r/suggestmeabook: I’d like a mystery with a strong sense of place and pacing set in Leeds in 1822.
Movie rating: PG
Pages: 238
Publisher: Severn House
Series: Simon Westow
ARC provided by Random Things Tours
Publication date: March 2, 2021
From the publisher: Leeds, 1822. The city is in the grip of winter, but the chill deepens for thief-taker Simon Westow and his young assistant, Jane, when the body of Laurence Poole, a petty local thief, emerges from the melting snow by the river at Flay Cross Mill.A coded notebook found in Laurence’s room mentions Charlie Harker, the most notorious fence in Leeds who’s now running for his life, and the mysterious words: To the dark. What was Laurence hiding that caused his death? Simon’s hunt for the truth pits him against some dangerous, powerful enemies who’ll happily kill him in a heartbeat – if they can.
This murder mystery is definitely atmospheric, as the darkness, pollution, and smell of industrial Leeds is hammered home. The pace is like a thrum of a machine, the beat of it steady and measured. Chris Nickson does an excellent job of creating a sense of place.
All her anger and frustration had faded, hammered down in footstep after footstep. Men would always think the worst of women. There was nothing she could do to alter their minds.
Chris Nickson, To the Dark
Simon Westow and Jane are living through their slow season when they are enlisted by the unfriendly constable to investigate the murder of the small-time thief. The phrase “to the dark” is repeatedly used, but the mystery is not solved—not in this book, at least, which is disappointing when it is built up as part of the focal point of the story.
She ran her fingertips over the scars on her forearm. A rising ladder of lines, the places where she’d cut herself. Her catalogue of failures, the punishments she’d inflicted.
Chris Nickson, To the Dark
The characters are not all that well-developed. Simon and Jane are explained by the significant traumas in their pasts, but not much else. Rosie, Simon’s wife, is mostly a placeholder. The bad guys are pretty much all stock characters. Perhaps there will be more in later installments, but there was little depth or growth from the characters.
At their age his home was in the workhouse, every daylight hour spent working in the mill. Beaten, abused, feeling like he was going to be trapped there for the rest of his life and wanting to die so it would be over.
Chris Nickson, To the Dark
Despite these shortcomings, the murder mystery and the atmosphere are enough to carry the book, making it worth finishing, and the writing itself is strong enough that I’d check out another installment.
From the publisher: It’s the summer of 1976, and after nine years in prison, James Minter is home to bury his mother. A history of depression and a series of personal issues has seen her death ruled as suicide. His refusal to accept that conclusion means he must confront his violent stepfather, deal with the gangster who wants his mother’s shop and, of course, face the family of the boy he killed.
ARC provided by Rachel’s Random Resources
Excerpt from Mint
The shop is all so familiar. This place I should have called home, yet only ever thought of as a place to return to. The address where my mother and half-siblings lived. Never home, more an approximation. I’m not connected to it like I imagine others are theirs. I hadn’t been safe here, nor welcome. My mother had been too controlled by her husband, and Sam too in his thrall. Lara had kept me here. All the time, I’d felt like the small bird being pushed from the nest by the bullying interloper. While he’d called me the cuckoo.
I restock the fridge with some milk and butter from the nearby shop and put the bread and cereal on the worktop. I open a new jar of coffee and put the kettle on.
Outside, I hear the whine of heavy machinery starting up, and the contact of whirring metal on stone.
I leave the kitchen and go out into the back yard, through the gate and into the alleyway running along the back of the houses before entering the yard of the Mason’s next door.
Along one side, slabs of rough-cut granite lean against the high wall, while black marble and white marble are stocked horizontally, kept apart by thick wood battens. A corrugated plastic roof built off the garden wall opposite the stacked stone extends over the yard, shielding the work bench and tools and bench-saw from the elements.
White dust fills the air, billows fussily around the head of a man in a grubby blacksmith’s apron, safety goggles, and blue facemask, who’s guiding a huge slab of white stone along a bench and through a whirling rotary saw. Water sprays onto the slab and throws globules of wet white dust onto the floor. The saw reaches the end of the cut and, as the slab breaks free, he presses a red button on the wall and the machine shuts off.
The man notices me but doesn’t pause to invite me to speak, or offer to himself.
“I’m Abigail’s son,” I say, when the whine of the slowing blade ends. The dust has reached me and the air clears slowly with little breeze to disrupt it.
