The Puzzled Heart - Amanda Cross
My tastes in mysteries run from cozies to procedurals, historicals to contemporaries. If there's any constant running through them, it's that I have a preference for reading about kick-ass women as protagonist-detectives, so Judge Deborah Knott, Amelia Peabody, Sigrid Harald, and Kate Fansler (to name a few) have regular visits in my head. Having recently run through yet another Sayers run, focusing on the Vane Quartet, I turned to Amanda Cross.
Still love The Players Come Again, which appeals to my geeky English-major side in a big way. Still enjoy Poetic Justice (the first Kate Fansler story I ever read, decades ago) and The Theban Mysteries, though these days part of my enjoyment comes from looking at the Vietnam Era through the eyes of an adult instead of the very young child I was at the time the books were originally published. I plan on re-reading An Imperfect Spy before much longer.
But I'm not crazy about The Puzzled Heart. I've yet to find it a truly satisfying and satisfactory read, and ... gah. For one thing, Kate spends much of the book's time being less than her usual perceptive self. Granted, as the jacket copy will tell you, the event that kicks off the novel's plot is a perfectly satisfactory explanation, and I don't know that I'd do any better myself in her situation, and Kate's deficiency is even a major plot point, with several characters telling her so. And they're all right.
I just don't find it very fun to read.
Like Poetic Justice and The Theban Mysteries, I can read it with an appreciation for the (not so distant) era it evokes, and given Amanda Cross' real-life experiences with the backlash to feminism (as her real-name self, Carolyn Heilbrun, Columbia University professor), I have no reason to doubt the authenticity of the attitudes she portrays in the novel. Readers of this blog already know how I feel about feminism as a theme in a novel (short version: I think it's a groovy thing to do, as long as the writer isn't being a doofus about it; a pro-feminist novel is not automatically a winner with me, but a well-done pro-feminist novel is always welcome), so ... why don't I like this book?
I'm still kind of fumbling with the precise reasons why. Maybe some day I'll figure it out beyond "I just don't find it very fun to read."
Still love The Players Come Again, which appeals to my geeky English-major side in a big way. Still enjoy Poetic Justice (the first Kate Fansler story I ever read, decades ago) and The Theban Mysteries, though these days part of my enjoyment comes from looking at the Vietnam Era through the eyes of an adult instead of the very young child I was at the time the books were originally published. I plan on re-reading An Imperfect Spy before much longer.
But I'm not crazy about The Puzzled Heart. I've yet to find it a truly satisfying and satisfactory read, and ... gah. For one thing, Kate spends much of the book's time being less than her usual perceptive self. Granted, as the jacket copy will tell you, the event that kicks off the novel's plot is a perfectly satisfactory explanation, and I don't know that I'd do any better myself in her situation, and Kate's deficiency is even a major plot point, with several characters telling her so. And they're all right.
I just don't find it very fun to read.
Like Poetic Justice and The Theban Mysteries, I can read it with an appreciation for the (not so distant) era it evokes, and given Amanda Cross' real-life experiences with the backlash to feminism (as her real-name self, Carolyn Heilbrun, Columbia University professor), I have no reason to doubt the authenticity of the attitudes she portrays in the novel. Readers of this blog already know how I feel about feminism as a theme in a novel (short version: I think it's a groovy thing to do, as long as the writer isn't being a doofus about it; a pro-feminist novel is not automatically a winner with me, but a well-done pro-feminist novel is always welcome), so ... why don't I like this book?
I'm still kind of fumbling with the precise reasons why. Maybe some day I'll figure it out beyond "I just don't find it very fun to read."