Cornelia Read

Santangelo Academy is unique - a crazy school for crazy teens and their equally crazy teachers. The students all have "behavioral problems" (like beating people) and are on medication. The teachers too have past "issues." Madeline Dare, the newest teacher, has a secret or two herself. The headmaster, guru, chief therapist, David Santangelo incorporates some rather unconventional techniques into his educational philosophy. His methods are dubious, to say the least. Two students die in an show more apparent joint suicide after a party (I use the term, "party," loosely, because Santangelo Academy is not a partying place) - or, as Madeline suspects, was it murder? She, too, drank the punch and became extremely ill - was it poisoned and by whom? I really like Madeline Dare. She's strong, resilient and quick with an acerbic comeback. I thoroughly enjoyed Read's snappy dialogue and her feel for the setting and context of her characters. And, for once, I didn't guess everything before the end. A fresh, new find for me. I had fun - and that's a good thing! Think I'll try her other Dare book - Field of Darkness. show less

It is 1988, and cocaine, big hair, and Madonna are all the rage. Madeline Dare, a recovering debutante and cub journalist, lives in Syracuse, New York with her husband Dean. College-educated and a brilliant inventor, Dean is still a farmboy, a townie, and thus pretty much the direct opposite of Madeline, whose admittedly disjointed world growing up consisted in large part of coming out parties, summers at the extended family's "camp" in the Adirondacks, and boarding school. Madeline show more (sometimes Bunny, which is her Oyster Bay Long Island uber-WASP nickname) loathes everything about Syracuse except Dean and longs to get away. She works as a lifestyles reporter at the Syracuse Weekly, the local free rag, reporting in depth on such important topics as "Hot Drinks for Winter" and "Best Midway Food Eats."

When Madeline learns about the gruesome 1969 murders of two beautiful, young, and never identified girls, she is horrified and intrigued. When her father-in-law--in the spirit of "I know something nobody else knows" tosses a set of dog-tags he plowed up in the field where the girls were found across the table at her, Madeline is terrified; the dog-tags belong to her beloved older cousin Lapthorne. What can a girl journalist do but commence an investigation? This Madeline does, an investigation she doggedly pursues even as people she knows begin to fall by the wayside, and even as it takes her to places--physical, psychological, personal--she'd really rather not venture.

Cornelia Read calls her crime fiction "WASP Noir," and has an intimate knowledge of the culture about which she writes; she, herself, as the biography on her official website tells us, was "born into the tenth (and last) generation of her mother's family to live on Oyster Bay's Centre Island." The voice Read has created for Madeline's first person narrative is original and fresh. Maddie is smart and cynical, acutely self-aware and frequently self-deprecating. Her points of reference--cultural and pop-cultural, from Puccini to Joni Mitchell to the Brothers Grimm--are wide, deep, and extraordinarily clever (but without any did-you-catch-that-one authorial winks). I knew from the first page that I would like A Field of Darkness, but it was round about page 75 or so, when Maddie's mom "perkily misquotes Arlo Guthrie for the thousandth time," that I knew I would love it.

A Field of Darkness is a brilliant first novel, an original take on a genre which is all too frequently tired and hackneyed. show less

2.75 stars. this is a little hard to rate because i really enjoyed parts of this, but definitely not all of it, although i did mostly find her writing to be excellent.

i think, in the end, that i didn't like the mystery or feel like that was particularly well done, but that i did really like the rest. i thought the way she captured a way of thinking, the classism, the discontent, and also the friendships and love, was what carried this book. there was maybe a little too much voice; at times show more it felt like she was trying too hard, but mostly it felt really richly drawn, full of references that let you know where madeline came from and the things she cared about and related to. for that, i really thought this was great, and a truly excellent first book. i'm not totally sold on the mystery and there were a couple of significant chunks of the book where i stopped appreciating the voice and felt it was too overdone. so maybe that's a first book problem. her writing is absolutely good enough that i'd try her again. show less

First Line: When we first moved to Boulder, I was entirely too happy-- a state of being so rare in my experience that I found it rather terrifying.

Madeline's husband Dean found a job in Boulder, Colorado, and while he spends a lot of his time on the road as a salesman, Madeline is a stay-at-home mother of two toddler twin girls, India and Parrish. Her world couldn't be any more different from the life she knew in New York City.

At first Madeline is ecstatically happy, but as exhaustion wears show more her down, she becomes dissatisfied. Her world has shrunk to an endless round of taking care of two demanding babies, a house that is never clean, and a husband who, when he is home, is more and more critical of her.

When her mother and her friends tell her that she needs to do something outside the house just for her, she manages to get a job writing restaurant reviews for a local newspaper. The editor loves her writing and asks her to attend a neighborhood meeting in which fire department officials will advise residents on how to defend themselves against an arsonist who's been torching buildings in the area. The subject fascinates her, and Madeline becomes friends with one of the arson investigators. She even begins to do a bit of investigating on her own, but when the fires turn deadly and the stakes disastrously personal, Madeline finds that she needs every atom of courage she possesses to keep those whom she loves safe from harm.

When someone asks me to list my favorite writers of any genre, Cornelia Read is always in the top tier. Her creation, Madeline Dare, is the best blend of smart alecky, brave vulnerability that I've ever encountered. At first, I was hesitant with this book. Madeline as a mother? I chose not to procreate for a very good reason: I am not child friendly. Read made me forget all that as Madeline hauled her children all over town in a red wagon, as she fixed them broccoli, and made sure she packed the sippy cups and extra diapers. Madeline was a natural, and she made me forget that I'm not.

I cheered as she found the job at the newspaper so she could do something she liked to do that didn't involve babies... something that made her feel better about herself. She needed that because as the pages turned I had grave misgivings about the way her marriage was going, and so did her friends in Boulder.

The mystery concerning the arsonist is an intriguing one, but this book is about so much more than arson. It's about motherhood and marriage, it's about friendship and tragedy and grief. It's about standing up for yourself and those you love. There are many things in life that can turn to ash within the blink of an eye. As Madeline deals with all these issues, I was intensely emotionally involved. This sassy-mouthed woman with a big, big heart is one of the few fictional characters who can make me cheer, laugh, gasp, and cry within the space of a very few sentences.

If I didn't know better, I'd swear that Cornelia Read dips her pen in her own heart's blood as she writes. This is beautifully written, emotional, soul-searing and laugh-out-loud funny fiction at its very best. It's anyone's guess as to whose soul is bared the most throughout the book, Madeline's or Cornelia's, and it really doesn't matter. What does matter is that I want more. Lots more. show less