The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo-Book

China is an ancient land with some ancient superstitions leading to tales to tell, either delicious or horrific depending on the storyteller. Although we are wary of foxes here in America, we haven’t built up a mythology about them. They are predators and it’s hard for domesticated humans to coexist near predators. Sometimes that is also hard in China since foxes are not considered good neighbors.

The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo has us mixed up in the business of three foxes. Unusually this is a love story and a mystery. Snow is a fox who can shape-shift and live in human form. In human form foxes are quite beautiful and have charisma that almost tips off the humans around them that something supernatural is afoot, Some humans become obsessed with their foxy friends.

Snow had a baby fox, a girl, that was dug from her snug hole in the ground and then died. There is guilt since mother and father had both left the baby alone but who would have thought anyone would dig in that spot. Snow is grieving the loss of her lovely child, and she is out for revenge. A photographer from Mongolia is involved and she must find him and kill him for what he has done. Her sad passions are so deep that she is not rational. Fortunately for Snow, the man is difficult to find. We follow her (human name -Ah San) on her wild journey to find Bektu Nikan, the photographer. On the way, we run into two more foxes, two males, both known to Snow. One is Shiro, the white fox, the other is Kuro, the black fox.

Two concubines have been found dead with brilliant smiles on their faces, one propped at a restaurant’s back door, frozen. The owner of the restaurant, familiar with Bao’s (Bao is a human) reputation as a detective asks him to find the dead woman’s name so that she can be buried properly by her family. Bao takes the case.

Bao has carried an old love in his heart for years and perhaps a curse, or a cure gone bad, that has affected his luck in business and in life for decades. He had a childhood friend, Tagtaa, from Mongolia and they built a fox shrine together. He fell in love with her, but this family would not allow the relationship. When Snow takes a job with Tagtaa as a companion, we realize that Bao’s path will cross that of his old playmate and young love once again. Because of his childhood experiences with the fox shrine, he knows that foxes are involved in this somehow.

Snow reunites with Shiro and Kuro but she is angry with both of them. Three foxes, all in human form is a lot. Tagtaa’s grandson and his friends also get involved in this mess which somehow has the photographer at the center. Fables are not my normal reading fare, but this one was entertaining, full of sorrow and also hope. Snow brought sweetness and her loss of her child, her beauty and her anger to pull us into the story.

Snow speaks.

“I wept bitterly then. Because I was the one who told Kuro to get out. To never come back or speak to me again. I hope you die, I’d said, snarling and furious. Because you can never bring our child back.Sometimes our wishes come back in the darkest, most twisted ways, like a thorn that pierces and grows through your flesh. A tree that drinks blood and blocks out the sun. The sin was mine; I had watered it with hatred and tears of rage, and it had grown to cast a monstrous shadow.” (p. 346)

In the Epilogue, Kuro speaks.

“I was very sad without you,” he said simply.

“There’s not much one can say to declarations like that. It’s my fault for having married someone who makes me blush with his seriousness.”

I enjoyed the story immensely.

System Collapse by Martha Wells-Book

From a Google Image Search – Tor.com

Ever since I met Martha Wells’ Murderbot I have looked forward to new books in the series, although they are finished much too quickly. The latest book is called System Collapse. This installment in the life and times of Murderbot opens with an action scene. Some ag-bots have been contaminated with an alien virus and are attacking anyone or anything that gets too close. If you are thinking about starting the series with this book, don’t. Start at the beginning. In this installment, Wells doesn’t do much in the way of summarizing previous adventures. SecUnit is here with ART, a university-run ship that conducts research and supports humans and bots who are being exploited by corporations. Can a ship be a character? Of course, just think of the Enterprise.

Fighting against alien contamination to protect a human community is difficult enough but our SecUnit is dealing with a personal issue (redacted) and a ship from Barish Estranza, a corporation that tricks populations in planetary settlements that are in disarray into signing contracts to work in corporate mines as corporation serfs or slaves. It turns out that some of the colonists on this planet split off to establish a separate community, but all communications have been abandoned between the original group and the splinter group. SecUnit finds those who left living in a pre-corporate space, but so does Barish Estranza.

