The Sum of It:
I'll be honest, it was pretty jarring to spend the first month of 2017 not completely immersed in Agatha Christie. Don't worry - I'm still keeping my Agatha obsession alive by working my way through the Agatha books Emily read without me last year (Seven Dials on Audible is my current favorite!) For the purposes of this post, the first novel I tackled in January was Emma Cline's mesmerizing The Girls, followed quickly by Erica Ferencik's thrilling The River at Night.
After a year of (for the most part) strictly mystery reading, I was interested to start 2017 out without the need to be on the lookout for a killer. The Girls centers around a character named Evie in the present-day, middle-age and 1960s. As a teen, Evie is bright, yet bored. It's summertime and her parents have divorced, she's fallen out with her best friend, and she's desperate for a distraction from her woes. The distraction comes in the form of Suzanne, a total free spirit whose dubious role-model/friend skillz get on super thin ice when she takes Evie to meet all her pals at a not-so-subtle cult meet-up. You can tell even teenage Evie knows this probably won't turn out well, and present-day Evie confirms these suspicions by relating cryptic fragments of her memories of that summer, which include, among other things, memories of #MURDER. While in the end there wasn't really much mystery to the murderS (yes, several #yikes), Cline's enchanting writing held me captive until the very last page...and made me a bit wary of making new friends in the park.
The River at Night is also about female friendship. Protagonist Wini and her group of three other besties are gearing up for their annual girls trip. Instead of a ski vacay or even Disney World, the group is going to go white water rafting in middle-of-nowhere Maine. PAUSE: THIS IS LITERALLY MY NIGHTMARE VACATION SO I WAS IMMEDIATELY TERRIFIED WHEN I READ THIS PART! (#shivers) Wini is a bit apprehensive about this particular excursion, but seeing the vacation as a way to reconnect with her friends, and have a break from her heartbreaking personal life, she acquiesces. While decidedly eerie, the beginning of this story gives the four women an opportunity to air some grievances and share some personal hardships. Even when it's discovered that the "leader" of the group, Pia, mayyyyy have decided to take this irregular trip to hook up with the hot young rapids guide (#partyfoul), it seems like the group might get home at the end of the day with some good campfire tales. BUT THEN THINGS GET REAL. I won't say much more for fear of #spoilers, but suffice it to say, things go from like a bummer, sleeping in the woods isn't the most fun kinda uncomfortable story to a things have gotten REALLY, REALLY, REALLY BAD kind of thriller. This book had me reading with wide eyes and heart pounding.
The YOA Treatment:
Many of the Agatha Christie books we read last year featured strong friendships. Obviously you have the ongoing besties saga of Poirot and Hastings, but her books show many other one-off friendships, particularly those between women, such as the one that develops between Ruth and Lenox in The Mystery of the Blue Train, the delicious Tea & Scandal group from The Murder at the Vicarage, and even tragic friendships like Jacqueline and Linnet in Death on the Nile. I wrote last year about how I appreciated Agatha's treatment of the teenage friendship in Cat Among the Pigeons. Though Emma Cline's meditation on the emotional rollercoaster that is being a teenage girl was much more in-depth than Pigeons, it made me smile to think the girls in both books were essentially from the same time period, and still have the same longings, delights, and frustrations as girls today. The River at Night's Wini reminded me of Destination Unknown's Hilary Craven: riddled with personal tragedy, but in the end defiantly ready to give life a chance, and do what she must for those she has come to care for.
So far, it's really interesting to dig into new books with the perspective of a steady stream of Agatha having coursed through our eyeballs and ears and brains over the past year. We'll continue to be on the lookout for parallels, recurring concepts, and #spookymoments as we move through more mysteries and thrillers in 2017.
There are more classical detective novels to come for me in February, so stay tuned! And Emily has a terrific review of an entire SERIES of detective novels she has flown through so far this year still to come this week.
Happy reading, friends!
-A.
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