Elegy for Eddie: a Maisie Dobbs novel

London detective Maisie Dobbs is hired by costermongers to investigate the accidental death of Eddie, the son of a friend. Maisie, whose father was a coster and who knows most of these working class men, takes the case which leads her to some unexpected places.

Jacqueline Winspear's  Maisie Dobbs series has progressed in time from post-WWI to the 1930's when the possibility of another war seems to be threatening. The tone of this series was initially melancholy because of the legacy of WWI felt by the title character and everyone around her in London. Maisie Dobbs managed, with help, to rise above her humble past, to get an education and to start her own detective agency after the war. She has a strong sense that she needs to 'pay back' for her good fortune and has barely had time to enjoy her successes before realizing that a war that has not even started has already claimed Eddie, the man whose death she is hired to investigate.

If you haven't read this series before, start with the first one, 'Maisie Dobbs' which introduces the character and her background.

Similar in tone are Louise Penny's Chief Inspector Ganache series which also are novel-like in the complexity of the plot and development of characters. Ganache, like Maisie, has a great sense of moral obligation to help people, rather than just to solve puzzles that intrigue them.

Olympic Overload

If you're an insatiable Olympics fan, you'll want to take a look at BHPL's collection of Olympics books and DVDs:

Gymnast Shawn Johnson's memoir Winning Balance, along with Gold, Chris Cleave's novel about two women cyclists preparing for the London Olympics, are new and getting a lot of publicity.  Bounce is former Olympian Matthew Syed's book about the science of success. In one of my favorite nonfiction genres, the obscure yet nearly impossible quest, we have Off the Deep End, Hodding Carter's attempt to qualify for the Olympics in middle age.  Nazi Games and Triumph are both about the 1936 Berlin Olympics, with Triumph specifically about Jesse Owens and the four gold medals he won in that Nazi-hosted Olympics.  David Maraniss, whose most recent book is a biography of President Obama, wrote about the "eighteen days of theater, suspense, victory, and defeat" that was Rome 1960: the Olympics That Changed the World. If the hours-long Opening and Closing ceremonies in London aren't enough for you, we also have the Beijing opening ceremonies on DVD, plus Discover the Summer Olympics with Cecile and Pepo, a children's introduction to the sports of the summer Olympics.

Figures in Silk by Vanora Bennett

This Friday at 10:30 a.m the library book group will discuss Vanora Bennett's Figures in Silk, a novel whose heroine is a merchant's daughter in late 15th century London, an apprentice silkwoman named Isabel.  Isabel's sister Jane is one of King Edward's mistresses, which helps Isabel immeasurably with business; but she is secretly a mistress herself, to Edward's brother Richard. Anyone who has read or seen Shakespeare's Richard III knows that black clouds are gathering on the horizon at this point. Fans of Philippa Gregory should enjoy Figures in Silk as well.

The author has written some articles about the historical background of the book for her web site, including one about the silk trade.

Discussion questions are available here.

Reference Roundup

Some of this week's questions/requests:

Do you have a map of Antioch? The patron just finished reading a historical novel and was delighted to find many of the places mentioned in the book in one of our atlases. 

Please read me Joyce Kilmer's poem Trees. (Maybe I have the sensibilities of a third grader, but this is an awkward poem to read aloud to a stranger over the phone.)

Why are the library ebooks I downloaded via wifi showing up in Archived Items on my Kindle, where I can't read them? This is a good question, as our ebook provider says it's a Kindle problem and Amazon said in an email that the patron should use a USB cable to download the books. Finally, we called Amazon and they told us to hold the power button down for a minute. Once the Kindle rebooted, downloading via wifi started working again.

What is the size of the market for pressure vessels? See Composites World's article.

Sorry, what I really meant to ask was the number of carbon fiber reinforced pressure vessels for gas transportation.  This one's going to take a while ....

What I Was by Meg Rosoff

What I Was is Meg Rosoff's first adult novel, but like her novels for teens, it is a coming of age story. A 16 year-old boy, nameless to the reader, is sent to St. Oswald's in 1962 after getting kicked out of another boarding school.  St. Oswald's is on the coast of East Anglia - a setting shared with Elly Griffiths' mysteries - with its salt marshes, Roman fort and a medieval lost town.  To escape from the brutishness of his school, he visits his idol, Finn, another teenaged boy who lives alone in a cottage that is cut off from the mainland at high tide.  Of course it turns out that living off the grid when you are only a teenager is not quite a safe thing to do, and tragedy strikes.  At just over 200 pages, this small book is a quick and enjoyable read, although not a favorite of mine like Meg Rosoff's Printz-winning novel How I Live Now.