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Buried in a Bog by Sheila Connolly

Jul25

Bostonian Maura Donovan is determined to honor her recently deceased grandmother’s wishes and visit the small Irish village of Leap in County Cork where Gran was born. But she gets more than a tourist’s introduction to Ireland, with friendly Irish people who may or may not be related to her grandmother, an Irish pub that could have been lifted from the nineteenth century, a job offer at that same pub, and unfortunately, death, possibly murder, in the sleepy Irish village where Maura just wanted to visit and lay to rest her grandmother’s memory.

Sheila Connolly has written two other mystery series: the Orchard Mysteries, set in western Massachusetts, and the Museum Mysteries, which take place in and among the museums of Philadelphia. Buried in a Bog, published in February 2013, is the beginning of a new series, called the County Cork Mysteries. Ms. Connolly has done her research, so anyone who’s interested in Ireland, its history and contemporary culture, would probably enjoy Buried in a Bog and its sequels when they come out.

I found the protagonist, Maura, a little sharp and prickly and prone to jump to conclusions. She’s trying to be an independent woman and prove that she can take care of herself, but the attitude feels unnecessarily confrontational in contrast to the ore easy-going Irishmen and women she meets in Leap. Maybe it’s an “ugly AMerican ” thing. I did like the fact that Maura is from the lower middle class in Boston. She doesn’t take her financial situation for granted; she worries about money enough to pay for basics, food and clothes and a place to live. I found this refreshingly realistic in contrast to most amateur gumshoes in books and on TV who seem to be able to finance most any journey or whim without any visible means of support. Or else they’re independently wealthy. Maura is able to go to Ireland because of a small sum of money that her grandmother saved for that purpose, and when she gets there she is careful with her funds and aware of the necessity of making plans for her future self-support.

Anyway, it’s a good story, and the series promises to be a hit for fans of everything Irish.

There You’ll Find Me by Jenny B. Jones

Apr6

The INSPY Awards are blogger-initiated book awards for fictional literature that grapples with expressions of the Christian faith. The awards were given in several categories in 2011, including the category of “literature for young people”, and I got to be judge in that category. The INSPY Awards took a break in 2012, but they’re back this year. And the list below is the “long list” of nominated books in the Literature for Young People category for this time around:

Wreath by Judy Christie
With a Name Like Love by Tess Hilmo. Semicolon review here.
Thundersnow by Sheila Hollinghead
Dead Man’s Hand by Eddie Jones
There You’ll Find Me by Jenny B. Jones
Crazy Dangerous by Andrew Klavan. Semicolon review here.
Cake – Love, Chickens and a Taste of Peculiar by Joyce Magnin
Right Where I Belong by Krista McGee
The Embittered Ruby by Nicole O’Dell
The Shadowed Onyx by Nicole O’Dell
Code of Silence by Tim Shoemaker
Addison Blakely: Confessions of a PK by Betsy St. Amant
Temptation: Solitary Tales No. 3 by Travis Thrasher
How to Save a Life by Sara Zarr

Three of the books on the list I’ve already read and reviewed, as indicated. Actually, I read How To Save a Life by Sara Zarr, and I thought I reviewed it but can’t find the review anywhere. I liked all three very much. I read a couple more of the books on this long list this past week: There You’ll Find Me by Jenny B. Jones and Code of Silence by Tim Shoemaker (review coming soon).

Ms. Jones is a rather prolific author of teen romances for Christian girls. Her books were all over Lifeway last time I was there. I rad one of her other books a year or two ago and thought it was just “meh.” This one was fairly low on the scale, too, and would have received a complete pan, were it not for the setting: Ireland.

Finley Sinclair, daughter of a wealthy hotel magnate, and sister to Will whose death in a terrorist incident has put Finley’s life in a tailspin of grief, is headed for Ireland to spend a year studying and trying to reconnect with God. Will came to love and know God when he studied in Ireland, and Finley hopes to follow in his footsteps, literally by visiting all of the places Will wrote about in his travel journal. Color Finley grey: grief-stricken, questioning, recovering from a mental breakdown, and lost.

Enter Beckett Rush, teen heart-throb, Hollywood player and bad boy, and star of a series of vampire movies. He’s in Ireland to film the latest movie in the Steel Markov vampire franchise. Beckett and Finley meet on the plane, clash, and hope never to see one another again. Alas, predictably, they are destined to meet again, clash again, and eventually fall in love and live happily ever after.

OK, it’s not quite that cliche. Take away the “live happily ever after.” Beckett and especially Finley are dealing with way too many issues to have a traditional happy ending. Beckett has a pushy dad who doubles as his greedy manager. Finley has mental health issues, a grouchy school assignment, and the loss of her faith, as well as the afore-mentioned grief and Beckett to keep her busy and confused.

As I think about it, this book would have made a good K-drama: Finley falls asleep on Beckett’s shoulder and drools, the two feud but are thrown together in spite of themselves, there’s a group of nasty, jealous girls at school, Finley has a sidekick, Erin, whom she mentors, lots of K-drama tropes. An awkward kiss or two, change the nationalities and the setting of the novel, take out the God-talk, and it would work on Korean TV just fine. In fact, it would work better on screen and with some editing.

