American Fire - Monica Hesse

Book of the Month has absolutely been killing it with selections recently; I have loved all of my main selections for the past few months, and it's been great to see more nonfiction that isn't in the style of a memoir.  Killers of the Flower Moon was stunning and terrible, and American Fire is sad and evocative and atmospheric.

This is a nonfiction book, accounting a string of arsons that took place on Virginia's Eastern Shore.  Between November and April 1, sixty-seven buildings in Accomack County burned.  (Well, it was more than that, but the sixty-seven were the related ones.)  As readers, we know pretty much from the beginning who is behind the arsons; Hesse puts it all out there right in the beginning, even on the jacket description.  But of course the people of Accomack don't know, and watching them try to figure out who is burning down their county is fascinating, as is watching the building and decaying relationship between the aronists and how it eventually all unravels in court.

Hesse's book definitely falls into the category of literary nonfiction; it reads like a story, alternating between a chapter or two about the fire departments, police, etc. trying to figure out the arsons, and a chapter about the arsonists themselves.  Hesse uses words to, stroke by stroke, paint the picture of Accomack County, accessed at the north by a road that passes by a gas station sporting a sign, "The South Starts Here."  It's a county that has largely been left behind by the rest of the United States; once the richest rural county in the US, it's now one of the poorest.  Its main employers are Tyson and Purdue.  The fire departments are entirely volunteer, so dispatchers need to call four in order to make sure enough people show up to fight each fire.  And there's no municipal water supply, so the fire departments have to bring their own water with them, and if they run out, their only chances to reload are sometimes ponds.  It's a completely different place from the urban settings that most of the country inhabits, a place that almost felt like it could have been the setting of a Sookie Stackhouse novel if they took place on the Eastern Shore instead of in Lousiana.

It's not a long book, and the narrative style is so readable that I absolutely devoured it in just a couple of hours.  But it shows wonderfully how no single factor in Accomack County or in the arsonists' lives caused the arsons.  Being poor and depressed doesn't make you set fires, and if you do set fires, it doesn't mean that you'll get away with it...but the societal fabric of Accomack County contributed immensely to it.  And, as Hesse points out, it could have happened elsewhere, too.  Such a fascinating look into this county, the arsons, the investigation, all of it.  Highly recommended.

5 stars out of 5.

Jaws - Peter Benchley

The movie adaptation of Jaws is my sister's favorite movie, and yet I've never seen it.  However, it seemed like a perfect, though scary, read for summer, especially in conjunction with Discovery's Shark Week!  And I have no plans of visiting the ocean this summer, which was even better, because though I logically know the odds of being bitten by a shark are minuscule and that the odds of being killed by one are even smaller, they're still scary.  All those teeth!

As most people know, if you watch Jaws backwards it's a movie about a shark that throws up people until they open a beach.  But if you read the book in its proper sequence, it's about the fictional town of Amity in New York that is plagued by a great white shark that appears off the coast one summer and starts killing people, putting the entire town in danger since the entire town relies on tourism and no tourists want to go to the beach and get eaten by a shark.  It's not really a horror story, but it's definitely a suspenseful one because you're never entirely sure of who is going to live and who's going to die--but you always know exactly what's going on, there aren't any jump scares or things like that, which I think keeps it from falling into the horror category itself.

I was pleasantly surprised by the writing, for the most part, as well as the narration in the audiobook version.  There was a lot of exposition about characters in the beginning which didn't seem necessary, and one very uncomfortable sequence involving some sexual fantasies of two of the characters--I mean, sure, have fantasies, but I certainly wasn't expecting that in this book and definitely hearing them was weird, which makes me think I never want to listen to a romance novel as an audiobook, and it was just so clearly written by a guy--but the book overall was good.  The character of Quint was completely cliched, and it seemed like the affair between two characters was thrown in just to take up space during a time when the beaches were closed and the shark wasn't attacking anyone.  Actually, the more that I list, the more that this book wasn't really good, but I'm still left with the feeling that I enjoyed it; I guess because, even though it had a lot of flaws, it was essentially exactly what it was supposed to be, and has aged surprisingly well for a book that was initially published in the 70s.  Yes, this book and the movie it spawned has caused a lot of trouble for sharks worldwide--but hopefully in modern times people can read it with an eye as to what it actually is--entertaining, but not accurate as to what sharks are actually like.

3.5 stars out of 5!