The man pulls the mask free. Dust has turned his thick black hair grey and clogged the deep lines of a weathered face. Years of wrangling stone slabs has built a powerful upper body with square shoulders, and large hands that hang at the end of strong forearms.
“I know who you are. I have to make the noise. Can’t work without it. That’s the last of the cutting,” he offers, as if there’s one purpose for my visit. “Your mother didn’t mind the noise, it soothed her.”
“I’m not here about the noise.”
“She liked the idea of hearing there were other people about.”
My mother had once admitted her weakness to me. ‘I don’t like being on my own, and I don’t like the company of women much. Which means I’m vulnerable to the attention of men. And women like her see only the baser reasons for that’. It had been her explanation for why Mrs Ayles had called her a harlot.
“Thought I should introduce myself, tell you I’ll be living in the shop while I’m here. In case you see the lights on.”
“None of my business.”
We face each other with our exhausted chitchat, whilst sensing there should be more.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” says the Mason, in the unpractised way of a man who doesn’t express emotion.
“I hear you found her?”
“Yes.”
“How come it was you?”
The Mason frowns, as if the answer has a multiplicity of paths for him to choose and he’s afraid he might opt for one it will be impossible to find his way back from.
“You mother and I…” He stops, already regretting the path taken. There is no way back. “We were friends.”
“Since when?”
“Since I arrived. More so after George moved out. Not before,” he adds, as if it might be important to me. “We were neighbours, so we’ve always talked. After George left, I used to go in and watch some TV with her in the evenings. She didn’t like being alone, certainly not since all you children have grown.” He stops talking abruptly, in the way of a man who’s aware he’s over explaining.
“Did George know?”
“He didn’t need to. Our relationship wasn’t improper. It was perfectly respectable.”
“I suspect George would see it differently.”
“I’m not afraid of him.” It’s a jarring boast, stuck into the conversation like a lone weed in a flowerbed. “We watched TV, that’s all.”
I don’t challenge his statement; can’t know if it’s truth or lie. It means little if it had amounted to more than his claim. My mother had been free to live the life she chose. But what had this reticent man talked to her about? Or had she talked and he simply listened. It struck me as the likely scenario of a relationship between them if sex wasn’t involved.
I catch movement in the right rear quarter of the image in front of me. A yellow flash through the doorway, and a slender woman wearing a sunny shirt tucked into jeans, bare ankles with flat shoes, and short brown hair hitched behind one ear, comes out.
“Dad, dinner’s ready,” she declares, before turning to me. “Hello,” she says shyly, and steps forward to offer her hand.
I’m struck by the contradiction of the diffidence set against the confidence of instigating a handshake. The skin is dry and the hand firm.
“Mint,” I say, and feel stupid, as if it’s a meaningless bark of a word. “Jimmy Minter,” I explain.
“Beth. Elizabeth Green.” She mimics my awkward delivery and smiles.
I’m not sure if she’s mocking me, or sympathising with me. I’ve spent nine years apart from women and I’m like a man who’s forgotten how to walk in a straight line. The need to leave overwhelms me, her presence making me feel unwelcome.
“Anyway, I’d better go. If your dinner’s ready.” I recall a long-forgotten line from the manual of social interaction. “It’s nice to meet you.”
Their eyes are on my back as I leave the way I came, and I’m in the shop before I remember my unasked questions. I want to return, need to get to the end of that particular conversation. I battle with the pull of curiosity and the contra-tug of my self-consciousness.
I’ll go back tomorrow, when my sudden retreat has faded from their minds.
r/suggestmeabook: I want a character-driven tale of a man who’s lost everything having to help those who took it.
Movie rating: PG
Pages: 452
Publisher: Roc
Series: Rai Kirah
Fantasy
From the publisher: Seyonne is a man waiting to die. He has been a slave for sixteen years, almost half his life, and has lost everything of meaning to him. Seyonne has made peace with his fate. With strict self-discipline he forces himself to exist only in the present moment and to avoid the pain of hope or caring about anyone.
I’m glad I didn’t pass this up because of the execrable cover (a different edition is on the banner, but the one I had was the terrible one). If Para hadn’t recommended it, I’d not have looked again after an initial shudder. I’d have missed out on a great book.
How could something so complexly wonderful and mysterious as human intelligence devise a world so utterly, absolutely absurd?
