend Erin asks him to go help an old girlfriend charged with murdering her husband. It seems like a strange request considering the woman stole Erin’s boyfriend, i.e. the dead guy, and they haven’t spoken since.

WHAT I LIKED

I am a bit of a sucker for stories involving unresolved emotional stories, and the story has a bit of that rolling around in it. There are even BOOKS, gasp, BOOKS involved in the story (shocker, right? The guy had a lot of high-end signed copies of middle-of-the-road scarce books, too many for a small-timer). So of course there are two stories — the death of the husband and the mystery of the signed books.

WHAT I DIDN’T LIKE

There is a bent local sheriff’s deputy who is almost a caricature at times, and the sub-story of the autistic boy is handled a little manipulatively (shows his grandparents are evil, for no real purpose — they didn’t need to be in the story at all — and two other kids that are referred to but hardly seen) plus he isn’t just autistic, more like Rain Man with drawing, of course. And the ending for the murder mystery is written taut, and supposedly riveting, but I just found it ridiculous.

MY RATING

Legend: 1/5 Finished 2/5 Not bad 3/5 Good 4/5 Enjoyable 5/5 Excellent

THE BOTTOM LINE

Good book mystery, poor murder mystery

See more details –> goodreads

Book Review Index
Intro Approach Review # Title Author Year Series Rating

The Bookman’s Promise by John Dunning (BR00155)

Posted on April 7, 2019 by PolyWoggApril 7, 2019

PLOT OR PREMISE:

Janeway decides to use his finder’s fee from the Grayson affair (book #2) to buy one amazing book, paying almost $30K for it at auction. The mystery is about the origins of the book itself, but more about the author himself, an explorer named Richard Burton (not the actor).

WHAT I LIKED

After buying the book, Janeway is contacted by an old woman who claims the book was hers once upon a time and subsequently stolen. Janeway believes her, and involves some other people in the story, one of whom ends up dead. There’s a killer chasing the book and it leads all the way to the same places the explorer visited in the American South before the US Civil War. Seedy bookdealers, a biographer with a familiar monkey on his back, a family friend with a similar but slightly different monkey. Everyone wants the book, the history, the story, and to own a piece of history.

WHAT I DIDN’T LIKE

There is a lot of exposition in the story. Some of it comes from a woman who did research using hypnosis and tape recordings to recover lost memories, and while it works as a plot device, it could have just as easily been done earlier in the woman’s life and without as much page time. In addition, there is a flashback to the people in the Burton story (just before the US Civil War), which happens about the 40% mark and runs about 10-15% of the novel. It’s engaging in the first person, but makes for another really long exposition. Finally, the action scene at the end seems more like out of a cheap action movie, and it takes a LONG time to get to the actual action.

MY RATING

Legend: 1/5 Finished 2/5 Not bad 3/5 Good 4/5 Enjoyable 5/5 Excellent

THE BOTTOM LINE

Good mystery, but a lot of exposition and slow ending

See more details –> goodreads

Book Review Index
Intro Approach Review # Title Author Year Series Rating

The Bookman’s Wake by John Dunning (BR00154)

Posted on April 6, 2019 by PolyWoggApril 6, 2019

PLOT OR PREMISE:

Cliff gets offered a bounty-hunter job by a low-life ex-cop PI-wannabe and he is all prepared to say no — except the skip’s name is Eleanor Rigby and she is running out on a burglary charge, after breaking and entering to steal a rare book. Cliff is hooked.

WHAT I LIKED

The story takes awhile to get going, and the opening prologue refers to a 20-year-old killing spree so you know there’s a story buried somewhere, all tied to the rare book. The book covers the history of a slightly-mad printer/publisher who created Grayson Press, a creator of fabulous beautiful books in limited runs up until he died in a fire that destroyed the company. And some books that he may or may not have published before the fire. Truly rare birds. Add in some characters like the sleazy PI, Eleanor herself, a biographer with a monkey on his back, and a reporter with the same monkey, and Janeway has some fun. There are two scenes where the life of the book scout comes alive, one spending a day in Seattle’s book biz looking for books and one where some biographical info of Grayson’s turns up. You feel almost breathless, just as Janeway does. And somewhere in the midst of all of it is a serial murderer.

WHAT I DIDN’T LIKE

The story lags in a few places, including complicated personal stories around the Grayson biographical info, and an extra action scene or two that are unwarranted simply because they do nothing to advance the story. The final wrap-up is a bit too formulaic in delivering some action, but it gets the job done.

MY RATING

Legend: 1/5 Finished 2/5 Not bad 3/5 Good 4/5 Enjoyable 5/5 Excellent

THE BOTTOM LINE

An excellent mystery, with a little too much backstory in places.

See more details –> goodreads

Book Review Index
Intro Approach Review # Title Author Year Series Rating

Booked to Die by John Dunning (BR00153)

Posted on April 5, 2019 by PolyWoggApril 5, 2019

PLOT OR PREMISE:

Cliff Janeway is a book-loving police detective, and when a down-on-his-luck bookscout gets killed in an alley, Cliff thinks he knows who did it — Jackie Newton, local sadist and suspected killer of homeless men.

WHAT I LIKED

The first half of the book has an almost “western” feel to it, with Jackie being the resident bad guy and Cliff the passing drifter who stands his ground against the bully. It has a nice feel to it, but nothing super special. Then Cliff moves into the bookworld looking for who killed Bobby the BookScout, and the book blossoms into a booklover who happens to also be a detective. It’s a fantastic world, made real with the details.

WHAT I DIDN’T LIKE

Jackie never seems real to me, more a caricature, and it is the bookworld that really brings it alive. Equally, there’s some romance elements that don’t really work in the story, seems more like going through the motions than immersive.

MY RATING

Legend: 1/5 Finished 2/5 Not bad 3/5 Good 4/5 Enjoyable 5/5 Excellent

THE BOTTOM LINE

Great first book in the series, worthy of an Edgar nomination.

See more details –> goodreads

Book Review Index
Intro Approach Review # Title Author Year Series Rating