Wrong Place, Wrong Time (McAllister)

Wrong Place Wrong Time
by Gillian McAllister (2022)

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

This was a Pandemic Book Club selection, but I would have read it anyway. As a matter of fact, I started it before it was actually selected by the group. (The final vote was 4-3, so I "lucked out", but I would've read the other book if I needed to.) I heard my daughter describe the book to her mother (my wife) and it sounded interesting to me, with a nice little fantasy/sci-fi twist to it. The book had been recommended by Reese Witherspoon, so there was a wait for the ebook -- about 10 weeks or so. I put the paperback on hold when I was afraid I might not finish the book in time, but I did. Still I'm curious how long it will be.

It starts on a Friday evening at the end of October 2022. Jen finished carving the Halloween pumpkin when without warning or explanation, her son Todd stabs and kills a man out the street outside the house. He's arrested and Jen and her husband Kelly are off to the police station. What caused this to happen?

Next morning, Jen wakes up confused to find that it's the same day again, and the day repeats. She does what she can to make sure that Todd doesn't leave the house and can't kill the man. Meanwhile, she wants to know what would cause her son to do this in the first place.

The next morning, she wakes up and it is a day earlier. This continues for several days where she relives those days but nothing carries over. She's getting younger, not older. She learns more about her son and and her husband's secret behavior. She also find some information about about a cop named Ryan and a poster about a missing baby.

Interspersed with these chapters, there are Ryan POV chapters. Ryan is a young cop who becomes an undercover cop and starts working on a car theft ring case. His chapters are told forward in time, but when exactly they take place compared to the Jen chapters isn't stated. Speaking of Jen chapters, looking at the chapter titles themselves is a bit of a spoiler, which I'm about to spoil.

After about a week, Jen starts jumping farther and farther back. She jumps back a year and then a few years to the day her father died and farther back than that, all measured by the number of days. She found a professor who can explain some of this to her, but she has to prove herself to him every time.

We learn more about Ryan and the secrets Kelly is keeping. There's a woman named Nicola whose number shows up on a burner phone. There's this man named Joseph who's nosing around, asking questions, who, it turns out, was in prison and who will become the murder victim. There's Joseph's daughter Clio who was dating Todd before they broke it off. And there's something connecting all of it.

It mixes Groundhog Day with Quantum Leap as Jen thinks that there is something that she needs to put right, but she doesn't know what it is. She just continues learning the pieces of the puzzles that she needs to know to eventually fix things way back in the past. (Note: the author herself admits that she conceived this after watching Russian Doll, which also has a Groundhog Day effect to it.)

I enjoyed the book but I'm not 100% on the final resolution and how things play out afterward, back in the present day. (She doesn't have relive all those years.) Whatever "science-y" explanation could be posited for the energy to cause this time travel, it doesn't explain waking up again in 2022, a leap of many years, with very little fallout. There is no "Butterfly Effect". The changes are very narrow, which works fine for the narrative (although a little too pat in one regard). Considering she went back and changed how she and Kelly first met and changed the nature of their relationship, the fact that their son was still born at the same time (and is the same person) means that there's something more to this guiding the outcome (as Sam would've said on Quantum Leap).

A minor quibble, but I can imagine some people might feel let down by what needed to be changed to not only prevent her son from becoming a murder, but all of the extenuating circumstances and ancillary factors, and then how little actually changed in the end.

I might have to check out some of Reese Witherspoon's other picks ... but the older ones, which might actually be available from the library.

Eggs in Purgatory (Childs)

Eggs in Purgatory
Cackleberry Club #1
by Laura Childs (2008)

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

This was a book club selection. The person who chose this (and two others) wanted to try a "cozy mystery" and this author had a couple of series going. To be honest, I didn't look at the publication date until I started writing this entry. I know that there are several books in the series.

I listened to this book twice. I got a copy of the paperback from the library when I was almost done the second time, so I only read a few chapters. By that point I already had the voices in my head. It's a quick read and probably reads faster than 8 hours of audio.

I gave it a second listen because I thought I'd missed a few things along the way, but it turns out that many of the others in our book club had issues with the book as well. Overall, we did enjoy it, and there was a feeling that it could rate 3.5 as a novel, and maybe a 4 as a cozy mystery.

I was one of the few who had read cozies before but, as I pointed out, this is the first one that I've read without any witches or elves or ghosts. Even some of the discussion questions were skipped because they addressed any paranormal elements of the book. I almost missed them, but it didn't need them.

