It’s lobster season again here on Nova Scotia’s North Shore and we’ve been feasting every weekend on those tasty crustaceans. I often wonder just how desperately hungry the first people to crack open these ugly creatures must have been.

Lots of tourists drive home from Nova Scotia with an old-fashioned wooden lobster pot, purchased directly from the fishermen, on roof of their car. But fishermen are using new square metal traps more & more and in a few years those nostalgia-inducing types may not be available except as reproductions.

But there’s always ways to take home parts of the sea trade. The rope that ties the traps together is sometimes fashioned into door mats – think how durable those are! (And until the end of June, The New England Trading Company is listing some of those mats at up to 20% off)

On our first visit east 20 years ago, we paid a dollar for a souvenir mimeographed booklet that explained how to eat lobster. Of course, back home in the middle of the country we never had a chance to test out the method. But here, at least for May and June every year, we perfect our lobster cracking!

For those of you unfamiliar with blog hops, here how it works: One blogger asks a question that other bloggers answer on their own blog. They all link to the original blogger’s blog (following me?) so if you enjoy the topic, you can click on the “Blog Hop” button and then find other blogs discussing the same thing. Whew!

SO, this week Jennifer over at Crazy for Books has asked “What book-to-movie adaption have you most liked? Which have you disliked?”

Gone with the Wind comes to my mind as the best movie adaptation ever. How they condensed a thousand pages into only four hours and didn’t seem to leave out anything of import is still a marvel to me. I first saw GWTW when I was in grade 12, after having read the book once a year since ninth grade. The book was near and dear to my teenaged heart and the movie did not disappoint me. I do remember thinking that Olivia de Haviland was so much prettier than Vivien Leigh and should have played Scarlett, but now I think the roles were perfectly cast because, after all, Melanie really was the beautiful one.

Choosing a miss is somewhat harder. Oscar and Lucinda was a great adaptation except that the ending was completely different from the book. Was it better? Happier, yes, but…
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button wasn’t even close to the book, but I still thought it was a good movie. I thought Inkheart was a terrible movie, but then so was the book. And so on. I’m really drawing a blank on the miss.

If you’d like to see what some other book bloggers have thought about book-based movies, click on the bloghop link above.

Before you go, though, leave a comment here and tell me your picks for best & worst book-to-movie.

We moved to Nova Scotia eight years ago this week, at the beginning of a month of perfect summer days. I thought we had landed in paradise. But as the year(s) passed and the reality of country living became clearer, there were many times I realized that paradise has indeed been lost.

But this morning dawned a beautiful day 20C/68F, sunny and with a soft breeze from the southwest. After my shower, I went out on the side deck in my robe to hang my towel on the line – and paused to count the wonders of the day in the country:
• I was outside in my robe – and no one was around to see me
• I was hanging my towel on the clothesline
• The air smelled fresh and I knew my towel would come in with the same scent
• The only sounds were the birds singing for their mates

In the city, I would never have ventured outside without being fully dressed – there were too many people around. We didn’t have room for a clothesline and the clothes would have come in covered in fine black soot anyway. (Many urban areas have bans against clotheslines.) And in the city, the traffic and sirens were constant, and the neighbors’ music often reached us when we didn’t want to hear it.

Small blessings, perhaps, but they feed the soul and remind me again why we want to live in the country.

A year and bit ago, I discovered the delightful new Chet & Bernie mystery series that began with Dog on It, which I reviewed here (third book down).

Thereby Hangs a Tail is the second book in the series and just delightful as the first. At the risk of repeating myself, Chet is the canine half of the PI team and the story is told through his eyes.

This mystery revolves around a missing show dog named Princess and her owner, who we learn early on has been murdered. But Chet can’t convey that to Bernie and so Bernie must discover it for himself. Chet’s advanced doggie senses of hearing and smell bring interesting angles to the story. But Chet’s no superdog, as evidenced by his typically canine memory:

Bernie (gave) me a private look. I knew those looks. This one meant…something, I forget.

