The Star-Crossed Sisters of Tuscany

 What a satisfying read The Star-Crossed Sisters of Tuscany (#977) is!  Lori Nelson Spielman's tale of an Italian American family under the spell of a two hundred year old curse dooming the second born daughters to lives without love hits all the right notes.

Emilia Antonelli has been brought up under the thumb of her unforgiving nonna.  At twenty-nine she's settled into an apartment in her grandmother's house, works in the family shop as a baker, and has given up on romance after an accident nearly takes the life of her college boyfriend.  Life is good though, she thinks.  That is, until the day Aunt Poppy, the family black sheep, invites Emmie and her cousin Luciana, both second born daughters as she is herself, on an all expense-paid trip to Italy.  On her eightieth birthday, Poppy will reunite with the love of her life on the steps of the cathedral in Ravello, and break the curse for all second daughters in the Fontana family.

How the trip changes everyone involved is a roller coaster ride of emotions, family secrets, longing and disappointments spread across Bensonhurst, New York, Venice, Florence, Ravello and Amalfi, Italy.  I couldn't wait to find out what happened next in this family saga!  No wonder I had to wait so long for it to become available at the library.

I think Ms. Spielman only got two things wrong in her book; Ravello is perched so high above the Tyrrenhian Sea you cannot hear the music of the sparkling ocean - you have to be in Amalfi for that.  Second, I certainly don't associate the smell of damp concrete with the beautiful cathedral in Ravello.  It's a beautiful spot inside and out.  I hope Ms. Spielman is lucky enough to find this out for herself one day.  In the meantime, this novel is a wonderful way to armchair travel.

The Crow Trap

 I have enjoyed watching the BritBox series Vera on PBS.  It's based on the Vera Stanhope detective novels by Anne Cleeves.  After reading the first book in this series, The Crow Trap (#976), I'm inclined to think I'll enjoy the TV series more than the books.  Billed on the cover as a psychological thriller, it seemed to take on awfully long time to get to the point.

In a remote locale, with a potential mine to be re-opened on uplands near a national park, the characters circle around an environmental impact study, greed, mental illness and long-held grievances with nothing tying the disparate parts together until halfway through this lengthy book.  Vera Stanhope herself only has an unidentified cameo in the first three hundred pages.  That's a long time to wait.

I must say, Brenda Blevin has tidied up Vera's character considerably for the small screen.  She's no fashion plate, but neither is she the bag lady encountered in print by the three women at a funeral.  The one thing that is the same in both is the stark beauty of the northern English landscape and coast.  There the camera definitely has the advantage.  Can't say I'll be in a hurry to read other entries in this series, even though it's provided a great base for quality TV.

One Thread Pulled - The Dance with Mr. Darcy

 Diana J. Oaks has penned a tribute novel to Jane Austen's beloved Pride and Prejudice.  In One Thread Pulled - the Dance with Mr. Darcy (#975) the plot of the original novel is followed closely until the ball at Netherfield Park.  From there, all bets are off as Ms. Oaks introduces a murder and its subsequent investigation, an attempted murder and the disposal of other, minor characters in new and different roles.  It's all the pleasure of reading Jane Austen combined with the thrill of not knowing precisely where this novel is taking you.

As much as I enjoyed reading this take on Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy, I have a feeling that the story is far from over on the final page.  If you enjoy dipping into the many, many iterations of Jane Austen's novels, One Thread Pulled  is a worthy entry.  Is it wrong of me to wish Ms. Oaks had dealt more harshly with Mr. Collins?  I suppose one can't have everything...

Anonymous Sources

 Who better to write a thriller about a female reporter than Mary Louise Kelly, currently reporting on air on NPR?  Anonymous Sources (#974) is her debut novel, but I'm happy to say it's not her last.  I tracked down Anonymous Sources online because I enjoyed The Bullet, her next book, so much.  (See my post of 7/22/20.)

Alexandra James is assigned to cover the death of a student at Harvard in a fall from a dormitory roof, as she has the Higher Education beat at Boston's New England Chronicle.  She's annoyed to be pulled away from a dinner engagement, but when she finds out that Thomas Carlyle is the son of the President's Chief Counsel in Washington, she realizes that the story will go national.  She persuades her boss to send her to Cambridge University, where Thom has just completed a year as the Harvard Scholar.  Her own year spent at Cambridge, she argues, will give her an "in" to interview Thom's girlfriend and fellow students, and dig up human interest angles the other news media won't have.

What she finds out leads her to suspect that Thom did not commit suicide, and that her questions have put her directly in the crosshairs of a plot that leads directly to Washington, D.C.

Really interesting character development, and a taut plot make this book hard to put down.  It's a real adrenaline rush from someone who knows the ins and outs of her protagonist's profession.  Don't miss this one even if it does keep you up at night! 

The Jane Austen Society

 I have very mixed feelings about Natalie Jenner's debut novel The Jane Austen Society (#973).  The actual action in this novel centers around WWII, when intrepid villagers decide to use their love of Jane Austen's literature to band together and create a group dedicated to the study and preservation of her work.  It helps that they live in Chawton, where Miss Austen resided for a number of years near her brother's family.

Sometimes I felt like I had dropped into the middle of a serious-minded book club whose members were trying to one-up each in their knowledge of Austen arcana, with their profound insights and ability to quote her various works verbatim at length.  This led to much mental eye-rolling on my part.

At other times, I felt the characters (all fictional, of course!) were competing for who had had the most traumatic experiences in their pasts, or whose secrets could potentially damage them more than any other character.  Was it the nearly mute farm worker whose chance encounter with an American woman led to his obsession with Jane Austen's books?  Or the widowed doctor who can't cope with his loss?  Or the agoraphobic daughter of the nearby Great House whose father is bent on destroying her life?  Or could it be the glamorous American film star whose fiancé is using her to his advantage?  Hmm.  Even though Jane Austen's characters had similar tragedies and traumas befall them, Miss Austen never found it necessary to provide the graphic details of such sordid encounters as are found here.

I'm glad the real Jane Austen Society exists, with a mission similar to the one stated in this book.  Just don't be deluded into thinking that these characters had anything remotely to do with the factual foundation.

And before I go, may I also say the linguistic anachronisms in The Jane Austen Society bothered me as well.  It breaks the rhythm of the narration when one of these clunkers pops out of the dialogue at you.  

In its defense, the Large Print edition did have an attractive cover.