The Mystery of the Sequel

Truly Devious by Maureen JohnsonNew York, NY : Katherine Tegen Books, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2018.
420 p. : ill., map ; 21 cm..

This well written, well-plotted mystery got plenty of good reviews - and it is interesting and fun to read - but I just didn't love it.  Okay, confession, I'm not a huge mystery fan to begin with so that has to figure into the mix.  However, I think there is more to it than that.  I just didn't feel like there was much "at stake" in this boarding school for elite thinkers mystery.

The story involves students who are at an elite, all-expenses paid boarding school founded by an extremely wealthy man in the 1930s who, not long after opening the school, lost his wife and daughter to kidnappers.  Additionally, a student at the school was also killed around that time.

Some students come to the school to write novels, direct plays, create art, or just be brilliant and eccentric, but one student is there with her project being to solve the kidnapping/murder case which has never been solved.  In the course of the novel, we get to know this modern sleuth, Stevie Bell, and witness new and terrible mysteries evolve in real time.

So what's wrong with that?  Well, nothing really.  I just found that I didn't care all that much, and never really had that reader's bond with a character which (for me) is one of the joys of reading - even escapist reading.

I think I would have been satisfied if instead of this character bond, I had at least had the satisfaction of a plot ingeniously and surprisingly tied up.  But that is precisely what does not happen, and my cynical guess is because Johnson's publishers insisted that a trilogy (yes that dreaded rainmaker of YA lit) was necessary.  So hold your breath, and wait for book 2 and book 3 of the "Truly Devious" mysteries to have all your questions answered.  Or if you have other reads on your shelf demanding attention, just shrug and say, "Whatever happens eventually, is a mystery to me."

Harsh Light

The Radium Girls by Kate Moore
Naperville, Ill. : Sourcebooks, [2018]
xviii, 477 p. : ill. ; 214 cm.

This is a fantastic book that ties several important periods of US history together - WWI, The Roaring Twenties and The Great Depression.  It also has a local interest in that half the drama of the story is in Ottawa, IL about an hour and forty-five minute drive from here in Urbana.

But it's a tough book, too.  It's the story of literally murderous corporate exploitation and dishonesty that shortened the lives of hundreds of women who worked in the factories where the luminous (and dangerously radioactive) radium was painted on wartime instrument panels and on civilian-use watch dials.  The deaths of several of the women featured in the book are slow, agonizing, and terrible to read about.  What makes the book inspiring, though, is the courage, grit and determination of the victimized women as they take on the companies that used and abused them - and eventually win significant victories.

This book has a lot of heart. The author succeeds in putting the reader into the lives of the women who worked in the radium-dial industry - capturing the initial excitement of well-paid employment for young women of the twenties and the freedom it gave them, and humanizing the gruesome and tragic illnesses that stalked these young women several years after they started the work.

The book is a great lesson about the dangers of unregulated corporate behavior, the power of unified resistance, and the importance of family, friends, community and the media in taking on powerful foes. It's a long, but very worthy read for anyone interested in US history.



    

Amazing Amazing

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
New York : Picador, c2000.
639 p. ; 21 cm.

Michael Chabon's novel won a 2001 Pulitzer Prize and I challenge a reader to not enjoy this  wonderful tale.  It's a gloriously written tale of the starting in the late 1930s and continuing into the 1950s and centers on the golden age of comic books in New York City, but also embraces the Holocaust, Harry Houdini, The Golem of Prague, Brooklyn, gay life, and of course love, friendship and family.

Though we have this book in the UHS library collection, I read it on my cell phone - accessing it through our library's eBook collection.  It's not the first book that I've read on my phone, but it was great to be able to carry it around in my pocket while traveling during the summer.

Fortunately, The Amazing Adventures seems to be doing quite well.  I looked for a copy at my local public libraries and all 6 copies were checked out.  It's a great book and I will definitely recommend it to any student looking for a rewarding literary fiction read from a contemporary author - especially a reader who has an interest in world of comic book writing and publishing back when vast majorities of young Americans regularly read comic books. 

Harsh Life - Lush Art

Black Boy by Richard Wright
New York : HarperPerennial ModernClassics, 2006.
xiv, 419, 14 p. : ill. ; 21 cm.

One of the joys of being a librarian is walking the stacks and seeing a book that keeps calling out to you, "Read me." It must have been about 8 or 9 years ago that I finally read Wright's stunning 1940 novel, Native Son.  Since then his autobiography has been sitting on the shelf demanding to be read, and so I finally have done it.  It is amazing!

What I loved about Wright's book is the way it puts you completely in the mind and heart of a young African American male growing up in the Jim Crow south in the early twentieth century.  It's especially interesting in that Wright is never able to learn to hide his thoughts from white people - even when he tries, and he realizes that - in the racist South - could easily cost him his life.

It is also a wonderful book for anyone who is an artist or loves art, but really has no idea why.  There are times as a boy, where he writes just for the sheer delight of using language.  It is something that almost none of his peers understands or appreciates.  The book is also tribute to the stubborn grace of someone clinging to his integrity while being threatened by the larger society with its violent racism, and his more intimate social circle where his assertion of his right to think independently is ridiculed and punished by teachers, guardians, religious people, and family.

The book breaks down into two major sections - his life in the Jim Crow south (Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee) and his move to Chicago where he gets involved in the heavily Stalinist, intellectually repressive Communist Party.  Both sections are very interesting, but my guess is that many students would especially like the first half.

I would definitely recommend this book to students.  It is a fascinating, well written book.