Tag: book reviews

Becoming, and then Being, Elisabeth Elliot: a review

On By Jennifer Mugrage3 Comments

Quick! Who do we know who’s a linguist, a former missionary, a gifted writer, and wants to capture in novel form the human condition and God’s grace to us in it?

Who is awkward, reserved, and can come off as rude and abrupt, but actually has passionate emotions, a deep love for others, and a rich inner life?

Who loves nature? Crosses cultures happily, but doesn’t fit in so well in the American evangelical context? Who has a secret desire to be admired, but also suffers from poor judgement about the opposite sex?

Why, Elisabeth Elliot, of course!

Me and Elisabeth Elliot

When I was college and just discovering the things I ranted about last Friday, like the fact that we as a culture could use some guidelines about the how the sexes ought to relate to each other, I came across Elisabeth Elliot’s book Passion and Purity. I devoured it.

This book was exactly suited for me at the time. I was just starting to grow in Christ. I really wanted to do God’s will. I also, unbeknownst to me, had a lot in the common with the author of Passion and Purity: socially awkward, ascetic tendencies, perfectionistic, a longing for old-fashioned values. This book is basically about the lessons Betty, as she was called at that time, learned during her five years (!) of waiting for Jim Elliot to make up his mind that God had given him the go-ahead to marry her. Their courtship story strikes many Christian young people as really spiritual upon first hearing, and then on a second look, it starts to look as if he didn’t treat her very well possibly. But I bought into it fully.

Anyway. Full of missionary zeal to win other young people over to the idea of an extremely awkward, chaste, long courtship, I gave this book to a friend. She read it, and her reaction was, “There are the Elisabeth Elliots of this world, but I am not one of them.”

That annoyed me at the time (someone had rejected my idealistic ideal!), but from my perspective now, that friend of mine didn’t know how right she was. In fact, not even Elisabeth Elliot herself was one of the Elisabeth Elliots of the world, at least not in the sense of having perfect wisdom and self-control. At the time she was writing this (early 1980s), Elisabeth was enduring an extremely controlling marriage with a man she married because she didn’t want to be lonely. She stayed with him for the rest of her life, despite an intervention by her family. It’s chilling to realize that the woman who wrote Passion and Purity could make such a foolish decision.

Before Passion and Purity, I remember as kid seeing black-and-white photos of Elisabeth toting her small daughter Valerie into the jungle to serve the Waorani people (then called the Auca), a few years after her husband Jim was killed by them. These were the photos taken by Hungarian photographer Cornell Capa. They, and the books Elisabeth wrote about the Waorani, had made her and her martyred husband Jim famous throughout the evangelical world.

Both greater and lesser than I thought

When you think you know a story, you expect it to be boring. I put off for some time reading this duology by Ellen Vaughn, until it finally floated to the top of my reading list. Once I opened the books, I found that I couldn’t put them down. Vaughn is an excellent researcher and a vivid and sympathetic writer, and though I had read a number of books by and about the Elliots, I certainly didn’t know as much of their story as I thought.

Vaughn, aware that she is telling a story the outlines of which are familiar to readers, moves skillfully back and forth through time, as in a novel (though in rough outline, the first book deals with Betty’s early life and the second book with her post-Ecuador years). Vaughn doesn’t try to tell every story–there are too many, many of which have been told elsewhere, and others of which are apparently too private and will stay hidden forever in Elisabeth’s prolific journals. In fact, as I read these books, I felt I was getting to know two fellow woman writers: Elliot and Vaughn.

When you are a former missionary, it’s difficult to read other missionaries’ stories without comparing them to your own. Usually, this means you are reading about people who were far ahead of you in dedication, selflessness, toughness, and in what they suffered. This is certainly true of the Elliots. At the same time, so much of their personalities and stories seemed shockingly familiar. For example, young Jim Elliot was, besides being a great guy, an insufferable holier-than-thou know-it-all, of the “I’m going to go read my Bible” type. Betty, as Elisabeth was then called, was quiet and reserved and often didn’t realize that she was coming off as standoffish. Jim’s family verbally eviscerated her after her first visit to their home in Portland, and foolish young Jim passed all these criticisms on to Betty in a letter. She was devasted, but thought and prayed over the things they had said, and then concluded that none of them were things she could actually change. Later, Jim couldn’t believe he had shared his family’s words with Betty. As Bugs Bunny would say, “What a maroon. What an imBAYsill.”

