Iris Anderson has won the standoff with her father, and he’s agreed to let her be a detective at his struggling detective agency one on condition: he’ll teach her the methods. Then not one, but two, cases fall on Iris’ plate. She uncovers evidence indicating her mother’s may have not committed suicide as previously thought, and Jewish students are finding anti-Semitic letters in their locker at her school.
Iris Anderson returns in this follow-up to The Girl is Murder by Kathryn Miller Haines. When we last saw Iris, she had just helped solve the case of a missing fellow student. Now she’s a little older and a little wiser. All the elements I loved from the first book return: New York, the period slang, and some side characters. I’d put The Girl is Trouble as a bit more noir than its predecessor but just as enjoyable. Once again I thought this book moved at a good steady pace, and definitely kept ramping up the action.
I love the main story – the mystery of Iris’ mother’s death. It had me guessing the entire time I was reading, and there were times I drew the completely wrong conclusion. I’ll always love a mystery that stumps me. The subplot of the anti-Semitism was well-done and I think it was so strongly done it could’ve stood alone as a separate novel, however, Haines has elements of both subplots intertwine and echo each other, which came together in a brilliant way. And at the core of the novel is Iris trying to reconcile her faith and beliefs.
There’s a nice side romance, something I can always take or leave in a non-romantic YA, and it distract me from the plot. I was very surprised by one romance. I was pleased to see Susie come back, but the best character of all is New York in the 1940s. I simply eat up every bit of detail evoking the time and Kathryn Miller Haines is so good at dishing them out.
You can read this The Girl is Trouble without reading the first book, but I recommend it, especially to see Iris’s character transformation. Trouble keeps you guessing as Iris winds her way down dark alleyways and abandoned streets searching for the truth about her mother and the note-leaver. Get it Veronica Mars fans!
Copy for review provided by the publisher.
Title: The Girl is Trouble
Author: Kathryn Haines
Level: YA
Date: July 2012
Pages: 336
Publisher: Roaring Brook
Format: Hardback
This review comes to you as part of the The Girl is Trouble blog tour run by The Teen Book Scene! Be sure to visit all the stops on the tour!
One of my favorite reads for 2012 is July’s The Girl is Trouble, a follow-up to the historical YA The Girl is Murder, from Roaring Brook Press. The author Kathryn Miller Haines has several books set during the 1920s, including the Rosie Winter series, and for a guest post, I decided to let her discuss her favorite historical movies.
And now, Kathryn Miller Haines!
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When I was a kid, my mom bombarded my sister and me with films from the 1930s and ‘40s (with an occasional one from the ‘50s and ‘60s). I think, in her mind, it was a way of keeping us from the sex and violence of more contemporary movies, although truth be told there was just as much sex and violence, it just tended to start onscreen and quickly move off. Too poor for cable, I was initially reluctant to enjoy these Friday night black and white Blockbuster picks (couldn’t we at least get a movie in…gasp…color?), but I eventually fell in love with them. There’s something about the clothes, the dialogue, the music, the everything that made these films so much more of a fantasy than things being released in the ‘80s and ‘90s. I yearned to talk like the women who populated these films, to move with their slinky grace and assurance, to express emotion with a raised eyebrow, a flick of a cigarette, and a single tear that fell without making my face red and my nose run.
Yeah, they had style. They had grace.
Here are a few of my favorites:
Stage Door(1937). Katharine Hepburn, Lucille Ball, Ginger Rogers. A group of girls inhabit a boarding house for actresses in New York and go through the trials and tribulations of becoming stars. Katharine Hepburn as the rich girl playing poor lured me in, but it’s Ginger Rogers with her fast patter and fantastic dance steps that makes me keep coming back to this movie. The dialogue zings, but as funny of a movie as it is, it’s got an emotional one-two punch at its center. This is the movie that inspired my Rosie Winter mystery series set among (you guessed it) actresses living in a New York boarding house.
Philadelphia Story (1940). It’s my namesake, Katharine Hepburn again, this time paired with Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant. More razor sharp dialogue (both Stage Door and Philadelphia Story were originally plays and it shows) as Hepburn’s Tracy Lord gets ready to remarry despite unresolved feelings for her ex, Cary Grant. While the three top billed stars are amazing, it’s the supporting cast I love in this film, especially Virginia Weidler as precocious Dinah Lord and acerbic Ruth Hussey as a love-lorn, wise-cracking photographer.