Carol Berg, Transformation
Seyonne has a terrible dilemma. He’s been a slave of the Derzhi since they conquered his homeland and took him as part of their profit for doing so. He’s been stripped of all the rituals that his people taught him would keep him clean before the gods, as well as the talents and powers he once had. He keeps alive by suppressing his past through a visualization taught to him by an experienced slave. Now sold to the crown prince of the Derzhi, he’s looked into the man’s soul and found that he will have to help him retain his birthright.
I am indeed afraid, Your Highness. Every moment of my existence carries such a burden of terror you could not imagine it. I fear I have no soul. I fear there are no gods. I fear there is no meaning to the pain I have known. I fear I have lost the capacity to love another human being or ever to see goodness in one. Among such fears as these, my lord, there is little room for you.
Carol Berg, Transformation
That premise is an amazing one to work through: having to willingly help a person directly benefiting from your suffering. How does one find the will, not to mention the compassion, to do something like that? Wouldn’t it be easier to curse your gods and refuse? The idea of gritting your teeth and serving a higher purpose, even if it assists your personal enemies, is explored at length in this lovely book, but not at the expense of an absorbing tale that moves forward at a pace to make the transformation indicated by the book’s title believable.
It was the ultimate expression of subjugation—to be forced to give up the most personal, most private self to one who had no claim, no right of friendship or kinship or guesting, to one who had no idea of the power of names or the dangerous entry they gave to the soul.
Carol Berg, Transformation
Seyonne is a protagonist to root for. He has too much experience with pain to invite it lightly, and still wants to survive, despite the seeming hopelessness of his predicament. When life has taught you that to trust is to be betrayed, and loneliness is a shield, how much harder to open yourself up to anything or anyone new?
The Derzhi were a warrior race, and though they prized the literacy of their scholars and merchants, it was much in the way they prized their dogs who did tricks, or their birds who could carry messages unerringly, or their illusionists who could make rabbits turn into flowers or sultry maidens disappear. It was not something they would want to do themselves.
Carol Berg, Transformation
And his prince? Aleksander is a reckless, petty prince. The idea of Seyonne having to help him fills him (and the reader) with disdain. No wonder you would wonder at whether gods exist, when they seem to snicker at you from their lofty heights by giving you the burden of helping this bastard at the expense of your own heart.
Ezzarian prophets say that the gods fight their battles within the souls of men and that if the deities mislike the battleground, they reshape it according to their will.
Carol Berg, Transformation
Slavery is difficult to write. Berg has chosen to go with the type of slavery more commonly found throughout history: making slaves of war captives. She doesn’t go into enough detail to let you know if the slavery is hereditary, but, on the face of it, there’s no indication that it is. It may be a little quibble for many readers, but for me, it was easier to cope with a civilization with that kind of slavery than the chattel slavery of the 17th-19th centuries of the Western Hemisphere. However, it isn’t an easy life, and Berg does a good job of portraying the powerlessness, pain, and isolation that slavery would inflict.
The merchants glared at me in warning, but a slave learns quickly to pick and choose the points of honor for which he is willing to suffer. As the years of servitude pass, those become fewer and fewer.
Carol Berg, Transformation
The world-building is convincing, with enough details to make you see a world with civilizations not unlike our own, but with different outcomes. Berg doesn’t litter the book with a huge cast, but enough to give you an idea of the complexity of the society. It works; with this first person narrative, Seyonne wouldn’t have interacted with all the various segments of the world, and his keyhole view is sufficient.
Survival was still of interest to me, though it was not the passion it had been when I was eighteen and still learning what manacles and whips were all about.
Carol Berg, Transformation
Demons, sorcerers, believers and unbelievers all populate this book. Berg doesn’t offer easy hope or redemption, but she does offer both, convincingly. If you want a book to affirm that good can still be found in the worst of situations, or, in Peat Long’s terms, a tale of healing, this is the read for you.
Murder, conspiracy, radicalism, poverty, riot, violence, capitalism, technology: everything is up for grabs in the early part of Victoria’s reign.
Radical politicians, constitutional activists and trade unionists are being professionally assassinated. When Josiah Ainscough of the Stockport Police thwarts an attempt on the life of the Chartist leader, Feargus O’Connor, he receives public praise, but earns the enmity of the assassin, who vows to kill him.
Circles of Deceit, the second of Paul CW Beatty’s Constable Josiah Ainscough’s historical murder mysteries, gives a superb and electric picture of what it was to live in 1840s England. The novel is set in one of the most turbulent political periods in British history, 1842-1843, when liberties and constitutional change were at the top of the political agenda, pursued using methods fair or foul.
