Force of Nature (Aaron Falk #2) by Jane Harper

3 Stars

Five women go out on a three-day team building exercise and only four come back. 

Work mandated Rah-Rah-RAH activities, I'm not a huge fan. I think there are better ways of motivating, less structured and more organic ways, but it's a management choice. So, this starts with the misfit group of employees, some with existing relationships that have already seen friction and others are peripheral. Quickly, the tensions begin to build; a few haven't figured out they're on this three day tour and rather than play things low-key they're immediately pushing buttons and invading boundaries. Yeah, not going to end well.

The characters are interesting, not groundbreaking. If you've worked in a corporate environment, then you've undoubtedly met them. I'm not going to break them down into archetypes because it's not relevant, what is key is whether or not the elements are used effectively. The characters have a solid mix and the additional interpersonal tie-ins provide a lot of tangle to the mystery of whodunit. The timeline and arc are good, and the pacing is perfect. But, I'm going to say that the tandem timeline didn't work for me; it rarely does. I don't like the dual reveal and switching back and forth between storylines from the women's story to the searchers later. The jumping back and forth might provide heightened suspense as the reader gets dumped right at a critical moment to bootstrap the exposition of the alternate timeline. It just feels manufactured and very heavy-handed to me. I know this is a personal preference, but this does play a role in my rating and easily deducts one star. 

Now, Aaron Falk. I didn't read the first book because this one was available first at my library. There is some backstory alluded to, but no major spoilers. I'll definitely read it. I'm assuming there's character development because there is significant discussion of Aaron's relationship with his father. In fact, parent/child relationships are a significant factor in this story as they are echoed through various segments and multiple characters. I liked Falk and can see enjoying other stories. 

So, I liked the story. The end seemed a little weak to me, but it might just have been the fatigue of timeline switching wore on me and by that point I was only looking for resolution. 

Favorite thought:

"When had teenage girls become so sexualized? Had they been like that at his age? Probably, he thought, except back then he had been all in favor of it. At that age, a lot of things seemed like harmless fun."

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri by Martin McDonagh

4 Stars

Rating a screenplay? Who knows?

Rating the story? Oh yeah... 

This all started with me attempting to cheat--no, that's not quite accurate, looking for an advantage in the annual Academy Awards ballot competition. While other participants read the local industry rags to find the odds, I decided to borrow a screenplay. Of course, I admitted I had a copy and was just starting to read it when the announcement that it was hitting Redbox Tuesday after the awards and I stopped. Truce of sorts. I don't really watch TV and the occasional show or movie is a concession I make, so I put it aside. 

Fastforward. So, I saw the movie before reading this, which to be honest, is a bit of a spoiler, but I still laughed at the same points in the screenplay as I did in the movie--Win. The technical aspects of how much direction is given was interesting to see. I really like the movie and I really liked the screenplay.

Because through Love comes Calm, and through Calm comes Thought. And you need Thought to detect stuff sometimes, Jason. It's kinda all you need.

Kudos to Francis McDormand and Sam Rockwell for their awards, though I have to admit that I was disappointed that Sam Rockwell didn't say:

Elmet by Fiona Mozley

5 Stars

Wow. Holy Crackerdoodles!

Bold and filled with images that are burnt into my psyche. Fierce, outside the box and filled with people who won't live in them. Others, not part of the system and no desire to be part of it. Only wanting to live honestly, in peace. But, there's always people who are waiting to take advantage, to play the game, manipulate it for gain.

This is no happy story. There is nothing but grit and determination and the price.

"We all grow into our coffins, Danny. And I saw myself growing into mine."

*Watch out and don't read too many reviews because spoilers would be a shame. I am definitely recommending this one to some people.

Electric Arches by Eve L. Ewing

3 Stars

I write this review as an outsider.

Poetry is often intensely personal in ways prose avoids. This is a collection of insights, remembrances, and calls to push forth. It is also an invitation for readers, to bear witness, to reflect.

"What words can you offer us to help us be free black people in a world that does not love us?"

A rating on technique I am not qualified to give, so the rating is strictly subjective. I did enjoy it. I appreciated being invited to step inside a place I'm not allowed and observe. As a non-colored person that is the only role I can have reading this.

Ewing addresses the weight of race, of social injustice, of struggle, but also the strength and beauty inherent.

