Yesterday I was outside perusing my newly refreshed gardens, which surround the front, side, and back of my house, daydreaming about what types of perennials I could plant to attract more pollinators.
Nature is amazing! Note: the black spot to the lower left of the caterpillar is a stain on my siding.
While thinking about milkweed, wild geraniums, wild columbine, and plants whose names I’ve yet to learn, something on the siding caught my eye. It was a caterpillar — like nothing I’d ever seen before.
Adhering to my policy of not touching insects or critters, for both their safety and mine, I left it alone. But I did run back into my house to grab my camera, which also doubles as my phone. I snapped a few pictures, and submitted one of them to my iNaturalist app. The results were simply stated as “unknown.”
To me the caterpillar looks like something one of my young grandkids would engineer out of odd pieces of Legos or draw and color on a blank sheet of paper, producing something otherworldly and fantastical, but in no way realistic.
So, I am asking if any of my readers knows what type of caterpillar this is and what it turns into.
I’m back with an update on my quest to read all of the Peter McGarr mysteries by Bartholomew Gill. I just finished The Death of an Irish Tradition, Bartholomew Gill’s fourth Peter McGarr mystery. So far, this one is my favorite. (And I really liked the first three.)
What is this book about?
It’s 1979, maybe a year earlier, in Dublin, Ireland. A sixty-five-year-old woman is murdered, starting a concentric ripple that encompasses the Irish Republican Army, one of McGarr’s childhood friends, a priest, a young and gifted pianist, a young drug addict, and a landed gentleman. Over the years, among these people, hate, greed, lust, revenge, snobbery, envy, jealousy, bigotry, and secrecy have combined and simmered like a Dublin coddle left to stew in a hot oven. But unlike the coddle stew, which can be pulled from the heat before burning in its own juices, there is no reprieve from the emotions that consume the characters in Gill’s fourth novel. Peter McGarr and his constabulary must sort through the tangled lives and motives of the characters, hoping to solve one murder and attempting to prevent others. The story culminates at the Dublin Horse Show, a long-standing tradition with ties to the hated British aristocracy and their rule of Ireland, which has left it a divided country.
Why did I like this book?
I love the dialogue. Gill knows when to let his characters speak and when to have them shut up. Sometimes what’s left unsaid resounds like a clap of thunder before a battering storm arrives. I find Gill’s characters interesting. And while his stories are far from rosy, I like to think that all officers everywhere, represented by the likes of McGarr and his constabulary, are doing their best to provide justice. Gill’s mysteries aren’t cozy, but they’re also not graphically violent, which I know is a relative statement depending on one’s view about what is and isn’t too violent. If it helps, I don’t like drawn out visceral violence, but I also don’t like overly cozy mysteries. I’d place Gill’s books in the middle of the visceral-to-cozy scale. (But that’s relative too.)
The murders in Gill’s books don’t always directly involve members of the Irish Republican Army; nevertheless, the IRA’s presence and its role in The Troubles of the 1960s and 70s form an undertow in Gill’s novels, whether in the background or the forefront. The IRA is shrouded in secrecy and so woven into the fabric of Irish life that McGarr approaches each murder as if it could be connected to the IRA and The Troubles in Northern Ireland, which also spills into the Republic of Ireland. It’s mostly an unspoken theme, but when reading McGarr’s books, I’m struck by the deep and lasting damage that imperialism and colonialism inflict on societies.
I think, in part, I’m intrigued by Gill’s novels because I remember the turmoil in which his stories are set. During the 1970s, I was a pre-teen and teenager, and I watched the violence in Northern Ireland play out on the TV news. I read about it in Time and Newsweek, which came to our house in the mail. I remember the bombs and the deaths of children, women, and men, along with the deaths of British Army and Irish Republican Army members. Reporters talked about Irish Catholics, Irish Protestants, self-rule, spies and traitors, and the English who’d lived for generations in Belfast but identified as British instead of Irish. When I was seventeen, I traveled to London and read signs on buses and the Underground, cautioning people not to touch unattended packages and to immediately report them to the conductor. The IRA had been setting off bombs in England. At the time, I thought the violence would never end because each death brought about a retribution.
