Birds of a Feather (Maisie Dobbs, Book 2) by Jacqueline Winspear
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Book Reviews of Birds of a Feather (Maisie Dobbs, Book 2)
Book Review: Nice try
Summary: 3 Stars
Maisie Dobbs is between boyfriends when she is hired to find a magnate's missing daughter. A decade after the end of the Great War, she will find that that terrifying experience still haunts the people she interviews, including her damaged assistant, soldier Billy. The story is feminine but glib, with many convenient coincidences, like the complete files young Maisie Dobbs has on people, a la Sherlock Holmes. Maybe her convenient friends and knowledge are better explained in the first book of this series, which I have not seen--but then we shouldn't begin with this second volume. Maisie shows surprisingly little effect on her language and learning of her start as a scullery maid. Maisie's investigation initially rests heavily on feminine intuition, aka acute observation, meditation, centering, and listening to the remnant energies in the places of death.
Maisie drops lots of names of fashion products of the day (1930. The considerable period details, fashions, and brand names seemed like an excessively prominent appliqué onto a modern feminist plot--until the solution to the mystery reveals that the motivation, and not just the situations, could have happened indeed only in the post WW I period. Maisie's feminist independence is somewhat undercut by her frequent recourse to male mentors, but perhaps that need was still true at the end of the Roaring Twenties. Author Winspear thrice interrupts utterly the flow of the novel, by intruding pauses where we are not to know the content of vital interviews Maisie has--because the author hasn't thought of a better way to prevent us knowing the murderer's identity. Maisie supplies a good twist when she does reveal the murderer, and finds the inklings of romance. She leaves us hanging also concerning essential details of the murders, such as how the murderer gained access to the victims.
I chose this book because of the period in which it is set. I read the original hardback version, whose cover has a deliciously apt historic photograph of three young women in gorgeous party outfits, dressed to fend off the English rains. Their smiles really captured my heart. Note: the proof reading of the text by Soho Press was not the best.
Book Review: Different reading for me...
Summary: 3 Stars
I don't ordinarily read mysteries, but because the Maisie Dobbs series has a heroine with a background in the Great War, I was intrigued, and picked up the first two books (Maisie Dobbs and Birds of a Feather).
I detected a sort of, I don't know, romance-novel-element about these books, I'm not sure how to phrase it... For instance, there are so many descriptions of what Maisie and other women characters are wearing, and the rooms they occupy. There's Maisie's potential relationship with Inspector Stratton which is gently hinted at the end of Birds of A Feather. Even her rise from employment as a housemaid to being trained as a private investigator, has a kind of romance-gloss about it.
Although the historical background; the research involved in establishing the time period for these books, is pretty near faultless, it almost seems as if there's too much of it, somehow? I can't quite put my finger on it, but something doesn't ring true. BIRDS OF A FEATHER is set in 1930 but modernity creeps in somewhere. The author simply isn't successful in holding back the 21st century from her characters and their times.
Also, I found the mystery element somewhat bland. Although, as I said, I don't read many mysteries, when I do, I want them strong. I wanted to be more intrigued by the plot; to have a harder time (and for the author to give Maisie a harder time) solving the mystery. In the "mystery" aspect of this story, it was an OK, not a great, read.
Perhaps a habitual mystery reader would rate this novel higher. Personally I would have liked to have been made more curious about what's next for Maisie Dobbs. Unfortunately, having read the first two books, they didn't succeed in leaving me with an appetite for more of her stories.
Book Review: Less shock than ongoing curiosity
Summary: 3 Stars
This book piqued my curiosity like nothing else. Maisie Dobbs is an excellent heroine because she is a woman each of us would like to know; at the intersection of Victorian self-discipline, Eastern mysticism, Jungian psychology and a smidgen of utilitarian philosophy, Dobbs is the yeoman person finding her way through the world with aplomb. We, the readers, looking for a world just distant enough not to touch us but enough similar that it can inspire our own, find strength in that. The mystery in it is more realistic than most in that although it is cryptic, it peels its own layers through a study of motivation and circumstances that are not what they seem, showing us both the cryptic and the mundane as two sides to the same coin. While it sometimes got a little too "teatime talky" for an American reader, perhaps, the quality is high and the characters only slightly hyperbolic. I would recommend this to any reader blessed with an attention span and a love for procedural mysteries.Book Review: Better Than A Finger In The Eye, I suppose.
Summary: 3 Stars
Slightly better than the first book. Not quite as hokey, but the new agey "aura sensing" involved in the investigating is pretty lame. The characters are rather dull and lack any depth or heart (Billy Beale and his phony accent are too much.) There is still too much pseudo-intellectual psycho-babble and a pretty thin subplot featuring Billy Beale drags the story down a little.
However, the main story is better in structure and content. (Although I figured out who the murderer was well before the fianle so it can't be that great.
And thank God the ridiculous Khan the "Blind Ceylonese Mystic" character is only mentioned briefly.
I'm willing to give Maisie one more shot though.
Book Review: Local color, yes; suspenseful, no
Summary: 3 Stars
Grab a quilt, a cup of hot chocolate, light the fire and curl up with Maisie Dobbs. I won't say much about the plot because others here have done that. If you want a perfectly drawn picture of post WW1 England open this book. Its hero is a woman suffering the effects of class separation, a war injury and loneliness while establishing her own career path. Throw in nascent techniques in meditation and drug rehab, and an introdution to Pilates in the 1930s, you have a mix of finely detailed fiction that lacks hardcore suspense. but who cares?