Weekly Reading Round-Up
Happy Friday, all!
I’ve been bouncing all over as a reader recently (including bouncing off some books, but I never include those!). This week, I’ve gone from 1990’s set ghost story to contemporary small town romance to an old (but new to me) cozy mystery.
Of course, I had to read the new Simone St. James on release day. Murder Road is classic Simone, and although this is one of her almost-contemporaries (1990s), thematically it reminded me a lot of both The Haunting of Maddy Clare and Silence for the Dead. One of her great strengths is the way she eschews stereotypes. Characters you may initially think are dreadful have hidden virtues. This one is also unusual in having a protagonist who’s newly married at the start of the book– and actually genuinely likes her husband!– rather than finding her love interest along the way.
It took me a few years, but I finally read an Emily Henry book (in this case Book Lovers) and was charmed to find it a mix of classic Susan Elizabeth Phillips and first wave chick lit, with a deep awareness of the tropes of the genre. If you take the first person narrative/heroine’s journey qualities of early 2000s chick lit and mix them with the sensibility and snark of SEP and then deliberately play with the standard tropes… you get this book, in which the workaholic agent heroine goes with her sister on an enforced vacation in a small town as her sister’s attempt to find her a Hallmark happily ever after doesn’t go quite as planned.
After that, I popped back forty years or so to read a vintage cozy mystery: Marian Babson’s Murder on a Mystery Tour, in which a murder mystery weekend at an English manor house goes rather more genuinely murderous than the hosts have bargained for. I do miss old school cozy mysteries. So many embrace the madcap, like this one, which also gently sends up the publishing industry as it was in the mid-80s and mystery writers in particular. And who doesn’t want to spend a snowed in weekend in an English manor house– with murders?
What have you been reading this week?
I just finished The Year That Changed US, really enjoyed it. It was fun to read a book set in Bath, since I was just there.
My book club is read Travis Baldree’s ‘Lattes and Legends’ but since I recently read that I’m doing the prequel/sequel ‘Bookstores and Bonedust’ which I think I like even more than the original, because revitalizing a bookstore run by a ratkin in a seaside town? Yes please!