Reading Gill’s novels has sparked my curiosity, and I want to learn more about the time of The Troubles. While reading The Death of an Irish Tradition, I received Rachael Hanel’s latest newsletter. [Hanel is a wonderful nonfiction author. To read about her and her books, click here.] Hanel recently spent time in Belfast, and she recommended some books covering The Troubles. I want to read at least one of these books before I read the next Peter McGarr mystery:
More thoughts about Gill’s books from a standpoint of craft . . .
Part of my interest in Gill’s mysteries is to see if and how he will develop his characters and their storylines as his series progresses. I hope Gill will present a broader view of his detectives that includes more of their personal lives. I appreciate a writer whose crime-solving characters develop and change throughout a series of books. To me it’s as important as a good plot. It becomes the mystery of a detective’s life set within the mystery of the crime.
You might remember I mentioned there was so much drinking in Gill’s first three books that I worried I’d wake up with a hangover. I questioned how Peter McGarr could even function, let alone solve crimes, considering the amounts of whiskey and beer he drank. In this book, while McGarr hasn’t come close to being a teetotaler, he drinks less. I wonder if Gill came under criticism from readers about his portrayal of the Irish as heavy drinkers.
There are still no female detectives. However, a woman has been hired as an office temp, and unlike the detectives, she knows her way around the new-fangled computers, which are starting to be used by police departments to access databases to help them gather pertinent information to assist in solving crimes. None of the male police officers in the department are interested in learning the new technology, but they all appreciate the new woman’s computer skills and her ability to quickly supply them with useful information.
McGarr’s wife, Noreen, is back, but her role in this story is small, like in the previous books. Noreen has one telling scene that gives readers a hint as to McGarr’s feelings for his petite, intelligent, beautiful, feisty wife. And I want more Noreen in the stories.
[For a Dublin Coddle recipe,click here. This stew has a cameo appearance in the book.]
[If you’re interested in the tangled story of the Irish and the British, I recommend the following novels: Trinity by Leon Uris, published in 1976, and In This Bright Future: A DC Smith Investigation, published in 2021. While these have mostly fictional characters and some fictionalized story lines, there is a lot of history in both of them. I read Trinity, a sweeping epic work that follows the Irish-British conflict during the late 1800s and early 1900s. I read it in the early 1990s, and some of its characters still haunt me. About a year ago, I listened to In This Bright Future. It’s an engaging story that takes the aging DC Smith back to Belfast, compelling him to solve a decades’ old mystery, while reliving his days in the British Army when he was stationed in Belfast and working undercover to infiltrate the Irish Republican Army. By the way, I recommend any of Grainger’s DC Smith mysteries. Also, Exodus and Armageddon by Uris are excellent.]
[I love it when I’m reading one book, and it makes me think of another book. For example, I’m listening to Jeeves and the Wedding Bells: An Homage to P. G. Wodehouse by Sebastian Faulks, which is set in England. At one point a character refers to another character as being judged like a horse at an Irish Horse Show — in other words: scrupulously and critically. I smiled because after reading Gill’s The Death of an Irish Tradition, I understood the reference on a deeper level.]
On the first day of my grandkids’ summer break, I took them to a local coffee shop. I ordered them fancy fizzy soda concoctions and let them each pick out a piece of bakery. I ordered myself a small latte and no bakery. The time with my grandkids — priceless. The cost of the trip to the coffeehouse — more than five happy meals at McDonald’s. I had sticker shock when the clerk gave me the total, but I acted like I spent that much in coffee shops all the time.
I handed the clerk my credit card and refused to think about the cost. Afterall, the soda concoctions were works of performance art served in 16-ounce glasses, mixed with fun flavors like watermelon, pineapple, cherry, coconut, and strawberry and topped with whipped foam. I almost wished I had ordered a fancy fizzy soda. As the clerk handed the first soda to one of my grandkids, she said, “Stir the soda very gently with the straw a few times. If you stir it too fast, it will overflow the glass. Then drink a little bit of the soda, and mix it some more.”
