The House of Unexpected Sisters: No. 1 Ladies' … (18) by Alexander McCall Smith *****

The House of Unexpected Sisters by AlexanderMcCall Smith

Precious Ramotswe of the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency investigates a suspicious firing of a saleswoman, the discovery of another lady named Ramotswe, and unexpected competition for Co-director Makutsi’s husband. As usual, all ends well in Botswana.

Mma Charity Mompoloki comes to Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi, unhappy that she was fired for being rude to a customer. She was an outstanding salesperson. Can the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency get her job back? Her mother thinks she was rude. Did a customer complain? Did the boss make up the complaint? Does Mma Makutsi think she is innocent because they both went to the Botswana Secretarial College? How does troublemaker Violet Sephotho figure in? There are so many red herrings and a surprise twist at the end.

The second mystery is Mingie Ramotswe. Ramotswe is an uncommon name, and Mma Ramotswe thought she knew everyone with this name. When she sees a newspaper mention of Mingie Ramotswe, she has to find out who she is. The path to discovery includes many difficulties.”

This is the eighteenth book in the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series. These are cozy books with more interest in slices of fruit cake, Mma Ramotswe’s “rather old and inclined to rattle” white van, “traditionally built” women, “old Botswana morality,” and cattle, rather than serious crimes.

The book includes LGBTQ themes.

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Notorious RBG: The Life & Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Irin Carmon & Shana Knizhnik ****

Notorious RBG: The Life & Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Irin Carmon & Shana Knizhnik

Notorious RBG was published in 2015, so it ends with an optimistic view of RBG holding on to her position on the Supreme Court to the very end. “A Hillary Clinton presidency might be the perfect moment for RBG to step down.”

Notorious RBG is a bitter-sweet biography of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She thought strategically. Under her leadership, the ACLU Women’s Rights Project systematically took cases to the Supreme Court to advance women’s rights one step at a time. She faulted Roe v. Wade because it moved too fast, legalizing abortion throughout the country before society was ready for that move. She would have preferred progress that went state by state.

While she was on the court majority, she espoused compromise and collegiality, but when the court shifted, she let those ideals slide and wrote many dissents. “RBG NEVER ESPECIALLY WANTED to be a great dissenter. She prefers not to lose, which is what, by definition, has happened to judges who write to dispute the court’s majority opinion.”

For all her strategic thought, in the end, Trump was the one who replaced her.

“RBG declared that Roe itself was the problem. If only the court had acted more slowly, RBG said, and cut down one state law at a time the way she had gotten them to do with the jury and benefit cases. The justices could have been persuaded to build an architecture of women’s equality that could house reproductive freedom. She said the very boldness of Roe, striking down all abortion bans until viability, had “halted a political process that was moving in a reform direction and thereby, I believe, prolonged divisiveness and deferred stable settlement of the issue.” RBG was always confident in her decisions, though not always correct. RBG was pushing sixty, and she had never been a large woman. “I told Ruth she should sit in the back of the boat, because she was so light that if they hit a rock, she would go flying over,” Neuborne says. “Her response: ‘I don’t sit in the back.’”

Sexism: When I asked her if she still experiences sexism, RBG replied readily. “Yes. Less than I once did. Once it happened all the time that I would say something and there was no response. And then a man would say the same thing and people would say, ‘Good idea.’” She laughed. “That happens much less today.”

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The Phoenix Pencil Company by Allison King ****

 The Phoenix Pencil Company by Allison King

A multi-generational story of Taiwan through the last 90 years, the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, the Nationalists' retreat from Communist China, and immigration to the United States. The book also explores who owns your story. Tech and History.

The book revolves around the power of a family of women to “reforge” pencils. They can retrieve what the pencil has written by piercing their wrists and bleeding out what has been written on paper. The form of eavesdropping (spying) is compared to software that scrapes information from social media accounts. Both extract stories from unsuspecting participants.

The book collects the writing of Monica Tsai, a second-generation Chinese-American, and her grandmother, Wong Yun. Monica’s story is collected from her online diary, and the grandmother’s story is reforged from a pencil. Thus, the entire book is stolen from the authors with magic (reforging) or technology (hacking Monica’s online diary with a program called EMBRS - Electronic Memory Bank Enabling Radical Sharing).

While different characters attempt to justify stealing writing without consent, in the end, Monica attempts to sabotage the EMBRS project/company.

The book also includes a lesbian love story.

The book often refers to the latitude and longitude (42.3721865, -71.1117091). This is Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Ignoring these coordinates, Harvard is mentioned four times, and MIT is mentioned nine times.“The joy of understanding her family.” Implicit in much of this book is ancestor worship and the idea that one can’t be happy unless one understands one's ancestors. Many books are built on this strange premise.

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