Beat by Amy Boaz

Yet another novel about yet another woman facing an identity crisis. Frances cheats on her long-suffering husband with a creepy beat poet. She abandons one child and hauls the other to Paris with her to escape her mistakes. While in Paris she neglects her child and even tries to lose her. Frances is filled with angst, self-centered, untrustworthy, and so forth and so on. An all too familiar story that has been told dozens of times. The author does a good job telling it, it's just been done to death. I just finished "Loving Frank" by Nancy Horan - same story, and a better novel.

Ninety-five percent of this book is about the unlikeable Frances and her affair with her creepy poet. The other five percent is what kept me reading - the unanswered questions. Is her lover in jail? Why is he in jail? What happened to her lover's lover? Is her lover cheating on her? Why did Frances flee to Paris? And please, please can Frances be punished for the suffering she is causing the reader?

Ultimately it all fizzles at the end. We don't really know the answers to the questions because Frances is telling the story and she is so confused she doesn't know herself what happened. The only good thing is that the novel is less than two-hundred pages long - the pain is over quickly.

Link to Amazon: Beat

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

Why did no one ever tell me about this book? Why did no one ever tell me about Wilkie Collins? A contemporary of Dickens, Collins was very popular in his lifetime, but somehow, in all my many years of school and college, I never heard his name or his books mentioned. Makes me wonder what other authors I may have missed.

This novel is described as the first of the English "sensation novels", what we would call in the U.S. a thriller. If Collins invented this format he was a genius. This novel has the elements we identify with a thriller. Its only weak points are its treatment of women as a somewhat helpless and inferior species, but I could easily say the same thing of Dickens. Even though one of the female characters (Marian) is instrumental in thwarting the plot Count Fosco (what a name for a villain) it is left to the male character to actually resolve things.

But it's a great read, actually a lot more approachable than some of the Dicken's novels. I wish that, as a high school junior, I had been given this to read instead of "A Tale of Two Cities".

Link to Amazon: The Woman in White (Modern Library Classics)

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

A modern gothic novel in the tradition of Jane Eyre.I really loved this novel. It is smart, sensitive, engaging, and suspenseful.

Margaret Lea is hired to wite the biography of best-selling author Vida Winter. Winter has made a habit of telling widely different tales of her life to interviewers, but now she is dying, and wants to tell her true story. She picks Margaret Lea to tell it to, a reclusive bookstore clerk who is herself emotionally damaged.

The tale takes many emotional twists and is full of revelations about the past. Winter was a twin - or was she? Her twin is dead - or is she?

I was disappointed when I finished the book to find that Setterfield has not yet written another novel. More! I want more!

Link to Amazon: The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel

The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl

I had high hopes for this novel, but ultimately it fell a little flat. I love historical fiction with real characters, and this one has literary figures Oliver Wendell Holmes, Longfellow, and others. The setting is Boston, and murders that copy punishments from Dante's Inferno are occurring at the same time that Longfellow is translating the Inferno to English. The literary figures become reluctant detectives.

But I think the author has real problems with the omniscient narration. I am not an inexperienced reader, and I had difficulty following the thread of the narration at times, especially when exciting events were taking place. It is not always clear whose eyes we are viewing a scene through, or even what is actually happening.

It's still an entertaining read though, and the literary allusions are very well done.

Link to Amazon: The Dante Club: A Novel