BOTW: catching up on August

This Books of the Week post should more appropriately be Books of the Month.  I will get back to more frequent book reviews in September.  

It's been a long time since the last Merry Folger mystery and this new entry in the series is most welcome.   The setting is current: November, 2021, when Nantucket brings back its traditional Winter Stroll to usher in the holidays -- with Covid masks on. Merry, now police chief (after her father) deals with two murders. One is a woman photographer living in a ramshackle cottage owned by her long-ex-husband. The woman recently reconnected with her now mid-20's son (whom the ex raised). The other is a lecherous old Hollywood talent agent traveling in the entourage of a film crew that includes an over-the-hill leading man, an unconfident female star, and the talent agent's wife (who is the director). Are the murders connected? Merry and her officers are determined to find out!

This was the perfect book to keep me occupied during a trip that involved long airline flights. I understand why everyone has praised it. It's a truly wonderful story!

In the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution Count Alexander Ilych Rostov is sentenced to lifetime house arrest and confined to quarters at the Metropol Hotel in the center of Moscow. He was brought up to be the consummate gentleman, elegant, sophisticated, but always understated. He made the best of a terrible situation from his quarters in the hotel attic (where servants once lived) to actually getting a job as the headwaiter in the hotel dining room (using his impeccable ability to know who to sit in proximity to whom, and his knowledge of fine cuisine). He befriended a young girl (daughter of a Bolshevik party leader) and years later he became guardian to her own daughter. The decades roll on, the Soviet Union becomes a world power, and the Count sees it all from the Metropol.

I was put off this book because it had a science fiction sticker. SciFi is not a genre I particularly enjoy.  It's the September selection for our AAUW book group so I had to check it out. Once I got into it I kept going!

"Stranger, whoever you are, open this to learn what will amaze you." This sentence from an ancient comical (parody?) is one of the threads that links the five storylines in this adventurous novel.

It took a while for me to get into the rhythm of the shifting points of view from the Diogenes story to Constantinopole/Greece in the fifteenth century, the two Idaho storylines (the old man Zeno and the boy Seymour) from 1950 to 2020, and on into the future with Konstance hurtling through space to a new planet.

Words and stories have power that transcend centuries and connect generations.

Not one but two unreliable narrators -- the fictional Freddie who herself was a creation of the fictional Hannah. It was hard to figure out what was happening to whom. No one was particularly likeable.