They were just people, you see. Not angels. Which means that “just people” can always serve God.

Jim Elliot, you beautiful dunce.

The things they suffered also rang poignantly familiar. They suffered setbacks that lost them a year of their work–for her, language work; for him, building a mission station. Neat and tidy Elisabeth at some points had to live in squalor, and felt guilty for the fact that it bothered her. Fellow missionaries (not all) and Waorani Christians alike (not all) proved manipulative and controlling. In fact, it was relationship difficulties that caused Elisabeth eventually to leave the Waorani, after spending only a few years with them. This was not Elisbeth’s fault: person after person found it impossible to work with Rachel Saint, her fellow translator. But she took on as much of the responsibility for it as she possibly could, agonizing before God in her journals, because that was the kind of person she was.

Elisabeth the Novelist

Now we are getting into events of the second book, Being Elisabeth Elliot. Elisabeth knew that she had a gift of writing. She had made so much money from her books Through Gates of Splendor and The Shadow of the Almighty that she was able to build a house for herself and her daughter near the White Mountains of New Hampshire (talk about living the dream!) and settled down to become a writer. She really wanted to write great literature, the kind that would elevate people’s hearts and give them fresh eyes to see the great work of God all around them in the world.

If I were writing a novel about Elisabeth Elliot, I would end it there, and let her have a period of rest, in the beautiful mountains, with her daughter, writing her books, for the rest of her days. I wish that was how it had gone. I kept hoping, as I read this duology, for there to come a point when Vaughn could write, “And then, she rested.” Alas, that moment never came.

Elliot was indeed a really good writer. Sometime in the twenty-teens, when I was a young mom who had come back from the mission field hanging my head over my many failures, and had unpacked my books and settled into a rented house to minister to my small children, I found on an upstairs shelf a slim volume that looked as if it had been published in the 1960s or 70s, called No Graven Image. This was the novel that Elliot wrote when she first settled down in New Hampshire. She wished, through fiction, to give her readers a more powerful, truer picture of missionary life than her biographies had done.

This is not the cover my copy of the book had, though it also had an image of a condor.

No Graven Image was not well received when it came out. It was the old problem of marketing. To what audience do you market a genre-bending book? The people who liked to read tragic, worldly novels were not interested in a so-called “novel” about a young missionary woman, probably expecting that it would be preachy. The Christians who liked to read missionary stories were shocked and dismayed by a novel in which the protagonist flounders around, makes mistakes, and ultimately, accidently kills her language informant when he has a bad reaction to a shot of penicillin. And then decides that her desire to have a successful language project had been a form of idolatry.

Some readers appreciated the novel (particularly overseas missionaries), but most found it shocking, even blasphemous. They wanted a triumphant novel, not the story of Job. They wondered whether Elisabeth had lost her faith.

When I picked it up, in the twenty-teens, it made me feel extremely understood.

One thing that killed me as I read of Elisabeth’s later years is that this was the only novel she wrote. She very much wanted to write others, and she got as far as making notes for another novel. But life (read: men) intervened, and she was in demand for speaking and for writing nonfiction books such as Passion and Purity. She wasn’t able ever again to get the extended periods of time to concentrate that it would have taken to gestate a novel. She convinced herself that she just didn’t have what it took to write actual good fiction (and perhaps, that it was selfish to try). I am so sad to watch this dream die. I believe that she would have been a good novelist. I don’t know whether her publisher would have kept publishing her books if she had turned to fiction, or whether she would have had trouble finding another publisher. Spiritual non-fiction was what she had already become known for. She probably would have made less money, perhaps found it difficult to support herself. But still … you know … it’s hard to watch. So many things about the second volume of her biography are hard to watch. At the same time, because of Vaugh’s amazing research and writing, it’s hard not to sit back and just stare at this major accomplishment.

A Return to Modesty at 26

On By Jennifer MugrageLeave a comment

So, I’m reading A Return to Modesty, which I stumbled upon in my dad’s extensive personal library.

This book came out in 1999. I remember hearing about it at the time. I was a Christian girl in my early 20s, just a year away from getting married though I didn’t yet know it. Wendy Shalit, the author of Return, was just a year older than me. I remember being jealous of her (a girl my age who had already published a book!). I also remember that it was rather snippily received. One female reviewer mentioned that it was difficult to take “being lectured to about modesty by a 24-year-old.”

