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530. Klara and the Sun

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Kazuo Ishiguro

Genre:  Fiction, Fantasy, Science Fiction

304 pages, published March 2, 2021

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

Klara and the Sun is set in the near future and is told from the perspective of Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities.  When she is purchased to serve as a friend to fourteen year old Josie who suffers from a potentially terminal illness, Klara learns that her role may be different from what she expected.

Quotes 

 

My Take

Klara and the Sun is the first novel by Kazuo Ishiguro since he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and it does not disappoint.  In the same vein as his earlier dystopian novel Never Let Me Go (a book I also really enjoyed), Ishiguro creates a fascinating world not too dissimilar to our current one, but different enough to make you think about the horror of the changes society has decided to accept.  Klara and the Sun explores compelling themes such as what does it mean to be a human, what is our purpose on this earth and what is love.  One of the best books that I have read in a long while.  Highly recommended.

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527. The Evening and the Morning

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Ken Follett

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction, Foreign

913 pages, published September 15, 2020

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

The Evening and the Morning is a prequel to Ken Follett’s very popular Pillars of the Earth series which center on life in the medieval town of Kingsbridge, England.  Set in 997 CE, it starts with the pillaging of a coastal English town by the ruthless Vikings.  A young Edgar, who is a skilled boatmaker, survives along with his mother and two brothers.  They start over as farmers in the town that will become Kingsbridge. Around the same time, Lady Ragna, a Norman noblewoman comes to England to marry Wielf, the man she loves.   Finally, we follow the story of Aldred, a monk who dreams of transforming his humble abbey into a center of learning.  The lives of Edgar, Ragna and Aldred intertwine to illuminate life in England during the end of the Dark Ages.

Quotes 

“In dog philosophy it was always better to go somewhere than to be left behind.”

 

“Ma and Pa had taught their sons to keep themselves fresh by bathing at least once a year.”

 

“And so, Aldred thought, great ones sin with impunity while lesser men are brutally chastised.”

 

“And that would be sufficient, if we lived in a world that was ruled by laws.” Aldred sat on a stool, leaned forward, and spoke quietly. “But the man matters more than the law, as you know.”

 

“in the end there’s no way to get rich crops out of poor earth.”

 

 “Coming to Glastonbury was like visiting the grave of his youth.”

 

 “When the Roman Empire declined, Britain went backward. As the Roman villas crumbled, the people built one-room wooden dwellings without chimneys. The technology of Roman pottery—important for storing food—was mostly lost. Literacy declined. This period is sometimes called the Dark Ages, and progress was painfully slow for five hundred years. Then, at last, things started to change”

 

“In principio erat Verbum, et Verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat Verbum.” In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Aldred felt he could spend his life trying to comprehend that mystery.”

 

My Take

Having thoroughly enjoyed The Pillars of the Earth trilogy, I looked forward to reading Ken Follett’s prequel to the series.  The Evening and the Morning did not disappoint.  Well developed and intriguing characters interwoven with historical events make for a captivating tale in the hands of the master storyteller Follett.  Well worth reading!

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526. The Sunlight Pilgrims

Rating:  ☆☆

Recommended by:  Boulder Librarian

Author:   Jenni Fagan

Genre:   Fiction, Dystopia

310 pages, published March 24, 2018

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

The Sunlight Pilgrims is set in a futuristic 2020 and imagines the world in a new ice age.  Rather than head south as many others are doing, a grieving Dylan  heads north to bury his mother’s and grandmother’s ashes on the Scottish islands where they once lived.  At the same time on the Scottish Highlands, twelve-year-old Estella and her survivalist mother, Constance, scrape by and prepare for a record-breaking winter. When Dylan arrives in their caravan park, life changes course for Estella and Constance.

Quotes 

“When grown-ups hear a little dark door creaking in their hearts they turn the telly up. They slug a glass of wine. They tell the cat it was just a door creaking. The cat knows. It jumps down from the sofa and walks out of the room. When that little dark door in a heart starts to go click-clack click-clack click-clack click-clack so loudly and violently their chest shows an actual beat – well, then they say they’ve got bad cholesterol and they try to quit using butter, they begin to go for walks.  When the tiny dark door in her heart creaks open, she will walk right through it.  She will lie down and inside her own heart like a bird in the night.”

 “…the child of a wolf may not feel like she has fangs until she finds herself facing the moon, but they are still there the whole time regardless.”

