Nancy Drew almost runs over a young girl who darts out on the road, but manages to avoid her. As she meets the girl and the two sisters looking after her, Nancy learns that they are the potential heirs to a promised fortune, but the only will known to exist disinherited them. Nancy searches to see if there is another will.
What I Liked
Nancy meets four or five groups of deserving “heirs” and they all are a bit one-dimensional but good. They each have a small piece of the puzzle to share. The family that currently is set to inherit everything are not very nice, and while equally a bit one-dimensional, they serve their function well-enough. As do the various bad guys running around (a secondary story of thieves robbing houses). Almost a hundred years later, the story still holds up.
What I Didn’t Like
As I said, the characters are a bit one-dimensional. Equally though, it becomes very clear quite quickly where the hidden will might be (clue: it’s in the title!) and so it is more a scavenger hunt than detective work. Similarly for the secondary story of the thieves, which knocks the overall score down a peg.
The Bottom Line
Welcome to the wonderful world of detective Nancy Drew
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
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.
Ah, January. When a young reader’s heart turns to updating all of his lists of various books to read, collect, etc. Okay, so I’m not exactly young and most people’s hearts may not turn that way. But mine does in January.
This past fall, I did a deep dive into Calibre, the ebook library manager program that I use. I’ve used the Windows version on my computer for about, umm, 10 years now, I think. I’ve often had multiple “libraries” of ebooks on my computer … ones that were waiting to be looked at, others that were actually part of collections / series that I’m working on, some from the library that I hadn’t sorted out yet when I would get to them. Tons of books I got way back in the heyday of Kindle ownership where people gave away dozens of ebooks free each day in the yearly teens of the new millennium. Plus books I had read, were reviewing, etc.
I found it hard to effectively manage my ebooks in multiple libraries, and I looked online for the forums, asked questions, explained how I “saw” my library and asked for tips on how to do it better. Which a bunch of fellow bibliophiles responded to with lots of suggestions. In the end, all of them basically said, “Put them all in one library and let the computer give you filtered views when you want to see different “sets” of books”. It is, after all, mostly a giant database with links to the book files.
I am now quite happy with the majority of my setup in the library. I’m down to 10 main workflow categories, all mutually exclusive ones that books “move” through from acquisition to having been read and reviewed:
TBR: Fiction
TBR: Series
TBR: Non-fiction
ACTIVE
REVIEWING: Backlog
REVIEWING: Current
FINAL: Fiction
FINAL: Non-Fiction
FINAL: Reference
FINAL: Did not finish
Admittedly, the TBRs categories are nominally huge but I won’t be reading all of them. Some of them came from a huge data dump of free books I got at some point, and while I weeded out a bunch (from 20K down to 10K), there’s probably another 5K to get rid of at some point. It’ll still lead me with about 20 years’ worth of reading. 🙂
But as I was playing with the recent additions, I realized that there are some other features I can add to the library manager that will actually give me some stats. Every January, I set goals, but somewhere as the year goes on, I kind of lose track. Dead tree versions are particularly problematic to keep track of, but even the ebooks get backlogged. But I went through basically everything I have from #5 to #10 above.
It brings my total up to about 475 books that are in the “read” stage or beyond, even though my actual reviewed list is a little less than half of that (225 or so). For the 475, I’ve added the years in which I’ve read them…goes back all the way to 1978, but there are lots in the last 7-8 years…and that gives me a bit of data to play with and share. The reviews could be new or old, but there’s a reason the backlog grew. 🙂
20 books read, 16 reviews
22 books read, 5 reviews
58 books read, 53 reviews
78 books read, 17 reviews
32 books read, 9 reviews
57 books read, 19 reviews
63 books read, 18 reviews
1 book read (so far), 0 reviews
So that means 137 recent books reviewed, plus another 88 old ones added to the website. That still leaves 47 to review from the last year or so, and another 187 in backlog.
Of course, I also have 332 ones to read “soon” in my “active” folder. Which I used to have all synched to my Kindle, which was looney toons to manage. So, I cut that back to about 20 for now. I probably should add a new category around 4B to the top set which is “Books to read this year”, and only pull 10-20 of those forward to the Kindle.
What I don’t know what to do is how to prioritize my TBR list. 🙂 Do I read the first / next one in each series? Or binge my way through like a rabid reader hooked on Netflix more than phonics? Do I set myself a rigid balance of Fiction to Non-fiction?
A lovely first-world problem to have, I know. What really warms my cockles is that I’ve managed to write about 20 new reviews each year over the last seven years (while still putting everything else up, and blogging almost 2M words), and averaging about 47 books a year. My goal is always 52, which I managed to surpass 4 times. And that’s just on the stats I *know* that I have so far. Other books will turn up and add to those titles, again mostly dead tree versions.
But for the first time in a really long time, I kind of feel like my library is mostly where I want it to be and I know what’s happening with it. Now I can start prioritizing dumping the dead tree versions of some old stuff while reading the 332 books I have in my active list hehehe
