"Major Fireworks" by B. R. Goodwin

This third Sugartree book may be my favorite one yet.  I enjoyed it a lot more than Honeysuckle Breeze, and a bit more than Southern Snow, too.  I really, genuinely liked both main characters, and I enjoyed spending time with both of them, not just one or the other.  Makes a huge difference.

Dakota Remillard is trying to figure out how to make a difference in the world, after spending the first few years of his adult life treading water, metaphorically.  He's also trying to figure out why he can't seem to get himself to quit being interested in Sadie, the manager of his family's small-town coffee shop.  She's made it clear she doesn't want to date him, but he can't stop hoping she'll magically change her mind.

Sadie wishes Dakota would just go away and quit being so interesting and kind and hopeful, because then she could stop feeling bad for disappointing him repeatedly.  She's got too much baggage from her past to consider trying to share a life with anyone.  Her parents are in the middle of a huge life change, so her whole world is in flux, and she just wants everything to calm down.

And so, of course, Dakota and Sadie set out on an epic road trip to pick up coffee beans for the shop, and everything goes kaplooey, until it doesn't.  As one expects.

B. R. Goodwin consistently makes me chuckle aloud with her books, and this one is no exception.  She's also aces at writing relatable Christian human beings. 

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-16 for some innuendo about a married couple's plans for the evening, lots of attraction between a man and a woman, many instances of dialog between friends being pretty open about their attraction to other people, and a discussion involving French kissing.  No smut, but more smoochy content than I would hand to a young teen.  No cussing or violence.

"The Mysterious Mr. Quin" by Agatha Christie

I really like the Mr. Quin mysteries.  Really, REALLY like them.  I read a few of them previously, in those seasonal Agatha Christie collections, and I liked them so much that I picked up this anthology that has nearly all of the Mr. Quin stories in it.  (WHY did they decide to leave a couple out?  So annoying.  Now I have to track those down.)

The Mr. Quin stories all revolve an aging gentleman named Mr. Satterthwaite who has spent his life cultivating a peerless taste in art of every kind.  He knows many, many people, and often happens to be at someone's estate when someone is in dire straits, or encounters desperate people while on holiday, and so on.  Then the mysterious Mr. Harley Quin will show up and give Mr. Satterthwaite a helpful hint or a nudge of some kind, and events will take a sudden turn, usually for the better.  Several suicides and murders are avoided, some grave disappointments are averted, and some crimes are solved over the course of the book.  And many of the stories have just a touch of eeriness, but no actual creepiness.  

This would have been a great collection to read in October around Halloween, and I'll probably reread it in the autumn in a couple of years, once I have forgotten how most of the mysteries turn out.  That way, they will be fresh and delightful again.  Happily, I only remembered the solution to one of the stories I had previously read, and I only remembered it about a page before we got to the reveal.  Quite delightful.

My favorite stories in the collection were "The Face of Helen," "The Dead Harlequin," and "The World's End."

Particularly Good Bits:

Mr. Satterthwaite put away the little set speech he had prepared, and hastily rummaged for sympathy and friendship in the bottom drawer of his mind (p. 183, from "The Face of Helen).

He was a sensible young man, and, as such, uninteresting to Mr. Satterthwaite, who was an artist and a connoisseur in life (p. 249, from "The Bird with the Broken Wing").

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG-13 for several murders, discussions of and depictions of suicide, and other crimes.

This is my 8th book read and reviewed for my fifth Classics Club list.

"The Sweet Life" by Suzanne Woods Fisher

If you love ice cream, you will probably enjoy this book, because a LOT of it revolves around making and consuming ice cream.  I read the whole book in one day while on a road trip and insisted we stop somewhere with ice cream for supper because I neeeeeded some.

When Dawn Dixon's fiancé calls off their wedding and, that same day, she learns her widowed mom has secretly been battling cancer, Dawn goes into an emotional tailspin.  Her fiancé insists she go on their already-paid-for-and-non-refundable honeymoon trip to Cape Cod, and take whomever along she wants.  Dawn picks her mom, Marnie.  Marnie is unpredictable, freewheeling, and secretive.  Dawn is secretive too, but prefers that her life be predictable and regimented, so she and her mom clash a lot, especially when Marnie decides to buy a dilapidated historic building and turn it into a quaint ice cream shop.   With Dawn's help, because Dawn loves to make ice cream.