About the author
Paul CW Beatty is an unusual combination of a novelist and a research scientist. Having worked for many years in medical research in the UK NHS and Universities, a few years ago he took an MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University emerging with a distinction.
His latest novel, Children of Fire, is a Victorian murder mystery set in 1841 at the height of the industrial revolution. It won the Writing Magazine’s Best Novel Award in November 2017 and is published by The Book Guild Ltd.
Paul lives near Manchester in the northwest of England. Children of Fire is set against the hills of the Peak District as well as the canals and other industrial infrastructure of the Cottonopolis know as the City of Manchester.
Selected quotes
Hands were steadied by friends so that older Chartists might sign for themselves. Those who could only make their mark had them attested by others, who initialed the petition forms.
Paul CW Beatty, Circles of Deceit
Of all things, he’s a Policeman, even though he went to grammar school. It’s a very common sort of profession, if you can call it a profession; even lower than being a manufacturer like Pappa.
Paul CW Beatty, Circles of Deceit
So now I know you, in your black and silver uniform. You who have only your fists and your pathetic stick with which to demand obedience. No rifle nor musket. No sharp sword or dagger. Nothing to protect you but the respect of the people. You are a servant, a humble servant, not a soldier, not a man of honour. You know nothing of true honour, nothing of true respect.
Paul CW Beatty, Circles of Deceit
Josiah had often heard it said that good news travels fast, but his own experience was that good news did not often travel faster than bad news.
Deadly Whispers in Lower Dimblebrook by Julie Butterfield
Rachel’s Random Resources Blog Tour
r/suggestmeabook: I want a murder mystery in a charming English village with a displaced city girl who’s still learning old-fashioned small town ways.
Movie rating: PG
Pages: 222
Publisher: Self
Series: Isabelle Darby Cosy Village Mysteries
Cozy mystery
From the publisher: When Isabelle Darby moves to the delightfully cosy village of Lower Dimblebrook, she’s searching for peace and quiet as well as a chance to escape from heartbreak.
Julie Butterfield has created a lovely world in Lower Dimblebrook, even if there’s a not-so-lovely murderer in the neighborhood. The protagonist, Issie Darby, is easy to relate to—a woman who left her city home for a small town life, but hasn’t quite become part of the town yet. Many of us probably have that fantasy, and Butterfield does a good job of making the transition believable.
She passed the small row of cottages with their uneven thatched roofs, mullioned windows and hollyhock bestrewn gardens, skirted the front of Brook House and arrived on her crunchy, gravel drive to find that she had left her front door slightly ajar. It was a habit quickly picked up in the tranquil backwater of Lower Dimblebrook, a relaxed attitude to security.
Julie Butterfield, Deadly Whispers in Lower Dimblebrook
Butterfield also makes Issie’s gradual involvement in solving the mystery quite believable—more so than many amateur sleuths. Rather than jumping into trying to catch a murderer, Issie is more concerned with her murdered friend’s reputation, and that seems like the kind of mystery that a layperson would reasonably get caught up in.
I know Fiona wasn’t having an affair and I’m going to get to the bottom of who started this wicked rumour.
Julie Butterfield, Deadly Whispers in Lower Dimblebrook
The “deadly whispers” of the title make for an interesting exploration: how gossip, commonly thought of as a minor infraction, can be dangerous. The novel opens with the local gossips salivating over the murder, and it is easy to see why Issie would want to keep the townspeople at arm’s length. Doris Stokes, the prime mover of news, is saved from being a cutout character, and details of her relationship with Gertrude well-served the story, illuminating her in both good ways and bad.
In Wainwright’s experience, love was not a barrier to murder. On many occasions, it was love that set off the chain of events that resulted in death.
Julie Butterfield, Deadly Whispers in Lower Dimblebrook
Her fellow exile from the city is the detective, DI Dave Wainwright, who can’t wait to get back to a city, and who finds the instantaneous information exchanges of the village remarkably frustrating. I hope that Butterfield will develop him past being pretty but grumpy into a more three-dimensional character.
The lack of mobile signal in many areas was driving him crazy, the relaxed approach and total lack of urgency to any request was making him grouchy and village life, in general, was giving him a headache.
