Book Reviews

 A few things I've been reading recently.

God Rest Ye, Royal Gentlemen by Rhys Bowen, Adult mystery, 2021

This is #15 in the Royal Spyness Mystery Series. The Royal Spyness Series stars Georgie, who is 35th in line to the British throne. The Queen has a fondness for Georgie and often asks her to keep an eye on her son, who is dating the "horrible American" Mrs. Wallis. This leads to situations where there is a murder to solve, often in posh locations. While the books are fiction, the settings are historically accurate.

This book takes place at Christmas in 1935, when Georgie and her husband, Darcy, spend their first Christmas together as a married couple with his aunt and a host of other houseguests. Someone has shot at the Prince, and another suspicious death occurs. Count on Georgie to eventually figure out "who dun it". 

These books are fun and easy reads. I find it interesting to read about how royalty and the class system work, which are often important parts of the story. This book references book #6, The Twelve Clues of Christmas, several times. I haven't read that one yet, so that's next up for me with this series. Ward enjoys these books also and has started at the beginning and is reading them in order. I'm not quite so orderly. 😀

In Farleigh Field by Rhys Bowen, Adult historical fiction, 2017

This is a stand-alone novel by Rhys Bowen, who writes the Royal Spyness books along with several other mystery series. 

Lord Westerman, his wife, and 5 daughters live on the Farleigh Estate in rural England. The war is on, and Hitler has been bombing London. The estate is housing soldiers, and children from the city are being sent to live in the country to keep them safe from bombing.  

Then one day, the youngest daughter finds a dead soldier in the woods. It looks like he jumped out of a plane, and his parachute didn't open. An investigation begins, and numerous theories emerge regarding his mission. Meanwhile, one daughter is stuck in Paris, where she was studying fashion, and another daughter is secretly decoding German messages. Another childhood friend is an ace pilot, and another is a spy. In this world, no one is above suspicion, and you are kept guessing who is working for which side of the war.

The story is complicated with many characters and several locations, enough so that there is a list of characters and locations at the beginning of the book. Despite the complications, it was not hard to follow the narrative. Even though this is a WWII novel, it reads like a mystery. I enjoyed this book and will read other Rhys Bowen standalone novels. This was my second one.

Mrs. Christie at the Mystery Guild Library by Amanda Chapman, Adult mystery, 2025

I picked up this book from the new bookshelf at the library because, you know, it had the word Library in the title.  😀

I was also drawn to the book's premise. Tory is a book conservator and works below and lives above a library that specializes in mystery books. One of the library rooms is set up like Agatha Christie's actual home was, including the books on the shelves. One day, an older woman appears in the room, claiming to be Agatha Christie from the beyond. She was bored in eternity, so they let her come to earth to solve a murder. Tory thinks she is a disturbed woman and is unsure what to do about her.

In the meantime, Tory's cousin, Nic, becomes involved with her manager's death. And thus a purpose for Mrs. Christie's appearance. Various people (an 11-year-old girl, a librarian, a detective, Nic, Tory, and Mrs. Christie) end up meeting every Monday evening to discuss the case. 

Mrs. Christie manages to appear and disappear without anyone seeing her come and go, and they never know when she will show up. However, she does come regularly to the Monday meetings. During the meetings, she is quiet and occasionally interjects with something that makes the others think. Most of her comments are quotes from one of her books. She gently guides the others to solving the crimes.

This was an entertaining read. At first, I was bogged down by the author trying to establish the backstory for everything. However, when Mrs. Christie appeared, the book began to pick up, and soon I was totally into the story. Tory has her own introvert issues, and among other things, she has a crush on the hunky detective, but is too shy to act. Her cousin Nic, an actress, is outgoing and naive. The little girl is clever beyond her years.

The story takes place in New York City with many place names. They didn't mean a lot to me, but they could to someone who knew the city. However, I did find it interesting to learn about the various aspects of conserving old books through Tory's work. 

The best part of the book was the numerous references to Agatha Christie's books. While I've read a few Agatha Christie mysteries, I've barely made a dent in the 66 detective novels she wrote. But I found the references to the books interesting and well done. I also found that there was more discussion about who committed the murders and why than in some other mysteries. The Monday meetings, with the diverse attendees, had them discussing all of the possibilities. I enjoyed that, and it didn't leave me with any confusion about what happened. Sometimes, I finish a book and feel like I have to have it explained to me.

This was Chapman's first book, and it just came out in August. If it sells well, I'm sure there will be more to follow.

Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village by Maureen Johnson and Jay Cooper, Adult non-fiction (Dewey 818.602), 2021

When I saw the title of this book in the library, I actually laughed out loud because so many mysteries take place in a "quaint English village". The book is a fun and quick read, with only 128 pages of text and illustrations. This would make a good gift book for a reader of cozy mysteries or one who likes to watch the many adaptations of them on PBS. BTW, it's on sale on Amazon right now for $10.

That's it for now.

Until next time...

Ward Goes to Poland, Churches

Ward recently took a trip to Poland and occasionally does a guest post here about his trip.

St. Mary's Basilica, Krakow. 

I don't pretend to understand the religious history of Poland, but I did learn a few things on my trip.  We saw a number of churches and cathedrals that had changed throughout history, to and from different religions as the ruling countries changed. At the end of the post, I tried to do a brief summary, if you're interested in a little more detail.*

The Polish constitution allows for religious freedom, but over 70% of the population identifies as Roman Catholic (7% say they do not identify as having a religion, the 0.4% are various Protestant religions). And because Christianity is considered an important part of Poland's history and culture, it is taught in schools. 

Currently, religious education is 2 hours/week, but a proposal is to cut it back to 1 hour/week and not count the grade in the GPA. Not everyone is happy about that, and we saw protests against the change. I found all of this very interesting because it is so different than our treatment of religion that we are familiar with in the US. 

The protest we saw for Solidarity in Warsaw. Our guide said that it was about the issue of cutting back on religious education in the schools, among other things.

Most everywhere we went, we saw beautiful churches and cathedrals. I had to Google the difference between them:

A church is a general term for any Christian place of worship, while a cathedral is a church that serves as the seat of a bishop and is the main church of a diocese. A basilica is a church designated by the pope for its historical and architectural significance, and a chapel is a smaller place of worship that typically does not have a permanent congregation or priest.

Here are a few of the churches and cathedrals we visited.

This is St. John the Baptist Cathedral in Wroclaw. It is a Cathedral because it is the Bishop's church, and is the seat of the Archdiocese of Wrocław. 

St. John the Baptist Cathedral in Wroclaw

Brass model of the cathedral. We saw a lot of these brass models outside many of the churches.

Inside St. John's Cathedral. Every time, I was impressed with the grand, tall, open space.

Next, we saw St. Elizabeth's Church in Wroclaw.

The tower was originally 130 meters (425 feet) tall, but was destroyed by fire. When rebuilt, it is now only 91 meters (300 feet) tall.

St. Elizabeth's Church official name is the Garrison Church Military and Civil Parish of St. Elizabeth. I think it got that name as part of the de-germanification of Poland at the end of WWII. This church was originally built in the 14th century. The old stone plaque is in German because this had been a Lutheran church since 1525. It was Lutheran until the end of WWII, then became a Catholic Church. The more recent sign (in Polish) has mass schedules. 

Inside St. Elizabeth's

Next, we visited Kraków. Kraków was the capital of Poland for many years before Warsaw became the capital. This was because the King had made an alliance with Lithuania, and Warsaw was more central in the new kingdom.

Very pretty St. Mary's Basilica in Krakow's town square.

St. Mary's Basilica at night on the town square, which is active both in the daytime and at night. 

In Warsaw, we visited Holy Cross Church, which is famous because

Frederick Chopin's heart is buried in a crypt here. He died in Paris, but told his family he wanted to be buried in Poland. It was too hard to bring his whole body back, so his sister cut out his heart and brought it back to this church in Warsaw in a jar filled with cognac, approximately 1850. 

The church is also really pretty (but they are all pretty) and supposedly has a splinter of the original cross. 

The Holy Cross Church, with a painting by Canaletto in the mid-1700s of the same church, and a photo below of the church after the devastation of WWII.

You can't tell from the photo, but the interior of the church burned to the ground, so the church is just a shell at this point. 

We went off the beaten path to visit the town of Lomza, where there were church records of my ancestors. It was very interesting to see descriptions of marriages and births.

The Cathedral of Saint Michael the Archangel at Łomża. We met with a records specialist here who helped us find and decipher family records. Some were written in Russian and some were written in Latin.

The next day, we went to Miastkowo, which is a small town with the parish church nearest to the village of Czartoria, where my family was from.

Here we found more records, but there was no one to translate them for us, so we took pictures, hoping to find someone to translate them later. We also saw several family names in the church cemetery.

One afternoon, we toured Krakow's Jewish District. This district was named Kasimierz after King Kasimir III, who, in 1335, formally declared the area, then a suburb of Krakow, a town where Jews and ethnic Poles could peacefully coexist. That happened until WWII.

