I Love the '90s... Maybe.

Last catch-up review - this time it's Nora Kelly's My Sister's Keeper. I needed something relatively short after my honeymoon reading, and this one fit the bill quite nicely.

Gillian Adams, head of the history department at the University of the Pacific Northwest in Canada, is once again separated from her Scotland Yard investigator boyfriend Edward as she starts her fifth term as head. As she falls into her usual patterns, an old UPNW tradition rises again: the annual engineers' Triumph Day parade, complete with prostitutes hired to ride as female slaves in a cart. This time, however, it's different. Feminist sentiment has been brewing on campus and the newly-formed Feminist Union (derisively known as the Eff Yous) stages a protest of the parade, and the clash between feminists and engineers turns aggressive. Almost immediately a tape of the incident is released to the local media, and the war of sexual politics is on.

Gillian is reluctant to get involved in spite of her support for the feminist cause, but when Feminist Union leader Rita asks for her help in winning an endowment for a new women's studies department using money that would traditionally be bestowed on the engineers, Gillian can't stay on the sidelines. However, it quickly becomes clear that someone is dead-set against allowing that to happen. What starts as pranks like smashed pumpkins and mooning quickly escalates to murder, and against her better judgment Gillian draws on all her resources to find out who's responsible.

My Sister's Keeper was originally published in the early 1990's, and the theme and force of the story reflects that. The fight for women's equality in academia seems almost quaint now, and the idea of such blatant sexism appears unreal. Not to say that it doesn't still happen, it's just a lot more subtle these days. The book makes for an interesting 'time capsule' sort of a read, and it's edifying just for that. It also happens to be well-plotted and smartly written, always useful pluses. Nora Kelly's created a winning character in Gillian Adams - she's likeable without seeming artificial, and the frank treatment of her flaws helps make her imminently believeable. Overall, well-done and a quick treat for fans of British mystery.

The jet-setter's reading list

I'm finally getting around to catching up on the blog after a fantastic two-week honeymoon in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. My other blog covers all the relevant details of the journey, so no need to bore you here with that stuff.

We travelled around by train a fair amount while we were over there, so I was able to get quite a lot of reading done. I'd specially selected three BFBs (big fat books) for the trip. The books had to meet stringent standards: more than 700 pages long, dense enough prose so that I don't speed through it too fast, books I'd feel OK abandoning on a train or in a hotel once they were done, and mass-market paperbacks only, please. We backpacked through the trip with smallish (think slightly bigger than a typical school backpack) bags, so I had no interest in lugging heavy, space-hogging hardbacks all over Bavaria and Tirol. The books that made the cut were: Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth, James Michener's The Source, and Caleb Carr's The Angel of Darkness. Since I'm so far behind, I'm doing the Reader's Digest Condensed Version of my normal reviews.

I started the trip with The Pillars of the Earth, after my maid of honor gave me her fierce endorsement. It's a fictionalized account of the building of one of the first "soaring cathedrals" in England. It follows the lives of the various people involved in the project, including the local prior, the mason, the major landholder, and a forest-dwelling family of unknown origin. It turned out to be a great read for the first part of our trip, as we were visiting a number of castles and other historic sites. I'd never really thought about how these types of buildings were constructed without all the modern tools and equipment we have today, and the book was entertaining from that perspective. It's also quite action-packed which keeps the plot humming swiftly. My one gripe with the writing is a common flaw among male authors - not knowing how to write the woman in a romantic scene. I actually groaned a couple of times reading his descriptions. Some male authors get it right, but by and large, it seems to take one to know one.

After polishing off the last chapters in the medieval walled city of Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Germany, I started in on Michener's historical epic The Source. The book traces the development of Judaic civilization from the beginnings of monotheistic worship through to the Arab-Israeli war in 1948, using an archaelogical dig in the 1960's as a framework. Like all of Michener's work, it's a very dense and very long book that attempts to encompass more than you'd think was possible. As a result it's slow in places and the sheer breadth of the book of can becoming overwhelming. Overall it's an interesting book, but it really helps if you have some background in Judaic civ., which, because I am a huge dork, I do. Not bad, but not great either.

After abandoning The Source on the Salzburg-Munich inter-city train, I started in Caleb Carr's The Angel of Darkness. It's a historical mystery involving the abduction of the Spanish ambassador's infant daughter just as tensions between the Americans and the Spanish are heating up as they move towards the rather uncreatively named Spanish-American war. The crack team of investigators on the case includes a child psychologist (or alienist, as they called them then), a reformed child thief, a pair of brother cops, a strong-but-silent black butler, and a staunchly feminist reformer turned private investigator. The team quickly learns that the abduction may be part of a far more sinister plot and the young girl's life is likely in jeopardy. With few leads, they use their broad range of skills to capture the perpetrator. The book reads as though it's the novelization of CSI: The Victorian Era - lots of forensics, a breakneck plot, and multiple threads coming together at the last possible second. It entertains, sure, but it's not the highbrow fare that the artfully designed cover would have you believe. Perfect for a long plane ride home though - it really doesn't matter if you fall asleep in the middle.