Fadeaway Girl

Fadeaway Girl by Martha Grimes  --

This book is the most recent installment in Grimes’ Emma Graham stories. I’m so fond of this series - Emma’s one of my favorite young girls in literature. She’s twelve and smart - just at the border of her childhood, she’s believably self-aware and believably dramatic enough to mourn the loss. She’s a romantic and a dreamer, but also curious, clever, stubborn, and willful. Grimes does such a wonderful job expressing these aspects of Emma while expertly laying out the story that’s been unspooling for the whole series. (There is a long-ago murder, there are old secrets, new secrets, stolen babies, mistaken identities, and characters with wonderful names like Carl Mooma, Fern Queen, Ree-Jane Davidow, Mr. Butternut, etc. Grimes has always had a way with character names.)

Emma’s an intrepid cub reporter, detective, cocktail inventor, waitress, busybody, sneaky prankster, and cinephile. Her world is pretty large, considering that she’s too young to drive; I love her friendships and sometimes adversarial relationships with the adults around town - she’s taken seriously because she takes herself seriously.

The setting of these stories is a faded family-owned resort hotel in a small town near the water (in Maryland? Yes! I just found it - “This is a little town on the tag end of Maryland, nearly in West Virginia—“ ). Emma’s mother, Jen Graham, is the chef and everyone will tell you (particularly Emma) that no one can cook like she can cook. Food is a feature and I’m always hungry when I read these. Emma’s older brother Will is some kind of showbiz prodigy who is always putting on entertainments in the barn. (I love the comic glimpses we get of his spectaculars, which almost always involve pulleys, fake beards, and explosions.)

The year is never explicitly stated, but I’d guess the books are set somewhere at the end of the 50s or early 60s. It’s not a big deal as the stories happen almost out of time, but it helps explain the cost of things (Emma takes taxis and is a regular at the Rainbow Cafe, among other eateries) and the pace of things, which is slower than a lot of mystery stories. (Not that the late 50s or early 60s were inherently slower in some sort of olden times walking in molasses way, just that there’s not that modern technological internet cell phone soccer practice hustle bustle.) I think they must take place in summer, because Emma’s never in school. This also allows for lots of daylight investigating. However, Emma being Emma, she does manage to get herself into some scary after-dark scrapes.

Here’s a pull quote from the back cover from the New York Times Book Review: “Grimes saves her loveliest writing for the gloomy images of empty train station and tumbledown houses in which Emma takes such a melancholy pleasure…. an explosive comic exuberance.” Emma really does have a connoisseur’s appreciation of the melancholy pleasure.

If you decide that this sounds like something you’d like to read (it’s not for everyone), definitely start with the first book - there is one central mystery that keeps spiraling out and you’d miss a lot not to begin at the beginning. (FOUR STARS, read in March 2011.)

Here’s the order of the previous books:
#1 Hotel Paradise
#2 Cold Flat Junction
#3 Belle Ruin

Book cover bonus: both cover art and title refer to artist Coles Phillips who did a lot of work for magazines and advertising. Click on the link to see more.

If you like looking at book covers in general (I really do), check out Book Covers Anonymous  and CoverSpy.

some books and subjective stars

Finally, some books! If I ever want to get through my 2010 list along with my 2011 list, I'm going to have get moving. I thought it might be useful (for myself as much as anyone) to put up a general description of my personal goodreads rating system. It's all so subjective - one person's three might be someone else's five, etc. etc. Anyway, here's mine (subject to change):


ONE STAR: I doubt I'll ever write up a book that gets one star -  if I hated it this much I don't think I'd finish.


TWO STARS: this would be for a book that's got a good premise but fails to deliver, or a disappointing book by an author I know can do better.


THREE STARS: This is a good, solid, would recommend it to someone but probably not everyone rating.


FOUR STARS: I like it a lot/ love it. What keeps a four star book from being a five star book (aside from how I'm really stingy with five stars) is that there's some little bit that I think could have been better, or maybe it reaches me intellectually but not emotionally or the other way around. I like it a lot, though.


