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This review has an odd start, but bear with me, please. I will talk about a book—even if I'm not starting there.

I never liked the movie Reds. I've only seen it once, in a theater at the time of its release, and I may give someday give it another chance, but I dunno. What I disliked about it was recognizing scenes from other "sweeping masterpieces." Oh, look! It's the red-lighted scene where Rhett and Scarlet part in Gone With the Wind. Hey! There's a railroad scene like in Doctor Zhivago. Oops. Back to Gone With the Wind again. I had a similar reaction to Kate Carlisle's Homicide in Hardcover, which bills itself as "First in a New Series!" (Be still my heart!)

Carlisle's female detective, Brooklyn (don't ask!), has the unusual career of restoring books, but in spite of that, I kept getting whiffs of other female detectives. Brooklyn shares a taste for fast food with Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone. Like Sharon McCrumb's Elizabeth McPherson, Brooklyn strives for a light, comical touch. Elizabeth, however, succeeds far more often.

So why'd I keep reading? Two reasons. 1) Early on Brooklyn meets and actively dislikes a cop. Ah, I thought, trite romance plot line number 42, category c. That one turned out just as expected. 2) At about that same time in the book, another character appeared, and I thought, "Ah, the murderer." On that one I was wrong, but then I had absolutely no clue the "bad guy" was restoring a family reputation after a relative shamed the name by saving Jews from concentration camps. Talk about left field.

Four specifics:

1) To give grudging credit where it is due: "This was why I owned my own business. I didn't work well in captivity." (page 83) Nicely turned phrase, also nicely descriptive. But let's make a comparison. The same sentences could apply to Kinsey Malone, but Sue Grafton never has to come out and say it. She shows us through Kinsey's behavior.

2) Another not-even-grudging credit: Brooklyn wakes up with a sense of doom and blames her mood on "the pint of Coney Island Waffle Cone Crunch I'd consumed last night while watching Survivor: East L.A." (page 100) Unqualified thumbs-up for the TV show. Here's hoping that when it actually happens, Maxine Walters can be a contestant.

3) And then Carlisle made me angry. Brooklyn is working on the restoration of a copy of Goethe's Faust and says, "The book was written in the form of a play with the characters' names written out before their speeches." (page 168) Hey, Kate, think maybe it was written in the form of a play because it is a … play? Maybe there are readers who don't know Faust is a play or how a play is written, but you've pretty much told me I'm not part of your target audience. And tell me: is your knowledge about book restoration as valid as your knowledge about drama? Just askin'.

4) "My appetite for food was history and trust me, that never happens." (page 197) Except for right now perhaps?

I don't have enough thumbs to turn down for this one. Trust me.

I declare myself completely in love with the Dave Robicheaux novels by James Lee Burke. And I'm not talking about any fly-by-night, love-at-first-sight thing. It's been gradual. I wasn’t crazy about the series at first; I kept comparing it to Ed McBain's 87th precinct novels and Dave Robicheaux's stories came up short. Now I'm more than willing to admit there's room on the literary scene for both of them.

Pegasus Descending takes Burke's usual collection of miscreant characters on their usual journey of debauched mayhem, but more and more I realize that what I like about the Dave Robicheaux series goes beyond plot and character. I'm in love with Burke's view of our world and how he frequently expresses it so beautifully. So here goes:

1) "I think as white people we know deep down inside ourselves the exact nature of the deeds we or our predecessors committed against people of color. I think we know that if our roles were reversed, if we had suffered the same degree of injury that was imposed upon the Negro race, we would not be particularly magnanimous when payback time rolled around. I think we know that in all probability we would cut the throats of the people who had made our lives miserable." (pages 75-76) Yes! Yes! Yes! I don't care whether your forefathers owned slaves or not. Slavery and racism have affected this country much more than many white people are ready to admit.

2) From a young, black character: "Hey, you the man called me a pimp. I sell dope, but I ain't no pimp." (page 111) Until I read that, I never really thought about ranking different types of vice. But doing so makes sense.

3) About that same character: "His mama is at M.D. Anderson in Houston. She's had every type of cancer there is. Monarch ain't tole you that?" (page 119) A beginning acting lesson is that you learn about your character by what he says, what others say about him and what he does. Those three sentences changed my view of Monarch on more than one level.

