Book Review: The Curator

  By Owen King

• Pub Date: 2023 

• Where I bought this book: The Novel Neighbor, Webster Groves, Mo. 

• Why I bought this book: I liked King's work in Sleeping Beauties

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    King has written the rare novel -- one that is multi-layered, complicated, yet eminently comprehensive and readable.

    It has a weird setting in distant time and place but one that's vaguely familiar -- reminiscent of Victorian England, with a few Dickensian characters thrown in for good measure.

    They live in a city on a sea that sounds much like many places in our world.* The land has its succession of kings and wars, its poverty and wealth, and its exploitation of both. There's revolution in the air amidst the magic. And there's those odd cats.

    But while the when and where is left unnamed, we know it's not in our area of the universe. The first sign is the description of a solar system with a sun and 11 planets. The second is the double moon.

Callisto sometimes expressed concern
about the presentation of cats in the book

    The novel is long, and takes a while to get going. But once it does, it's a fast moving page turner. We learn there's been some type of uprising of the poor against the rich; the government has been overthrown but is hanging on up north; a temporary group has taken power and is trying to keep things running, but people's daily lives have changed little.

       The story focuses on several people caught up in the aftermath, who are trying to keep up as strange, fantastical things happen around them. They are unclear about what is happening, and so are we. It's either magical, led by a secretive unknown group, or simply the will of the omniscient cats.

"And when we die, if we've been decent, and if we've been good to the little ones here" -- the man gestured at the cats languidly picking their way over the rocky ground -- "there's a Big One, the Grand Mother. She comes long an picks us up by our scruff, like we were her own young ones. ... She takes us to where it's soft an warm an the milk runs forever an She protects us."

    Near the tail-end of the book, King pens an explanation, such as it is, for much of what has happened. It's not all encompassing, but it helps. It explains who the characters are and what they represent. It also explains the power and authority of the cats.

    Well, for the most part. But they are still cats, and still inscrutable.

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    *King gives a wonderfully detailed description of the city, and the book has some fine illustrations by Kathleen Jennings, but alas, no map. I've said this before and I'll say it again here -- every book could be made better with a map.

Book Review: The Woman Who Died A Lot

The Woman Who Died a Lot, by Jasper Fforde

This is Jasper Fforde at his best and his worst.

The writing is witty and wonderful. The story arcs are wild and unpredictable. The characters are well-drawn and seem exceedingly normal is an unnatural world.



The plot, is, well, bizarrely Ffordeian

This is book seven in the Thursday Next/Bookworld series. I've read them all, but my mistake was finding book number six, One of  Our Thursdays is Missing, and reading it first. That was a long time ago, and over the years, have read them in order. So I had a background before cracking this one open.

In some ways, it's a little too much Fforde. The plot is all over the place. So much is going on that trying to determine what is happening at any given moment is a special challenge. It's just better to let it all ride. Let me try to sort it out.

Thursday Next is home recuperating, in a forced retirement, after an assassination attempt at the end of the last book. But Thursday doesn't taken lying down lying down. God, now known as the one and only Global Diety, has come out of hiding and has been smiting towns (because he can). Thursday's hometown of Swindon is next on his list, so her daughter, Tuesday, a young scientific genius, is preparing an anti-smiting shield that may or may not work. (It depends on something called the Unentanglement Constant.) Thursday's son, Friday, has lost out on his future job as head of the force that polices time-travel because travelers to the future discover that time travel is impossible. Friday also knows he is destined to murder someone within a week and thus will spend most of his future in prison.

Meanwhile, lots of synthetic Thursdays keep showing up and replacing her. Also meanwhile, representatives of Goliath -- the company that either runs everything in this world or wants to -- keeps stealing obscure 13th century manuscripts. Thursday, in her prestigious (really) new job as chief librarian of Swindon's All-You-Can-Eat at Fatso's Drink Not Included Library, meets one of the thieves, Jack Schitt -- her nemesis throughout this seven-book series -- in her office. It leads to this conversation:

"'We don't often see any Goliath high-fliers in Swindon,' I added. 'What position are you on the ladder these days?'

'Ninety-one. The corporation rewards loyalty.'

'So? Starbucks rewards loyalty -- and they're not out to take over the world. Okay, that was a bad example. Tesco's rewards loyalty, and they're not out to ... Okay, that's a bad example, too. But you know what I mean.'"

Such is an example of the Welsh author's off-beat sense of humor. Here's another: Angry God's smiting of Swindon will center on the town cathedral. The City Council wonders how it will be replaced: "'The price of cathedrals is simply shocking these days, and insurance is impossible, as you know.' 'The "Act of God" clause?' 'Right'"

The town also takes its libraries seriously. Libraries have their own police forces, and the uniform includes combat fatigues, "replete with the distinctive camouflage pattern of book spines for blending into library spaces." Its chief in Swindon begged Thursday to sanction pre-dawn raids to collect on overdue books.

Like I said, sometimes a bit overdone. But don't worry. Fforde wraps things up nicely, although I am not sure if the series is ending -- this book was published in 2012, and Fforde has gone on to other books.

But you never know.

Review: Going into Town: A Love Letter to New York

Going into Town: A Lover Letter to New York, by Roz Chast

I was browsing  through my local bookstore today when I picked up this illustrated book.

So I looked inside, and saw it was more a love letter to Manhattan. As a native of upper Manhattan, born and reared, I was OK with this, but wanted to see how much attention my neck of the woods received. When I say upper Manhattan, I mean upper Manhattan -- I grew up on 207th Street -- and that part of the borough is ignored so much it often is cut off on maps of the city.

I started perusing the book, chuckling over a number of drawings and observations. Then I got to this comment about the city's crowded streets, "The main drawback is getting stuck in a herd of out-of-towners, who, for some reason, always seem reluctant to cross against the light." I looked at the next page and saw this.

See that frustrated person shouting? That's me. Seriously. I am that guy. I may be older, with less hair, but otherwise, that's me.

So I bought the book.

Totally worth it.








This book is funny, mostly true, and a nice homage to the city and its people and places. The drawings are wonderful, often with little inside jokes or asides. If you're an out-of-towner, you might even learn something about the city and its people. If you're a native, you'll get a new appreciation for the greatest city in the world.

Even if my part of town was, once again, ignored.