Truth? Hard to say.

The Queen of Tuesday: A Lucille Ball Story by Darin Strauss
Rating: 3 stars
Genre: historical fiction
Review:This book is being marketed as a romance, a love story.  I say, really?  There are elements of that in it, to be sure, but in some ways this book is quite the opposite.  The story is two-fold.  One part is a part-fictional, small-part memoir of the author's grandfather, who may or may not have had an affair with Lucille Ball.  They met at a party in New York, before she was nearly as famous as she would later become.  He was established in his real estate career, married, with children.  She too was already married, and focused on making herself (and Desi) a rising star in the acting world.  But they caught each other's attention and a slight obsession followed.  The book jumps through the years, following both, and interspersed with the author's own story of talking to his dying grandfather (the one who, as a younger man, is a character in the larger story - don't worry, it's not as confusing as it sounds).

Do Lucille and the author's grandfather ever get together?  Well, such is the stuff that stories are made of.  Did any of this really happen?  That's a more complicated question.  What is the responsibility of the author of historical fiction to historical fact?  Strauss is completely clear that he doesn't know the truth of the matter, but he also acknowledges fudging such fundamental facts as the day of the week on which I Love Lucy aired.  And why?  That particular detail is absolutely not relevant to the plot, so why bother to change a fact of history.  To me, that calls the entire enterprise of this book into doubt.  Maybe he did that on purpose, since he himself doesn't know the truth of the possible relationship between his grandfather and Lucille Ball.

Setting the absolute truth aside, this is a very readable story.  It follows Lucille Ball through her early struggles with Desi and her career, into her stardom, and through the collapse of her marriage, even as she continues to grow more powerful in Hollywood.  It follows Isidore Strauss, mostly through a family lens, as his children grow and his wife becomes an alcoholic.  Either of these stories separately might have made good reading.  Tying them together is something of a conceit on the author's part, and it doesn't quite work.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

fun but ridiculous

Siri, Who Am I? by Sam Tschida
Rating: 2.5 stars (out of 5)
Genre: fiction
Review: Mia wakes up in the hospital with a head wound, amnesia, and no ID of any kind.  She only learns her name because Siri tells her.  But, having woken up, and there being nothing "medically wrong" with her, her doctors discharge her.  She figure out where she lives by "triangulating" from the backgrounds of her Instagram posts, and fortunately the key in her clutch fits in the lock of the place she winds up, which turns out to be her boyfriend's place, which is being house-sat by a very cute neuroscientist.  Ready for a deep breath, yet?  What follows is a somewhat madcap adventure, suitable for the Pink Panther, except that Inspector Clouseau (as portrayed by either Petter Sellers or Steve Martin) is both smarter and more endearing) than Mia.

Watching Mia try to figure out her life, and who caused her head injury is quite a page-turner.  Mia's voice is very real, as the author has abandoned many writing conventions for a very colloquial tone.  It works, though.  Mia's discomfort as glimpses of who she was before amnesia also feel very authentic.

What doesn't work is the actual plot.  In the interests of not giving away any spoilers, I can't reveal most of the actual problems, although they definitely start with Mia being released from the hospital before she even knows her own last name, but suffice it to say that a lot of Mia's conclusions are leaps, and a lot of things don't hang together even after she figures everything out.  If you can move beyond those issues, this is a fun read, and presents some thoughtful questions about how much of identity is immutable.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

something's very strange here

Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas
Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)
Genre: fiction
Review: Ines Murillo is a first-year at Catherine House, a prestigious but unusual college tucked deep in the woods of Pennsylvania.  The admissions process is extremely selective, and both rigorous and demanding.  It's entirely unclear what they're looking for, beyond intelligence, but fortunately for Ines, she has whatever it is, since the world outside suddenly seems like something from which she has to escape.  Once she gets there, though, she seems intent on continuing with the debauchery that got her into trouble in the first place.  She sleeps around, drinks too much (to be fair, wine seems to flow freely at all times), and skips class.  Can anything convince her to turn things around?  And what's really going on at Catherine anyway?

Reading the blurb for this book, which describes a secretive school that graduates powerful people, immediately made me think of that episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer with the fraternity whose members got their power from a demon in their basement to whom they had to offer human sacrifices.  So, here's a spoiler: there's no demon in the basement of Catherine House.  What there is, isn't quite clear.  It has something to do with a "new material" called "plasm" which, if I understood correctly somehow allows all things to be connected.  The science behind it wasn't all that important to me.

Rather than the specifics of what's going on in the lab, this book is anchored by the atmosphere of the school.  Full of lush descriptions of damp rooms with peeling wallpaper and mismatched furniture and meals made of strange combinations of food, the sense of something a step beyond shabby gentility emerges.  Add to that some students who are, shall we say, very focused on plasm, and one gets a decidedly gothic feel.

