A Series Of (Un)Fortunate Reviews

Miss Me When I'm Gone is Emily Arsenault's third novel.  Her first two were reviewed previously on the blog.  Go  here and here to read about them.  Now that there are three I can see similarities--all three feature themes rooted in different areas of the literary world (there was the dictionary publisher setting in the first one, poetry appearing in a high school journal connected to a disappearance in the second, and the last manuscript and its research are the whole point of this third outing) and these last two also deal with themes of friendship and disconnection.  Neither of these latest two novels have settings as original as the first that was set in a dictionary publishing company whose stores of entries on index cards hid a decades old mystery. After Jaime's old college friend, Gretchen, is found dead at the bottom of a treacherous, poorly maintained, concrete staircase, Jaime is asked by Gretchen's family to serve as unofficial literary executo...

Arcadia Falls is the latest release from Carol Goodman.  I've read all of her books, sometimes for better or for worse.  This is one of her better ones.  In previous novels the resolution of the present day mystery sometimes came out of left field because more time was spent developing the historical mystery to the neglect of the present day mystery.  This was not the case with Arcadia Falls in which the sixty year old historical mystery is so intertwined with the present day mystery that solving the historical mystery is prerequisite to understanding the present day mystery.  Granted the twist at the end is highly improbable, but it still gives the reader a good feeling because ultimately everyone turns out to be where it is that they belong. This book has similarities in superficial details of the narrator's life and setting with Goodman's first novel, The Lake of Dead Languages .  Meg, the narrator, flees the city to the rural New York campus of an e...

The Broken Teaglass is Emily Arenault's debut novel and it features a rather unique mystery that needs some good, old fashioned sleuthing to solve. Billy's a recent college graduate who is hired as a lexicographer in training at the Samuelson Company, home of America's premiere and most prestigious dictionary. Samuelson is home to a rather odd work atmosphere fueled by the academic, intellectual, sometimes socially awkward staff. At work Billy meets Mona, another junior editor, hired about a year ago. Together they stumble upon two mysterious citations that come from a book that doesn't exist, written by an author who doesn't exist, published by a company that never existed. It appears the citations themselves were written in 1985 by another junior editor. Billy's extremely reluctantly dragged into this office intrigue and mystery by Mona, who craves an adventure amidst the monotony of the Samuelson office. Mona's determined to track down the identity...