The Midnight Library

 What a fabulous plot!  This novel, The Midnight Library written by Matt Haig explores a topic I wrestle with on a regular basis.    The road not taken.... 

Quoting the poem from Robert Frost, walking down the road and coming to a fork, which road should you follow?  Whichever one you. choose you will always wonder what if I had taken the other route.  So many times I wonder what would my life look like now if I had done something differently.  Where would I be if I had made a different choice.  Even as a child I used to say to my mother, "if you had married a different father I could have had this kind of life." She would always explain, "then you wouldn't be you."

In this novel Nora Seed is the protagonist who gets to follow so many different roads.  Though the premise is different than mine wondering, the idea is still intriguing.   Nora is unhappy. with her life.  She has made choices along the way that have not brought her any. pleasure.  In fact, all she can see the the negativity of each choice.  Along the way. she has let people down and lost relationships.  

She ends up in the Midnight Library, a place where it is always midnight.  In this library the shelves are filled with the stories of her life.  She is given the chance to take a book off the shelf and live that life.  If she likes it she could stay there, if she does not she can come back to the Midnight Library and pick another book, life off the shelf.  

The question is can you really find the perfect ideal life.  Will there always be something that could be better? This book was so entertaining and fun to read, but also leaves you. with so many great morals and messages. to consider.  I think in the end I should be quite content with the life I am living and not look for the greener grass anywhere else.  

The Chanel Sisters

 Judithe Little has brought The Chanel Sisters to life in her new book.  What a wonderfully amazing story of how women who changed the fashion sense of the world started out and developed into the icons they became.

The Chanel Sisters starts out with four young sisters abandoned by their family.  Left in the capable hands of the nuns at the convent, after their mother's early death, by their father, the sisters have to rely on each other and their own strength and fortitude to succeed.  Each sister tries to cope with the circumstances in their own way.  The oldest daughter is not so successful and her life is difficult and ends young.

Antoinette and Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel always have felt they are destined for a better life.  Though the nuns explain that girls like them from impoverished homes, will be lucky to marry a shopkeeper or laborer, the girls have bigger dreams.

While living in the convent they learn the art of sewing.  They read romance novels and cut pictures out of the fashion magazines from Paris.  When they finally leave the convent they head to the stylish cafés of Moulins, the dazzling performance halls of Vichy—and to a small hat shop on the rue Cambon in Paris, where a boutique business takes hold and expands to the glamorous French resort towns.

Antoinette learns the hat business while working in a small shop, though she finds it hard to escape the gossip and hurtful behavior of friends.  Gabrielle tries to become an actress or singer, but cannot get a part. She tries to live as a kept woman, but has too much drive to succeed.  In the end the two sisters put their talents together and open their own hat shop, designing first simple hats, then dresses and finally perfume.  

Their simple different styles become the rage and they are famous.  World War One brings devastation to their relationships and love lives.  Though they are successful in the business world their personal relationships are  more difficult to navigate.   

This is a fascinating novel based on the true lives of this intriguing famnily.

 

Come Fly The World

 This is a very interesting book about the world of PAN AM airlines ... though I was alive during this time periods, my family was not a traveling family through the 1960s and 70s.  

It is very interesting to read about the privileged world of air travel and how the airlines built their reputations and business models.  Flight attendants were an integral part of the this experience.  Also very interesting story about how the airlines and Vietnam War intersected.  The flights of soldiers, and orphans back and forth across the globe was all new to me.

Come Fly the World: The Jet-Age Story of the Women of Pan Am.  by Julia Cooke was not really what I had expected.  This is a more serious in-depth look at the flight attendant and her role as a serious, educated woman, not just the attractive, flirting female that was portrayed in the airlines advertising at the time.

It was a new time in aviation history, we were flying around the country and across the ocean for the first time and the airlines were rivals for the business.  They served fancy meals on transatlantic flights, they wanted to use the flight attendants as an attraction to their companies. But flight attendants have always been the people who need to know the safety of the plane, how to handle an emergency and medical experts.  All that in addition to being friendly, serving food and drinks, and at the time looking a certain way.  Passengers were often surprised to find out these women were college educated and just working these jobs to be able to travel and see the world.

