We took a brief holiday over the Ascension Day weekend, and because my kids didn’t really want to leave the campsite I got the chance to catch up on my reading. I finished three books. The third one deserves its own review, but I grouped the other two together.
The Alewives (Elizabeth R. Anderson) **
In the Middle Ages, in the tannery district of the Alsation town of Colmar, four women team up to brew ale, bemoan their useless and/or dead husbands, and solve crimes. There’s Appel, an older widow, pious but frequently accused of witchcraft; long-suffering Gritta, struggling to feed her small army of children in spite of her drunkard husband, and naive, recently widowed Efi. Their endeavours to brew ale are frequently thwarted by the paternalistic, tightly structured society in which they live, and they receive help from a local friar. But when their neighbours start dropping dead, the Alewives set out to discover whodunnit, and why.
Historic fiction is a genre I always think I’ll like, but rarely do, and this novel exemplifies why: the middle ages are a fascinating era of human history, but it’s difficult to get the tone right and still create a readable novel. I couldn’t get through The Name of the Rose either: that one was too opaque, too dry, too different in its thinking for me to grasp. The Alewives has the opposite problem: it has far too much fluff. It’s also painfully uneven in its tone. It tries to grasp serious themes: domestic violence, alcoholism, the vulnerable position of women. At the same time it tries to stay light-hearted and cheerful. This is something that can be done, but the effect here is rather unhinged because the two don’t so much co-exist as they clash.
This is part one in a planned series. I know some Cannonballers really liked this novel, but it wasn’t for me.
Lock Every Door (Riley Sager) ***1/2
If something seems too good to be true, it usually is – and yet every year, hundreds of thousands of people fall for seemingly obvious scams, because they are desperate and grasping at straws. Such is the premise at the heart of Lock Every Door: Jules Larsen has lost her boyfriend, her apartment and her job all on the same day and she’s been living on her friend’s sofa for a while when she sees a Craigslist ad asking for an apartment sitter. Jules will be paid a thousand dollars per week to take care of a large Manhattan apartment in one of the most famous buildings in New York: the Bartholomew. Jules’ friend warns her it may not be what it seems, but Jules is broke, her family is dead and she is eager to ignore the weird rules the woman lists if it means she’ll have a chance to fatten her bank account. But, of course, not everything is as it seems.
I liked this one better than I thought I would. Jules is never really painted in broad strokes and occasionally, you want to tell her to stop digging, but she’s not a superhero, just someone who is forced to be resourceful. There are a couple of nice, unexpected twists, and I liked that the book didn’t go in the direction in which I thought it would go (it’s never a good idea to try to out-Rosemary’s Baby Rosemary’s Baby).
Sager comes highly recommended by people whose recommendations haven’t really landed with me in the past. This is the second book of his I’ve read and they’re hardly high art, but they manage to be just the right kind of popcorn factor to overlook implausibilities. All in all, this was the perfect holiday read.
