What a puzzlement! I enjoyed it enough to sign up for a second one. But I can't say she was ever a "real" detective protagonist in any manner. The detection she did was more of a side-effect of trying to keep herself out of jail and figuring out how to keep her job long enough to get a settlement check (or some such) to pay the bills.
So I'm hoping the next one will be a real detective story. Where she self-identifies as a detective, or at least an investigator of some sort. But in any event, she's a very amusing character and I'd like to see more of her.
This Will Be Funny Someday
by Katie Henry
Really good YA book. A little unrealistic--a 16-year-old passing as a college junior?--but still really, really good. I got the impression the author was an older person who was using her characters to teach a lesson, but in such a believable way that it wasn't the slightest bit contrived. Well...maybe a little bit contrived, since I picked up on it as slightly out of character for the heroine to put up with the boyfriend's controlling behavior. She--the heroine--was awfully passive and easily led at first, but that's what got the story started.
And wow, did it get started! Her standup comedy wasn't always all that funny (I guess you had to be there) but it was cool to imagine.
If I were a teen, I might read this twice.
by David Gessner
Great book! So many times I've read a book about bird-related journeys, or other types of journeys, and ended up pleased but slightly deflated. A little too much bare fact, or a little too much serious travelogue....
Not this one! The cover blurb described it as 'irreverent' and that's right one. He's clearly a devoted follower of Osprey, and yeah, it's full of facts and observations and depictions of birds, but even more than that, it's full of people! People who like birds, especially the Osprey! It's a bit of a magical bird in some countries.
He keeps the obvious downers (guns, power lines, and hurricanes) to a mere factual mention, so you can read a book about such a perilous journey--the Osprey's migration from Cape Cod to Argentina--and marvel that they ever make it at all. And yet, oftentimes, they do.
And that's a bit of magic badly needed in life. Thanks for sharing, Mr. Gessner!
Aunt Dimity's Good Deed
by Nancy Atherton
This was a third in the Aunt Dimity series. For reasons unknown, probably unrelated to the book itself, I grew bored as heck. I lost interest in the mystery and the characters early on, and about three-quarters of the way through, I realized I didn't even care about the main characters anymore. Nor the ending--I skimmed forward to see what happened to the heroine and found that of course, exactly what I'd been expecting to happen was going to happen. But I didn't care enough to finish.
Life is too short and there are too many great books out there. (It doesn't help that I am currently listening to a great*great*great audiobook that is not only about real-world issues and real-world people, but it's real!)
Sometimes a good book and a good reader just aren't good together, as you know when you hook up two of your best friends and find they don't hit it off at all.
I won't give it a rating. I can see people liking it very much. It's maybe not as "good" as the previous too, but it's not at all bad.
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