Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs has been my first (committed) attempt to listen to fiction, and overall, it’s been a success.  Some of the voices and occasional phrases come across differently in an audiobook–I do still prefer reading fiction to listening to it–but the British accent of the narrator added a nice bit of authenticity, and I certainly reached a point, like in any decent mystery, where I didn’t want to stop.  Some of Maisie’s investigative methods are a bit far-fetched for me, but I liked her and her cast of supporting characters; moreover, the why of the mystery did actually surprise me.  (Not the general result, but the psychology behind it.)  My one serious beef with the book as a whole was the lengthy flashback that makes up a least a third of the book.  My guess is that Winspear, as a first-time novelist, wasn’t sure how else to include the information; alternating chapters from the two time periods represented would have been better for the book’s structure, but it would also have been very hard to do.  In a first book, this is understandable (if not ideal), and I don’t imagine that subsequent books in the series will have quite the same issue.   The good news is that I do care about the next book, and audio does seem to be the way for me to read a series that I would likely never have gotten to otherwise.  If you like period mysteries–this one takes place both during WWI and in the late 20s–you should definitely give this one a try!