At 18, I began my unsingle life.
After I announced my June marriage, the dean at Wellesley told me I couldn’t return to college for my second year. I would lose that privilege along with my virginity. In 1956, even a prestigious school like Wellesley saw a woman as her body, and a woman’s body as her possible role in life. I impressed my housemother, Mrs. Tower, with my diamond engagement ring.
Defying crime fiction convention, nobody dies in Donna Leon’s latest mystery, Give unto Others. In fact, the bloodiest encounter in this, the author’s 31st novel featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti, occurs between two dogs — and by the time we are aware of it, a vet is already on the scene (both animals survive). Humans are injured in the course of Brunetti’s latest case, one seriously. But the true victim of the crime at the center of this book is trust — in those we love and in ourselves as well.
But it’s not only the intelligent and riveting storyline or the carefully conceived and fully developed characters that elevate this book far above mundane thrillers. Foley’s precise prose rings with echoes of her British background and the elegance of her French setting.
And for those who cherish Paris, the author offers scores of scenes and sites that evoke memories. But do not expect passages that reflect only the City of Light’s charm and beauty; others depict the inevitable dark underbelly found in any metropolis.
The novel is imbued with an old-school feminism of a kind currently unfashionable. It looks squarely at the consequences of stifled female ambition — to the woman herself, and to those in her orbit.
Muddy Matterhorn is a swan song in which McHugh recalls old friends and nods at death as well as worries about its approach. She remembers her youth and the nuns who taught her in school. She thinks about her parents and their arguments, reminisces about her former husband and his mother, and celebrates a love found late in life.