This is the first book of a series, so not everything gets figured out and resolved by the end, but the ice cream shop does open, and the two main characters do come to understand each other much better.

I really liked that this book revolved around the relationship between a mother and daughter, rather than around a romantic relationship, though those existed on the fringes of the story.  And I loved all the ice cream making :-)  And I liked that Marnie had solid faith in God and was a regular churchgoer, but Dawn didn't and wasn't, so we got to see a mother helping her daughter grow and mature in her faith.  That was cool.  

However, the writing was very simplistic most of the time, almost to the point of being clunky.  There was also an awful lot of telling us how a person felt or what kind of person they were, rather than showing us those things.

Particularly Good Bits:

She was a big believer in miracles.  Big ones, small ones, everyday ones.  You just had to keep your eyes on the lookout for them (p. 29).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG.  You have some romantic sparkage here and there, but it's not exactly a "kissing book."

"The First Fast Draw" by Louis L'Amour

Well, this was not a new favorite L'Amour book, but it was still fun.  And I read it in like three days, so you know the pacing was excellent.  Kept me turning those pages like crazy!

Cullen Baker returns home to Texas after the Civil War ended.  He didn't really participate in the war, but everyone assumes he did.  The people who hated him when he was a kid living there still hate him.  Seems like the only people who don't want to punch or shoot him are outlaws... and Katy Thorne.  Katy is from one of the best families in the area, but even her friendship can't save him from greedy carpetbaggers and a variety of other creeps.  Cullen just wants to farm the land he already owns, but everyone keeps blaming him for all sorts of crimes he didn't commit, just because he makes a handy scapegoat.  Eventually, Cullen takes after the people who hate him, and the sparks fly fast and furious.

I know this is an earlier L'Amour book, so I'll cut the too-fast ending some slack.  It's a fun read, and I liked Cullen and Katy a lot.

Particularly Good Bits:

A really rough man never has to prove anything to anybody, he knows what he can do and he doesn't care even a mite whether anybody else knows it or not.  With a youngster it's otherwise.  He figures he's got to show everybody how tough he is or nobody will believe it, so he winds up in plenty of grief (p. 9).

One thing I'd learned was it mattered mighty little how much money a man had as long as he was contented (p. 13).

For a man to be a peace with himself was important, Will said, not what people say.  People are often wrong, and public opinion can change, and the hatreds of people are rarely reasonable things.  I can hear him yet.  He used to say there was no use a man wearing himself out with hatred an dill-feeling, and time proved it out (p. 13).

A few men riding into the street meant nothing to anybody, not those days.  There were loose men from everywhere, just drifting, hunting they knew not what, men who had lost what they had i the war and were hoping, away back inside their skulls, to find it somewhere else (p 53).

To have friends a man has to be friendly, and to get others to think of you, you have to think of others (p. 145).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-13 for violence and threats made to a woman.  Some cussing, obviously a good bit of western violence, but no smut.

"Williamsburg at War: Virginia's Colonial Capital in the Revolutionary War" by Michael Cecere

I picked this book up while at Colonial Williamsburg last month to celebrate July 4th.  And started to read it while staying in a house that was build in the 1750s on the other side of the James River from Williamsburg.  And then it took me more than a month to finish it, but it still seemed like the perfect time and place to start reading.

Williamsburg at War was particularly interesting to me once we got past the lead-up-to-the-war part.  Having been to Colonial Williamsburg dozens of times, I know a good bit about the Powder Magazine Incident and Lord Dunmore (who the colonists all wished had done less) fleeing Virginia and so on.  But everything past that point was pretty new to me, and I liked getting to learn new and interesting things about a place that is dear to my heart.

I particularly liked the author's point at the very end of the book, that the fact that the capitol of Virginia was moved to Richmond during the war meant that Williamsburg sank into relative obscurity... which made many parts of it remain fairly unchanged over the next hundred and fifty years, allowing for the Rockefellers and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation to create the most amazing living history experience right where history happened, without having to tear down a lot of skyscrapers or something.  I had always felt kind of sad for Williamsburg, getting left in the dust back then, but now I see that it was actually a blessing for us today.