A June of Ordinary Murders - Conor Brady (Joe Swallow #1)

A June of Ordinary Murders was a Book of the Month pick a while ago, and while I missed out on getting it through BOTM, I added it to an Amazon order so I could get free same-day shipping at one point.  I like mysteries with a historical setting much more than I like contemporary ones; investigation just seems so much more interesting in the days before the advanced forensics we have available now.  I mean, those forensics are great for actually solving crimes, but they typically don't make the process as fun to read about!  (Or do they?  I'm watching FX's People V. OJ Simpson right now on Netflix and maaaaan.)  This book, with its setting in Victorian-era Ireland, specifically Dublin, and the potential of a serial killer seemed to be something that would be very interesting.  (Have I mentioned I also love Criminal Minds?)

The story here follows Joe Swallow, a detective with the G-unit in Dublin.  Swallow had some success earlier in his career, but recently an unsolved crime has been hanging over him.  With the discovery of two mutilated bodies in a park and no leads to be found, and with a volatile political climate simmering all around, he feels a lot of pressure to solve the crime, and fast--but doesn't really know how.

Unfortunately, the book wasn't all I'd hoped it would be.  The setting is excellent, yes, and I rather liked the actual mystery and how it unfolded, as well.  But Brady apparently has a love for info-dumping.  While a few nuggets of information are necessary in order to get a grip on the setting and the characters--such as an "ordinary" crime just being one that doesn't have a political element--I felt he went into way too much depth sometimes.  Pages upon pages of background on characters and situations who ultimately weren't that important took up space.  For example, was the entire saga of the barge trip and how barges and locks work really necessary?  It didn't feel like it.  It just felt like the 15 minutes of stuff that would occur before the start of a Law & Order episode, and could have easily been worked into the main narrative rather than just dropped all in one place.  Episodes like this made my eyes glaze over and sometimes made it hard to continue reading the book.

Additionally, while I felt like the main crime as well-integrated into the larger story, the second crime was not.  It initially seemed like it had promise, but at the end of the book I was left going, "Really?  That's it?"  That's not a great feeling to be left with at the end of the mystery; everything with the main crime felt so neatly tied together, but for the second crime, it ultimately just felt tacked-on and unnecessary, added in for extra page space more than anything else.  Thinking back on it, I actually can't think of any way in which any of the information tied to the second crime was really integral to the main one.  It was meant to serve as a distraction, I suppose, but honestly I was just bored by it rather than distracted, as well.

Overall, this was an okay book, but I found myself bored at multiple points while reading it.  I appreciated the historical setting, but it's just a "meh" book overall.

2 stars out of 5.

Love & Gelato - Jenna Evans Welch

Love and Gelato was on my to-read list because it was a Goodreads Choice nominee for 2016, and I'm always interested in what my fellow readers like, but I ended up reading it because it was a free full-length read on Riveted.  Riveted is Simon & Schuster's young adult website, and every week they have free full-length reads as well as extended excerpts.  They don't usually have a ton that I'm interested in, but I think it's very cool of them to provide free books to read online, without any sign-up fee or anything like that.

Anyway.  The story is about Lina, whose artist mother dies of pancreatic cancer and sends Lina to the father she never knew existed, Howard.  Except Howard lives in a cemetery in Italy, outside of Florence.  Once there, one of Howard's friends and coworkers who also knew Lina's mom gives Lina a journal that her mom had mailed there prior to her death.  Lina decides to solve the mystery of what happened between her parents by reading the journal and visiting the places her mother mentions in it with Ren, the cute half-Italian boy-next-door.

I get what this book was trying to do, but there have just been so many other books that have done its components better.  Solving a family mystery across Europe?  Try 13 Little Blue Envelopes.  Romance in a European city?  Take Anna and the French Kiss for a spin.  Love & Gelato tries to combine the two components but it doesn't snap or sizzle like the others do.  While some interesting parts of Florence are mentioned, the city doesn't come alive like Paris does in Anna or any of the locations in Blue Envelopes do.  And honestly, the setting is attempting to do the heavy lifting in this book.  The thing is, no part of it is explored or celebrated fully enough to capture the magic that the author is trying to evoke.  The other part of the book, the romance, is just a sidebar.  It doesn't really develop until the last few pages, and as the entire book takes place over the span of about five days, most of which the characters spend interested in other people, it doesn't really ring true.  There's no real chemistry between them.  I think there could have been, easily, but it just never developed like I thought it was going to.