Julie Butterfield, Deadly Whispers in Lower Dimblebrook
The novel suffers from a couple of points that are common to cozies (and many mysteries generally, both print and film). First, the identity of the murderer becomes fairly obvious about halfway through the story, so the reader is just left with waiting for the denouement. Second, as a result of this, moments when you want to yell at the protagonist not to be stupid start arising with greater frequency as the story nears the end. Or maybe that’s just me, but I get very frustrated when the protagonists are being dense given the evidence both she and I, the reader, have. However, many readers of cozies aren’t particularly fussed by the puzzle being over early, and even with the aggravation, I wanted to finish the story.
Madeleine always used bone china, she never poured milk from the bottle and the biscuits were usually served on a two-tier cake stand inherited from her grandmother. But it was rarely tea in the teapot.
Julie Butterfield, Deadly Whispers in Lower Dimblebrook
The pleasant atmosphere of Lower Dimblebrook pervades the story, and the concrete details have me ready to book a cottage with the delightful Madeleine Halesowen, Issie’s landlord, murder or no. Save me some rhubarb wine.
Big 4+ review: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
Audiobook narrated by Bahni Turpin
r/suggestmeabook: I want a reimagined history of slavery that illuminates individual and group brutality as seen through the eyes of a young enslaved woman.
Movie rating: R
Pages: 320
Audiobook: 10 hours and 43 minutes
Publisher: Doubleday
2017 Pulitzer Prize: Fiction
From the publisher: In Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor: engineers and conductors operate a secret network of actual tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora embarks on a harrowing flight from one state to the next, encountering, like Gulliver, strange yet familiar iterations of her own world at each stop.
I decided to read this book after seeing it on a list of historical fiction must-reads and didn’t look into it any further. For a change, I decided to try the audiobook (and it was available sooner from my library). Bahni Turpin is an amazing narrator. She did a great job with the voices, making each character distinct. She got through all the brutality without ever overdoing it and turning it into a mockery, which would have been tempting, as harsh as it gets at times. And the writing? Gorgeous.
Sometimes such an experience bound one person to another; just as often the shame of one’s powerlessness made all witnesses into enemies.
Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad
The first section of the book, about 1/5 of the overall text, is straight historical recreation. Colson Whitehead makes sure that we’ve adequately toured the degradation of field hands in Georgia’s cotton fields. What was unexpected was that, unlike other books I’ve read or movies I’ve seen, Whitehead delves into the relationships between the enslaved—not the typical house vs. field, but among those working the fields—and how the cruelty of their environment poisoned the relations among them. Twelve Years a Slave or Django Unchained didn’t go nearly this far, so be prepared for a shit ton of violence. Is it unwarranted? I think not, given what the reality was.
Ajarry made a science of her own black body and accumulated observations. Each thing had a value and as value changed, everything else changed also. A broken calabash was worth less than the one that held its water, a hook that kept its catfish more prized than one that relinquished its bait. In America, the quirk was that people were things.
Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad
So imagine my surprise when I get to the part where the railroad is literally carved underground. It’s not like they hide it in the description, so it’s my bad for not knowing. Not knowing that this was going to be more along the lines of alternate history, it was like taking a bite of what you thought was gravy and finding out it’s pudding. It’s not that you dislike the pudding; it’s just that you weren’t prepared for it.
The black mouths of the gigantic tunnel opened at either end. It must have been twenty feet tall, walls lined with dark and light colored stones in an alternating patter. The sheer industry that had made such a project possible.
Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad
I do have some issues with the literal underground railroad, just because the world is so literal in most ways that it’s a strain on the suspension of disbelief. Creating tunnels that reach from Georgia to Indiana would be a feat of engineering far past the ordinary abilities of untrained labor, even today. In the period, the technology was just being invented after early attempts to tunnel under the Thames demonstrated the hazards of doing so–it’s not just a matter of enough brute strength to pick your way through the stone or earth.
But even that didn’t bother me so much as what anyone who watched enough WWII POW escape movies (or even Hogan’s Heroes) knows: What would they have done with all the debris? That’s always a big thing for those movies–or of prison escapes by tunneling. You have to have someplace to put the dirt you’ve taken out of the hole to avoid suspicion. So where the hell did they put the debris? It bothered me more than it should.
The cabins radiated permanence and in turn summoned timeless feelings in those who lived and died in them: envy and spite.
Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad
But, okay, I got past that. The writing is beautiful, in contrast to the horror it invokes, and the pace is generally on point. I’m not crazy about the digressions into other points of view that don’t really lend themselves to moving the plot along; only two of them seem at all necessary to the story.
White man trying to kill you slow every day, and sometimes trying to kill you fast. Why make it easy for him? That was one kind of work you could say no to.
Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad
The use of other historical assaults on the health and integrity of Blacks in this country, although displaced in time and place to be included in this narrative, integrates the narrative of racism in an effective way. It’s not just evil slaveowners on the plantation, but reaches out across to those who are purportedly looking to advance Blacks.
Sometimes a slave will be lost in a brief eddy of liberation. In the sway of a sudden reverie among the furrows or while untangling the mysteries of an early-morning dream. In the middle of a song on a warm Sunday night. Then it comes, always—the overseer’s cry, the call to work, the shadow of the master, the reminder that she is only a human being for a tine moment across the eternity of her servitude.
Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad
As a result, it’s easy to enter into the feelings of Cora, the protagonist, when she is suspicious of whites who say they’re going to help. It’s easy to say; hard to do. Even seemingly helpful whites offer betrayal at times, so it’s hard to know who to trust. But Whitehead doesn’t then elevate all Blacks to sainthood; there’s treachery there as well. Whitehead’s world in The Underground Railroad, bent and distorted by slavery and the concomitant racism, is a stunning feat of imagining oneself into another reality, informed by facts but turned into an immersive experience through his artful use of them.
As the years pass, Valentine observed, racial violence only becomes more vicious in its expression. It will not abate or disappear, not anytime soon, and not in the south.
Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad
So, on the balance, I am in favor of this alternate reality, as it shines a light on truth through fiction. It’s not quite perfect, but, damn, it’s close.
1917: with her father in the British secret service and her brother Alfie in the trenches, under-age Poppy Loveday volunteers against her parents’ wishes to drive ambulances in France. We follow her adventures, racing to save wounded men driven to the Casualty Clearing Station, and back to the Base Hospital.
“Jon Wilkins gets to the very heart of the mud and the blood of the battlefields and then with the same ease the gaiety of the ballroom in a thriller that will keep you entertained for hours.” Stuart Hill, author of The Icemark Trilogy.
During one battle she finds Élodie Proux, a French nurse, at a roadside clutching a dead soldier. Poppy rescues her. Élodie becomes her dearest girl as they fall in love.
Poppy and Élodie encounter frightening adversaries at the Western Front as well as away from it during the closing weeks of World War One.
From the author
Jonathan loves to write. He is a retired teacher, lapsed Waterstones’ bookseller and former Basketball Coach. He taught PE and English for 20 years and coached women’s basketball for over 30 years.
He regularly teaches creative writing workshops in and around Leicester.
The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water by Zen Cho
r/suggestmeabook: I want a wuxia-inspired novella about bandits trying to deal with the outcome of temple desecration in a fantasy mid-20th century Malay.
Movie rating: PG
Pages: 155
Publisher: Tordotcom
From the publisher: A bandit walks into a coffeehouse, and it all goes downhill from there. Guet Imm, a young votary of the Order of the Pure Moon, joins up with an eclectic group of thieves (whether they like it or not) in order to protect a sacred object, and finds herself in a far more complicated situation than she could have ever imagined.
This novella has plenty to love: combat, deceit, trans rep, a corner of history largely unknown in the US, and lots of little mysteries. The writing is lucid as mountain spring water, and the characters are intriguing where not sympathetic, and mostly sympathetic (if occasionally annoying).
It was of course safest to avoid bandits, but since most looked like ordinary people—indeed, if you were unlucky, some of them were your cousin, your uncle, your brother—this was not always possible.
Zen Cho, The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water
There’s the bandit with the pretty face, Lau Fung Cheung, also known as Ah Sang, who could be Aramis of The Three Musketeers in a different life. There’s the solid and dependable Tet Sang, Lau Fung Cheung’s second, who finds himself drawn into conflicts he’d prefer to avoid. Then there’s the woman they made the mistake of helping, Guet Imm, a former votary of the tokong of the Pure Moon, a temple which has been destroyed.
Either she was on of those happy persons whose periods gave them little trouble, or her stoicism over her blistered feet extended to cramps and cold sweats.