We were five minutes into sipping, noshing, and gabbing when out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a slightly built, older man walk into the shop. Dressed from head to toe in dark colors, he carried a small black grip, which he placed on a chair. He picked up a large dinner-plate-sized planter filled with succulents and moved it to a table where a younger man sat eating a bowl of food. This didn’t bother the younger man, who wore headphones and watched his computer screen.
The older man removed his black jacket and slipped on a whitecoat, the type doctors wear. I stopped paying attention to him because the grandkids and I were tasting each other’s sodas. Thankfully, they didn’t ask to try my latte; although, I would have been a good sport about it.
A short while later, the man in the white coat appeared at our table. The name Dr. Twist was stitched above his left pocket. In his hand he held a purple dog made of balloons. He gave the balloon dog to my six-year-old grandson. He twisted up more balloons, making a green crown with an alien’s face, a yellow crown with a funny face, and a brown monkey, which he gave to my other three grandkids. He made a balloon flower for me, which I took home and put in a crystal vase. Besides being good with balloons, Dr. Twist had a great table-side manner, cracking deadpan jokes and making us laugh.
I don’t think Dr. Twist was a planned event at the coffee shop. I got the impression the balloon doctor was a free spirit, showing up on a whim, twisting up fun, then leaving smiles and laughter in his wake.
After we finished our treats, we bussed our table, and balloons in hand, we thanked Dr. Twist again.
It was a windy, blustery Winnie-the-Pooh day, so as we left the coffee shop, I warned the grandkids, “Hang on tight to your balloons or the wind will take them.” We’d made it to the van and were almost inside — when a sudden gust of wind snatched the yellow crown balloon with the funny face from my eight-year-old grandson’s hand.
As one, and without a spoken plan, we secured the rest of the balloons in the van and gave chase. The untethered balloon swirled up and down alongside the building in the wind. A couple of times we came close to catching it, but at the last second, the wind, in a game of keep away, would lift it high into the air. Finally, the wind carried it into the busy street.
Released from the updrafts surrounding the building, the balloon dropped to the pavement. We watched as a semi-truck approached, sure the balloon would burst beneath its large tires. Miraculously, the yellow crown with the funny face survived. The wind gently ushered it onto a quiet side street, where it came to rest against a curb.
When the balloon stopped moving, I ran across the busy street, hoping to grab it. Don’t worry, I exercised plenty of caution. I understood it would not be a good look to be hit by a vehicle while rescuing a balloon. I thought about the online news articles reporting on a dim-witted nana who was run over by a car while trying to catch her grandson’s balloon. I imagined being trolled by online commentators, who would all come to the same consensus: “Yeah, that lady was stupid” and “Darwin’s theory in action.”
So, I waited for traffic to clear, then I ran across the street. In that moment I suffered a pang of vanity, and I wondered just how strange I looked while dashing madly through the crosswalk. But I assured myself that anyone who may have taken notice of me had surely seen stranger things than someone’s nana chasing a balloon. Then, I wondered if anyone was taking a video of me to post on TikTok, perhaps titling it “How Not to Cross the Street.”
The balloon had waited for me on the side street, and as I reached for it, I hoped the wind wouldn’t snatch it away again. But the wind had finished messing with me. I grabbed the yellow crown, and when it was safe, I strode back across the street, all while singing in my head, My superpower is chasing balloons.
I handed the balloon back to my grandson. I thought he’d smile or tell me I was amazing. But he just looked at me — like he was trying to figure something out. I didn’t ask him what he was thinking. But I was thinking.
We all got back into the van.
“Hey,” I asked my grandkids, “Nana didn’t look funny running across the street after a balloon, did she?”
From the third-row seat came the voice of clarity. It was my oldest grandkid who reassured me, “Actually, Nana, you looked really funny.”
We all laughed.
I was glad I hadn’t let the cost of the sodas, and latte, and baked goods upset me. Because in the end, the amount of money I spent on the one-time visit to the coffeehouse wasn’t going to impact my financial security. There are plenty of disasters in life that could possibly do that, and I try not to dwell on those either.
