The Flight: A Monthly Book Sampler (April 2020)
Board member Andrea Humphries’ book review column is back for 2020! Here’s her summary of what she read in April:
April’s fiction reading was basically a collection of the latest installments in my favourite series.
Until recently, I wasn’t sure that Andrea Penrose was going to continue the Lady Arianna Hadley series, so I was delighted when I learned that A Tangle of Serpents would be coming out this month. I love the obsession with chocolate in all its forms, the political intrigue, and the snark. I appreciated Penrose’s spin on the classic “Can we really trust our friends?” plot and the resultant growth of the characters.
I laughed and sobbed my way through Hope for the Best and the remainder of Long Story Short. I’m working on Why Is Nothing Ever Simple? and when I finish it, I’ll be all caught up on The Chronicles of St. Mary’s. The next book, Plan for the Worst, came out on April 16th but, unfortunately, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the audiobook release got pushed back to August. Since I’m a hardcore devotee of the audiobooks, I’ll be waiting until then to rejoin my favourite disaster magnets.
The Becić Connection continued the Genevieve Lenard series and while I enjoyed the mystery, at this point - 14 books in - I’m really just here for the characters. I love them. A lot. And I never cease to be entertained by new characters being utterly befuddled by the existing dynamic. The basic premise of the series is that a specialized team with very interesting backgrounds solves art-related crimes in Europe. There’s a lot more to it than that, but to explain much more would be to spoil the early books. You don’t have to know anything about art to enjoy them though. There’s essentially a brief art history lesson in the setup of each mystery and the author, Estelle Ryan, has a page on her website with the art mentioned in each book. Whenever the characters leave their home base in Strasbourg, France, as they do in this one, it just makes me want to travel through Europe more. I’ve added several places to my travel bucket list because of these books.
A Stroke of Malice more or less picks up where An Artless Demise left off and I read the whole thing in the wee hours of the morning because who even has normal sleeping patterns anymore? Again, this is book eight and I’m here for the characters. They could be standing around debating the existence of the Loch Ness Monster for all I care as long as Huber works in some character development. Including the 1832 cholera outbreak in England and Scotland was weirdly coincidental and made me grateful all over again for the development of germ theory and modern epidemiology.
The one exception to the ‘favourite series’ category was Sandstorm by James Rollins, the first in his Sigma Force series. Somehow (it might’ve been an email newsletter, it might’ve been a recommendation on a bookstore website - I can’t remember), I came across a later book in the series that sounded intriguing, but I can’t start a series in the middle, so I decided to start from the beginning. It was a really fun read. I mean, what’s not to love about an action adventure novel that strongly resembles National Treasure meets Indiana Jones meets Jack Ryan. I’ll definitely keep reading the series as a fun departure from my normal fiction loves.
I read exactly one non-fiction book in April - Ruth Reichl’s food memoir, Comfort Me With Apples. Shauna Niequist has been periodically posting lists of her favourite books in a variety of genres and this was on her food-related list. Reichl was the last editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine and I loved My Kitchen Year, her memoir about the year after the magazine shut down, so I decided to snag Comfort Me With Apples from my library’s digital collection. I devoured it. After a few weeks of my brain refusing to focus on any non-fiction, I was delighted to find that I could get lost in Reichl’s memories and recipes.
Photo by Brigitte Tohm on Unsplash 