The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield

Title: The Thirteenth Tale
Author: Diane Setterfield
Year of Publication: 2006
Length: 406 pages
Genre: Gothic fiction
New or Re-Read? New
Rating: 3.5 stars

I am in the unusual position of thinking that a book was exceptionally well-written and compelling, and yet still not liking it very much.

The Thirteenth Tale is a modern Gothic tale, very much in the vein of Rebecca, Jane Eyre, Northanger Abbey, The Woman in White — and Setterfield is not only consciously aware of it, but calls attention to it throughout the novel. Her heroine, Margaret, is steeped in these books, but also in obscure biographies. She works at her father’s used book store and has never, it seems, really had to do much of anything; her father occasionally trades in priceless literary artifacts, and that sustains her family while the shop is just a side project. She is introverted to the point of being something of a recluse, and she is haunted by her dead twin — a twin who did not survive much past birth. Her mother could never emotionally connect to her because of this (something I’ll expound on later).

Margaret is surprised to receive a summons to write the biography of the notoriously private but fabulously successful writer Vida Winter, whom the narrative posits as a modern-day Dickens, voice of England in a new century. Winter has stalwartly refused all previous attempts at biography, but she knows she’s dying and she chooses Margaret (for reasons that become clear as the book goes on) to document her life. Margaret is suspicious at first, knowing that Winter could easily play her and fob another falsity off on her, so she asks for verifiable details. She gets a few, including Winter’s real name – Adeline March. And then Winter starts telling her story.

It’s compelling, dark, twisted, and thoroughly saturated with death. It begins with death — her grandmother’s, leading to her grandfather’s withdrawal from society. Their children, Charlie and Isabelle, grow up almost entirely without supervision; Charlie becomes obsessed with Isabelle. She goes along with him, teases him, but eventually runs off and marries another man — only to return with twins not much later, announcing that her brief husband is dead. The twins, indiscriminately named Emmeline and Adeline, have Charlie’s colouring. Draw your own conclusions. The twins grow up even more feral than Charlie and Isabelle did, speaking in their own language. Adeline is brutally destructive and without empathy; Emmeline is soft, weak-willed, controlled by her sister, and captivated by stories. The cook and gardener do little to influence them; a governess briefly instills a bit of order but is driven away by scandal. That’s the inner story. The outer story is also saturated with death. Winter is dying, Margaret cares more about dead people than she does about the living, someone else she meets was abandoned as a child and everyone he knows seems to be dead — themes of death and loss just permeate the entire book.

And that is what made it really difficult for me to enjoy. It was just too morbid. I am, by nature, far more sanguine. I mean, it certainly isn’t that I mind death in a story, but throughout The Thirteenth Tale, it just seems as though everyone is luxuriating in death, utterly steeped in it and not particularly willing to be otherwise. Margaret, for example, keenly feels the lack of her mother’s attention — though Margaret must be at least thirty years old by now, she’s never formed another social network, so that has remained a powerful influence on her. And I can’t forgive her mother for that neglect. I can’t even imagine what a devastating loss it must be, to lose a child — but I must also think that, when it’s a child you lose at birth and never know, and when there is another child there who needs you, then it must be a recoverable loss. I cannot fathom nor can I excuse that sort of neglect. But Margaret has never shown any inclination not to be ruled by it or by her dead twin’s ghost, either — rather she ensconces herself in the loss, and that is a point of view I also cannot see from.

I also can’t figure out when the book is set, and that just drives me up the wall. I know it’s intentional — the reader’s guide at the back of the book indicates as much. But I just can’t stand it. It distracts me throughout the entire book. Margaret’s part of the story, the “present day” as far as the narrative is concerned, could be anywhere from the 1950s to the advent of the Internet. When a character is mentioned as having gone to war, there’s no indication of which war. The family is so removed from society and untouched by world events that there’s no indication of what decade the story begins in. The twins could be growing up anywhere from Victoria’s last few decades to the 1930s, knowing only that sixty years have passed between the close of that story and when Vida Winter seeks out Margaret. I couldn’t pin it down, because Setterfield deliberately didn’t want me to, and that frustrated me immensely.

But for all of that, The Thirteenth Tale really is well written. Like I said, I found it compelling even as I disliked it, and the technical proficiency is quite high. Winter’s pronouns as she tells the tale of the twins are particularly well-handled, and the weaving of frame narrative and the meat and bones of the story is deft. The twist at the end was unexpected, but still managed to tie up all the loose ends. Setterfield also deals rather smartly with the idea of unreliable narrators — Margaret wonders throughout the whole book if Winter is being completely honest with her, but, of course, we as readers can never know either way, since the book is written from Margaret’s point-of-view, and we don’t know if she’s being honest with us, either. It’s an interesting angle from which to approach storytelling, and Setterfield makes a nice job of it.