His Girl Friday (1940). The plot is similar to Philadelphia Story, but this time its Rosalind Russell’s fast-talking reporter that Cary Grant is trying to keep from remarrying, while she gets roped into the biggest story of her career. Another play turned film, what’s intriguing isn’t just the marvelous, quotable dialogue but the fact that Russell’s part (in the play, The Front Page) was originally written for a man and the romance angle wasn’t added until this film.
All About Eve (1950). This time it’s Bette Davis in the lead in a film about an up and coming actress (Anne Baxter) who’s trying to usurp the career of one of theater’s grande dames. Witty, gut-wrenching, agonizingly frustrating, this is the movie that made me finally understand why Bette Davis was a star. Bonus points: it was Marilyn Monroe’s first film.
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Visit KathrynMillerHaines.com for all the latest on her books, including The Girl is Trouble and The Girl is Murder. You can also read my review of Girl is Murder! Thanks to the Teen Book Scene and Kathryn Miller Haines for this great guest post!
Come back for my review of The Girl is Trouble July 6!
For author Kimberly Pauley’s new book Cat Girl’s Day Off, her publisher Tu Books (an imprint of Lee and Low) has a blog tour all about bloggers and their cats. The main character of the novel can speak to cats, so bloggers are answering the question “If my cat could speak, what would it say?”
There’s a giveaway below too, so scroll down if you want that!
It’s pretty obvious that my cats would say food. FOOD FOOD FOOD FOOD. Now I don’t share this with just anyone, but within our family, we have a “special voice” for just one cat, Shadow. I have three cats – Buddha, Shadow and Ivy, but I’ll start with Shadow.
Shadow, a black longhair.
Skill: An adorable disarming squeal whenever she sees anything that may reasonable food. And the worst of all, the big eyes and silent squeak combo. Many a chicken nugget has been lost to this attack.
Shadow thinks all dog’s names were “Dog.” If you asked her about the dogs downstairs, she would name them as Little Dog, Big Dog, Dog, Dog, and Fuzzy Dog. The white terrier next door is “Fancy dog.”
Shadow is a world class lazybones, like the other two. She starts in the living room in the morning, lays on the table in the dining room at lunch, next the kitchen, then the bedrooms. She follows the sun throughout the house taking the world’s longest siesta.
Next we have Buddha…
Buddha, Russian Blue
Skill: Slamming kitchen cabinets at 6 am.
Don’t let that playful cat fool you. She is completely my partner A’s cat. Buddha lets me pet her maybe every other Sunday and she’s very particular about everything. She takes twenty minutes banging her paws after getting in the litter box. She is insane. The other day she did her slow torture method – slowly ripping paper until I got up to check her food bowls. And what did she want was to be fed…in the yellow bowl. The pink bowl had food, but she wanted the yellow bowl.
And she doesn’t like me because she was A’s cat for over 12 years. So if she could talk, she wouldn’t say anything! Except maybe “girl, feed me.”
See this video. I am talking RIGHT TO HER and completely ignores me.
And finally, the baby of them all.
Ivy, calico.
Skill: A loud and persistent meow when she sees food or you’re not really paying attention to her.
She loves high places and if you asked her what she’d wanted to say, it’d pretty much be “chicken? jump! jump!” and then she would jump from the bed to the dresser to her perch on another dresser. Also she’d be sulking because we’re getting rid of the torn chairs that are trash-bound after we move next week. She’s been hiding in the bedroom forever but now she’s become more social…making us feel horrible we’re leaving! She’d probably whine for 8 days about how we WEREN’T FAIR, and she HATED US, and she was going to move to AUSTRALIA to live among the wild calicos.
If you haven’t read my blog before, I adopted Ivy a couple of years ago at a shelter. I’d fallen in love with her after seeing her on Petfinder.com. She’s grown into such a cute kitten with a quirky personality.
She does have an adorable murr.. she murrs when she sees us, when she’s hungry, when she’s sleepy…
Wow! After all that, I am so glad my cats don’t talk. Although they are perfectly lovely creatures. I’d much rather read about the dialogue of a cat in books.. like Cat Girl’s Day Off!
