"North and South" by Elizabeth Gaskell (again)

Have you ever felt like God nudged you to read a specific book when you needed it, without your realizing He was doing that?

At the beginning of June, my father-in-law was discussing the Industrial Revolution with some of us.  He said something about wanting a good way to get a clear idea of how the implementation of factories affected ordinary people.  I piped up and recommended North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell, which is all about the two sides of the factory coin -- it shows the struggles of the factory owners and of the factory workers.  I said it's pretty even-handed, and it's written by someone who lived in a manufacturing-centric city, and it's a really enjoyable read besides.

My father-in-law said maybe he would try it someday, if he lives long enough.  I extolled its virtues some  more.  He was still unenthusiastic.  I doubt he will ever read the book.

But I had reminded myself how very much I like this book.  (After this third reading, I will bump that up a notch and say I love it.)  All this took place while I was hastily packing for a will-we-or-won't-we vacation that we finally decided to take two days before we meant to leave, after having to toss all our original travel plans out the door and make new ones almost on the spot.  The night before we left, I pulled out of my bag three books I'd meant to take along and put in a copy of North and South instead.

It's the only book I read over the two weeks of our vacation (not counting an audiobook we all listened to as a family).  And it was exactly what I needed.

The reason we had to rearrange our travel plans was that my mom had gotten a preliminary diagnosis of lung cancer, pending more tests.  Instead of spending two weeks of June at her house in Iowa with us, she had to stay here in Virginia with my brother's family and have a biopsy and other tests done.  So we rejiggered all our plans and set off for a vastly different vacation than we had been looking forward to, all while having this possibility of Mom having cancer hanging over our heads.  

And what is this book about?  Why, a daughter whose mother slowly succumbs to a lingering illness, and who loses her father without warning.  I lost my dad without warning last fall, and here I am, facing my mother's lingering illness.  While we were gone, my mom did receive a diagnosis: stage 4 lung cancer.  And Margaret Hale was right there beside me, bearing up under personal pain and loss and fear and worry and uncertainty, just like me.

I'm fully convinced the Holy Spirit sometimes nudges my hand to pick up specific books.  Like when I read Summon the Light by Tor Thibeaux on the way to my dad's funeral.  Like when I ditched other books and stuck this in my bag at nearly the last minute.  Fiction has such power, and our Creator knows it.  Why else would He have taught using fictional stories so often?

Particularly Good Bits:

"I must do something.  I must make myself busy, to keep off morbid thoughts" (p. 35).

"I came here very sad, and rather too apt to think my own cause for grief was the only one in the world.  And now I hear how you have had to bear for years, and that makes me stronger" (p. 129-130).

"My theory is a sort of parody on the maxim of 'Get money, my son, honestly if you can, but get money.'  My precept is, 'Do something, my sister, do good if you can; but, at any rate, do something'" (p. 231).

"Come! poor little heart! be cheery and brave" (p. 304).

"It is the first changes among familiar things that make such a mystery of time to the young; afterwards, we lose the sense of the mysterious.  I take changes in all I see as a matter of course.  The instability of all human things is familiar to me; to you it is new and oppressive" (p. 359).

(I find it very interesting and appropriate that all my favorite lines this time are very different from my favorite lines the first time I read this.)

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG for some violence and quite a lot of character deaths, really.

"The Case of the Terrified Typist" by Erle Stanley Gardner

Yeah.  Definitely a new comfort-read series.

The plot of this one really kept me guessing.  It had several twists that I greatly enjoyed :-) 

Perry Mason has a lot of work to get done in a short amount of time, so he sends word to a temp agency to send an extra typist because Della Street and Gertie are unable to keep up.  A typist arrives, proves to be brilliant at her job, but disappears.  And then there are all sorts of robberies and treasure discoveries and accusations of murders, culminating in a very surprising trial.

Once again, this mystery was everything I wanted and needed when I read it, and I'm relishing having 78 more Perry Mason books to explore.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-10 for murder and some mild bad language.

"The Case of the Glamorous Ghost" by Erle Stanley Gardner

Friends, I think I have a new comfort author.