Overall, I was pretty underwhelmed by this one.  If I hadn't read 13 Little Blue Envelopes (or Johnson's other books--Girl at Sea is also excellent in this regard) or Anna and the French Kiss and its companions, which each evoke other cities, then maybe I would have been more impressed by this.  It strives to be cute and sweet and mysterious and romantic, but I think it kind of fell flat.

2 stars out of 5.

Read This, Then That Vol. 3

It's been a long time since I've done a "Read This, Then That" post, but I've just had the most lovely pairing of books that I wanted to share it with you.  Taking a turn to light sci-fi and post-apocalyptic fiction, but with beautiful prose and human elements, let's first take a look at a book from a few years ago.  To start:

Read This...
The world ends with the flu.  Scattered survivors who evaded infection roam the desolated land; they live in airports full of planes that no longer fly and vending machines that have long been depleted.  A travelling theater company provides entertainment for a world that is suddenly and tragically without much to laugh at.  And a custom comic book is at the center of it all.  A startling and yet beautiful look at the sudden disintegration of life and society as we know it, and what what might be left behind once many of us are gone, Station Eleven made waves a few years ago for its stunning prose, wonderful characters, and refreshing take on a post-apocalyptic story.  With no zombies or nukes in sight, Station Eleven is about people far more than it is about plot, though there is a plot there.  The parallels between the different parts of the story are breathtaking, building on each other to a whole that is so much more than the sum of its parts.  There are Star Trek references: "Because survival is insufficient." And honestly, that's what this book is about--not just surviving, but living, even when everything that you've known has come to an end, and how people can come together, remember what was lost, but still move on into the future.  And when you've seen what's happened at the end of civilization in parts of the world we're more familiar with...


...Then That
...move on to the ones that, to many of us, are Great Unknowns.  Instead of travelling players and ad-hoc museum curators, Good Morning, Midnight focuses on an isolated astronomer left behind in the Arctic Circle when he refused to evacuate the observatory and the crew of the spaceship Aether, on the way back from Jupiter to a world that has suddenly and strikingly gone silent.  This is also a story of parallels, of people desperately trying to reach out and connect--over the radio, physically, emotionally.  And though the circumstances are bleak--the handful of characters on our pages might very well be the last humans alive, and most of them aren't even on Earth--the story manages to be wonderfully hopeful and uplifting.  There is a story of redemption and new beginnings, of overcoming seemingly unyielding odds, and of coming back to a world that it seems like everyone else has, in one way or another, left behind.  It has the same feel as Station Eleven does and it's easy to imagine them taking place in the same world, though of course miles and miles apart and with Good Morning, Midnight having a distinctly sci-fi slant that Station Eleven lacked.  But ultimately, both books come down to this: The world is a strange place.  The universe is an even stranger one.  And people are looking for where they belong in both.

Born in Sin - Kinley MacGregor (Brotherhood of the Sword #3/MacAllister #2)

Born in Sin was my pick for the Unapologetic Romance Readers' 2017 Reading Challenge, specifically for the category of "a medieval romance."  I'd originally slated another one for this category, but my library removed it from the digital lending collection before I could get to it.  Luckily, they added Born in Sin instead.

This takes place in the twelfth century, firmly medieval.  Our characters are Sin, a knight serving Henry Plantagenet who was enslaved by the Saracens during Crusades and ended up serving Henry instead of assassinating him, and Callie, a Scottish noblewoman who's being held hostage by the English in hopes that the raids being executed against the English by the Scots will cease.  Callie is also accompanied by her younger half-brother, Jaime.

This was interesting for a Scottish/Highlander romance because it's the heroine who's Scottish; typically in these, it seems to be the English rose falling for the big burly Highlander.  Not so here.  But that doesn't meant that Sin is a wilting English man.  No no no.  In fact, he's a huge knight who has never been defeated in battle, who always goes around dressed in black armor (my, that must be remarkably uncomfortable all the time) and who has tinted his black clothes with red dye so that his opponents won't know when they've injured him in battle.  Because of course that's what one does.  Henry wants to marry Sin to Callie to cement relations between the English and the Scots, which Sin doesn't want because he's no good for her, blah blah blah. But of course they eventually get married and then off to Scotland they go.

This is a pretty simple romance and the medieval setting is more window dressings than anything else.  Callie doesn't act anything like a medieval woman; she's very much of the stereotypical redhead school of foot stamping and hair tossing and going her own way, though she hasn't been characterized with the "fiery redhead" persona, which was a nice change.  In fact, despite her determination, she's very sweet and kind, which was really a revelation.  That's not how most romance heroine are characterized because it's quite easy to go from sweet and kind to downright boring.  Now, was Callie the most intriguing of characters?  No...but then, no one in this book was really super-riveting, so I can't blame her more than I can blame any of the other folk decorating these pages.