Instead we have a happy memory, which will remain long after the air seeps out of the balloons.
Penguin Books edition, 1982. I love the pocketbook edition. It’s been well loved over the last forty-three years. Sometimes as I read it, bits of the aged cover flaked away, and I imagined all the other hands that held this book.
I’m back with a quick review of the third mystery in the Peter McGarr series by Bartholomew Gill. I said I’d keep you updated about how Gill’s series progresses. [To read my thoughts about Gill’s first two novels, click here.]
McGarr on the Cliffs of Moher debuted forty-seven years ago. I believe it’s out of print because Amazon sells only used copies. I bought well-worn copies of Gill’s first three books from ThriftBooks. In my review of Gill’s first two McGarr mysteries, I said if I liked the third book, I would buy a couple more. Well, when I finished reading The Cliffs of Moher, I bought Gill’s fourth and fifth mysteries, once again from ThriftBooks.
What’s McGarr on the Cliffs of Moher about?
Shortly after traveling from America to visit her parents in Ireland, May Quirk is found dead in a pasture near the Cliffs of Moher. She has been run through the chest with a pitchfork. May was born and raised in Ireland, but shortly after becoming a young woman, she left Ireland for New York City, partly to follow a young man whom she loved and partly to seek opportunity and adventures not available to her in Ireland. In New York her romance with the young man falters, but they remain friendly. May finds success as a well-respected journalist.
CID Peter McGarr has a list of suspects, each with a motivation worthy of murderous intent. Did the man she originally left Ireland with kill her in a jealous rage? He had returned to Ireland about the same time she did. Did the country farmer down the road from her parents kill her? The farmer has been obsessed with May for years, believing God intended them to be together. Did the man who discovered May’s body in the field kill her? He doesn’t seem to have a motive, but he was so drunk on the night of May’s murder he can’t remember passing out next to her body. Did someone in the Irish Republican Army have her killed? If threatened, the IRA is capable of swift and cruel violence. Did May’s current lover, who is married, kill her? He wanted to marry her, but he’s an Irish Catholic with a passel of children, and May seemed uninterested in becoming anyone’s wife.
Why did I like this book?
It’s a page-turner. Once I start reading one of Gill’s books, I don’t want to put it down. The dialogue is snappy, with just the right amount of levity. I like the rivulets of sarcasm permeating McGarr’s conversations with suspects or other people who try to get in the way of his investigation. So far Gill’s books have interesting plots, and I’m kept guessing about whodunit. Finally, McGarr’s books are quick reads with well-written prose that often sparkles, but they don’t require deep thought on my part. And for this reason, while I enjoy them, they don’t rank as high as some other detective series that I have read.
Back to my thoughts about Gill’s books from a standpoint of craft . . .
You might remember I mentioned there was so much drinking in Gill’s first two books that I often felt like I’d wake up with a hangover in the morning. The consumption of alcohol in this book surpasses anything found in the previous two, partly because a lot of scenes are set in pubs in Ireland and New York. I don’t know how some of the characters can drink so much and still walk, talk, and think, let alone commit crimes or try to solve them. I have moved beyond the idea I might be vicariously hungover in the morning to seriously thinking I might need a vicarious twelve-step program after reading the series. I wonder if McGarr can keep up his pace of drinking throughout the series.
I’m still waiting for McGarr to have some sort of crisis of the soul. We don’t learn much about him in this book either. It’s mentioned again that he grew up in poverty, but that doesn’t seem to have affected him in any visible way. But where does all that drinking come from? Is Gill perpetuating a stereotype about the Irish love of whiskey and beer? In Gill’s stories there is a fine — but uncommented upon — line between McGarr and other characters, some of whom seem to be able to drink without getting drunk, and others who cannot hold their liquor. McGarr is one of the characters who can hold his liquor and solve crimes.
I’m waiting to see if female detectives will become part of the Irish constabulary landscape. However, it’s still the 1970s in McGarr’s world, and it’s a male dominated society.