Although Bernie is an environmentally aware all-round nice guy, he’s not perfect either (except in Chet’s eyes). He’s flawed enough to be real, good enough to be extremely likeable.

This series is outstandingly readable, the mysteries are solid, and Chet’s observations can be laugh-out-loud funny. You will not be able to help yourself from feeling good when you’re reading Thereby Hangs a Tail. After all, as Chet says to Bernie’s observation that life is pretty good:

Pretty good? Life was great! How could anyone miss that? It was right out there every day.

I’ve already reserved the next in the series, To Fetch a Thief at my local library. May there be many more to come.

Recommended.

Links for my Canadian readers:

Okay, this week I cheated a bit and stepped outside the door to take this shot, but I’m so proud of my tulips.

I have huge gardens here but a couple of years ago I had surgery on my hand and spent the summer in a rehabilitation device that restricted all use. My gardens got away from me that year and I haven’t yet been able to get them back in control, so this show of non-weed color thrills me.

Please ignore the lawn in the background. The constant rain has made it lush but has prevented us from cutting it as often as it needs.

P.S. If you don’t have tulips but want some, why not send yourself some?

“Behind the glamorous exterior of horse racing lies the gritty reality of the backside”: a competitive world of owners, trainers, vets, jockeys, and other hangers-on. In this particular backside, someone is killing horses and demanding protection money.

That’s the premise of Bullet Work, although the title does not refer to the method of killing but to some sort of exercise with the horses. Oddly enough, the author explains just about everything else involved in the backside, but passes by the one mention of “bullet work” in the story without explanation.

Exercise riders had been given instructions for each mount, whether that was a canter just to stretch the legs, a two-minute mile clip, or a bullet work.

Nonetheless, I learned a great deal about racetracks and horse racing from Bullet Work. O’Brien manages to clarify most terms peculiar to that environment without being condescending to the reader.

If only that clarity had carried over to the plot. This book is not really a mystery because clues are not given to the reader; instead the story is just told. The climax occurs too early, and the follow-up death seemed gratuitous—at least not necessary to the advancement or completion of the plot.

In addition, the writing is choppy. It seems as if O’Brien had written each setting, action, or explanation in a number of different ways, and then simply strung them all together without integrating the thoughts. Moreover, the structure of most sentences is a basic subject-verb configuration that becomes overly repetitive and jerky. Although the writing is grammatically correct and mostly free of spelling & punctuation errors, it seems to suffer from a lack of good editing.

I thank Cadence Marketing Group for this copy of Bullet Work. Steve O’Brien is clearly familiar with the backside of horse racing. If that’s something you’d like to learn more about while being mildly entertained, pick up your own copy of Bullet Work.

Link for my Canadian readers:
Bullet Work

The garden in the middle of our front lawn is filled with wild rose bushes, which look sort of ratty this time of year. But the ground below is carpeted with daffodils–it’s a bumper crop of blooms this year.

I picked some for the dining room table. There seems to be five different varieties: a golden yellow King Alfred type, a paler yellow similarly shaped variety, cream petals with an orange center, white petals with a yellow center, and a double yellow bloom (most of these are past their prime so there’s not many in the bouquet).

Which is your favorite?

Don’t have daffodils in your garden? Send yourself some spring flowers. Here are some beautiful tulips.

Eleanor Brown’s The Weird Sisters has been getting lots of buzz since its release in January of this year, so I was surprised at how quickly my hold request at the library produced this copy for me.

Brown’s debut novel is the story of the Andreas sisters, Rose, Bean and Cordy—named for the Shakespearean characters Rosalind, Bianca and Cordelia–who have returned home to small town Barnwell, Ohio, ostensibly to help care for their mother who is undergoing treatment for breast cancer. Each of the three, however, have come to lick wounds from injuries that, although we the reader know immediately, each is unwillingly to divulge to her family. They take on their old roles within the family, while trying to reconcile these with the women they have become.

Brown writes convincingly about the complexities of sibling relationships. She captures the dichotomy between old lives and new. She successfully traces the growth of each sister.

