Fran: M is for Massey

Misty Massey has a pirate book, Mad Kestrel, which I read for my "M" book.

It took some time to get into the book.  It started a bit slow, a standard pirate book, full of "color" on ship board.  I liked having a female protagonist in the aggressively male world of pirates.  Things picked up quickly with the appearance of the mysterious stranger (who is clearly not all he seems), the arrest of Capt. Binns and the race for Kestrel to escape the soldiers, an attempted kidnapping, a boat-napping, swords, mutiny, strange packages, etc.

My main complaint is that the world has magic but that the way that the magic is written is overly-downplayed and somewhat tangential to the book.  We're told (on the back cover so it isn't a surprise) that the fearsome group of magic users, the Danisobans, rip children from their parents and raise them as magic users for the king.  Kestrel's parents die getting her away from them and now she hates and fears/denies the magic that is part of her very being.  But we never meet a Danisoban.  And magic use seems quite distant except for Kestrel's extraordinary powers and a few magic items used by the mysterious stranger.  Magic felt tacked on to the main plot line.

But...Good female character, strong and passionate and clever; interesting main characters, a very visual chase as the main activity of the book.  Swashbuckling and fine as a light read.

Fran: G is not really for Gholson but Gregson

Again, browsing the library shelves, I pick up a bunch of likely Gs.  The first was Christien Gholson, A Fish Trapped Inside the Wind, which had an entrancing title and a good blurb:

This is the story of A Fish Trapped inside the Wind.
It all begins in a small town in Belgium near the French border on the morning of the festival of St. Woelfred. There are dead fish scattered everywhere seemingly blown in by the wind. The empty quarries of Villon are soon to be used as toxic waste dumps. Are the fish a sign from the saint or a trick played by Contexture, the dance group who once got naked at the Vatican?
The lives of six people who live in the town are about to be changed forever.
A story with magic and fish… and the lost poems of Rimbaud.

I expected to like it more than my other G book.  It turned out to be a little character study, with a lot of fish rotting about town and little resolution, and precious little Rimbaud (as far as I could figure).  Rimbaud once lived in Villon and the lost poems are in their physical pages objects of interest, but there's no quotations from Rimbaud, no interest in the words (unless the references are so oblique that the general populous doesn't get them).  St. Woelfred is also tangential.  Gholson writes well but I found myself reaching the end of the book and wondering "interesting people but so what?".  I don't think that's the reaction you want to have at the end.

So I picked up my other G: Julia Gregson, Band of Angels.  At least I recognized this as a reference to early nursing under Florence Nightengale.  Florence is a tangential character as we follow a Welsh landed-gentry girl who runs away to become a nurse in London and then finds herself in the Crimea with the British wounded.  There's a romance (without explicit scenes, not the interest of the author) that runs through it--her friend from home similarly circuitously ends up in the Crimea with horses he's trained.  On the whole, it was a fairly compelling historicized romance and I enjoyed it a good deal more than the fish.

Fran: Z is for Zabytko

Irene Zabytko's novel, The Sky Unwashed, is set in the Ukraine at the time of the Chernobyl disaster.  Marusia is an old widow who lives with her son and daughter-in-law and their two children; Yurko, her son, and Zosia, his wife, both work at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, like so many of the villagers.  Zabytko's novel looks at the disaster not from the immediate site but from the periphery leading edge--Marusia sees the family's and village's evacuation from the area in the chaos of Soviet bureaucracy, the radiation poisoning and subsidiary problems in her son that cause his death, the loss of her focus.  And her return to her village, and the return of other old women, is interesting.

Though I picked this just to get a Z author, I enjoyed it quite a bit.  I'm fascinated by the healing of the area.  I would heartily recommend the presentation of Swarthmore alum Mike Rothbart who photographed the area.