Zen Cho, The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water
The novel is based on the Emergency, a conflict in the former Malay Colony of Britain, which was perceived as a communist insurrection by the Chinese ethnic population in the postwar period (1948-1960) by the British colonial powers. Taking a chapter from Stalin, the British relocated approximately one million Chinese “squatters” who lived on the fringes of the jungle and were supporting the insurrectionists, who saw themselves as a liberation army. In most of the British official summaries found by a quick Google search, the relocation was benign, giving them housing and infrastructure. The truth is more complex: these “squatters” were first moved to emptied prisons and, when those grew too full, to concentration and detention camps. It was only when the British realized this was not going to be a workable solution (and the more economically advantaged ethnic Chinese began to unite to protect the squatters), that the new villages were created.
“Of course I knew there were problems. But even when I went to town and got a job, nobody talked about a war.”
“Nobody talks about it. It’s not that kind of war.”
“What kind of war is it, then?”
Zen Cho, The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water
The spark was racially motivated: the British were about to offer full citizenship to the Chinese Malays, but there was a popular backlash from the rest of the Malay population, and the British retracted the offer. This lead to members of the Chinese population responding more violently. This reaction didn’t come around as quickly as it sounds from this context: the Chinese in Malay had dealt with Chinese exclusion laws much like those in the US, from persecution during the Japanese occupation, and lack of adequate recourse to justice before and after the Japanese took Malay.
A bespectacled man with slick hair and alert lidless eyes of a gecko, he seemed cleanly and decent, like a clerk. At the same time, there was something off-putting about him—one would not be surprised to hear that he had embezzled funds or slapped his mother-in-law.
Zen Cho, The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water
At any rate, this novella of a fantasy Malay during that time partakes of aspects of the actual history. Cho uses the term “Tang” to refer to the ethnic Chinese (although it’s actually a dynasty), and it’s clear throughout the story that these are a people being singled out for persecution. The protagonists are not guerrillas; they are just displaced poor people who ran out of options for anything better.
You cannot stay rich in times like these without eating sin. If you don’t dare to do wrong, then you will suffer.
Zen Cho, The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water
The attitude toward trans people is refreshing. It appears that during this period, transgender people were generally accepted in Malay; it wasn’t until a Muslim resurgence in the 1980s that attitudes started to change. A culture with matter-of-fact acceptance and lack of stigma is a pleasure to imagine yourself into.
Tet Sang had known members of her Order who had been dedicated to the Pure Moon at a young age but then decided they could not endure to be called sister. They had departed to join male orders or start other lives. Conversely, he had no doubt that some of the Pure Moon’s nuns had lived as men before they joined her Order. Once they entered the deity’s light, no one was particularly interested in what they had been before.
Zen Cho, The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water
Possible spoiler here forward–no specifics, but you might find it to be one: My only real complaint about the novella is the ending; it feels as though it simply stops, rather than having a conclusion. It’s something I like about fiction; unlike real life, resolutions are almost always possible. Like most readers, an ending I dislike tends to color my opinion of the entire story. Cho has said she may return to these characters; I hope this ends up as a first part of a longer story, but even so, I’d have liked a better resting place.
He knew how dangerous it could be to assume that either women or mystics were harmless.
Zen Cho, The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water
All in all, it’s a book I recommend, although be warned that you may be ready to turn the last page to another chapter, and find that you’ve been left in the Malay jungle to wonder.
Want a different take? Check out Peat Long’s review of Zen Cho’s lovely book.
Review of a classic: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
r/suggestmeabook: I want a classic murder mystery narrated by a whimsical doctor with Hercule Poirot investigating.
Movie rating: G
Pages: 256
Available through Kindle Unlimited
From the publisher: Roger Ackroyd knew too much. He knew that the woman he loved had poisoned her brutal first husband. He suspected also that someone had been blackmailing her. Then, tragically, came the news that she had taken her own life with an apparent drug overdose.
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a murder mystery classic from the indisputable master Agatha Christie. The irritating but brilliant Hercule Poirot discloses facts, but never illuminates why they matter until the end, giving the reader tantalizing clues that rarely disclose the ending.
The chains of habit. We work to attain an object, and the object gained, we find that what we miss is the daily toil.
Agatha Christie The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
The narrator of this mystery is the primary reason for it being singled out from among Christie’s 82 mystery novels as a standout. For me, the best parts of the novel were the interaction between the narrator, Dr. Sheppard, and his sister, Caroline. He’s constantly exasperated by her nosy attitude and superior attitude. She’s an inveterate gossip, always looking through the windows to monitor the comings and goings of everyone around her.