SecUnit usually soothes itself when overloads occur or it needs to rest up by watching episodes of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, which it wishes it could access much more than the constant need to pay attention to real-world events allows, but Sanctuary also taught SecUnit lots of useful strategies and has educated SecUnit (an organic and inorganic construct) in human behaviors. In fact, SecUnit introduced ART to the videos and he also uses it to help other SecUnits after they disconnect their governor modules.

What has SecUnit redacted? Is SecUnit becoming more and more human? Will SecUnit be given a human name? That is all up to Martha Wells. I am just a human organic form who enjoys following SecUnit all along the corporate rim and beyond. It’s a literary amuse bouche in space.

First Lie Wins by Ashley Elston-Book

From a Google Image Search – Shreveport’s Secrets

First Lie Wins by Ashley Elston was chosen by Reese Witherspoon for her book club. Since it seemed that it might involve some creative plotting and offer entertainment, two things on my reading radar, I added it to my iPad Kindle app. It’s not great literary fiction, but it succeeded in satisfying my desire for a dessert course.

There is no sense in naming our main character since she has many names. When she finds herself at a young age having to support her mother who is dying and herself, when she has to pay all the household and medical expenses, she becomes a jewel thief. She finds a job that allows her to meet women who come shopping wearing their valuable jewelry. She learns to separate the gems from their settings as the settings make the jewels too recognizable. She is caught, but not by the police. A very scary man she never meets in person exploits her fear of exposure and pays her very well to use her skills for his purposes.

What happens when she falls in love with her assigned target forces her to face the unsavory side of her current situation and the fears that keep her tied to this blackmailer posing as a benefactor. Can she beat him at his own game? Can she learn his identity? Although her attraction to the man she is being paid to target motivates her, the last straw is when her dream of one day returning to her real identity is destroyed and all seems hopeless. She makes use of all she has learned to turn the tables. The first lie wins! The story is both creative and entertaining. The reader wins!

Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarrow – Book

Sometimes taking a break from reading about weighty subjects is good for the brain. We might return to a genre that has given us pleasure in the past, in a novel that flies by, the passing of time forgotten. Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros promised to be just such a novel. It has been given a new genre classification, romantic fantasy. There are dragons, family intrigue, magic, power struggles, and love happening at a military college training kids to become soldiers to defend the kingdom. Some at the college are training to be infantry, some to be riders bonded to a dragon, some to be scribes to keep the books that record the history of Navarre, and some to be Healers.

Violet Sorrengail is the newest cadet to walk the Parapet to gain entry to this school that is headed by her estranged mother. Violet has a weak joint disease and was trained by her father to be a scribe, but she decides to become a rider, despite the challenges her fragile body presents. Violet surprises everyone, especially the wingleader, Xaden Riorson who would like to see her fail but is drawn to her by a powerful sexual attraction. Violet, although not training as a Scribe, realizes that something is wrong with the Basgiath College archives. Books are missing. Parts of the histories of Navarre have been lost or locked away. And the wards that guard Navarre’s borders are weakening or falling.

It takes a while to put together a group of true friends when you are in a new school. There is a lot of social power jockeying and close friendships emerge along with personal enemies. The power of friendship and love to align the forces of good against the forces of evil is part of any good fantasy world and the Empyrean is no exception. It is these friendships, sexual attractions, and love relationships that bond us to the characters in a fantasy, even the dragons, and it is the animosities, the evil plots that inspire us to read further to see what unfolds. We always hope that good will win, that our heroes will grow and add to their talents. Until George R. R. Martin this outcome was predictable. Not so much now.

This book is part of a projected series of fantasy books known as the Empyrean Series. Iron Flame is the second book in the series, but the last three books have not yet been written. If you like Nora Roberts and hot sex you may like Fourth Wing.

