• Goodnight Irene, by Luis Alberto Urrea **** (of 4)

    July 25, 2024

    Based on accounts from the author’s mother, Luis Alberto Urrea has created a fictional account of two young women who volunteer for the Red Cross in WW II. They are assigned to trucks outfitted to make donuts and sent off to the war. The two women serve GIs a taste of home: fresh donuts, hot coffee, and some healthy flirting with young female servers. As one commander says about his soldiers fighting Nazis from the beaches of Normandy toward Germany, “My soldiers know who they are fighting against, but the Donut Dollies (“STOP calling me, Dolly!” is recurring refrain) is reminder of what they are fighting for.”

    The idea of serving fresh donuts to raise the morale of troops, in hindsight, feels as quaint as a Bob Hope variety show. Urrea has set himself a difficult task of justifying another book about World War II, this one about donuts. He succeeds marvelously by painting a rich picture of Irene Woodward, a scion of New York socialites, and Dorothy Dunford, a strapping midwestern farm girl, as they descend into the dangers of wartime duties. Irene and Dorothy ask themselves repeatedly, “Is serving donuts really helping to win the war? What are we doing here?” It all matters. Keeping up morale is as important as supplying ammunition or shipping the right number of warm socks in the right sizes to soldiers on the front lines.

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  • The Maid by Nita Prose ** (of 4)

    July 12, 2024

    Molly the Maid is what we used to call “on-the-spectrum.” She does not read body language or comprehend social cues. She is 25 years old and very smart. Repeatedly, she asks herself if a smile is genuine or not; are people laughing at her or with her. Like in a fairy tale, she has no mother but is raised by a fairy godmother of a grandmother. Molly loves being a maid, “May I bring your room to a state of perfection?” she asks as she rolls her trolly into a client’s room in the archetypal Regency Hotel.

    Above all else, Molly is an exceedingly decent person, which is why it is supposed to feel so bad when she discovers a wealthy hotel client dead in his bed. When questioned by police, Molly’s proclivity to perceive all inquiries literally–even snarky and sarcastic asides–quickly land her in hot water. The mystery of how the dead man died is eventually worked out. Unfortunately, the trope of a maid who takes everything literally (unless, somehow, her insight is helpful to the investigation) begins to feel like a grown-up version of the children’s book series about Amelia Bedelia. When Amelia Bedelia is asked to pick up her feet when she walks, she uses her hands to pick up her feet. Molly does just about the same, which after a while starts to outweigh her essential goodness.

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  • Down the River Unto the Sea by Walter Mosley *** (of 4)

    July 12, 2024

    Joe King Oliver is, no, was, a NYC cop. He was sent to Rikers after being framed for molesting a perp. Now, a dozen years later, still suffering flashbacks and PTSD from his time in the hole, he is trying to put his life back together. He is working as a private investigator when a client asks him to take on the case of a cop-killer on death row. Cop-killers don’t get let off, especially those who admit to doing the shooting. Except, the man on death row is an African American who worked hard to lift up NYC’s most down and out. Now calling himself A Free Man (formerly Leonard Compton), A Free Man ran up against a crooked ring of police who were extorting junkies and prostitutes. The cops hunted down our do-gooders associates and came after A Free Man, guns blazing.

    Joe Oliver now has two cases involving unknown crooked cops: A Free Man and his own hunt for the guys who framed him. He prowls the streets of the city expounding the philosophy of a well-read, self-taught, working class Black man making him one of the most interesting characters to ever interrogate the line between right and wrong. Race and class are given the attention they deserve. New Yorkers, who are honest with themselves, are always measuring and assessing. At times the circuities of Oliver’s attempts to uncover the bad cops who framed him and the bad cops that went after A Free Man are too tangled to follow, but stick with Oliver. His observational skills about life in the city, and about life in general, are magnificent.

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  • Essex Dogs by Dan Jones **** (of 4)

    June 10, 2024

    In July of 1346, King Edward crossed the English Channel to reclaim territory taken by his independently-minded cousin, King Phillipe. Thousands of troops land on the beaches of Normandy, but we follow 10 peasants who fight together and call themselves the Essex Dogs. They have made their livings as soldiers-for-hire during summer fighting season and have gotten good at their craft. They are a Band of Brothers.

    The ten men are real people. The de facto leader of the Dogs, Loveday FitzTalbot, is questioning whether he still has the drive to kill and pillage indiscriminately. After many seasons in the field, his belly is bigger than it is used to be, running uphill winds him, and he recognizes the villagers he is terrorizing as being not unlike himself. It is hard to swing an axe effectively when your mind is questioning your motives. Their youngest recruit, Romford, overcomes hazing because what he has left behind is worse than becoming a warrior. He also has an appetite for drugs and during the heat of battle disappears to ransack apothecaries. There are a pair of expert archers from Wales who speak no English, but can shoot an arrow through the peak of your hat from a galloping horse, and a former priest, called Father, who has become a bloodthirsty madman.

    Then there are the film-clear descriptions of life on the march. Soldiers wait in long lines in the French sun while engineers repair river crossings destroyed by retreating Frenchmen. Insects swarm them. They have not washed in weeks. The food is wretched. Their leather shoes have holes. Water is often unpalatable. They get the runs. Small cuts get infected. They have been promised pay only if they complete the campaign. And they can all see that not only are knights and lords sleeping on soft beds in tents attended to by servants and squires, but that other soldiers appear to be receiving special treatment. There is a lot of well-earned grumbling.

    If you have a chance, listen to the audiobook. Not only does the reader keep all the accents straight, but he sings the abusive curses of captains handing out orders with alacrity and minces the words of King Edward’s teenage brat of a son with comedic perfection.

