Monday's Reviews Today: Atkinson's New Mystery & Vowell's Puritans

-- Publishers Weekly, 7/25/2008 8:00:00 AM

Kate Atkinson's "stellar" new mystery, When Will There Be Good News?, PI Jackson Brodie is back tracking a 30-year-old family murder. Juggling various storylines and a shifting timeline, Atkinson "brilliantly, simultaneously ties up loose ends from Turn and opens new doors for further Brodie misadventures." In sarah Vowell's "witty" The Wordy Shipmates the author visits our Puritan roots, tracing the 1630 journey of notable colinists to the New World. Our critic notes: "Gracefully interspersing her history lesson with personal anecdotes, Vowell offers reflections that are both amusing and tender."

When Will There Be Good News?
Kate Atkinson. Little, Brown, $24.99 (320p) ISBN 978-0-316-15485-7
In Atkinson’s stellar third novel to feature ex-cop turned PI Jackson Brodie (after One Good Turn), unrelated characters and plot lines collide with momentous results. On a country road, six-year-old Joanna Mason is the only survivor of a knife attack that leaves her mother and two siblings dead. Thirty years later, after boarding the wrong train in Yorkshire, Brodie is almost killed when the train crashes. He’s saved by 16-year-old Regina “Reggie” Chase, the nanny of Dr. Joanna Hunter, née Mason. In the chaos following the crash, Brodie ends up with the wallet of Andrew Decker, the recently released man convicted of murdering the Mason family. Enter DCI Louise Monroe, Brodie’s former love interest, who’s tracking Decker because of a recent case involving a similar family and crime. When Dr. Hunter disappears, Reggie is convinced she’s been kidnapped and enlists the reluctant Brodie to track her down. A lesser author would buckle under so many story lines, but Atkinson juggles them brilliantly, simultaneously tying up loose ends from Turn and opening new doors for further Brodie misadventures. (Sept.)

The Wordy Shipmates
Sarah Vowell. Riverhead, $24.95 (272p) ISBN 978-1-59448-999-0
Essayist and public radio regular Vowell (Assassination Vacation) revisits America’s Puritan roots in this witty exploration of the ways in which our country’s present predicaments are inextricably tied to its past. In a style less colloquial than her previous books, Vowell traces the 1630 journey of several key English colonists and members of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Foremost among these men was John Winthrop, who would become governor of Massachusetts. While the Puritans who had earlier sailed to Plymouth on the Mayflower were separatists, Winthrop’s followers remained loyal to England, spurred on by Puritan Reverend John Cotton’s proclamation that they were God’s chosen people. Vowell underscores that the seemingly minute differences between the Plymouth Puritans and the Massachusetts Puritans were as meaningful as the current Sunni/Shia Muslim rift. Gracefully interspersing her history lesson with personal anecdotes, Vowell offers reflections that are both amusing (colonial history lesson via The Brady Bunch) and tender (watching New Yorkers patiently waiting in line to donate blood after 9/11). (Oct.)