I am in the universe and it is my hair.
each strand arched electric and perfectly still
before my eyes, dancing, crooked,
arranged just so in the air
like the last humming chord of a song.
-excerpt, 'at the salon'

I grew up in the Caribbean. Many of my friends were black, and I was in awe of the intricate hairstyles they would come to school with, Monday mornings were magic. Revealed were the hours they spent with their sisters and mothers braiding and beading. I think it was envy. To never have your hair slip out of a ponytail during basketball, to not have to brush it all the time, and to have people who would want to spend seven hours doing your hair. Definitely envy.

A man can be may things: a snare drum
or a willow tree with its branches dragging down into the muddy water,
the white rind of a watermelon, or a run in your stockings,
or the moment that you see our name
written on the inside of a desk at school
and it wasn't you who wrote it. 

But you can be your own gin
and your best sip too.
You can make him with a nation and still be sovereign,
your own gold coin and your own honest trade.
You can touch his hand
and still be your own snapping fingers
when the snare has gone quiet.
-excerpt, 'appletree'

Magical realism is a genre borne out of oppression. A way to break reality in unrealistic ways in order to create something magical. It is optimistic by its nature because it provides trapped people modes of escape in the ugly of contemporary times. Not all the poems utilize it, but the ones that do have an extraordinary playfulness.

Again, a spectacular and gorgeous cover. The full image is even more amazing.

Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London by Lauren Elkin

2 Stars

Historical retrospective of cities and the literary women who haunted their avenues with overlays of Elkin's experiences.

This is more biographical than geographical. Elkin explores feminism through the lens of authors' lives and their writings. Specifically, women's use of city space or exclusion from it. It has strong associations to arguments of female confinement and the interiority of their lives, but Elkin emphasizes the subversion of it by artists and writers from historical periods.

New York
Twenty pages and only two that actually discuss walking the city, the rest covers nearly everything else but flaneusing.

Don't think I don't see the irony in complaining about the lack of focus in a book titled Flaneuse. But, I took it literally, as an armchair adventurer not as a disjointed treatise on everything from Post World War II architecture, to postmodernism, to feminism, to the epiphany that, "I've lived in a cage and never realized it!" experiential sharing.

Paris
Twenty five pages and maybe one that discusses walking the streets contemporaneously, from a firsthand account. The rest is a dissection of Jean Rhys' literature oeuvre with a provocative counterpoint of Hemingway and a dash of Ford. I haven't read Rhys and I can tell from the analysis provided I'll despise her books--women in penumbral spaces who continually make the worst choice possible-- dear god, yes, why wouldn't I love that?

London
Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group. Again, more literary than actual discussion of London. That said, I was very familiar with the area discussed so I enjoyed moments of flashbacks. Plus, I like London.

Paris Deuxième
This revisit features George Sand and her radical flight to Paris in the early nineteenth century, leaving behind her children to pursue her writing and political ideals only to return to the countryside in Berry after the unrelenting bloodshed of Paris power struggles. Sand refocusing on themes of matrimony and education as the liberator of women. Again, there are brief, one line ties in to contemporary Paris but that is it.

Venice
Diary entry about Elkin's PhD avoidance by writing a novel set in Venice instead of a thesis. Clearly, firsthand experience required. Sophie Calle turns out to be a source for character development and the reader gets to run down this rabbit hole. Turns out Sophie liked to follow interesting looking strangers around the city, see where they went--which to be honest, I've done while wandering various cities myself so I can't knock it. The idea is that someone that interesting looking must be going somewhere interesting. Where? Alas, not always true, but I found strange nooks and crannies with unique shops, festivals, and even dreary financial districts utilizing this method.

Tokyo
I feel like Elkin and I are on opposite ends of the spectrum; I would take Tokyo in a heartbeat over Paris--any day. This section is primarily a diatribe about how much Elkin hated Japan and everything about it with a backdrop of her destructing relationship. The part that really drove me nuts was that for a person who travelled the complaint that the real Japan couldn't be found dumbfounded me. Like everywhere else in densely populated cities, jump on the Metro, Tube, subway and go!

Paris Troisième
God, I don't like Paris, and certainly not enough to start the third chapter of its history and effusing over its "charm". I'm tapping out of this book, page 150. My library loan is about to end and I just don't have the desire to continue on.

This is probably a fantastic read for people looking for an author biography and feminist discussions of restricted space. Just know that it tends towards tossing out philosophical concepts like confetti as it meanders. Either you find it pretentious or a clever tie-in. I clearly had incorrect expectations and while I found it interesting, Paris killed it for me.