So, on the whole, I can’t recommend this book quite as full-throatedly as I have some others — I just know that others may find far more enjoyment in it than I did. If you like Gothic novels, then, by all means, delve into this one.

Interred with Their Bones, by Jennifer Lee Carrell

Title: Interred with Their Bones
Author: Jennifer Lee Carrell
Year of Publication: 2007
Length: 416 pages
Genre: thriller
New or Re-Read?: New
Rating: 2.5 stars

Interred with Their Bones is a Shakespearean twist on The Da Vinci Code, and if you approach the book with that firmly in mind, you’ll probably find some enjoyment in it. It is, however, one of those books where you can only apply but so much logic to it before the entire structure collapses under the weight of sensibility.

The book’s plot structure follows a little too neatly in the Da Vinci path, involving many of the same character tropes and narrative devices. We open, after a brief and vague historical flashback, with Kate Stanley, director of the Globe’s Hamlet, meeting for the first time in years with her estranged and eccentric mentor, Roz Howard. (If you’re enough of an early modern history geek to be quirking an eyebrow at those names, rest assured: yes, everyone in the book labors under similarly referential nomenclature). Roz has some terrible secret to impart and a quest to set Kate on, but before she can reveal the details of either, she is found dead in the aftermath of a fire (not, as the book jacket would have you believe, at the Globe itself, but in an auxiliary building). Kate feels obligated to pick up Roz’s trail of bread crumbs. As she follows them, more dead bodies start piling up around her, and she ends up fleeing with the police on her trail, a device which feels even more strange in this book than it does in The Da Vinci Code. Kate has no real reason to distrust the police, no reason not to clear herself from culpability before embarking on her quest, and so her actions just seem bizarre and inexplicable. It gives the drama of the plotline a false echo, and it’s just one of the threads that a reader has to avoid plucking at in order to avoid a total collapse of the narrative. Still, with thrillers, you do sometimes have to make plausibility allowances, so this element may not prove troublesome to all readers.

Part of what hindered my enjoyment of this book, which I could otherwise have consumed as mere Da Vinci Code-esque fluff, is that I resent, as a scholar, how much this book not only entertains anti-Stratfordian opinions, but implies that very serious people in the Shakespearean world would hold those opinions. (Hint: They don’t. Some actors and directors, shamefully, but no scholar worth his or her salt gives the authorship “controversy” any credence because it doesn’t deserve any). I started to recoil as soon as Carrell broached the topic, and eventually, that aversion colored my reading of the text pretty strongly. I now know how art historians and theologians alike must feel about Dan Brown.

Despite the pitfalls of the exploration of the “controversy,” the book is actually at its best when traipsing through historical possibilities — the inventions linking Cardenio to Catholic plots via Cervantes and Jesuits are reasonably entertaining and provide some profitable fodder for exploration. I could cheerfully entertain all of that, if not for the editorial commentary suggesting that any of it might be true. The jet-setting aspect of the book, volleying from London to Harvard to the Southwest to Spain (and ricocheting back and forth between some of those a few times) is a fun diversion, and Carrell does an admirable job of painting her landscapes.

One of the critical failings in this book, unfortunately, lies in its protagonist and narrator. Carrell presents Kate as though she is some big up-and-comer in the Shakespearean field, a director that a Patrick Stewart/Ian McKellan type would refer to as “that brilliant American child.” Kate, of course, demurs from this description in , but the whole thing smacks of Informed Ability. Kate is a brilliant scholar and director because Carrell tells us that she is. This trait in of itself wouldn’t be so bad, except that, for such a prodigy, Kate has some pretty glaring gaps in her knowledge — and one of them is the fundamental underpinning of the mystery, the fact that Shakespeare wrote a lost play entitled Cardenio. The first-person narrative also hampers the book, partially because Kate’s head is not quite an interesting enough place to spend four hundred pages in, partially because it accentuates that gulf between her reputation and what she actually knows. First-person narration creates a trap for a writer: if the audience needs to know something, either the narrator knows it and tells it, which can come off as preachy, or the narrator doesn’t know and has to find out in order for the audience to find out, even if it’s something the narrator should already know — or shouldn’t need quite as much hand-holding to figure out. Interred with Their Bones manages to fall into both pits multiple times at different points in the story.

Interred with Their Bones was adequate entertainment for lying on a beach. If you’re in a place where your mind can let go and indulge freely in a suspense romp, then by all means, pick this up. The pace clips along well enough to keep a reader engaged, and if the plot turns are occasionally too predictable, sometimes that’s what you’re looking for out of light summer reading. If you’re looking for heavier fare or superlative writing, though, you may want to look elsewhere, as this book doesn’t hold up well under even light scrutiny. Apparently there’s a sequel. Might I read it? Sure, if someone handed it to me free of charge, and I had some time to kill. Unfortunately, that level of engagement and investment is all that Carrell’s writing warrants.