From a Far and Lovely Country by Alexander McCall Smith – Book

From a Google Image Search – Penguin Random House

With all the weight of world events and the serious issues on our minds it was my pleasure to spend some time in Gaborone, Botswana with Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi at the #1 Ladies Detective Agency. This is a long series of books about the simplest, the sweetest, and sometimes the bitterest things we encounter in our lives. These life lessons are learned under blue skies and in the shade of acacia trees with plenty of breaks for a cup of tea, preferably red bush tea. From a Far Away and Lovely Country was written by the Scottish author Alexander McCall Smith who lived in Botswana and never lost his love for this little nation. He depicts it as struggling to be modern without losing the values of the land and those who raised cattle on it.

Mma (Precious) Ramotswe set up her detective agency almost by accident. Then Mma Makutsi of the big eyeglasses and peculiar ways became the secretary (who scored 97% on her final exam at secretarial school). Mma Makutsi has promoted herself into a role as another detective in the agency and now Charlie, apprentice to J.B.L. Matekoni (mechanic and husband of Precious Ramotswe) is taking his first try at taking on an investigation on his own.

Two cases need solutions when we visit Gaborone this time. Julia Cotterell has arrived from America, newly widowed, looking for distant relatives in Mochudi where Mma Ramotswe grew up. Then when Mma Ramotswe visits her friend Mma Potokwane who runs the orphanage a new house mother, Mma Ikobeng, talks about a new club in Gaborone which is advertising that it is a place for single’s to meet, but it appears that the men who pay to belong to the club are married and just pretending to be single.

This is all happening on Mma Ramotswe’s birthday, which her beloved husband seems to have forgotten. And then there is the incident of the red dress. Most of the cases that Precious takes on are family problems, or minor crimes or misbehaviors. She is very wise and never lets praise go to her head. She solves cases in human ways, without a need for weapons or action scenes.

Mma Ramotswe is with Julia looking down on the village where she spent her childhood. “They stood in silence, each lost in the sort of thoughts that come to us when we look upon a place we love or are ready to love. Then the sound of cattle bells drifted from below, and Julia turned and looked at Mma Ramotswe and said in wonderment, “There are bells Mma.” And Mma Ramotswe smiled and pointed towards the place where, far beneath them, cattle moved between the acacia trees. It was a sound that all those raised in Botswana had imprinted upon their hearts: the anthem of the land, the notes of the country. And it reminded her of her father and all that he meant to her.” (pg. 140)

These little books contain plenty of homespun philosophy that is necessary in such a complex world as ours. “Experience had taught her that there were many people who seemed to be searching for something that they could never find–who might not even know what they were looking for. That, she thought, was because so many of us felt that there must be an answer to the questions we all asked at one point or another–what was the purpose of our lives and why was there so much suffering?–and if we looked hard enough we would find the key to that search, although understandable, was one that was more or less destined to fail, and inevitably we were disappointed. The way to deal with the sorrow of the world, Mma Ramotswe thought, was not to think you would ever necessarily understand why the world was the way it was. Rather you should list the things you felt were good, and work towards bringing those into the lives of others. That would keep you busy enough, because there was always-always-room for more kindness and love (and tea) in our lives, none of which needed any explanation.” (pg. 140)

I keep reading this series of books because I know they will offer me a dose of kindness, refresh me, and send me back out into the real world where kindness is much harder to find. You will find that kindness is still around if you dish out a bit of kindness yourself. Alexander McCall Smith’s version of Botswana is a lovely place to find myself every time I visit.

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett – Book

From a Google Image Search – The Harvard Crimson

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett is a pandemic book of sorts. Lara and Joe Nelson own a farm, rows of cherry trees, some plum trees, some pear trees. The cherries are the money makers. Sweet cherries must be hand-picked. The tarter cherries for pies and cooking can be shaken from the trees onto tarps and they can be frozen.

