WWW.WEDNESDAY

WWW. WEDNESDAY asks three questions to prompt you to speak bookishly. To participate, and to see how other book lovers responded, click here.  

1. What are you currently reading? Murder at Archly Manor by Sara Rosett. Set in England in the early 1920s, this book introduces pretty young Olive Belgrave. She has a specific problem: money. Her family is prestige rich but newly cash poor. 

She needs a job but she's too well-bred for most jobs and not qualified for others. She visits family for a few days and soon finds herself working to clear a cousin accused of murder. Olive discovers she's a natural, if unconventional, sleuth, and a career is born!

So far I'm enjoying this book. It's so perfect in its time and place. People live in places called Tate House, Parkview and Archly Manor. Men are named Sebastian, Alfred and Jaspar. Women wear hats with plumes. Everyone says things like, "One really shouldn't, should one?" And yet, there's a murderer among them! They're really no better than us declasse Yanks, are they?

2. What did you recently finish reading?  The Watergate Girl by Jill Wine-Banks. Today she often appears as an MSNBC legal analyst. Now in her mid-70s, she seems wise, self-effacing and careful. But this sedate lady was once a trailblazer. Decades ago, she was "the Watergate Girl," the young mini-skirted lawyer who was on TV and in the newspapers every day as the only woman on the team of special prosecutors assigned to Watergate. 

 

After the drama and consequence of bringing down a corrupt President, she had a hard time adjusting to private practice. She took a job as General Counsel of the Army at the Pentagon under Jimmy Carter. Once again, she was a trailblazer, advocating for women in the military.

This is as much a story of her personal life as it is of her career. She may have been a trailblazer but not a radical. She had a hard time extricating herself from a terrible marriage. She was the oldest daughter of a family in the Chicago suburbs. She was expected to get good grades, to behave, to make a good marriage and stay married. I found this part of the book almost as involving as Watergate. While more than a decade younger, I am familiar with this milieu and attitude. I understand her concern with disappointing those who have expectations.

 

I just read Katie Holmes has purchased the rights to this book. I hope it actually makes it to the screen.

 

3. What will read next? I don't know.