Book Review: Blue Monday by Nicci French

Blue Monday (Frieda Klein #1) by Nicci French, 2011

Setting: London, England

Genre: mystery

Source: library ebook

I discovered Nicci French through other bloggers and decided to begin with the first in this series. I was not disappointed and really enjoyed the character of Dr. Frieda Klein, an unusual psychiatrist who used her insight to help solve a mystery involving one of her patients. There are also twists and turns in the plot that kept me interested. I'm looking forward to #2 in the series!

Summary: Dr. Klein notices a similarity between her distraught patient's dreams and the disappearance of a five-year-old child. She unravels the mystery and reveals the link to another child's disappearance twenty years earlier. 

Book beginning:

1987

In this city there were many ghosts. She had to take care. She avoided the cracks between the paving stones, skipping and jumping, her feet in their scuffed lace-up shoes landing in the blank spaces. She was nimble at this hopscotch by now. She had done it every day on her way to school and back ever since she could remember, first holding onto her mother's hand, dragging and jerking her as she leaped from one safe place to another; then on her own. Don't step on the cracks. Or what? ...

I am looking forward to the next in the series. 

Meme: visit Book Beginning at Rose City Reader.

Meme: My Life in Books 2017

Got this meme from a couple of bloggers years ago and have done it for several years.  My Life in Books, using titles of books from my reading for 2017.  Join in if you like.  

Which book (titles) read in 2017 describe your life so far?

Describe myself:
The Keeper of Lost Things

How do I feel:
Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know

Describe where I currently live:
Glass Houses

 If I could go anywhere, where I would go:
The Little French Bistro

My favorite form of transportation:
Walking with Peety

My best friend(s) is/are:
The Widows of Malabar Hill

My friends and I are:
Sarong Party Girls

What’s the weather like:
Into Thin Air

Favorite Time of Day:
The Twilight Wife

What is life to you:
Little Fires Everywhere

You fear:
Rich People Problems

What is the best advice you have to give:
Cooking for Picasso

Thought for the day:
The Rules Do Not Apply

How I would like to die:
Pushing Up Daisies

My soul’s present condition:
Are You Sleeping

I looked up past memes and see the last one I filled out was for 2015.  Join in and have fun with it.

Click on each book title to see the description on goodreads.

Book Review: The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro

My 2017 Goodreads Reading Challenge has been met! I read 105 of 95 books pledged, the last being
The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro.

My comments:

Surprising yet familiar, The Buried Giant recalls old Arthurian tales and fables, Tolkien, and Dante.   I am still considering possible meanings to all the elements of the story of a journey into the past and into the future.  There are themes of the elusiveness of memory, forgetfulness and remembering, romance, and history. And the theme of secrets buried or forgotten in the mists and slowly revealed. The protagonist, Beatrice, and her husband Axl, set out on a journey into the unknown, barely remembering where their son lives and hoping they will find his village. They are joined on their trip by a Saxon warrior on a dragon-slaying quest, a young boy they help to protect, an elderly knight reminiscent of Don Quijote, and finally the boatman who will row them to an island, the end of their journey. I loved this unusual book with so many literary and classical reminders. The elderly couple Beatrice and Axl and their devotion to each other is particularly poignant, in spite of human weaknesses, past mistakes, and a shadowy future. My rating: 5/5.

High-Risers by Ben Austen: Book Beginning

High-Risers: Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing by Ben Austen

Genre: nonfiction

Publication: February 6, 2018, Harper

High-Risers braids personal narratives, city politics, and national history to tell the timely and epic story of Chicago’s Cabrini-Green, America’s most iconic public housing project.

Book beginning:

Portrait of a Chicago Slum

Tucked into the elbow where the river tacks north, just beyond the Loop and a mie from Lake Michigan, it is as historic a neighborhood as there is in Chicago.In 2016, it was named one of the city's best places to live. A couple of generations earlier, and more than a century after the banks of the Near North Side were settled, surveyors from the Chicago Housing Authority walked its narrow streets, confirming with every step their belief that it was a slum beyond salvation. 