So, a few months ago, my 17-yr-old mentioned he would like to see some episodes of Perry Mason (1957-66), as I've mentioned now and then how much I liked that show when I was a kid watching reruns in the summer on cable at my grandparents' house.  Not long after, I found a couple seasons on DVD and bought them.  He tried some eps and liked them, so it was a win :-)

Not long after, my mom and I were looking for something to watch together in the evenings when she is staying with me.  I mentioned I had just gotten some Perry Mason DVDs, and she thought that sounded great.  So, we have been watching them 3 or 4 evenings a week when she stays with us.  And that has been an absolute blast!  I had forgotten how much I adore Paul Drake (William Hopper), Perry's on-call detective pal.  And I love Perry Mason (Raymond Burr) and Della Street (Barbara Hale) too.

Well, then I was at a used bookstore with my mom and some of her friends this spring, and I stumbled on a big hardcover collection of seven complete Perry Mason novels by Erle Stanley Gardner, some of the books that inspired the TV show.  And I bought it, remembering that my grandpa used to read Perry Mason books once in a while and figuring maybe they would be enough like the show I would enjoy them.

Y'all.  Oh, y'all.  They are so much like the show.  I mean, I can hear and see the actors and actresses from the show on every page.  Perry Mason might be a little more impulsive than his TV counterpart in the two I've read so far, and Della might be a bit more sarcastic than her TV self.  Paul Drake is also somewhat more lackadaisical, though they clearly took a lot of details from the books for his portrayal on the show.  Right down to having a special, secret knock he uses to let Perry Mason know it's him before he enters, just in case there's a client or a policeman he maybe shouldn't encounter just yet.  A very specific knocking pattern that I glommed onto while watching the show before the age of 11, as I vividly remember mimicking it when on an overnight outing with my mom.  I've used that knock many times ever since.  I may have forgotten for a while how much I love Paul Drake, but not how much I love the way he knocks on doors!

The main difference between the books and the show thus far are that there's some mild cussing in them, and a bit more innuendo.  (Actually, the show gets pretty suggestive for something that aired on network TV in the 1950s and '60s -- but like all good '50s and '60s shows, it's all in the suggesting and implying, no overt hanky panky shown or explicitly talked about.)  (Though I watched a season 5 episode the other day where they did talk about a guy dealing with a lot of lawsuits that involved paternity tests, which I betcha raised some eyebrows pretty high even in the early 1960s when that one would have aired.)

Anyway, The Case of the Glamorous Ghost is about a girl who is picked up by the police because she's running around a public park at night, wearing a thin negligee and a clear raincoat.  She appears to have amnesia.  Perry Mason gets hired to defend her, just in case it turns out she's in any kind of serious trouble.  Which, of course, she is.  Jewel smuggling and clandestine trips to Las Vegas and elopement and murder all come out in the open by the end of it.  

And it's all so... cozy, somehow.  Like a mug of hot chocolate with a little kick of chili powder in it that just warms you up all the way through.  Or like hanging out with friends you have known three-quarters of your life.  Comfortable.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-13 for discussion of unmarried couples going away for weekends and sharing hotel rooms, some mild cussing, and violent murder.

"The Grump's Bodyguard" by Latisha Sexton

You know how I like plot-driven romances, but I'm not a fan of romance-driven plots?  This is definitely one of the former.  

Clover's parents are famous movie-makers, and she moved to Colorado to get away from their glitzy, hectic Hollywood life.  She's a book editor, she battles anxiety, and she just wants to be left alone.  But when someone from her parents' life has a mental break and comes after Clover, the quiet and safe life she's built for herself is shattered.  She agrees to let her parents hire a bodyguarding service to protect her until the danger is past.  

Enter Thor, ex-military bodyguard built like a movie star and scarred inside and out from his past.  Obviously, Thor and Clover are going to fall in love.  I think the thing I liked best about the whole book was how staunchly they refused to act on their growing feelings while Thor is her bodyguard, since a romantic relationship would be completely inappropriate at that time.  

This is a clean and sweet Christian romance.  You can't even call it "closed door" because Clover and Thor don't seek a sexual relationship with each other, but instead choose to date chastely while considering marriage.  There's a lot of yearning and desire expressed on-page, but never in a steamy way that could lead a reader astray.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-13 for danger, lots of noticing physical attractiveness, and one night accidentally spent together (in which it is very clear that the couple never even made out, much less made love).  Probably fine for older teens.

