Postcrossing Blog

I’ve been promising for a while that I’d write a review of Emmi Itäranta's The Moonday Letters. This one’s a bit different from the other books I’ve reviewed here so far, since it’s a sci-fi novel written in the form of letters, set in a future where humans have left Earth and colonised Mars. The main character, Lumi, is from Earth, and writing letters to her partner, Sol, while they’re parted.

The book is a bit of an “eco-thriller”, but from the sidelines—we see it from Lumi’s point of view, and she’s not really in the thick of it anyway, she’s just deducing what’s going on from the outside. I think it’ll also read as a fantasy novel for most readers, given the shamanic-type elements of how Lumi does her healing and also interacts with the world. It’s an interesting mix, and one that I didn’t quite like myself (though I know plenty of people who would find it very exciting!).

I’ve talked before about how I love the way letters reveal personality, but there’s a downside to letters which I think kind of gets at what my problem was with the book. Letters are usually written after things happen. You can get a little mileage over a letter interrupted by events and resumed later, but it’s pretty rare for someone to be able to actively write a letter while things are happening.

It’s also a difficult way to get a good grasp of characters and situations. Personally, when I’m writing a letter, I don’t include a lot of physical detail about what I’m doing and how I do it. If I write to my grandmother that I’m done with my exams, then I wouldn’t describe the process of actually taking the exams too much—but in a novel, that description is exactly what you want to see! Itäranta has been careful to include quite a lot of description, to help characters and situations come alive, and I think it made the book less credible as a collection of letters (much as I like a good epistolary novel). She wouldn’t need to describe certain things to her partner: they’ve both seen them, and even if they hadn’t, there’s no need to write to this level of detail.

So that for me kind of spoiled the immediacy of the novel and the “authenticity” of the letters—I didn’t really “believe” (in the context of the story) that these were letters, which is sad, because letters as a form can do so much.

This all makes it sound like I really didn’t like the book, though, and that’s not quite true. Despite feeling the description didn’t seem “realistic” for letters, there’s some beautiful imagery, and I found the idea of the story fascinating. The author chooses to end the story on a pretty ambiguous note, which I also thought was brave and interesting; it might make it a little less satisfying, for some, but I thought it was a nice touch.

Overall, as you can see, not a total winner for me, but I don’t regret spending the time on it!

Next time, I’ll be reviewing a book I’ve wanted to talk about for a while, Lydia Pyne’s Postcards: The Rise and Fall of a Social Network. I put so many little sticky notes in this one! I’ve also promised to review Lynne Kolze’s Please Write, which just came out… and I have a post-related classic mystery called Post After Post-Mortem, by one of my favourite Golden Age crime writers, E.C.R. Lorac, which I’ve been saving for a rainy day and a Postcrossing review. So there’s plenty to come!

When I posted my last review, I promised the next would be about Emmi Itäranta’s The Moonday Letters. I still plan to review that novel, but in honor of Letter Writing Month last month, I thought I’d pause for a moment and review the book I just finished: Simon Garfield’s To The Letter: A Curious History of Correspondence.

Garfield’s history opens with a story about the writer, and about his interest in a particular set of historical letters being auctioned off, but from there it goes all over the place. It discusses the Roman letters found at Vindolanda, the developing tradition of letters in Rome, and surveys history through discussing famous correspondents from Madame de Sévigné to Ted Hughes, and discussing how society reacted to letter-writing (such as the letter-writing manuals so common at one time).

Interspersed between each chapter, though, is my favourite part: a series of letters between a soldier named Chris and a woman back home named Bessie, written during the Second World War. Through their letters you come to know them, and even with such a small fraction of their letters included, you come to feel for them as they fall in love, and hope they managed to overcome the odds. The letters are a beautiful example of the power of letters to reveal character and allow someone to bare their heart, and I’m excited to discover now that there is a full volume of them available, My Dear Bessie.

Garfield makes this power clear as well, picking out passages from the other letters he discusses to highlight his points. One part that stuck out to me was the discussion of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, through Hughes’ own letters. (As a warning, though, that chapter can be quite upsetting, given the circumstances of Plath’s death, and given Hughes’ emotions about it as expressed in his letters.)

The whole thing made me wonder what my letters say about me, to be honest! I’ve always written letters here and there, and at the moment I write to my grandmother every week. It made me want to work a little more at it, and see if I can make my letters as lively as some of the examples here.