The Book of the Dead, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Title: The Book of the Dead (Pendergast #7)
Author: Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
Year of Publication: 2007
Length: 597 pages
Genre: thriller
New or Re-Read?: Re-Read
Rating: 4.5 stars
Spoiler Warning: Spoilers for Dance with Death

This is probably my favourite Pendergast novel. Perhaps coincidentally, it’s also the first Pendergast novel I read.

Like Brimstone, this book has a lot going on, a lot of different threads that weave in and out of each other. To begin with, Aloysius Pendergast is in a maximum security prison, awaiting trial for several murders and for the theft of the jewel collection of the Museum of Natural History — all crimes perpetrated by his brother, Diogenes, during the last book. Diogenes’s frame job was masterful, near-perfect — but there are just enough holes to be holding up the trial, and Laura Heyward finds herself investigating them despite herself. Vincent D’Agosta is taking a much more active role in clearing Pendergast’s name, risking his own career and his relationship with Laura in order to break Aloysius out of prison. He’s working with Eli Glinn, a forensic psychologist introduced to the Pendergast series in Dance with Death to analyse Diogenes, and who apparently appears first in Ice Limit, another P&C novel that I haven’t read.

Meanwhile, Diogenes is taking advantage of Aloysius’s incarceration to set his real ultimate crime into motion. His planned apotheosis wasn’t stealing the Museum’s jewels, nor was it framing Aloysius for the murders. His true goal is on a much larger scale, and he uses his alter ego’s position at the Museum to set it into motion. He’s also somehow managed to find Constance Greene, sequestered in Aloysius’s Riverside mansion; he wants to win her loyalty away from Pendergast, and slowly attempts to befriend her and turn her against her guardian.

At the Museum, Nora Kelly is back, tapped to organise the Museum’s next big exhibit: an authentic Egyptian tomb, first installed in the 1930s, which closed and was walled off after a series of strange accidents happened in connection with it. Inevitably, rumours of a curse grew — but now a mysterious Baron is fronting the money to re-open it. Everyone shrugs off the old superstitions, until more tragic “accidents” start to occur. A lighting technician is found disemboweled, apparently by the computer programmer. A notable British Egyptologist, brought over to help Nora, goes mad and attacks her, forcing a security guard to shoot and kill him. When his replacement turns out to be the lovely Lady Viola Maskalene, a woman with a profound connection to Pendergast, more people start to suspect that something is up — but all attempts to stall or cancel the exhibit’s opening fail. I don’t want to say too much about the nature of Diogenes’s plan, or how Pendergast figures it out, because there’s so much rich character work that goes on in both of those revelations. Like many elements of the Pendergast series, it dances right on that edge of implausibility.

I like this book best of the series because it handles all the disparate threads so well. None of the plotlines ever feel like it’s gotten subsumed by the others (as the subplots in Brimstone did). The action clips along throughout the book, and the double-climax carries the last 200 pages of the book along superbly. We get to see Pendergast at his best and at his worst, navigating his way through obstacles yet unable to face his own personal history. This book also wraps up the Diogenes trilogy, though not all the threads tie off precisely — there’s plenty to continue carrying through the next books in the series.

As always, P&C do a great job with atmosphere. From the detail of the extremely regulated world of Herkmoor Correctional Facility, to the eerie, gilded claustrophobia of the Tomb of Senef, to the various locations visited in the last 100 pages of the novel, as the story turns from crime to chase, the authors know how to make the reader feel the full effect of where the story is happening. It’s a wonderful way of giving you intimacy with a place you may never have been, and it makes the story that much more real — a necessary quality when other aspects of it may strain credulity.

I highly recommend this book, though I would recommend that you at least read Dance with Death first. The Book of the Dead is one of the most tightly-plotted and best-paced of the Pendergast series, with the added benefits of giving the characters some real, tangible depth.

Dance of Death, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Title: Dance of Death
Author: Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
Year of Publication: 2006
Length: 592 pages
Genre: suspense thriller
New or Re-Read?: Re-Read
Rating: 4 stars
Spoilers: for Brimstone‘s ending

Dance of Death picks up not too long after Brimstone leaves off, with Aloysius Pendergast presumed dead and Vincent D’Agosta left to assume a troubling legacy: the charge of stopping Aloysius’s brother, Diogenes, from committing the perfect crime. He has the assistance of Pendergast’s ward, a major player in this book for the first time, though her history stretches back to Cabinet of Curiosities. Constance Ward is an improbable creature, her life unnaturally prolonged since the late 19th-century by the mad scientist schemes of Pendergast ancestor Enoch Leng. A century of secluded life has left Constance old-fashioned and socially inept, but has given her time to hone a brilliant mind, making her an ideal research assistant. Such is the state of events when the book begins.

