"Mara, Daughter of the Nile" by Eloise Jarvis McGraw

I've got mixed feelings about this book.

On the one hand, the historical details and worldbuilding are fantastic.  I took a history class on Egypt and the Ancient Near East back in college, and reading this brought back so many good memories of that class and the professor, who was my favorite history prof.  

The characters were nuanced and believable, and mainly likeable.  I didn't like some of the things that Mara in particular did, but I understood why her history as a slave and her desperation to be free informed her choices.  And the plot was thick with intrigue and suspense, with lots of spying and sneaking and planning.  

But there was a point about four-fifths of the way through the book where I set it down in great annoyance for over a day because it started to involve Miscommunication, and I am always always always irked by Miscommunication.  It was a little less avoidable here because spies tend not to trust others easily or reveal things readily... but it also bugged me.  And I could see where it was going to lead, which it did, and I had a hard time picking the book up again after that.  But I did, because I did want to know how it ended AND I'm going to be using this book for the oldest literature class at our homeschool co-op this year.  I'm glad I finished it, as it was pretty satisfying (even if I did have to suspend disbelief about a young woman who has been beaten unconscious TWICE in the past few hours blithely walking around and not screaming when someone accidentally touches her lacerated back.  Um, no).

I don't want to give the plot away too much, so I'll just say it follows Mara, an Egyptian slave who ends up acting as a spy for rival powers in the court of Pharaoh Hatshepsut, one a leader of rebels trying to unseat the queen and the other trying to discover who the rebels are.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-10 for quite a few kisses and embraces, a young woman being beaten/whipped repeatedly, a suspenseful grave-robbing sequence, and political intrigue.

This is my 42nd book read off my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfProject2023.

"The Queen's Falconer" by Charity Bishop

The fifth book in Charity Bishop's Tudor Throne Series does not disappoint!  Intrigue and treachery still swirl around King Henry VII even while his court celebrates the Twelve Days of Christmas.  Many familiar faces and names return from the previous four books, and I love that I'm really starting to feel like I know King Henry, Queen Elizabeth, Kathrine of Aragon, Prince Harry, and Princess Maggie.  But not Thomas Lovell, because he is, of course #unknowable.  Or so he likes to tell himself.

I was just telling my husband yesterday about how Lovell started out in The Usurper's Throne as this sort of cunning, deceitful, shadowy figure that you told yourself you'd just have to trust even if you weren't sure you should like him as much as you do.  And yet, he was one of my favorite characters in it, and by now, yeah, he's totally my favorite.  In the whole series.  Because you know I love me a guy with a dark, ruthless exterior and a melted-chocolate center.

Anyway.  This book revolves around Lambert Simnel, the titular falconer for Queen Elizabeth.  As a boy, he was used by King Henry's enemies as a Pretender to the throne in one of their many attempts to overthrow the Tudor monarch.  Henry spared his life and allowed him to work in the royal household, no doubt so he could keep an eye on him, and Simnel eventually became their falconer.  All of that comes straight from history.  Bishop weaves a compelling spy tale into this story, with Lovell enlisting Simnel's aid to round up the last cadre of Henry's enemies.

Though the series as a whole has focused a lot on the king and queen, this book makes them its emotional center, as Elizabeth prepares for her confinement and the birth of their latest child.  She and Henry love each other deeply, and the impending separation darkens their yuletide festivities.  Though many things do get sorted out in a satisfactory way by the end of the book, sticking to the historical events means this book has a sad ending, alas.

As always, this book left me wanting more, and I eagerly await book six!

Particularly Good Bits:

"Sin being common does not make it right" (p. 19).

"Never apologize for tears.  I can protect you from many things, but not sorrow.  It is the price we pay for our love... and our mistakes" (p. 65).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG-16 for husbands and wives desiring each other, discussions of marital infidelity and love affairs, and violence.

This is my 30th book read from my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfProject2020

"The Spy Who Came in From the Cold" by John le Carre

My husband and I watched the 1965 Richard Burton film based on The Spy Who Came in From the Cold a couple of weeks ago, and I decided I wanted to read the book because it had been sitting on my TBR shelves for longer than most of my children have been alive, and that's a nonsensical way to live.

