S. Coldsmith

Perfect metaphor for our times

Revisado: 09-12-23

It’s a fact that smart people are better equipped to make themselves believe whatever lies they want to believe. This has been particularly obvious in the Covid era, where the average MAGA business owner, the kind of person who has no trouble handling a spreadsheet or understanding sports stats, can convince him or herself that untested remedies for a novel disease or better than tested ones. King’s malignant old folks, professors of no great repute, take resentment coupled with intelligence to a new level. This time King delivers with his familiar verve and all the usual, delightful cliches apply. I couldn’t put it down. Had to stay up all night. Can’t wait for the next novel in the Holly Gibney series.

The narrator was great, too. I wanted Holly’s voice to be older, however. I like thinking of her as another old bat like myself, but that’s hard to do with Justine’s vibrant, musical delivery. This isn’t really a complaint, just a preference. Whenever a director hires an actress in her forties to perform opposite a man in his 60s, I mourn the lost opportunity.

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Now I know how democracies die

Revisado: 08-11-22

Marvellous depiction of ancient Rome and the emergence of tyranny (how to do it Mr. Wannabe Tyrant: delude the rabble into thinking that it’s other rich people, not you, who will fight for them while you’re actually pocketing their donations). I am soooooo annoyed that I can’t download the second book in the trilogy. Audible owns the UK title so I’d like to know why I can’t purchase it.

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Leaden Prose, Mouthpiece characters

Revisado: 09-14-21

Let’s just say that this novel has made me really angry that the Audible Returns policy has become so limited. It only took me 45 minutes to observe that this is historical fiction at its worse, where every character is simply a mouthpiece for the author’s—or in this case authors’—favorite bits of research. Perhaps I should have listened to the sample more carefully. The opening sentence, where the heroine quite pointlessly refers to her “voluminous skirts” (what, she normally wears shifts when she’s out on the street? Ah, no, she’s just cheerfully reminding modern readers, in a first person voice, that women wore a lot of fabric in 1905), should have been enough to warn me off.

And it just got worse. In a scene that the heroine recalls from her youth, her parents argue over the morality of “passing” for a different race. Good material! But instead of sounding like actual people, the characters sound like dueling opinion columns (bizarrely, the heroine recalls this conversation in all its verbal detail).

What I have learned here? Don’t take a chance on a novel you can’t return.In future, I will be much more careful to listen to the sample before I buy. Which is a shame, because that will mean missing some great books.

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esto le resultó útil a 3 personas

The first Flowers book I’ve not even liked

Revisado: 07-05-21

A very sick group of people, living in the sticks, having fully dehumanized each other, now manage to dehumanize Virgil Flowers as well. No, he doesn’t become a sexual predator or anything like that, but he has apparently become an empty shell of the human we knew from the earlier books. In this novel, Virgil has no apparent personal life and I’m not sure he mentioned fishing even once. And did something happen to that sweet mother of 5 he’s been canoodling with in the last four or five novels? Is this some weird break-up novel where the readers aren’t worth letting in on the joke? It didn’t work.

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No Ifs, Ands, or Buts

Revisado: 07-04-21

Finally. This wonderful novel has the decency of a “cozy”—the semi-perjorative word for an English country house murder mystery—but all the narrative richness of much darker crime novels. The 4 protagonists are unforgettable—the retired nurse, the (we suspect) retired MI-6 agent, the retired union activist, the retired psychologist—and I loved every quirky one of them. I loved the sense of place that surrounded these old folks now living in a former convent turned into a luxury assisted-living complex. Most of all, I loved the story itself, of a crime-solver’s club that at last has a real crime to solve. Beautiful, funny stuff. And the narration from Leslie Manville was so expert, it almost made me giddy.

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Gets 5 stars even if it isn’t my favorite Evans

Revisado: 06-09-19

I’ve listened and re-listened to Lisa Evans’ Crooked Heart and Their Finest Hour and a Half. Both books are piercing and realistic depictions of wartime Britain, both of them surprisingly funny given how determined both are to focus on the dourness of that age. In this novel, Old Baggage, we get the backstory to Mattie Simpkin, the unforgettable former suffragette and hunger striker who featured so hugely in Crooked Heart. Lissa Evans reveals exactly how Mattie escaped the usual fate of a well-bred girl in pre Edwardian England, that is, to become a barely educated breeder for some scion of her social caste. Being a bit of an old baggage myself, I particularly appreciated how Evans tells the story of Mattie’s youth in flash-back, choosing to focus instead on the lessons the indomitable Miss Simpkin is now learning in her late middle-age. Surely this is one hero who will never hang up her spurs, or so we think at the start of the book. But it would seem even Mattie still has a few things to learn about people.