I probably wouldn’t have made it through this one, though, if it hadn’t been set in Ireland. Give me a vivid setting, and I’ll follow you anywhere. And I got to read parts of the dialogue with an Irish lilt inside my head. A good plot and some engaging characters would have helped the journey, however.

Other reviews in which the blogger thought it was just peachy (I may be in the minority on this one): Edgy Inspirational Romance, YA Books Central, Christian Novels, Tree Swing Reading, etc.

The Seven Tales of Trinket by Shelley Moore Thomas

Nov16

I don’t like short stories, and I don’t much like it when authors disguise a book of stories as a novel by creating some over-arching narrative that sorta, kinda ties the stories together. Thank goodness, The Seven Tales of Trinket is NOT that kind of book.

Yes, there are seven tales here: folk tales about faeries and banshees and selkies and a gypsy fortune-teller and a pooka. And the journey of Trinket and her friend, the pig-boy Thomas, to find adventure and to find Trinket’s father is the Tale that ties all of the seven tales together. But the book is a meditation and a story about telling stories, about the art of the Irish seanechai or storyteller. And the author, Ms. Thomas, is storyteller herself. So it all works together; it just fits.

As Trinket looks for her father, James the Bard, who left on a story-telling journey of his own long ago and never returned to Trinket and her mother, she grows and becomes the storyteller she wants to be. She’s not a copy of her father or of her beautiful mother, although she carries a little of each of them in herself. She’s Trinket, the Story Lass, her own person and a teller of tales in her own right.

My favorite story of the tales Trinket lives and collects is the story of the The Faerie Queen and the Gold Coin. I delighted in this story of Orla, a girl who’s such an accomplished dancer that the Faerie Queen takes notice and challenges her to a dancing contest. Of course, as Trinket says, “humans and magical beings often see things differently.” The Faerie Queen changes the rules of the contest at the last minute, and Orla must dance the dance of her life to win the contest.

These are lovely stories, drawn from Celtic sources but adapted to fit with and enrich Trinket’s story. If all story collections were this well harmonized and tied together, I’d read more stories. Because it’s a story-telling kind of book, this one would be a great classroom or homeschool read aloud.

A Couple of Ghost Stories

Nov15

Ghosts are always good for a fall evening of reading. My favorite ghost stories: Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, Hamlet by Shakespeare, The Saracen Lamp by Ruth M. Arthur (an oldie but goodie for children/YA), The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens,

As you can see, old-fashioned ghost stories are my favorites, so these Cybils nominees were just O.K. for me. If you’re a fan of the ghost story genre, you may really enjoy them, though.

The Whispering House by Rebecca Wade.
This ghost story reminded me at first of an Agatha Christie novel or an Alfred Hitchcock TV episode. The tone was very matter of fact and not supernatural at all. I kept thinking throughout the first half of the book that everything would turn out to have a natural, if somewhat sinister, explanation: the dusty, spooky attic, the creepy doll, the deteriorating house, the stories of mysterious death a hundred years in the past. But then a ghostly visitor, a little Victorian girl named Maisie, who may or may not have been murdered by her ugly spinster aunt, starts making appearances, breaking things, leaving messages in strange places, and generally creating poltergeist-like havoc. And our twenty-first century protagonist, Hannah Price, travels or dreams herself into Maisie’s time, chasing the elusive ghostly girl in the white dress with the long dark streaming hair (see cover art, which is very good and evocative, by the way). And after that, things get really ghostly and somewhat ghastly, and there is obviously not going to be any natural explanation for the events in the story.

Still, the sensible, pragmatic actions of the children in the story make the supernatural elements that much more eerie. Hannah and her friend Sam go to visit their friend Miss Murdoch, a Wiccan witch, to get her take on the strange events in the borrowed house that Hannah’s family has rented. Hannah asks her friend the bishop what he thinks about it all. (The bishop and the Wiccan have a friendly but competitive discussion about the differences between magic and miracle, a discussion that I would have liked to read more of.) Hannah takes the doll, which has human hair, to be tested by her friend at the police lab. (Hannah has a lot of useful adult friends.) The kids do normal things to solve this abnormal mystery. I liked that aspect of the story.

A Greyhound of a Girl by Roddy Doyle
A Greyhound of a Girl is very Irish, and I liked that. But it didn’t really feel like a children’s book, exactly. The story is about four generations of women, and it’s partly told from the youngest girl’s point of view. But it’s also about the girl’s grandmother and great-grandmother (who’s a ghost), and I guess it just left some questions unanswered for me. Why did the great-grandmother feel as if she had to stick around as a ghost? She says it’s to make sure her daughter was O.K. but that took about 60 years of ghost-hood?

The themes are death and dying and living life to its fullest, and the characters have rich and thoughtful conversations about those issues. I think adults would enjoy this book more than children would, but I could be underestimating children and over-estimating adults.

A few ghost quotes:
“You said I killed you – haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always – take any form – drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!” Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.

“In one aspect, yes, I believe in ghosts, but we create them. We haunt ourselves.” ~Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls

“[M]ost people have never seen a ghost, and never want or expect to, but almost everyone will admit that sometimes they have a sneaking feeling that they just possibly could meet a ghost if they weren’t careful – if they were to turn a corner too suddenly, perhaps, or open their eyes too soon when they wake up at night, or go into a dark room without hesitating first.”
~Shirley Jackson, Come Along With Me

What’s your favorite ghost story?