Short, hilarious, and puzzling. This book has a somewhat elegant, somewhat maddening tendency to speak on a subject without actually addressing the subject. We don’t really know why she lives in Dijon or Switzerland (she just does). We don’t know why she gets divorced from Al or where this new husband, Chexbres, comes from (but they’re madly in love). Unless you’ve read the Wikipedia page, you don’t know Chexbres kills himself, nor do you know that her brother does the same (and yet her grief for both is palpable). Strangely, these omissions don’t harm the narrative. Instead, Fisher measures the story of her growth in relation to the world around her — how she manages to bend the world to her tastes, and, when that proves impossible, how she finds suitable compromises. These vignettes capture an adventurous soul figuring out how to thrive, love, and navigate the world against the rigid constraints placed on her as a woman of the time.

I was fascinated by how blunt and straightforward certain passages were compared to others where she seemed not quite sure what she thought about a situation. For one, Miss Fisher was not afraid to read a bitch down. Seriously, I would die if she described me the way she destroys some of these characters. She was also very conscious of what it meant that she was a woman and had a very pragmatic view of how to navigate social norms so that she could fulfill her “masculine” appetites or simply exist as a woman alone in public. (A whole chapter describes the system she developed to eat in a restaurant by herself without causing a scene.)