By the Currawong’s Call

author: Welton Marsland

I so very much wanted to like this book, and am so very disappointed that I did not. The setting – very rural Victoria, Australia, in the 1890s – was fascinating, and I think the initial chapters do a marvelous job of not only introducing the characters but also the place. The descriptions of the trees, the birds, the desolation and the beauty of the landscape surrounding the main characters were absorbing in a way I found delightful..

Anglican priest Matthew Ottenshaw receives his first church assignment in the aforementioned small town. He takes his calling and his profession seriously, and wants to do well, a goal that is both helped and hindered by the local sergeant, Jonah Parks. Jonah tends to order Matthew around initially, announcing rather than inviting him on a tour of the town, but Matthew finds that Jonah is deeply smart and aware of how the town views them both (job first, person second). He also realizes that he and Matthew will end up working together. Matthew’s attraction to Jonah is more of a problem he feels he has to solve on his own.

I liked the differences in their dialogue, the way the writing took such care to distinguish between the two of them, and how their language and word choices revealed so much. But the book went sour for me in a hurry, and I ended up skimming to the ending.

First, there is no specific antagonist except “the law” or “the government” until the very, very end, and that lack of specificity meant that for me, the narrative turned into a daily journal of day time job/night time secret visits for Jonah and Matthew. It got dull in a hurry because it felt like the tension was suspended then reanimated abruptly. Their relationship is illegal and being found out could easily mean persecution, but the source of that persecution from an individual person or group was largely absent, so when it did show up (I’m trying to avoid spoilers) it was a handful of pages to deal with.

Worse, there are several minority characters who have very specific roles, all of them limited and stereotyped, and all of them in service to highlighting the nobility and goodness of the two white protagonists. One tells stories about Jonah’s heroism, and another provides a means to an end to the story. The ways in which these characters were marginalized in this book caused me to further lose interest because they seemed only to appear and be deployed to make clear the goodness of Jonah and Matthew compared to the rest of the town. In fact, the other characters in the town receive scant development after the opening chapters, which, again, made their reappearances in what were supposed to be key moments seem too convenient and contrived. I reached the final pages disappointed that the promise of the beginning wasn’t sustained.

– SB Sarah

LGBTQIA, Historical: Other, Romance

From Here to Eternity

author: Caitlin Doughty

I follow Caitlin Doughty on Twitter (@TheGoodDeath) and when I saw my library had her new book, I hopped on that hold list. This is a world tour of death rituals, led by Doughty in a conversational, empathetic, and at times deeply funny style. Each chapter examines how different cultures and groups, including some that are quite remote and hard to get to, care for their dead, and the rituals that are part of their funeral and long-past-funeral rites.

I found this book fascinating. It was a very fast read, but each chapter was grounded in the stories both of a cultural ritual and of the individuals who keep that ritual and custom alive. In Indonesia, bodies are taken out of mausoleums, cleaned, dressed, and posed with for pictures. In Bolivia, the Catholic church struggles against the belief system focused on  ñatitas, which are wish-granting human skulls, each with a highly specific area of expertise. In Japan, Doughty examines the tension between the expectation of honoring and visiting the dead and the practical realities of time, work demands, and lack of physical space. The solutions were extremely creative and thought provoking. The chapter on Dia de los Muertos in Mexico City is incredibly moving (content warning for child loss) and also surprising (wait till you read about the parade).

I wished each chapter had explored more, gone a little deeper (no pun intended) into the ways other cultures and groups honor their dead, both the memory of the person and the physical body they inhabited. Basically, I wanted more of everything.

The intimacy of the way the people in this book interact with and care for their dead was the most interesting part, as it caused me to question why American funerary rites are the way they are. There is a “death industry” in the US, one that profits greatly on the sale of coffins, and Doughty has been battling against it as a mortician for a long time. Reading this book was an intimate journey through world cultures of mourning, and also an inspiration for me to question why funeral practices are the way they are, and more importantly, to question what it is that I want to happen to my body after I die.

– SB Sarah

Nonfiction

Hard as Ice

author: Raven Scott

Hard as Ice is a romantic suspense that might be a good fit for readers who don’t like a lot of violence in their books. Trigger warning: there is a brief discussion of sexual assault in the book.

Most of the suspense revolves around a jewelry heist: an extremely expensive red diamond known as the Crimson Amazon was stolen from an auction house in a manner that suggests an inside job. Sales manager Nia James knows that this puts her on the suspect list, and she’s afraid that she’ll be found guilty of a crime she didn’t commit for the second time in her life.

Evan DeCosta is former CIA, and now part of a team of investigators called Fortis. Evan goes undercover, selling his late father’s painting collection through the auction house in order to see if he can find the inside man/woman. He starts wooing Nia as an investigative technique, but the feelings he develops are real.

I love heist books, so the suspense angle of this novel worked really well for me. My only issue was that Evan spent most of the book lying to Nia about who he was. There’s a lot of work spent by both of them trying to recover from that, so I was glad that the author didn’t try to resolve that quickly, but that level of deception is still really hard to come back from.

– Elyse

Romantic Suspense, Romance