So, I read it.

And I really dug it.  I've never read something by John le Carré before, and I quite liked his style.  It struck me as a mix of Robert Ludlum's swift pacing, Ernest Hemingway's terse understatements, and Raymond Chandler's overall gloomy-yet-not-depressing outlook on humanity.  I could see myself becoming a le Carre fan.

The story revolves around a British spy, Leamas, who is getting up there in years, but has a lot of fight in him yet.  He's been in charge of the whole British spy network in Germany, and since this is all about the Cold War, that was a pretty important position.  But he's weary, and when he loses yet another agent to the Communists at the beginning of the book, he gets recalled to London.  There, the head of British Intelligence tells him it's perfectly fine if he's tired of being out in the cold, fighting alone in the dark against unseen enemies.  But if he wouldn't mind, they do have one special operation in the offing that he could help with.  One last foray into the cold before he comes in for good.

Leamas accepts.  He doggedly sets his teeth into this project, setting out to ruin his reputation and convince the Communists he's sick of British Intelligence and wants to defect.  And, because he's an expert spy, he does exactly that.  By the way, Richard Burton was perfectly cast as Leamas -- I could hear him saying most of the dialog in my head while I read.  Partly because a great deal of the movie's dialog came straight from the book.  But mostly because nobody could make crabby weariness look appealing like Richard Burton.

Particularly Good Bits:

He met failure as one day he would probably meet death, with cynical resentment and the courage of a solitary (p. 13).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-16 for some scattered curse words, derogatory innuendo about people's sexual orientations, a few bawdy moments, and some torture and violence.

This is my first book read and reviewed for my third go-'round with the Classics Club and my 29th for #TheUnreadShelfProject2020.

"The Malleville Conspiracy" by H. L. Roethle

This was a fast-paced spy story, quite a change of pace from the classics and hard-boiled mysteries I've been reading a lot of lately.  It's H. L. Roethle's debut novel, and a nice first effort.  Imagine a teen joining the Mission: Impossible gang, but also imagine they're all Christians.  And very nerdy, prone to referencing every imaginable nerdy fandom at some point.  And also baroque music.

Its premise is fun, if a credulity-stretcher: an 18-yr-old gets to join a secret spy organization because his uncle is the head of it.  He then gets into various scrapes, helps out a bit here and there, and the adults wisely leave him home when it comes time for the big finale.  That last was sensible and realistic, though I did come away feeling a bit like, if I was going to suspend my disbelief for the rest of the book anyway, they might as well have full-on let him do the dangerous stuff too.

I definitely enjoyed the interaction between the characters, and I thought the action scenes read very smoothly.  I have some issues with some of the theology presented, as so often happens when I read Christian fiction, which is part of why I often shy away from it.  However, that didn't detract enough to change my enjoyment level, so it wasn't a huge issue.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-13 for violence and scenes of peril.

This is my 25th book read off my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfProject2020.

"Girl in Disguise" by Greer MacAllister

I've had such a great string of reading luck lately -- book after book that have been awesome!

Girl in Disguise is a fictional book based on the life of Kate Warne, the first woman detective hired by the famous Pinkerton Agency back before the American Civil War.  She walks into the Pinkerton agency to ask for a job, wows Mr. Pinkerton himself, and goes on to become one of his finest operatives.  Her career takes her all over the US and spans decades, though most of the book occurs during the Civil War while she is spying for the Union Army as part of her Pinkerton duties.

I finished reading this and set out to find a non-fiction biography of Kate Warne because I wanted to know just how much of this book was based in reality and how much was made up.  And then I learned something disturbing:

There aren't any biographies of Kate Warne.

In fact, we know almost nothing about her.  We don't even for sure have any photographs of her.  All we know was she existed, she was the first woman detective, Pinkerton hired her and eventually made her head of his female detective division, she worked as a spy for the Union during the Civil War and helped Pinkerton smuggle Abraham Lincoln through Maryland on his way to his inauguration, and that she's buried near Pinkerton and his family.

