Third Sentence Thursday: ASHES TO DUST

From the Proud Brook Nerd,  here are the rules: "take the book you are currently reading and post the third sentence of the third chapter. Feel free to share one or two of the following sentences, if you’d like." I'm reading Yrsa Sigurdardottir's ASHES TO DUST.

The third of the third (and the two previous): 

Some days in Thóra’s life were slightly worse than others; on a bad day, for example, she would need to stop on her way to work to go back and turn off the coffeemaker, or she’d get a call from the school asking her to fetch her daughter Sóley, who had got a bloody nose at break time. Other days were even worse: bills were overdue and the cash machine was broken, petrol got pumped into the family car which ran on diesel, and so on. On those days nothing went as it should, neither at home nor at the office. 

This is the 4th novel in Sigurdardottir's thriller series featuring Thóra Gudmundsdóttir.Thóra is an Icelandic lawyer who gets involved in various frightening scenarios while defending unlikely clients. One of the best things about Thóra is that she feel average, compared to many protagonists of mystery series: she doesn't have the sociopathic tendencies of Laura Lippman's Tess Monaghan, or the hapless, sloppy self-loathing of Elizabeth George's Barbara Havers. 

When Thóra demonstrates bravery in the face of the unknown and often supernatural, it's very easy for the reader to identify with her, because she doesn't have some kind of virtual superpower that facilitates the resolution of the problem posed in the novel. Her creator explores the ways in which she has to balance her family and her career in a way that feels very different from the ways in which most American mystery series handle the competing desires of female protagonists. I suspect cultural context has a lot to do with the ease with which Thóra's desires are legitimized.

The best example of how Thóra's life is utterly different than I'd imagine an American fictional counterpart's to be is how the teen pregnancy of Thóra's son's girlfriend is handled. Thóra and her ex-husband accept and support the teens' choice to keep the baby. But it isn't because of religious belief or societal expectations. The teens make the decision themselves, and then each family switches off weeks housing the mother and child. There's no moral condemnation, no authorial punishment inserted into the situation. The pregnancy treated in a matter of fact manner that is the polar opposite of the angst ridden scenarios conjured up in semi-fictions like "Teen Mom."

 I'm only about five chapters into Ashes to Dust, so I don't feel ready to weigh in on how it compares to the other books in the series. But the mystery centers around the discovery of bodies in a house being excavated after the devastation of the 1973 explosion of the Eldfell volcano on one of Iceland's Westman Islands. The video above is footage of the explosion and evacuation. How can a murder mystery set in a modern day Pompeii not be good?!

Third Sentence Thursday: CLOCKWORK ANGEL

It's Thursday again, somehow, and time to play along with Proud Brook Nerd. Here are the rules: "take the book you are currently reading and post the third sentence of the third chapter. Feel free to share one or two of the following sentences, if you’d like."

 I'm rereading Cassandra Clare's CLOCKWORK ANGEL because I want to read CLOCKWORK PRINCE and realized that I'd forgotten much of the plot of the first book. I experience this problem more than I'd like to admit, especially with books that have fast paced plots. 

Since I read them so fast, I think I retain less. I should coin this Harry Potter Reading Recall Syndrome, since, similarly, I read every one of Rowling's tomes and can barely remember a sliver of the actual plots. Yes, I could just read slower. But it's sort of like eating a bag of potato chips all in one sitting. Sometimes it's hard to stop experiencing something you enjoy!

The third of the third:

"As Tessa watched, their features changed, their eyes sinking into their heads, their hair falling out, and stitches appearing across their lips, sewing them shut."

Intense. Examining this line reminds me that there are a lot of moments that I think are meant to be gruesome and horrific in CLOCKWORK ANGEL, but they don't truly have that  impact on me. I may be jaded  due to my recent immersion in the genre, but the automatons and various cruel supernatural creatures in CLOCKWORK ANGEL don't horrify me. I prefer it that way, actually. Clare's Mortal Instruments and Infernal Devices series appeal to me because they're cozy. It feels like there's always a cushion behind the bad things that happen in Clare's novels. 

I realize this sounds like an insult, something along the lines of saying the books don't have high stakes or emotional impact. But I read Clare's books because I enjoy them so much. Crazy amounts of enjoyment! Sometimes I want to read a book that I'll think about for weeks, in which the reading experience will involve lots of uncomfortable moments. Other times, I want a book that just feels good. In the best possible sense, Clare's work reminds me of Charlaine Harris's. Theirs are the books you can retreat into when you need a story that won't play too rough with you.

Third Sentence Thursday: THE HYPNOTIST

 Time to play Third Sentence Thursday, a blog game hosted by Proud Brook Nerd.  Here are the rules: "take the book you are currently reading and post the third sentence of the third chapter. Feel free to share one or two of the following sentences, if you’d like."

I'm reading THE HYPNOTIST, by Lars Kepler.

The third of the third:

Erik says the boy’s name, and something passes painfully across the face.

I think it's fair to say that's not a great sentence. I'm only half way through the book, and I haven't pin able to pin this one down. It's the type of novel I was looking for--a creepy thriller that features an evil child. 

However, it's intensely gruesome in a gratuitous way, and unless something changes quickly, the plot is extremely predictable. It is excessively long--some might even say self-indulgently so--and there may be a shocking twist in the next 250 pages.

 But I'm not sure I'll be able to keep reading till the end, as the stilted prose (which may be a problem with the translation) and the predictability are making me rapidly lose interest. I'll update if this novel ends up on the "did not finish" list.

The one thing this novel has going for it is the cover above on the left. It's a perfect blend of elements that intrinsically make the reader fearful--the figure in the shadows,the stairs, the red carpet. It's subtle, unlike the alternate cover above on the right. Unfortunately, I think that the cover on the right is more representative of the novel.

