rachelmanija | Entries tagged with author: gilman dorothy

A book of interconnected short stories about, unsurprisingly, a clairvoyant Countess.

After falling upon hard times, the psychic Madame Karitska is now living in genteel poverty in New York City. But being psychic gives you an edge in finding a new apartment, and also telling you when to start a business. The book follows Madam Karitska’s psychic practice, where she encounters a number of people who are the victims of odd crimes. Because of this she meets a police officer, Detective Pruden. After that the book relies less on crime victims coming to her and more on Pruden, who is a skeptic who gets mostly converted, bringing crimes to her. In between she rescues a young man from shoplifting, meets interesting people while reading Tarot at parties, and so forth.

Each mystery is effectively an individual story, but there is a through line involving her relationships with the various people she meets along the way, and also some previous mysteries have later repercussions. It's a very fun book, with her psychic powers being the equivalent of Sherlock Holmes' deductive abilities. They gave her an intuitive edge, which she uses to solve the mystery, but she still has to do the leg work and figure some things out for herself.

The book falls on the line between dated and period piece, but for the most part on the positive side. You can tell that Gilman was very interested in different ways of seeing the world and reality, both personally and culturally. I'm sure that some of her depictions of other cultures are not perfectly sensitive or accurate, but she takes everyone seriously, is genuinely interested in trying to see things from other perspectives, and most importantly believes that all perspectives have equal value.

It's not as good as my favorite Dorothy Gilman books (The Tightrope Walker, A Nun in the Closet,, and the first few Mrs. Pollifax books) but I liked it as much or more as my medium favorite Mrs Pollifax books. It's got a very vivid New York City milieu, and Madame Karitska is a great character.

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Mrs. Pollifax (now remarried, I assume in one of the books I missed) discovers a young woman hiding in her closet; when she asks Carstairs for help protecting her, they are both stashed in a carnival that’s a front for spies in need of stashing. Unfortunately his last one was just stabbed there. Oops. Pro: Mrs. Pollifax is conveniently on hand to investigate. Con: So is the stabber.

Fun but not my favorite entry in the series. There is a foreshadowed but still sudden turn in which the carnival portion of the story abruptly ends and then they all go to Africa. As one does. In other series entries, all the supporting characters had full arcs; in this one, some did but others were left hanging.

I was also frustrated by the suggestion that Mrs. Pollifax pretend to be a psychic and tell fortunes, only for them to decide that would be too difficult and instead had her pretend to be a journalist and interview people. What a bait and switch! Mrs. Pollifax telling fortunes would have been hilarious. In fact I am going to add that as a prompt to my Trick or Treat letter right now.

Mrs. Pollifax Pursued

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Post-divorce and mental hospital stay, Melissa goes on a trip to Europe. On a cruise ship, a man claiming to be a secret agent gives her a package to deliver; when he drops dead, she’s left to ponder whether he really was a secret agent and whether she should deliver it.

This book sounded more fun and more like her Mrs. Pollifax series than it was. It’s not a thriller, but a psychological novel and a character study. There’s a little action but it’s 90% Melissa contemplating herself and her post-therapy insights. Gilman writes beautifully but I found Melissa uninteresting and her insights a bit navel-gazey. This is so far the only book by Gilman I didn’t really enjoy.

Uncertain Voyage by Dorothy Gilman

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A standalone novel by the author of the charming Mrs. Pollifax series, about a retired grandma who becomes a spy, which seems to be taking my f-list by storm.

When the small and impoverished Abbey of St. Tabitha gets a surprise bequest of a house, two of the cloistered nuns, the enthusiastic Sister John and the herb-wise Sister Hyacinthe, are sent to inspect it – a process which involves borrowing a delicatessen delivery van and teaching Sister Hyacinthe to drive (terrifyingly).

Upon arrival, they discover a wounded man in a closet, a suitcase full of money down the well, a kitchen empty except for fifty jars of sugar, and a local population of hippies, political agitators, migrant workers, corrupt sheriffs, and a contingent of dangerous men intent on getting back into the house they were clearly using for something.

This is an absolutely delightful book, and one with depth underneath its breezy surface. It’s set in the early 70s, but if you look past some of the language it feels more like a period snapshot than dated, and the themes are just as relevant now as they were when it was written. While the nuns’ innocence is often very funny, their philosophy and knowledge set is serious and taken seriously, as is that of the hippies. There’s hilarious hijinks, a cast of distinct and mostly very likable characters, clashes of world views and also surprising commonalities in world views, a lot of herb lore, and a tiny but real community that springs up in and around the house. And all this is contained in a quite short novel that one could easily read in one sitting, and is compelling enough that you probably will.