4) "You cracking wise now?" (page 122) Until these books and NYPD Blue I was only familiar with the noun wisecrack. I like the concept expressed as a verb.

5) IMHO Burke does not handle foreshadowing well. "But the hand had already been dealt, for both Bello and me and his son as well. None of us, at that moment, could have guessed at the outcome." (page 124) Ultimately Bello winds up destitute, his son dead, and Dave busy trying to find some meaning in all of it. So? Those outcomes are not all that different from what happens to other Burke characters. Since the outcomes are not surprising, the foreshadowing proves disappointing—not a reaction a writer should want from a reader, it seems to me.

6) Sorry, Mr. Burke. That's wrong. I know 'cause that’s what I used to think. Then Doug Thompson on capitolhillblue.com kept attributing it to H.L. Mencken. I knew he was wrong so I googled it. Guess what! Thompson's right. You and I, Mr. Burke, were wrong.

7)
I like people to whom the answer—see 1) above—is never THE ANSWER.

8)
The above broke my heart. If you ever meet anyone—or anything—that has that kind of trust, you do nothing that might mess with it.

I did once. By accident, of course. I was playing Old Maid with a four-or-five-year-old, and I won. In my defense, how was I supposed to know his parents always let him win? When I was five, no one let me win. (Right, Martha, and we all know how well-adjusted AND SECURE you turned out to be.) Anway, I didn’t know the child-always-wins rule, I won, and the look on the little boy's face told me what I had done. I had collapsed an underpinning of his world. Kids didn't always win 'cause they were cute and little, and—somehow—his parents had misrepresented that world. I tried to tell him the rule was best-two-out-of-three, but he wasn’t buying it. I knew the damage was done, and I've felt guilty ever since.

9) Dave disses Monarch, sums up the conversation and ends with: "Even worse, I had been deliberately cruel, an act that under any circumstances is inexcusable." (page 307) See 8) above. At least my cruelty wasn't deliberate.

10) "But I knew Ragusa (he of the tube of roach paste) belonged to that group of human beings whose pathology is always predictable. By reason of either genetic defect, environmental conditioning or a deliberate decision tojoin themselves at the hip with the forces of darkness, they incorporate into their lives a form of moral insanity that is neither curable nor subject to analysis. They enjoy inflicting pain, and view charity and forgiveness as signals of both weakness and opportunity. The only form of redemption they understand is force. The victim who believes otherwise condemns himself to the death of a thousand deaths." (page 312) Hey! Evil does exist. I thought it might.

11) About a group of young people planning "the takedown of a casino": "They're all amateurs. They get up each day and pretend they're country singers or boxers or Hollywood screenwriters. It's like being in a roomful of schizophrenics." (page 326) Think that's different from being in a room with any other people? We're all just very good at protecting each others' pipedreams. Or rationalizations.

12) A character asks Dave to let go of the past. He can't because "we're the sum total of what we've done and where we've been." (page 325) Are we? Yeah. I guess so.

13) "How do you explain to a man whose daughter has killed herself that there is no 'they,' that the pitiful guilt-driven man who raped her was a victim himself, that the fraternity boys who gangbanged her couldn't think their way out of a wet paper bag, that Slim Bruxal (all-around bad guy) had acted with a degree of conscience and tried to return her safely home? How do you deal with the moral authority of ignorance?" (pages 472-3) Empathetic Martha: Oh, those poor misguided people. Schoolmarm Martha: Please, don’t tell me those people vote.

14) The afterward in Pegasus Descending foreshadows the next Dave Robicheaux book. "… all the events since the death of Yvonne Darbonne (the suicide) seemed to telescope into the distant past. Hurricane Katrina, the nightmare New Orleans had feared for years, struck the city with an intensity that was greater than the destructive force of the nuclear weapons visited upon the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. … It is no exaggeration to say that the southern rim of Louisiana is gone." (pages 485, 486) Even as I await reading that book with dread (Burke does so love that region of the country), I take solace in my opinion that foreshadowing is not his strong suit.

One fish to go. Sigh.

PS Tripod survives Pegasus Descending; Regusa doesn’t.

Not sure where this link should go but - a friend of mine introduced me to an amazing on-line graphic novel/comic (not sure which) - it had me hooked immediately and I'm not particularly a fan of the genre.

