A young Indigenous teen growing up in Northern Michigan on the border with Canada deals with love, friends, hockey and crime in her community.
What I Liked
Daunis is trying to figure out who she is — as a person, as an Ojibwe native, as a friend, as a daughter. She lost a family member under a cloud, and some young members of her community have been overdosing of late. It’s cool to see the personal side develop as she meets a new member of the local hockey team, and tries to resist his charms without much success. Meanwhile, there are lots of side developments. There’s a particular scene with her community as she turns 18 that is really moving and heartwarming. I liked the overall story enough just to read about her, without introducing the whole “FBI informant” role as they investigate drugs coming into the community. It is not a typical style of story that I like, but it was amazingly well done, and I enjoyed visiting the community through her eyes.
What I Didn’t Like
Some of the action stuff is a little overdone, but not enough to pull away from the overall story.
Two women making their way in a man’s world during prohibition in Los Angeles — Letty Hart making wine for the local church, Annabel Forman bucking to be made detective.
What I Liked
I liked that there wasn’t a lot of backstory for either woman. The story starts at the jump with Hart making legal wine for the church during prohibition, until the church decides to go with another distributor and putting her effectively out of business. You also meet Forman who convinces her boss to give her a real case, a theft of high-end jewellery from a wealthy woman. Add in bent cops and a friend on the party circuit, the story is decent. With a bit of action on the side.
What I Didn’t Like
I would have liked to see more interaction between the two women, it is more like parallel stories until the end with a “forced” scene in the middle. As well, there is a somewhat contrived action scene with a fire, and a young man who is the stupidest person on the planet apparently, although some of it is implied by involvement with the church as a slam. But mostly I knocked a star off the rating for the final “twist” at the climax, both seen coming and a shallow payout that drags on way too long. I felt like I was watching two kids argue “Did too! Did not! Did too! Did not!”.
Disclosure
I received a free reader’s copy of this book as part of the Amazon Prime First Reads program. I am not personal friends with the author, nor have I ever interacted with them on social media.
The Bottom Line
Good story, fun read, a bit shallow on the mystery
When I left off reading, Raskolnikov had committed the crime, been laid low by a fever, and has slowly recovered. He had been summoned to the police, a terror and a defeat, only to find they summoned him for debts, not murder.
Now, the fever is slowly leaving him, but he is still having nightmares. He hid the jewellery and told himself that he must have been ill when he committed the murder, or he would have done a better job of the crime and the aftermath (stains, hiding the loot, etc.). By his account, his incompetence is evidence that he couldn’t have been in his right mind, and thus, he must be relatively blameless for what he has done.
But good fortune has prevailed upon him in his illness. Natasha has been tending to him with soup and food, and his friend (Razumikhin) has arrived to help him recover financially, paying for a new suit and a doctor to attend to him. But when Luzhin, the sister’s fiancé, arrives, Rask goes a bit off on him and accuses him of his fears when reading his mother’s letter. Yet what set him off the most was his friend Raz debating whether a person already charged with the murder was really guilty or if his alibi was so weak that it must have been true.
The guilty mind is upon him for much of the 10%, including running into the police clerk and accusing him of thinking him the murderer when the police clerk was thinking no such thing. But as Rask escapes his bedroom and wanders the city, he is overcome repeatedly with dark thoughts, including that of suicide. Or to turn himself in. He even returns to the scene of the crime and pretends he wants to rent the apartment, but they throw him out for being strange.
It’s fascinating to see how the guilty mind is plaguing him.
Mary Russell, a young, financially independent woman, chanced upon a strange retired beekeeper in the countryside and became Sherlock Holmes’ apprentice.
What I Liked
I have a long list of To Be Read books, and they sit on my Kindle until fancy strikes me, and I start reading, often having no memory of how why or when I chose that title to join the queue. So it was delightful to get a few pages in and realize it’s a Sherlock Holmes story. I liked that the book reveals a few stories/cases, keeping the mix neither too long (some of Conan Doyle’s novels) nor too short (the enumerable short stories). We get to see some of her training and her adventures at school. It’s interesting to see some of the treatment of WWI, with a looming “baddie” on the horizon, who proves more than capable of taking them both on.
What I Didn’t Like
There are a couple of long lulls in the stories where nothing happens. Since the stories are told from Russell’s perspective, you have no idea what Holmes is doing during those times. This is rather reminiscent of the Hound of the Baskervilles, where Holmes is gently felt but not seen. There are also a couple of significant errors by Holmes, corrected by Russell, and they feel forced. It works well when she thinks of something he didn’t, connecting some dots, but when she thinks of potential impacts on others that he is oblivious to, it doesn’t ring true. It is sort of like chess…while he might miss an opening gambit or a rogue move, he wouldn’t miss obvious moves likely to follow the opening three or four moves.