And then people start dropping dead. A professor at Tulane. An artist in New York. An FBI agent . At first, there’s little to connect them, but eventually — and then Aloysius turns back up, not at all dead. As was implied in the epilogue to Brimstone, Diogenes freed Aloysius from Count Fosco’s entombment and nursed him back to health; his triumph wouldn’t be complete without his hated older brother there to witness it. Aloysius soon figures out that not only is Diogenes killing people from his past, but he’s murdering them in ways that emulate the gruesome deaths of Pendergast ancestors — and aiming to frame Aloysius for the murders.

This mayhem is set against the backdrop of events back at the Museum of Natural History, yet again. Nora and Margo are back. Nora’s working on a Sacred Images exhibit; Margo is editing the magazine’s journal. They clash a bit over an interesting repatriation issue regarding some Native American artifacts, but decide that their professional disagreements on such matters shouldn’t be a bar to friendship. Unfortunately, Margo’s desire to make sure that the Sacred Images exhibit is at least presented respectfully leads her into the exhibit alone at night, where Diogenes attacks her. P&C pull off a masterful move here, and I won’t spoil it for anyone, but it’s a good one. Margo’s death enhances the feeling that no one is safe, and it alarms Pendergast, who realises that Diogenes is speeding up his timetable.

The book’s endgame is magnificent, involving chases, a jewel heist, a kidnapping, and Aloysius’s total entanglement in the web that Diogenes spun. It definitely sets up The Book of the Dead, and so it’s not quite a stand-alone novel in that regard, because I don’t know how you could read this one and not want to know what happens next. Dance of Death is one of the more compelling Pendergast novels, and it’s also the first to feature almost no sci-fi or supernatural element. The tension here comes entirely from the characters, from their personal histories and harrowing situations. Pendergast’s vulnerabilities begin to show, which is strangely nice to see, and Vincent D’Agosta ends up having to balance his personal life and professional responsibilities against his loyalty to and respect for Aloysius. The plot is tightly and intricately woven, and manages to keep up a clipping pace of action while still introducing us to new facets of familiar characters — making it a success, in my judgment.

Brimstone, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Title: Brimstone (Pendergast #5)
Author: Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
Year of Publication: 2004
Length: 752 pages
Genre: thriller
New or Re-Read?: Re-Read
Rating: 3.5 stars

There is a lot going on in this book. Brimstone throws out more side plots and red herrings than the other P&C novels tend to, which makes for an exciting read, but which also gives the book a bit of an uneven pace.

Brimstone opens with our old friend Vincent D’Agosta, who we learn is now with the Southhampton PD, after leaving the NYPD to try to make it as a mystery writer. When that doesn’t pan out, he can’t make it back into the NYPD thanks to a hiring freeze, so he has to take a less vigorous duty in a beach town. A bizarre murder brings him back into contact with everyone’s favourite FBI agent, Aloysius Pendergast. The victim has been burned alive, but with no trace of accelerant — or, indeed, of any fire whatsoever. The only hints are the smell of brimstone in the air and a hoof-shaped mark scorched into the floor.

Two more murders happen in New York, with similar — though not precisely identical — trappings. The psuedo-religious nature of the crimes gets attention (thanks to hack reporter Bryce Harriman, nemesis of Bill Smithback, who doesn’t appear in this novel thanks to being on his honeymoon), and eventually, a crowd of hippies, anarchists, Satanists, pagans, and fundamentalists start gathering in Central Park, near the scene of one of the crimes. Their unofficial leader is a lost soul with a Messiah complex, and when his following gets a little too large and rowdy, it’s up to another old friend, Captain Laura Hayward, to try and sort things out. Unfortunately, not everyone’s willing to give her way of doing things a chance, and the situation rapidly spirals out of control. And then, on top of all of that, we get the first hints about Pendergast’s alarmingly adroit brother, Diogenes — a psychopath who faked his death, but is resurfacing in order to commit the ultimate crime, and taunting Aloysius along the way.

Pendergast and Aloysius find themselves at a loss as to connecting the dots between the crimes. When they finally do piece some bits together, the lead takes them across the ocean, to Florence, Italy, where thirty years ago, a group of young men attempted to summon the devil and make a pact with him in exchange for fortune and glory. Pendergast and D’Agosta take several twists and turns in Italy, and the story there is quite gripping (even if the villain’s ultimate motive seems a little odd and improbable). Unfortunately, as soon as Pendergast and D’Agosta depart for Italy, the plot back in New York sort of gets the short end of the stick. Which is a shame, because there was good material there, but it’s definitely a side plot at that point, no longer tied to the main stream of events. Everytime they return to New York City, it feels like getting jerked out of one book and dropped down into another.  It sort of feels like P&C started this thread and then weren’t quite sure what to do with it. Preston handles the concept of religious fervor boiling over into violence a lot better in his solo book Blasphemy.

