Bargain Books and Medicine Chests

It’s true to say that whether you enjoy a book or not, or even whether you finish it, can often be as much about the mood you were in at the time as it is about the literary, or otherwise, merits of the book in question. Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch has been sitting on my bookshelves since 2014 when we had a brief sojourn back to Blighty in an expensive experiment to prove that we’d rather be in Canada after all. Anyway, back to the book in question. It had been recommended by practically everyone I know back in the UK, and that was enough for me to seek it out, and at the time I think it was also a way of connecting back with the UK after years away because Rivers of London is by its nature a very British book. With that in mind and given that our attempt to fit back into British life was not altogether a success, in retrospect it’s perhaps no surprise that I didn’t get on with the book. I mean, I really didn’t get on with it. I started it, but while it was a perfectly ok

It’s been about 10 days since I finished History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund and I’ve had to let it sit in my brain and fester a bit before I felt I had my thoughts in order. First up, a bit about the book. It’s a first novel and tells the story of Linda, a teenage girl growing up in very rural Minnesota who befriends a young mother and her four year old son who have moved in to a summer cabin on the other side of the lake while they wait for the arrival of the absent academic husband/father. The relationship between Linda, the mother and son is at the heart of the story. Additionally, we have a picture of rural and small-town Minnesota – a teacher who may or may not be guilty of child pornography. A fellow pupil who may or may not have had a relationship with the teacher. On top of that we have a time shift with adult Linda looking back at the events of her teenage years and we see how they affected her initial and continuing maturation into adulthood. That’s a lot of stuff

If I was trying to find a literary illustration for the term ‘curate’s egg’ for someone who’d never heard of the phrase, I could do a lot worse than point them at Mr Churchill’s Secretary by Susan Elia MacNeal. I’m torn between trying to decide if it is a good book with bad bits or a bad book with good bits. Before I get into the whys and wherefores of those feelings, a bit about the book. As the title suggests this is set during World War II. Our heroine is Maggie Hope, a Brit by birth and Bostonian by upbringing who is settled in London in 1940 after trying and failing to sell her grandmother’s rambling Victorian house in London. After one of Churchill’s secretaries is killed, Maggie is persuaded, against her better judgement, to take on the job and from her position in the corridors of Downing Street and the bunkers of the Cabinet War Rooms she is drawn into the intrigues of the different factions jockeying for power behind the scenes in Churchill’s first months in office.