The biggest complaint with the book was too many characters, not enough information about the crime/mystery, a lot of talk about food, and a "side quest". Most of us enjoyed the side quest but it didn't distract/detract from the main story. One of the reasons I listened a second time was when the murderer was revealed, I was totally "huh?". I wasn't alone. The second time through I paid more attention. Even with that, there is a confrontation in the restaurant that ends when a character named Junior comes flying through the door. Not only had I forgotten about Junior when this scene occured the first time through, I'd forgotten about him again the second time, even though I knew how the scene would turn out.

So some notes:

There are three women, Suzanne, Toni, and Petra, who are all widows. Suzanne is the POV character. Her husband ran a gas station in Kindred and after he died, it couldn't stay a gas station because she was getting squeezed by suppliers. The Cackleberry Club was born. The place becomes something of a community center with a restaurant (with a prixe fixe menu), a book nook, a yarn/knitting/quilting area, etc. One morning, Suzanne's lawyer is found dead in his car with eggs in purgatory on his face and blood on his chest.

Suzanne looks into the mystery. The local Sheriff Roy Doogie is overly accomodating with spilling information at times (although the voice acting is awful). He's not an idiot, though.

Also in the cast of characters are the romance-novelist widow of the deceased lawyer, the lawyer's secretary, the former partner of the Suzanne's deceased husband and that man's wife, who is on the Library Council (yeah, it's a thing), the Rev. Yoder on the old, local church down the road, and a religious cult not far away but technically one county over. And there are some people who sell produce and folks who are of interest because of the tires on their trucks.

THere were some good characters, but it was a little too much and the ending wasn't entirel satisfying. Also, the print edition (not the audio) had a handful of recipes. I considered making Eggs in Purgatory over the Memorial Day weekend, but I was alone each morning and I had other food in the fridge. I did end up making Toad in the Hole, but the baking dish was too big and the amount of sausage required was too little. Since there were no pictures, I didn't understand how to arrange the sausage in the baking dish. I looked online after the fact and saw that a square dish might've worked better.

Anyway, it was a good book for a cozy mystery. A non-paranormal cozy mystery. I will probably read more, if not this series than of others. I know I have downloaded a few of them from Amazon (freebies) before I put a halt to it. Summer is coming and I'll have some reading time.

The Library of the Unwritten (Hackwith)

The Library of the Unwritten
(A Novel from Hell's Library) by A. J. Hackwith (2019)

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

This book was one of three that was our book club was to choose from, but it didn't win the vote. After the previous month, where the ebooks were difficult to come by, I placed holds on all three books before we even voted. Since the winning book was short, and since this one seemed to be of interest, I gave it a shot. I'm glad I did. I did have to pause reading this one to read the next month's book, but I immediately came back to it.

There is a library situatied in Hell, but it isn't part of Hell and doesn't serve it. It is filled with books that were never written. It was a librarian, Claire, who used to be human, before she died. And she replaced the previous librarian, Bjorn, who is now in the halls of Valhalla (which will get visited).

Sometimes books get restless, and characters step out of them. They usually have to be sent back. Luckily, characters can't stray to far from their books, but they can take their books with them if they sneak off.

When the novel starts, a book is missing and it's made its way to Seattle. The character, who later takes the name Hero, meets his author and tries to persuade her to finish the book. This works against him because that writer started to fall from him, since she wrote him to an ideal, and when he leaves here (to go back to Hell), he leaves some pages from the manuscript. She burns them. He doesn't feel well after this. Claire attemps to repair the book with fresh pages, hoping that the story will mend/rewrite itself. In the meantime, the book rejects Hero and doesn't let him back in.

Just before they go to Seattle, a man dies but somehow manages to bring a piece of a book to Heaven. Waiting outside of the gates of Heaven, reviewing all of the souls, is the angel Ramiel, who fell with Lucifer. He's tried to redeem himself ever since, but he's been denied Heaven. He recognizes what the fragment is and brings it to an Archangel, in this case, Uriel. Uriel is portrayed as female and somewhat overwrought with emotion because the Creator has gone away (voluntarily, it would seem). The pages are from a codex written by Satan. Uriel sends Ramiel to find the rest of it, believing that the magic encased in such a book would be powerful enough to summon back the Creator to Heaven.

When Ramiel gets to Earth, he crosses paths with the Librarian, who assumes is part of the conspiracy, and depends the book. Claire, Hero, and Leto (a demon in the guise of a human on Earth) are perplexed what the fallen Watcher would want with some romance book. Before they quickly depart, Leto snatches the fragment Ramiel has, and they're back to Hell.

