book reviews

D. Michael Ryan, Concord and the Dawn of Revolution - This is a small book about the lives and contributions of a number of Concord residents during the events of the battles of Lexington and Concord. The vignettes both convey a lot of information and offer a sense of the people involved and how they were affected by the start of the revolution.

Naguib Mahfouz, The Thief and the Dogs - Essentially, a retelling of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment , but set in 1960s Egypt. I never got a good sense of what qualities in the main character I was supposed to care about, or why his revenge should matter to the reader. Every character in the book was deeply unpleasant, the pacing was extremely slow, and in the end I was left without a good sense of what the story had been supposed to be about.

Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Lonely Heiress - One of Gardner's more convoluted plots, I still wasn't certain by the end of the book that I understood how each element fit in. It had a lot of the elements one expects from Perry Mason's adventures - the courtroom scene, the part where Perry gets himself in potential trouble with the law, the defendant who lies to Perry when the truth would have been a better choice. In addition, this one had a vivid description of the cops giving the defendant the "third degree", contained a touching little romance, and had a mix of particularly interesting characters.

Tracy Winn, Mrs. Somebody Somebody - Set in Lowell, MA, in the 1940s-1970s, this series of stories left me so depressed I had to go out and get ice cream. No one in any of the stories ever had anything good happen to them. Additionally, the book is not billed as a set of short stories, and the first two chapters are a linear narrative. So once I finished those and we started jumping around in time and character, I was extremely confused, waiting to find out what happened to the characters from the first couple of chapters. I was never with any of the characters long enough to be truly interested in what happened to them, and they were all so miserable I wasn't sure I wanted to know anyway.