Dear TBR,
BITTER WATERS, by Vivian Shaw: I started reading this series years ago. It’s called STRANGE PRACTICE, and that’s the title of the first book about a young English woman called Greta Helsing, a distant relative of THE van Helsing family, the slayers. She is most decidedly not a slayer, having inherited her father’s medical practice. Rather than slaying the undead, her entire life’s work is dedicated to keeping them comfortable and healthy within their… unlife. Or whatever it is. As you might imagine, this is a magical book, but only in the most delightfully minor way. Greta’s patients are, for the most part, perfectly normal barrow wights, vampires, banshees, and the like. Like everyone else, they’re just doing their best to get by.
In this episode, Greta, now Lady Varney, is relaxing of an evening at her new husband’s country home. It’s lovely and posh, and worlds away from the cramped, damp London flat she could barely afford for so many years. It would have been a lovely respite, if it weren’t for one of the neighborhood wights coming by and dropping off a lost vampire, disrupting their evening, and rupturing Greta’s peace. Her newest patient is eleven year old Lucy – a child who has had her childhood – and her mortal life – stolen forever. Greta, her husband, Francis, and their whole community is outraged. Who would both turn – and then abandon – a child? There are no clues, though Francis drags himself to exhaustion tracking. Even his werewolf friend, a hearty older woman who teaches at Oxford, can only track him as far as a car park, where he disappeared. Lucy can remember nothing, of course – but “nothing” isn’t good enough for Francis and his friends. A reckoning is due, and the small family is pulling out the big guns. It’s time to call the Voivode, Vlad Dracul, because when a child has been hurt, decent people make sure that justice is served…
WOE, written and illustrated by Lucy Knisley: I’ve been meaning to read alll the Knisley books, and this week made my way to WOE. I can’t quite say if it was marketed to kids or adults – it’s a good crossover for cat-lovers though, and is a great gift book.
Linney was a rescue cat who was older – and a little peculiar. She featured in myriad Knisley single frame comics during the pandemic, and people came to love her dramatic, verbal, and completely bonkers cat who would helpfully snuggle at her, and milliseconds later be highly offended that she was being touched. The “woe” title is especially hilarious, because that’s the sound Linney made – not so much a meow, but the song of her people, sunk in ruin, misery, and despair. Oh, the life of a being receiving soft, canned foods and skritches! Truly a life of endless angst… Because she was an older cat, Linney’s family never knew how old she was, and when her inevitable health issues began, Lucy began chronicling even more of her adventures, likes and dislikes as a way of keeping her close before her inevitable end. This book is considered a “novel” but it’s mostly a series of cartoons about how cats change us, and how we enjoy their antics – when we’re not rolling our eyes and thinking about how we wish they’d act normally JUST ONCE – and how we love them until the bitter end.
ODE TO A GRAPEFRUIT, by Kari Lavelle, ill Bryan Collier: This is a very new book, having come out in July, but I was eager to get my hands on it, because it’s a nonfiction picture book biography of a boy named James Jones. THE James Earl Jones, whose resonant voice filled our childhoods with Darth Vader’s intimidating, breathy pronouncements is celebrated in this slender book illustrated with collage and watercolor. The title comes from a poem James Earl wrote in high school – and recited flawlessly. This was a big, big deal, because James Earl Jones suffered from selective mutism and a stutter which plagued him through childhood and young adulthood – and onward, throughout his entire life into the present.
The writer keeps the facts as simple as the ones found in Jones’ autobiography, not offering conjecture as to why the bright boy developed fluency disorders, though the back matter alludes to the fact that Jones’ mother left him to be raised by her parents in a small Michigan town while she returned to Mississippi. The book names teachers and mentors who helped to nurture Jones’ love of the written word, of ideas, and helped to anchor the practice of memorization within him. I would have liked to have read a bit about how he moved into acting, and what plays he was in before he came to young Americans attention as Darth Vader, but this book is solely about James Earl Jones relearning to speak up demanding to be heard.
Fresh onto the TBR:
- The Blue Book of Nebo, Manon Steffan Ros
- Bloom, by Kevin Pannetta
- Check & Mate, by Ali Hazelwood
- Love Triangle: How Trigonometry Shapes the World, by Matt Parker (NB: No intention of reading this, just love the title)
Until the next book, 📖
Still A Constant Reader