FIVE STARS: I REALLY LOVE IT YOU GUYS! It's so good and if I think you'll like it, I will be relentless suggesting it until you give up out of sheer exhaustion. It will be so good you won't even hold my disgraceful behavior against the book. (Have you read Jane Eyre yet? You probably should! It's long, so start now.)


and now, today's books: 

Color: A Natural History of the Palette by Victoria Finlay - (for my nonfiction book group). This is an interesting subject, but I found the book to be as frustrating as it was intriguing. It's meant to be a combination travelogue and a history of color; while it contains these elements, it's also full of speculation and presumptive guessing that never quite landed for me. I love travelogues, I love natural history, I love adventure, I love imaginative leaps. You'd think this would be a slam dunk, but I found her digressive ruminations on what people might have maybe been thinking when they may or may not have done such or another thing to be distracting. She lost me on the first or second page with sentences like this one (talking about a monk in a medieval Florentine prison): "Perhaps he paused for a moment before doing something that was probably forbidden to him as a prisoner of the Vatican(…)" It goes on, but that perhaps so close to the probably in a work of nonfiction made me crazy. 

The subject is fascinating - how pigments are made, where they come from, how they were used, what makes them valuable, where they're found in the world. She often took tremendous risks to do her research (I'm thinking specifically of visiting Afghanistan shortly after 9/11 to see the lapis lazuli mines) and I respect the legwork that went into this - if only more editing had gone into it! I think there's a good book on the natural history of color somewhere in here, as well as a collection of short stories based on her ruminations and wild-ass speculation. I wish it had been a little tighter; I wish she'd talked more about the travel - it was mentioned just enough to be tantalizing, but never satisfying. I should note that there were people in the group who LOVED this book, but most of them hadn't read the whole thing, only the chapters on their favorite colors. Maybe reading it straight through was my mistake. THREE STARS.  (read Jan. 2011)

Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Twilight (Season 8, # 7): I don't even know what to say about this except WHAT?! I've been getting these from the library so I don't have the earlier volumes to look back on, which might be helpful with the sense making. Or maybe it makes NO SENSE no matter where and when you look.  When season 8 is all done I'll gather them up and do a re-read. At this point, I'm always happy to see the old gang from the series, but WHAT?! Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should, and that's all I'll say about that right now. THREE STARS, with hope that the last volume will exceed all my FIVE STAR DREAMS.  (read Feb. 2011)

Silent in the Grave (Lady Julia #1) by Deanna Raybourn: This book set in Victorian London features a plucky, first-person lady detective in the form of one Lady Julia Grey. Lady Julia's husband dies and foul play is suspected; being the clever, independent-minded woman she is, she assists the handsome, dashing, mysterious yet irritating personal inquiry agent Nicholas Brisbane to solve the case. "To say that I met Nicholas Brisbane over my husband's dead body is not entirely accurate. Edward, it should be noted, was still twitching on the floor." Oh, Lady Julia! Don't ever change. 

I liked it - plucky, first-person lady detectives are one of my favorite things - I recommend it if you also like these things! However, I will offer some caveats: first, the book started very slow - during the early chapters it wasn't bad enough to abandon but was taking its sweet time to get anywhere. I think this is often the case in first-person stories which are intended to be the start of a series: we have to meet the protagonist, then we have to meet the large cast of characters as she encounters them - most of whom will be returning at some point so they require even more time to set up. This takes a while - it's an investment - but once things got underway the pages started turning faster and faster. Second caveat: if you're bothered by anachronistic heroines in historical fiction, this is probably not the book for you. Lady Julia reminds me very much of a 21^st century woman (with modern, enlightened attitudes to sex, class, and race) who has traveled in time to the era of bustle skirts and scandalous decolletage. For some reason it doesn't bother me when she does it. So yes, - the book started slow, had some ludicrous plot developments, not to mention the psychic, multi-talented, polylingual hero who plays the violin, sings, boxes, fills out a white shirt, and solves crime - but as soon as I finished it I put the next one on hold at the library. I'm excited at the thought of having a new series to read. I give it THREE STARS, but it's a solid THREE PLUS.  (read Jan/Feb. 2011)