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Book Review: The Cat Who Smelled a Rat

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The Cat Who Smelled a Rat
Book #23
by Lilian Jackson Braun

My rating: 4.5 / 5
Genre: Cozy mystery

When a series of brush fires threaten the safety of everyone in Moose County, is it due to drought conditions? Or is it arson? Then there’s an explosion in town and a pair of deaths, some of which could have been accidents, but former crime reporter Jim Qwilleran begins to look for threads between all of these events.

After the last couple of books seeming to have less and less of Qwilleran doing any real investigating, he shows us here what he’s capable of, digging into matters, asking questions, and getting to the truth of the various calamities. Though this book brings yet another weather extremity, it doesn’t affect the residents of Moose County as much as some of the previous ones did and adds suspense to the story in a way I enjoyed. And it’s always more interesting when one of the locals is heavily involved in the mystery, especially as the culprit! I felt like this one was a long time coming, though I won’t say any more to avoid spoilers.

What baffles me, though, is that there is a series of haikus included in the book, and not only do none of them follow the 5 syllables-7 syllables-5 syllables pattern, they don’t even have 17 syllables in any format! I guess Braun is better at prose than she is at poetry, though it’s certainly majorly out of character for Qwilleran to not make note of this or for Polly and the other judges to choose winners that aren’t correct at all. Still, that’s a minor quibble in the grand scheme of things. I can’t believe I’m down to 6 books left in the series! I hope to find some more gems in those final books!

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Book Review: Fall of Hades

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Fall of Hades
Michael Vey #6
by Richard Paul Evans

My rating: 4 / 5
Genre: YA sci-fi adventure

Spoiler notice: The following review may contain some spoilers for the previous books in the series, starting with The Prisoner of Cell 25.

Along the way to trying to cripple Hatch and the Elgen’s, Michael Vey and most of the rest of the Electroclan are sent on not one, but two rescue missions.

I am absolutely baffled by my own reaction to this book, and to a greater degree, to this series. I struggle so much with some of the writing—the teen drama, the dialogue, the over-attention to food details, and the overabundance of facts that we’re supposed to believe are all in one kid’s head—and yet, I generally have enjoyed the series and want to know what’s going to happen in the next (but no longer final) installment. I do appreciate that this book has more forward motion than the previous, and it also has a killer ending. 

On the other hand, how on earth has Hatch not already been overthrown by his people when he leads like he does? He basically “makes an example” of everyone who looks at him the wrong way. I’m not sure it would be as easy as it’s portrayed here to keep the loyalty of as many subordinates as Hatch does. But I’ve said since book #2 that Evans has made his villain so over-the-top evil that it’s a little disturbing, and that hasn’t lessened…only worsened, really. On top of that, these “good guy” kids are starting to get way too cavalier about killing anyone that does them wrong in the slightest bit, which bugs me a little, especially in a YA series. There’s also an over-abundance of random thug-type characters (gang members, elk hunters) that are way too quick to jump to violence and even murder as well. 

I think that what I’m realizing is that I’m just not a fan of Evans’s writing, and I will most likely never re-read this series, yet there is enough intrigue in the overall plot that I want to see it through. So that’s something, even though I usually have more complaints than compliments. And though this review may not seem like a 4-star review, I felt like even 3.5 was just too low for what I thought of the book in the end. It’s the highest rated book in the series, which I suspect has something to do with the ending.

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Book Review: Adventures with Waffles

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Adventures with Waffles
by Maria Parr

My rating: 4 / 5
Genre: Children’s fiction

Trille and Lena are neighbors in a small, close-knit coastal town in Norway. Through summer and into the school year around the time they’re both 9 years old, they have adventures, get in trouble, and deal with tragedy.

For the first several chapters of this book, I wasn’t quite sure what the overarcing plot was, or if there even was one. And really, much of the book is a series of adventures that these two kids get up to in this otherwise-sleepy Norwegian cove. But there is a thread that runs through it, in which Trille, who thinks of Lena as his best friend, isn’t sure whether he is her best friend. And it’s not really surprising, since she is quite an outspoken, antagonistic girl, while Trille is more meek. My own daughter has gone through something similar, more than once, so Trille’s plight hit close to home for me.

As an entire year passes, a few bigger side plots emerge, and more than one of them caused me to tear up a little. Though it’s true that Trille and Lena don’t obey their parents very well and face some consequences for their disobedience (though not always are those consequences very severe), there is quite a bit of heart in this book, and that’s what I was left with at the end. This would be a great book to read together with kids, recommended for 7-10-year-olds.

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Book Review: The Cat Who Robbed a Bank

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The Cat Who Robbed a Bank
Book #22
by Lilian Jackson Braun

My rating: 3 / 5
Genre: Cozy mystery

When a jewel dealer from Down Below visits, it has the attention of all of Pickax City 400 miles north of everywhere. Then the jewel dealer is murdered, and former crime reporter Jim Qwilleran pays extra attention. 