McGarr’s marriage is another curiosity. His wife, Noreen, is twenty-one years younger than him. He married late in life because he considered himself a confirmed bachelor. In this book we learn why he married, but I’ll let you discover the reason for his marriage. It’s tossed in as a single sentence, but the sentence is striking and not easily missed. I always like to discover these little gems in a story for myself, rather than being told. The McGarr marriage could become an interesting side story. There are many ways Gill could play it.
The pages have mellowed into a yellow brown. It’s hard to imagine they were ever white.
So, I bought the next two books because I’m still curious to see if and how Gill develops his characters. In the meantime, his crime mysteries are entertaining reads just as they are.
Today I went to the Monarch Festival hosted by Duluth Monarch Buddies (DMB) because I want to plant pollinator gardens. But I also went because I wrote an article about DMB, and I promised the organization’s president I would come. (To read my article, click here, and turn to page 22.)
What a thrill to see my article front and center on the welcome table!
The Festival was held at the First United Methodist Church, which we locals call “The Coppertop Church” because it has a magnificent copper-topped roof. (If you want to view the locally-famous roof, click here.)
On my way into the Monarch Festival, I passed a table with pamphlets and brochures. And in the center of the table was a copy of Northern Wilds magazine opened to the page with my article. Wow! I was excited and touched. I told the woman seated next to the table, “I wrote this article.” In my right hand, I carried three copies of the magazine to give to DMB board members. One for the president, one for the vice president, and one for the secretary.
Once inside, I reintroduced myself to the president and gave her a copy of the magazine. I’d met her last summer, and I’d spoken to her on the phone this spring. She gave me a wide smile and a big hug. She asked if she could take my picture while I held the magazine open to my article. She made me feel like a celebrity. I already knew she liked the article because I had her read it for accuracy before I sent it off to my editor in April. I wanted the facts about monarchs, pollinators, and DMB to be correct. But seeing the article in print with photos is different than reading it in a word document. She was ecstatic, thanking me and telling me it was wonderful. This made my whole day because I worked hard to make the article interesting and informative.
She introduced me to someone who was filming the event for the local public TV station. She thought he might be interested in interviewing me, but he wasn’t. This wasn’t disappointing in the least because I don’t like talking to TV cameras. (Although, I would’ve done it because I’m trying to be braver about public speaking.)
The Monarch Festival was wonderful. I talked to people who are passionate about helping monarchs and bees. I learned more about planning my own pollinator gardens. I listened to the featured speaker talk about using drones to count milkweed plants in order to monitor pollinator habitats.
On my way out of the Festival, the woman seated by the table in the entry said, “I’m going to read your article later.” Talk about leaving on a high note.
It warmed my heart to know that the people I wrote about enjoyed my article, and I felt proud to represent pollinators who make our world a sustainable place.
Today was sweet because writing is hard. It’s frustrating to hear the words in my head, yet know as I endeavor to put them on paper, it will feel as if I’m searching for them in a mist. Usually, this is how each piece I write begins. But somewhere along the way, as I revise and revise, and if I’m lucky, the words fall into place. And if I’m very lucky, someone loves what I’ve written.
I scored information, seeds, a butterfly sticker, and a card.
My article “Duluth Monarch Buddies: Helping Monarchs One Waystation at a Time” appears in the June issue of Northern Wilds. To read my article, click here, and turn to page 22.
I’m particularly proud of this article because it focuses on pollinators, such as monarchs and bees. With the current threat to our national forests and programs designed to protect our environment, there are ways we as individuals can help make Earth a better place. Plant a pollinator garden, ditch the use of pesticides, plant a tree, learn about the natural world around you, and connect with organizations like Duluth Monarch Buddies to learn how you can be a power of one in the protection of our planet.
Northern Wilds also published my short article “Capt’n J’s Mini Golf: A Treasure Chest of Fun on Barker’s Island.” To read my article, click here, and turn to page 7.
Because reading books like Where Rivers Part by Kao Kalia Yang, reminds us that we are all people, that we have a shared humanity, and that understanding and kindness should always be the most important things. It warns us that war and dictators take a devastating toll on that humanity.