 

“I’m going to draw up a human-rights contract that says everyone on earth must agree we are here as caretakers of the planet, first and foremost.”

 

 “She focuses, trying to absorb the suns’ energy deep into her cells so when they descend into the darkest winter for 200 years, in the quietest minutes, when the whole world experiences a total absence of light — she will glow, and glow, and glow.”

 

“It’s all borrowed: bricks; bodies; breathing — it’s all on loan! Eighty years on the planet if you’re lucky; why do they say if you’re lucky? Eighty years and people trying to get permanent bits of stone before they go, as if permanence were a real thing. Everyone has been taken hostage.”

 

My Take

I found The Sunlight Pilgrims to be a meandering slog without much to say.  It includes a completely unecessary subplot about gender identity that distracts from the cataclysmic environmental message of the book.  Skip.

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524. Trespass

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Boulder Librarian

Author:   Rose Tremain

Genre:   Fiction, Foreign

273 pages, published October 18, 2010

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

Trespass tells the story of the competing interests over an isolated stone farmhouse, the Mas Lunel, in southern France.  The owner, Aramon has let his life devolve into squalor as punishment for his past sins.  His sister Audrun, who was vicitimized by Aramon and their father, is trapped in the torment of her past.  She loves the house and the land and can’t imagine anyone else taking possession of it.  Enter Anthony Verey, a disillusioned antiques dealer from London who views Mas Lunel as his chance to start over.  The clashing interests of these three individuals sets in motion a series of tragic events.

Quotes 

“They both knew that it was borrowed, because if you left your own country, if you left it late, and made your home in someone else’s country, there was always a feeling that you were breaking an invisible law, always the irrational fear that, one day, some ‘rightful owner’ would arrive to take it all away, and you would be driven out . . .”

 

My Take

Trespass was the first book that I have read by Rose Tremain and I was impressed.  She is a gift writer and hooked me into this dramatic story  of family love and betrayal.  There is also a real undercurrent of sadness that gives the story a poignancy and endurance.  I look forward to reading more of Tremain’s work.

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523. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:    Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Genre:   Fiction, Young Adult

359 pages, published February 21, 2012

Reading Format:  Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe tells the story of teenage friends Aristotle,an angry teen with a brother in prison, and Dante, the loner child of a professor who is gay.  As the boys start spending time together, they discover that they share a special friendship.

Quotes 

“Words were different when they lived inside of you.”

 

“I got to thinking that poems were like people. Some people you got right off the bat. Some people you just didn’t get–and never would get.”

 “Another secret of the universe: Sometimes pain was like a storm that came out of nowhere. The clearest summer could end in a downpour. Could end in lightning and thunder.”

 

“The summer sun was not meant for boys like me. Boys like me belonged to the rain.”

 

“I wanted to tell them that I’d never had a friend, not ever, not a real one. Until Dante. I wanted to tell them that I never knew that people like Dante existed in the world, people who looked at the stars, and knew the mysteries of water, and knew enough to know that birds belonged to the heavens and weren’t meant to be shot down from their graceful flights by mean and stupid boys. I wanted to tell them that he had changed my life and that I would never be the same, not ever. And that somehow it felt like it was Dante who had saved my life and not the other way around. I wanted to tell them that he was the first human being aside from my mother who had ever made me want to talk about the things that scared me. I wanted to tell them so many things and yet I didn’t have the words. So I just stupidly repeated myself. “Dante’s my friend.”

 

 “I hated being volunteered. The problem with my life was that it was someone else’s idea.”

 

 “I renamed myself Ari.  If I switched the letter, my name was Air.  I thought it might be a great thing to be the air.  I could be something and nothing at the same time. I could be necessary and also invisible. Everyone would need me and no one would be able to see me.”

 

“Sometimes, you do things and you do them not because you’re thinking but because you’re feeling. Because you’re feeling too much. And you can’t always control the things you do when you’re feeling too much.”

 

 

“I wondered what that was like, to hold someone’s hand. I bet you could sometimes find all of the mysteries of the universe in someone’s hand.”

 

“I had a rule that it was better to be bored by yourself than to be bored with someone else. I pretty much lived by that rule. Maybe that’s why I didn’t have any friends.”

 

 “Scars. A sign that you had been hurt. A sign that you had healed.”

 

“Senior year. And then life. Maybe that’s the way it worked. High school was just a prologue to the real novel. Everybody got to write you — but when you graduated, you got to write yourself. At graduation you got to collect your teacher’s pens and your parents’ pens and you got your own pen. And you could do all the writing. Yeah. Wouldn’t that be sweet?”

