6. A Dark-Adapted Eye–Barbara Vine

Genre: Historical Mystery

Rating: Very Good

I had no idea when I began reading this that this book would dredge up so many childhood memories. I’m sure the pain of revisiting some of that colors my thoughts regarding it, but I will say that the book was riveting, emotional, and very much a story that could only happen during the timeframe it is set. Times have changed, attitudes are different, circumstances would be very different at other times.

It is the story of a murder, dredged up from the narrator’s past, when a writer contacts the family and wants to write a book about the murder and the circumstances of the murderer’s life.

The narrator, Faith, revisits what she knows, what she didn’t learn until too late, what she thinks is true, and how it is that the truth is never clear or logical.

Very much a psychological tale, examining all the characters in an extended family and how secrets and lies lead up to misery and hatred.

My personal experience is that lies and family secrets most certainly do that.

5. Thieftaker – D.B. Jackson

Genre: Alternate History

Rating: Interesting!

We’re in 1765 Boston, where Sam Adams and his buddies are beginning to stir up Boston against the Crown and its taxes. During a night where the rabble attack and break into three houses of prominent Bostonians, a girl is found dead, with no apparent wound on her.

It turns out the girl is from another prominent Boston family and so Ethan Kaille, a thieftaker, a conjuror, and a convicted felon, is called in to search for a valuable brooch she was wearing, and if he can, to find out who killed her.

I thought the setting was drawn very well, the miseries of the poor in Boston and the relatively easy life of the wealthy made all too clear. The magical system was intriguing.  Ethan, who’d nearly been hung as a witch, but had been instead sent to Barbados to work in the sugar cane fields, is hiding in plain sight. People ‘know’ he’s a conjuror/witch, but mostly because he’s been no threat, they leave him alone. But when he’s employed by a wealthy merchant to find out about the merchant’s daughter, that draws way too much attention to Ethan and he finds himself up against not only the only other thieftaker in Boston, but also up against a conjuror far stronger than he.

I’ll definitely be continuing this series.

4. The Remains of the Day] – Kazuo Ishiguro

Genre: historical fiction

Rating: Good

The story of one man’s life as a butler during the run-up to World War II.

I’m unsure what to say about this book. Beautifully written, but depressing and rather hopeless. Talk about living your life through others and letting them be your conscience and your guide.  But he certainly maintains his dignity throughout.

3. To Say Nothing of the Dog – Connie Willis

Genre: Speculative Fiction/Time Travel

Rating: Very very good!

The second book of the Oxford Time Travel Series.  The first book, The Doomsday Book, dealt with the Black Death. This one is a comedy of manners, and takes place during WWII, involving the search for some missing artifacts from Coventry Cathedral which was bombed during the war.

Tongue in cheek from the very beginning, poor Ned is sent through time to jumble sales all over England in search of ‘The Bishop’s Bird Stump’ an admitted atrocity of Victorian proportions but still wanted to go into a reconstruction of the cathedral.

But time goes awry nearly from the beginning when a young woman save a cat from drowning, and Ned adopts Cyril the bulldog. So suddenly the problem is finding what has messed up the future, to say nothing of retrieving the cat who is accidentally transported into the future.

Highly recommended!

1. Black Ships–Jo Graham

Genre: Historical Fiction/Magical Realism

Rating: Very Very Good

A retelling of the Aeneid, through the eyes of a young girl enslaved when Troy falls. She is hurt, and no longer able to work, is then given to the temple of the Lady of the Dead as an acolyte, who when grown, becomes the chosen of the Lady and the Sybil to Aeneas.

Written beautifully, plainly and clearly told with no fake embellishments,  moving and engrossing.

What a great book to start the year with.