That, of course, is not a coincidence. As Shalit points out in the intro, modern sexual-liberation-niks don’t just disagree with modesty-niks; they actually hate them:

I was fascinated … with the way others would react to them. People around me were saying that these modestyniks were really abuseniks: This one was “obviously very troubled,” and that one seemed to have a “creepy” relationship with her father. Or “Maybe she just had a Bad Experience.” Either way, whatever her problem is, “why doesn’t the poor girl just get some counseling already, and then she won’t take it all so seriously?”

I really became intrigued when I offhandedly mentioned my interest in the modestyniks to a middle-aged man at a cocktail party, and he screamed at me, turning almost blue: “They’re sick, I’m telling you! I’ve heard of them with their not-touching, and they’re sick, sick, sick!” Someone later informed me that this man had been divorced three times.

I began to perceive a direct relationship between how much one was floundering, sex-wise, and how irritated one was by the modestyniks.

ibid, pp. 5 – 6

By writing this book, of course, Shalit put herself among their number. She notes that feminists are often open to what she has to say about women needing privacy, dignity, and romantic dreams of a monogamous relationship … until they find out that she’s an “extreme right-winger,” that is, someone who thinks female modesty (and chastity and reticence and embarrassment and all the other things that come with it) is a good thing.

Shalit first learned of what she calls modestyniks by looking at engagement, wedding, and post-wedding pictures of an elderly couple’s granddaughter, who was following “tzniut, the Jewish laws of sexual modesty.”

In this [picture] the granddaughter was on the beach holding a little baby boy–only now her modestynik smile was twinkling under the brim of a black straw hat. “That’s for the head covering,” her grandma piped up proudly over my shoulder. “A married woman cannot leave her head uncovered.”

That’s how I learned that there are different stages in the life cycle of a modestynik. No Touching, Touching, then Hat.

ibid, p 4

All the reviewers who in 1999 were reacting to the thesis of Shalit’s book were so excited–or offended– by its serious content, that they failed to convey that Shalit is a terrific writer: spunky, funny, able to move from chuckles like this to very serious and heartbreaking content, and back, multiple times in the same chapter or even on the same page.

When I picked up this book from my dad’s library, in preparation for drafting my own book on the logistics of modesty (a project now shelved), I thought I might just thumb through it. I didn’t expect that it would lure me in, as books do, and prove to be a page-turner. But it has.

I won’t go over all the ways Shalit enumerates that the Sexual Revolution and second-wave feminism, by destroying the notion of female modesty, have opened Pandora’s Box for girls and boys both. I’ve ranted about it elsewhere, and so have many others. You could probably write such a rant yourself, and maybe you even have. I will say that it’s really poignant to read a book like this written in 1999.

The 90s are now officially A Long Time Ago. Cars from the 90s are now antiques (!). I am even starting to see memes that portray the 90s in a similar way that we once portrayed the 50s: a naive, wholesome time, when we didn’t have all the problems we have now. For example, one meme said something like, “The 90s were so problem-free that Kurt Cobain had to kill himself because he had nothing to be depressed about.”

As someone who came of age in the 90s, I cry foul. We were a good 30+ years after the Sexual Revolution and 20+ after Roe. We were deep into the divorce and moms-having-serial-boyfriends epidemic. We had anorexia and bulimia and cutting. Ninties kids did not have one foot in pre-1960s social norms; instead, we were completely unmoored from any kind of consistent or coherent framework for how to relate to the opposite sex, or even how to become a man or woman, except that we knew that both of those things were bad. Shalit’s book focuses on the destructive messages that girls and young women got:

Be independent. Don’t count on anyone. Have the low expectations you’re supposed to have. Be independent. Don’t ask any questions. Don’t demand more than what we say you can have. Don’t feel anything you’re not supposed to feel. Do as you’re told. Be independent! Don’t embarrass yourself by loving someone other than yourself. Remember, don’t trust anyone! Show him that you’re an independent person.

ibid, p. 94

… but of course, boys got a very similar litany about how they were not supposed to be polite or gentlemanly or, God forbid, protective of women, and in fact they were not supposed to take any initiative at anything.