Overall, strangely intimate editorializing, but then since complete strangers often share oddly intimate details of their lives unprompted on street corners waiting for lights or deli counters and parking lots this wasn't as weird as it could have been.

Gentleman Nine by Penelope Ward

1 Star

So not what I was hoping for after reading the blurb.

The romance genre is mostly a miss for me nowadays. I went in looking for some nostalgic and smexy loving and I got this emo and way more chaste story than I expected with a blurb flogging escort services and playboy ex-crushes. Actually, I call FLAG on the play!

This was bait and switch. 

A virgin adjacent and a reformed rake comprise this story that has A LOT of emotional baggage. Add on that these two mid to late twenties individuals act at times like they're a decade younger and you get a weird faux teen angst story. The alternating first person point of view did it no favors since it was the crutch that made the story all internal monologuing and fretting. It took this story from two stars to one. 

Finally, there were some plot points that made me roll my eyes so much that I nearly got eye strain. I know they're my peccadillos, but they just rubbed me the wrong way. Spoilers abound so not going into to detail, but if this is a real thing for people, then I don't want to know how messed up people are about human bodies and their function. And they shouldn't be characters in a book advertising itself as a racy romance. 

Maybe I can't read blurbs correctly anymore, but whatever this was I didn't like it.

Two Man Station by Lisa Henry

3 Stars

City life didn't prepare Gio for this.

Gio's professional life has thrown 180 and he's been offloaded to the hinterland. He's trying to make the best of it, but his past won't stay past, and soon the present seems very different.

This is an armchair romance with a slow burn and easy meander because country life ain't city life. Henry does a bang up job painting the isolation, quiet, and stark beauty of the Australian outback. The politics of small town policing has a learning curve as Gio finds out.

This is more a character study story than a police action, or rather it focuses of the everyday minutiae of police work, the unglamorous and unsexy. Not to say that there isn't a burr in the ointment. Gio's got problems, but he's not the only in Richmond, and when the humdrum of everyday breaks--it's fast and merciless. Don't be fooled by the quaint.

This almost feels like it could be the beginning of a series because while there's resolution there's enough threads to pull and follow on in subsequent books. Recommended for those looking for conflicted and heartfelt heroes in a setting that dominates the story.

Binti by Nnedi Okorafor

3.5 Stars

Transformation has a cost.

This was a lovely novella. Short, but packed with so much world building, action, and resolution. Okorafor gives the reader a wonderful vision to explore with a daring protagonist. Binti is a classical hero story that takes technology, an African perspective, and weaves it into a sci-fi/fantasy. Issues of sacrifice, race, culture, and how differences can coexist within a framework of respect dominate this first of the series.

Definitely continuing on even though young adult is usually not my favorite. The rating is really 3.5 stars. If I judge this as an adult story it's 3 stars and closer to 4 stars as a YA/NA novella.

And I LOVE this cover. Gorgeous. Perfect for the story, too.

Defiance: The Extraordinary Life of Lady Anne Barnard by Stephen Taylor

3 Stars

An in-depth biography of Lady Anne Barnard nee Lady Anne Lindsay.

For a woman of her time period she was eccentric and skirted traditional values and social norms. This account portrays an intelligent woman of minimal means who rose to ply the drawing rooms of the intelligentsia. Her sharp mind and quick wit more than countered her reduced financial means, and if she had been a man the world would have been her oyster. As it is, being a woman was a significant liability. Nonetheless, she managed to avoid the pitfalls and carve out a life she would be happy to live, not one the world and her circle of peers would have necessarily picked.

It got a bit gossipy, but then Georgian England lived for it, and the French Revolution did nothing to downplay the dramatic events unfolding. Add in her experiences in South Africa and the battling sides in colonialism and you can see that there were many traps. 'May you live in interesting times', yeah, it's not hard to see how this is actually a curse. But the book gives a solid overview of political events driving peoples' lives, including Lady Anne.

While I can't call this upbeat, and I'd never wish to have been in her shoes, it is intriguing to see how she managed/mismanaged all the balls including matrimony. Overall, Taylor's approach is very sympathetic and lionizes Lady Anne Barnard.

Africa took Anne back to the innocence of childhood, wandering in an elemental place almost like the girl who once rode a pig at Balcarres.