Overall, I really enjoy this book, and it’s definitely a good setup for Dance of Death and The Book of the Dead. I knock a little off the score for the jumble of plotlines and the flagging nature of the Central Park events. It does meander a bit, but there’s a whole lot of juicy material, and I like that they took more chances with the red herrings than in previous books. The endgame is heart-thumpingly good. You see the full force of the villain’s diabolical machinations, Pendergast suffers a miscalculation that keeps him out of “too-perfect” territory (which, admittedly, he can veer near sometimes), and you see some wonderful if slightly shocking growth in D’Agosta’s character. And then, the cliffhanger finale segues directly into the next book, Dance of Death.

Still Life with Crows, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Title: Still Life with Crows (Pendergast #4)
Author: Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
Year of Publication: 2003
Length: 592 pages
Genre: mystery-thriller
New or Re-Read?: Re-Read
Rating: 3 stars

If anyone ever asked me to play “one of these things is not like the other” with the Pendergast series, this would be the book I would choose. (Well, perhaps this and also Wheel of Darkness, which we’ll get to later). It has a very different feel to it than the other books do, thanks in large part to its very different setting, and also, ultimately, to its very different criminal.

Still Life with Crows finds Agent Pendergast in Medicine Creek, Kansas — of all places. Medicine Creek is a dying town, suffering from lack of jobs, lack of tourism, lack of, well, anything. Its one hope hinges on some experiment cornfields that Kansas State University might plant in the town’s territory — unless they choose neighboring town Deeper. The situation infuses the characters native to Medicine Creek with a certain desperation in a very different way than the characters in the New York books typically have.

With the review for the KSU cornfields underway, it’s pretty much the worst time ever for a serial killer to crop up. Admittedly, there’s never a good time for that, but you take my meaning. It’s attracting attention of the wrong sort, particularly because the nature of the gruesome killings suggests a correlation to the vengeful ghosts of local Native Americans. One victim is found naked in a cornfield, surrounded by the arrow-impaled bodies of crows. Another is boiled alive, buttered and sugared. Another is cut open and has creepy-crawlies sewn up inside of him. The killings are clearly deranged, but Pendergast struggles with getting a profile on the killer, because he seems to be neither the “organised” nor the “disorganised” variety of serial killer. There’s no recognisable pattern to his murders, yet the ritual nature of several of them suggests some kind of underlying order, at least in the killer’s mind. Thus is Pendergast’s challenge: to figure out the inscrutable mystery behind these strange murders. His job isn’t made easier by the local PD, who, resentful of his intrusion into the town’s matters, decides that the killer must be from Deeper, trying to scare the KSU rep into not choosing Medicine Creek. He barrels on with this idea despite a lack of evidence, threatening Pendergast if he keeps getting involved, and generally causes a lot of trouble.

I honestly find a lot of this book forgettable. On re-reading it, I had trouble remembering the sequence of events and the endgame. I had a vague awareness of how everything was interrelated, but the finer details escaped me. Overall, this book has less to do with the overall Pendergast series than any of the others, and there’s never really any good explanation for why Pendergast even ended up there in the first place. I do thank this book, though, for giving us Corrie Swanson. Corrie is a disaffected teenager with Goth affectations, desperate to get out of Medicine Creek and away from her alcoholic mother forever. She ends up Pendergast’s assistant, and he demonstrates a faith in her intelligence and abilities that no one’s ever really shown her before — and with that, and her salary for helping him with the investigation, he also gives her hope for a way out.

Overall, this isn’t one of the better Pendergast novels, in my opinion. It’s the odd duck out, the plot meanders a bit too much, and it’s not quite as gripping a premise as some of the others. It’s worth a read if you’re in it for the whole series, but I’m not sure I’d recommend it in isolation.

Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins

Title: Catching Fire
Author: Suzanne Collins
Year of Publication: 2009
Length: 391 pages
Genre: young adult – dystopian thriller
New or Re-Read?: New
Rating: 4+ stars
Spoilers: Armed and active for both this and The Hunger Games; I don’t know how to talk about this book without them, unfortunately.

The last time I felt this way about a series was starting Harry Potter, back almost a decade ago. Nothing else in recent memory has matched the sheer irresistibility of this series. I’m a little floored, honestly, by how much I’m taken with this series and how desperately I need to move on to find out what happens. But I thought it important to pause and capture my thoughts now.