Why did I read this book?
Where Rivers Part is the One Book Northland 2025 selection for the area where I live, so I decided to buy Yang’s book and read it. Yang came to the Northland to talk about her book, and I’m sorry I missed a chance to hear her speak in person. But I did listen to Kerri Miller from Minnesota Public Radio interview Yang. You can listen here: Big Books & Bold Ideas.
What is this book about?
Where Rivers Part is really two stories bound together. First, it’s the story of Tswb, an ordinary Hmong girl, who is born in 1961 to parents living in the lush mountainous region of Laos. Everything in Tswb’s life is plentiful: her large extended family, the love that nurtures her, and the bountiful food that nourishes her. She attends school and excels; she wants to be a teacher. She experiences the loss of her beloved father. She grows up and falls in love. Leaving her mother and family behind, she begins a new life with her husband, Npis, and his family. She has children. She experiences the ups and downs of marriage and parenthood and aging.
But the story of Tswb’s ordinary life is overshadowed by another story: the war in Vietnam, which escalates as she grows up. Laos and Vietnam share a border that is 1,343 miles long, and after the U.S. pulls out of Vietnam, the communists enter Laos to hunt down and kill Hmong people as traitors because many of them helped the U.S. during the war. Tswb is a young teenager when her family leaves their mountain village home and hides in the jungle. At seventeen Tswb falls in love with Npis, a young Hmong man who comes from another village, and she marries him. As is the custom, she leaves her family and becomes part of Npis’s family. They continue to hide in the jungles of Laos from the Vietnamese soldiers. Finally, because the Vietnamese are closing in, Npis’s family decides to escape to Thailand, where they live in a refugee camp before immigrating to America.
In the United States, Tswb and Npis work jobs that take a toll on their bodies. They live in neighborhoods that are dangerous, in homes that are dilapidated and filled with lead and mold. They face racism and discrimination because they are Hmong and immigrants, but they work hard to improve their lives and to give their children a brighter future.
What makes this book so good?
Yang’s writing is beautiful, compelling, and detailed. As the story shifts from place to place, Yang brings the lush mountain village of her mother’s youth and the dense jungles of her mother’s teen years to life. She captures the hopelessness, filth, and stagnation of the refugee camp in Thailand. And once her family has immigrated to the U.S., Yang captures the hope, fear, joy, and frustration as her parents move from home to home and from job to job, inching their way up the ladder of the American dream.
When Yang asked her mother if she could write the story of her remarkable life, her mother replied that she didn’t think her story was remarkable, and that no one would be interested in reading about her life. I imagine that is because Tswb’s life was filled with many people who lived lives similar to hers. Lives interrupted by war, time spent in refugee camps, separations from family, and emigration from their homelands. But to Yang, her mother’s story is extraordinary. And readers will agree, the story of Tswb’s life is a story worth telling.
From the standpoint of craft . . . Yang’s book uses an interesting point of view.
Yang’s book is a biography of her mother’s life. However, Yang has written her mother’s biography in the form of a first-person point of view memoir. So, when we read Yang’s book, we must remember that she has adopted her mother’s voice and she is telling the story as if she were her mother. In the prologue of her book, Yang carefully explains how and why she has done this. If you like to skip prologues, this is one you should not gloss over.
Yang tried to write the story of her mother’s life in third-person point of view like a biography, and she tried to write it in second-person point of view. Both of those attempts felt awkward to her. Yang kept returning to the idea of using first-person point of view because as strange as it seemed to write her mother’s life story that way, Yang believed it worked. She wanted her mother’s “strong and certain voice” to rise up off the page. And it does.
There’s probably a general rule against this technique, but like so many writing rules, there comes a time when it’s okay to break one. It works for Yang for several reasons. First, before she began the book, she was intimately familiar with her mother’s way of speaking and her stories. Second, Yang’s mother was an enthusiastic participant in the telling of her story. Third, as Yang wrote the book, she spent hours and hours interviewing her mother. Finally, Yang had her mother read the finished draft for accuracy.
