The Bookslingers Bookslinging Podcast #24: Murder, murder, murder

Congratulations CLA Book Award winners! (Dear CLA, your website needs some work.)

It's TD Book Week, so check out bookweek.ca for events in your community.

If you don't know about WikiWars and the way female American Authors is being divided into "American Authors" and "American Women Authors," and you really enjoy being infuriated, you might want to check that out.

Puffin is releasing new editions of four beloved Canadian children's classics! Included are Awake and Dreaming by Kit Pearson, Mama's Going To Buy You A Mockingbird by Jean Little, Run by Eric Walters (which oops, neither of us has ever read) and Underground to Canada by Barbara Smucker. And none of them has an inexplicable buxom blonde on the front, so they're already a vast improvement on the last time somebody tried to revive a Canadian children's classic *coughAnneofGreenGablescough*.

This week's book is the latest and greatest (maybe? my feelings are confused) in the Flavia De Luce series by Alan Bradley: Speaking from among the Bones. If that title gives you the shivers, you're already in just the right mood for this book.

Books from this week's podcast:

• Speaking from among the Bones by Alan Bradley
• The Fire Chronicle by John Stephens
• Grave Mercy by Robin Lefevre
• Scarlet by Marisa Meyer
• The Madness Underneath - Shades of London #2 by Maureen Johnson
• Unspoken by Sarah Rees Brennan
• The Phryne Fisher series by Kerry Greenwood
• The Pigeon Pie Mystery by Julia Stuart

Your Morning Peruse

No doubt Miss Maiar is still recovering from the foaming-at-the-mouth bliss of watching Iron Man 3, so I am here to bring things back to the things that matter. Books.

And wait it out until I see it on Sunday.

The Edgar Award winners have been announced! 

WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO MY CAREEEEEEEER?

 Congrats to all the winners and the nominees.

I suppose this is just another reason to finally read Code Name: Verity. I know that it's going to be amazing but I am convinced that I am going to cry myself into an asthma attack.

Future Slings: Doll Bones by Holly Black

Holly Black is cool.

She has a fantastic scary-book writer name, she wrote The Spiderwick Chronicles and YA books that I am too wimpy to read, and she sometimes wears a hat.

Black is back for middle grade audience (essentially I have created this entire blog post just to type that) on May 7th with Doll Bones.

It looks like another welcome addition to the highly specialized genre of "Creepy Ass Evil Doll Books for Children."

Because that is the look of the doll that children can't wait to bring into their bedrooms

I hated dolls.

Especially dolls with eyeballs. A well-meaning grandparent gave a three-year-old me a baby doll that had eyes that opened and closed depending on how you held it. It was a lovely present (although, as an older sister, I never saw the point of baby dolls as I could grab the real thing from the crib and roll them around in the dirt). I christened the doll as "Harry."

And then screamed that it was evil and locked it in the closet.

Needless to say, I will be reading Doll Bones in the daytime with one hand around a cricket bat. In case the dolls come for me.

Other classics of the Creepy Ass Evil Doll Genre (in no particular order of creepiness) are:

The Time of the Ghost by Diana Wynne Jones - Dolls are trying to kill you and all your friends

Ragweed by Garth Nix - The moral of the story is, DOLLS ARE EFFING EVIL

The Dollhouse Murders by BettyRen Wright - Dolls are not only often gender stereotypes, they are also MURDERERS

Behind the Attic Wall by Sylvia Cassedy - THIS BOOK HAUNTED ME AS A CHILD. IT HAUNTS ME STILL.

Labour of... Gritted Teeth

Happy May Day, Bookslingers!

Not only is this a day where you can unabashedly dance around a maypole (as much as such a thing can be done unabashedly) but it is also a day to celebrate that fact that children are no longer legally allowed to work in mines in the US and Canada!

Labour has penchant for toques

This is the day where we salute those who fought for the  working day many of us "enjoy" today: eight hours of work, eight hours of pleasure/reading and eight hours of sleeping/reading.

And it was a fight. Peruse the Wikipedia article on History of Union Busting in the United States. And then this one.