The only reason this won’t be my favorite Evans may be my fault: I wanted more! Key plot developments learned in the last chapter were handled as quick information dumps, when they merited a long chapter (or two) in their own right. That aside, Old Baggage is another reason for me to rush out and buy everything Lissa Evans ever writes. The only historical novel I’ve enjoyed as much as Evan’s work was Helen Simonson’s The Summer Before the War.

And the narrator, Jane Copland, was superb.

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Fun to read; more context would be nice

Revisado: 08-30-18

For about the first half of this novel, I thought Farthing was too slight a story to justify the alternate history frame. Indeed, combining a matter as weighty as fascism with something as slight as an English country house murder mystery seemed tactless. A rather thinly drawn police detective and a somewhat insipid English gentlewoman who seems to lack backbone -- at least that's how the characters come across for far too long in the beginning -- almost had me abandoning the book.

But I'm glad I stuck with it, because the story is less generic in the second half, and the author tightens the action. Walton finally adds details that, while they could have been foreshadowed better, were at least compelling once they were revealed. I'm definitely willing to try the next book in the series. "Farthing" is a digestible reminder that the British ruling class really dithered, for quite some time, over what they hated more: Nazis or labor unions. Churchill wasn't the only factor that tilted Britain against the Nazis, but seeing how many ethno-nationalists are among us now, in a time of relative peace and prosperity, it's not hard to believe that in the much poorer 1930s it might have all just as easily gone the other way. Walton's novel capably demonstrates how history sometimes turns on a dime.

The actors' narration rescues the somewhat flaccid first half of the book, and in the second half of the book, the improved story rescues the acting. Bianca Amato has not mastered a proper Home Counties accent, and someone should have told John Keating that a social climber like Inspector Carmichael would never pronounced "Magdalen" the way it's spelled. "Farthing" was one case where the whole of narration plus story was definitely better than the individual parts.

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Wise, Perceptive, Heart-breaking

Revisado: 04-16-16

What made the experience of listening to Sacred Hunger the most enjoyable?

I can't remember the last time a novel impressed me so much. Any modern individual looking at the history of the Atlantic slave trade has to marvel that such a horror took place. What, we ask ourselves today, possessed European slavers to abduct, torment, and then finally sell perfect strangers who had done them no wrong? You can read the histories, some dry and some vivid. But if you want to hear how the slavers justified themselves in their own voices, this is the book for you. Thru fiction, Unsworth relates what the impoverished UK underclass saw in slavery, what the profiteers saw, what a man of the Enlightenment might have seen. In telling this tale of the Atlantic slave trade, Unsworth ignores all temptations to cheap and empty moralizing. Humans aren't born with much of a moral sense, Unsworth seems to be saying, but change does happen and in that we can take some comfort.

What about David Rintoul’s performance did you like?

Fortunately, the author's powers of prose and story-telling are matched by the talents of the narrator, David Rintoul. Not only does he nail the many regional accents of Britain (and Ireland), he nails them even when he has those characters speaking pidgin! And Rintoul is an utter master of tone and inflection to distinguish characters who would otherwise sound too much alike.

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esto le resultó útil a 16 personas

Exhausting inventiveness

Revisado: 12-28-14

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

Only if the friend doesn't care much about characters; because the characters are so thinly conceived, the story has little to offer besides the author's admittedly hugely inventive fantasy imagination.

Would you ever listen to anything by China Mieville again?

Only if someone can assure me that he's grown as a writer. Readers who like urban fantasy but want something with more depth should try instead Nick Harkaway's Angelmaker.

What aspect of John Lee’s performance would you have changed?

For some of the detective novels I've listened to, Lee's narration is often quite appropriately plain and restrained. You'd think that a book as rich in visuals as Kraken would be better served by the more old-fashioned narrational style that Lee favors, but in fact the thin characters might have been improved by a livelier, more actorly approach. And the lack of speech tags in the writing absolutely demanded a greater range of voices than Mr. Lee deployed.

If this book were a movie would you go see it?

Maybe.

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