This one is a fantasy, with references to music and folk literature. It's in the post-slavery South, but the time is indefinite. I can't begin to explain it; I just think it's really well-done and worth taking a look.

Bayou

How do I start it?
Martha, the dummy

Close the "tips" screen you'll see when you click on the link; then the controls are in a bar across the bottom of the screen. The right arrow turns the page. (Sorry; I should have been clear - this is not a video, and you must turn the pages yourself.)

My next four posts here are "catching up," the books I read but didn't report on while I was limited to a desktop computer. They're not in any specific order.

Until page 37 The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski was horrendously boring. I couldn’t wait until page 50 so I could put it down. Then, on page 38, I was hooked. And I stayed hooked until 50-ish pages until the end. Then I couldn’t wait until I finished and could PUT IT DOWN! But pages 38 through 512? Wow!

Basically, it’s your standard boy-meets-dog story, seasoned with tinges of Hamlet. I’ll let the overall go with that and concentrate on specifics.

1) There’s no particular quote connected with this specific, but Edgar Sawtelle is one of the few books containing a series of events so gripping that I literally HAD to turn a few pages ahead to see what happened. From me that’s high praise. I’m pretty sure I can count the number of books where that has happened on one hand—excepting the Nancy Drew series, of course. (Blame those on youth.)

2) Edgar Sawtelle’s father dies as the result of an accident. While trying to help him make sense of the event, his mother says, “Things always change. Things would be changing right now if your father was alive, Edgar. That’s just life. You can fight it or you accept it. The only difference is, if you accept it, you get to do other things. If you fight it, you’re stuck in the same spot forever.” (page 228) Yep. I’ll buy that. And try to remind myself of it—at least twice a day.

3) Interesting comment on animals, IMHO at least: (Almondine is one of Edgar’s dogs) “Wind she distrusted. Wind could come into the house and slam doors.” (page 262) I’ve noticed that about my cats. Something feels different, but nothing looks different. Then, a door slams. Yeah. Scary.

4) Hamlet element: a bit from Trudy’s (Edgar’s mother) POV. “Things with Claude (Edgar’s uncle) had just, well, happened one morning—a breakdown on her part, a strange, momentary kindness on his. It hadn’t felt wrong; afterward she’d felt as though a great burden had been lifted—as though she’d been given permission to carry on with a different life. What Edgar didn’t understand was that was that it was all going to be a compromise from then on out. This wasn’t something she could say, not to Edgar, not to anyone, but she knew it was true. They’d (Trudy and Edgar’s dad) had the real thing, the golden world, the paradise, the kingdom on earth, and you didn’t get that twice. When the second chance came, you took it for what it was worth.” (italics his) (page 299) The above sure provided me with a new view of Hamlet’s mother.

5) An absolutely wonderful sketch of a minor character—Ida, the clerk in the general store.
Of course the description is about way more than Ida Paine. That’s why it’s good.

6) A farmer befriends Edgar. “From the look on his face I could see he was one of the lucky ones, one of those people who like doing what they’re good at. That’s rare. When you see that in a person, you can’t miss it.” (page 416) I think I’m one of the lucky ones. I can at least say that if I haven’t liked what I was doing, I moved on. That’s comforting.

7) And there a chapter from Almondine’s POV that will tear your heart out.

Do I recommend? Yes, if you like long books that start slowly. Will I read anything else by Wroblewski? Only if it’s shorter. Same length? Maybe. Longer? No way in hell.

I just finished "The State of Jones: The Small Southern County That Seceded From the Confederacy" by Sally Jenkins & John Stauffer. I actually saw her on the Daily Show one night and decided to check the book out.

Jones County is located in Southern Mississippi. My husband was raised in Mississippi and his immediate response was "they didn't teach me that in school" to which I said "as if they would".

Either way, it was quite an interesting book. While Jones County did not really secede completely, a large population of the men resident there remained loyal to the North and left The Conferate army at the first opportunity.

There are arguments, of course, about Jenkins' and Stauffer's accounts, as another book claims there were almost no men who deserted the confederacy. I find that somewhat hard to believe as it's fairly well stated in most civil war histories I've read that there were deserters on both sides.

Either way, whatever the history, it was a pretty good read.

Thanks, Siannan, I've been wondering how that book would turn out.

The South lost.

But you knew.