Third Sentence Thursday: GODDESS INTERRUPTED

Time to play Third Sentence Thursday, a blog game (somehow I prefer this description to "meme") hosted by Proud Brook Nerd.  Here are the rules: "take the book you are currently reading and post the third sentence of the third chapter. Feel free to share one or two of the following sentences, if you’d like."

 

I'm reading Goddess Interrupted (courtesy of NetGalley). It is amazing! But I'm not going to say any more about it, because I'm going to be writing a review of it in a few days. I will share that I keep mentally putting a comma between "goddess" and "interrupted." My stubborn brain wants to draw a parallel between this title and "Girl, Interrupted." 

Rest assured that the only parallel between the two books is the title in which a word beginning with the letter "g" precedes the word interrupted. Kate does not get committed to a psychiatric hospital. On to the sentence!

The third of the third:

 "But one of the major perks of being immortal was not worrying about pesky things like blood and death."

This sentence isn't terribly illuminating in terms of plot if you've read The Goddess Test. It does, however, have a word that I like more than most: "pesky." If there was a spectrum of word love, based mostly on sound, with "panties" being a 0 and words like "ampersand" and "aquamarine" being a 10, "pesky" gets a solid 8.

Third Sentence Thursday: DON'T LOOK BACK

Time to play Third Sentence Thursday, a blog game (somehow I prefer this description to "meme") hosted by Proud Brook Nerd.  Here are the rules: "take the book you are currently reading and post the third sentence of the third chapter. Feel free to share one or two of the following sentences, if you’d like."

I'm reading another Nordic Noir (I love this moniker for Scandinavian thrillers/mysteries). Today it's DON'T LOOK BACK by Karin Fossum.

The third of the third:

He had four pieces of flat-bread stacked on top of each other with butter and sugar in between; his record was six.
 
The "he" in this sentence references to Raymond Lake (there's a mark over the "a" that I've never seen before, but I'm digressing). Raymond has Down's syndrome, and the book opens with him sort of kidnapping a little girl. Being kidnapped seems like one of those states that are akin to being pregnant: you either are or you aren't. Fossum employs ambiguity so well that it's acceptably unclear to the reader whether Lake is sinister, child-like, or possibly both.   

This third sentence is drastically different from last week's unsuccessful attempt. The writer manages to tell me that Raymond eats like this all the time, which says something about how he lives, that he likes sweet starches, and that he compares the levels of his sandwich to all the previous sandwiches he's eaten, like they're towers that are difficult to build. I'm envious of Fossum for this sentence, because it packs so much in. It's definitely the sort of sentence I want to emulate in my own work.

I'm about halfway through the novel, and it appears that the in-between kidnapping by Lake of a young girl is just a device to lead into the discovery of the body of a teenager. I'm really hoping that by the end, the beginning will be tied in more strongly to the main plot. Otherwise, the book will have been like an episode of "Law and Order": a series of thrilling events that are meant to lead you from one scene to the next, but that don't follow any of the events through to their logical conclusions. 

As a viewer, I feel like either the writers think I won't notice that there are gaping plot holes, or they don't care. Either way, I feel vaguely insulted. I'm really enjoying DON'T LOOK BACK, and I'm rooting for Fossum to not insult me in the end.  If you like mysteries, particularly Nordic ones, I'd recommend DON'T LOOK BACK. If the end is disappointing, I'll come back to update!

UPDATE: I've finished DON'T LOOK BACK. The ending is so ambiguous that I'm not certain who the killer is! It's got a good twist that pulls all the plot threads together, but I just can't understand why the author left the reader to figure out "who dunnit." Maybe it's a problem in the translation, but whatever the reason, you are now forewarned that the end of this book will leave you confused and contemplative.

Third Sentence Thursday: ANNA DRESSED IN BLOOD

I love games, especially ones with rules that I can retain (card games are the bane of my memory-impaired existence). Today's game is Third Sentence Thursday, and the rules are simple: "Take the book you are currently reading and post the third sentence of the third chapter. Feel free to share one or two of the following sentences, if you’d like."

I'm reading Anna Dressed in Blood, by Kendare Blake. I just started it last night, and tore through a good 3/4 of the novel. I've been wanting to read more paranormal YA horror/thrillers, and this book definitely fulfills my requirements.I like how there's plenty of gore, but it's not gratuitous. I also love that the "monster" in the book is complex, though the revelation of how Anna became both ghost and monster wasn't quite as complex as I would have liked.

The third of the third:

"Recently, since we really started moving around, she’s developed this hobby of intensely researching each new place we live."

It's interesting how isolating a sentence can highlight a weakness in a novel that you might gloss over when you're reading chapters at a time. In the case of the above sentence, the narrator, who is a nomadic ghost-hunting teenage boy, is talking about how his mother deals with their frequent moves. But reading over this sentence, I wonder why she's researching the places. It doesn't have anything to do with the reasons for their moves. They're going where the ghosts are, so does his mom want to know a lot about each new town?

I went back and the next two sentences sort of answer the question: "She says it makes it feel more like a vacation, to know places where she wants to eat and things that she wants to do when we get there. I think it makes her feel like it’s more of a home." Well, which is it? Vacation or home? What I'm getting at is that I feel like focusing on these few sentences highlights a problem in the novel which I hadn't noticed before. The mother's characterization is a little fuzzy, if you examine it closely. But, if you're reading fast, absorbed by the plot, you don't really notice this weakness in the novel. I'm curious to see if in playing this game in the future, I'll notice weaknesses I overlooked in most of the books I'm reading, or if some will appear stronger. 

In any case, I'm really loving the book, and look forward to finishing it tonight. For more third sentence posts, head on over to Proud Book Nerd.