 

My Take

While I mostly enjoyed Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, I found it to be a bit pedestrian.  As a fiction novel for young adults, I’m not the target audience.  It’s not bad, just not great.

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519. The God of Small Things

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Arundhati Roy

Genre:  Fiction, Foreign

340 pages, published 1997

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

The God of Small Things takes place in Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India, in 1969.  It tells the story of an Indian family, young mother Ammu, her twins Rahel and Esthappen, the blind grandmother, Mammachi, Oxford educated uncle Chacko, and Baby Kochamma (grandaunt and ex-nun.  When the twins’ English cousin, Sophie Mol, and her mother, Margaret Kochamma, arrive for a Christmas visit, Esthappen and Rahel learn that Things Can Change in a Day.

Quotes 

“D’you know what happens when you hurt people?’ Ammu said. ‘When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.”

 

 “…the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.  That is their mystery and their magic.”

 “And the air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. Big Things lurk unsaid inside.”

 

“If you’re happy in a dream, does that count?”

 

“This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.”

 

“Change is one thing. Acceptance is another.”

 

 “The way her body existed only where he touched her. The rest of her was smoke.”

 

 “Perhaps it’s true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes. And that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house—the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture—must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for. Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story.”

 

“He folded his fear into a perfect rose. He held it out in the palm of his hand. She took it from him and put it in her hair.”

 

 “If he touched her, he couldn’t talk to her, if he loved her he couldn’t leave, if he spoke he couldn’t listen, if he fought he couldn’t win.”

 

“Ammu said that human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kind of things one could get used to.”

 

 “Writers imagine that they cull stories from the world. I’m beginning to believe that vanity makes them think so. That it’s actually the other way around. Stories cull writers from the world. Stories reveal themselves to us. The public narrative, the private narrative – they colonize us. They commission us. They insist on being told. Fiction and nonfiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons that I don’t fully understand, fiction dances out of me, and nonfiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.”

 

 “Being with him made her feel as though her soul had escaped from the narrow confines of her island country into the vast, extravagant spaces of his. He made her feel as though the world belonged to them- as though it lay before them like an opened frog on a dissecting table, begging to be examined.”

 “Insanity hovered close at hand, like an eager waiter at an expensive restaurant.”

 

“Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Suddenly, they become the bleached bones of a story.”

 

My Take

While Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things is an acclaimed book, winning the 1997 Booker Prize, I had a hard time fully immersing myself in the story.  There were parts I liked and some beautiful language, but it left me a bit cold.

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516. Anxious People

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Stephanie Schroeder

Author:    Fredrik Backman

Genre:  Fiction

341 pages, published September 8, 2020

Reading Format:   E-book

Summary

In Anxious People, a bank robber walks into an apartment open house after failing to actually rob the bank and holds an unlikely mix of strangers hostage.  The captives include a recently retired couple who buy fixer-uppers to avoid the painful truth that they can’t fix their own marriage, a wealthy banker who has shut herself off from the world, a young, nervous couple pregnant with their first child, an 87 year old, feisty woman, and a mystery man who has locked himself in the apartment’s only bathroom.  As the police try to free the hostages, we learn surprising truths about each of them, including the ultimately sympathetic bank robber.

Quotes 

“Because the terrible thing about becoming an adult is being forced to realize that absolutely nobody cares about us, we have to deal with everything ourselves now, find out how the whole world works. Work and pay bills, use dental floss and get to meetings on time, stand in line and fill out forms, come to grips with cables and put furniture together, change tires on the car and charge the phone and switch the coffee machine off and not forget to sign the kids up for swimming lessons. We open our eyes in the morning and life is just waiting to tip a fresh avalanche of “Don’t Forget!”s and “Remember!”s over us. We don’t have time to think or breathe, we just wake up and start digging through the heap, because there will be another one dumped on us tomorrow. We look around occasionally, at our place of work or at parents’ meetings or out in the street, and realize with horror that everyone else seems to know exactly what they’re doing. We’re the only ones who have to pretend. Everyone else can afford stuff and has a handle on other stuff and enough energy to deal with even more stuff. And everyone else’s children can swim.”

“They say that a person’s personality is the sum of their experiences. But that isn’t true, at least not entirely, because if our past was all that defined us, we’d never be able to put up with ourselves. We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we’re more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.”