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  • Murder in Old Bombay by Nev March *** (of 4)

    June 10, 2024

    It is 1892. India is a British colony and Indians, at least upper class Indians, aspire to move up the British hierarchy. Two young women in the wealthy Framji family fall to their deaths from the university clock tower. The official ruling is suicide, but Captain Jim Agnihotri, recovering from a battle injuries suffered as a Dragoon fighting in Afghanistan cannot abide the ruling. He suspects murder.Captain Jim is hired by the Framji family to investigate.

    Captain Jim provides us with an insider’s view of British colonization, Indian opposition to British rule, and Victorian longing (think incessant pining for Lady Diana Framji, daughter of the patriarch, who is devilishly alluring, but above his station in life). Murder in Old Bombay burrows into the trains, villages, markets, and homes of turn-of-the-century India making the book a worthwhile adventure.

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  • The Secret Hours by Mick Herron *** (of 4)

    May 18, 2024

    This is Herron’s prequel to his successful Slow Horses series, which is one of those rare compilations that is better on screen (Apple +) than it is to read. The spies in this book (a couple of whom will appear in previous books for which this is the recently published prequel) are working in Berlin just after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union. Espionage is in chaos as old countries disintegrate, new ones are formed, and spies no longer protected by an Iron Curtain seek to settle old scores.

    MI5’s lead operative is laying a Berlin trap for a former Stasi agent who killed one of his best East German sources. Details of his operation emerge in front of a present day tribunal ordered by Great Britain’s PM. The Prime Minister has established a task force to search for historical illegalities perpetrated by MI5. It’s a publicity stunt that is accurately and hysterically recounted. Griselda Fleet and Malcolm Kyle, lifelong bureaucrats, trudge through the tedium of hearings everyone knows are never going to amount to anthill of dirt.

    The spycraft is slow, and the hearings slower, but the office dialogue and repartee among spies who feel like they are punching a clock, and occasionally punching one another, is priceless.

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  • Red Queen by Juan Gomez-Jurado ** (of 4)

    April 25, 2024

    Antonia Scott is a genius at penetrating the minds of dastardly criminals. She is also a morbid recluse with no sense of smell (is this important for us to know?), gorgeous, and without social skills. John Guiterrez is assigned to be her partner by an unseen handler called MENTOR. John is overweight, or just strong, gay, a good guy, without a partner, and disgraced by the police department for a dubious infraction. And the criminals they pursue are unspeakably heinous.

    Which is to say the book (apparently well-loved around the world) is tolerable if it is read as a comic book without pictures. Antonia Scott is the smartest person in all of Europe. Mentor works for a shadowy European consortium of crime-fighters who operate outside of and above the law. Criminals slink through shadowy underground tunnels. Confrontations appear in word-panels that burst with gore and the equivalent of starburst “POWS” and “OOFS.” For the full (not so pleasant experience) listen to the audiobook. The reader has only two distinct voices: angry and angrier.

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  • Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell *** (of 4)

    March 26, 2024

    The story’s most famous character, William Shakespeare, is never mentioned by name. History tells us that Hamnet, the son of William and Agnes (Anne Hatheway) Shakespeare, died at age 11, but little more is known. O’Farrell brings to life, and death, the 1500s in rural England. The plague comes and goes. Neighbors squabble. Relatives promote themselves and (some of) their brethren, while petty jealousies fester. For the sheer strength of O’Farrell’s characterizations, her book is Shakespearean.

    But the added benefit is the authority with which she describes muddy lanes between thatched roof homes, household gardens, glove-making shops, apothecaries, market stalls, and, on the edge of town, cow fields. When illness befalls Hamnet, medical wisdom of the era recognized the symptoms and likely deadliness of Bubonic plague, but knew little of its transmission or treatments. Hamnet’s mother is broken by her son’s illness and ensuing death. William Shakespeare, speculates O’Farrell, was, too. His play, Hamlet, is a tribute to his lost son.

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  • The Golden Gate by Amy Chua *** (of 4)

    March 25, 2024

    Detective Al Sullivan’s first big murder case erupts when former presidential candidate Walter Wilkinson (modeled on FDR’s 1940 opponent Wendell Wilkie) is shot in his room in the swanky Claremont Hotel. Wilkinson may or may not have been canoodling with one of the three desirable daughters of the wealthy Bainbridge family.

    While the Bay Area press goes wild for the story, Wilkinson digs deep into the questionable alibis of the Bainbridge sisters. On the upside of this noir, World War II era novel, are the attention to race and class as Al Sullivan (Mexican, Jewish and other ethnicities) fights his way upward through California’s stratified society. Sullivan is joined by the most interesting character in the book, his feistily independent niece, Miriam. The mystery is complicated, but aside from Al and Miriam, not all of the characters are as well developed.

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  • Lessons in Chemistry *** (of 4) by Bonnie Garmus

    February 8, 2024

    Elizabeth Zott is a chemist, but the early 1960s is no time to be a woman in science. Or, for that matter, to be woman with a mind. Elizabeth Zott believes in the applicability of scientific reasoning to solving life’s problems. The rest of society believes women should dedicate themselves to homemaking.

    Zott faces an unending sequence of closed doors, abusive male superiors, and unrelenting religious dogmatists. Fortunately, Elizabeth Zott is unsinkable, brilliant, and funny. The match-ups are science vs. religion, male vs. female, and an individual vs. society. Lessons in Chemistry is a delightful tower from which to observe the birth of what would become the 1960s women’s liberation movement.

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