The motto of the mongoose family, so Mr. Kipling tells us, is: “Go and find out.” If Caroline ever adapts a crest, I should certainly suggest a mongoose rampant.
Agatha Christie The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
As is often the case for Christie, the murder takes place in an estate where there are a limited number of suspects holed up together. The doctor was there for dinner and met most of the suspects there: The grasping sister-in-law, the blushing ingenue and niece, the big game hunter, the personal finance manager, the housekeeper, and the butler. Off-screen is the main suspect, the nephew and heir of the victim.
It is odd, when you have a secret belief of your own which you do not wish to acknowledge, the voicing of it by someone else will rouse you to a fury of denial.
Agatha Christie The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
The novel is mostly charming, although there is a moment that stands out as an unpleasant reminder of the period. While the narrator is interviewing the sister-in-law, the sister-in-law describes the bill collectors. Trying to strike a sympathetic note, the narrator derides the bill collectors as having a “Semitic strain in their ancestry.” This casual antisemitism is a cruel reminder of just how commonplace it was in 1926. Sadly, almost 100 years later, this stereotypical gibe has not complete disappeared.
I don’t know exactly what a “proper place” constitutes—it sounds chilly and unpleasant—but I know that Miss Russell goes about with pinched lips, and what I can only describe as an acid smile.
Agatha Christie The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Another stock character of the past is in place: a big game hunter. Christie’s depiction of him is ambiguous. On the one hand, the narrator makes a rather snarky reference to the trophies he’s provided; on the other, he is presented as a relatively honorable man. I get the impression that she’d think of him as roughly equivalent to any other sports fanatic: the activity isn’t objectionable so much as the obsessive response to it.
I am sorry to say I detest Mrs. Ackroyd. She is all chains ad teeth and bones. A most unpleasant woman. She has small pale flinty blue eyes, and how ever gushing her words may be, those eyes of hers always remain coldly speculative.
Agatha Christie The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
As a woman writing in the twenties, Christie isn’t particularly feminist to our eyes. She offers many different characterizations of women, but no one seems to be particularly keen to change their power relationship with men. Class is challenged slightly more, with some women looking outside the class of their birth for mates, but that particular type of challenge is long-standing and not about to threaten anyone’s outlook,
Women observe subconsciously a thousand little details, without knowing they are doing so. Their subconscious mind adds these little things together—and they call the result intuition.
Agatha Christie The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
All in all, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a solid example of Christie’s finesse at writing an enjoyable puzzle that keeps you guessing, so try to avoid the numerous spoilers out there which will come up quickly if as part of the explanation as to why this particular novel is significant for her. Best to find out after you’ve read it.
They sent three hundred warriors to kill one man. It wasn’t enough.
Mercia lies broken but not beaten, her alliance with Wessex in tatters.
Coelwulf, a fierce and bloody warrior, hears whispers that Mercia has been betrayed from his home in the west. He fears no man, especially not the Vikings sent to hunt him down.
To discover the truth of the rumours he hears, Coelwulf must travel to the heart of Mercia, and what he finds there will determine the fate of Mercia, as well as his own.
I’m an author of fantasy (Viking age/dragon-themed) and historical fiction (Early English, Vikings and the British Isles as a whole before the Norman Conquest). I was born in the old Mercian kingdom at some point since 1066. Raised in the shadow of a strange little building, told from a very young age that it housed the bones of long-dead Kings of Mercia and that our garden was littered with old pieces of pottery from a long-ago battle, it’s little wonder that my curiosity in Early England ran riot. I can only blame my parents!
I write A LOT. You’ve been warned!
Not sure where to start your journey through Early England? Here are some pointers.
If you like action-adventure, with a heavy dose of violence, foul language and good old camaraderie – The Ninth Century series is for you, starting with The Last King, or The Seventh Century, starting with Pagan Warrior, has a little more politics to go with the set-piece battles.
If you like stories about the forgotten women of history, then the Tenth Century series, starting with The Lady of Mercia’s Daughter, is a good place to begin. Or, The First Queen of England, with a little more romance.
If you’re interested in the last century of Early England (before 1066) then The Earls of Mercia series is for you.
If you want to read it all, then you can read in chronological order, or mix it up. The series weren’t written in chronological order.
books + ecstatic = BIBLIOSTATIC 