 

 “The truth of course is that if people really were as happy as they look on the Internet, they wouldn’t spend so much damn time on the Internet, because no one who’s having a really good day spends half of it taking pictures of themselves. Anyone can nurture a myth about their life if they have enough manure, so if the grass looks greener on the other side of the fence, that’s probably because it’s full of shit.”

 

“That’s the power of literature, you know, it can act like little love letters between two people who can only explain their feelings by pointing at other people’s.”

 

 “Some people accept that they will never be free of their anxiety, they just learn to carry it. She tried to be one of them. She told herself that was why you should always be nice to other people, even idiots, because you never know how heavy their burden is.”

 

“This story is about a lot of things, but mostly about idiots. So it needs saying from the outset that it’s always very easy to declare that other people are idiots, but only if you forget how idiotically difficult being human is.”

 

“Nothing is easier for people who never do anything themselves than to criticize someone who actually makes an effort.”

 

“We don’t have a plan, we just do our best to get through the day, because there’ll be another one coming along tomorrow.”

 

“Expensive restaurants have bigger gaps between the tables. First class on airplanes has no middle seats. Exclusive hotels have separate entrances for guests staying in suites. The most expensive thing you can buy in the most densely populated places on the planet is distance.”

 

“God doesn’t protect people from knives, sweetheart. That’s why God gave us other people, so we can protect each other.”

 

“Have you ever held a three-year-old by the hand on the way home from preschool?”

“No.”

“You’re never more important that you are then.”

 

“Boats that stay in the harbor are safe, sweetheart, but that’s not what boats were built for.”

 

“Some of us never manage to get the chaos under control, so our lives simply carry on, the world spinning through space at two million miles an hour while we bounce about on its surface like so many lost socks.”

 

“that we don’t want our children to pursue their own dreams or walk in our footsteps. We want to walk in their footsteps while they pursue our dreams.”

 

“We’re trying to be grown-up and love each other and understand how the hell you’re supposed to insert USB leads. We’re looking for something to cling on to, something to fight for, something to look forward to. We’re doing all we can to teach our children how to swim. We have all of this in common, yet most of us remain strangers, we never know what we do to each other, how your life is affected by mine.  Perhaps we hurried past each other in a crowd today, and neither of us noticed, and the fibers of your coat brushed against mine for single moment and then we were gone. I don’t know who you are.  But when you get home this evening, when this day is over and the night takes us, allow yourself a deep breath. Because we made it through this day as well. There’ll be another one along tomorrow.”

 

“We give those we love nicknames, because love requires a word that belongs to us alone.”

 

“Something my dad says…He says you end up marrying the one you don’t understand. Then you spend the rest of your life trying.”

 

“Because that was a parent’s job: to provide shoulders. Shoulders for your children to sit on when they’re little so they can see the world, then stand on when they get older so they can reach the clouds, and sometimes lean against whenever they stumble and feel unsure.”

 

“Do you know what the worst thing about being a parent is? That you’re always judged by your worst moments. You can do a million things right, but if you do one single thing wrong you’re forever that parent who was checking his phone in the park when your child was hit in the head by a swing. We don’t take our eyes off them for days at a time, but then you read just one text message and it’s as if all your best moments never happened. No one goes to see a psychologist to talk about all the times they weren’t hit in the head by a swing as a child. Parents are defined by their mistakes.”

 

“We are asleep until we fall in love.”

 

“You don’t have to like all children. Just one. And children don’t need the world’s best parents, just their own parents. To be perfectly honest with you, what they need most of the time is a chauffeur.”

 

“You can’t live long with the ones who are only beautiful, Jules. But the funny ones, oh, they last a lifetime.”

 

“children used to be punished by being sent to their rooms, but these days you have to force children to come out of them. One generation got told off for not being able to sit still, the next gets told off for never moving.”

 

“This book is dedicated to the voices inside my head, the most remarkable of my friends.  And to my wife, who lives with us.”

 My Take

Anxious People is the sixth book that I have read by best-selling Swedisth author Fredrik Backman (previous reads were:  A Man Called Ove, Beartown, Us Against You, Britt-Marie Was Here  And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer) and I like his wry, insightful style that peels back the layers of human nature.  He always has something interesting to say about the way human beings function and interact with each other and Anxious People is one of his better efforts.