And she does it all in the third person plural voice that seems to call for constant attention on the part of the reader. It’s as if all three sisters are speaking in unison and yet, when the actions of one are described, she is portrayed in the third person also. The effect is that the speakers are ever moving—one minute it’s all three telling the story, the next it appears to be Rose and Cordy or Bean and Cordy. This seemed to keep the story’s voice lively. For example:

So this was it, then. She’d been replaced. Bean and Cordy were going to the ones to put everything right…Apparently we could have done it without her all along.
So she was useless, then. We only wanted her if we were feeling too lazy to do what we were apparently perfectly capable of.
If only we’d been there to talk to her, soothe those fears, to tell her that no, we could not have done it without her all those years, it was only now, only after all we had been through, only because we had seen her managing things that we could step in and take up the reins, do our part.

I also enjoyed Bean’s struggle to return to small town living after being in NYC for several years.

The whole drive home she had pictured her stay in Barnwell, imagining an ascetic, nun-like existence that would serve as spiritual penance for what she had done. She would wear drab colors and eat dry bread and her skin would take on the cinematic pallor of a glamorous invalid as she modestly turned down creature comforts. But the reality of that hair shirt was beginning to chafe already. It was Saturday night, for crying out loud. At this hour in the city, she would only just be getting ready to go out, and here she was seriously considering going to bed.

Although all of the sisters have life-changing circumstances to deal with, the tone of the book is upbeat, perhaps a bit too much so to be taken as serious literature. Nonetheless, I really enjoyed The Weird Sisters and was sorry to see the book end.

Four stars out of five.

Link for my Canadian readers:

The Weird Sisters

In 1969 San Francisco, young single mother Lisa Fay finds herself swept into a drug deal and looking at 15 years in jail before parole. Her young son, Wrecker—named for his destructive tendencies—is sent to live with Lisa Fay’s sister, Meg, and her husband Len in Humboldt County, California, although Lisa Fay is not aware of his fate.

Also unbeknownst to Lisa Fay (and system administrators), Meg is brain-damaged following a dental infection and unable to care for Wrecker. Len turns for help to his next-door neighbors at Bow Farm. There, in what amounts to be a commune, live Melody, Ruth, Willow and Johnny Appleseed. This motley crew agree to help out and find themselves falling for Wrecker. Eventually, Melody convinces Len to adopt Wrecker but to leave the actual raising of him to her.

The book covers the time from Wrecker’s arrival at Bow Farm, just before his third birthday, until the time he is twenty. But it’s more than the story (as compelling as it is) of an angry boy becoming a strong and gentle young man.

It’s a story about families, how they form and grow, and how they change. The diverse & flawed characters of Bow Farm, and Len and Meg, become Wrecker’s family, and Melody, his mother. Mother love—both Melody’s and Lisa Fay’s—drives the book.

Sometimes she looked at him and was horrified…(W)hat if she made a mistake? No. What if the mistakes she made (of course she made mistakes, how was she to know how to raise a child like this, any child) mounted up and somehow tipped the scale toward bad? What if she made—a monster? It would be her fault. Everyone would know she had been a BAD MOTHER.

I was hooked on Wrecker from the first paragraph and could seldom put it down. Lisa Fay’s longing for her son and her fear of losing him wove throughout the story, keeping a tension that was balanced by the love and hope on Bow Farm.

Without wasting any words, Wood brings alive the setting:

There was a man on the moon. All across America children sat cross-legged on shag rugs and watched F Troop and Gilligan’s Island, Gigantor, Bewitched.

She is skilled at capturing emotions in a few perfectly chosen words.

She knew how grief could shove you off your moorings. She was afraid that he would drift so far he would lose his way back.

Wrecker is never cliché in its setting or its emotions. As much as it is a story of being foster or adoptive parents, it is not one-sided. I felt as empathetic toward Lisa Fay as I did toward Melody. There are beautiful insights and rich emotion, caught in spare and lovely prose.