"The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective" by Catherine Louisa Pirkis

I'm so glad that some reader friends of mine picked one of the short stories in this collection to include in the #DickensDecember buddy read event on Bookstagram last winter.  These stories are so delightful!  I can see why Brooke was a big hit back in the 1890s, even considered a female Sherlock Holmes.  She's bright, knowledgeable, clever, and not sniffing around for a husband.  That probably made her seem kind of unusual (and maybe unladylike) in her day, though now we're pretty used to confident female characters who aren't trying to catch the eye of every eligible man who crosses their path.  

There are seven short stories here, all of them enjoyable mysteries.  Loveday Brooke is a professional detective -- she earns her living working as an operative for a detective agency.  She's unmarried, in her thirties, proper and ladylike, and ready for whatever assignment comes her way.  She solves crimes using observation and deduction, like so many classic detectives.  Although these mysteries don't quite "play fair" (they don't give the readers every single clue), they're still very fun to read.  I only wish there were more!

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG for some violence, including murders.

This has been my 40th book read and reviewed for my 4th Classics Club list.

"The Souls of Lost Lake" by Jamie Jo Wright

Oh my.  This was very creepy.  So creepy, I almost quit reading it about halfway through because I was afraid it was going to give me nightmares.  But I decided to read a couple more chapters, and then eerie and creepy things started getting real-life explanations, and I went ahead and finished the book.  It turns out that all the ghostly and creepy things were totally explainable and due to secret human activity, and there were no hauntings.  There definitely were horrible murders in the past, and those were hard to read about, but they weren't what was creeping me out anyway.

This is one of those split-timeline books where you have one storyline going on in the present day, and another in the past.  The present-day story is about a young woman named Arwen who lives at and works for a Christian camp in the north woods of Wisconsin.  She is helping with a search for a missing little girl who disappeared near the camp.  In the process, she digs up a lot of information about her own past.

In the past story, it's the 1930s, and there's a young woman named Ava Coons whose whole family was killed in a bloody and terrifying way when she was a child.  Their bodies disappeared, and her family home burned to the ground -- only Ava escaped, and she was covered in blood and dragging a massive, bloody axe when she was found by people of the small Wisconsin town nearby.  Even though Ava had no memory of what happened to her family, and clearly was too small and weak to even heft the axe she was dragging, many people still thought she killed her family.  A decade later, a person from that town is killed with an axe, and many people want Ava arrested for the crime.  About the only person who believes she is innocent is a new minister who isn't very well known in the area yet.  Ava starts to fall for him, even while trying to figure out how to prove she isn't now and never has been a killer.

The burned-down Coons cabin also plays into Arwen's story, and she lives near the small town where Ava grew up after her family died.  

I devoured this book in three days because I absolutely had to know how everything turned out.  I've been assured by some friends that the rest of Wright's books are not this creepy, so I think I will try another, one of these days.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-16 for creepiness, discussions of murder victims, lots of innuendo, and scenes of a child being in peril.  I would not hand this to any of my teens to read, to be honest.  But it's also not really R-rated.

"Curtain: Poirot's Last Case" by Agatha Christie

This is sad and melancholy and was hard to read.  I'm glad I randomly read it because I wanted to finish off a hardcover anthology and not because I was reading all the Poirot stories in order, because if I was reading them in order and got to this as the very last one, I would now be very depressed.  Instead, I have plenty of jolly Poirot mysteries to enjoy in the future still.

Poirot and faithful Hastings end up at Styles, the same house where the very first Hercule Poirot mystery takes place.  They have to catch a diabolical fiend who is responsible for a strong of deaths, and also protect Hastings's daughter from said fiend.  Poirot is in failing health, and seeing him through the kind eyes of Hastings was sometimes almost enough to bring me to tears.  So I wouldn't say I enjoyed this book, really.  I doubt I will reread it.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-13 for descriptions of some poisonings, discussions of marital infidelity, and a smattering of bad language.

This is my 39th book read and reviewed for my fourth Classics Club list.  Although Curtain was published in 1975, which is after my usual cut-off for when I will consider a book a classic, it was written during WWII.  So I think it suits.