Also, I was greatly amused by this one bit of complaining from a European officer, Captain Ewald, about the misery of summer in Virginia:

"For six weeks the heat has been so unbearable that many men have been lost to sunstroke or their reason has been impaired.  Everything that one has on his body is soaked as with water from the constant perspiration." (p. 187).

I regret to say Virginia summers have not changed.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG for discussions of warfare, including things written about war and death by people who experienced it.

This has been my 8th book read and reviewed for my #RevolutionaryWarReads challenge.  I've bought a lot of new books about the Revolution this year, because of it being American's 250th birthday, so I've made an entirely new graphic to display just the books I have read for this challenge, not the ones I might read.  I'm still aiming for thirteen by the end of the year, one for each of the original colonies.

"The Leavenworth Case" by Anna Katherine Green

I probably never would have read this if it hadn't been for Patricia Meredith's book A Deed of Dreadful Note.  That book is a fictional imagining of how Green could have gotten the ideas she needed to write The Leavenworth Case.  It took me a few years to get around to reading the original, but I'm very happy I kept it on my TBR and finally made time to read it, because I very much enjoyed it.

A wealthy merchant is murdered.  His two nieces, whom he has raised, are the prime suspects.  Particularly since one of them has become an heiress thanks to this murder.  We get two detectives in this book, one professional and one amateur.  The professional is a New York police investigator named Ebenezer Gryce, while the amateur is a young lawyer named Everett Raymond, who also narrates the book.  Gryce has the wisdom and experience needed, but Raymond has a personal stake in things that aids his natural cleverness.  He falls in love with one of the dead man's nieces over the course of the book.

From what I have read, The Leavenworth Case was a really popular book when it was released in 1878.  Green has been called the Mother of Detective Fiction because her Detective Gryce books (she wrote quite a few more) made the genre popular almost a decade before the first Sherlock Holmes stories appeared.  She made the detective series popular in particular, and also is credited with inventing the "girl detective" type in a later book.

For me, The Leavenworth Case was remarkable not just for being so seminal to my favorite genre, but also for being a really satisfying mystery.  A lot of very early detective fiction can feel simplistic or even a bit twee, but this book kept me guessing until the big reveal.  I will say it's got a slow and contemplative pacing that some modern readers might not appreciate, and there was also a long letter of confession from the murderer at the end that felt unnecessary, but those weren't big enough detractions to make me dislike the book as a whole.  I hope to find more of the Detective Gryce books to read in the future.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG for murder and related subject matter.  No cussing, gory violence (though blood spatter and brains are briefly mentioned) or smut.

This has been my 7th book read for my 5th Classics Club list.

Top Ten Tuesday: Bygone August Books

This month's Top Ten Tuesday prompt from That Artsy Reader Girl is "Books I was reading on this day mid-August over the past ten years."  I keep a monthly record of what books I read and what movies I watched, and it's really fun to go looking back through that for things like this!  But it does mean I don't necessarily know what I was reading on a specific day, so I just aimed for things toward the middle of my list for each August.

I've linked the titles to my own reviews, in case you want to know more about any particular book.

2016 -- Rainbow Valley by L. M. Montgomery (classic, coming-of-age, World War One, Canada)

2017 -- Rules of Murder by Julianna Deering (Christian, mystery, historical fiction, 1930s Britain)

2018 -- Famous Gunfighters of the Western Frontier by W. B. "Bat" Masterson (non-fiction, Old West history, essays)

2019 -- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (classic, Russian, Napoleonic Wars)

2020 -- Rook di Goo by Jenni Sauer (fairy tale retelling, sci-fi + fantasy, strong heroine, found family)

2021 -- The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (classic, swashbuckler)

2022 -- Rose Petals and Snowflakes by Kendra E. Ardnek (fairy tale retelling, fantasy, Jane Austen retelling, sisterhood)

2023 -- The Last Atlantean  by Emily Hayse (Christian, historicalesque fantasy)

2024 -- The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle (classic, fantasy)

2025 -- The Case of the Footloose Doll by Erle Stanley Gardner (Perry Mason, mystery, courtroom drama)

Do you keep track of what you read?  If so, how?