Since a Suitable Boy took me two full weeks to read, I completed only six books in April. And I posted no reviews at all.

After some consideration, I’ve decided to ramp up my volunteer work for the remainder of the year. This means that likely the only reviews I’ll be posting on my blog from here on in are these ‘minis’ at the end of each month. (And I refuse to feel guilty anymore!)

And, since you won’t be seeing individual reviews at Exurbanis, if you’d like more of my thoughts on any of these books, please leave a comment on this post and I’ll reply there.

1. Gillespie and I by Jane Harris

Although this is alternately told from 1888 Glasgow and 1938 London, the main story is the earlier one. Harriet Baxter recalls two years in the lives of the Ned Gillespie family.

We know almost immediately that Harriet will prove to be an unreliable narrator and trying to see past her perspective to what really happened is lots of fun. 4½ stars

2. A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth

Set during an 18-month period in 1950-51 India, just a few years after Partition, it involves several families of the upper Hindu castes, and a Muslim family. The story was decent and the class perspective a different one than I had encountered in the past, but it was just plain too long.

At 1,349 pages in hardcover (1,488 in the paperback that I read), this is one of the longest English language novels ever written. Was it worth two weeks of my life? Meh, I don’t think so. 4 stars

3. The Land of Decoration by Grace McCleen

A ten-year-old girl, devoutly religious and emotionally estranged from her father, is bullied at school – and then more. How she and her father react to the persecution that comes because of their religion, her father’s status as a factory ‘scab’ during a major strike in the town, and the psychological twistedness of the bully and his father, forms the core story.

I couldn’t stop turning the pages, but other readers may not feel the same. This book can be interpreted in many, many ways and I’m certain it will be the source of numberless discussions and widely varying reactions. 4 stars

4. Winnie and Gurley: The Best-Kept Family Secret by Robert G. Hewitt
When Hewitt published NO INSTRUCTIONS NEEDED: An American Boyhood in the 1950s, evidently several readers took him to task because he had not elaborated on the grandmother with whom he had spent so many childhood hours.

He was fortunate enough to inherit the ephemera and other materials that allowed him to trace the courtship and married life of his grandparents, and to discover a disturbing family secret.

Anyone who has tried tracing their family tree will be fascinated by this. 4 stars

5. The Mapping of Love and Death (Maisie Dobbs, Book 7) by Jacqueline Winspear

I love Maisie Dobbs. And, until this book, I’d loved all the stories in this mystery series. The book wasn’t bad, mind you, and provided lots of interesting details about the mapping of war.

But there were just a couple too many coincidences that advanced the solving of the mystery to suit me: Maisie’s friend just happened to try to match-make her at dinner with a man who just happened to know a guy who made films of the troops in WWI and who just happened to have filmed a cartography unit (and all this just happened to have come up in dinner conversation 14 years after the end of said war). The cartography unit caught on film just happened to be the one Maisie was looking for, and the villain just happened to be visiting the unit that day and was captured on celluloid trying to stop the film crew.

You get the picture. And I didn’t think the clues were fair enough to allow the reader to solve the case – unless one must consider that anyone and everyone introduced in the gathering of information might be more involved than that. I hadn’t noticed this element in previous Maisie books.

ANYWAY – I still love Maisie and I’m going to continue reading this series, hoping that this is just a blip in Winspear’s otherwise impeccable record. 3½ stars

6. A Place for Johnny Bill by Ruth Bishop Juline

I read this for the Books That Made Me Love Reading Challenge. Johnny Bill Mason is the eldest child in a family of migrant workers, following the crops around the southeastern US in the late 1950s.

I remember checking this out of our public library time after time after time. I must have been fascinated by the poverty of these people – people who had less money than my working-class family. And who were poor in more than finances: Johnny Bill’s greatest dream was to settle someplace so he could get some book-learning and have a dog. We didn’t have a dog, but I had a home and a school routine, and lots of books to read.

Unfortunately, A Place for Johnny Bill hasn’t stood the test of time or perspective for me. 3 stars

For Canadian readers:

Gillespie & I

A Suitable Boy

The Land Of Decoration

The Mapping Of Love And Death: A Maisie Dobbs Novel

Kindle editions:

Gillespie and I

The Land of Decoration

Winnie and Gurley: The Best-Kept Family Secret

The Mapping of Love and Death: A Maisie Dobbs Novel