1921 in Gilda Carr’s Manhattan involves a thirteen mile fence that runs down Broadway. East of the fence, things continue basically as they were. West of the fence is an overgrown wasteland that is at odds with and disallows modern technology. Thousands of people have disappeared in the Westside, and now the people who remain are thieves, bootleggers, murderers, artists, writers, drunks and the people who are too poor to leave. Gilda lives on the Westside.
In W.M. Akers’ Westside, Gilda is a detective, who solves ‘tiny mysteries’ as she calls them. What starts out as a usual tiny mystery for the wealthy Mrs. Copeland tracking down a white leather glove becomes the mystery of why Mr. Copeland is on the wrong side of town, murdered on a Westside pier. Which she wants no part of. That’s way too big for her. Her father, murdered years ago, was a cop, then a private eye, who solved big crimes. And who was eventually killed for what he stumbled upon. Gilda is not a solver of big crimes, she is a solver of small mysteries. The tiny questions that nag us to death and keep us up at night, not murders.
Still, she finds herself tracking down the details of Mr. Copeland’s death in the swampy Westside world of corruption, bootlegging, smuggling. Now Gilda finds herself on the verge of solving his murder and saving the city, even if she doesn’t want to be the person who does any of that.
I liked Westside. It had a very Neil Gaiman Neverwhere feel setting wise, and I very much enjoyed the whiskey, jazz, and the wild west feel of a wild New York City. Gilda herself is a compelling protagonist who distracts herself from her grief with the small mysteries she solves to make a living. The mystery is interesting but the pace was a little off in some places. I have already read the second Westside novel and have the third to dig into as well. I’m looking forward to it.
Category Archives: fantasy
Westside: A Gilda Carr Tiny Mystery
Blood of Elves
This is less of a recap/review and more of a story of how I made a huge mistake. Okay, this mistake was actually compounded by several smaller mistakes.
The first mistake was watching The Witcher on Netflix. I got through the first season in 2019 when it came out, because a bunch of fantasy nerds were excited about it, since the series is beloved by a lot of people. I didn’t like the TV show that much, and I love all sorts of fantasy. I also don’t find Henry Cavill a particularly compelling actor but that’s just my personal preference. I have considered several times returning to the series on Netflix, but just can’t really talk myself into it.
I was let down by the show. Andrzej Sapkowski’s series was very popular though, so I thought maybe the book would be better. Which leads me to mistake #2. For whatever reason, I was told Blood of Elves was Book 1. I was lied to. It is Book 3. Soooo. I listened to Book 3 on audiobook and was entirely lost the whole time.
The story might have been compelling, but it was hard to tell because I had no idea what was happening. This was not one of my cozy mysteries where I could read them out of order and still have a pretty decent idea of what was going on. I was going to go back and maybe try with Book 1, but never got around to it. So that’s mistake #3 – I let myself lose interest before going back to read/listen to the first part of the story.
Like I said, the series is beloved by a lot of people, particularly in Poland where Sapkowki’s from and still resides. I googled him and he looks like Santa Claus without a beard, so I’d love to support him in anyway because he’s clearly tirelessly making toys for small children in December. I should go back to them. I just…haven’t yet.
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke had been on my TBR list for a very long time, and it was one of the last books I listened to while I was still commuting, pre-pandemic, to work every day.
This book was long and sort of dense, but I enjoyed it all the same. The story takes place in sort of an alternate victorian England where magic has left but has made a return in the form of our title characters. Strange and Norrell have to navigate their complex relationship as the only two magicians left in England. They have different ideas of what magic should be and do.
I’m not going to lie, if you’re looking for a fast-paced, action-packed fantasy adventure, you’re going to be disappointed. What this is is a study of complex character and a sort of mystery. The magic had strange rules, the fae were part of the book but not the biggest part.
I listened to this book but didn’t read it – supposedly there are footnotes and illustrations and so if you’re someone who gets a lot of the reading experience this might be a book to read instead of to listen to. I listened to it because it’s much easier for me to listen to books than to read all of them, but this is one I’d like to go back to if given the opportunity to read it.
As I said, I recommend this if you like alternate history, complex characters, and speculative fantasy. I wouldn’t recommend this if you’re looking for the George RR Martin style fantasy, or Tolkien style fantasy, or even Harry Potter style fantasy. The tone is masterful and the prose is great, but it’s not a typical fantasy novel in terms of action or magic. It’s part of what makes it special.
The Thursday Next Novel Series
Thursday Next is the protagonist of a book series I accidentally stumbled on 2019. I believe I bought One of Our Thursdays Is Missing by Jasper Fforde at an airport when I forgot my own book, not realizing it was part of a series. I enjoyed it in spite of being somewhat confused by it (I definitely remember reading it and in the middle having a moment of clarity where the entire story made sense).
Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series currently stand as such:
Series 1:
The Eyre Affair
Lost in a Good Book
The Well of Lost Plots
Something Rotten
Series 2 (so far):
First Among Sequels
One of Our Thursdays is Missing
The Woman Who Died A Lot
In 2019, I read/listened to four Thursday Next novels. The second novel of the second series, and the first three novels of the first series. The only reason I didn’t continue is that I couldn’t find the later books as audiobooks, although as I was writing this I went back to check and was able to borrow Something Rotten as an audiobook right away (and did so, will be listening to it after my current book).
I am sort of at a loss as where to begin “reviewing” the Thursday Next series, as the universe created around them is one of the most creative and complex I’ve read outside of high fantasy. The Thursday Next wikipedia page describes the stories as “comic fantasy, alternate history mystery novels” and that’s about as good a genre breakdown as you’re going to get.
Thursday herself is an engaging character, in her mid thirties and quite bright, working in the Literary Detective section. Literature is much more popular in Thursday’s world than ours, and much of the plot is centered around classic literature.
Fforde’s writing is full of wordplay – alliteration and puns abound – and he plays with traditional genres. There’s metafiction, fantasy, and parody. There are many, many literary references that made me grin. I quite enjoyed the novels and highly recommend them to all nerds who like literature and wordplay. I am pleasantly surprised to have Something Rotten on my audiobook shelf and look forward to trying to find the other books in the series.
Absolutely recommend.
The Wolf in the Attic
I picked up Paul Kearney’s The Wolf in the Attic by chance when I was in Barnes & Noble one day with my mom. I was attracted by the title which interested me, and by the blurb on the back which featured CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien. They weren’t huge parts of the story but they did clearly inspire some of the setting and I appreciated that.
The story revolves around Anna Francis, a refugee of the Great War, in England from Greece, where her village was destroyed by (IIRC) the Ottomans. Her mother and brother were killed, and Anna and her father managed to make it to England, where Anna was bullied for being foreign so badly that she was eventually pulled out of school. Aside from her tutor, her only friend is her doll, Penelope, who Anna is aware is not real but is still acknowledged to be her best friend. Penelope is the only one Anna can talk about her homeland and her mother and brother with; her father does not want to talk about it. Her father has become involved with a political group of Greek ex-pats and has taken to heavy drinking.
With little else to do when not studying, Anna explores the house in which she lives and wanders the streets of Oxford and the surrounding countryside. She eventually meets a boy with yellow eyes in the attic and then his family in the woods – and her life takes quite the turn.
This was a historical fiction and fantasy book which I truly enjoyed, even though books like this aren’t usually my jam. Anna is a wonderful character, childlike but still smart and insightful, and her loneliness pervades the entire story. The writing was quite beautiful. I read part of the book on the train to and from New York City, and remember vividly looking out the window, startled to find I was on the Hudson River in New York, not in Oxfordshire.
The book’s ending suggested a sequel and I would not hesitate to read another of Kearney’s books, especially one featuring Anna. I absolutely look forward to this, although it will probably be even further down the line than this review as I have so many other books to read.
That said, The Wolf in the Attic was a wonderful story and I highly recommend it.
The Winternight Trilogy
Katherine Arden’s Winternight Trilogy is an adult historical fantasy series that consists of three books:
The Bear and the Nightingale
The Girl in the Tower
The Winter of the Witch
I listened to all of them in 2019, and I loved them so much that I bought them as books.
These books contained what was, by far, my favorite story of 2019 and I loved the saga so much that I cried when it was over (not a typical reaction for me).
The series centers on Vasilisa Petrovna, or Vasya, the youngest of five children in a remote Russian village. Her father is the boyar of the village (basically a lord in the Eastern European feudal system), and Vasya is the only (living) member of her family who has the ability to see creatures of Russian folklore, such as the domovoy who lives in their home, the rusalka of a lake in the forest, the bannik of the bathhouse, and Morozko, the frost king.
The story follows Vasya’s journey for personal freedom, from adolescent to young adult woman, within the confines of both her gender and her society’s values in medieval Russia. She is a likable and compelling heroine, and I *really* liked her. Per the author: “She is strong enough to embrace her differences, but she still reads as a woman of her time.” I felt alternately elated and terrible for her, as she struggled to do what was right for herself, her family, and eventually her country. The world building was impressive and immersive, and I enjoyed wandering through the forests with Vasya and Solovey.
There are also clear elements of Russian folklore and Slavic myth woven into Vasya’s tale, and I learned more about the history of medieval Russia than I ever learned in school. My favorite creature was definitely the domovoy, although I liked Morozko a lot too. There is also insight into Russian names, which I have never been able to figure out before (not that I extensively tried), but the explanations of how names work in the translation from Russian to English made this book *much* easier to understand.
