slemslempike | April books

Geek Drama - Holly Smale
All That Glitters - Holly Smale
Persuader - Lee Child
Five Little Pigs - Agatha Christie
Cybill Disobedience - Cybill Shepherd
The Enemy - Lee Child
Jump! - Jilly Cooper
Mapp and Lucia - EF Benson
One Shot - Lee Child
The Player's Boy - Antonia Forest
The Players and the Rebels - Antonia Forest

I quite like the Geek Model books, while finding the main character really rather irritating in her cluelessness, and the usual discombobulation of YA heroines who are surprised that their "unusual looks" are considered beautiful, or at least photogenic. It was rather awful when the students all came to her party because they thought there would be famous people, but at least she wasn't awfully stood up, which happens far too much for my liking.

I think I might have overdosed on Reacher, and definitely need to stop now so that I still enjoy number 20 when it comes out in September. (I remember Jen telling me that Lee Child said he would one day kill off Reacher, and I do wonder if he likes round numbers and this is the one.) Persuader is the one where he stages foiling a kidnapping and killing a cop to infiltrate a drug dealer's place. There is cold swimming. The Enemy is one of the retrospective ones where he's still in the army, and he has to work out why everyone's been moved around an where a briefcase is. One Shot is where a guy's been framed for shooting people at an NBC affiliate and it turns out it's a weird Russian thing.

Five Little Pigs is Poirot trying to retroactively solve a murder, after the daughter of a woman who was convicted of killing her husband comes to him about 20 years later to say she's sure her mothe was innocent. And so it proves, of course, after Poirot gets all the people who were originally there to write a letter. I was quite pleased for working out who it was relatively early on, and for identifying where some of the red herrings weren't leading to, but overall it wasn't a terribly exciting read.

The biggest takeaway from Cybill Disobedience was that Maryann and Cybill aren't really friends. And I know that's the whole point of acting, and that in fact expecting women co-stars to be best of besties is something that doesn't necessarily get put onto male actors (I remember some of the Sex and the City people noting this) BUT OH THEY WERE SO PERFECT AS FRIENDS and it is sad that the reality was so far from the TRUTH of this. It is a book that is at pains to be reasonable about people after she has been so vilified by co-workers. I can see that her insistence on adding in songs to Cybill any time she could would be intensely irritating, but that hardly seems reason enough.

Jump! was over 800 pages long. It kind of felt as though she'd written the book and then shoved in two sequels after it, and published it all together. And the sequels were mostly rehashes of the first book. It featured a reformed terrorist learning to be a jockey (who prays "to Allah" while we are left wondering about the addressee of everyone else's prayers, and refers to his girlfriend as "infidel" in bed, and is also approvingly lauded as the first Muslim to win the Gold Cup), lots and lots of phonetic spelling of Northern people who are not quaite the thing, dreadful Rupert and Billy and that lot, a horse called Mrs Wilkinson, and two rapes played for laughs, including on involving three adults forcing a fifteen year old into group sex while she sobs (in text) and the only reprisal is that a woman puts off sleeping with Rogue because he was involved and she was jealous.

Reading Mapp and Lucia straight afterwards was another shot of moneyed people behaving badly, but obviously in a rather different way. I had forgotten that the sea-going table comes in this book, I had somehow pictured it towards the end, perhaps even in a Holt continuation, and entirely forgotten about Major Benjy moving into Mallards so precipitously. It was an online loan from Edinburgh Libraries, and I hope that the others become available soon.

I was describing my feelings at having finished the two AF historicals to favourite colleague Anne, which are mostly that I love reading them so much that I can't bear that they're finished again, and also that I must leave it a longer time before I reread again so I don't spoil it for myself. For ages I only had access to The Players and the Rebels in my local library system (and of course counted myself very lucky indeed to have that), until I splashed out for a proper sort of inter-library loan of The Player's Boy aged about 16, I think, I found out the beginning. I get distracted by how wonderful the modern day Marlow books are and somehow forget to mention that the historicals are some of the most absorbing depictions of people and place I've ever come across. Nicholas Marlow has to leave his home village, aged 11, and through Kit Marlowe and the Earl of Southampton, ends up as the apprentice to Shakespeare, and the originator of roles including Kate in Henry V and Jessica in The Merchant of Venice. I highly, highly recommend them and am indeed in a position to help out those with e-readers.