Nice ... ummm, Donkey - yeah, that's it, Donkey

Who Killed Marilyn Monroe? by Liz Evans


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Hmm, I'm not sure this is as cozy as I had expected. Sure, there's a bit of romance and the PI is a tad inept. There's also some deadly peril and a lot of blood - not to mention animal abuse. Marilyn Monroe is the donkey. It is apparently common to name donkey ride animals after old movie stars. According to one of my traveling friends, it's done in Greece as well - and they aren't all named Melina Mercouri. Old American film stars seem to be the norm.
Grace Smith, forced to leave The Force and now an unsuccessful private investigator and full-time mooch, is hired by the donkey ride owner to find out who killed an innocent beast of burden.
This case gets tangled with the murder of a young woman - and everyone is off looking for the Maltese Falcon (oh, whattagiveaway!). Well, that's what I was saying to myself once the statue element entered the story. And once you know there's a vicious donkey, you can predict what happens later.
This was, despite those predictable bits, a good and satisfying read that held up right to the end.

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Walk a Mile in Their Shoes

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Having read this, I now see how The Watsons go to Birmingham - 1963 was stage-managed. First, you suck people in with amusing childhood remembrances and get them all chuckling. Then you serve them what seems to be the climax and let them settle back down. At the very end you slam them with deadly peril, made to appear a little less deadly in the case of this book because all the narration seems to take place from inside a ham costume.
Both are powerful books and move me to tears. Neither of them were books I wanted to read, but in the end I was glad I read them. TKAM is difficult for me to relate to, so I may have appreciated Curtis's children's book more - a book that is much less preachy and less neatly sewn up at the end. And is there anyone as saintly as Atticus Finch?
Where TKAM tells you to walk a while in another person's skin, TWGTB actually does the walk. Writing from the black point of view after the passage of 50 years (or so) shows just how slowly society changes and how far we have to go.

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And Don't Leave Out the Juicy Bits

The Man Who Loved China: Joseph Needham and the Making of a Masterpiece by Simon Winchester


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is a review of the audiobook.
I'd read almost anything by Simon Winchester. You wouldn't think that a book about a man who WROTE a book ("a" book - ha ha) would be that interesting without, say, a parallel story about a fiendish murderer, but again Winchester takes what could be the driest story on earth and injects it with his usual enthusiasm, making it palatable to those who would doubt him. And I did doubt it would capture my interest, but I picked it up anyway because it was an audiobook read by the author.
And I loved it. Okay, I loved his reading.
Needham was a socialist, a biologist, a womanizer, a nudist, and an unrepentant Morris dancer. Consequently, he was a Renaissance man. His life-long passion for women led him to China which took him from biology to the study of the history of science and invention in China. Apparently, all we know about the Chinese firsts (abacus, wheelbarrow, kite, gunpowder, etc.) come to us courtesy of Needham. That later he was a dupe of Korean War propaganda was the only glitch in a stellar career. Oh, that and the Morris dancing.
[The author of this review holds no known hostility to Morris dancing, having never been subjected to it, and is merely parroting other sources in an attempt to be Humorous.:]

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The Flavor Is Red, the Coating Is Powdered - Period

The Three Silly Girls Grubb by Ann Hassett


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Well, first of all, how could you resist that cover? [Interestingly, I know some Grubbs. I wonder if they've read this.] Reworking the story of the 3 billy goats and the troll, Hassett gives us a dirty little boy named Bobby who tries to bully each girl in turn into giving him her lunch. Understandably, each one refuses to give up her jelly donuts. As a connoisseur of le deaunutte gelee, I really appreciate the last page illustration of Robert, now utterly reformed and terrorized by the presence of the sisters, and the Gals Grubb with the white rings of powdered sugar around their mouths.
The characters are so ugly that they're cute. The solution to the story is brilliant and one that any child can relate to. Now if only I could find a way to use this in a storytime. [Hankers after a good NY state jelly donut where they understand red filling and powdered sugar.]

