April Read 2019/2

Title: A Lesson in Secrets
Author: Winspear, Jacqueline
Call Number: F
Book Description from amazon.com:
Private investigator Maisie Dobbs receives her first assignment from the British Secret Service in A Lesson in Secrets, the eighth book in Jacqueline Winspear’s award-winning mystery series. Sent to pose as a junior lecturer at a private college in Cambridge, she will monitor any activities “not in the interests of His Majesty’s government.” When the college’s pacifist founder is murdered, Maisie finds herself in the midst of sinister web of murder, scandal, and conspiracy, activities that point towards members of the ascendant Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei—the Nazi Party—on Britain’s shores. An instant classic, and sure to captivate long-time Maisie Dobbs fans as well as readers of Agatha Christie, Elizabeth George, and Alexander McCall Smith, A Lesson in Secrets is “a powerful and complex novel, one that will linger in memory as a testament to her talent and her humanity” (Richmond Times-Dispatch).
My Read:
Page 321--"She wondered abut happily ever after. Did it exist only in fairly tales, in stories for children? Or was there hope, really?..Was it that she did not trust happily ever after, that she was deliberately indifferent to the possibility? Or was happily ever after another one of time's secrets, waiting to be revealed on the journey? She smiled at the irony--the junior lecturer in philosophy struggling with a child's fairy-tale ending. Yes, time would give up her secrets. She just had to wait."
I think "happily ever after" is not as illusory as it sounds. It's the willing mind that would set the path on the journey. Happiness is not for pursuit; instead, it's a by-product of hardworking and determination for a better life.  

April Read 2019

Title: The Mapping of Love and Death
Author: Winspear, Jacqueline
Call Number: F
Book Description from amazon.com:

August 1914. As Michael Clifton is mapping land he has just purchased in California's beautiful Santa Ynez Valley, war is declared in Europe—and duty-bound to his father's native country, the young cartographer soon sets sail for England to serve in the British army. Three years later, he is listed as missing in action.

April 1932. After Michael's remains are unearthed in France, his parents retain London psychologist and investigator Maisie Dobbs, hoping she can find the unnamed nurse whose love letters were among their late son's belongings. It is a quest that leads Maisie back to her own bittersweet wartime love—and to the stunning discovery that Michael Clifton was murdered in his dugout. Suddenly an exposed web of intrigue and violence threatens to ensnare the dead soldier's family and even Maisie herself as she attempts to cope with the impending loss of her mentor and the unsettling awareness that she is once again falling in love.

My Read:

Page 62-63--"Extremes live within us all. The joy of association resides alongside the anticipation of loss. What is given will be taken, what we have is often only of value to us when it is gone."....."A map is a conduit for wonder, a tool for adventure. But it is also an instrument of power--and like all things, power has two faces."

Page 69--"When you are sitting in silence, you open the door to a deeper wisdom--the knowing of the ages. When you are walking, with the path to that wisdom already carved anew by your daily practice, you find that an idea, a thought, a notion, comes to you, and you have the solution to a problem that seemed insoluble."