In case you can’t tell, I highly recommend this novel series. You know how sometimes you leave a story feeling like you’ve been changed? I felt like that here. I’m not sure why, exactly, but I came out in love with Vasya’s world and plan to reread the series again in the not too distant future. I hope everyone else who reads it enjoys it as much as I did. I loved it.
Skulduggery Pleasant
So I finally did a YA novel that I knew was a YA novel going in.
I really enjoyed Derek Landy’s Skulduggery Pleasant.
Skulduggery reminded me of my best friend, which may have been why I enjoyed it so much.
The story begins with Stephanie Edgely, a twelve year old who inherits the bulk of her best-selling novelist uncle’s estate, in spite of her living parents and aunt and uncle. Mr. Skulduggery Pleasant, also at the funeral and will reading but unknown to the family, is left a piece of advice (which nobody is very jealous of, as it sounds rather useless).
Stephanie spends time in her new property and is attacked there by a man demanding a key. She is rescued by Skulduggery Pleasant who throws a fireball he generated with a finger snap at the man. Skullduggery’s disguise is knocked askew in the fray, and he is revealed to be nothing but a skeleton held together by magic.
Stephanie goes on to figure out that her uncle was murdered and was very involved in sorcery and was quite the magician. As it turns out, he had discovered some kind of magic weapon that the first sorcerers used against their gods. (As everyone knows, it is *never* a good idea to fuck with gods). Skulduggery and Stephanie go on to investigate, save the day, etc…
Anyway, as this goes on, Skulduggery and Stephanie also become friends, with Skulduggery encouraging Stephanie to come up with a new magic name, that she needs if she plans to continue in the magical world. She, of course, does.
Again, I really, really enjoyed this book, even though it was YA. Stephanie was likeable enough, and Skulduggery’s deadpan humor and dry wit amused me to no end. There are more books in this series. I’ll try to get to them, and have been meaning to for awhile. I just haven’t yet.Â
I may give the book to my cousin’s kid for her next birthday. I’m going to try to corrupt her into fantasy but she’s into mysteries right now. Perhaps this magical mystery will be the first step on the path…
The Darkest Part of the Forest
Holly Black was an author I hit hard in 2018. Not as hard as Stephen King or Bill Bryson, but still pretty hard for me (3 books).
This was the second Holly Black book I listened to, again, mostly at the gym.
I will say that it was under the Stephen King umbrella of supernatural/fantasy/horror, although this book was definitely less horror and more fantasy.
This was my favorite of Black’s books. Hazel and Ben, her brother, live in a town where the humans and fae live in close proximity. In the woods is a glass coffin where a boy with horns has been asleep for as long as anyone can remember. Then he wakes up.
Black has a knack for capturing the tumultuous inner lives of teenagers, and anyone who does a decent job of making teenagers anything other than just angsty whiners is a hero in my opinion. I’ve just read so much teenage angsty garbage that when I find characters that do more than this, I really appreciate it.
The story is a complex mix of fairy magic and a damsel-in-distress-with-a-twist story. Hazel’s relationships with her brother Ben, and another teenager named Jack, and with herself are basically the defining narratives here, that all combine to solve the mystery of what’s terrifying the people in town and how to stop it.
I liked Hazel, although she was a bit of a sociopath. Kids killing creatures – even non-human creatures – with delight always freaks me out a little. That said, children’s sense of justice is frequently much more black and white than an adult’s.
To illustrate: when I was a very small child in playgroup, a girl bit me. I was wearing a thick sweater, and still had teeth marks and a huge bruise on my arm. Also there were apparently no just consequences for this in my little mind. The girl wasn’t really “punished” (and again we were about two years old). My parents did as parents do – parenting. They tried to explain that sometimes kids do things wrong and it’s not nice to bite and the girl didn’t mean to hurt me, and I should forgive her etc… apparently I spent the time until the next playgroup saying “Not nice to bite?” and my parents would say “Yes, not not nice to bite.” Then, at the next playgroup, I apparently waited on a chair for that girl to run by, pulled her up by her hair, shook her around and yelled “NOT NICE TO BITE!” at her.
I don’t remember any of this, but I know myself well enough now to know that sounds like something Toddler!Kristine would do. VENGEANCE.
I didn’t love Black’s technique of going between the past and the present to reveal Hazel’s character. It felt a bit contrived, something to draw out the plot and prevent the reader from getting these pieces of the puzzle too soon, but without a real reason for doing it.
The story, though, was fun and well paced and there were some twists to keep me guessing, even if there was a bit of teenage angst that slowed things down here and there.