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505. The Perfect Wife

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:  Blake Pierce

Genre:  Fiction, Thriller, Suspense, Mystery

199 pages, published November 13, 2018

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Hoopla

Summary

In The Perfect Wife, after 29 year old criminal profiler in training and newly married Jessie Hunt moves to Orange County, the intrigue begins.  Her husband Kyle insists they join an expensive yacht club with perfect couples that Kyle insists is key to his professional advancement.  Jessie is uncomfortable from the get-go and discovers that dark secrets lurk in her new town and club.  As her world unravels, Jessie fights for her survival.

Quotes 

“got a lot of energy,” she said, trying to sound admiring. “I’d like to bottle it.” “Yeah,” Mel agreed. “He’s a piece of work. But I love him. It’s weird how stuff that annoys other people is charming when it’s your kid. You’ll see what I mean when it happens to you.

 

 “when conducting an investigation, guarding against making assumptions and setting aside preconceptions about people.”

 

My Take

Despite its 4.06 rating on Goodreads, I was disappointed in The Perfect Wife.  Full of clichés and highly implausible scenarios, I was never hooked into the underlying mystery and felt like the ending was especially contrived.  You can skip this one.

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502. Moonflower Murders

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Anthony Horowitz

Genre:    Fiction, Crime, Mystery, Thriller, Suspense

608  pages, published  November 10, 2020

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

In Moonflower Murders, best selling author and creator of Foyle’s War and Midsomer Murders Anthony Hororwitz picks up where his mystery Magpie Murders left off. As with Magpie Murders, Moonflower Murders cleverly features a book within a book.  The protagonist of the modern day mystery is Susan Ryeland, a book editor who returns to the United Kingdom after several years decompressing in Greece.  She comes home to solve a mysterious disappearance that is connected to a mystery novel she previously edited.  That novel features the famous literary detective Atticus Pund and is included in the book in its entirety.

Quotes 

“Everything in life has a pattern and a coincidence is simply the moment when the pattern becomes briefly visible.”

 

“What makes them dangerous is their belief that they should not be stopped, that they are justified in what they do. I will not speak of my experiences in the war, but I will say this. The greatest evil occurs when people, no matter what their aims or their motives, become utterly convinced that they are right.”

 

“On the one hand, they’re monstrous egotists. Self-confidence, self-examination, self-hatred even … but it’s all about self. All those hours on their own! And yet at the same time, they’re genuinely altruistic. All they want to do is please other people. I’ve often thought it must demand a sort of deficiency to be a writer.”

 

“Pünd had never seen murder as a game, not even as a puzzle to be solved. His work was an examination of humanity at its darkest and most desperate. You could not solve crime unless you understood its genesis.”

 

“There were books everywhere, hundreds of them on shelves that had been designed to fit into every nook and cranny, and it goes without saying that anyone who collects books can’t be all bad.”

 

 “I do not know what has brought you here or how you have been driven to an action as extreme as the one you are now contemplating,’ he said. ‘You must be very unhappy. Of that I am sure. Will you believe me if I say that no matter how bad things may appear, they will be better tomorrow if you allow tomorrow to do its work? That is the way of things, Miss Mitchell, and I am the living proof of it.”

 

“Atticus Pünd had no time for religion. During the war, he had been persecuted not for what he believed but for what he was, a Greek Jew whose great-grandfather had emigrated to Germany sixty years before he was born, unaware that although he was bettering his own life, his decision would lead to the extinction of almost his entire bloodline.”

 

 “We had managed to drift into that awful arena, so familiar to the long-term married couple, where what was left unspoken was actually more damaging than what was said. We weren’t married, by the way. Andreas had proposed to me, doing the whole diamond-ring-down-on-one-knee thing, but we had both been too busy to follow through, and anyway, my Greek wasn’t good enough yet to understand the service.”

 

 “It wasn’t that she would judge me. It was more that I would feel myself being judged.”

 

My Take

I read Magpie Murders during the second year of my reading quest and loved it.  I followed that with several more books by the incredibly talented writer Anthony Horowitz, but have not liked any of them nearly as much as Moonflower Murders, the sequel to Magpie Murders.  Horowitz knows how to spin a complex, incredibly clever trail that keeps you turning the pages long after bedtime.  I highly recommend (but read Magpie Murders first).

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497. Troubled Blood

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Joni Renee Zalk

Author:   Robert Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling)

Genre:   Fiction, Crime, Suspense, Thriller, Mystery

944 pages, published  September 15, 2020

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

Troubled Blood is the fifth book in J.K. Rowling’s Cormoran Strike detective series.  Strike and his partner Robin Ellacott are hired by a woman whose mother, Margot Bamborough, disappeared forty years ago in 1974 without a trace.  As they investigate this cold case, Strike and Robin encounter tarot cards, a psychopathic serial killer and witnesses who cannot be trusted, along with their own long simmering feelings for each other.