Catching Fire ups the ante in a big way. It continues more or less seamlessly on from the end of The Hunger Games. Katniss and Peeta are expected to go on a Victory Tour around all of the Districts. The trouble is that unrest has been sizzling in some of them for a long time, and Katniss finds herself the inadvertent mascot of rebellion. No true uprisings have broken out yet, but you can feel them simmering, low-burning embers, all through this book. And that’s terrifying the living hell out of the Capitol. Enough so that the President himself feels compelled to visit Katniss and make a few well-placed threats against her family and friends.

This includes Gale, who was kind’a-sort’a Katniss’s boyfriend before she went to the Games, but who she’s had to treat as an amiable “cousin” ever since she got back, since her only thread of protection lies in being able to claim that love for Peeta made her act so defiantly. There’s a lot of emotional entanglement between the three of them, and I think it’s handled very well. It’s not overblown or made into the stuff of melodrama. Instead, all three act in the time-honoured manner of teenagers everwhere: with extreme awkwardness. They don’t know what to say to each other, how to act. And it doesn’t help that just as soon as poor Katniss is thinking she’s set her heart on one, the other will do something spectacular to sway her around again. And yet, all without turning her into just some pathetic chick.

Is it wrong of me to hope that Katniss will get to live polyamorously happy-ever-after with them both? Yes. Yes, it is. That would barely pass muster in fairly edgy adult fiction; it’s going to be another century or so before you could get away with that in young adult. What I then assume is that either Gale or Peeta has to die. So, then, is it wrong for me to hope that it’s Gale? Nothing against the guy at all, but he’s not the one we, the readers, have spent as much time with. My emotional investment lies far more in Peeta.

So. All of that’s going on, and then District Twelve has a really hard year. It’s partially to punish Katniss — law enforcement becomes really strict, the minor infractions (like hunting in the woods) that folk used to be able to get away with, they can’t anymore — and it’s partially just bad luck, from a really hard winter. Desperation’s sinking in, and even while Katniss feels the urge to rebel burning deep inside her… she can’t. Not with so many people relying on her. Not with so many innocent lives at stake.

And then the Capitol changes the rules on everyone again, and announces that for the 75th Hunger Games, they’ll be drawing only from a pool of prior victors — who are supposed to be exempt for life. The second half of the book deals with this. With no other female victor living, Katniss has to go for 12, and though their mentor Haymitch’s name is chosen, Peeta immediately volunteers to take his place. So they’re back, and have to quickly determine who among the other tribute-victors they might be able to trust at least long enough for a temporary alliance. The arena designed for the 75th Games is diabolical and utterly ingenious, and in some ways I wish they’d gotten to it earlier in the book in order to spend more time examining it.

Some other reviews I’ve seen charge that Catching Fire suffers from middle-of-trilogy syndrome and that it’s slow to get going, that too much time is spent on exposition in the beginning. I couldn’t disagree more. I think this book is superbly strong, and I don’t feel it has any of that lag. In fact, I sort of wish they’d spent more time on the Victory Tour, describing the various Districts — but that’s because I’m obsessed with world-building, especially in dystopias. I want to know everything. From what I can gather, District 4 is probably Gulf Coast (wherever the coastline actually is now), because their main industry is fishing. 3 seems like it might be Detroit-ish, as they focus on electronics and manufacturing. 7 seems like Wisconsin-Minnesota, timber country. 11 I can’t quite place, because it might be either the South or the Midwest. I’m guessing Midwest because the agriculture seems a bit more wheat-and-corn, though in Book 1 Rue does talk a lot about orchards — but also because, if part of the cataclysm leading to this world setup was rising waters, most of the agricultural south is probably under the Atlantic Ocean now. Anyway — I wish I knew more. I want to know about all the Districts, where they are, how many people, how they got to be the way they are. What we do learn along the way is that District 11 is much more strictly controlled than 12 has been, and that the people there seem to be getting sick of it.

So. This book is fabulous, the series is fabulous, I’m moving on to Mockingjay as fast as may be — and it looks like it’s going to have pretty much my favourite thing over. Not just a dystopia, but a dystopian rebellion. I am aquiver with excitement.

The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins

Title: The Hunger Games
Author: Suzanne Collins
Year of Publication: 2009
Length: 374 pages
Genre: young adult – dystopian thriller
New or Re-Read?: New
Rating: 5 stars

It has been a long, long time since I tore through a book as quickly and as avidly as I tore through this one. The word for The Hunger Games is, absolutely, “compelling.” This is a book that grips you by the throat and doesn’t let go.

