{"id":3837,"date":"2012-03-22T03:10:33","date_gmt":"2012-03-22T08:10:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.spritewrites.net\/?p=3837"},"modified":"2012-03-22T03:10:33","modified_gmt":"2012-03-22T08:10:33","slug":"into-the-stacks-birds-of-a-feather","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.spritewrites.net\/?p=3837","title":{"rendered":"into the stacks: birds of a feather"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em>Birds of a Feather<\/em>, by Jacqueline Winspear<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>From the jacket: &#8220;<em>Birds of a Feather<\/em> finds Maisie on another dangerously intriguing adventure in London between the wars. It is the spring of 1930, and Maisie has been hired to find a runaway heiress. When three of the heiress&#8217;s old friends are found dead, Maisie must race to find out who would want to kill these seemingly respectable young women before it&#8217;s too late. As Maisie investigates, she discovers that the answers lie in the unforgettable agony of the Great War.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><strong>My take:<\/strong> Empathic detective Maisie Dobbs has a new case. She and assistant Billy Beale have been hired to find and bring home the missing daughter of a self-made grocery mogul. Charlotte Waite is 32 and lonely, and this is not the first time she&#8217;s run away. Her father believes she&#8217;s being petulant and headstrong, but Maisie suspects there may be more to it than that. Could the murder of a young housewife be related? As Maisie investigates Charlotte&#8217;s past habits and contacts, she must also deal with Billy&#8217;s mood swings, stemming from lingering and chronic pain relating to a leg injury sustained during the war. And out at Lady Rowan&#8217;s country estate, it&#8217;s becoming more obvious that although her father remains optimistic about the future of the horses he&#8217;s raising that he is not as young as he once was.<\/p>\n<p>The second in an ongoing series, this novel focuses much more on Maisie&#8217;s case at hand than did the previous book, which split its time between the case and Maisie&#8217;s back story. In this instance, although we&#8217;re still getting little bits of it, and although we&#8217;re still dealing with a lot of repercussions from World War I, the story is a more hopeful one, in that we can see a path forwards for the characters. In fact, that&#8217;s probably what I thought was most important in this book. Maisie specifically asks a doctor about what separates those patients who recover from their injuries quickly from those who languish. His quick answer is that it&#8217;s acceptance of the injury\/illness (rather than getting stuck on the circumstances that led to it). He elaborates:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>One is accepting what has happened. Three is having a picture, an idea of what they will do when they are better, or improved. Then in the middle, number two is a path to follow. (p. 221)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And that&#8217;s probably what this novel is about. Finding the path forward to the future. A good lesson to take away from characters you can&#8217;t help but like.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Pages:<\/strong> 311<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Birds of a Feather, by Jacqueline Winspear From the jacket: &#8220;Birds of a Feather finds Maisie on another dangerously intriguing adventure in London between the wars. It is the spring of 1930, and Maisie has been hired to find a runaway heiress. When three of the heiress&#8217;s old friends are found dead, Maisie must race [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3837","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>into the stacks: birds of a feather - sprite writes<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.spritewrites.net\/?p=3837\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"into the stacks: birds of a feather - sprite writes\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Birds of a Feather, by Jacqueline Winspear From the jacket: &#8220;Birds of a Feather finds Maisie on another dangerously intriguing adventure in London between the wars. 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