The pandemic has made it difficult for their usual pickers to arrive. Lara and Joe’s three daughters, all grown but not yet married, come home to ride out the pandemic and to help pick the cherries. When Lara’s daughters find out that she dated Peter Duke, a famous and handsome movie star, Emily, Maisie, and Nell enliven a tedious repetitive task by prying the story of their mom and Peter Duke out of their reticent mother.

Once upon a time a local presentation of the play Our Town finds Lara and her friend registering local actors for the upcoming production in their New Hampshire town where Lara’s mother and father live. Our Town is a big deal in New Hampshire. If you have read the play, you know why. If you haven’t read it, you should. After a failure to find an “Emily” to play that important role, Lara ends up trying out. Turns out she is a natural. Her Emily is so well done that she is invited to go to Hollywood to test for a movie. Lara feels a connection to the Emily character but is she a great actress she wonders. After she wins the part in the movie playing another Emily-style character the film is shelved for several years. Lara is packed off to play Emily in Our Town again, this time in a professional summer theater in Tom Lake, Michigan.

Lara’s daughters, picking cherries and prodding their mother to get to the part where she meets Peter, find that they are finally there. But they want more, they want details. Because these daughters did not come home to tend to their mom on her deathbed (as in some novels and movies), this is a far lighter novel with only a few tragic elements. It’s basically a book that would make a great Nora Ephron movie. Do we have a new Nora Ephron? If Ephron was a product of her times, then we may never have another Nora Ephron, nor another Ann Patchett.

The challenges of being an independent farmer are braided through the other elements in the book and the specter of all those cherries which represent the farm’s income rotting on the trees with no one to pick them is a pressure as intense as our desire to hear about Lara and Duke and why Lara is a farmer’s wife rather than a movie star. Readers also get an interesting peek into what it’s like to work in a summer theater.

Tom Lake was a good read, but it’s also a trip to more carefree, innocent days even though it is during the COVID pandemic. Perhaps people envy America these days in the 21st century because some people still get to live such a life. How much longer? How many of us? Although it is a new novel it already feels nostalgic. The orderliness of a well-run farm, the lines of heavily laden cherry trees under blue, blue skies. You might enjoy spending some time in a place that seems so fragile so in danger of disappearing altogether. I borrowed this book from my local library.

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch – Book

From a Google Image Search – The Guardian

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch won the Booker Prize. That would be enough reason to read it, but the dystopian nature, reflecting America’s possible descent into authoritarianism, makes it essential reading. Eilish and Larry Stack are having a perfectly ordinary night with their children (except the oldest boy who like most teens does not always get home on time). Bailey and Molly are in front of the TV and Ben is breast-feeding, as the author muses on behalf of Eilish,

“The night has come and she has not heard the knocking, standing at the window looking out into the garden. How the dark gathers without sound the cherry trees. It gathers the last of the leaves and the leaves do not resist the dark but accept the dark in whisper. Tired now, the day almost behind her, all that still has to be done before bed and the children settled in the living room, this feeling of rest for a moment by the glass. Watching the darkening garden and the wish to be at one with the darkness, to step outside and lie down with the fallen leaves and let the night pass over.

But the knocking… ” (pg. 6) (Paul Lynch’s writing would drive Grammarly crazy which doesn’t make it wrong.)

This proves to be one of the last ordinary nights the Stack family ever has. Who is at the door? The police, but not the ordinary police, these are the police of the new order, the order that is making up rules against every aspect of the state in which the people have lived for decades, perhaps centuries.

What do these people want, these people who were once neighbors, fellow citizens but are now, somehow, the police who can come to anyone’s door and make them disappear? It seems that they want nothing except power over you and your family. As Eilish struggles on her own, once her husband is rounded up and his fate becomes a mystery, she at least still has a job. Soon her job too falls afoul of whatever it is the new government will tolerate and she loses her grasp on the equanimity that routine offers. Everyone tells her to leave but she can’t imagine leaving while her husband is still being held, while her oldest son is off fighting with the revolutionaries against the new government which sees all citizens as enemies. Why? There appears to be no why, but just a quest for absolute power. These new leaders seem to offer nothing to citizens. Eilish’s sister wants her to come to Canada, but she wants to wait it out, believing it to be a temporary upheaval.