I’ve been feeling a bit like I’m stuck in a rut lately and that I might need a bit of a kick in the butt to jar my brain into a different perspective. Occasionally, I’ll grab a self-help business book from one of the big names to see what they say that might resonate with me.
Stuff from Zig Ziglar has been around for a long time, and lots of people have bought his tapes etc. I’m often suspicious of certain types of self-styled “gurus” who are about an inch-deep and 10 miles wide in their approach, and after reading MYWE, Ziglar is one of the best/worst examples.
I really struggled with his writing style for two reasons. First, he uses a strong “selling” approach to persuasion…basically, the methodology is that if I tell you 10 superficial things that are simplistically true, you’ll likely agree with them all and then when I feed you malarkey as the 11th, you’re already agreeing to the other 10 so you’ll swallow it as truth. One of the biggest criticisms of this type of persuasion is in biased research where it is “acceptance by association”, not because the logic holds or because you actually agree with the 11th statement. Most of the chapters are cliché after cliché, and I started to be reminded of a Yes, Minister episode. A string of relatively unrelated statements that get you agreeing so that you want to agree with the last one like you were “convinced” even if the 11th has very little to do with the previous 10. Reading a long series of very short anecdotes left me practically exhausted trying to figure out where the “wheat” was compared with all the “chaff”.
The second element is one of credibility, and it started to grate on me with all the anecdotes. For example, he would say “This famous person told me this.” Which would be some perfectly crafted line that the person likely never said, and likely NEVER said it to them, it was like a talk show or something. But I searched on a couple of the quotes, and they were attributed to that person, but with different language and syntax. Kind of like reading a Grade 9 essay by someone who thinks 20 quotes strung together makes an argument. Then he would refer to one of the people that he has helped … say for example, an almost illiterate high-school dropout who listened to his tapes and it transformed his life. Which is demonstrated by the 20 lines of perfect prose that the person wouldn’t have been capable of actually saying, given their background, and they would never have talked that way. But the text swears that this is verbatim what he said. The credibility gets strained.
But what bothered me most was that he would have these series of anecdotes, all of which he says he experienced personally with the people quoted, and then he’ll throw in a joke that happened to a specific person or him personally, but it’s a joke that is 50 years old. He includes it for a laugh, sure, but he presents with the same approach as the other 10 stories. Which really makes most of the stories seem “faked”.
I don’t really care when he proselytizes about the amazing benefits of teaching values from the Bible (ignoring that many of the largest scandals of the 20th Century were those that devoted their life to the same “teachings”), or that he associates the downfall of society with television and soap operas in particular. It just makes him look stupid.
And yet, some people have found some nuggets in his work. So I stuck with it. And found a few lines that resonated with me.
You’re not going to change one whisper about yesterday (Chapter 1). It’s a typical quote about not letting the past define you, but it’s well-framed here.
Failure is an event, not a person (Chapter 1). This is a popular theme that people often pitch as just dusting yourself off, to keep going, let the past be the past, not the definition of your future. Often with some example of baseball players who don’t bat 1.000 or clichés like “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” But it’s a slightly different framing. Failure is a moment in time. It’s something that “happens”, shifting the idea a bit away from you. I prefer to think of it a bit like a Star Trek: The Next Generation quote from Picard to Data about how you can do everything exactly right and still lose/fail.
Quoting Dr. Joyce Brothers about self-image (Chapter 2). Paraphrased, but that you cannot consistently perform in a manner which is inconsistent with the way you see yourself. I’ve seen this used before, and often mischaracterized as the more popular form, “If you want to be a success, you have to visualize yourself as a success.” But that’s not what the quote is about…it’s more about a double-edged sword. How you see yourself guides how you perform, and if you are just pretending, your performance will not measure up to the real you. People often want to use it as “fake it until you make it”, when in reality it is more about “being honest with yourself”. Good quote, totally misused here though.
You can’t make a good deal with a bad guy (Chapter 3). It’s a nice framing of something I have heard in a different way from a lawyer who writes about the publishing industry. His version is more like “don’t do business with crooks”. Or the ever popular, “Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.” They are all variations on a theme, but again, it is nicely framed here.
Platitudes from his mother (Chapter 3). While hardly original, I liked the phrases he heard from his mother — “When a task is one begun, you leave it not until it’s done,” and “Be a matter great or small, you do it well or not at all.”
Don’t try to change the boss (Chapter 4). I think this one resonates a bit with me as there are some things I’m dealing with where it is really frustrating that someone else is not doing their job. I want to enter their lane and correct it, but it’s not really my place to correct it. I think it’s stupid, but it’s also not a good investment of my time. I do like the framing, and linked to a stronger element of “don’t let the way the other person treats you affect or determine the way you treat them”.
At work you can fool the boss, you can even fool the people around you, but as employers, you will never fool the people below you. (Chapter 5) It’s a great life lesson to remember, although Ziglar presents it more about managing your self-image.
