When A Good Book Ends

My sister Tuna really likes to be near my mom. I like to be near my mom too but Tuna really likes to be near my mom. Once at the train station my mom and I were waiting to put Tuna on a train back to college. Tuna went to buy a magazine and told us not to move. We moved. Some seats opened up and we moved twenty feet to go sit down. Tuna of course came back, panicked and promptly had my mom paged on the loudspeaker. When we rushed to the security desk, Tuna just shrugged and said "I wanted you to show up."

When I finish a good book I get a little homesick, a little restless and a little strange flutter of panic. I want to page the next good book to show up at once. I want one that will inhabit the exact silhouette of the last one. I want the edges to match. I am in the market for a congruent shape.

I loved Kate Morten's The Forgotten Garden. It was lyric, but stopped just short of being distractingly so. It was surprising but not irritatingly surprising. It was lit in a gentle, mellowed afternoon light and peopled with complicated, compelling people. The foreshadowings of this story, told in fluidly broken chronology, were heavy but amiable. It follows three stories: two trying to solve the mystery of the third. It works.

I went to the bookstore yesterday and there was no congruent shape. I was not surprised my luck had run out. The Forgotten Garden had already filled the empty shoes of Daphne, the story of Daphne Du Maurier, also set in early 20th century Cornwall. So I decided to up sticks and move to the London modeling scene circa now, and am going to read Wendy Holden's Beautiful People. Let's see if snappy, sharp language and a gorgeously kitch pink and blue cover will make me want a different shape.