The Cruelest Month

I’ve really enjoyed the world and the characters that Louise Penny has created in her Chief Inspector Gamache series, but I feel she needs to be called out for her persistent fat shaming in these books. Anytime she introduces a character who is overweight (which is often), she can’t resist referring to that character as “massive” or “huge.” And she doesn’t drop the mockery; later references often refer to how the character takes up so much room on a sofa or struggles to reach over his/her “girth” to grasp something. Many of her characters are quirky and very likeable, but she doesn’t seem to want the reader to forget how fat they are. This is present in all the books and it becomes distracting. I love the pace, the tone, and the detective work in these books, but sheesh…quit it with the blatant hostility toward larger folks.

I have listened to these books on audible and read them through paper and kindle. 12 books is not enough. I did not read them in order and didn’t have any issues with that. It made it more interesting that way. Am now going back and going in order again. After a long day, it is great to escape into Three Pines.

**Please help and select if you thought this was helpful!!

Louise Penny’s books, set in Qubec, have such a sense of place that they could not be set in Ontario, British Columbia, or the Maritimes. Once again in The Cruelest Month, the almost-fairy-tale village of Three Pines is the setting for a murder case and Gamache and his team return to solve it. But besides the murder — which at first looks like something supernatural — Gamache is dealing with the continuing blowback from what we might call an Internal Affairs case that occurred before the first book in the series. Whom can he trust among his team and his colleagues? This mystery was, for me, harder to solve than the murder of Madeleine Favreau in Three Pines. I was pretty sure who the murderer was, but the continual harassment of Gamache and his family had one surprise for me at the end. Gamache is a bit of a philosopher and fits well in Three Pines, where nearly every character has something important to say about life, art, or love. I came late to the enjoyment of Louise Penny’s work, and that’s a good thing because I still have nine books left to read. Very highly recommended.v

As usual, Louse Penny delivers an excellent read. She’s truly a superior writer. But I found this book frustrating. As with all the Penny mysteries I’ve read so far, there is the mystery at hand and simultaneously the meta-mystery that spans the whole series (the Arnot case). Perhaps its my slow reading pace, or the fact that I was actively reading two other books at the same time, but I found the number of red herrings thrown in on the Arnot case very confusing in this book. Who is a friend of Gamache? Who a traitor working against him? This book takes attention. I don’t recommend approaching it as i did. Give it your full attention and I think you will be richly rewarded.

In a literary landscape of detective murder mysterys where the protagonist is hard bitten, atheistic and cynical, and holds these values as virtues, it has always been refreshing to come across another Louise Penny novel. She infuses Her books with grace, friendship and life joys. Both her settings and her style can best be described as pastoralAs far as you can get from the gritty LA or New York most readers are familiar with. In this book her descriptions of the scenes sparkle, and the conversations between her characters are remarkably alive, witty and consisting of a great deal of the kind of subtext that you find in conversations of close friends. The quality of writing is a very high I came across more passages that I immediately wanted to read out loud to someone than in any of her other books I have read. This is a wonderful thing to come across these books, and I plan on reading as many as I can as long as she will write them.

Galaxyaudiobook Member Benefit

- Able to comment

- List watched audiobooks

- List favorite audiobooks

- Bookmark will only available for Galaxyaudiobook member