materialist

Hilarious denouement; fantastic narration

Revisado: 04-08-25

My second Kate Atkinson/Jackson Brodie. The first was Case Histories, which caused me a lot of anxiety as it was about missing children and domestic abuse. But my goodness, what an intelligent, witty, and compassionate writer. So this book (Rook) is a cornucopia of crime novel tropes, satirized and still humane.

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Charming historical characters

Revisado: 02-19-25

The protagonists were indeed charming. Sadly, the writing is rife with annoying rhetorical questions, unoriginal psych-pontification, and historically jarring diction: surely in 1930, one did not “share” one’s ideas, for example. Performance was mostly good but not great.

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Great narration of a crazy story

Revisado: 04-09-24

Boy the Parker stories are a perverse pleasure. Rootin’ for the hard boiled, melancholy, manly, morally pure detective, except he’s a violent psychopath. An amazing feat of storytelling!

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Such an original take on a murder mystery

Revisado: 01-30-24

I loved the sheep, their perspective on humans, the thoughts about “the herd”, human society and the different natures of creatures. The German narration was superb. Just lovely.

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Deservedly a classic

Revisado: 01-23-23

Read wonderfully, as always, by Martin Jarvis. The last chapter is one of the great exegeses of the nature and psychology of evil.

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An intelligent and whacky satire

Revisado: 01-03-23

I can’t quite give it 5 stars, because of the silliness of the story and the terrible East London accent attempted by the narrator, but I did enjoy this book a lot. Most importantly, I learned a surprising amount about the Islamic faith, the experience of immigrant Muslims, and about the politics of terrorism.

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Very disappointing performance of a weird and angry book.

Revisado: 01-01-23

Odd amalgam of fury and grotesque humor. I totally get why, but wish it had been both better written and performed by someone with more skill at reading aloud.

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Horrible narration

Revisado: 04-16-22

The stories are quite dated, beautifully written, and with that odd catholic theme that doesn’t really register for most people these days. The narrration was all wrong: a creaky, Oxbridge, nasal diction, completely wrong for sweet, diffident father brown, interspersed with a clumsy, stereotypical French accent for the various French characters. This all makes it almost impossible, imo, to focus on the story.

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Oh heavens. I couldn’t even listen to the whole thing.

Revisado: 07-16-21

The cadence of the narrator is simply bizarre, and caused me to stop listening long before the middle of the book. Rats!

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Period pieces

Revisado: 07-12-21

Closer to Sherlock Holmes than to the later closed room/English village/grande dames of English mystery: imperturbable little Father Brown who notices everything and interprets the human heart through the lens of its relationship to spirituality. These murders, gruesome and described with considerable relish, are situated in a society only beginning to wrench itself away from Victorianism, and there is none of the questioning of the class structure and social roles that mark later, post World War I, mysteries. Mostly, Chesterton seemed to use the stories as ways to comment on religion. (He was a convert to Catholicism, which in his England was still a fraught thing to be.) Narrator was a bit too blasé for my taste; only his Father Brown voice was gentle and sweet, but every so often the softness took on an almost creepy quality. The French accents were annoying but perhaps inevitable.

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