ARGH!  

So much for me learning all about Kate Warne.  Or learning more about her, anyway.  Still, I really, really enjoyed this book and look forward to re-reading it one day.  

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG-13 for bad language, some violence, and a lot of innuendo and adult situations.  It never crossed the border into explicitness, but it sure danced around that border a lot.

"The Brass Compass" by Ellen Butler

I got to hear Ellen Butler speak at my local library a couple of months ago on the topic of women in the OSS.  That's the Office of Strategic Services, if you don't know, the American intelligence service they created in the early days of WWII, which has since become the CIA.  I watched the Alan Ladd movie O.S.S. (1946) earlier this year and was curious as to how accurate that representation might have been, and I'm always interested by anything to do with WWII anyway.

Butler was knowledgeable and engaging, and I very much enjoyed her presentation.  I even raised my hand to ask if she'd seen Alan Ladd's movie and if it seemed accurate in light of her own research.  (She said she thought it was accurate overall, so yay.)  Butler has even managed to meet and interview some surviving female OSS agents, and her own grandfather served as a cryptographer during WWII.  I found her fascinating.

As for The Brass Compass, it was overall most enjoyable as well.  It follows Lily, a young American who speaks French and German flawlessly.  She joins the OSS because she's bored and purposeless and is soon behind enemy lines, posing as a nanny so she can spy on a high-ranking Nazi officer.  But her cover is eventually exposed, forcing her to flee across Germany in the dead of winter.  She's eventually reunited with the man she loves, an American airman, and goes on to have more spying adventures with and without him.  It's kind of an episodic story, with Lily having various spying escapades, and with the love story threading through all of it.  

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  a soft R for violence and torture, mentions of rape, description of a Nazi death camp, bad language sprinkled throughout (including an f-bomb dropped by a soldier confronted with said death camp), and some non-explicit love scenes.  Really, it's the torture that pushes my rating up from a PG-13.

"The Bourne Identity" by Robert Ludlum

"Cain is for Charlie, and Delta is for Cain."

Every time I read this book, that phrase gets stuck in my head and cycles around and around for weeks.  Not in an annoying way, but more in a "Here's how I can instantly get sucked back into the world of this amazing character whenever I feel like it" way.

This is the third time I've read this book, and I must admit I was a little hesitant going in because I went through a phase where I read like ten of Ludlum's books and then got tired of him and haven't touched one since.  That was 9 or 10 years ago, and that was when I read this twice, and each of Ludlum's sequels (Supremacy and Ultimatum) once.  Those are really good too, and I would like to reread them at some point, but it's the original that I love.  And I do still love it!  Yay!

There are also 9 sequels written by some other guy after Ludlum's death, but I refuse to read those because by the end of The Bourne Ultimatum, this poor character has been through so much that I want him to be able to live in peace, not keep getting sucked into one deadly situation after another.  And this is a little odd for me, since usually once I love a character, I want to spend more and more and more and more time with them -- that's why I love Sherlock Holmes pastiches and so on.  But nope, not for Jason Bourne.  Let him be at peace.

Now, I also love the Jason Bourne movies that star Matt Damon.  But they have very little to do with these books besides the idea of a trained assassin with amnesia who starts out the story riddled with bullets and floating in the ocean.  Watching them is what got me to read this book in the first place, and I love both dearly, but they are quite different.  Quite.

Matt Damon as Jason Bourne

I have a great fondness for stories about amnesia.  I think it's because I myself treasure my past and my memories -- I rely on them to inform so many of my daily decisions, small and large, trivial and important.  The idea of having all that erased, of having nothing at all to rely on in that way... it terrifies and fascinates me.

Which brings me to describing the plot of this book, I guess.  Only I don't want to describe too much, so consider this relatively spoiler-free.  As spoiler-free as I can make it while still giving you some idea of what it's like, at any rate.