They also were sadly unprepared for the fact that women have lots of emotions:

“My ex-girlfriends? Well, let’s see … she was a nut, and then she was a nut, and then her … let’s see … yes, she was a nut, and then … yeah, she was a nut, too, come to think of it! It’s strange that I’ve had such bad luck, to date so many nuts. Anyway, then there was what’s-her-name, who was evil. She left me. God, that really sucked! She was really evil! And then there was another nut …”

What makes a man perceive a woman as a “a nut”? And can all women be nuts? A silly question. Clearly all women can’t be nuts. What does it mean, then, when a society judges that a considerable number of its women are, in fact, nuts? Could it tell us something about how we view womanhood?

ibid, p. 163

If I had read this book in the 90s, I probably would have agreed with it, in a slightly superior, glad-you-finally-came-to-the-modesty-party kind of way, like the smug 20-something Christian know-it-all that I was at the time. I also would have missed a lot of the content that is now resonating with me. Because I’ve spent the 26 years since this book was published wrestling with these very issues and going on these very rants.

I might have been raised in a Christian home. I might have come up in a social environment that was relatively traditional compared to the secular one in which Shalit grew up. I even, somehow, escaped the super-explicit sex-ed elementary school classes in the public schools that Shalit was spared only because her mom found out what was happening, threw a fit, and got Shalit a pass to sit out that class in the library. (I’m not sure how I escaped the explicit sex-ed, to be honest. I went to public schools. Possibly it’s because our family moved a couple of times and school districts were on different schedules.)

But even with being–you would expect–sheltered, I still absorbed all the same messages she did, directly from the teat of society, as it were. As a Christian, I did get the message that you were supposed to be chaste until marriage (opposite of the message she got). But on the other hand I received, loud and clear, the picture of the ideal woman as tough, smart, independent, unconcerned about her clothing or appearance, ready to go join the Navy S.E.A.L.s … basically, a woman with a man’s mind and as close as possible to a man’s body. Girls who had their wedding all planned out at the age of 9 and had already picked out names for their kids, and who wore pink and giggled and blushed and so forth, were “stupid.” I’m a 90s kid, after all.

Anyway … the sad thing about reading this book is, almost thirty years later, nothing has changed. Shalit predicted a return to modesty among my generation. We were figuring out, she said, that modesty is natural to us, it protects us, it’s ultimately more romantic and even sensual. That was why, she said, we liked Jane Austen so much. And while I plead guilty on all charges, it turns out that longing for a return to female modesty has not been enough. You cannot just bring back an entire social system that is lying in smithereens at your feet. There weren’t any rules or norms or consensus about how a girl–or boy–should dress or talk or behave, and we didn’t know what to do. None of us knew what to do. And when I look at my kids’ generation, they still don’t.

The Murderer’s Mother

On By Jennifer MugrageLeave a comment

She doesn’t know her son is suspected of murder, at this point. She just thinks he has been passing bad cheques again.

“That gun cost over a hundred dollars. Dick bought it on credit, and now the store won’t have it back, even though it’s not hardly a month old and only been used the one time–the start of November, when him and David when to Grinnell on a pheasant shoot. He used our names to buy it–his daddy let him–so here we are, liable for the payments, and when you think of Walter, sick as he is, and all the things we need, all we do without …” She held her breath, as though trying to halt an attack of hiccups. “Are you sure you won’t have a cup of coffee, Mr. Nye? It’s no trouble.”

Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, p. 171

Just look at that masterful dialog, how it breaks your heart!

In Cold Blood made my Blood Run Cold

On By Jennifer MugrageLeave a comment

Well, I will be thinking about this one for a long time.

On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues. As Truman Capote reconstructs the murder and the investigation that led to the capture, trial, and execution of the killers, he generates both mesmerizing suspense and astonishing empathy.

from the back of the book

The first thing to know about In Cold Blood that it’s incredibly well-written. Each paragraph is a work of art. Truly. It’s not ornate, which is why I don’t say “each sentence,” but it’s simply and eloquently told.

The book reads like a novel. It goes in chronological order – roughly – but it also slips through time seamlessly, like a good novel should, filling in glimpses of each character’s backstory just when it is needed, and in just the right dosage, no more. The details of the crime itself aren’t revealed until the last quarter of the book, though before Part II of the narrative, the crime has already taken place.