So, having this in mind, you get a peak into the source of my ire towards Dear America: The Diary of Pringle Rose by Susan Campbell Bartoletti.

Ostensibly, this is a book about the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 that killed hundreds of people and destroyed great swaths of the city. Unfortunately, the historical tragedy takes second billing to Pringle Rose's bizarre struggle with unions and domestic melodrama.

Part of my issue with the book was not the writing, which is solid and engaging, but with whose story was being told. It really brought me back to Bill Campbell's critique of another book in the Dear America series which tells the story of Japanese American Internment through the eyes of a priveledged, white protagonist. Though not to the same extent, the misplaced protagonist displaced the story from where it should have been.

Pringle Rose is the daughter of a rich mine owner in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The workers in his mines are on strike for better conditions and the situation is quickly descending into violence. Pringle is a world away in Merrywood School for Girls in Philadelphia but her life is overturned when her parents are killed in a mysterious carriage accident - her brother Gideon (who has Down Syndrome) is the sole survivor.

When her uncle arrives with his inevitably cruel wife, Pringle doesn't know if she can go on. Her only bright spot in a life darkened by grief is Rabbit, the handsome miner who courts her with Alice in Wonderland quotes. But when her aunt finds the letter to her friend detailing their little romance, Pringle decides to run away with her brother to Chicago to start a new life.

Seems like a hopping place... Hop right into the river, am I right, fleeing survivors?

She finds work as a nursemaid in the home of a labour newspaper publisher. But when their young male relative comes to visit, everything changes.

Oh, and Chicago burns to the ground.

So, why so grumpy Miss Corene?

Well, maybe because:

- Does Pringle really intellectually engage with the struggle of the workers? Nope. They are just a mass of threat to her family. Pringle hears about the working conditions and the mining disasters but doesn't sympathize or seek to understand what the unions are asking for. Why add the details to the story if you aren't going to engage with them?


- Why not tell the story from the point of view from an immigrant coming to the city? Or a child from one of those mines that Pringle's father owns who decides to leave that awful life for the city? Why did this story have to be told from a place of privilege and money? Does that help the story of the Great Chicago Fire? Pringle looses very little during the fire but what about the people whose lives were destroyed? Why not a story about picking up the pieces after the fire?

- Every person involved with a union is either charmingly childlike in their understanding of how the world works in compared with Pringle or treacherous, unreliable, dangerous jerks. That is all. Gwen and Peter Pritchard open their house to Pringle and her brother. They give them both lodging and employment. But the are portrayed as simplistic.However, Gwen's brother is revealed to be HIGHLIGHT FOR SPOILERS the murdering murderer of Pringle's parents and Rabbit. Rabbit is a murderer and he is the only person in the book actually involved in strike. FOR REALZ. So when this is revealed, the Pritchards kick Pringle to the curb and she wanders into the Great Fire to work out her sadness. And the Pritchards are portrayed as the villains. Damn working people sending rich girls to fiery deaths!

Let's all read Lyddie by Katherine Patterson instead.

Fighting for your right not to die of byssinosis

And Flesh & Blood So Cheap: The Triangle Fire and Its Legacy.

Grumpily yours,
Miss Corene

OMG FLAVIA (Speaking from Among the Bones)

GUYS DID YOU KNOW THERE WAS A NEW FLAVIA DE LUCE BOOK?

I try to keep up, but as I am not, like Corene, immersed in an environment when the publication dates of all and sundry new tween and YA novels come flying constantly at my face, I often miss them entirely, even when they are awesome amazing incredible clever murder mystery books about genius chemist girl detectives like the most excellent Flavia De Lucie in Alan Bradley's new Speaking from Among the Bones.

This time, I was unaware until some weeks ago when I saw a girl on the SeaBus reading it, and immediately rushed out to buy it.

And then all the bookstores were closed, so the next day I tried to get it out of the library, but all the copies were checked out and I am too impatient for waitlists about 60% of the time.

So I bought it at a tiny local shop on Vancouver Island while visiting my mother.

BUT THE POINT IS I have read it, it's amazing, and guys, this post could be full of so many spoilers, but I'm going to restrain myself because this book is slated to be Book of the Week in our next podcast. Cut for maybe, sort of, vaguely, potentially spoilers.