The book takes place in a dystopian future — which gets me right there. I love a good dystopia. North America as we know it has fallen to pieces, thanks to what the heroine vaguely describes as “the disasters, the droughts, the storms, the fires, the encroaching seas that swallowed up so much land, the brutal war for what little sustenance remained.” The civilization that replaces America is called Panem, a cluster of districts ruled by the Capitol. There were once Thirteen Districts; now, after a failed rebellion, there are only Twelve, with the Thirteenth having been obliterated in the war. As a reminder to the Districts of its power, and to prevent further rebellions, the Capitol holds the Hunger Games each year. Each District sends two tributes each year, a boy and a girl between the ages of 12 and 18.

In coal-mining District 12 (probably situated in what was once West Virginia, based on the descriptions), Katniss Everdeen volunteers to take her sister’s place when twelve-year-old Prim is chosen. The “reaping”, as the ceremony is grimly called, is a stark look at how the government can so easily manipulate poverty. A twelve-year-old has his or her name entered once, a thirteen-year-old twice, and so forth — but, you can also choose to enter your name more times in exchange for tesserae, allotments of grain and oil. This is a frequent occurrence in District 12, impoverished and struggling. Katniss has been her family’s provider since she was 11, when her father died in a mining accident and her mother slipped into a deep depression. She’s now sixteen, with her name put in 20 times; her friend Gale, with more siblings to support, has his name in 42 times. And yet it’s Prim, with her name only in once, because Katniss wouldn’t let her take on any more risk, who gets called.

And this is all just in the first few chapters.

Katniss goes to the Capitol to prepare for the games, along with Peeta, the male tribute from her District — a boy who once threw her bread when she was starving, near-death, before she learned to hunt and trap. They’re up against others like themselves, unwilling tributes who’ve never had a full belly in their lives, but they’re also up against tributes from wealthier Districts, where the Games are not a punishment but a chance for honor and glory, who’ve trained their whole lives for this moment. Katniss experiences the shock and confusion of being treated like a pampered pet even though she’s really a beast for slaughter, and through her eyes, we see the horrific, casual cruelty of a society that places enormous monetary value on her life but no spiritual or moral value on it whatsoever. Because the Hunger Games are entertainment, televised and trumpeted.It’s the Olympics as bloodsport. (It’s no surprise that everyone in the Capitol seems to have a Roman name — Flavius, Octavia, Cinna, Portia — because there’s certainly a smack of the Colosseum about the whole thing). The tributes have to compete not only against each other in the field, but also for sponsors, who can send them life-saving gifts during the Games — and the tributes who put in the best show during the opening ceremonies, training, and interviews. Katniss, both feisty and sullen, unable to conceal her resentment, is saved from making a total mess of things partially through her own audacity and partially through the machinations of the District 12 handlers, who manipulate circumstances so that Katniss and Peeta look like star-cross’d lovers. The burden for that is on Peeta (and for a long time Katniss isn’t sure if he really has feelings for her or if he’s just playing the game), but Katniss reaps some benefits of it, and eventually learns to work the angle herself.

The strength of this book is in the relentless way that Collins builds suspense. Even when Katniss is on something resembling “downtime”, healing from wounds, feeding herself, scoping out the lay of the land, it never feels as though the action slows down. There’s always another threat, always something else lurking on the horizon — and those things explode into action with magnificent force. The Games are a fascinating look at survivalism; the “Career Tributes” from the wealthy districts may know how to fight, but they don’t know how to hunt for food, find safe berries to eat, or bandage up their wounds. Eleven tributes are killed outright in the first battle, but from then on, it becomes a matter of playing advantages and covering for weaknesses. It’s gruesome, deeply troubling, heart-poundingly thrilling, and unexpectedly emotional. There was one moment that got to me, not because of who died or the way in which she did, but because of Katniss’s reaction to it — and the unexpected benefit that Katniss received afterwards. I don’t want to throw in a spoiler, but it’s a really poignant moment, and it made me tear up. And then it’s right back to breath-holding suspense.

So, this book is fantastic. Collins has created not only a fascinating dystopia, but also an eminently relatable heroine. I’m usually not a fan of first person narratives; they have to be done really well for me to like them. And this one is. Katniss’s voice is wonderful, practical and laced with sardonic humour, but you also get to hear her struggling with vulnerabilities she doesn’t want to admit to. She is not a perfect person, but she’s a tremendously engaging protagonist.

I know I’m late to the train, and I don’t know why. It wasn’t for lack of interest, I just somehow never got around to picking this book up. Probably no one actually needs my recommendation to read this book, as I suspect I was the last person in America not to have done so already. But if you do need it, here it is: Read this book. Immediately if not sooner. I’m off to get Catching Fire and Mockingjay right now, because I can’t stand not knowing what happens next.

Fever Dream, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Title: Fever Dream
Authors: Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
Year of Publication: 2010
Length: 528 pages
Genre: thriller
New or Re-Read?: New!
Rating: 4.5 stars

Okay, so. I love the Pendergast thrillers. I got hooked on them when I picked up The Book of the Dead by accident (the 7th book in the series, and third of an in-series trilogy), and then had to backtrack and put the rest of them in order. Someday, I’m going to start the series at the beginning and review them all on this blog, but I have quite enough re-read projects on my plate at the moment as it is. Maybe over the summer — these are great beach reads.