My biggest complaint here is that I had a really hard time keeping track of Sin's tangled relations with everyone else in the story.  (Also, his name is Sin?  Really?)  This is probably partially because this is the third book in a series, but I don't really think so; Sin seems to be a new character on the scene, he doesn't have the feel of someone who had been introduced before.  But he seems to be related either literally or figuratively to half the people in the book, and keeping those relations straight was a real doozy.  I think I finally got it figured out towards the end, but it involved a big infodump on MacGregor's part to get me to that point, so that's not exactly excellent.  I like the idea of all the ties--it puts forth the potential for future webs of books, which is something I really like.  But the execution wasn't as well-done as it could have been.

Overall, this was a fine book.  It was kind of cheesy in several ways and the historical setting was more wallpaper than anything else, as all of the characters blatantly flaunted any social conventions that would have accompanied a proper setting of the story.  This happens a lot in medieval-setting books, it seems; while it of course occurs in other time periods as well, it just doesn't seem as egregious in a Regency or Victorian setting as it does here, maybe because those times are just the slightest bit closer to our social norms.  Sin's brothers do intrigue me as characters, so I might investigate their books, but I'm not sure this is a series that I'll really dig into.

3 stars out of 5.

The Ghost Map - Steven Johnson

I love me some good nonfiction, and the story at the heart of The Ghost Map is one I'd encountered before but was interested in learning more about, so when it showed up at the library, I snatched it up.

The Ghost Map is the story of an outbreak of cholera in London in 1854 that ripped through a neighborhood like wildfire, far faster than any other cholera epidemic and with no visible source.  While most of the city fretted about the poisonous "miasma" that they thought caused disease and every inhabitant who was still mobile fled the area, two men--Dr. John Snow and the clergyman Henry Whitehead--ultimately narrowed down the source of the outbreak to the Broad Street water pump (Snow) and the "patient zero" whose illness had contaminated the water therein (Whitehead).  In doing so, they actually challenged the prevailing "germ theory" of the day, even though "germ theory" as it is today didn't exist then.  Though their efforts didn't immediately revolutionize the world of public health, the case was still an important one in changing urban design, public health, and the future of cities in general.

This is a pretty short book.  Most of it covers the "solving" of the cholera outbreak, along with the counterproductive efforts that were being undertaken by the "miasma" believers who thought that the disease must have been spread by London's poor air quality.  But Johnson also dips into how cities were on the verge of collapse due to things such as epidemics and eventually into how this case of cholera set up a chain of events that ended with the revolutionizing of London's sewer system, water quality control, and overall approach to public health.  In the wrap-up, Johnson moves to the big "but what does this mean to me?" question, in how the cities of today are still expanding.  He goes into how cities are actually greener to live in than the countryside is due to economies to scale, how bioengineering can be used to essentially take out a bacterium or virus before it can even get started, how eighty percent of the world will probably eventually live in urban areas, how waste and clean water are interconnected.

The narrative parts of this book are excellent--you know, the parts that are really "solving the mystery."  Snow went through a process that no one else had, not only mapping the deaths of the cholera victims geographically but also figuring out their connections to the Broad Street pump in order to determine that it was the source of the outbreak.  Whitehead used his local knowledge and "ins" with the people of Soho in order to find the "patient zero" that caused the contamination in the first place.  What was less fascinating was how Johnson kept hammering on the "BUT EVERYONE THOUGHT IT WAS MIASMA!!!!" angle.  That was pretty apparent very quickly, but Johnson kept coming back to it, again and again and again, and just hammering on it.  Additionally, while I think he raised some good points in the epilogue, it came across as scattered and unfocused, jumping from one type of threat to another--viruses, terrorists, nuclear holocausts...  And by the time that he got there, I think he'd made his point thoroughly enough that I was ready to just be done with the book.

Overall, this is a book about a fascinating case that I'm not sure really does it justice.  The thing is, there's not that much to be said about the case; I'm pretty sure there's an episode of a show on maps on Netflix that covers all of this pretty thoroughly in about half an hour.  There's just so much added stuff in here that wasn't particularly intriguing or relevant that seemed to be added simply to bulk out the book and I think that did drag it down somewhat.

3 stars out of 5.