This is a disturbing book that we still ought to read since our senses tell us that this is something that could happen in America right now. Who would know better than Ireland (where this is set) what can happen in a divided nation? What would you do if the stormtroopers, no matter how polite they seem and how officially they are dressed, were to start appearing at doors across America warning you about mysterious transgressions that you were accused of committing? What would you do if family members were taken into custody and never returned? Suppose no information about their whereabouts was forthcoming? Would you leave America? Where would you go? You would have to be quick about it before the rules got too stringent and security measures forced you to find illegal ways to travel. It’s chilling to read about it, but it would be far more chilling to live it. A very timely book and a warning to all of us.

Absolution by Alice McDermott – Book

From a Google Image Search – Audible.com

In Absolution by Alice McDermott, we travel back to the days when America was first getting involved in the war in Vietnam, perhaps hoping to solve the issues between north and south with diplomacy while using private corporations to get South Vietnam ready for war. The story is told through the vivid memories of a woman who was only just married to her husband Peter at 23-years-old when he is sent to Vietnam as a consulting engineer. Tricia goes with him. She describes her aspiration at that time was “to be a helpmeet for my husband.” Her father told her on her wedding day to “be the jewel in his crown.” She doesn’t exaggerate. This is the way daughters were raised at that time. Like Mrs. Bennett in Pride and Prejudice who had five daughters to find husbands for, my mother had six daughters to marry off. I was once presented to the pots and pans salesman as a potential bride. I confess that I disappointed my mom.

This is a story of another time, of the time many wish we could recapture, although not necessarily the part where we venture into Vietnam. Tricia describes her days as an endless round of cocktail parties bringing together men (and their families) from the military, the government, and corporations. Women, being helpmeets for their husbands, spent hours wearing gauzy cocktail dresses over iron-clad undergarments at garden parties in humid, hot discomfort, attempting to look cool and pretty. She begins her story by telling what a typical day was like. Wives would bathe in the morning, staying in their bath until noon. Then they would do their nails, send out little witty notes to other wives, burn joss sticks to perfume the heat. After that they would apply face powder, rouge, lipstick, pin dress shields in the chosen cocktail dress, don undergarments and stockings, add shoes, and spray some perfume. Tricia says that she would be “faint with heat in my column of clothes.”

Obviously, Absolution is not a book about the Vietnam War. It offers a peek into something we never thought to wonder about. What was daily life like for the wives of the men who were trying to make peace while preparing for war. America tends to turn the foreign countries where it spends time into spaces that resemble America as much as possible. Except for their servants and shopping in the marketplaces these wives saw little of what life was like for the Vietnamese. Tricia describes the Vietnamese women who passed them by as “girls we passed on the streets…were like pale leaves stirring in the humid stillness, sun-struck indications of some unseen breeze, cool, weightless, beautiful.” Alice McDermott is a good writer.

Charlene, who befriends Tricia, is a mother of three and “a seasoned corporate spouse.” She practices the small charities that she would have pursued if she was still in America, taking baskets of small gifts into hospitals for example. She comes up with the idea to dress Barbie dolls in Vietnamese attire and she sells them to help her buy the supplies for her baskets or she gives them as gifts sometimes. Tricia, although shy, is easily persuaded to help the beautiful and confident Charlene with this and other activities. Tricia is having a crisis of her own as she attempts to be the perfect helpmeet and partner by making a family, having a child. She has a series of miscarriages that make her feel guilty, damaged, and which undermine her own confidence.

It’s a little gem of a book that too many might dismiss as a “girl book.” The way the author immerses us in the mores of the 1950s and 60s, the evocation of a world and a time most of us have never experienced makes this novel well worth a read. Some key scenes have been left out of this review to make them fresh when you encounter them for the first time. While it would have perhaps had more universal appeal if we also followed the husbands as they lived out their days, there is no way for most of these women from these times to have any intimate knowledge about that.