The other thing about this book is that it is really, really tragic. And not just because a family of four were shot in their beds. Just about every conceivable tragedy happens to someone, somewhere in this book. The only ameliorating thing I can say about it is that no indecent assault happens, as it were, “on camera.” We are given to understand that people have experienced it, but we have to read between the lines. The author uses the smallest effective dose.

The thing I really can’t forgive, though, is the way that Capote made me care about the murderer … one of them, that is. Dick Hickock is what today we would call a sociopath (the psychiatrist’s diagnosis is “severe character disorder”). I don’t give two figs for him, except that I wish he wasn’t crashing around the world, ruining everybody’s lives. The other one, though, is more complicated.

Perry Smith (“very nearly a paranoid schizophrenic” according to the doctor) is basically a lost man-child. He is “sensitive,” prescient, plays the guitar, and cherishes a dream, left over from boyhood, of finding sunken treasure. He “has a brilliant mind” (his words) and resents that he never got more than a third-grade education. (He got his high school equivalence during one of his stints in jail.) Perry travels with a cardboard suitcase full of books, journals, maps, and adventure magazines.

… his personal dictionary, a non-alphabetically listed miscellany of words he believed “beautiful” or “useful,” or at least “worth memorizing.” (Sample page: “Thanatoid = deathlike; Omnilingual = versed in languages; Amerce = punishment, amount fixed by court; Nescient = ignorance; Facinorous = atrociously wicked; Hagiophobia = a morbid fear of holy places & things; Lapidicolous = living under stones, as certain blind beetles; Dyspathy = lack of sympathy, fellow feeling; Psiloper = a fellow who fain would pass as a philosopher; Omophagia = eating raw flesh, the rite of some savage tribes; Depredate = to pillage, rob, and prey upon; Aphrodisiac = a drug or the like which excites sexual desire; Megalodactylous = having abnormally large fingers; Myrtophobia = fear of night and darkness.”)

page 146

This is a remarkable list, especially if it was truly taken from Perry Smith’s papers. It is remarkable for the way that every single entry seems to have some special relevance to Perry. Taken together, they almost constitute his biography as it is starting to emerge from the book at this point.

So, what makes him dangerous? Perry has dissociative tendencies, and a substratum of rage that he’s not even aware of. He thinks of himself as a genius with spiritual depths whom nobody appreciates. His is the rage that comes from being inadequately parented. Perry came from an unstable home and spent time in orphanages, where (to take just a sample incident) the nuns would beat and humiliate him for wetting the bed. He’s never had a good mother or father, and has roamed the world trying to find a home. All this deprivation has made him weak, and so he is dangerous in the way that weak, conceited men are dangerous. He is too weak to control his own actions when it matters.

Dad snatched a biscuit out of my hand, and said I ate too much, what a greedy, selfish bastard I was, and why didn’t I get out, he didn’t want me there no more. He carried on like that till I couldn’t stand it. My hands got hold of his throat. My hands–but I couldn’t control them. They wanted to choke him to death.

page 136

Perry also suffers chronic pain. A motorcycle accident left his legs never the same again, and the pain in his legs (and head) tends to flare up when he gets emotionally disturbed, making it even harder for him to concentrate.

I started feeling the tragedy within a page of meeting Perry. The first thing the book tells us is that it’s his dream to learn to skin dive and find buried treasure, and I had a feeling that dream was never going to come to pass. Damn you, Truman Capote!

I may do a whole separate post about Perry as a character, but there’s one more thing I will say about this book. Both Perry and Dick are types of people that you meet very often today. Perry’s history, in particular, is mirrored by many, many others. In fact, his wild, nearly fatherless youth of knocking about the American West reminds me very much of the family history of some of my own cowboy relatives.

Both murderers are treated by the psychiatrist who is called to write reports about them as if they are uniquely mentally ill individuals. Perhaps at the time they were (or perhaps the fact that they had already committed murder made them seem more egregious), but as I look at our society nowadays, their mental landscapes seem more like the rule than the exception. Do with that what you will.

Read this book if you don’t cry easily and want to enjoy 343 pages of the most amazing writing. But just be aware of what you are getting into.

The Book Titles Tag, Wimpy Version

On By Jennifer Mugrage5 Comments

I got this tag from Bookstooge, who found these lists at Emma’s site. The idea is to answer each question with the title of a book you read from the previous year. Emma and Bookstooge both filled in three sets of blanks using titles of books they read in 2024 alone. I, on the other hand, am filling in one of the three sets of questions, using books I read in roughly the last year. When I say roughly: If I am currently reading the book (now, in 2025 – In Cold Blood), I get to use it. If I read portions of it last year (The Seven Laws of Teaching), I get to use it. And so forth. Enjoy!

