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tessisreading2 's review for:
Bar Harbor Babylon: Murder, Misfortune, and Scandal on Mount Desert Island
by Leslie Landrigan, Dan Landrigan
This is one of those “collections of anecdotes plucked and summarized from other, better-written books about more comprehensive subjects” books. As such it’s… okay, but the authors never bother with background information on Bar Harbor, Mount Desert Island, or anything else, and the chapters aren’t arranged in chronological order, so we go from murders in the 1950s to the servant problem in the Gilded Age (which is pretty yikes, based as it is on accounts from employers) to the original theft of the island from the Abenaki people (which is even more yikes, beginning with the fact that they’re referred to repeatedly as “Indians” and continuing through the fact that, again, they’re seen pretty much entirely through the eyes of their white contemporaries - do we really need some of that quoted?).
Many of the stories have little to no relationship with Bar Harbor save that someone involved at some point owned a summer home there, which can get tedious. If I wanted to know about the Louisiana Lottery scam, I’d be reading about that. Additionally, the “summarize it” strategy means that the prose is clumsy and often kind of dumb. Like, this is the kind of book that people worry about AIs writing, honestly. And there’s a weirdly censorious turn to some of it, which makes sense when you’re coming at it from the perspective of gossips - for example the chapter on “the mad Hoyts” which is basically about a family who all struggled with mental illness and addiction while frequently making it into the tabloids for their "bad behavior" - early 20th century Britney, basically. The glib tone undoubtedly matches that of the contemporary tabloids but it’s gross when written down seventy years later; we should know better now.
Many of the stories have little to no relationship with Bar Harbor save that someone involved at some point owned a summer home there, which can get tedious. If I wanted to know about the Louisiana Lottery scam, I’d be reading about that. Additionally, the “summarize it” strategy means that the prose is clumsy and often kind of dumb. Like, this is the kind of book that people worry about AIs writing, honestly. And there’s a weirdly censorious turn to some of it, which makes sense when you’re coming at it from the perspective of gossips - for example the chapter on “the mad Hoyts” which is basically about a family who all struggled with mental illness and addiction while frequently making it into the tabloids for their "bad behavior" - early 20th century Britney, basically. The glib tone undoubtedly matches that of the contemporary tabloids but it’s gross when written down seventy years later; we should know better now.