(This quote is from an uncorrected proof. The final copy may differ).

Memes:  visit Book Beginning at Rose City Reader

The Fortunate Ones by Ellen Umansky: First Chapter

The Fortunate Ones by Ellen Umansky,

November 21, 2017, William Morrow Paperbacks

Genre: blend of historical and contemporary fiction

Setting, Vienna, 1939 and Los Angeles, present day

First chapter:

Vienna 1936

Oma wanted to send a telegram to Papi in Paris, but Mutti said no. "He will be back in three days. He will know soon enough," Mutti said from the cot in the little room that would have been the nursery. She had moved in once the pains began. ("It's too early!" Rose had heard Mutti cry out.) The doctor had come and gone, the sheets had been changed, the blood scrubbed away. Without any evidence, it almost seemed to Rose as if it hadn't happened. 

Book description:

A Chaim Soutine painting—will connect the lives and fates of two different women, generations apart, in this debut novel that moves from World War II Vienna to contemporary Los Angeles.

Would you continue reading, based on the beginning and book description?

MEME: Every Tuesday Bibliophile by the Sea hosts First Chapter First Paragraph, Tuesday Intros sharing the first paragraph or two, from a book you are reading or will be reading soon

Sunday Salon: The Girl in Times Square by Paullina Simons

Visit The Sunday Post  hosted by The Caffeinated Bookreviewer,  It's Monday, What Are You Reading? by Book Date

A new book this week, thanks to William Morrow: The Girl in Times Square by Paullina Simons,
December 19, 2017, William Morrow.
"(A) riveting novel about a young woman whose search for her missing friend turns into a life-shattering odyssey." Part mystery, part romance, part family drama . . . in other words, the perfect book.—Daily Mail 

I am finishing up Ne lache pas ma main,  in French, by Michel Bussi, a thriller set on the French island of Reunion, Indian Ocean. Slow going, but good!


Also reading:

Rebellion by Molly Patterson, August 8, 2017, courtesy of Harper

"the stories of four women who dare to challenge the boundaries of their circumscribed lives." From rural Illinois to the far reaches of China, a vibrant story of compassion and discovery... (publisher)

"Molly Patterson is a writer of the first order, and her debut novel is a revealatory, immersive miracle. Ambitious in scope and exacting in its language, Rebellion becomes a grand exploration of fate and circumstance."—Claire Vaye Watkins, author of Gold Fame Citrus

What books are on your desk this week?

It's Monday: Cozies and French thrillers

It's Monday, What Are You Reading? by Book Date. Visit also Mailbox Monday.
The title of this cozy, Twelve Angry Librarians, February 21, 2017, caught my eye. I can't imagine twelve angry librarians, at least not in the same space. The book is the eighth in the Cat in the Stacks series.

Dial M for Mousse by Laura Bradford, Emergency Dessert Squad Mystery #3, January 2, 2018, from Berkley.
Baker Winnie Johnson works overtime to satisfy the emergency cravings of Silver Lake, Ohio and solves a murder mystery along the way. 

Death Below Stairs by Jennifer Ashley, January 2, 2018, Berkley Books
Victorian cook Kat Holloway takes a position in a Mayfair mansion and soon finds herself immersed in the odd household of Lord Rankin. Kat is unbothered by the family’s eccentricities as long as they stay away from her kitchen, but trouble finds its way below stairs when her young Irish assistant is murdered. 


Other reading last week: I finally finished a French thriller by Michel Bussi,
 N'oublier jamais, one I can recommend to those who read in French sometimes. A plot with so many twists and turns and unbelievably complex and interesting characters, not to mention the setting on the coast of Normandy, France.

I am now reading another thriller by Bussi, Ne lache pas ma main, set in the island of Reunion, a French territory in the Indian Ocean. Its about a tourist mother who disappears from her hotel on the island, leaving behind her young daughter and husband. I am eager to see if she fled or if she was abducted. I'm sure the plot will have more twists and turns.


Happy reading week everyone!