First Impressions by Charlie Lovett

First Impressions is another work of fiction that sucked me in through promises of Oxford and Jane Austen. It’s a literary mystery and perfectly readable but not great. (It is certainly no Possession, although it’s better than Pioneer Girl.)

One very annoying thing is that Sophie, the librarian/researcher/bibliophile main character, is a thief. Another one! (The main character of Pioneer Girl is also a researcher and thief.) You can’t solve a literary mystery without stealing? Without stealing from an Oxford library? I hope she loses her Oxford library card in perpetuity!

(The declaration new readers must agree to before being granted access to Oxford’s Bodleian Library, which I had to declare in 2005 when I took a continuing education course at Oxford, reads as follows: “I hereby undertake not to remove from the Library, nor to mark, deface, or injure in any way, any volume, document or other object belonging to it or in its custody; not to bring into the Library, or kindle therein, any fire or flame, and not to smoke in the Library; and I promise to obey all rules of the Library.”)

When the hot stud Wilson (who is after the same book Sophie is seeking) takes her to The Randolph (a fancy and expensive Oxford hotel), he admits she’s not the first women he’d brought there and “Somehow the fact that he had been here with other girls only made her want him more.” (p. 236). Ugh, really? Not a very good judge of character, our Sophie.

Also this happens, when Sophie hears some shocking news (p. 140):

“He rang off, but Sophie didn’t know it. She had fallen to the floor in a faint.”

Seriously? People do faint, I realize that, but how often do people really faint when they hear bad news, especially plucky and daring heroines like Sophie? I didn’t buy it.

The mystery is actually a fairly interesting one, and I enjoyed the made-up parts about Jane Austen as well as the factual information, but on the whole this was only an okay read for me because Sophie is not very likeable. Also, there is a romance (*SPOILER*) but the heroine spends way too little time with the good guy and too much time with the bad guy.

For die-heard Austen fans who also love literary mysteries and don’t mind heroines who need rescuing from their own foolish behavior. First Impressions can be found in the adult fiction section under the author's last name.

Unlike some of my friends and coworkers, I was not a huge Laura Ingalls Wilder fan growing up. I read the Little House books, but I don’t remember them having a big impact on my childhood reading. Laura Ingalls Wilder is woven into the literary mystery that is the plot of Bich Minh Nguyen’s novel Pioneer Girl.

Narrator Lee Lien is the daughter of two Vietnamese immigrants. Her father is dead; her mother and grandfather run a restaurant in the Chicago suburbs. Lee has disappointed her mother by getting a PhD in literature instead of something more practical. She continues to disappoint her mother by searching for work in her field, instead of resigning herself to the family business.

Lee is jealous of her older brother, who she sees as her mother’s favorite, and complains about her mother constantly. The family has an heirloom and a story. In 1965 a woman named Rose visited her grandfather’s café in Saigon and left behind a small gold pin. The pin sounds like a gift given to Laura Ingalls Wilder by her fiancé and described in one Wilder’s books. Lee becomes obsessed with trying to discover whether the Rose from the family story was Wilder’s daughter Rose.

There are some great passages in Pioneer Girl. There is a spot-on description of American “Chinese” buffets at the start of Chapter Three and this musing on small towns in the Midwest:

Mansfield, Missouri reminded me of how the past will not be banished. So many small, dying, basically dead towns in the Midwest looked like this. Where once-graceful, ornate courthouses and libraries – back when libraries meant something important, something civic – had been, if not torn down or boarded up, converted dozens of times over into shops and offices and apartments and barely surviving historical societies. There might even be the remains of an ambitious opera house. The nicest building in town was likely to be a funeral home.

Main Street had been built broad, to accommodate horses, buggies, and hitching posts. And surely local efforts tried to preserve the “historic downtown” area. Surely there were sad little parades on Memorial Day or the Fourth of July. In Mansfield a few local “shoppes” offered “olde-fashioned ice cream” and “sewing notions,” but it looked like most of the money was flowing in and out of the paycheck advance and pawn shops. (p. 140)

Still, I had some issues with the novel. The narrator is not very likeable. In addition to being a whiner, she is a thief. While doing research, she steals a photograph, a letter and a book. She talks about racism, ignorance about Asian culture, and stereotyping, but she herself stereotypes, and not in a self-aware manner.

A small band of researchers squinted over Hoover’s notes and newspapers, setting up cameras on tabletop tripods to record their findings. They were a standard lot – frumpy and frowning, pallid and disheveled. (p. 76)

At times I felt that the author was judging the Midwest and finding it wanting (and once the narrator refers to the University of Illinois as “UI,” something no true U of I graduate would ever do). There is a random, out-the-blue sex scene between Lee and someone she just met that seemed pointless.

However, especially in light of recent high profile cases in the U.S. of unarmed black men being killed by white police officers, the themes of this book are quite timely, and I loved the book’s cover. If you are a fan of literary mysteries or novels dealing with stereotyping and race in America, you may find Pioneer Girl an interesting read.