Sometimes it can seem that Qwilleran rarely solves the mysteries in these books—that answers simply fall into his lap. But usually, much of the book is spent with him making connections, asking just the right questions, and sort of lining things up to work out so that he gets to the solution in the end. Not so in this book. He truly didn’t solve much of anything. Speculations early in the mystery turned out to be correct with little in the way of deviation. Yes, he was kind of caught up in the climax, but it was really only because of a friendship that he’d been cultivating for a while, nothing to do with his suspicions about the case. The community surrounding the mystery wasn’t as interesting as it has been in other books, maybe because it was more disjointed.

There was one interesting development. Anyone who has read many of these books knows that Qwilleran is basically devoid of all family and does tend to long for a connection. This was dangled in front of him—and us—in this book, and I’m not really sure how I feel about the way that turned out. Maybe it would have seemed to fake if it had gone a different way, but I really hope to see more in this line in the future. Overall, though, I’m hoping the next book is better.

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Book Review: Ramona and Her Mother

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Ramona and Her Mother
Ramona Quimby #5
by Beverly Cleary
Read by Stockard Channing

My rating: 4 / 5
Genre: Children’s classic

This book did not stand out to me as much as previous in the series did. I think that’s just because a lot of it felt like rehashing of things Ramona did, misunderstandings, etc. from previous books. After how much I loved the previous book in the series, this one felt a little like a letdown. It seems like she could really do with a little more discipline, but on the other hand, she’s at a young enough age that both of her parents being gone full-time would have to be very difficult on her. I feel for Ramona in some of the situations she gets herself into, and there are also some nice moments in the book, as in previous ones. Stockard Channing’s narration is pretty great, too, and I recommend it for anyone who might be interested, young or old.

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Book Review: The First Four Years

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The First Four Years
Little House #9
by Laura Ingalls Wilder
read by Cherry Jones

My rating: 3.5 / 5
Genre: Children’s historical classic

I can understand now the claims that this book is so vastly different from the rest of the series. The main thing I noticed is that there is a lot of hardship, just like the rest of the books have, but while the rest of the books also make sure to talk about the happy things mixed in, this one barely does. I get the feeling that Laura Ingalls Wilder, or perhaps her daughter Rose Wilder Lane, who edited the previous works, intentionally included those happy moments to soften the difficult ones. No one did that for this manuscript. Not that there weren’t a few happy moments, but they were meager compared to the loss of crops time after time, the bad weather, the fire, the sickness. And Almanzo comes across pretty terrible in this book. He convinced Laura to give farming 3 years when she tells him that she doesn’t really want to live a farmer’s life due to the hardship (which she was absolutely correct about, obviously) before they were married, so it’s not like she waited until afterward to tell him she didn’t want him to farm, and that, if farming isn’t so much a success for them that she’s okay with continuing, he’ll quit. After 3 years of losing their crops every year, though, he talks her into “just one more year.” To me, that sounds like a man who has no plans to ever give up his own way. I haven’t read Wilder’s diaries from after this time, and I don’t plan to at this time, but I do hope that he wasn’t as manipulative as he seems in this book.

For this whole series, my enjoyment of the book was greatly enhanced by the audiobook narrator, Cherry Jones, who does a fantastic job. If you’ve ever considered reading this series, or have already read it and have occasion to listen to the audiobooks, I say do it!

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Book Review: Click Here to Start

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Click Here to Start
by Denis Markell

My rating: 2.5 / 5
Genre: Middle grade mystery, adventure, fantasy

Twelve-year-old Ted Gerson meets his namesake, his great-uncle Ted, for the first time shortly before the man’s death. At that meeting, his great-uncle asks about his penchant for escape-the-room video games, and then makes him promise to never stop looking for answers. This cryptic message is followed by Ted being given all of the contents of the great-uncle’s apartment after his death. But then Ted discovers that the newest escape-the-room game on his computer is set up just like his great-uncle’s apartment and that the clues in the game are in the apartment in real life!

I really wanted to love this book for more than one reason. First, my daughter is the one who recommended it to me, which is always a special situation. Second, I’m an escape room player (real life games more than computer ones though), worked as a game master and game builder for a while, and still make escape room-type games for my job now. You might say they’re a big part of my life. But it’s probably because of that second reason that this book wasn’t so great for me. The main story about Ted’s great-uncle, whose history Ted got to know through the hunt, was interesting. The sub-plot with the mysterious person who is on Ted’s trail and clearly lying about being a reporter named Clark Kent wasn’t bad, though the reveal and conclusion were underwhelming. The three main characters—Ted, his best friend Caleb, and new girl Isabel—left a bit to be desired, but that didn’t really bother me much.

