The Raging Storm

I have not read any of Ann Cleeves books previously--at least any that I have written down--but I have watched multiple episodes of two TV series based on her Vera and Shetland books. Not familiar with the protagonist in this series, Detective Matthew Venn.  I'm relying on Library Journal's review for a plot summary:

"Greystone, in England's North Devon, is a remote, forbidding, stormy coastal community where lifeboats are essential. When Jeremy Roscoe walks into the Maiden's Prayer, he's welcomed as a local legend, an adventurer who attended Greystone schools and left to sail the world, becoming a TV star and celebrity. Now he's right there, renting a cottage, buying rounds in the bar every night. He slyly hints he's waiting for someone. But when he fails to show up one night, the locals feel cheated. Then the lifeboat is called out for a rescue, but it's too late--national treasure Roscoe is dead, in a stolen dinghy. Detective Matthew Venn and his small team report to Greystone, and it's a bitter return for Venn, who was there as a child with his parents' religious group, the Barum Brethren; some of the locals still belong to the group that Venn left. When another body is found, Venn realizes he's not the only one with bitter memories of Greystone. The third... in Cleeves's award-winning series is an atmospheric police procedural that builds on the other books while introducing fascinating suspects." This novel can easily be appreciated on its own without reading the previous two.

Booklist closes their review by saying, "Quiet tension, a moody atmosphere, and engaging characters heighten the mystery." There is also a nice summary of the story in Kirkus' review which closes with this high praise, "A surprising denouement moves this character-based mystery to the top tier." The New York Journal of Books rightly notes that the novel "includes the weather as a factor so strong as to qualify as a character—in this case, gray, cold, and wet, a ferociously windy antagonist that influences almost every character’s attitude." Their overall review is more lengthy and nuanced, starting by saying, "...for mystery readers who like boots-on-the-ground British police procedurals, book three in the Two Rivers series delivers." And they conclude their review, "...for readers who want a brainteaser to unravel by following the characters through the procedures of investigation—including coaxing needed information out of a recalcitrant, oftimes hostile community—The Raging Storm will keep them plenty intrigued." Publishers Weekly lands on the positive side, closing with "Cleeves crafts a devilishly intricate mystery that will surprise even seasoned genre fans, and Venn remains an appealing lead every bit as memorable as the author’s Vera Stanhope or Jimmy Perez."

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal

I was unaware of author Jeanette Winterson's fame (the BBC adaptation of her novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit won a BAFTA for best drama) when I started this book, although she does talk about it in this straight out memoir of a miserable childhood in an adoptive home and her struggles to form strong close relationships as an adult. "When my mother was angry with me, which was often, she said, ‘The Devil led us to the wrong crib.’
 The image of Satan taking time off from the Cold War and McCarthyism to visit Manchester in 1960 – purpose of visit: to deceive Mrs Winterson – has a flamboyant theatricality to it. She was a flamboyant depressive; a woman who kept a revolver in the duster drawer, and the bullets in a tin of Pledge. A woman who stayed up all night baking cakes to avoid sleeping in the same bed as my father." Also when she was angry, her mother would beat her, lock her in the coal hole, or lock her outside the house all night. If her father was working night shift, he would let her out/in when he got home. If not, she "sat on the doorstep till the milkman came, drank both pints, left the empty bottles to enrage my mother, and walked to school."
Winterson describes how literature and poetry saved her psychologically as a child and how the creative process of writing saved her as an adult. "To avoid the narrow mesh of Mrs Winterson’s story I had to be able to tell my own. Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out."
I am generally not a fan of memoirs (with some notable exceptions, like May Sarton's) and it was a struggle to get through this book for me. Still there were some very astute observations that I had to write down.
"Mental health and emotional continuity do not require us to stay in the same house or the same place, but they do require a sturdy structure on the inside--and that structure is built in part by what happened on the outside."
"I love the way cats like to be half in half out, the wild and the tame..."
She describes books as thresholds where the author's story "crosses the threshold from my world into yours."
"Books for me are a home...you open a book and you go inside."
"Unconditional love is what a child should expect even though it rarely works out that way. I didn't have that and I was a very nervous watchful child."
"When love is unreliable and you are a child, you assume that it is the nature of love--its quality--to be unreliable."
"For most of my lie I have behaved in much the same way because that is what I learned about love. Add to that my own wildness and intensity and love becomes pretty dangerous. I never did drugs, I did love--the crazy reckless kind, more damage than healing, more heartbreak that health."
"I had no idea that love could be as reliable as the sun. The daily rising of love."
"It is never too late to learn love. But it is frightening.
When talking about leaving home she said,"You always take it with you. It takes much longer to leave the psychi place than the physical place."
Said that in the post WWII move away from neoliberal economics, in order to rebuild societies, "It was a real advance in human consciousness towards collective responsibility; an understanding that we owed something to each other. Society. Civilisation. Culture."
"The more I read, the more I felt connected across time to other lives and deeper sympathies. I felt less isolated."
Glowing reviews abound: The Guardian, The New York Times, The Independent, The Telegraph, The Washington Post, Publishers Weekly 

I Want to be Left Behind

Brenda Peterson is a nature writer primarily, but this is a memoir of her life being raised by devout Southern Baptists who are part of the 47% of Americans ( according to her with no source cited for the figure) who believe in the Rapture. Her father worked for the US Forest Service and she was raised largely in and around national forests and grew to have a deep and abiding love for nature and the flora and fauna and waters and mountains that comprise it. She was the only one in her family who simply couldn't accept the idea of leaving the earth behind as an end goal, and her family always thought her ideas were definitely weird. This is her collection of memories of family get togethers and conversations that dealt with these conflicting philosophies.
Ms Peterson lives in Seattle, one of the most "unchurched" major cities in the US...no wonder I felt so at home there! For the remainder of us who don't believe in this version of the end of our days, and for myself who doesn't buy into organized religion of any stripe, this was a fairly painless way to learn a bit more about the devoutly religious. I know I should read the bible, but not sure I ever will, even though each chapter of this book opens with a scripture citation which made me wonder what I would find there. I finished the book because I wanted to understand how she reconciled these divergent forces in her life. I guess I would say that she accepts her family and values them for what is good in them, without buying into their beliefs. She is encouraged by the fact that the generation that comes after her (nieces and nephews) seem more attached to this earth and to trying to do good things here, rather than ignoring the problems as she fears many "true believers" do. The subtitle of the book is "Finding the Rapture Here on Earth" and that is the predominant thread in her personal belief system--that this earth and everything on it, is part of any divine spirit, and deserves our full attention to preserve it as best we can. A quote I loved that she included went something like this..."Extinction is not good stewardship." Indeed.