And so, I took a leap of faith with Yang. After I turned the last page of the prologue, I put aside the idea of Yang as the narrator. As I began the first chapter in the book, I listened to Tswb tell her story through her daughter. For the first few pages, it was a little disorienting, but I quickly found myself immersed in Tswb’s life. Yang’s book is wonderful and her bold move works. I can’t imagine Yang writing her mother’s story in any other way.
American Canopy by Eric Rutkow takes a unique look at a slice of United States history by focusing on its relationship with its immense forests. When settlers first arrived in North America, forests covered more than half of what would eventually be the forty-eight contiguous states. Rutkow notes that in the United States people will find giant sequoias, the largest trees in the world; coastal redwoods, the tallest trees in the world; bristlecone pines, the oldest trees in the world; and the biggest single living organism in the world, a stand of quaking aspens in Utah.
When the first settlers arrived on the Eastern shores of the New World, they encountered dark, dense forests. Settlers viewed the forests as something to be cleared to make way for farms and towns and as a resource to be used in trade and manufacturing. And with so many extensive forests, people and lumber companies cut down trees as if the supply was endless.
Rutkow’s book is a comprehensive, chronological history of America’s forests and how those forests played an integral role in the building of a nation. Rutkow’s history covers how trees were used to build ships, trains, railroad tracks, and airplanes until other materials like steel and aluminum were developed. And while some new technologies meant a decreased demand for wood, other innovations called for an increased demand. He covers the lumber industry’s devastating impact on forests and the growing movements to save forests in order to protect water and air quality and to mitigate climate change. Readers meet lumber barons, conservation advocates, politicians, botanists, environmentalists, naturalists, and entrepreneurs, among others.
Why I loved this book . . .
It’s well-organized, well-written, and interesting. I learned so much about the history of our forests. I liked this book so much that I bought Eric Rutkow’s book The Longest Line on the Map: The United States, the Pan-American Highway, and the Quest to Link the Americas. But most importantly, at this moment in history when some of our political leaders have turned their backs on our national parks and forests, and hope to sell public lands to private industries, Rutkow’s book informs us why our national parks and forests are vital to our well-being and the health of our planet.
In 1959, Hardborough is a quiet English village on an island between the sea and a river. It’s a town steadily losing bits of itself as the years go by — its sources of income, its land to erosion, its youth to the cities. It’s a town where everyone is intimate with everyone else’s business. If you sneeze over breakfast, by noon people all around town will have asked, “Do you have a cold or is it hay fever?”
Florence Green, a childless widow nearing middle age, decides to open a bookshop. For ten years she has lived in Hardborough. Over the years, she has carefully measured the words and actions of her neighbors against an imaginary yardstick representing the progress of her acceptance in the community. She believes her fellow townspeople will shop in her store.
Florence obtains a loan from the bank and purchases a property referred to as Old House, which has stood empty for many years and is rumored to be haunted. Florence converts the first floor into a bookstore, and having given up her flat, she lives on the second floor.
For the first time, Florence is invited to a party at the Stead by Mrs. Gamart, a woman of status and means in Hardborough. Mrs. Gamart smiles and chats with Florence, appearing to approve of her bookshop. Mrs. Gamart, with all the glib banter of a cobra offering to watch over a nest of eggs, claims she wants to help Florence. However, what Mrs. Gamart really wants is Old House because she wishes to turn it into an arts center. She suggests to Florence that the soon-to-be-empty wet fish shop would be a better place for a bookstore.
But Florence doesn’t want to sell. She has legal title to Old House, which comes with a rumbling ghost, and who doesn’t want a ghost in their bookstore? Especially one that while noisy at times is always standoffish. Although Florence has legal title, Mrs. Gamart has money, status, and connections to influential people. As Florence hires a clerk, stocks the shelves, and wrestles with the question of whether or not to sell Vladimir Nabokov’s new controversial novel Lolita in her store, Mrs. Gamart calls on her connections and forges a devious plan to obtain Old House for an arts center.
It was short-listed for the Booker Prize.
Why I loved this book . . .