Quotes 

“We aren’t our mistakes. It’s what we do about the mistake that shows who we are.”

 

“Every married person he knew seemed desperate to chivvy others into matrimony, no matter how poor an advertisement they themselves were for the institution.”

 

“Then he closed his eyes, and like millions of his fellow humans, wondered why troubles could never come singly, but in avalanches, so that you became increasingly destabilized with every blow that hit you.”

 

 “. . . she’d seen a flicker of something in his face that wasn’t mere friendship, and they’d hugged, and she’d felt . . . Best not to dwell on that hug, on how like home it had felt, on how a kind of insanity had gripped her at that moment, and she’d imagined him saying ‘come with me’ and known she’d have gone if he had.”

 

“But he was her best friend. This admission, held at bay for so long, caused an almost painful twist in Robin’s heart, not least because she knew it would be impossible ever to tell Strike so.”

 

“But people who fundamentally change are rare, in my experience, because it’s bloody hard work compared to going on a march or waving a flag. Have we met a single person on this case who’s radically different to the person they were forty years ago?”  “I don’t know . . . I think I’ve changed,” said Robin, then felt embarrassed to have said it out loud.  Strike looked at her without smiling for the space it took him to chew and swallow a chip, then said, “Yeah. But you’re exceptional, aren’t you?”

 

 “How could he say, look, I’ve tried not to fancy you since you first took your coat off in this office. I try not to give names to what I feel for you, because I already know it’s too much, and I want peace from the shit that love brings in its wake. I want to be alone, and unburdened, and free.  But I don’t want you to be with anyone else. I don’t want some other bastard to persuade you into a second marriage. I like knowing the possibility’s there, for us to, maybe . . .  Except, it’ll go wrong, of course, because it always goes wrong, because if I were the type for permanence, I’d already be married. And when it goes wrong, I’ll lose you for good, and this thing we’ve built together, which is literally the only good part of my life, my vocation, my pride, my greatest achievement, will be forever fucked, because I won’t find anyone I enjoy running things with, the way I enjoy running them with you, and everything afterward will be tainted by the memory of you.

 

 “If I’ve taken you for granted,” said Strike, “I’m sorry. You’re the best I’ve got.”

 

“I think there are a lot of nutters in the world, and the less we reward them for their nuttery, the better for all of us.”

 

“He was well aware that he hadn’t told Polworth the whole truth about his relationship with Robin Ellacott, which, after all, was nobody else’s business. The truth was that his feelings contained nuances and complications that he preferred not to examine. For instance, he had a tendency, when alone, bored, or low-spirited, to want to hear her voice.”

 

“And there was something more, something highly unusual. Strike had never once made her feel physically uncomfortable. Two of them in the office, for a long time the only workers at the agency, and while Robin was a tall woman, he was far bigger, and he’d never made her feel it, as so many men did . . .”

 

“The roses, which were for Joan, were also for him: they said, you won’t be alone, you have something you’ve built, and all right, it might not be a family, but there are still people who care about you waiting in London. Strike told himself ‘people,’ because there were five names on the card, but he turned away thinking only of Robin.”

 

“. . . Strike explained about his failed attempt to buy Robin perfume, the previous December.

‘ . . . so I asked the assistant, but he kept showing me things with names like . . . I dunno . . . “Shaggable You” . . . ‘  The laugh Robin failed to repress was so loud that people turned to look at her . . .  and I panicked,’ Strike admitted . . .”

 

“Robin was thinking, is this where single people end up, people without children to look out for them, without double incomes? In small boxes, living vicariously through reality stars?”

 

“She’s lived with it for forty years . . . People who live with something that massive stop being able to see it. It’s the backdrop of their lives. It’s only glaringly obvious to everyone else.”

 

My Take

Having read the four previous Cormoran Strike novels ( The Cuckoo’s Calling, The Silkworm, Career of Evil and Lethal White) I was really looking forward to Troubled Blood.  I was not disappointed.  While J.K. Rowling is adept at spinning an engrossing mystery, this series really shines when it focuses on the protagonists Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacot.  The two are fascinating characters and the “will they, won’t they” dynamic really works.  At 944 pages, Troubled Blood is a commitment to read, but it is well worth the time.