Your Morning Peruse

So, in case you weren't aware, there is a book called I Could Pee on This: And Other Poems By Cats.

Yep.

That's a thing.

In honour of this, NPR has a delectable comic tribute to cats and the poets who loved them.

No surprise, Margaret "Momma can get nasty!" Atwood makes the list with this painfully true quote: "I have a lot of cats. What else can you do with a B.A. these days?"

I think she may have a shot as a professional goalie.

Your Morning Peruse

Good morning, Bookslingers!

After a brief break (mostly to recover from the new Flavia de Luce book but more on that later), we have your mid-morning peruse.

Via Flavorwire a fantastic gallery of 25 Vintage Photos of Librarians Being Awesome.

Possibly the most awesome photo of the bunch is this one:


The caption reads: "The Librarian at Tuskegee and his assistant, 1910".

SOMEONE WRITE THIS BOOK NOW.

These two look like they got up to some cracking crime-fighting adventures between shelf reading and storytime.

Your Morning Peruse

Sebastian Faulks  is writing an authorized Jeeves and Wooster sequel.

Let me express my feelings on the subject through the dramatic stylings of classical-trained actor, Alan Rickman.

Where'd You Go Bernadette?

So, in short, Where'd You Go Bernadette by Maria Semple was not the book for me.

It was the cover for me.

Looks at those giant black sunglasses! The weird fringe! Not wild about the blow up doll mouth though.

This is the story of Bee, her Microsoft-drone father, their aspirational neighbor with a topiary fascination Audrey, and her mother, Bernadette Fox.

In the form of letters, emails, transcripts and newsletters, Bee tries to unravel the mystery of her mother and where she may have disappeared. This will not be easy.

Bernadette is a bundle of hates. She hates the gnat-like parents at the progressive Galer Street School with their classes on Expressive Movement. She hates the fact that Washington State is adjacent to Idaho. She loathes Seattle with its mountains and rain and clouds and pitching-in and yuppies and Microsoft and people. Bernadette has outsourced her entire life to Manjula in India.

To the earth-friendly hybird driving parents, she is a aberration with no sense of community. To her husband, she is not the woman he married. For Audrey, she is the owner of the blackberry bushes that are threatening her perfect Prospective Parent Lunch to attract Mercedes parents to the school.

For Bee, Bernadette is someone who always has her back. She sings to Beatles songs and is calm in a crisis and chaos in regular life. So when Bernadette disappears without saying a word to her, Bee knows that she has to track her down and bring her back home.

Like I said, this is not the book for me. The story of a girl tracking down her mother and a woman struggling against the expectations of a ridiculous, accessory-based society? Awesome.

However, that's only half the book.

The other half is a biting satire of Microsoft and the Subaru-parents of Seattle. Which pretty much sailed over my head. As someone who is at best indifferent and at worst, will walk away from any conversation that surrounds Seattle and Microsoft, this didn't connect. Satire depends on recognition - a common base upon which to launch your barbs. I didn't feel like Semple brought us into the world enough for us to laugh along with her at the ridiculousness of the Galer Street School parents and their marimba demonstrations.

Maybe because of this, the whimsy in the book felt a little forced. All the slavish TED Talk admiration and Victims Against Victimization groups and Antarctica cruises just didn't connect.

But what did connect was Bernadette. She is a tough character. Fueled by petty spite and smug superiority, she navigates her world with a mix of dismissive selfishness and all-consuming rage at small Seattle things (like her day-long rants about five-way stops). But as you read further, you beginning to understand the root of her unbalance, of her frustration about everything around her.

You might not like Bernadette but you do care where she is going.

Congrats to our Plain Scandal giveaway winners!

Many, many thanks to everyone who entered our A Plain Scandal and beeswax candle giveaway. 


Our winners, as chosen randomly by Rafflecopter, are Suzan F and PJ! Look out for our missive in your inbox.

Again, thank you to everyone who entered the contest and I hope that you all pick up Amanda Flower's book from your local bookstore or library. It's a perfect anecdote for the February blues.