Blitzkreig Book Reviews

I've been reading a lot of things lately that have me considering switching preferred genres. I'm considering taking a sabbatical from mysteries and either becoming a Smart Bitch romance junkie or a faux-intellectual and reading the classics and modern fiction to clear my mind. I should take to writing, what with the spanky new computer and all.

But for the moment, I'll offer up some brief reviews:

Detour For Meg--Helen Diehl Olds

Wow, what a glimpse at what feminism has saved us from comes between the covers of this 1958 teen novel. Meg's family is scraping by (mom works at the library, so we know she's not making the big bucks) and her brother Robert is trying to win a scholarship with a fabulous physics notebook. Because they don't have enough money to send both kids to college and it's more important for Robert to go than Meg, and they'd have to pay to send Meg. And Meg is apparently not smart enough to be applying for scholarships herself. Stop and step away from the computer while your head explodes. Good. Anyway, the fabulous physics notebook gets lost during a car accident, which means everyone has to take the new driver's ed course, even Meg, who along with being nice and dumb is afraid to drive. She's not afraid to snoop around though, and this leads her to making new friends, mastering her fear of the car and the damage it can do, and becoming a candy stripper. Yes, everything turns out okay in the end. Whew! I was worried.

Mona Lisa Overdrive--William Gibson

Maybe I'll go back to science fiction. I have a longtime loathing of fantasy, but I do like science fiction. Right, so this book is a continuation of several concepts from Neuromancer, which I read 10 years ago in college. And I just got rid of my copy so I couldn't get the full effect of Gibson's vision. But this is an enjoyable romp, well-written, just not emotionally involving in terms of characters. Wait, that's the problem I always have with science fiction.

Babs: A Sub-Deb--Mary Roberts Rinehart

Stop me before I read more vintage fiction! Because it's really only good for the lines like "How pleasant it is to lie thus, having wine jelatine and squab and so on, and wearing a wrist watch with twenty-seven diamonds, and mother using the vibrator on my back to make me sleepy, etcetera." (341) Yeah, I snickered. Want to make something of it?

Snapshot--Garry Disher

I don't think I've mentioned how much I love Soho Press's Soho Crime imprint. Love, love, love. I'd work there. Anyway, for those of you who haven't heard, Soho Crime is an imprint devoted to the best current and reprinted crime fiction coming outside the US or written by US authors and set outside the US. The stories are all gritty and realistic portraits of life in each setting and culture. This is the latest in Garry Disher's series about cops on the Mornington Peninsula of Australia, which is a whole lot like various shabby, rural US locales. Meaning people are poor, crime happens, and its usually because of lost tempers and trying to get by. Hal Challis is chief inspector on the local force, and he's got a difficult past--his wife and her lover tried to kill him, and until she killed herself she was doing 8-25 in the pen. Whoops. That's what I'm talking about in terms of petty crime. Anyway, the rest of the force have their own problems and we get little glimpses of their lives as they try to figure out why the unpopular, unscrupulous, and mean psychologist who was the daughter-in-law of Police Superintendent got shot out in the middle of nowhere.

I like crime stories best when it's something I can identify with. There's a huge trend at the moment of the quirk driving the characters--it seems like every book I pick up is fascinated with serial killers, or jokey weirdness, and no attention is paid to human emotion and motivation. And frankly, that's where crime fiction's true resonance comes from. It's a genre of social commentary on our culture and what drives our actions, and the stress of righting a social order that has fallen apart.