I love Parks and Recreation, and I think Leslie Knope is a heroine for the ages–fierce, funny, sweet, occasionally wrongheaded, but mostly blazing with the desire to make the world, or at least the small, quirky town of Pawnee, a fairer, healthier, and more beautiful and fun place. The woman behind Leslie’s defiant curls, bright eyes and mercurial expressions, Amy Poehler, is more flawed, more mixed-up–but, judging by Yes Please, also someone you’d want to go for a hike with, followed by dancing at the […]
Black sheep and stage fright
I can never decide whether Ngaio Marsh’s Died in the Wool (1945) has one of the silliest or best detective fiction titles I have ever seen, and there are a lot of bad ones out there (ahem, Charlaine Harris). The story seems to be constructed around the pun; the dead body of a lady sheep farmer and member of parliament in New Zealand is found rather mashed up in…a pack of wool. It’s like calling a book Bloody Mary and having the main character be […]
I would go out tonight but I haven’t got a stitch to wear
So I peer beyond the parapet of middlebrow interwar women’s writing and detective fiction to tackle something that’s very new but set in the very early nineties, a story about a girl who’s too big, too bright, and–at times–too brave. Moran’s pragmatic, if sometimes problematic, brand of feminism informs How to Build a Girl, which works to some extent as a companion piece to the early Adrian Mole books–it’s peculiarly British, and it’s about teenage lust, angst, dysfunctional families and communities, and poverty. It is […]
Meatballs and murder
This is the first book I’ve read in Andrea Camilleri’s series about the laconic and short-fused Inspector Montalbano, and I believe it’s somewhere in the middle of the long-running series. Inspector Montalbano is a man who is afraid of commitment and loves fine dining–which in Sicily means that there is very fine dining indeed, if you happen to like pasta and seafood. He has a tumultuous relationship with his girlfriend, and a relationship of mutual irritation with his colleagues and superiors–and there is something of […]
“From chaos climb with many a sudden gleam, / London, one moment fallen and forgot.”
I loved Westwood, and it’s increasingly rare that I love books at first read. I generally rather enjoy Stella Gibbons’s work (and I reviewed The Matchmaker here) but apart from Cold Comfort Farm, which I adore unequivocally, I’ve found Gibbons’s novels to be pleasant rather than stimulating. Westwood (1946) manages to be both comforting and sparkling, a Victorian novel of morality and marriage with a Regency comedy of manners at its heart, and sprinkled with the fragments of a modernist tale of disconnection, dysfunctional marriage, […]
“But screw your courage to the sticking-place”
It seems like Philippa Palfrey has everything–a scholarship to Cambridge (or Oxford, I can’t remember which), comfortably-off parents, health and beauty–but she feels that there’s a part of her selfhood missing. She’s always known she was adopted, but not who her birthparents were, or why she has very little memory before the age of eight. She sets out to find the answers, and discovers a legacy of blood and horrible crime. Meanwhile, Norman Scase is a milquetoastish middle-aged, verging on elderly, man, who made a deathbed promise […]