You should Have known, Hons and Rebels, and the Burren Mysteries–reviewed by Lois

I read with interest, ahem, “YOU should HAVE known” (upper and lower case use as on the cover), by Jean Hanff Korelitz, it’s about a couple’s therapist and men and women, and I think that as wise women and wide readers, you know as much about the book from the title and this sentence, as you would by reading it. As we discussed, interesting subject, some genuinely interesting insights, interesting depiction of an Upper East Side Manhattan successful professional life and struggles, but oops, that’s redundant isn’t it, strike struggles. So after all those “interesting”‘s, why the attitude? Plot a tad contrived and predictable, maybe more than a tad. Oh well, accept it, that’s what the book tells you: nothing’s perfect, thinking it is, is an illusion. So I did read it to the end, which isn’t what I do when a book has nothing valid to say. Maybe it’s this year’s beach book

The Mitford Sisters

And the half-forgotten but never-forgotten Mitford reads, well, that’s an entirely different category. Of the many books they all wrote, I  think the one I had in mind and would recommend if the sisters’ upbringing is of interest, was “Hons and Rebels”, by Jessica Mitford, and whatever she followed it with.

The Cora Harrison book mentioned, set in medieval Ireland, is about a woman named Mara who is a Brehon–untranslatable, but means a lawgiver and legal scholar and judge under the historically accurately described system of Brehon Law. There are several books in the series, beginning with “My Lady Judge”. They are mysteries of sorts, and describe with great charm an Irish society, and an ingenious indigenous respected and functioning system of justice, which was literally wiped out by Henry VIII’s political might, and replaced in significant part with customs and laws more like those of England. But these books don’t go there, at least not all the way. They document in a gentle way, the last years of a certain kind of life in Ireland, and a certain kind of woman who lived it. And if there’s the distant rumbling of thunder of doom in the distance, the storm does not strike in this series–at least, not yet, and there have been 8 or 9 books so far.

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