It seems perfectly valid, though, to go ahead and do a review now for Fever Dream, the 10th book in the series, which I got in the mail a couple of days ago and tore through in under 24 hours. (I wait for the paperbacks of these because I have a thing about matched sets, and since my first 8 books in the series were all mass markets… yeah, it would make me a little crazy to have hardcovers. So I have to torture myself by waiting for the paperback releases). It’s the first book in a new in-series trilogy, and it’s not so heavily dependent on what’s come before. One of the great things about these books, though, is that they all are stand-alone, even the ones within sets.

Readers of the Pendergast thrillers have long known that he had a wife, once upon a time, who met with a tragic accident while on a hunting trip in Africa. In Fever Dream, Aloysius Pendergast learns that the accident was actually murder. The opening chapters flashback to these events, and it’s… really quite brutal. P&C don’t shy away from the gruesome when occasion calls for it. Pendergast uncovers a previously overlooked detail, and this discovery sets him on a path to vengeance like none he’s ever pursued before. Naturally, he pulls in Lieutenant Vincent D’Agosta, the closest thing to a best friend he has, to help with the investigation.

I won’t even try to hide the fact that I adore Agent Pendergast. He’s fascinating, and has been ever since he first showed up in a purely supporting role in Relic. The mix of ruthless FBI efficiency with genteel Southern charm just makes me swoon. He’s so full of odd quirks, peculiar habits, and contradictions. He shows more genuine emotion in Fever Dream than he’s shown before, even when dealing with his brother in an earlier trilogy — the resurfacing of emotions attached to his wife really seems to get to him. The readers experience him largely through D’Agosta in this book, and so we feel the bewilderment at seeing Pendergast come a little unhinged. I confess, it thrills me — there’s just something delicious about watching the iron control slip. Everyone describes Pendergast as cold, but it’s apparent here that there are deep passions in him — just ones that he’s spent a long time and a lot of effort burying. In Fever Dream, we see them threaten to boil over.

This book takes off like a rocket and doesn’t let up. I nearly had two heart attacks in the middle of it — because I know that P&C aren’t afraid to pull punches or kill off beloved characters. It’s the “no one is safe” threat, and it’s always real, so when something bad happens, it’s truly heart-stopping. Pursuing clues, Pendergast and D’Agosta ricochet from Louisiana to Zambia to Maine and back again. And I had been waiting for P&C to take Pendergast back to his native Louisiana. I’d been praying they would for years now. Most of the books take place in New York, though a few have had other settings — the Midwest, Europe, the Atlantic Ocean — but we’ve only gotten tantalizing hints of Pendergast in his homeland. When I heard Fever Dream would take place in Louisiana, I was overcome with excitement, and P&C didn’t disappoint me; Fever Dream is full of backwater towns and gator-ridden bayous. P&C handle the twists and turns deftly, never letting the pace slacken — precisely what you want from a thriller.

The other thing I so enjoy about P&C thrillers is that they always have a slightly sci-fi twist. It’s always within the realm of plausibility, but they make speculations about where modern science could go. In that way, their novels are somewhat like Michael Crichton novels — only with a suspense twist. In Crichton novels, the science is typically front-and-center; in P&C thrillers, it slides in sideways. Usually the main characters discover it as they go along, piecing improbabilities together, and that’s the case in Fever Dream, though in some other novels, we get the viewpoint of the involved scientists as well. Their sci-fi elements never create a new universe, it all fits in perfectly well with our version of reality, but it gives their novels that little extra kick that not all mysteries have.

I’ve also noticed that P&C have a fascination with mob violence. It shows in the Pendergast novels (Reliquary in particular) and in some of the stand alones (especially Preston’s Blasphemy). It’s a concept they explore again in Fever Dream. I confess, I was worried when the idea was introduced that it would take over the story, derail an already packed plotline — but it didn’t. P&C used it as an effective element and then let it drop naturally, rather than carrying it through past the point of usefulness.

Overall — I loved this book. P&C deliver brain candy of the very highest quality yet again. Fever Dream is a fast-paced rocket of a book, a thoroughly enjoyable entry into the series. The mystery of Helen’s murder isn’t fully solved by the end of the book, which ends on a cliffhanger. I’ll be looking forward to the next two books with great excitement. I highly recommend this, and the whole Pendergast series, to lovers of thrillers and mysteries, but also to anyone looking to experiment in a new genre. I don’t typically read a lot of thrillers, but P&C’s are just fantastic, and I’m completely addicted to them.