A Nun in the Closet

Crossposts: https://rachelmanija.livejournal.com/1325837.html

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Just a heads-up that Palm for Mrs. Pollifax (Mrs. Pollifax Series Book 4) is currently on Kindle for $2.99. It's # 4 so I haven't read it yet, but I bet it's good and I suspect you could start there if you like.

Crossposts: https://rachelmanija.livejournal.com/1322972.html

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I probably won't keep writing these up as pretty much everything that I said about # 1 is also true of # 2, though there's less of a voyage of self-discovery as you can only tell the story of "how a widow in her sixties discovered that she makes a really great spy" once. However, the strong supporting cast, travelogue, suspense, humor, and most of all, the delightful Mrs. Pollifax remains. I read this while riding a stationary bike at the gym and repeatedly unnerved my fellow workers-out with bursts of maniacal laughter.

The Amazing Mrs. Pollifax

Crossposts: https://rachelmanija.livejournal.com/1322163.html

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This oddly cozy spy thriller has some similar qualities as Gilman’s The Tightrope Walker: crisp writing, a sheltered and depressed heroine discovering that both her life and her own capacities are far greater than she imagined, and a generous view of humanity despite a fair amount of murder and mayhem.

Mrs. Pollifax, a sixty-something widow with grown children, is quietly depressed. Her life lacks meaning, and also lacks joy. Taking inspiration from an unexpected question from a doctor, she shows up at the CIA and suggests that they hire her as a spy; due to a conglomeration of coincidences and accidents, they actually do hire her, but as a one-time-only courier for a mission which requires someone who absolutely cannot be recognized, and which shouldn’t be dangerous. Needless to say…

While dated in some ways, it’s more due to language than worse things; the large of array of non-American characters generally prove to be a lot more individual and less stereotypical than one might expect. Like the Indian guru in The Tightrope Walker, they all have their own quirks and agendas, all the way down to the cameo by a family of Albanian goat-herders and their herd of goats that Mrs. Pollifax reluctantly hides within.

The sensible, not quite unflappable but certainly hard-to-flap Mrs. Pollifax is a great character, and it’s an immense pleasure to see her in a sequence of escalating dangers in which she is both a fish out of water and a fish who was always meant to be in water, and never got a chance till now.

This was delightful and I am delighted to know that there’s plenty more where it came from.

The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax (Mrs. Pollifax Series Book 1)

Crossposts: https://rachelmanija.livejournal.com/1321324.html

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The important thing is to carry the sun with you, inside of you at every moment, against the darkness. For there will be a great and terrifying darkness.

- The Maze in the Heart of the Castle. (Epigraph to The Tightrope Walker)

Maybe everyone lives with terror every minute of every day and buries it, never stopping long enough to look. Or maybe it's just me. I'm speaking here of your ordinary basic terrors like the meaning of life or what if there's no meaning at all...Sometimes I think we're all tightrope walkers suspended on a wire two thousand feet in the air, and so long as we never look down we're okay, but some of us lose momentum and look down for a second and are never quite the same again: we know.

Amelia, a sheltered young woman with a traumatic past, is jolted into life and action when she first becomes the proprietor of an antique shop, then finds a note in an old hurdy-gurdy beginning, They’re going to kill me soon.

The mystery aspect is inextricable from the rest of the book, but it’s also a novel of character development and a book about how to live and thrive in a terrifying world. Amelia has anxiety, social and otherwise, and for good reasons; her evolution from spending most of her time locked in her room alone to engaging with fear and joy, both physical and existential, is beautifully depicted.

I had never read anything by Gilman before, though I had vaguely heard of her Mrs. Pollifax series, about an old woman spy. Amelia is a great character, the themes are moving, the plot is solid, and it has a good supporting cast. Even the wise Indian guru wasn’t that bad (low bar, I know), largely due to his philosophy turning out to not be generic wise guru wisdom but something distinctly odd. The love interest also turned out to much less awful than I initially expected.

Most importantly, the writing style is absolutely fantastic, witty and distinctive and an absolute pleasure to read. It grabbed me from the first page and never let me down. I look forward to reading more of Gilman’s books.

I read this one because someone here (whoever it was, thank you very much!) recommended it for integrating an imaginary book, in this case Amelia’s beloved children’s fantasy The Maze in the Heart of the Castle, into the story. This is very well-done, with just enough detail given to show why it was so meaningful to her and also to make it seem worth reading if you like that sort of thing, and also neatly integrated into the plot and themes. It turns out that after publishing this book, Gilman wrote and published The Maze in the Heart of the Castle! I’m not sure if I want to read it, or just keep on imagining it.

The Tightrope Walker Only $4.99 on Kindle.