However, one of my pet peeves involving games that are included in TV shows, movies, or books was a huge part of this book. The way some of the escape room elements were solved just made no sense. There is NO way someone, especially a kid, could have figured out some of these puzzles. Some of them were just huge logic leaps that can absolutely ruin a game for players. Throughout the story, a new online escape room game will present itself to Ted, and it will be exactly what he needs to progress in his mystery. While this is, of course, a stretch, I can accept it as a fantastical element to the story (though, spoiler alert, it is never explained how this happens or who is behind it). However, the first of these games that Ted plays, he plays for 5 hours, then gets stuck, then goes to the apartment and walks through the same steps in a very short amount of time. Yes, he had already done the solving when he’d played the computer game, but 5 hours? To solve what took maybe 10 minutes to get through in real life, and some of that time was spent trying to give the others a chance to feel like they were solving it? I don’t buy it. Then, later in the story, somehow a book that is part of Uncle Ted’s mystery ends up being a clue to the home alarm system of someone completely unrelated (literally and figuratively) to Uncle Ted. How does that make any sense? 

It’s certainly difficult to translate something like escape room puzzles to a novel, though several authors have tried. Sometimes it works okay (the Mr. Lemoncello’s Library series is an example of it working okay, though it’s fairly light on the puzzles), but sometimes it doesn’t. In this book, it doesn’t. And unfortunately, for me at least, the rest of the book wasn’t enough to make up for that. For people who aren’t quite as into escape rooms as I am and just like a good puzzle-light mystery in the middle grade category, you just might find this a good read. If you’re a major escape room enthusiast, I don’t recommend it.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Added to my Shelf Because of Top Ten Tuesday

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It’s time for another Top Ten list from That Artsy Reader Girl, and I’ve poked my head back in just time to thank my fellow TTT’ers for their recommendations! I can’t tell you who recommended each of these for sure, and some were in multiple posts, but they’re all books that I know I learned about because of a past TTT post. The first six in this list I’ve read and are ordered from lowest to highest ratings (by me), and the last 4 are on my TBR, but I haven’t gotten to them yet. I won’t say much about any of these, but I’ll post links to my reviews for those I’ve read. Though they didn’t all become favorites, I never regret any book I read, no matter the rating I give, and am always thankful for recommendations that help me expand my reading horizons.

The Saturday Night Ghost Club by Craig Davidson
My rating: 1 / 5 stars—see my review here.

The Flatshare by Beth O’Leary
My rating: 2 / 5 stars—see my review here.

A Seven Letter Word by Kim Slater
My rating: 3.5 / 5 stars—see my review here.

Sadie by Courtney Summers
My rating: 4 / 5 stars—see my review here.

The Thousand-Dollar Tan Line by Rob Thomas & Jennifer Graham
My rating: 4 / 5 stars—see my review here.

When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead
I’ve already read this twice and recommended it to my 12-year-old daughter, who also loved it. My rating: 5 / 5 stars—see my review here.

The Pawn by Steven James
I’ve read one book by this author and look forward to trying another.

Book Love by Debbie Tung
Comics for book lovers? Count me in!

Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss
Maybe a book about the decline of proper pronunciation will turn out to be pretentious, but I’m still intrigued.

Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion
One of many movies I’ve seen and liked that I found out later was originally a book, I learned about this one from a TTT post and plan to read it soon.

Have you read any of these? What’s on your list this week?

Book Review: Very Good, Jeeves

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Very Good, Jeeves
Jeeves #4
 by P.G. Wodehouse
Read by Jonathan Cecil

My rating: 4.5 / 5
Genre: Classic British humor

This was definitely one of my favorite collections of the series. Maybe the outlandish situations Bertie Wooster gets himself into should be getting stale, but I’m only enjoying them more as I go. Maybe because I’m starting to get into the overall feel of the stories more? There were several moments that made me laugh out loud or at least smile; I regret that I was listening to the audiobook and couldn’t make note of them at the time. Bertie fooling himself into thinking Jeeves doesn’t always get his own way, though, is one such moment. I only wish I could have continued to listen to Kevin Theis, but apparently he only narrated 4 of the books. Though I still like Theis more, Jonathan Cecil was good too, excepting for the strange speech impediment he gave to Bingo Little. I can say with certainty at this point that I will listen to these audiobooks again someday.

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Book Review: A Spy on the Home Front

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A Spy on the Home Front
American Girl Molly Mysteries #1
by Alison Hart

My overall rating: 3.5 / 5
Genre: Children’s historical mystery

Having just read the main Molly series, I read the first Molly mystery to follow it up. It wasn’t bad, but it didn’t really have the style and heart of the main series. No one from the main series, besides Molly herself, is in this book, and Molly’s summer friend Anna doesn’t really have much of a personality. I do like the historical information regarding German-Americans placed in internment camps, the pro-Nazi Silver Legion, and the WASPs, of which Molly’s aunt is one. This book also has a “Looking Back” section like the main series books, which goes into detail more on each of these points. The mystery in the book, which involved tracking down a Silver Legion member who was sending anti-American propaganda flyers out via planes at a local airfield, was not terribly complicated, but it was a decent vehicle for the history, keeping the book from feeling dry. Molly’s strategic and slightly manipulative personality from the main series does continue here, making it a decent follow-up for anyone who has read the main series, though it could be read as a stand-alone too.

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