Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke (2017) Mulholland Books

An Edgar winner, yet hard to get through.  Not because the writing is obscure, or the craft is poor.  It’s mostly that the writer does not get me to care about the protagonist.  He’s a Texas Ranger, he’s black, and his status is questionable.  His wife has kicked him out, he’s being looked-at by his boss and the Rangers because of how close he was to his uncle, who has killed a man on his property.  In the meantime, at a small town, if you can even call it that, there is a place that isn’t quite a juke joint, where multiple murders of its patrons have happened.  Who kills whom is a longer story?

The Witches by Roald Dahl (1983) Jonathan Cape

Witches are real.  And they’re not like you and me.  They’re bald, so they wear wigs, which makes their scalp itch.  Their hands are claws and don’t really have five fingers, so they hide them with gloves.  They don’t have toes, so they wear these terribly uncomfortable shoes to hide that fact.  And they hate kids.  To them kids smell like dog poo – especially if they’re clean.  So, a young boy, who is being raised by his grandmother (because his parents are dead), finds himself trapped at a witch’s convention and turned into a mouse.  Now he must save the rest of the kids in England from being turned into mice too.

The movie that was remade in 2020, Directed by Robert Zemeckis, starring Anne Hathaway, Octavia Spencer and Stanley Tucci is worth watching.  We did this in our Book and a Movie club.

Dance of a Burning Sea by E J Willow (2021) Montlake

The three Musai are back.  This is the story of the middle sister, the dancer, who can spring the heat of magic from her dance.  Only she got herself, and her sister’s secret in danger.  She revealed who she was to the worst pirate the Thief Kingdom as ever known.  And her father, the King, has put a bounty on his head.  She has no idea what he would do if he found out his middle daughter let the pirate learn their secret.  It takes a bet, lost by the dancer, which has committed her to a year’s service on the pirate’s ship to induce the Thief King to rescind the bounty on the pirate’s head.  Only during that year, she finds that he is really a prince in a kingdom he was supposed to rule but stole its magic artifact to force the kingdom to save his sick, younger brother, and let him rule.  Now, he has to restore the artifact to save his kingdom.