It all begins with a man on a ship in the middle of a storm.  He gets shot by person or persons unnamed, falls in the water, and is left to die.  Except he doesn't die, he gets found by fishermen and taken to a drunken English doctor who patches up his body.  But what the doctor can't patch up is the man's mind -- he's got amnesia and remembers nothing at first of his previous life.  Images and words trigger fragments of memories for him, and from that he pieces together clues that lead him to believe that his name is Jason Bourne, and that he's a ruthless assassin.

Then there's Marie St. Jacques, a Canadian financial analyst who was in the wrong place at the wrong time and whom Bourne takes hostage to escape people trying to kill him.  Through lots of twists and turns, they wind up falling in love.  She's a great character -- she's fiercely intelligent, stubborn, brave, clever (not the same as being intelligent, you know!), resourceful, and morally strong.  I really love her way more than Marie in either of the movie versions.

Um, yes, I said either of the movie versions.  Besides the Matt Damon version from 2002 that I mentioned already, there's also a TV movie from 1988 starring Richard Chamberlain.  I didn't realize the 1988 existed for a long, long time, but once I found out about it, I had to find and watch it, and I'm so glad I did!  In fact, I bought a copy.  

Richard Chamberlain as Jason Bourne

The TV version follows the book's plot very closely, and the book's characterization too.  At first I wasn't sure if I could buy Chamberlain as Bourne because I'm so used to him in costume dramas like The Count of Monte Cristo (1975), but he absolutely nailed my perceptions of the book's character and made me hungry to re-read it.  I'll review the 1988 version on my Soliloquy blog after I've had a chance to see it a second time, but I really did want to mention it here because if I didn't know it existed, very likely lots of other people didn't either.

Okay, so back to the book.  It's got lots of action, lots of suspense, and many, many plot twists.  So many wonderful plot twists that feel absolutely right and real as they happen, but that I couldn't see coming beforehand.  The very best kind of twists.  Also, it has some slam-bang character development -- we see Marie St. Jacques turn from a lonely, hardened career woman into a fiery, determined champion.  We see a man who has no idea who he is begin to learn who he once was while also figuring out who he is now.  As he learns more and more layers about his past, so many of them frightening and horrible, he fights to hang onto what he's grown into in the present, and it's beautiful and aching and... I love this guy, okay?  The last three lines of this book both give me cold chills and make me want to cry at the same time.  


Particularly Good Bits:

The day was being born, and so was he (p. 34).

"The easiest thing in the world is to convince yourself that you're right" (p. 371).

He was going mad!  Blurred images from the past converged with the terrible reality of the present, driving him insane.  The doors of his mind opened and closed, crashing open, crashing shut; light streaming out one moment, darkness the next (p. 424).

...all around him objects too painful to look at; he knew them and did not know them.  They were fragments of dreams -- but solid, to be touched, to be felt, to be used -- not ephemeral at all (p. 517).

He was being pulled to another room high up in the brownstone, a room that held both the comfort of solitude and the frustration of loneliness (p. 519).


If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  A very regretful R, for lots of bad language (including many instances of taking God's name in vain), a non-explicit rape, several non-explicit love scenes, and lots of violence.

"The Black Shrike" by Alistair MacLean

It's been a few years since I read a new-to-me Alistair MacLean book.  I really enjoy his writing -- it's streamlined and fast-paced, and I never figure out his plot twists ahead of time.  Exactly what I like in a spy novel!

In The Black Shrike, Agents Bentall and Hopeman get sent to Australia to find a bunch of very important scientists and their wives who have gone missing.  Bentall and Hopeman never reach Australia, and they spend the rest of the book pretending they're married and trying to figure out what's really happening on a mysterious island.

As MacLean books go, this was not in my top five, but I liked it quite well.  Bentall had a self-deprecating sense of humor that amused me -- he was always berating himself for screwing things up that he didn't really, and so on.  The suspense was top-notch, the heroics were appropriately thrilling, and the plot twists caught me off-guard as they should.  


Particularly Good Bits:

I tried out my carefree laugh to see how it went, but it didn't, it sounded so hollow and unconvincing that it lowered even my morale (p. 27).

I was still giving my impression of one of the statues on Easter Island, carved from stone and badly battered (p. 158).


If This Was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG-13 for violence and suspense.