The Address (Book Review)

The Address by Fiona Davis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While The Lions of Fifth Avenue has the better title, The Address may have the better plot. While I definitely appreciated all of the facts about the New York City Public Library in the former, I was often distracted by what I felt were inconsistencies in the historical settings; by contrast, The Address doesn't seem to offer up nearly as many factoids, but the timelines are spot on.

One may consider Davis' novels to be a bit formulaic: two women on two different ends of history, one (real) historic building connecting them, with a mystery across decades/centuries to solve. So far, though, the mysteries are not the same, and The Address provided some extra twists that I did not anticipate. And everyone knows it's the above formula that counts, it's the "how" -- how we get there, how the stories connect, etc. Davis seems to have that aspect well in hand.

As with Lions, The Address has an undercurrent of (much appreciated and respected) feminism throughout, much subtler, actually. And she deals with classism as well.
I also like that her main characters are well-rounded. 

**SPOILER**

When we get to the final reveal, our villain isn't a villain with one huge deep dark secret that drops like a bomb; it's a series of "smaller" items that add up to make him not the person we thought he was. I don't think he's 100% bad in way that would seem cliche or stereotypical; that might feel anticlimactic to readers, but I appreciate the nuance.

This novel doesn't exactly have a happy ending; it's far more tragic than The Lions of Fifth Avenue, in my opinion.

I've borrowed Davis' other novels from my local library, and at least one of them does not deal with two women on opposite ends of the century; it will be interesting to see how Davis deals with the shorter timeline(s).

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The Lions of Fifth Avenue (Book Review)

The Lions of Fifth Avenue by Fiona Davis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If you enjoyed A Gentleman in Moscow , you may well enjoy this book as well, with its strong sense of place, both historically and physically with the main building involved. In many ways, The Lions of Fifth Avenue is what I wanted Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch to be: pieces of historical fiction with an art mystery at the center (and no whiny white boy with mommy issues just making the same mistakes over and over again -- can you tell I did not care for The Goldfinch?).

Fiona Davis does extensive research on the buildings in which she places her research, and it shows. I continue to say it's the mark of a good piece of historical fiction when I want to do more research afterward, to see what's "true" and what isn't, to learn about the subject matter. And Davis has done that here; I know more about the New York Public Library than just that it's featured in Ghostbusters, and now I really want to visit it if I ever get back to New York again.

My quibbles are just that --small and probably trivial, but here are they are nonetheless:

**CONTAINS SPOILERS**

• I nearly wanted it to be longer as I finished it in a day.
• I sometimes questioned the math regarding the ages and relationships of our two main women, Laura Lyons and Sadie Donovan. I would have expected at least one more generation in between them. If Sadie is 43 during the "present day" (1993) pieces, that means she was born in 1950. So why does she wear vintage 1950s things when those are the very fashions she grew up with? That would be like me wearing 1980s stuff now, which doesn't seem far enough removed to be "vintage" or "retro," just odd.
• And her brother Lonnie is roughly 10 years older than she is, making him born in 1940 (and a 53-year-old father of a six-year-old girl, still pretty unusual in the 1990s), making their mother (Pearl, age 7 in 1913) 34 when she had Lonnie and 44 when she had Sadie -- that seems a bit of a stretch, especially for a woman in 1940s America.
• Davis may have been better suited to place Sadie & Lonnie about ten years later in time, inserting another generation between the families. I can see why she chose 1993, though, as she doesn't have to deal with the technology of mobile phones, social media, etc., which can make mystery-writing infinitely more complicated.
• Even though I said I nearly wanted the book itself longer, the ending/wrap-ups seemed too long. We like to have things wrapped up, and yes, we wanted to know the specific connection of Robin to the family, but that entire section seemed too long. It was a lot of exposition, particularly about Harry, and I don't think we needed that much detail. We wanted to know the connection, but why he stayed away, etc. -- we could have easily filled in the blanks ourselves. So much guilt and cowardice at the end didn't really benefit anyone, audience or characters. I also found the sentencing at the trial to be a bit sanctimonious and heavy-handed.

I'm pleased to discover that Davis has other similar historical books with mysteries at the center of them, and I'm looking forward to reading them.

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The Other Bennet Sister (Book Review)

The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

**DNF**

I could not finish this book; it was an effort to get through the 100 pages (only 22% of the book!) that I did. It was simply too sad, too depressing.

After I got through the issue of reconciling what I knew of Mary's character from Pride & Prejudice with Hadlow's "version," there was the much larger issue of this "new" Mary's existence being utterly awful. Hadlow seems to have forgotten that Austen's original work is a comedy; this book is not a comedy but some terrible drama about a lonely, misunderstood girl surrounded by one-dimensional characters. While many of the original Pride & Prejudice characters are intended to be ridiculous, farcical, and/or satirical, Hadlow has made them simply mean.

Remembering that this book does "catch up" to the events of P&P, I forced myself to at least read that far, for curiosity's sake. And while I believe this book extends past the events of P&P to continue with Mary's life, I simply couldn't punish myself any further. I have no idea how it ends, but I couldn't endure Mary's misery any longer.

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The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires (Book Review)

The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

In all fairness to Mr. Hendrix, I should stipulate that my two-star rating has less to do with his writing quality and more to do with the fact that this book was not what I was expecting.
Based on the title and the synopsis, I was expecting something funnier, cleverer, sassier, possibly even sillier. This book is not those things.

I did not expect but did appreciate the feminism, the blasting of 1980s and 90s patriarchy, the acknowledgement of systemic racism and white privilege.

Hendrix lost me at the gore, I suppose. If you are a fan of horror as a genre, you may well enjoy this book and his gruesome turn of phrase. I did not, and a few times considered putting the book down; another point in Hendrix's favor that I did actually finish the novel.

**SPOILER ALERT**

I would also call this "the book of false endings." 

At several different chapters' ends, I expected the next chapter to be a sort of wrap-up, a "where are they now" with our antagonist firmly put in his place with perhaps a smug thought from Patricia and/or her cohorts. That does not happen. The book keeps going, and when the antagonist does finally meet his doom at the hands of the Southern ladies, it is neither clever nor smart nor neatly tied up with a bow; it is, however,...thorough.

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