Sherry Chandler » Reginald Hill & Claudia Emerson
Reginald Hill & Claudia Emerson
A Cure for All Diseases by Reginald Hill
My review
rating: 4 of 5 stars
This semi-epistolary novel is a re-telling of Jane Austen’s unfinished novel, Sanditon, as a detective novel. As a gimmick, it’s pretty amusing, though I’d guess the number of people who have read Sanditon is small indeed.
Beyond that, the novel offers Hill’s usual cast of characters: Andy Dalziel, Peter Pascoe, Edgar Wield, and the nemesis Frannie Roote. They blend in well with the resort town characters “rescued” from Austen.
Hill is an intelligent writer who seems to be having fun with the English literary tradition in all his books.
It’s a good read. Maybe not the very best of the Dalziel/Pascoe novels.
Trying out this widget that lets me post my GoodReads reviews to my blog. I am not the real Hill fan on this blog and I leave it to, in fact invite, Poppysmatus to give us his take on the novel.
Meanwhile, here is also my GoodReads review of Claudia Emerson’s Late Wife:
Late Wife: Poems by Claudia Emerson
rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is a clean even eloquent collection of poems that somehow didn’t move me as much as it ought to have. I am willing to admit the fault to be in myself. Sometimes wonderful books come to us at the wrong time.
The book has three sections: Divorce Epistles, Breaking Up the House, and Late Wife. The last section, mostly loosely rhymed sonnets, is haunted by the ghost of the lover’s late wife. This is the section that spoke most to me, though I read it in a noisey cafeteria.
For a long time there would be the small
resurfacing of things you had forgotten
to throw away, or ceased to see at all.
These returned her, not to you, but to me
the way I had seen a spider unknot itself…
– from “Corrective”
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