Get Your Hands On Uma Espia Imperfeita (A Kate Fansler Mystery #10) Originated By Amanda Cross Available Through Document
liked the first two books I read by Amanda Cross but it seems she wears a little thin with prolonged exposure.
Her characters are all surface, without growth or change so it's hard to care about them unless there's a constant supply of new ones.
You may ask why i keep reading them, Book club. Even if I liked the character of Kate Fansler as described in this book I probably still would have awarded it only one star due to the absurdities in the plot and the weakness of the dialog.
The author sets up ridiculous ultrareactionary straw men that Kate helps to bring down while teaching law students to rage against the machine.
This inThe villains in this book are caricatures of villains from decades earlier, That said, it is the smug righteousness of the heroine who is certainly willing to forgive herself her own weaknesses that really made this book so hard to stomach.
As for those absurd plot turns and awful dialog, I discuss a bit of each below I don't think it's a spoiler, but if you haven't yet read this piece of trash you might not want to read further.
It's several weeks into the semester in which Kate, a visiting professor of literature, and Blair, a tenured law professor at a small law school in Manhattan New York, not Kansas are setting students' minds ablaze with their "revolutionary" discussions of gender and the law.
A male law school student locks the classroom door, turns to Blair and says "I've had enough of your goddam bullshit and I'm going to show you how real men behave" and proceeds to assault the professor.
Blair goes to the floor with the studentassailant on top of him, One female law student picks up a chair and begins to beat the assailant whose name, Kate remembers, is Jake.
Kate and several other students follow her example and beat Jake with chairs until he rolls away from Blair, who gets on top of Jake and beats him with his fists.
Once the dust settles, Jake explains "I've been listening to all this propaganda, cases where guys rape girls because the damn girls can't make up their minds even when your balls are blue.
And what the hell are girls for anyway You people, you and this crazy dame, are polluting the whole atmosphere of this law school and of the country, and I intend to put a stop to it.
"
So we've got an assault in the middle of a law school lecture, The assailant is set upon by several people swinging chairs, but doesn't appear to be particularly harmed by the beating he receives.
He then stands and rationalizes the assault on the basis that the professor and his "crazy dame" sidekick are ruining the country by discussing rape when, after all, "what the hell are girls for anyway"
It seems that Blair never reports the incident to the dean of the law school or to the police.
For all we know, Jake returns to class the next week, Inside Kate's head we learn that her biggest takeaway from this incident is that she's turned on by Blair's "caveman" behavior.
If I could have given this book zero, I would have, Didn't remember I had read this, so I read it again! Pretty dire, actually, filled with political correctness and male chauvinist pigs and anger against educated women.
If thes in America were really like that, I'm glad I was/am living here in Italy.
Although author was supposedly a university prof, she certainly has no awareness of how courses are created, approved, etc.
Who creates a course a week before the semester Bah! I also remember liking Kate amp her relationship with hubby in years past but she is bored, unethical amp disagreeable in this one! The time I spent reading this is time I will never get back.
This was supposed to be a mystery, or at least involve some spying, Nothing close happened. A woman having a midlife crisis tries to make a death into a murder it is not, then gets a closed case to be reexamined all while teaching a literature class in a law school full of misogynistic students and faculty.
It probably didnt help that I have never read anything by John Le carre, who this author obviously loves.
reading challenge: a book you found in a little free library
Alphabet reading challenge: N New York I have always liked Amanda Cross mysteries.
They are so literate. This mystery has quotations from John LeCarre before each chapter, one character identifies with George Smiley, another with Hardy's Tess.
There are references to other authors and one to Greek mythology, There are many subplots and is a very intriguing mystery, Kate Fansler is asked to coteach a course on the law and literature at a notverygood law school, while her husband Reed is leading a project there to aid women in prison in filing appeals for wrongful convictions.
The school is unfortunately very sexist, with the only female law professor having recently died, ostensibly from a fall in front of a truck in New York Citys chaotic traffic an older staff member, however, thinks this might not have been an accident and she asks Kate to investigate.
The more Kate digs into the culture of the school, the more misogynistic she finds it, but whether that in itself is reason enough for murder is another question.
This novel, the eleventh in the series, was published inand to me was chiefly memorable for its bleak view of gender politics in thes I certainly dont remember that time as being so very misogynistic, but then I was in San Francisco at the time, not NYC, so perhaps that accounts for it.
In any event, Kate and Reed are also going through a rough patch in their marriage, which seems to stem from boredom more than anything else I found that subplot kind of irritating.
Each chapter is prefaced with a quote from John LeCarrés work, involving espionage, but since I havent read those books, the allusions were lost on me.
