the personal journal of Brent Stewart
My reading journal has been dormant, but I have been reading! I’m going to try to catch back up, so you’ll see several entries in short order.
The Bellingwood series by Diane Greenwood Muir has been a favorite of my step-mother’s for quite a while. She recommended it to my wife and - after watching her rapt reading and listening to her laugh in bed - I was convinced to try them.
My stepmom dismissed them as silly enjoyable mysteries, and on that level she was right and understated. The books (I’ve read the first ten so far) are fairly straightforward. Polly has moved back to Iowa and has made a lot of friends. She also gets involved in the lives of people in her community. There’s a lot of dealing with the problems of children and teens, local romance, and family problem elements in this part. At some point, she discovers a body and there’s some kind of threatening circumstance. Then the book moves toward advancing the story of everyone’s lives - kids figure it out, people fall in love (or don’t), families are reconnected, all while clues to the mystery are interspersed in the storyline. The denouement solves the mystery and gets everyone to a good place until the next book.
In the first book, All Roads Lead Home, Polly has inherited money after her father has passed and moved back to Iowa. She’s bought an old school building and started turning it into an Inn when bodies are found hidden in the plaster. This book introduces the main characters and establishes some of the critical relationships.
These books read like a weird cross of Murder She Wrote and Star Trek. Polly is investigating a mystery when she should know better. She’s a bit sturdier than Angela Lansbury, but she’s commonly over her head and her ideals lead her into trouble. But there’s an air of hopefulness. I can only describe it as the suspension of disbelief that let’s one assume that everyone is basically good, with a few exceptions. It’s this sense of secular righteousness that reminds me of Star Trek. At the same time, the lives of all the characters advance - people get married, have kids, get houses - so there’s this sense of forward movement between stories.
I felt the mystery developed some narrative tension, but it’s the soapy aspect of following people’s lives that really hooked me to binge. Yes, I enjoyed the read.
I really have enjoyed reading these books (I read ten in a row). I’ve lemented how Reddit and the like have encouraged me to spend more time on browsing highlights of short articles and less on deep reading. I’ve missed that ability to just lean into a book and get lost, and you don’t always get that. These are just really fun.