Notice the white wall on the right-hand side of the picture. The top of the wall is street level. The white building with the green roofs is a synagogue that was built below street level because Jewish synagogues were not allowed to be taller than any Catholic church.

We saw more beautiful churches, both inside and out. And they made me wonder about the money and labor that went into creating them.

*I tried to boil down the very complex religious history in a few words below. I think I got the general points right.

Roman Catholicism formally began in Poland in 966 AD and has been the predominant religion in Poland since then. Other Catholic religions (Greek and Russian Orthodox) have a part in the history of the country and have current populations.

While the borders changed (frequently) with Germany, Austria, Prussia, Russia, Czech, and Hungary all exerting dominion over Polish territory at some time over the last several centuries, the dominant religions of those countries extended into Poland. 

Also, the Protestant Reformation affected Poland, with Lutherans (mostly from Germany) and Calvinists (from Switzerland) coming to and staying in Poland.

In the Middle Ages and into the Enlightenment period, Poland was relatively more tolerant of religious diversity than most of the rest of Europe, so there was an influx of people of different religions (Baptists, Moravians, Jews, etc.) looking to settle there to practice their religions in peace.

Flowers

 Continuing with yesterday's nature theme, here are some of the flowers that are still blooming in our yard. I took these pictures a couple of days ago, and some of the flowers have faded more since then, but they are still lovely to see.

Until next time...

Thankful Sunday

Ward and I took a walk today, and this hymn is what I was thinking as we were enjoying the beauty of autumn.

For the Beauty of the Earth

For the beauty of the earth

For the beauty of the skies,

For the love which from our birth 

over and around us lies:

Lord of all, to thee we raise 

this our joyful hymn of praise.

For the beauty of each hour

of the day and of the night.

Hill and vale and tree and flower,

Sun and moon and stars of light:

Lord of all to thee we raise

This our joyful hymn of praise.

Words: Fol­li­ot S. Pier­point, in Lyra Eu­cha­rist­ica, by Or­by Ship­ley, se­cond edi­tion, 1864.

Music: Dix, Con­rad Koch­er, 1838

Pictures from a walk today in Fountain Rock Nature Center.

Until next time...

Black Cat Day

 There's a day for everything now, and today is Black Cat Day. So, in honor of Black Cat Day, I'm going to rerun a post about the black cat we used to have, Lucky. 

We got Lucky with his sister Lucy, as a young kitten from one of Theo's classmates. When Lucky was a few weeks old, he followed his mother out a door that closed on him before he was all the way through. His family thought the slamming door had killed him, but no, Lucky had other ideas. When he came to us a few weeks later, he was a healthy, playful kitten that we named Lucky because of the good luck he had already had in his young life.

It was soon evident that he was the dominant cat over his littermate Lucy, a sweet, gentle girl. Three years later, he remained the top cat when the other two cats, Leo and Annie, came into the house. Despite constant challenges from Annie, Lucky remained in charge. No need for swats or growls to keep the others in line. A stern look from him was all that it took.

As part of his leadership role, he was a leader in the food department. He was the one who got to eat first and the one who opened the food bag for the others. He could tear a hole in a new bag of food in no time flat. Then the others got to enjoy the spoils of his efforts. We tried to put the food away as soon as we got it, but he was amazingly fast at this trick.

He also got first crack at the prey that ventured into our house. He didn't bring the dead mouse or mole to us, as many cats do; he hid them under one particular rug in the basement. The same rug that he did his trick of lying on his side and running around the edge of it. We don't know what all of that meant in cat behavior, but I guess he did.

Lucky was also a relaxed cat who enjoyed a good lap to purr on and a pat from anyone — stranger or not. Even the vet. That was until he had some medical problems that needed invasive procedures. After that, the vet was not his friend. In fact, sometimes it took two or three of the most experienced people at the vet's to help Lucky with what he needed. Can't say that I blamed him. I wouldn't have been very happy with the people who poked and prodded me for no good reason that I could understand. But he and I survived, as did our other cats he hissed at for several days after they had been to the vet.

He was also our adventure kitty. All of our cats were indoor cats. They were curious about the outside, but happy to watch the show from a window. A door left open by mistake might get a cat creeping outside, but never a dash. So we couldn't figure out how and why we would occasionally find Lucky outside meowing at a window to come back in. He seemed happy, just ready to come inside for a bit of warmth. Sometimes he had been out all night, and we didn't even know he was out there. One time, he helped us figure out that we had a torn screen (maybe he tore it), but other times, we never figured out how he made it out. But he always came back.

Lucky had a good, long life of 18 years, and we still miss him.