Book Updates

I just finished The Splendour Falls by Susanna Kearsley.  I was expecting another timeshift romantic (not necessarily romance but romantic, like the excitement and mystery of love but not a bodice-ripping tale of infatuation) novel, but this one was more mystery.  Most of the Kearsley novels I have read so far include an element of the main character reliving the past in her dreams or in a trance and then trying to solve the past mystery while finally hooking up with her reincarnated past-lover, or actually being transported to the past, solving a mystery, and choosing to remain in the past for love.  Sounds trite and maybe a bit weird, but they are entertaining novels, I promise you.  The Winter Sea was the first I read, and it won some awards, so I can at least say that I’m not the only one who enjoyed it.

 

The Splendour Falls seems to be an older novel that has finally been published – after all, there are still static-y international calls and francs and lire in Europe.  There is a hint of romance, but not much.  The mystery takes center stage, but it’s a bit forced and not well fleshed-out.  Still, it was the type of mystery I prefer these days: no blood and gore, no terrible monsters preying on children or innocents, no devil-worship, no sociopaths.  Okay, well, a little sociopathic behavior.  After all, people are killed and the killer thinks to justify these murders (totally sociopathic), but he’s not eating them after he kills them or anything like that. 

 

So I don’t know: read it, maybe, if you’ve read all the other Kearsleys and want more, but perhaps don’t read it if you are expecting a revelation of a novel.

 

In other disappointments, I’m about halfway through Lev Grossman’s novel The Magicians and I am bored.  The mystical world is clearly a giant ripoff of Narnia and I don’t go in for Young Adult novels in general (Hunger Games being one of the few exceptions).  I might finish it; I might not. 

 

What have you read lately?  Anything good?  I have Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand in my Kindle, ready for me to abandon The Magicians.