  • When I was younger I was Ellen Tebbits
  • People might be surprised to discover that I Hope This Finds You Well
  • I will never be The Sentinel
  • At the end of a long day I need The Hiding Place, Young Reader’s Edition
  • Right now I’m feeling (like) A Woman Underground
  • Someday I want to (fulfill) The Seven Laws of Teaching
  • At a party you’d find me In Cold Blood
  • I’ve never (seen) The Whisper on the Night Wind
  • I really don’t enjoy Race Marxism
  • In my next life I want Loves Saves the Day

Review of the The Innocent

On By Jennifer Mugrage5 Comments

The Innocent, by David Baldacci, Grand Central Publishing, 2012

What can get me to read outside my accustomed genre?

That’s right, free books can!

My husband, a truck driver, knows another truck driver who likes to read. This man has somehow found out that I am also a reader, so when he finishes a book, he sometimes passes it on to me through my husband. I have never met the man, but we now share a number of harrowing mental experiences. Such is the secret society of readers.

The Innocent is a spy thriller. The first several chapters follow the lonely life of crack government assassin Will Robie as he carries out two different hits. (Apparently, this is going to be “the first Will Robie novel.”) We see that Robie is tough, cool under pressure, and professional at killing people. He’s covered in scars, which are covered in tattoos. Due to the nature of his job, he leads a lonely life. He goes to many exotic locales but never has relationships with any of the people there. He gets to eat good food and drink alcohol sometimes, but he has to keep insane hours with very little sleep sometimes. His home base is in Washington, D.C.

Robie was an inch over six feet and a rock-solid one hundred and eighty pounds. He possessed a compact musculature that relied more on quickness and endurance than sheer strength. His nose had been broken once, due to a mistake he had made. He had never had it reset because he’d never wanted to forget the mistake. One of his back teeth was false. That had come with the broken nose. His hair was naturally dark and he had a lot of it, but Robie preferred to keep it about a half inch longer than Marine buzz cut. His facial features were sharply defined, but he made them mostly forgettable by almost never making eye contact with anyone.

the first page

I love that that’s on the first page. That’s how you introduce a character, boys and girls! Now I have a clear mental picture of Robie (like a shorter Jim Caviezel), and the author won’t need to say much about his appearance for the rest of the book. Also, the description is given in a way that’s woven in with a sketch of his history.

It’s a good thing Robie has a cute last name that sounds like a first name. It’s the only thing softens him for some time.

For the first eight chapters (per the thriller genre, they are very short chapters), we see Robie go about his business. He carries out two hits. He withdraws from each successfully. He goes back to D.C. He starts to make tentative friends with a young lady who lives in his apartment complex, though he wonders whether this is a good idea. He gets ready to carry out his next hit, which is local.

Then, finally, in Chapter 9, we meet The Innocent.

She’s a fourteen-year-old girl named Julie Getty. Julie is smart and scrappy. Her parents love her, but they are druggies, so she’s been in and out of foster homes. Nonetheless, she’s in AP Calculus. In Chapter 9, Julie sneaks out of a subpar foster home to go meet up with her mom, who has sent her a note saying they are moving. When she gets to her house, though, she witnesses her parents get shot by unknown men. Not having a phone, Julie flees. Her story and Robie’s will soon intersect.

Julie came along at just the right moment. I didn’t want to read a whole novel that was basically Jason Bourne, consisting only of action + Hero Is No Longer A Normal Person Because of His Past. Once Robie starts to feel responsible for Julie, he now has to behave like a normal person in ways that he didn’t before. He also has to put up with a canny teenager who, naturally, wants to be involved in finding out why her parents were killed. And he has to do this while keeping her safe.

I’ll stop there because of spoilers, but this book was an outstanding example of its genre. It’s mostly action, but the plot is also a twisty puzzle. I don’t think the reader is meant to be able to figure out the puzzle in time to Save the World, but Robie is meant to be able to. Even the assassinations in the early chapters become relevant later. All the subplots get tied in together. There is a satisfying debrief at the end, where it’s all explained from a bird’s-eye view in case the reader missed any pieces. There is some emotional turmoil (Robie might not be normal, but he’s still human, you see). And there are hints that Robie has a heartbreaking back story, no doubt to be alluded to in later novels. Four stars.

