reading list: april - june 2023

Anne Hillerman, Rock with Wings. NY: HarperCollins, 2015. In the daughter’s second installment, Leaphorn is still recovering from being shot. Chee is called to assist on a nearby movie set, while his wife obsesses over a traffic stop, and their cases turn out to be related. Jean Meltzer, Mr Perfect on Paper. NY: MIRA, 2022. Dara is a third generation matchmaker, so of course she has a list. And with help from Chris, the man hosting her reality dating show, she finds her sexy Jewish doctor -- only to find that perfection doesn’t taste quite right. Denise Williams, Do you Take This Man? NY: Berkley, 2022. If not for the cover image, I might have completely missed that the protagonist is a Black woman; I think that fact came up twice, in passing, and never did we learn the male lead’s race though his image on the cover is white. Did it matter, either way? Not even a little bit. They don’t get along for other, better, reasons. Ernest Hemingway, Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories. NY: Scribner, 1936. “Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well. Well, he would never have to fail at trying to write them either.” These two sentences, in which Hemingway acknowledges and takes on our burden, make him a hero to all writers. Tessa Bailey, Getaway Girl. NY: HarperCollins, 2018. Well that was believable. The future mayor of Charleston is left at the alter; the bride’s (unacknowledged illegitimate) half-sister rescues him from the embarrassment; they, of course, end up together. One of the nice things about contemporary romance is how it (often)features more realistic, humanly believable characters -- folks you might actually meet, if not know -- than more historical versions of the genre. Except that authors still feel a need to present aspirational vocations and lifestyles, millionaires and C.E.O.s and athletes and entertainers. Okay, most of us will never experience these occupations -- may even be a bit curious -- but trying to relate the problems of rich folk to those struggling to survive simply because they have similar emotional responses? Well, it’s tiresome. The rich don’t think of themselves as similar, don’t want to be like us, and we should rather wish them all working poor than wish ourselves idle rich. Stop writing about rich people unless they are ingredients in a recipe. The underground infrastructure engineer replacing a water main contributes more to the reader’s well being, and has more in common as well, than a politician or startup founder likely could. Oh wait, this is genre fiction. Bailey does a great job with generic expectations; the story moves along, the characters are well-drawn and well-matched; she’s one of the best, and I’m a frustrated socialist. Tessa Bailey, Runaway Girl. NY: HarperCollins, 2023. The other half of the story above follows the girl who -- as the title says -- ran away. For good reason, even if her fiancé ended up with her half-sister and she landed another oversized soldier, since until she left Charleston, she didn’t know who she was. Jean Meltzer, Matzah Ball. Toronto: Mira, 2021. It’s a Hanukkah romance about a candle-lighting party (the Matzah Ball, get it?) in which the Jewish writer of Christmas stories falls in love at a Matzah Ball while prepping to write a Hanukkah romance. It’s all sorts of meta, and a little denser prose than many rom-com titles; it doesn’t feature steamy sex scenes; it deals with issues. And it’s good fun. Tessa Bailey, Too Beautiful to Break. NY: Forever, 2017. The final Clarkson book focuses on Belmont, the oldest son by another father, and his co-dependency on Sage, Peggy’s wedding-planer turned best friend. And it goes to some dark places. Antonia Tricarico, The Inner Ear of Don Zientara. NY: Acashic, 2023. This coffee table tribute feels like the comment book after a wake: lots of little stories from the artists he recorded about how Don never interfered with their visions, but always had advice on achieving them. With photos. Robert B Parker, Double Deuce. NY: Berkley, 1993. Thank Tubi for making the 1980’s TV series available; now I have an image of Spenser and Hawk to accompany Parker’s clinical description of what characters look like, as described in a police report. The story moves quickly; the voice is familiar; it’s a lot of fun. Valerie Burns, One Part Sugar, Two Parts Murder. NY: Kensington, 2022. Maddy is a spoiled brat when she inherits her aunt’s bakery on the shore of Lake Michigan, but she sets about learning the business and making friends. And ends up solving three murders while discovering that she enjoys her new home. Walter Mosley, Jack Strong. NY: Open Road, 2014. Mosley generally writes noir, but his talent cannot be confined to a single genre. Jack Strong is a modern prometheus bent of discovering why, and how, he exists. Stephen King, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. NY: Scribner, 1999. A nine year old girl -- tall for her age -- steps off the Appalachian Trail to pee during a family outing and gets herself fantastically lost. Can her hero, the Red Sox’s closer, save her from the God of the Lost? Hilaire Belloc (pictures by B.T.B.), The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts, &c. NY: Dover, 1961. A re-publication of three books, this collection of monsters probably took/ as long to write/ as a bottle of absinthe/ will last into the night. / The rhymes are absurd and the morals are worse;/ not even the pictures can save this verse. Shauna Robinson, Banned Bookshop of Maggie Banks. Naperville, IN: Sourcebooks, 2022. Maggie is floating through life, and lands for a moment in Bell River, where her job is selling books published before 1968 in an author-legacy bookshop. Except the author’s legacy isn’t what everyone thinks, and there’s a market for new books. Alexa Martin, Better than Fiction. NY: Berkley, 2022. Drew gave up her travel photography career dream when she inherited her grandmother’s bookstore. But what if Grandma had other plans for Drew?