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Jul. 11th, 2020 09:43 amTuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts was described to me as "like the Westing Game, for adults, but also intensely Boston" and I am happy to report that this description is completely accurate -- especially the Intensely Boston bit. I hit this paragraph and I had to put the book down for the moment and reel at the truly devastating accuracy:
"They all considered themselves Black Cats, but within that there were subgroups, treasure-hunting gangs like pub trivia teams, representing their corners of Greater Boston. The Smoots had MIT; the Gay Mafia covered Eastie; The Highlanders, Somerville; The Green Monsters and Challahback Girls, Fenway and Brookline. Adama Is A Cylon -- the name of a trivia team she and Dex had gone up against more than once, which couldn't be a coincidence -- had parts of Cambridge."
YEAH, OK.
(I still want to know where the place is near the MFA that Lila Korrapati got an incredible-sounding falafel on the night she met Vincent Pryce? Please, Kate Racculia! Tell me what you know! A sincere plea from a falafel-starved ex-New Yorker.)
Anyway, the plot! Vincent Pryce is an elderly eccentric who dies dramatically of a heart attack at a charity auction, then launches a posthumous series of announcements inviting the city of Boston to participate in an elaborate treasure hunt game. Protagonists enmeshed in the quest include:
- Tuesday Mooney, most protagonist-y protagonist, a donor prospect researcher at a local hospital who declares herself perfectly satisfied with both her pleasantly detective-y job and her self-defined lifestyle as a Cool Goth Loner until the lure off the treasure hunt pulls her dramatically off-course
- Poindexter (Dex) Howard, Tuesday Mooney's current best friend by dint of constant effort on his part; a born diva who feels required to squash the most interesting parts of himself down most of the time to maintain his comfortable lifestyle and boring finance job and series of cute but boring boyfriends, and Has Regrets
- Dorry Bones, Tuesday's next-door-neighbor and occasional tutee, a sad and lonely teen not coping very well with her mother's death who thinks Cool Goth Loner Tuesday is just the absolute knees of the bees and is DELIGHTED by the opportunity to help her with a treasure hunt - until Tuesday gets distracted, and Dorry starts wondering if she can play on her own
- Archie, a hot-but-problematic billionaire scion with a missing-presumed-dead father, a dramatically unhealthy family, and a mysterious tie to the dead Vincent Pryce, who wants to team up with Tuesday on the treasure hunt for Reasons Of His Own
The journey to pursue Vincent Pryce's clues brings up a moderate level of metaphorical and/or literal haunting from everyone's personal ghosts (for Tuesday it's the best friend who vanished in high school; for Dorry, her mother; for Dex, the version of himself that he wanted to be) while putting tension on their connections to each other -- one of the most endearing things about the book is that, although pretty much everyone gets their own B-plot romance, the emotional foreground is on the complexity of the friendships between Tuesday + Dex and Tuesday + Dorry. The Tuesday-Dex dynamic felt especially real to me, an incredibly relatable grown-up friendship that began as Casual Work Hangs and through the course of both time and conscious effort and various inequal levels of investment on one side or the other has grown into something that's actually deeply significant. I love it and I care very much!
Also I have just lived in Boston long enough by now that it's just a delight to read a book that's so very Boston. I mean, it's extremely Boston in a number of ways; it's incredibly nerdy, deeply aware and possibly a little too proud of its own geek cred, a little too ready to be charmed by the glamor of its wealthiest and most privileged characters and to give itself credit for queer joyous progressive spirit without really grappling at all with the city's underlying systemic inequalities ... like, I think it's also worth noting the absence of Dorchester or Roxbury in the paragraph I quoted above. And Archie is a poor little rich boy with a tragic backstory, and Dex is a finance guy who feels kind of bad about negative world impact of his job, and Vincent Pryce is a good, fun, wacky billionaire. You know. But I do also love the Boston that Kate Racculia loves, too.
"They all considered themselves Black Cats, but within that there were subgroups, treasure-hunting gangs like pub trivia teams, representing their corners of Greater Boston. The Smoots had MIT; the Gay Mafia covered Eastie; The Highlanders, Somerville; The Green Monsters and Challahback Girls, Fenway and Brookline. Adama Is A Cylon -- the name of a trivia team she and Dex had gone up against more than once, which couldn't be a coincidence -- had parts of Cambridge."
YEAH, OK.
(I still want to know where the place is near the MFA that Lila Korrapati got an incredible-sounding falafel on the night she met Vincent Pryce? Please, Kate Racculia! Tell me what you know! A sincere plea from a falafel-starved ex-New Yorker.)
Anyway, the plot! Vincent Pryce is an elderly eccentric who dies dramatically of a heart attack at a charity auction, then launches a posthumous series of announcements inviting the city of Boston to participate in an elaborate treasure hunt game. Protagonists enmeshed in the quest include:
- Tuesday Mooney, most protagonist-y protagonist, a donor prospect researcher at a local hospital who declares herself perfectly satisfied with both her pleasantly detective-y job and her self-defined lifestyle as a Cool Goth Loner until the lure off the treasure hunt pulls her dramatically off-course
- Poindexter (Dex) Howard, Tuesday Mooney's current best friend by dint of constant effort on his part; a born diva who feels required to squash the most interesting parts of himself down most of the time to maintain his comfortable lifestyle and boring finance job and series of cute but boring boyfriends, and Has Regrets
- Dorry Bones, Tuesday's next-door-neighbor and occasional tutee, a sad and lonely teen not coping very well with her mother's death who thinks Cool Goth Loner Tuesday is just the absolute knees of the bees and is DELIGHTED by the opportunity to help her with a treasure hunt - until Tuesday gets distracted, and Dorry starts wondering if she can play on her own
- Archie, a hot-but-problematic billionaire scion with a missing-presumed-dead father, a dramatically unhealthy family, and a mysterious tie to the dead Vincent Pryce, who wants to team up with Tuesday on the treasure hunt for Reasons Of His Own
The journey to pursue Vincent Pryce's clues brings up a moderate level of metaphorical and/or literal haunting from everyone's personal ghosts (for Tuesday it's the best friend who vanished in high school; for Dorry, her mother; for Dex, the version of himself that he wanted to be) while putting tension on their connections to each other -- one of the most endearing things about the book is that, although pretty much everyone gets their own B-plot romance, the emotional foreground is on the complexity of the friendships between Tuesday + Dex and Tuesday + Dorry. The Tuesday-Dex dynamic felt especially real to me, an incredibly relatable grown-up friendship that began as Casual Work Hangs and through the course of both time and conscious effort and various inequal levels of investment on one side or the other has grown into something that's actually deeply significant. I love it and I care very much!
Also I have just lived in Boston long enough by now that it's just a delight to read a book that's so very Boston. I mean, it's extremely Boston in a number of ways; it's incredibly nerdy, deeply aware and possibly a little too proud of its own geek cred, a little too ready to be charmed by the glamor of its wealthiest and most privileged characters and to give itself credit for queer joyous progressive spirit without really grappling at all with the city's underlying systemic inequalities ... like, I think it's also worth noting the absence of Dorchester or Roxbury in the paragraph I quoted above. And Archie is a poor little rich boy with a tragic backstory, and Dex is a finance guy who feels kind of bad about negative world impact of his job, and Vincent Pryce is a good, fun, wacky billionaire. You know. But I do also love the Boston that Kate Racculia loves, too.