I Hope This Post Finds You Well

On By Jennifer Mugrage2 Comments

Well, we have made it through February, when I did a post about something I love every single week. Phew, I’m certainly glad that is over with! What a relief to get into March, and start writing about stuff I hate again.

Just kidding. I didn’t hate this book; in fact, I mostly really enjoyed it. It just wasn’t a perfect bull’s-eye like all the stuff I posted about last month.

This 2024 book is narrated by Jolene, a Canadian woman whose mother is Iranian-Canadian and who works in a regular, that is to say fairly miserable, office. She has social anxiety, a moderate drinking problem, a big cohort of Persian Aunties (her mom’s friends) who really really hope she will get married, and a dark trauma from high school. Oh, and she has a habit of adding passive-aggressive postscripts to her e-mails to her colleagues, hidden in white text.

One day she forgets to turn the text white, and that kicks off her madcap adventures.

If this setup sounds like it’ll be boring and full of self-pity, all I can say is it’s anything but. Jolene, despite her hermitlike ways, is a keen observer of human nature and is mistress of the witty, cunning turn of phrase, which is exactly what makes her e-mail postscripts so devastating, and this narrative so fun to follow.

This little human [baby] doesn’t even realize the greatness of this: the only time in your life when people will simply ignore your public outbursts. The rest of us must cry without actually crying. This child, I learn as Celeste continues to soothe it, is named Thomas. I watch his little eyes dart around the room, taking it all in. Maybe Thomas is just now realizing that eventually he will grow up to spend all his daylight hours under fluorescent lights and water-stained ceiling tiles.

I don’t mean to chuckle at this depressing thought, and I stifle it as soon as I can, but that doesn’t stop a few eyes from drawing my way while I pretend I didn’t just cackle at a technically crying baby.

Then Thomas begins being passed around like a hot burrito. I curl my hands close against my chest and try to back away. When Caitlin takes said bundle, it stops crying in an instant, and her face softens in a way that makes me realize how hard it’s been lately.

“So, how is being a mom?”

Celeste starts describing things that sound dire as sh-t.

Gregory randomly pokes the ——- baby in the belly, and the cries start again in a screeching pitch.

Has anyone ever punched him in the face?

“How was the birth?” Stu for some cursed reason has to ask. I take a step back in order to avoid sticking around for Celeste’s answer.

Rhonda flashes me a disapproving stare. Why is it socially acceptable to discuss a human getting pushed or cut out of a body, yet somehow, it’s unprofessional for me to simply work rather than hold the tiny person I don’t even know?

page 102

That’s a pretty good sample of the writing style — and also a pretty good, lively description of what it’s like to be a woman with social anxiety or maybe autistic tendencies. Very very relatable.

I finished this book very quickly because of the good writing. However, it’s not uplifting or heartwarming. Jolene is engaging in some pretty significant deception throughout almost the entire book, which made it hard to enjoy. She’s under a lot of stress with several different crises bubbling (including one with the Persian Aunties), which keeps the pace fast, but makes the read also stressful. I knock off one star for this dynamic and for the author’s use of the phrase “white-passing.”

A Woman Underground by Andrew Klavan

On By Jennifer Mugrage4 Comments

February, month of Posts of Stuff I Love, continues with the category “novels by Andrew Klavan” for 500. What I didn’t anticipate was the way that putting title and author together would make the author sound a bit like a serial killer. Anyway … onward!

Here is Andrew Klavan, known by some as “hot Gandalf.” (No, I’m not kidding.) Ironically, given that he is a fiction writer, my first discovery of Andrew Klavan came through his autobiography, The Great Good Thing, where he chronicled his journey from tough, noir-loving Jewish kid from Long Island to tough, Jesus-loving Jewish geezer from California. Klavan always loved the old-school tough-guy private-eye stories and aspired to write more of them. He got really good at tension, pacing, and action scenes. He’s also good at psychology, and particularly loves stories where the character isn’t sure he can trust his own mind.

Now, in his golden years and arguably at the peak of his art, Klavan is finally writing a mystery series. (His other novels have been stand-alones, plus movie scripts and a fantasy trilogy.)