For readers who enjoy a sense of nervous dread about what happens on the next page, this book will pull you to the end, while you nervously look over your shoulder.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

what lies beneath

Alice's Tulips by Sandra Dallas
Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)
Genre: historical fiction
Read 20 in 2020 category: published in 2000 (or history)
Review: Midway through the Civil War, Alice has been living for a year with her new husband and his mother on their small farm in Iowa, when her husband hears the call of patriotism and joins the Union Army.  Alice left the more genteel circumstances she grew up in to marry Charlie, and it does appear to be true love, as they're quite happy together.  He leaves Alice with his mother, a woman of very strong opinions, and the hired man to do the heavy lifting on the farm.  This seems somewhat problematic at first, as Alice's only apparent talents are quilting and flirting (which puts her one up on Scarlett O'Hara).

As the circumstances get tougher, Alice soon finds that she has more skills than she thought she did, including loyalty and the ability to work hard.  In this book, Sandra Dallas has mastered the art of showing the reader how a character develops, rather than simply saying so.  Told in the form of letters Alice writes to her sister, the reader can almost feel Alice developing both muscles and a backbone as she faces both day-to-day and rather more extraordinary challenges.

not all adults here

All Adults Here by Emma Straub
Rating: 3.5 stars (out of 5)
Genre: fiction
Review: Some books are enjoyed because of plot, some because of characters, others because of the tone or style of the language.  One might recommend this book for the plot, which moves along, or possibly even the style, which is engaging, but probably not for the characters, most of whom seem more to become fully colored in, more than they grow throughout the book.

But there are plot points aplenty.  The book nominally centers around the matriarch of the family, who has a stunning revelation to share with her three grown children.  Her middle child, and only daughter, has a very different revelation of her own, and her eldest son is struggling with a weighty decision.  Her granddaughter is struggling with a new school, and the reason she left her old school.  There's more than enough here to keep us turning the pages.

My biggest issue with this book is the fact that they are not, in fact, all adults.  The most compelling parts of this book come from children.  Eighth graders, to be specific, as they navigate the difference between secrecy and loyalty, and what it means to really be someone's friend.  It is these parts of the book that had the most meat to them.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

not another one!

The King's Justice by Susan Elia MacNeal
Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)
Genre: historical mystery
Read 20 in 2020 category: mystery (or history!)
Review: In this 9th installment of the Maggie Hope series, MacNeal's heroine is really struggling.  Poor Maggie has been through the wringer is the first 8 books, and has taken up living on the edge as a way to deal.  She's zipping through town on her motorbike, smoking, trying to get her new boyfriend into bed with her, and defusing bombs left over from the Blitz.  She's convinced herself that this is perfectly acceptable, until another serial killer hits the streets of London.  Despite her best efforts, she can't help but get involved, especially when she figures out that her new comrades in bomb defusing, many of whom are conscientious objectors, may be the killer's targets.

This serial killer seems to have a connection to the killer she thwarted in The Queen's Accomplice (book #6), even as that murderer is counting down the days to his execution.  Much as Maggie might like to be able to put those memories firmly behind her, she must confront him in order to try to apprehend the new murderer, and deal with her conflicting feelings about the death penalty as well.

Like Maggie's other adventures, there are more than a few red herrings thrown across our path, and quite a bit of pedantic dialogue, but overall MacNeal keeps this mystery rolling along nicely.  Maggie might be a little out of control, but readers will empathize with her, and of course root for her to solve the mystery, protect her friends, and even find a little bit of emotional peace.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

doesn't deliver

The Fortress by S.A. Jones
Rating: 2 stars (out of 5)
Genre: speculative fiction
Review: Jonathon is deeply in love with his wife.  Truly, he thinks she's amazing and the best thing that ever happened to him.  But that doesn't stop him from participating in what amounts to a rape culture in his high-powered corporate world.  Did he himself ever actually rape one of the "poodles" (as female junior analysts are called) in his office?  It doesn't seem so, but he certainly engaged in activity where "consent" was not exactly voluntarily given.  And, as is pointed out to him, he doesn't do anything to stop other women from being raped either, even though he's fully aware of what's going on around him.  When his wife finds out, she kicks him out and agrees to take him back only if he does a year as a supplicant at The Fortress, a nation-state ruled by the all-female Vaik.

The Vaik play by their own rules, the most important of which seems to be that the men who live with them can never say no, to any of them, about anything.  Shockingly, Jonathon doesn't find it hard to "submit" to their will when they slip out of their diaphanous gowns, although he does struggle with the rule against asking any questions.  Somehow, the rules, and the hard physical labor are supposed to reform him into being the kind of man who doesn't objectify every woman he sees.  How that's supposed to happen when women are propositioning him regularly is unclear, but the system does make him submissive, even to the point of doing things that violate his own moral code, which may not be exactly what his wife had in mind.

Where this book really fails, though, is in helping the reader understand how these changes happen, or even how they're supposed to happen.  Jonathon moves rocks to learn to control his emotions, yes, and is able to move rocks in his mind to simulate the control even when there are no actual rocks to hand, and he wears a technically advanced piece of clothing that fits him like a glove and, we are told repeatedly, leaves very little to the imagination.  But the remainder of the Vaik's program is left to the reader's imagination.  We are told that it works, not shown how it works, which makes the results not entirely believable.

I wish I could recommend this book.  The premise is really interesting, which is why I read it in the first place.  Unfortunately, the execution leaves a lot to be desired.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in advance of it's US release in exchange for this review.