The Bookshop is a slim novel that reads like a long literary short story. I love these types of novels, strung together like a pearl necklace with graduated beads. The early scenes start out small, then expand like the pearls in the necklace: perfectly shaped and incrementally growing in size — until the largest moment of the story hangs like the largest pearl in the luminous strand. And at that moment, a truth about people and life resonates. These are the kind of novels that play in my mind for months and years to come.
The Death of an Irish Politician and The Death of an Irish Consul by Bartholomew Gill
Book 1 and Book 2. The three books I bought are pocket books. When I toss one in my Mary Poppins purse, it nearly disappears!
Recently, someone in something I read suggested that Bartholomew Gill’s Peter McGarr police detective mysteries set in Ireland were a wonderful read, so I looked them up. Bartholomew Gill was the nom-de-plume of Mark C. McGarrity (1943-2002), an Irish-American crime and mystery novelist. McGarrity’s first Peter McGarr mystery was published in 1977 and set in Dublin, Ireland. The summary mentioned something about a crime at a marina, a beautiful woman, an ambitious politician, the Irish Republican Army, and the conflict between the British and the Irish over Northern Ireland. I came of age in the 1970s during some of the worst violence in Ireland, I’m part Irish, and I like police detective mysteries, so I bought the first three books in the series from ThriftBooks. I’ve read the first two.
When Gill’s series begins, his fictional character Peter McGarr, has recently returned from continental Europe to accept the coveted position of chief inspector of detectives with the Dublin police department. McGarr, known for his leadership, brilliance, cunning, and successful arrest rate, has had an exemplary career with INTERPOL before returning to Ireland. The officers under his command respect him. He’s clever, likable, and incorruptible.
I enjoyed Gill’s first two McGarr books. CID McGarr is an interesting character. He doesn’t come across as deeply flawed or deeply troubled by demons of the past. He’s usually a half step ahead of the criminals, and he can smell when something is rotten in Denmark. Gill doesn’t spend a lot of time in McGarr’s head, so readers don’t get a lot of that internality that often comes with detectives in newer stories. (Which, depending on one’s preference, could be good or bad.) What readers do get are interesting plots, conspiracies, double and triple crosses, great dialogue, and wry humor. The novels mix murder, politics, and business together, exploring themes of political corruption, corporate greed, and personal ambition. (Some things in this world never change.)
McGarr’s wife, who is about fifteen years his junior, is a good cook. She’s also bright and loves to discuss his cases with him, but she’s had a minor role so far. There are no women detectives in the first two books. Women who appear in the novels are of the femme fatale variety. It’s the 1970s, and it’s a man’s world. There is a lot of drinking in these two books. Not the hard-hitting-sit-at-the-bar-until-you-pass-out-on-it kind, but rather the steady-throughout-the-day-as-you-go kind. CID McGarr rarely turns down a drink — doesn’t matter if he’s on duty or not. The police station has beer on hand for the detectives and the suspects. Although, officers prudently strive to keep the suspects from getting drunk to avoid having their statements tossed by the courts as unreliable. Sometimes at night when I read one of these books, I was afraid I’d wake up in the morning with a hangover!
I liked these books. They were an easy read and interesting — a nice escape at the end of my day. I’ll read the third one soon. If I like that one, which I hope I will, I’ll buy the next two or three because I’m intrigued to see if Gill’s character changes over time. Does his wife stay with him? (A brief moment in the second book gave me pause.) Does he have to curtail his drinking or get sober? (McGarr mentions a line in the sand, which if he crosses, would mean he’s an alcoholic. But has he ever heard the phrase functioning alcoholic?) Will past demons surface?
Gill’s last McGarr mystery was published in 2002. By that time, I would hope to meet women detectives in his novels. I would think that drinking on the job is forbidden and that suspects aren’t offered anything stronger than water during an interrogation. I would expect to find that McGarr has changed as a person. Of course, all this depends on whether or not Gill continued to set his novels in the 1970s and 80s, or if he sets them in the times in which he wrote them. I’ll keep you posted.
Writing Near the Lake 