Overall, I liked The Darkest Part of the Forest. Would recommend.
The Lady Trent Memoirs
Marie Brennan’s Lady Trent memoirs may have been for young adults. Really. I’m not sure.
But I really liked them! They featured a really strong minded female character. AND DRAGONS. I would have been just like her, if I lived in her universe. There were five Lady Trent memoirs. In order, they were:
A Natural History of Dragons
The Tropic of Serpents
Voyage of the Basilisk
In the Labyrinth of Drakes
Within the Sanctuary of Wings
Isabella is a tomboy with four brothers, growing up in would-be Victorian England. Her version is Scirland. The world in the book is very much like our world in the 19th century, except there are dragon in distant parts of it, with much about them unknown. They’re in very remote regions and are very dangerous, making them very difficult to study.
Isabella’s parents – her mother in particular – want her to be a proper lady (meaning definitely no studying dragons) and want her to marry, and she does. She eventually marries Jacob, a gentleman, who is like minded about scientific research and who she manipulates into going on a dragon expedition financed by a famous scientific wealthy backer. After she cracks, breaking down in tears and explaining to him that she really wants to go because basically all she’s cared about since she was a kid was learning about dragons, Jacob takes her with him and convinces their backer to let her come to be a sketch artist and secretary for the trip.
Jacob is probably my favorite character in the first novel. He is kind, and understanding, and treats Isabella as an equal. He is quite hurt when he thinks Isabella doesn’t love him, but she does, she’s just super bad with her feelings.
The stories are of Isabella’s expeditions in the wild to study dragons – her obsession since she was a kid. I love her relationship with Tom, at first an antagonist, then her partner and best friend. Like Isabella, Tom also has trouble being accepted into the high society scientific community. Isabella is of high birth but is a woman, and Tom is a man but of a lower class. They make a great team in the later novels.
She is finally accepted by the scientific community, rather grudgingly, but accepted all the same.
I really enjoyed these books. The world building was good. It’s true they were a bit predictable but overall I didn’t mind this because 1. they weren’t mysteries, 2. Isabella was a really wonderful character, and 3. THERE WERE DRAGONS.
Like Isabella, I am also obsessed with dragons. I liked these books a lot. They will not be for everyone, but I enjoyed them immensely.
2018: The Year of Stephen King (Part II)
Because Stephen King’s Dark Tower audiobooks are popular at the library, I couldn’t just listen to them all in a row. I had to wait in between and listened to more of his books in the meantime. The other Stephen King books I completed last year were:
Doctor Sleep
Gwendy’s Button Box (co-written with Richard Chizmar)
Mr. Mercedes
Finders Keepers
End of Watch
Salem’s Lot
Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers, and End of Watch were a series of detective novels featuring retired detective Bill Hodges and his nemesis Brady Hartsfield. I don’t know if I loved the supernatural-ish twist the series took, but overall I really enjoyed it, especially because Hodges’s side kick characters, Jerome Robinson and Holly Gibney.
Holly might be the best female character King has written. She is neurotic, socially inept, and has a ton of anxieties, but she is brilliant, loyal, funny, and infinitely capable. I loved loved loved her, and she appears in The Outsider (which I haven’t read yet), and is apparently getting her own book next year. I am so excited.
Gwendy’s Button Box was a novella set in Castle Rock, Maine, where 12 year old Gwendy meets a stranger in dark clothes who invites her to “palaver” (hello, reference to The Dark Tower series) and gives her a box with – you guessed it! – buttons. This was a novella, mostly about personal choices. It was ok. I didn’t love it as much as other books by King this year.
Doctor Sleep was a sequel to The Shining, which follows once cute 5 year old Danny Torrence into his alcoholic adulthood. Alcoholic Dan is way less adorable but he does pull it together to help Abra, a girl with “the shine,” who is being hunted by the cult True Knot. I liked Doctor Sleep, but for some reason felt it was missing something. Can’t quite figure out what it was.
Salem’s Lot is the story of a man named Ben Mears, who returns to his childhood town to discover it’s being taken over by vampires. I watched the TNT miniseries starring Rob Lowe in 2004 but never got around to reading the book. This was one of the books I listened to last summer at the gym (I spent A LOT of time at the gym last summer). I really liked this one. It’s one of King’s earliest books and easily one of his most famous and beloved. I liked a lot of the vampire lore that King built on (again, this was a Dracula year) and I liked the ending immensely. I decided to listen to the whole story because Father Callahan appeared in the The Dark Tower novels.
So that was my year with Stephen King. I plan to continue with his stuff. King can suck me into just about any story within a few pages, which is a talent beyond measure. How many books do I start and then drop because they just aren’t interesting? Quite a few, but none of Stephen King’s books, that’s for sure.
words in scarlet ink 