Murder Most Fowl

 Murder Most Fowl is a continuation of this long running mystery series. Amazing to be on book 29 with this time Meg Lanslow and her family hosting a traveling troupe of historic, medieval  reenactors and a Shakespearean play in production.  She seems to have her parents and visiting relatives cooking and cleaning for the actors.  Seems so unlikely.  her father is a retired doctor who can perform the autopsy.  Her husband is the college professor leading the play production.  Meg herself works as a blacksmith, forging tools or in this case a sword.  There are many farm animals that need to be taken care of.

Thrown in are some vandalism and of course a murder. There are many plots happening concurrently. There are also a few Shakespearean facts and historical tidbits to keep the reader interested, as you are waiting to see the reveal of the murderer and the reason behind it. The play is Macbeth and the three witches and their caldron are off in the woods casting spells.  There is a filmmaker who wants to make a documentary and keeps getting in the way and filming many turbulent scenes around the farm house.  Many characters and many distractions to keep you off balance and not sure who the killer is.

Interesting but not compelling. Very cozy mystery.

An Artful Corpse

 An Artful Corpse is the third in a series by Helen Harrison, but the first one I have read.  I love a good cozy mystery and it is always interesting when there is a new twist on who the amateur detective will be.

This time TJ a young college student is the amateur detective, though he is the son of two officers of the law.  His father and mother are both New York City police detectives, which gives them all an inside track on the murder case at hand.  Though a little unrealistic that the officers handling the case would give out information to a fellow detective not assigned to the case, who would share it with their child, is a bit of a stretch.  

Tj is in school to learn police training but still is exploring the idea of being an artist.  He is attending The Art Student's League .  This is a famous art school in NYC.  The main attraction of the book to me is that both my mother and my sister took classes at the school.  So reading about the history of the school, hearing the names of real teachers who worked at the school was interesting.  Also the descriptions of the art and artists that came through the school.  Imagining the picture of TJ and his love interest and friends attending classes and life drawing classes takes me back to family conversations at home.

Mystery wise this was way to easy to solve. I knew who did it even before they did it. So the most interesting par of this book was the history of the 1960s in New York.  The inclusion of real locations and what was happening around the Vietnam War at that time.  I am not sure I will go back to read the first two mysteries in this series.

Dangerous And Unseemly

 This is a interesting mystery novel from the perspective of a history lesson about how women were treated during the late 1800s. Women's rights were not equal at all even in an all girls school.  Concordia Wells is a single woman who goes to teach at Hartford College for Women.  She has to live in the dorm with the girls and along with the house mother, watch the girls behavior.  Male teachers can go home to their own homes at night.  Women teachers can not be married and there is a "lady principal" but there still is a school president who oversees the school.  As people are starting to die and some others are being attacked at the school, Concordia starts to help the lady principal investigate.  When her sister dies unexpectedly,  she is suspicious of what is happening at the house where she just returned from her honeymoon with her new husband .

Written by K,B, Owen this is a complicated mystery to follow with many characters and a few red herrings thrown in to make the murder undetectable.  But there are great descriptions of the clothes of the times the modes of transportation in a small college town and great details about the lifestyle women and their rights during this time period,.

Talking to Strangers

 Malcolm Gladwell has written, for me, another incredible read.  I really can follow everything he says and it all makes perfect sense. This time he is looking how we interact with each other.  he focuses on strangers, but I can see how it also works between friends and acquaintances because do we really ever know each other that well?

Talking to Strangers uses a few very.well known legal cases to make his points.  He starts back with Hitler and the beginning of World War II.  Neville Chamberlain went to see Hitler to negotiate with him about Germany not invading Czechoslovakia.  He met with Hitler on two occasions and came back to England reporting that hitler was not going to attack and that he was trustworthy.  This was even though many other leaders who had never met Hitler face to face were skeptical and did not trust him.

There are many other cases in the book to illustrate the same idea that people go to a trust default when they meet someone.  They want to believe that the person who is looking them in the face and saying something is believable.  Another example is the Bernie Madoff situation.  Madoff was able to convince so many people that he was trustworthy.  That even if you asked him directly if he was lying he would answer no and you would believe him.  There was one man who saw through to the reality of the corruption and was not fooled.  Gladwell refers to a person like this as a Holy Fool.  He sees the truth and is not swayed by the doubt from his position.

Gladwell tells a very convincing story about each of the cases he uses as examples through out the book.  As with all his previous books I find them fascinating reading and come away feeling that Gladwell has really unearthed some very interesting information about humans work and respond.