Despite my eyes dealing with Their Troubles, I found that I could read this physical book (one of my Christmas gifts) more easily than an ebook. A World of Curiosities is the eighteenth Inspector Gamache novel from Louise Penny. This is a favorite series of mine, and this one is darker than they usually are, darker than I would usually read.
For me, there’s a trust that must happen between a writer and a reader, especially in a series. I trust Penny to the point that when I was absolutely sickened by a crime from the past, when I got a hard look at evil of a type that I can’t bear, and when a suspension of disbelief was required to accept that Gamache has been, in either his thoughts or his life, absorbed by people from the past who were never mentioned in the seventeen books previous, I kept reading. Even if this journey was going to be a challenging one, with tears and anxieties and sometimes revulsion, I held on to that trust. I realized, along the way, that the characters who’ve come to be familiar friends were on the same journey; they, too, grappled with the kinds of things or events that often haunt me.
I came away with two quotes (there are always bits of poetry or conversation in Penny’s books that stay around long after the last page) that held powerful meaning for me.
“You’re lying on your deathbed. You have one hour to live. Who is it, exactly, you have needed all these years to forgive?”
And a bit of dialogue that encapsulates more than I wish to expound on here:
“Anne Lamarque…was punished for many things, including being happy. So I wanted to capture that. The power of it. Happiness as an act of defiance. A revolutionary act.”
This isn’t a book review, because I don’t do those, but I give up very little writing space/time to things I don’t like. I’m glad and relieved to say that in the end, I trusted Penny and Gamache, and they didn’t let me down.