After the gem that was “The Players Come Again,” this one is a bit of a disappointment for me mildly recommended, but really only for completist readers of the series.
Kate
Fansler is a professor of English Literature and her husband, Reed, is a Law School professor.
They are invited to teach one semester of Literature and Law for Kate and set up a clinic to help women in prison for Reed.
The law school where they will be teaching is a mediocre one with a very conservative faculty.
The one woman faculty member the law school had, was run over by a truck, Was she pushed Kate meets a woman who works at the school who thinks she may have been murdered.
Very intelligently written. Highly recommended.
This is a love story, The love between a wife and husband of mature years, between a mother and daughter, and even the love of literature that allows people to find wisdom for their own lives between the pages of a book: those are the heart of the story.
To the exact extent that love is a mystery, this book is a mystery, and not a bit more.
It is not a whodunnit, We know from the start that Betty Osborne killed her husband, Fred, It is not a whydunnit, We know although the faculty of Schuyler Law School, where he taught, try to dismiss it as too vulgar to regard that he was abusing her and she killed him out of desperation, before "battered women syndrome" was named or understood.
It is a bit of a spy storythe title is truth in advertisingand the epigraphs from sitelinkJohn le Carré at the head of each chapter are well chosen and pertinent as one would expect from a professor of literature writing spy fiction.
So, if you are interested in afeminist look at a stodgy law school, and if you're the kind of person who likes reading popular fiction that makes them want to reread sitelinkTess of the DUrbervilles and sitelinkMiddlemarch and look up case law on sex discrimination, then this may be the perfect book for you!
But really, all we detectives do, amateur or professional, even private eyes, even the police, is change the direction of events.First off this is NOT a mystery, Nothing remotely resembling a mystery occurs in this book, Kate Fansler is a literature professor, Her husband Reed is teaching a law clinic at Schuyler law school and Kate decides to coteach a law and literature class there for the semester.
None of us really solves anything anymore, do we We just try to alter history, however slightly.
Now let me get that drink,
The book is essentially one long, boring case for feminism and how horribly women, at least in the's, are treated at universities.
The only vague hints of a mystery are that the only female teacher at the school was run over by a bus but this is quickly shown to be an accident.
There are lots of random references to John Le Carre's books for no particular reason,
The whole law and literature class was ridiculous, Kate and her coteacher Blair don't decide on the date and time for the class until the week ahead of time let alone what the class will be covering.
A student randomly beats up Blair during class and Kate is not sure what they should do about it, how about report the student the police for assault and have him expelled from school.
Nope, all she does is think Blair is sexy for beating the student up in return, gag.
Kate also annoyed me because she thinks it's fine to cheat on her husband but gets extremely jealous when another woman flirts with him.
I only finished this book because it is short and I thought something eventually must happen, I was wrong NOTHING happens.
I'll definitely be avoiding this author in the future, Harriet the Spy, in a mystery whose title transparently is modelled after a le Carré title, Most of the quotes are by le Carré as well,
A more difficult subject, battered wives as well as male bastions of misogeny who in particular ignore older women.
A book worth reading, with a nice twist or two at the end, In backfilling my GR with books read decades ago, I suspect I am ranking many of them lower than I would have if ranked at the time.
Ah well, so it goes if I don't remember them well, I suspect they should get no more than "it was OK.
" This is myth reading of one of theKate Fansler mysteries, This book is not a mystery but a literary nod to John le Carré's Smiley couched within a treatise on women's equality very much of this Uma Espia Imperfeita's publication date of.
Innocent readers ofwho were not around in the's can easily dismiss this book as boring and even confusing.
I was around and do remember theworld conference in Beijing working to gain gender equality, Obviously this was a recurring theme for this author, so if this crusade holds no interest, this book should be avoided.
Otherwise, we get Kate and Reed working at a law school in a temporary positions one summer.
The men who run the school are painted with a broad and damaging brush,
It's justpages, so that shortens the discontent, Mostly, even though I like the Kate Fansler character, this book does not work, I can almost envision the author sketching out the plot, adding events that might provide drama and then pasting it together to meet a deadline.
The problem for me is she added some personality characteristics to Kate that are somewhat indigestible,
Can't recommend this one unless feminist struggle is your thing,
One incident at the school has someone pasting Kate's head onto a Hustler centerfold and passing it around the school and its male faculty.
"The idea isn't shocking anymore it's on a par with being told that all feminists hate men and won't wear makeup.
. . it's the hatred and the fear, The degree to which some men are threatened by feminism, "
The "spy" character of the Uma Espia Imperfeita's title is an older woman who has followed Smiley's patterns in setting herself up with a new identity with a purpose and that purpose pulls Kate and Reed to that law school for a reason.
Library Loan.