To the Letter was definitely an enjoyable read for me; I was more interested in some of the famous letter-writers discussed than others, admittedly, but Garfield’s enthusiasm for letter-writing—and for peeking in at the lives of people as revealed by their letters—is infectious. It’s a bit of a chunky book, but it flew by—especially with Chris and Bessie’s letters with each chapter, and wanting to know how things ended for them!

Next time, I promise, I’ll take a look at The Moonday Letters—before I forget the whole book, since it’s been a while since I read it! And in the meantime, don’t forget you can tell me about books about letters (fiction or non-fiction) in this topic on the forum (you may need to browse the forums a little before you can post in it, though!).

Ever since I started writing book reviews about books that involved mail in some way, people have made the same recommend­ation again and again. I promised last time, so I can’t get out of it now… yes, I’ve finally read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society!

The title makes it sound a bit quirky, but it’s worth knowing going in that it actually looks at the aftermath of the Nazi occupation of Guernsey. Many of the characters describe traumatic experiences, including the experiences of prisoners of war.

It also includes a lot of references to and discussion of a past romance between an islander and a Nazi (who was kind and sympathetic to her, and to others on Guernsey, who remember him fondly). I know that among the romance community there are a lot of people, especially those with personal connections to the Holocaust, for whom these types of romances are very upsetting, due to the fact that they can valorise characters who are implicitly or explicitly condoning Nazism. It isn’t the main romance of the book, but it is important to the story, and I didn’t want to review this without at least warning readers who might find that quite upsetting.

All that said, the book definitely has plenty of charm and quirk! The whole thing is told via letters, almost without exception, aside from one case where a private diary is used. This gives lots of room for characters and relationships to shine, which I’ve always really enjoyed. It can be difficult to make it read naturally; we don’t usually explain basic facts about our lives to our regular correspondents, after all! Letters can be so revealing, but it takes reading between the lines, and the best authors make that work in fictional letters too. I found the letters in this book mostly satisfying, and it’s made a little easier by the fact that many of the characters haven’t known each other before writing.

Because the whole thing rests on letters, the plot is somewhat basic; those characters and relationships have to carry the book. I will say that I would have preferred to see a couple more letters between a particular pair of characters, to develop things a little more and allow us to see them interacting and building a relationship. I was all on board for that relationship, but we see it mostly from outside after a certain point… it’d have been nice to get a better look at their growing friendship.

The thing that surprised me most, in the end, was the setting: I didn’t really know anything about Guernsey and its history, and now I want to!

My new review here will take us a bit further afield than Guernsey: I’ll be reviewing Emmi Itäranta’s The Moonday Letters. I have lots of thoughts about it already, so I’m looking forward to writing a proper review for everyone.

If you have ideas and recommendations for a book you’d like to see me review for this blog, get in touch! I have a topic on the forum for sharing these recommendations (you’ll need to be logged in to view it, and may need to browse the forum a little to open up all the areas first), or you can comment here.

As promised in my last book review (on Deirdre Mask’s The Address Book), this time I’m reviewing Rita Mae Brown's mystery novel, Wish You Were Here. And while we’re getting started, I mustn’t neglect to mention that, in fact, Rita Mae Brown had a co-author on this book, Sneaky Pie Brown, a cat which condescends to share her living space!

In my search for books about post, I’ve come across quite a few mysteries—including one by one of my favourite Golden Age crime writers, E.C.R. Lorac, which you can probably expect to see me review here sometime in the future. I try to select a range of different genres when I can, since I know that Postcrossers are a very diverse group with all kinds of interests… but nonetheless, the mysteries are compelling, and this book in particular got me thinking about why—but let me introduce it for a moment first!

Wish You Were Here is set in a post office, which gives the protagonist plenty of opportunity to snoop. The protagonist Harry is the postmistress, so she’s able to put two and two together when people start turning up murdered shortly after receiving mysterious postcards—a clue that the police would otherwise have missed.

That’s what I think is so appealing generally about using mail in some way in mystery stories. The things we write on our letters and postcards can be revealing of our personalities, and even addresses and postmarks can tell you a lot, even without peeking inside. The handwriting on the outside of an envelope can be the tiny telling detail that someone’s long lost auntie is about to make a triumphant return. In addition, postal workers can make a convenient witness, criminal, or provider of an alibi, or bring along the crucial evidence at just the right time.

In Harry’s case, the mystery is enlivened by interludes featuring cats, dogs, and other creatures, all sleuthing away at the mystery as well. For me, this was just a bit too cutesy; I’m not above anthropomorphising my own pets, but no matter how clever I tell them they are, my bunnies can barely sniff their way to their food bowls without great encouragement! I had difficulty with suspending my disbelief to imagine that a cat—even a clever cat—could reason out why someone might be the murderer… or that cats and dogs would talk amongst themselves exactly like humans do. That spoiled things a bit for me, though I think that touch of whimsy might be exactly what makes other people enthusiastic. Especially the pet-lovers amongst us!

I do love the idea of a postmistress being ideally placed to figure out a murder, all the same, and I got wrapped up enough in figuring out whodunnit that I finished the book in record time. I don’t think I’ll be continuing with the series, but it was an enjoyable read despite my doubts about our feline friends, and in this book at least, the postal system is pretty important, with threats/clues being delivered by mail, and Harry’s knowledge as the postmistress of Crozet giving her the information she needs to start working things out.

Don’t worry, I haven’t spoiled you on any of the clues, if this book sounds like your thing. There’s plenty still to discover in Crozet (especially judging from the number of books in this series).

Now that I’ve reviewed this one, I’ve promised plenty of times already that I’ll read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows), so I really better stick to it… and after that, who knows? E.C.R. Lorac’s Post After Post-Mortem is beckoning, but I’m hoping to find another non-fiction book to review first. There are a few on my wishlist, so watch this space!

Don’t forget, you can also make book suggestions to me in the forum thread I set up (you’ll need to be logged in to access it).

I don’t know about you, but as a member of Postcrossing, I take having an address for granted. I hadn’t thought about life any other way, nor put a lot of thought into my various addresses over the years. In the end, what got me wondering about it was helping out at Postcrossing, checking people’s addresses to make sure they were correct and learning about how different countries format their addresses.

Just at the right moment to answer some of these questions, I came across Deirdre Mask’s The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power. Do any of her opening questions — the ones that led her into the subject to begin with — sound as familiar to you as they do to me?

I set out to write a letter. I was living in the west of Ireland, and I had sent a birthday card to my father in North Carolina. I pressed a stamp on the envelope, and just four days later the card appeared in my parents’ mailbox. I thought, not particularly originally, that this should have been much more expensive than it was. And how did Ireland and the United States share the proceeds? Is there some accountant in a windowless back room of the post office, dividing each penny between the two countries?

In case you’re wondering, Mask does include the answers to those questions!

It was pretty surprising to me how much there was to say about addresses, and how little I’d thought about it. Mask picks apart the advantages and disadvantages of having an address, and discusses how some people in areas without addresses actually oppose any change. For people in politically unstable areas, having an address can be a bad thing, because it makes you easier to find — and no one is likely to be sending you postcards!

On the other hand, it makes all kinds of things more difficult: most documents for proving your identity rely upon you having an address and a traceable history. You can end up barred from working, having a bank account and signing up for government services, and once you’ve got into that situation, it’s difficult to get out.

It’s also surprising to me how recent some of these conventions are. Zip codes in the US were only introduced in 1963, and reading in Mask’s book about their introduction prompted me to look up the system of postal codes in the UK, introduced between 1959 and 1974. They’re so ubiquitous now that I didn’t even realise my parents might not have had postal codes when growing up!

One issue that Mask discusses that was particularly relevant for me (since I’m studying for my MSc in Infectious Diseases) was the importance of clear maps and precise locations for epidemiology. Ever since John Snow (not that one, GoT fans!) made a map of London to track cholera infections, epidemiologists have used maps and addresses to try to identify the causes of infection and the sites of transmission. Sometimes they need to use addresses to contact people and do follow-up work… but often the people most at risk of diseases like tuberculosis are people who have no fixed address, or live in improvised homes and shantytowns. How do we find those people and help them access the long-term treatment they need, without addresses?

The book is packed with all kinds of dilemmas like that — many of which I really hadn’t thought about before picking it up. It was pretty eye-opening, and I won’t be taking my address for granted again! What do you think; will you be giving this book a try? Has anyone already read it? I’d love to hear what you thought of it, if so!

The next review should be about Wish You Were Here (by Rita Mae Brown and her cat), but after that, I’m not sure! The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society features high on the list, since several Postcrossing members have asked my thoughts on it. I haven’t read it yet, but it’s ready on my shelf! But is there something you’d like me to review? You can make book suggestions to me in the forum thread I set up (you’ll need to be logged in to access it).