Easter is the celebratory setting for #3 of Penny's Gamache series.
Each of her books picks a calendar event (#1 Still Life was Thanksgiving, #2 A Fatal Grace was Christmas), and there's always some kind of celebration happening at Three Pines, which allows her characters to all come together, just as there are often references to Three Pines as a "place outside of time" or a feeling that Three Pines could be now or many years ago. A timelessness. Like her characters, I, too, find it comforting.
With The Cruelest Month, Penny seems to be hitting her stride with storytelling - with an even more complex set of events and angles to the mystery. Where Still Life revolves around a painting and a mysterious death with an arrow, and A Fatal Grace around a "life-style" guru wannabe and a mysterious death by electrocution, The Cruelest Month involves a séance and apparent death from fright and the psychological concept of "near enemies" and how emotions can be mistaken for virtues. Similar to "The road to hell is paved with good intentions". For example, equanimity may turn out to not be equanimity at all, but a passive, indifferent attitude to life that merely looks like calm and acceptance. This turns out to be crucial in the personality of the murderer.
Quotes that stood out to me from the book:
‘The near enemy. It’s a psychological concept. Two emotions that look the same but are actually opposites. The one parades as the other, is mistaken for the other, but one is healthy and the other’s sick, twisted.’
‘I prefer T. S. Eliot. The cruelest month.’ ‘Why do you say that?’ ‘All those spring flowers slaughtered. Happens almost every year. They’re tricked into blooming, into coming out. Opening up. And not just the spring bulbs, but the buds on the trees. The rose bushes, everything. All out and happy. And then boom, a freak snowstorm kills them all.’
"He reflected on T. S. Eliot and thought the poet had called April the cruelest month not because it killed flowers and buds on the trees, but because sometimes it didn’t. How difficult it was for those who didn’t bloom when all about was new life and hope."