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 Blackburn Hall by Sara Rosett. Olive Belgrave has a problem: money. So why she doesn't just get a job? She tried, but she comes from a titled family, and in 1920s London, she can't just be a barmaid. The book opens with her interviewing for a "suitable" position as a hat model. The milliner hoped Olive could attract her friends in the gentry to the shop. This is a suitable short-term fix, but Olive would prefer to have her own clients for her "high society lady detective service."

Olive discovered quite by accident that she has a talent for "discreet inquiries." Turns out that's something the aristocracy needs every now and then -- to check out a daughter's new beau, find a lost chihuahua, vet a nanny candidate, or, as is the case in this volume, look into the disappearance of a famous author on behalf of his publisher. Olive is so much more circumspect than those vulgar police!

This is the second book in the series and, while I'm not very far into it, I'm already enjoying it as much as I did the first, and for the same reason. The writer creates such a lively post-WWI London. I love the hair and the clothes (especially the hats; 100 years ago everyone wore hats) and the milieu: Olive bounces back and forth between two worlds, upstairs and downstairs. Here's hoping the mystery itself turns out to be as engaging as the setting.

2. What did you recently finish reading?  The Break by Marian Keyes. I am so MAD at this book! There is the kernel of a great story here. But Marian Keyes buries it in bloat. Too many irrelevant characters and scenarios that go nowhere. Consequently it takes 400 pages to tell a story that could comfortably have been told in 325.

 

Amy and Hugh have been married for 17 years. Amy thinks she has a happy home, but when a pair of deaths hit Hugh hard (first his dad, then a boyhood friend), she realizes her husband is really struggling. He tells her he wants six months off, "a break" from marriage. He wants to travel, to put himself first for a change, to get more out of life before it's too late.

 

I like the way Keyes uses flashbacks. It would be easy to dismiss Hugh as selfish and heedless, but slowly we see that he's a wonderful dad, just crippled by depression. Very effective dimensional story telling that makes you question what you think you know about your friends' marriages.

 

But then there's the ridiculous excess. Amy has four siblings. Each is given a backstory, yet only two really matter to the plot. Example: Her gay brother and his partner have an adorable baby via surrogate. I kept waiting for them to matter to Amy's tale. They never do. 

Amy works in PR and keeps flying back and forth between Dublin and London. Her job was interesting, but did we need to meet so many of her clients? One of her clients brings his brother -- a sour man who prefers to be called "Dan" and not "Dante" -- to meetings because ... well, hell, I either forgot why or stopped caring.

 

Amy loves vintage designer clothes, which shops for at estate sales. OK, I get it. She's giving new life to the clothes of dead people. It's a charming idiosyncrasy. But do I need to know what she wore every damn day for a year?

 

Really, I'm tempted to take my own damn blue pen to this thing and see how much I can excise without diminishing the center of the story: the homelife that Amy and Hugh built together for themselves and the three girls they're raising, and what Hugh's sabbatical does to it.

 

3. What will read next? A biography of Paul Newman (hence this week's photo).