And now the chase is on to find the rest of the codex before its magic can be used to upset the balance of power in the afterlife.

It was an enjoyable read, with only a couple of nitpicks, but they're ones that will always bother me, like a Geometry classmate poking me in the back of the neck with the point of a metal compass.

First, every chapter starts with a journal entry, written by some librarian from present day, going back over two thousand years. Each chapter has a POV character in the title, most of whom, don't author journal excerpts. It's a little bit of a disconnect. The annoying part, for me, is that the entries are dated BCE and CE. I guess Hell has a problem with B.C. and A.D., the latter one being understandable, but the substitituion is silly. It would be just as to use After the Fall or some other metric. Otherwise, why even use Christian dating in the first place.

Moreover, rather than create their own Heaven and Hell, the author simulates a Christian version of it. Ramiel and Uriel appear in apochryphal text, and Ramiel is a fallen Watcher. Uriel can be identified as a cherub or an archangel, usually an angel of repetance, and can be shown to be as pitiless as any demon. Archangels tend to be shown as males=, so switching the gender of one (particularly when maybe they shouldn't have gender) is reasonable. I didn't envy the choice: the Betrayer, or the pitiless, emotion boss lady who seems on the verge of running afoul of a Deadly Sin or two.

Nope, the thing that bothered me, for all the re-creation, was that the "Creator", whom I don't recall ever being mentioned as "God" with a capital "g", is referred times as "she", generally by Uriel. The only God references are the titles of the two archangels who are "______ of God". But not "God" "herself".

Again, that's my nit to pick and many others wouldn't be bothered by it. If I come across this entry at the end of the year, I might think about looking for the next book in the series.

Note: the above was written on May 11. I don't know why I didn't publish it sooner.

The Daughter of Doctor Moreau (Moreno-Garcia)

The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (2022)

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

This was a book club selection. We discussed it in a zoom call while was away at HeliosphereNY, a sci-fi con in Piscataway, NJ. That was amusing.

Despite my interest in science fiction, I have never read the original "The Island of Doctor Moreau". In fact, I've never read any Jules Verne. I attempted in college but was thrown by the old writing style. (Similarly, it took me a few tries to get through Frankenstein.) Basically, all I had to go on was the movie adaptation The Island of Lost Souls. I have not seen any of the remakes.

This book takes the original tale and sets it in the Yucatan in the 19th century and makes a historical romance out of it. I don't know what I was expecting from the title, but what I got wasn't it.

Carlota Moreau is the Doctor's daughter. When we first meet her, she's a child, and hangs out with two of the "hybrids" that the Doctor had created. I originally thougt she was younger from her childish behavior (with the other two), but she's nearly an adult when the narrative jumps 6 years forward.

Moreau's patron is a man named Lizalde, who has provided the Yaxaktun property and funding so that Moreau can produce hybrids that Lizalde can use as workers. Moreau has to overcome physical limitations and increase their longevities. Lizalde brings in Montgomery Laughton, who owns money and is basically an indentured servant, to manage the property because Moreau doesn't have a head for this. Laughton is also a hunter, and occasionally hunts jaguars for Moreau (not an easy thing to do).

Side note: Charles Laughton played Moreau in The Island of Lost Souls. That was the first thing that popped out at me.

Years later, Carlotta is grown. Lizalde's sons come to check out the property (and to find revolutionaries hiding in the area). The Doctor hopes that Carlotta would enamor one of the sons to secure his funding and her future (likely in that order). Eduardo Lizalde falls for her. Laughton isn't thrilled with this, but he's always been like an uncle, so it isn't a love triangle, but it's sometimes written as one.

Stuff happens, including a reveal which wasn't much of a reveal. In fact, I was hoping that the opposite would be revealed. Or that the truth had been revealed in Chapter 2, and let the narrative flow from there.

The consensus of the book club is that we would've like more of the hybrids. Why use "Doctor Moreau" if not for the hybrids. I, personally, would've like to have seen the daughter have more agency. If the book was the "Daughter of...", I would've liked more than a typical historical romance. Either Carlotta should've been a doctor in her own right, following in her father's footsteps after relocating to Mexico, or the Doctor could've died in the early chapters, and she could've assumed control of the hybrids. Either of these could work whether Carlotta was a human or a hybrid (such as Lota, in the Lost Souls movie).

One member who has read more of Moreno-Garcia's work suggest we read Mexican Gothic, saying that was a superior work. That's a possiblity, but it's not at the top of my list at the moment, and I have a large TBR list.

I'd give it a rating of 3 out of 5. It was enjoyable for what it was, but it could've been more.