“But how I wished that there existed someone to whom I could say I was sorry.” says Tricia in the Epilogue, quoting Graham Greene from The Quiet American.

The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport by Samit Basu – Book

From a Google Image Search – Tor.com

While The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport by Samit Basu is not great literature, this novel epitomizes the discussions of AI that dominated 2023. It also does that thing that sci-fi does so well. It offers commentary on modern and future society and politics.

Shantiport is a once-prominent city with a port that was busy and thriving. It is now a backwater decaying city that has internal problems which keep it in existential danger of dying out completely.

We wonder how we will ever become home to multicultural societies which should be easy for us because we are all humans. Shantiport wants to become a multicultural oasis which seamlessly protects the rights of both humans and bots. The bots seem to exhibit the same propensities as humans for violence, elitism, and tribalism. In this case the Tiger clan is warring against the Monkey clan.

The bot characters are well done and are as appealing, at least those who are main characters, as the human main characters. In fact, we find that those main characters, both bot and human, are a family unit as in brothers/sisters/ancestors. When the “jinn” is recovered from where it was hidden (Aladdin of legend) the one who holds the jinn gets three wishes. If your goal is to restore Shantiport to its former glory and make it a truly multicultural city what would your three wishes be? Be careful, it’s a very tricky jinn.

The same difficulties apply if you are trying to profit personally and don’t really care about the fate of Shantiport. This may not be literary fiction, but it is fun, and inspires thoughts about our own present and future dilemmas.

The Secret Hours by Mick Herron-Book

From a Google Image Search – Audible

The Secret Hours by Mick Herron is a sort of spy story, but it’s not James Bond. No loveable Moneypenny or Q here. No clever devices that look ordinary but have magical abilities to save an agent in dire straits. In fact, half of the characters are not even spies, but their story begins when the Berlin Wall falls and an actual spy comes out of the East and meets a grieving wealthy man who lost his sister and who knows what happened to her and who did it. Who is Max and why is he being chased down the Green Lanes as the book begins by people who seem intent on killing him?

You will have to spend some time in the Regent Park Office in London where a group has been set up to find what kinds of unethical business the hired hands in the spy business have been up to. The committee’s remit is called Monochrome, which perfectly describes how Griselda Fleet and Malcolm feel about being assigned to this investigation. Both thought they were headed up the ladder to plum assignments and both are unhappy and worried to have been shunted sideways. They did not even have access to documents from Regent’s Park where actual scandals might have been expected to lurk. If you happened to read any bits from David Foster Wallace’s unfinished book, The Pale King, which takes place in the IRS, then you feel right at home in the home office.

Don’t get too bored because you are going to have all the action you can handle in Berlin (the spook’s zoo). They are a depraved bunch who have seen it all and are jaded and deep in the aftereffects of WWII. Myles has been embedded in East Berlin and has experienced the peak moments of postwar Soviet spying, the dossiers, the imagined crimes, the real crimes, the Stassi, the paranoia, the tattling, and the terrible repercussions of the tattling. Into this foreign office enters Allison, a young intelligent innocent who had expected to work at a desk and now finds herself pretending to complete assigned paperwork. At the same time, she does the real work assigned her which is to spy out what is going on in Berlin. However, the crux of this matter is personal, not professional. So, not about true spying at all, although it feels exactly the same. It’s about people, people who will surprise you. I can’t tell you; it’s a spy story, sort of.

Clearly wars do not end when treaties are signed, when spoils are divided, when horrendous war crimes are turned up, when revenge is planned and eventually taken. Names change, years pass, people age and disguise themselves and become unrecognizable. Justice gets done but not in a court. First Desk proves to be not all talk and no action. The author knows how to set a scene. Don’t you just love a good spy story. This one is very good while you are reading and great after contemplation. Don’t just move on to your next book until you have sat with this one for a bit.