l'shana tovah to all. we're over-due for a good and peaceful new year.
though you would never guess it from the books i've been reading lately. one thing you can say for murder mysteries is that, as a whole, they tend to end with everything neatly tied up--in a way that life does not. right now, i know that whatever we do in syria will be looked at as a disaster five years from now. our younger friends will be saying, 'why couldn't they have seen?' it's over and over again.
but in the ridiculously make believe world of daniel silva and 'the english girl,' gabriel allon, israeli spy and art restorer, his beautiful wife, and madeline hart, the english girl of the title skip from country to country, from continent to continent solving their problems. transportation is simple for them. i can't find a parking space in downtown canton!. these are sometimes more, sometimes less, the good guys. the bad guys are on the same trajectory, just ahead or just behind them. if you like a travelogue with your spy story, this is for you. you'll have to accept that when the russians search a house, they skip the bathroom where the good guy is hiding. otherwise he would have been killed. well, what's an author to do?i used to love these allon stories. you might still.
the novel is 473 pages, published by harper collins, and sells for $27.99.
'the english girl' is a story on a geographically macro level. sophie hannah's novel 'kind of cruel' is more on a micro level with a great deal of interiorized dialogue. here's another writer i have previously liked and don't this time around. could i be getting crotchety in my old age? hannah usually handles psychological drama extremely well, but in 'kind of cruel' she has a cast of characters, usually related to each other, that i don't care about and i don't see how any one else can either. in the other novels i have read by hannah she also uses micro subjects, household and family relations but holds her stories together with much stronger themes and clues than 'kind, cruel, kind of cruel.'
at 434 pages, perhaps the novel is too long for its story. it is published by g.p. putnam and costs $26.95.
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