Girls Being Girls Being Girls Being Girls: The Girls & The River at Night | 2016

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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Something's Rotten in the State of Meadowbank: Cat Among the Pigeons | 1959

(image from here)

"But you must remember this," said Miss Bulstrode, "one or other of the girls may wish to make herself important by exaggerating some incident or even by inventing one. Girls do very odd things..." -Cat Among the Pigeons, p. 94

The Sum of It:
As we get closer and closer to the end of our Agatha journey this year, I am becoming more and more sad about saying goodbye to Poirot! Although Emily and I discovered this year that we prefer a Miss Marple book (#sorryHercule), it was still sad to realize this was my second to last Poirot read! Okay so on to the summarizing:

Our story begins in Ramat (a fictional Middle Eastern country) where the Prince of the land (one Prince Ali Yusef, Hereditary Sheik of Ramat) is consulting his British private pilot and pal, Bob Rawlinson. There's a revolution going on, and Prince Ali has decided he needs to flee the country or be killed. Bob agrees to fly him out, but before they go, Prince Ali entrusts Bob with a huge task: thinking of a way to smuggle nearly a million pounds's worth of jewels out of the country! Bob is like GEEZ, LOUISE HOW DO I DO THAT? The palace is full of spies, and the two men's plane ride will be dangerous enough. Luckily, Bob's sister and niece have been visiting him, and they should be able to leave the country un-searched. Bob goes to their hotel to make the jewel arrangements and potentially bid farewell (forever!?) to his family, but they are not there. He spends some time in their room doing something mysterious to hide the jewels, and then takes off with Prince Ali on their flight to freedom.

Some months later, Bob's niece, Jennifer, is one of many girls arriving at fancy-dancy school, Meadowbank, for the start of term. The school is run by "headmistress extraordinaire" Miss Bulstrode, who prides herself on running an establishment that takes on the brightest students, with a couple of princesses sprinkled in for the wow factor. One of these princesses is Princess Shaista of Ramat. Princess Shaista is fond of touting the fact that a) she is royal, b) she was engaged to her cousin, the now deceased Prince Ali (Bob and Ali's plane crashed in the mountains as they attempted to flee #RIP #sadface), and c) as an important royal, she is likely to be kidnapped at any moment. Miss Bulstrode and Co. assume she is just a dramatic teenage girl and ignore her fears.

Meadowbank is experiencing an influx of new staff, notably a new games mistress, Miss Springer, a new French mistress, Mlle. Blanche, and a young gardener named Adam, who is repeatedly described as obnoxious to the Meadowbank staff, as they assume all the young girls will be in love with him (#accurate). We learn early on that Gardener Adam is actually not a gardener (well, sort of, apparently his mom was good with plants?), but in fact a secret agent sent to keep an eye on Princess Shaista. The school year seems to be going along swimmingly, until games mistress Miss Springer is found #MURDERED in the new sports pavilion! Although a rather brusque and disliked woman, there doesn't seem to be much motive for her death. Local Inspector Kelsey is doing his best on the case, and then has to work double time when there is a SECOND murder, and a kidnapping to boot! The case needs a professional, and so, nearly 3/4 through the book, one of Meadowbank's plucky students gets herself to London to bring in none other than Hercule Poirot to make sense of it all. As he makes his way through his usual interviews, it becomes apparent that something (or more importantly, someONE!) is not right this year at Meadowbank...there is a cat among the pigeons!

The YOA Treatment:
When I first started reading this book, it felt a bit like Agatha was in two places at once. The opening scenes set in Ramat (and the following intrigue) felt very much like They Came to Baghdad or Destination Unknown. And then the rest of the story set at Meadowbank felt like her usual English countryside murder mystery. However, she did a fairly good job of bringing the two together and leaves you with a story that is one part caper, one part whodunit. I was a bit disappointed that Poirot didn't come into the picture earlier (and when he did, he figured things out awwwwfully quickly), but the cast of colorful Meadowbank characters kept my attention until it was finally time for Hercule's appearance.

I also admire Agatha's take on a bit of a coming of age story by setting this mystery at a girl's school. Quite a bit of the story is seen through the eyes of several of Meadowbank's students and it's entertaining to see how their adolescent trials and tribulations fit into the plot. Secret cigarettes are discovered, tennis rackets are unraveling, tiffs are had with Mother, and the halls are thick with gossip about the teachers. I'm attempting to work my way through Emma Cline's truly excellent book, The Girls, and while Cat Among the Pigeons is vastly different, I get some of those same pangs of recognition of my younger self like "Oh wow, that IS what it was like to be 15 and have a crush on the hot guy that mows the lawn at your school."

Overall, a read that's fun and intriguing and with a bit of Poirot to boot!

-A.