Chris Newfield

Implausible self-destruction among main characters

Revisado: 01-17-25

The villain’s psychology isn’t vey convincing either. The core detectives aren’t very engaging. this is A weak pitong in this series

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Most overrated 19th century classic

Revisado: 11-15-24

Great reader of this edition - she kept me going. But the novel is predictable and mostly dull, with occasional illuminations of psychological insight. Anna and her great love have some moments of eloquence but even this relationship is repetitious and stagnant. . The whole thing is resolved by focusing on the least interesting couple and then collapses into religious dogma- really the opposite of the complexities novels are able to explore. I love 19th century novels and have read a ton of them and have no idea why people think this one is so great. Read Middlemarch, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Our Mutual Friend, and any of a few dozen others rather than this.

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Implausibly gruesome

Revisado: 05-29-24

This is my 5th or 6th in the series, and the first that felt forced for shock effect

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Least plausible of the plots so far

Revisado: 04-06-24

Detection process holds up well as does the convergence of multiple stories. But the underlying mystery is unconvincing and the characters were more superficial that I remember from the previous 3 books

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A superb writer dumbs it down a bit

Revisado: 02-19-24

I loved Deborah Kennedy's Tornado Weather and belatedly realized she'd published a second novel, which I'd worried about because of the brutal concentration of fame and stardom in the publishing industry. Tornado Weather had a brilliant set of interlocking stories that showed the small-town midwest from a full range of angles. The key feature is that every character is a thinking, feeling intelligent person regardless of where they get stuck in society and how they are viewed by the people who think the town belongs to them. "Billie Starr" focuses on a single mother getting into her late twenties and her precocious daughter. They are broke, and there's lots of intelligent material about how hard it is to raise a kid under threat of eviction, patronizing non-help from family and community, and so on. Kennedy always writes very well. But the star of the show isn't the ensemble of the community this time and two things happen. First, the mother-daughter relation becomes contrived as it can't bear the weight of all the issues in play in the book (the Republican takeover of now deep-red Indiana is going on in the background, as is deindustrialization and growing precarity and spreading suburban white Christianity. Second, the townspeople and the politicians become less intelligent and more stereotyped. The story itself is good, but the characters are less so, including the mom at the center, who goes from Ms.Bad Choices to Ms. Marple in a frenzy of maternal angst. I'm really looking forward to Kennedy's third and more small-town intelligence, as she's clearly a major talent.

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Vital information told extremely well

Revisado: 06-03-23

This whole series is a window into a history we’re still living. you won’t forget it.

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Great but drop the foreign accents next time

Revisado: 09-21-20

The book is one of the great historical narratives. The reader is basically excellent, but someone decided to have French generals speak English with a French accent and the same for Germans. This is prejudicial and misleading: these were all native (and often brilliant) speakers of their own language and the equivalent in English is unaccented native fluency.

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