Is there anything better than an impulse book from the library? All of the joy of an impulse bookstore purchase but for free!

Tangerine by Christine Mangan was just such a find – I went to library to pick up a few history books and added this to the stack. Described as a Hitchcock-like thriller the first half of the book was full of tension and doubt. Why won’t Alice leave the house? What has made Lucy come across the world to find her? How did they go from as close as you can imagine to essentially strangers? The second half of the book answers all of those questions but with a little less flair than I’d hoped for. Once you find out who each of our main characters are and their thinking it because very easy to guess their next move. But it also says something about Mangan that she was able to create two main characters I knew that well in the end…

The Green Man of Eshwood Hall by Jacob Kerr pulled me in with its gorgeous cover – black and bright green with a pattern of foliage full of both the beauty and the danger of the forest with birds and butterflies next to snakes and skeletal hands. The title sold me just as quickly since one of my favorite childhood story collections was just stories about the mythical green man[1]. In this version he’s a powerful creature who reaches out to a young girl with a flighty father, a cruel mother, and two younger siblings who are nothing but a burden to her. Normally I’m very open minded when reading anything related to folklore but this one disappointed me because it was a bit uneven. Izzy is our main character, but we sometimes switch perspectives to her younger sister. The relationship in and amongst her family is complicated but not fully fleshed out because of the brevity of the novel. The trades and conversations between Izzy and the Green Man are certainly the highlight of the text but their relationship doesn’t begin until the second half of the book. I think it either needed to be a longer text or have a smaller cast of main characters to really work but there are certainly passages and moments that make the text worth reading if you have an interest in folklore retellings.

Black Gold: The History of How Coal Made Britain by Jeremy Paxman is an excellent example of a journalist writing history. Thanks to his years both as a newspaper reporter and television broadcaster he knows how to research a topic just as well as how to hold a reader’s attention. Although it’s a chronologically structured book Paxman isn’t just laying out the history of the coal industry, he wants to remind readers of the significance of coal for Britain. His thesis, clearly articulated in the introduction is that coal made modern Britain what it is today and just because of the tumultuous and emotional history and end of the industry, it does us no good to forget its importance.

The Ghost Slayers: Thrilling Tales of Occult Detection edited by Mike Ashley is part of a British Library series of stories and works that have been sitting in the Library’s archive for decades (or centuries) and are not easy for the general public to access. This volume of the series focuses on detectives looking into hauntings but before you think of Sherlock Holmes and The Hound of the Baskervilles these stories usually end up with real ghosts at the heart of the mystery instead of big dogs and evil living men. (Although my favorite tale, The Searcher of the End House, does manage to involve both the living and the dead.) If you love a mystery and a ghost story, this book will introduce you to a whole new cast of detectives.

[1] The Green Man: Tales from the Mythic Forest put together by editors Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling.