January 2021 books

Traitor: A Novel of World War II by Amanda McCrina
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Oooh, I really liked this one! It reminded me a lot of Code Name Verity in that the story is a bit of a puzzle that you need to put together and you might find yourself flipping back pages every once in a while, muttering, "oh wait, is that?? And did he just??" under your breath. It's a pretty intense mystery once you figure it all out and dear goodness, I don't know how anyone ever survives any war, anywhere. This book focuses on Lviv, Poland/Ukraine during WW2 and does a good job highlighting how alliances between sides formed and shifted and disappeared. I did still have to refer to Wikipedia a couple of times to straighten things out, but I didn't mind. The twists and turns and reveals of the plot were really enjoyable, even if there were too many scenes like that Mexican standoff GIF from The Office (if it's even possible to have "too many" of such a thing).

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Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA by Amaryllis Fox
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've never been in the CIA, but as someone who's worked at an embassy and lived abroad for years, there was a lot to commisserate with in this book! Fox did a good job reflecting on the impact of surveillance and an international career on family relationships - there were issues and situations she brought up that I had never really thought about before, even though I lived through them. A very fast and entertaining but thoughtful read.

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We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence by Becky Cooper
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I DEMAND that you read this book and I FORBID you from googling anything about its central mystery before OR during. When I first picked it up and saw that it was 500 pages long, I thought, "does this book really have any business being that long?!?" and quickly realized, YES. IT DOES. This book truly is about the journey - the friends and enemies and assumptions and mistakes we made along the way, not the destination. You know that GIF with the guy gesturing wildly in front of a full-on conspiracy theory bulletin board with photos and cut-outs and red yarn? This book is like that GIF. Its chapters are brief, there are a lot of really good photos placed in the relevant parts of the text, and we zig-zag through time and space rather than following the developments linearly. Some of those red-yarn-connections don't pan out, but some do, and it's not always the ones you expect, or hope for.

The end result is like some kind of macabre Mamma Mia: we know this woman has been killed. Now, let's journey backward in time to see how potential perpetrators may have crossed her path in her short life, even as we also journey forward in time to see how her death continues to affect friends and family and institutions in the present day. And instead of musical numbers, we have some fascinating deep dives into: anthropology, archeology, Harvard, dig sites in Iran, dig sites in Labrador, 1960s changing mores, institutional sexism, politics in academia, and an unsettling number of women who are pretty sure their ex-boyfriend/professor/neighbor is capable of murder. Astonishingly good.

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A Lady's Guide to Mischief and Mayhem by Manda Collins
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I almost wonder if I read the wrong book. I can't remember where I heard about this book or how it got on my to-read list and since there are SO MANY books with titles like this these days, it's very possible that the book I meant to read was not this one.

Which makes me feel better about saying that I didn't really like THIS book, the one I ended up reading! I actually went and checked TWICE to make sure this was the first book in the series, not the second, since there were only sudden, vague references to seemingly substantial backstories that were complete news to me. It was just BAM there are two ladies who...run a newspaper? and an investigator who...has a long (and ultimately irrelevant) rivalry with a coworker? and there is a guy who...inherited a big country house and named it Thornfield and Has A Past with one of the newspaper ladies? I guess?

The newspaper thing in particular seemed like it would be relevant, given that the column they start writing together is literally titled "A Lady's Guide to Mischief and Mayhem." But we never get to read any of that column, and there's not any kind of conceit like "the book itself is the column." They exist next to each other but never interact. It's weird.

And this is kind of a "country house mystery" but it doesn't even matter because the book forgets to talk about the characters who are guests at the house. They're just there. So when the crime is solved and all is revealed, it feels like a random roll of the dice because it could literally have been ANYONE.

Finally - and I am absolutely not here to yuck anyone's yum, but - the romance in this book is so cringe-y. Again, this could be because I wasn't aware I was even reading a romance until two characters randomly started kissing each other but it reminded me of when Diana Barry inserts inapt Rolling's Reliable Baking Powder references into Anne Shirley's short story. There was this country house mystery going on...and then every once in a while people made out with each other. If you want to read a mystery series with serious swoon, I recommend the A Study in Scarlet Women series.

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A Good Girl's Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Really fun and kept me guessing!

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