A Love Letter to Louise Penny

I didn’t plan to fall in love, but then, who does?

While listening to Anne Bogel’s excellent podcast What Should I Read Next?, I first heard of Louise Penny’s crime/mystery series. As luck would have it, its first installment, Still Life, was already on my bookshelf (so maybe I actually had heard of it before?). I started in right away and found myself transported to an imaginary but vividly rendered town in Québec and was greeted by all its quirky, warm, hilarious, and human inhabitants. I walked with them as their community was fractured by a dreadful crime, shared their pain and surprise. And met the wise and thoughtful man who would enrich my life forever. I was down for the count. I willingly gave my heart, not only to that honorable inspector of the Sûreté du Québec, but also to his creator.

Louise Penny, an author whose skill and artistry I now admire more than those of any living writer, has done more than mold and shape fully human personalities and craft compelling stories around them, although these probably would have been enough for me to burn through the 16-book (and counting) series. She has created a normal place that is magical, a combined heaven and nirvana without the saints and angels. In fact, her characters are purposely flawed, and each has struggles with their inner demons, their relationships, their careers, their art. And she placed them all in Three Pines, a town that is unreal and yet familiar.

Without a doubt, one thing that makes Ms. Penny’s books so delicious for me is that they are set in Canada, admittedly a place I’ve always had a strange but unapologetic affinity for. If you’ve read any of my other blog posts, especially Oh, Canada, you know how much I adore the Great White North. I love the unspoiled outdoors, particularly the magic of snow – how everything feels clean and fresh afterward, and the unique stillness and quiet it brings. (Three Pines gets a lot of snow, and what’s perhaps even more attractive to me is that its inhabitants, like me, do not seem to be fans of the sticky, oppressive heat of summer. In at least one book, the summer is unusually and unbearably hot, and nearly every one of the characters complains about it. These are truly my people.) I also love that there are few really big cities, and not so many small ones either. I do love a place that feels wild and wide and yet cozy and welcoming at the same time.

One of my happiest trips — not just because it was the last one I made before the whole world shut down in 2020 — was to the province of Québec, in winter, when everything was frozen and fabulous. While in Québec City, I got to go to the Morrin Center, which houses the Literary & Historical Society of Québec, a location featured prominently in The Beautiful Mystery.

Now, I don’t recommend reading these lusciously and subtly interwoven books out of order because you’d be missing quite a lot of what I believe is the point – the slow, rich character development and interconnection between plots, the buildup of friendship and the agonizing, awful burn of relationships deteriorating. Like most series, the books get better and better and better as you become familiar with the emotional landscape, trust me. (I have a rule about book series that you can’t decide to continue or drop them until book 3, and it’s not let me down with this or any other series I’ve read.) But if you just want to dip a toe into a quirky little mystery set in snowy, deceptively quiet Québec, complete with historical backstories and rife with the exploration of healing and redemption, you could certainly do worse than The Beautiful Mystery.

I’m not going to summarize plots or give you any spoilers here. I might be an okay writer, but I would just utterly fail to convey the experience you will experience if you just read the dang books. So please do that. I promise you’ll be transported.

Where will you go? Sometimes you’ll go to Montreal or Québec, but mostly, you’ll journey to Three Pines, where most of the books are set and to where all of its characters have a deep connection. It’s a quaint village (modeled on the one Ms. Penny herself inhabits) that is purposely out of reach of the rest of the more populated world, roughly an hour south-ish of Montreal and near the US border. A running joke in the books is that it’s terribly hard to find and outsiders frequently wonder why you want to find it anyway. There is practically no cell service and even the wifi is, well, mostly dial-up. It’s small, and tucked away, and community means everything to those who live there, so much so that they’ll welcome others to that community without question. And it’s a good thing too, because another running theme is that those who need to find Three Pines, will.

I suppose Three Pines is the character I’ve most fallen in love with. Absolutely everything about the location, the village cafe and bookstore, the food, the people, and the traditions appeals to me. And maybe I’m crazy, but its spirit speaks to me. It’s become symbolic to me, a “place” where I can think deeper and reflect on redemption and forgiveness and the goodness of humans. I recently bought a t-shirt that just has three pine trees on it. It makes me happy every time I see it and even happier when I wear it — kind of an inside joke with myself, a reminder to smile and be optimistic. Because of Ms. Penny’s lovely creation, when I see three pine trees together, I go to a place in my imagination that lifts my mood and soothes my soul.

Some might argue that Three Pines itself isn’t real, and they’d be right, but limited in their view. The village does not exist, physically. But I think of it as existing in ways that are far more important and powerful. Three Pines is a state of mind. When we choose tolerance over hate. Kindness over cruelty. Goodness over bullying. When we choose to be hopeful, not cynical. Then we live in Three Pines.

Louise Penny

So thank you, Louise Penny, for giving me so many hours of reading bliss, and for continuing to do it. For being curious about human nature and pretty smart about it observing it and mirroring it through your characters in all its messy and beautiful ways, too. And, of course, for bringing to life Gamache — and Ruth, the duck, Gabi, Olivier, Clara, Myrna, Reine-Marie, Jean-Guy, Annie, and those delightful dog-like pets. While my love will likely remain unrequited, I am rewarded nonetheless by the pleasure and peace I receive in living often in Three Pines.