🐎🗽👴🏻❤️‍🩹💀🕯️🕵️‍♀️🛤️🫆The Lastest Ann Patchett, Fantasy and a Murder Mystery

    Ann Patchett's latest book, Whistler, reminds me of building with Magna Tiles. There are squares and triangles of different sizes with magnets embedded on the sides. They click together, and you build with them. Here is a quick YouTube video to demonstrate: s2jFeogTEgQ. The tiles have jewel tones that remind me of stained glass. When I am building with my fellow engineers, my grandsons, we start with a stack of unimpressive shapes and create cathedrals that glow. It's amazing. Every writer uses words and sentences--Magna Tiles, but Ann Patchett creates glowing cathedrals with hers, and she gets better with each book. I think Whistler is her best book. It is a good book to read after her essay collection, These Precious Days, because it contains her essay exploring her relationships with her three fathers (her birth father and two stepfathers). Whistler's plot centers on a woman in her 50s, Daphne, who accidentally bumps into her former stepfather, Eddie. He and her mother had been married for slightly over a year when Daphne was eight, and when they divorced, she never saw him again. They had been very close. The woman starts to untangle the knot of what happened to the marriage and why. It pulls deeply on the father/daughter relationship. Ann Patchett shines at showing how complex that relationship can be, intertwined with love, disappointment, expectation, longing, safety, so many things. Whistler is excellent. 

Previous reviews of Ann Patchett's books: https://barbpruittwrites.blogspot.com/search?q=Ann+Patchett

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The Thirteenth Child by Erin A. Craig was recommended to me by a daughter. It had several things I liked in a fantasy novel. The premise was that Hazel is a rare thirteenth child, which made her coveted by the Gods. Her father promises her to Merrick, the Dreaded End, the god of death. His will is for her to be a healer, a very famous healer, and he gives her the ability to see what is wrong with her patients and to know how to heal them. However, not everyone can be healed. Some patients are marked for death, and in fact, their deaths are required. I found this to be an interesting plot, with creative world-building and surprising story paths. It felt like it took a long time to tell the story; the pacing could have been faster. The story proposed that some people needed to die to keep more people from dying. They had to die for the greater good, but when using the God-Eye, Hazel could see all of a person's possible futures. I found the book's internal logic inconsistent, which bugged me, but not enough to stop reading. Craig is a captivating storyteller.

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    Last week, I read Sulari Gentill's Woman in the Library and liked her creative approach to plotting a mystery, so I read Five Found Dead. This murder mystery takes place on the Orient Express! Bold move. The story is told in the first person. Meredith Penvale has suspended her job as a corporate lawyer to help her twin brother Joe, a successful mystery writer, as he fights cancer. To celebrate his survival, the two book a trip on the famous Orient Express. In the cabin next to theirs, a murder occurs. The door is locked, the room is splashed with blood, but there is no body and nowhere to hide. Or is there? This book was also clever. It could have moved faster, but it was a fun read.

(https://barbpruittwrites.blogspot.com/2026/06/mysterymagical-ya.html)

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🫆🕵️‍♀️🦞Mystery!🦝🕯️👻Magical YA

    I saw The Woman in the Library by Sulari Gentill on a list of Books Within Books. Intrigued, I picked one on Libby, and this was available. It starts with four strangers at a table in the Boston Public Library scoping each other out. A woman's scream rings out, startling everyone. These strangers begin to talk, trying to unravel the mystery, and become friends. One of them is a murderer. This was a fun, twisty book. The protagonist is a mystery writer, Freddie — short for Frederica — who uses the unexplained scream as the impetus for her new mystery novel. The other three at her table, Freud Girl, Handsome Man, and Heroic Chin, become characters. There are several mysteries unfolding. An avid fan of Freddie's is allowed to read and comment on each chapter, but this fan seems too avid and decidedly odd. What's happening there? Where is the screaming woman? Is she tied to the three strangers around the table? I found this novel an intriguing peek at the writing process, while debating modern novel plots, and keeping things hopping. I think I will read more by Sulari Gentill.

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     I don't know why Ferris by Kate DiCamillo isn't more well-known. It is a YA book, but it brought tears to my eyes. The main character, Ferris, has a notable family. Her little sister's goal in life is to be on a wanted poster. She works hard to make that happen. Her uncle lives in the basement, painting a history of the world, missing his hairstylist wife, who kicked him out. Her father is convinced that there are raccoons in the attic. Her grandmother, Cherise, and the dog are both seeing a ghost. Then things get weird. The book is entertainingly zany, yet it explores death, grief, and uniqueness in touching, sensitive ways. I found it magical.

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🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟Three Excellent and Very Different Books

 

     Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson is a five-star book. It has great, complex characters, mystery, drama, a twisty plot that bounces around in time, amazing settings, a surprise ending, all wrapped up in beautiful writing. It really is the whole package. At the heart of the book is Covey. A young black woman growing up on a British island in the Caribbean in the 1950s and 1960s, but the book starts with estranged siblings Byron and Benny forced together by the death of their mother, Eleanor. She leaves them 8 hours of herself telling about Covey. Wilkerson creates tension by making us wonder about all the mysteries and the battered relationships. She presented a tightly coiled story knot and then tantalizingly unpicked it. I found the ending quite satisfying. This might be my best book of the year.

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The Book of Doors by Gareth Brown has all the things I love about fantasy. It has special books that do magical things, time travel, monstrous people, and people who find their bravery. I was impressed that every question I had, and everything I hoped could be repaired, happened. Some writers plan meticulously, then write. Their plots can feel mechanical. Others fly by the seat of their pants, and what happens, happens. Their plots can feel unresolved or ill-conceived. Gareth Brown manages to create an obviously carefully planned plot that felt spontaneous in how the novel's storyline nested together. I enjoyed it from start to finish. 

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    I have read Elie Wiesel's book, Night before, and am reading it again for June's book club. I had forgotten how bleak it is. It is a memoir of a young Romanian Jewish boy's experience in several Nazi concentration camps. He faced death repeatedly. In the book, he recounts how the brutal suffering stripped him of his love for his father, his humanity, and his faith. He grew into a fierce defender of human rights: Jewish, but also Palestinian. He spoke out against apartheid, the Soviet Union's oppression of Poland, and others. There is a lot of anguish in Night because it is difficult to read the casual cruelty inflicted on fellow humans. It is a worthwhile book to read to know what we are capable of and to be goaded to speak and act against it.