I very much enjoyed Wrecker and rate it a solid four stars out of five.

Link for my Canadian readers:
Wrecker: a Novel

In the springtime, the back portion of our 2.5 acres, usually swampy, becomes a small creek. I sighted this pair of mallard ducks out there today.

Since there’s a male and female, I’m hoping there’s a nest.

One of the perks of country living.

I gobbled up several mysteries in April, getting through thirteen books in total. I have no idea how I had time to read them all but…

1. The Spellman Files by Lisa Lutz
This is the first in a mystery series featuring 28-year old Isabelle (Izzy) Spellman whose family runs a private investigation firm. Fast paced and funny.

2. The Death Instinct by Jed Rubenfeld
A mystery set around the real-life September 1920 bomb on Wall Street that killed 38 people and injured 143. Witnessing the blast are war veteran Stratham Younger, his friend James Littlemore of the New York Police Department, and Younger’s friend, a French radiochemist named Colette Rousseau. A fine mystery, second in the Stratham Younger series, but stands alone.

3. Mark of the Lion by Suzanne Arruda
First in the mystery series featuring Jade del Cameron and set in 1920 British East Africa (Kenya). My review is here.

4. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
This classic WWI tale is told from the point of view of an eighteen-year-old German soldier. His experiences, common to men on both sides of the conflict, make clear the horror of war. I read the illustrated edition which includes many period photos.

5. February by Lisa Moore
On February 15, 1982 the oil rig The Ocean Ranger sank in Canadian waters off Newfoundland. with all hands lost. February is the fictional account of one woman whose husband died in the disaster.

6. The Obamas: The Untold Story of an African Family by Peter Firstbrook
Firstbrook traces the history of the Luo tribe in Kenya, of which Barack Obama Sr was a member. The book details the life and character of President Obama’s father and grandfather. Interesting history.

7. The Beekeeper’s Apprentice: Or On the Segregation of the Queen by Laurie R. King
First in the mystery series featuring Mary Russell, a young English woman who meets her neighbor – a retired Sherlock Holmes, and apprentices with him to become a super-sleuth. If you like Sherlock Holmes stories, you’ll love this.

8. Murder is Announced by Agatha Christie
Featuring Miss Marple and considered to be one of the best books written by this author. Great mystery and wonderful period piece.

9. The Body in the Library by Agatha Christie
An earlier Miss Marple story, slightly convoluted but still worthwhile.

10. They Do It With Mirrors (also published as Murder with Mirrors) by Agatha Christie
Another Miss Marple, with a slightly different flavor. You’ll solve it if you choose the correct paradigm – but therein lies the challenge.

11. In the Queens’ Parlor, and Other Leaves from the Editors’ Notebook by Ellery Queen
Behind the scenes observations on authors, publishing, plotting, naming and other mysteries of mysteries by Manfred Lee and Frederic Dannay who wrote scores of mystery novels as the fictional Ellery Queen. First published in 1942 and updated several times, the last in 1957. Out of print, but I was lucky enough to get a copy on inter-library loan from Halifax. Loved it. (It’s available used on Amazon.)

12. The Hunt for Sonya Dufrette by R. T. Raichev
First in the Country House Crime series set in England. I knew from the second chapter what happened to Sonya on the day of the 1981 royal wedding of Charles and Diana. Kept reading, hoping for surprises, but there were none.

13. Evans Above by Rhys Bowen
First in the mystery series featuring Constable Evan Evans of Llanfair, Wales. A very good mystery with all the necessary clues and lots of red herrings. If you like M.C. Beaton’s Hamish MacBeth, you’ll enjoy this series. I’ll be reading more of Evan Evans.

Links for my Canadian readers

Evans Above: A Mystery

P.S. If you click through the affiliate links in the book titles, you may notice a different cover. I like to see the cover that’s on the copy I read – and it’s usually different than Amazon.com because they display the American release, and I read the Canadian. Again, the links are affiliate links so I will receive a small percentage of any purchase you make after clicking through from this blog.