Book Review: The Beekeeper's Apprentice

One of the best things about being part of a book club is that I get to read genres that I wouldn't usually read. We are a diverse group in terms of our preferred genres; and in order to give everyone an opportunity to read from "their" genre, we have a yearly meeting in which we pick our upcoming reading year. We each come to book club with three books we'd like to read, and we explain our books. From there, we vote on one book from each person's list, so we end up with 10 books for the next year. We've been doing this for two years, and I've really enjoyed stepping outside my reading zone. But at the same time, this has reaffirmed my love for my usual reading zone!

All that to say, Laurie King's The Beekeeper's Apprentice is a mystery—not my usual genre—and I loved it. I didn't love it so much that I'll rush out and read any others in the series, but it was refreshing, fun, engaging and quite well written. This novel introduces Mary Russell, a brilliant teenager who is soon to become the apprentice of none other than Sherlock Holmes. I am not a Sherlock Holmes aficionado, and I'm sure this book would be even more meaningful to those who are, but I loved the concept of fiction taking place inside another fictional world.

When I was a teenager, I read through nearly all of Agatha Christie's mysteries in one summer, and this novel reminded me of those wonderful days when I had nothing else to do but bask in the sun (ignorant of the harmful UV rays) and read, breaking occasionally for a dip in the lake. My reading is done now in 30-minute chunks at most before I go to sleep each night. This novel, however, did absolutely hold my attention.

And I take it back. I just might read through all the Mary Russell books. There is something intensely comforting about a solid, clean, well written mystery.

Book Review: The Thirteenth Tale

I read this book by Diane Setterfield many years ago and absolutely loved it. (My woefully short review is here.) I just spent a lovely weekend re-reading it for book club. This is one of those times I am grateful that I can rarely remember what happens in books and movies because I had forgotten everything that happens in this wonderful novel.

First of all, Setterfield is a beautiful writer. Her prose is poetry, her insight speaks to my core. Next, Setterfield is a masterful storyteller. This is a book that is hard to put down, the kind you keep thinking about as you go about your day and can't wait to get back to when your day's activities are finished. I even took the luxury of reading this one on the couch during the day, which I don't usually do.

This is a kind of ghost story, a mystery, a love story, a story of families gone horribly wrong and also being repaired or forged anew.  It's a story of discoveries and confirmations. Famous author Vida Winter is dying, and she wants someone to tell her true story. She picks Margaret, a quiet young woman who works in her father's bookstore.  Margaret reluctantly enters into this relationship as Vida Winter's biographer but ultimately does everything she can to find the truth in Vida's tale.

The novel was a big hit in our book club, and we rarely all love a book. One of our members pointed out that it is extremely disturbing. There are scenes that are hard to scrub out of one's memory, although I assured her that I had no recollection of those scenes these many years after reading it for the first time. We all agreed that we wanted to underline whole paragraphs because Setterfield's writing is so beautiful, especially when she is talking about the power of families and the necessity of books.

I'm glad I had a chance to read The Thirteenth Tale again, and I am excited to see that Setterfield finally has another novel due to be published in November, Bellman and Black: A Ghost Story. If you like Kate Morton, you'll love Diane Setterfield.

Linked up at Semicolon's Saturday Review of Books

Book Review: Interred with Their Bones

The New York Times called Jennifer Lee Carrell's Interred with Their Bones a "feverishly paced action adventure." Honestly, my only feverish pace was to hurry up and finish it so that I could say "I read it" at book club.

Basically, this book is a hunt for a lost Shakespearean play, coupled with the perennial question: who really wrote Shakespeare's plays? Way too much happened in this novel. I got hung up on the little things, like how do these people afford to fly all around the world? How do they just happen to get flights so quickly? When do they sleep? Why does Kate keep involving innocent people in her quest, knowing they will be murdered? How did Kate go from being a Harvard professor to a director at The Globe in her late 20s? And how can they just leave all these dead bodies around? And has the author actually ever been in a cave? Please. You can't just go crawling around in an unknown cave and stumble upon—oh wait. I don't want to give that away. Actually, I was so perplexed that I don't even know what they found, except more dead bodies.

I know. I'm so trivial, but I have a really hard time becoming involved in a book when I am distracted by such details. Not only were too many things happening that seemed disjointed, but the characters were rather flat and terribly unfeeling. This book is compared a lot to Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, and I must say I liked the latter much better. I probably shouldn't admit to that, but there you go. 

I guess if you are absolutely enthralled with all things Shakespeare, you might enjoy this for the Shakespearean discussions. But if I hadn't felt compelled to finish this because of book club, I would have thrown it across the floor by page 50. Sadly, I wasted three entire weeks of my reading life on this book—that's how long it took to conquer these 416 tortuous pages.