After listening to The Body under the Piano by Marthe Jocelyn last week, I borrowed the audiobook version of the sequel, Peril at Owl Park, which is set a few months later, when Aggie, accompanied by her indomitable Granny Jane and her best friend Hector, spends the Christmas holidays at her sister's house. (I should really call it a "country estate," since the young woman is the new Lady Greyson.) There's a blizzard, a secret passage, a cursed jewel, a missing guest, a body in the library... everything you need for a good old-fashioned murder mystery! But the novel, which is marketed as Middle Grade, also shows its intended audience that it's possible to navigate life after experiencing loss, as well as how to express empathy towards others. I enjoyed it even more than the previous one, and have already put the third (final?) book on hold.
A few weeks ago, Abby Boucher from the excellent "Save Me from My Shelf" podcast mentioned The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff, whose previous novel Matrix I absolutely adored. This was such a bleak story... Somehow, as we follow a young woman fleeing northwards after escaping from a New England settlement ravaged by hunger and illness, as we witness her resolve and resourcefulness, as we discover the events that brought her there, as we come to understand her desperate drive for survival and the fierceness of her love, we experience a narrative that celebrates life even as it acknowledges the inevitability of death. I was once again bowled over by Lauren Groff's masterly use of language: precise, unadorned yet evocative, starkly poetic.
And the stones, with their lives so slow that to all impatient moving creatures of animated life they did appear unmoving, but even the stones she understood now did meet and mate, did erupt and splinter, did rub to powder stone upon stone and stone upon water and stone upon air, so that in the long scale of their lives the stones saw within themselves incredible vitality.
I mean, how beautiful is that? My library has two of her other books, which I plan to get to later this year.