Natalie Ng’s little sister is a super-genius with a chameleon-like ability to disappear. Her older sister has three Class A Talents, including being a human lie detector. Her mom has laser vision and one of the highest IQs ever. Her dad’s Talent is so complex even the Bureau of Extra-Sensory Regulation and Management (BERM) hardly knows what to classify him as.
And Nat? She can talk to cats.
But it’s Nat’s Talent that catapults her and her friends right into the middle of a celebrity kidnapping mystery that takes them through Ferris Bueller’s Chicago and on and off movie sets. Can she keep her reputation intact? Can she keep her friends Oscar and Melly focused long enough to save the day? And, most importantly, can she keep from embarrassing herself in front of Ian?
Find out what happens when the kitty litter hits the fan.
If you like, leave me a comment telling me about what your cat would say (or another animal, I’ll be equal opportunity here). I’ve also got a giveaway! US only please. The giveaway will end May 7. Enter below.
I set up the widget incorrectly, so I extended the giveaway window to May 11!
Hannah’s boyfriend Colin is heading off to college soon, but before he does, Hannah wants to have one amazing time with him. Spurred by photographs of his family’s old lakehouse, Hannah plans a surprise trip to the cabin…without telling Colin. His family hasn’t visited the house in years and Hannah thinks it’ll be a romantic hideaway. But as they get closer to the lake house, Colin begins acting strangely. The house miles from town and the town is as abandoned as the lake house..but all that won’t matter is Colin keeps up his strange behavior.
Emma Berne can write a thriller. This is her second and it doesn’t look like she’s stopping any time soon. What she does so well is write sparsely and just so clean. That’s always a detail I like to see in a thriller. The writing isn’t clunky with detail, but just right with an unease simmering underneath the surface.
One of my favorite passages is below.
The air was close and stuffy. Hannah walked over to the sofa. A book lay splayed open, facedown on the side table. It was Middlemarch, opened at page 210. Beside it was a coffee cup with a brown crust in the bottom. Hannah looked more closely. A lip mark still stained the rim. The sofa cushions were mashed in one corner, as if the reader had just gotten up for a second to answer the phone. Hannah backed away, bumping into one of the chairs. She whirled around. Jesus, this place was creepy. pg. 64 Still Waters ARC
That’s the beauty in the writing – there’s something, just something, lurking in the wings, but we don’t know what. In true thriller style, the author doesn’t show all her cards at once, and leaves us guessing what’s going on. The best thing, to me, with thrillers is not seeing the Big Bad up close but only flashes of them. Those flashes keep you reading and guessing. One thing is clear: this house is very bad news.
My only complaints regarding Still Waters have to be the abrupt ending. I was so into the book and it seemed like the ending came too soon.
Still Waters is out in paperback now. Copy for review received from the publisher.
Title: Still Waters
Author: Emma Carlson Berne
Level: Young adult
Date: December 2011
Pages: 215
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Format: Paperback
Steve Brezenoff, author of The Absolute Value of -1 and Brooklyn Burning, both from Lerner Books, sent an original piece of fiction for my blog tour post for Brooklyn. Thanks to The Teen {Book} Scene, Steve, and Lerner, I’m able to bring it to you below. It features an encounter between Lily from -1 and Felix (love that name!) from Brooklyn Burning.
Walking till Sunrise
They were gone.
The three senior girls who had dragged me along on the Long Island Rail Road, each of them drunk and high and laughing their collective butts off, had been too quick on the stairs—or I’d been too slow. Either way, I’d been up and down this station platform about ten times—hardly able to walk straight myself—and they were definitely not here. I was drunk too. I admit it. And I was a little high, even. But at three in the morning, wandering alone through the North Seventh Street L train station in Brooklyn, I was mostly just tired—and afraid.
It wasn’t an empty, abandoned, frightening station, like you might imagine you’d find in Brooklyn in the wee small hours of the morning, with a drunk man sleeping across three seats, or a lecherous weirdo in a dirty trench coat, standing at one end of the platform and exposing himself at frightened sixteen-year-old girls from the suburbs. In fact, it was actually pretty crowded—with people who were not scary in the slightest, at least not in that way. Several loud groups of Williamsburgers stood together here and there. Mostly they seemed about as drunk as Claire and the others had been; they just seemed to handle it better. So they were scary, but in a socially-enviable sort of way.