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How Could We Have Handled This Better?

So Far from the Sea by Eve Bunting


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Ignore the cover. I hate the cover. The illustrations inside are terrific, though. Soentpiet (pronounced soon-pete) is a genius. The story, by Eve Bunting, follows a Japanese-American family whose parents are revisiting the location of the internment camp where the father had once been ... well, interned. The grandfather is buried there as well. This will be the last time they are able to visit before moving east.
Soentpiet separates the main timeline from the WWII timeline by making the illustrations of the latter in black and white like photos (or, as Calvin's dad explained to him, in the old days, the world was monochromatic).
The father revisits his past and the psychological blow of being interned that he says started killing the grandfather before he even developed pneumonia. But, he tells us, it's "a thing that cannot be changed." What it was, was what it was. Gotta move on.

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Aw, Give the Kid a Break!

Train to Somewhere by Eve Bunting


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This book is about a child riding the orphan trains in the late 1880s, abandonment, disappointment, and unrealistic expectations. Abandon all hope, y'all, before entering here. Marianne's mother abandoned her at an orphanage to go west, but promised to return. She never did. Marianne, and her younger friend, Nora, are being sent west now in an effort to unload the swamped orphanage of its extra weight. Marianne and Nora want to stay together, but most people who meet the trains want a. One Child and b. A Boy to Do Farm Work. Marianne's hopes to be met at one of the stops by her real mother and her continual rejections and disappointments drip from every page. The illustrations are okay - the trains are especially good, but the story is what is compelling.

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Important Story Not Told Well Enough

Cheyenne Again by Eve Bunting


My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Eve Bunting is a great author of children's books and I admire her work. That said, I was a little disappointed in this book which is told in the voice of a young Cheyenne boy who is forced to go to a boarding school to be "civilized." The text is laconic (as opposed to Lakota - hrr hrr) and pared down to bald statements of fact. The illustrations seem stiff (unless they contain horses) and I'm torn between thinking that was intentional (showing the rigidity of the school and the cookie-cutter effect on the children), intentionally naive, or not that good. So I had to calibrate by re-reading The Train to Somewhere and So Far from the Sea, both of these historical fiction about separation and/or minority abuse.
The former, about orphans from the east being sent out west for "adoption," immediately brought me to tears and I marveled at the illustrations in the latter, which was about the Japanese internment camps during WWII.
Well, maybe Cheyenne Again is a "boy book." A young boy will probably be able to identify with the constrictions of school life and won't be weighed down with pesky emotions dripping all over the page. As a girl, I like A Train to Somewhere.

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A Morbid Taste for Cozies

A Morbid Taste for Bones: The First Chronicle of Brother Cadfael by Ellis Peters


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Peters wrote Medieval-Lite, but. I know other authors who came behind her to write medieval mysteries tried to capture the grittier reality from a time that was not all Chivalry and Great Ideals, and I can appreciate them as well, but these are just so ... nice. Although the settings in these books are somewhat sanitized, the characters are compelling and the mysteries are good. In this the first of the series, we meet Brother Cadfael (who is nothing like Sir Derek and one wonders how that man hasn't changed since he was Claudius - perhaps he has a painting in his attic ... ), a former man of the world who has been both soldier and lover and now appreciates a bit of peace and quiet.

We are also introduced to other continuing characters, the gentle Abbott, the supercilious Prior and his sycophantic assistant, and other brothers. Cadfael is the herbalist and that and years of military service have taught him what death looks like. Years of amatory service have given him sympathy for those in love.

In this story, Prior Robert's ambitions for the monastery (and himself) send a party to Wales to extract an underutilized saint literally from that soil. The Welsh aren't happy about this and the village's most outspoken authority is murdered. An Englishman unaffiliated with the monks is implicated. Being Welsh, Cadfael is torn between loyalty to his brothers and to his countrymen. Being a cozy mystery, Peters neatly resolves everything and shows Cadfael to be whimsical at the same time as being Solomonic.

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