The hero of this series is Cameron Winter, a former poor little rich boy and former spook whose Apollonian good looks and tweedy job as an English professor do a poor job of hiding the fact that he is still a dangerous man. Because this is by Klavan, about 30% of each novel is spent in Winter’s shrink’s office, where we find out through a series of sessions about different aspects of Winter’s tragic past. In the very first book, we heard that Winter’s childhood crush was Charlotte Schaefer, the daughter of his German-immigrant nanny. Winter has been looking back on Young Charlotte as his feminine ideal, and kind of not really growing up partly as a consequence of the Ghost of Charlotte. In this book, Winter finally has to deal with that. He has to go to the aid of the real Charlotte. But time has been flowing for her, too, of course, and Real Charlotte has her own ghosts.

(By the way, A Woman Underground is book 4 in the series, but I had to go crawling on my hands and knees to Amazon to find this out. Please, Mysterious Press, put the book numbers in a prominent place both on the spine and on the title page!)

I won’t give anything further away, but like all Klavans, the book weaves through time, giving us satisfying action in several different forms: international spy games, local mystery that is really none of Winter’s business, sentimental looks at the way things used to be … or did they? Plus a psychologically satisfying twist at the end.

You may wonder, since this is a series, do you have to read the earlier books first? No, you don’t, because Klavan does a fine job making each book work on its own. However, just in case you want to, here they are:

  • #1 When Christmas Comes
  • #2 A Strange Habit of Mind
  • #3 The House of Love and Death

So, what do you think? Do these sound like something you would like? Are you also in favor of book numbers being put on spines? Let me know in the comments!

You Guys! A Book of Poems about Prehistoric Burials!

On By Jennifer MugrageLeave a comment

There’s a reason I’m posting about this book on Feb. 14.

It does something that I want to do with my novels.

It takes the feeling that I get when hearing about bog burials, stone circles, cave paintings — and amplifies it.

Did I mention that I love it?

I’ll be posting quotations from this book throughout the month of February. The one I posted two days ago – To The Air – could have been written about the scene in The Long Guest where the family cremates … well, I won’t give it away. It was trying for the same thing as that scene, or vice versa. But I mostly posted it for that evocative last line.

you died horribly but are beautiful,

sleeping face and pointed cap and perfect feet,

a peat cutter’s slash dug into your back

but preserved as none of your captors are —

though what a price for immortality.

–from Tollund Man, p. 39

If you’ve ever seen a picture of Tollund Man, this is exactly it.

I haven’t yet read every poem in Bone Antler Stone. They require close attention, and some of them are not short. But every so often I’ll dip into it, and find gems like this one:

The sun sets into the sea with a hiss

and rises with the sound of a driven wheel,

the creak of speaking stone, metal and wood.

The sun sets into the sea to simmer

and rises with the sound of stretched leather

and the song of the horse’s chain and bit.

ibid, p. 23

The idea of the solar system as a great big machine, perhaps made of hoops or wheels, that is alluded to in that first stanza is actually very close to how some ancient cultures conceived of the cosmos.

The last poem in the collection shows the author leaving Orkney, where he went to view the burials, with a friend who is named Pytheas for some reason. This poem raises the thought that not everyone is going to “get” a book of poems like this one.

The price to pay for a place like that,

the price to pay for poems like these…

our intensity is terrifying or just tiresome,

and so the dead and the damp doubleback

into just another of our silent, stone secrets.

It the compares the book itself to a barrow burial waiting to be discovered at the right moment:

So Pytheas proceeded in reply,

assuring me that for us, and for ours,

there was only the odd look, the old look, the awed look,

but rarely the real look of revelation,

or the consolation of having communicated.

And so the motive was to make meaning and memory

a kind of barrow burial in bloom

a garlanded grave underground

forged with turf and stone and fire and then forgotten,

until a propitious step or a sudden storm

blows open this book’s binding

and lays each line out in the light again,

shells of syllables dotting the sand.

Well, with a propitious step, I have found it.

When You Don’t Bury

On By Jennifer Mugrage5 Comments

TO THE AIR

Not burial at all

but instead a great freeing,

flesh handed over to the

birds and elements,

dead lives widely scattered

and confined to no single ground.

Or the hunger of fire,

earth gods dusted with ashes

and sky gods smudged with our smoke,

the wide circle covered

and all of us everywhere.

–Tim Miller, Bone Antler Stone, 2018, 2024