"Illiterate" (read: dyslexic) working class home help kills her well-meaning but utterly clueless upper class employers.  The end.  (And because it's an inverted mystery, we know literally from the first sentence that this is going to happen.)  Aaaannnd ... I'm out.

I'm not merely bored, though.

Chiefly, I'm furious at Rendell for deliberately framing dyslexia:

(1) as a class issue (which it patently is not and never has been), and

(2) what is infinitely worse, as the trigger that causes a psychopath who is secretly morbidly ashamed of her lack of literacy to fatally lash out at others.

Shame on you, Baroness.  You ought to have known better.

Let no part of the blame fall on Carole Hayman, however, whose spirited reading made me give this book way more of my time than I should have.

Professed - Nicola Rendell

This book started out fun and a nice change from my rom reading glut. I love a masquerade and I also love that this book accurately portrayed the obsessive OMG-I-think-about-you-all-the-time nature of attraction and falling for someone. I also enjoyed the alternating first person present POV and college setting. But about 70%, it went off the rails. 

What I enjoyed: the author's voice, the heroine is sex-positive and independent, the college setting, and that it was erotic romance.

What didn't work for me: the main conflict seemed to get fixed too quickly and easily, some of the kink-choices (i.e., writing on a person with a sharpie, nylon rope) took me out of the story, and I felt like the characters--he, a philosophy professor and she, a philosophy major NEVER wrestled with the huge power imbalance in their relationship. They didn't want to get caught because of the impact it would have on his job and her scholarship, and there was a slight acknowledgement (in their heads) of their age difference, but nothing about how she was a student in his class, and lived in a dorm that was somehow under his "domain" or whatever.

So, this forbidden romance trope, especially with a new to me author, just might not work for me. Sigh. But, I finished the book and am glad these two philosophy lovers ended up together. 

I will have to take a break for the Indigo buddy read next week, but for now, these are next up on my metaphorical reading pile.

I have a big mystery week planned!

I'm going to finish Silverhill by Phyllis Whitney tomorrow, and I only have three stories left in Double Sin. From there, I will move onto a reread of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (yay) and the buddy read of Murder on the Nile, which takes place on Tuesday. 

I've also broken down and bought The Yellow Dog, which is the 6th Maigret, and - according to Tigus - is a good one! I am excited to read it. It should arrive tomorrow.

Last - but surely not least - is Cyanide and Compliments, which is the 5th in the Pollard and Toye series. This series is available through KU, and I've read the first 4 in a couple of weeks. They are silver age, first published in the 1960s, and are a lot of fun.

That's probably enough for a week, right? But if I make it through all of those, I'm going to read Going Wrong by Ruth Rendell, because I need a little psychological suspense in my life.

Les Misérables, the historical classic novel set during the French Revolution and written by Victor Hugo in 1862, may never be seen the same way again after you read this YA sci-fi re-imagining. Sky Without Stars is the first in a series of novels in the System Divine set on the planet Laterre, where the divide between wealthy and poor is massive, and signs of revolution are everywhere.

There is so much to say about this book that it’s hard to know where to start in describing it, especially without revealing too much. While the size of it is daunting, its pace is even and kept me enthralled throughout; I didn’t want to put it down at all over an entire weekend. You also don’t have to know the story of Les Misérables (and many readers will likely only know the story from the several films of the same name) so I'll be a heathen and say it doesn’t matter if you haven't read the original book this is based on.

This glorious epic novel follows the lives of Chatine, Alouette, and Marcellus, and we gradually find out how a thief, a guardian, and a general can have such desperately different lives but actually have a lot in common.

Within the Frets of the planet Laterre, Chatine survives as a thief, her parents run a gang, and she hides her identity by posing as a boy. Beneath the city in The Refuge, Alouette lives within the Sisterhood, protecting the only surviving library of the Old World and unbeknownst to her, has been living her life behind a web of lies. Meanwhile, Marcellus, grandson of General Bonnefaçon, struggles with the responsibilities of living up to the standards of his grandfather and doubts the government he is supposed to serve and stand by. The paths of these three characters intersect in a fascinating world that melds scenes from Hugo's epic novel with a space-age future where humans have inhabited multiple planets many centuries from now. I found all three of them to be multi-faceted and to constantly be in tune with what was going on around them, and even when they were struggling or seemingly at their worst, I found myself pulling for them.

I was easily drawn in with the excellent world-building, which has shades of rebellion that made me think of Star Wars, but the new planet that everyone has inhabited still feels very French, with Français used throughout the book, so it keeps the heart of Les Misérables close. The science fiction comes across as plausible and frighteningly realistic (the best kind to read, in my opinion!). I lapped up all the details in this world that was created for these characters: Everyone has electronic ‘Skins’ implanted in their arms, and audiochips in their ears, and the squalor that everyone lives in is hard to digest; it made me think of Bladerunner, that fusion of the old and new. The very fact that the written word has become extinct, that books have become extinct (and protected by the Sisterhood) is heartbreaking. Being able to actually read has also become a rare skill.

The planet is illuminated by three fake Sols and the moon has become a prison colony, even the use of fire has been banished. It seems there is some forest on the outskirts of the city and on the periphery of LeDome; all of these environments and areas are sketched out in a map in the front of the book. There are also other planets described in the System Divine and I really hope they are visited in subsequent novels in the series.

Authors Brody and Rendell have created an entire imagined parallel universe that I could’ve kept on reading about for hours longer, no matter how sobering and dark.

There is action, adventure, science-fiction, romance, the feeling of reading a history, as well as political intrigue, an underground revolutionary uprising called the Vanguarde. Based on one of the greatest novels of all time, ‘Sky Without Stars’ depicts a future where the chasm between classes has grown exponentially, but the layers in between make this novel irresistible.