One thing that you can rely on during the summer season is a heat wave or two(perhaps even more these days) to endure as best as you can. Said endurance can be made much better by having the perfect excuse to stay inside and read, preferably with a filled to the brim with ice cubes drink in hand.
To that end, Seasons of Reading will be hosting their High Summer Readathon this August(thanks to Michelle Miller). It’s basically a good time to catch up on relaxing reads in a beach free fashion. As always, I do have a trio of entertaining titles that should offer much refreshing amusement here:
Mr. Malcolm’s List:
Suzanne Allan ‘s romantic comedy of errors is set in Regency England, where Julia Thistlewaite is furious upon learning that the gentleman of the title has such a list of preferred qualities in a potential bride.
Angry that this set of standards caused him to break up with her, Julia plots revenge with the aid of Selina, a friend from the country. By making Selina become Mr. Malcolm’s ideal woman, she can attract his attentions and then brutally break his heart.
Since Selina has little opportunity to join in high society and believes that their target is worthy of such punishment, she goes along with this plan at first. However, upon getting to know him. Selina begins to question this whole scheme and may be on her way to truly falling in love with Malcolm. Yet, can this relationship really work out once all is revealed?
The film adaptation of this rather charming novel was released earlier this summer to rave reviews from critics and audiences alike. While it may be some time before I can this movie for myself, the book ought to do quite nicely indeed:
Donut Fall in Love:
We then head to modern day Canada, courtesy of Jackie Lau, where popular actor Ryan Kwok finds himself in need of baking lessons.
While his career in film is going well despite receiving more praise for his looks instead of his acting, Ryan is offered the chance to be a celebrity guest on the hit culinary series Baking Fail. Since his talents in the kitchen are not even good enough for a show about baking blunders, he asks local baker Lindsey McLeod for a few points about pastry.
Given that the first time they met was when Ryan knocked over a fresh batch of donuts in her bake shop,Lindsey is less than inclined to help out here.
In need of some positive distraction from her own problems , she decides to teach him enough to get by and finds that the two of them have more in common than they think. Will their time together create a recipe for romance or be more of a flaky fail than anything that cooking show ever displayed?
I do like stories about cooking competition shows and by stirring in some heartfelt flavors of love and friendship, you’ve got a tasty treat to dive on into. Plus, donuts just make everything better, folks:
Mango,Mambo and Murder:
This debut cozy mystery from Raquel V. Reyes introduces us to Miriam Quinones-Smith, whose move to Miami has caused her to delay getting her PhD in food anthropology.
Hoping to revive her culinary educational spirits, she takes a job as a food expert for a morning TV show which opens a few doors of opportunity to her.
Unfortunately, one of those doors proves deadly for a socialite at a luncheon Miriam attends, especially since her good friend Alma is seen as a main suspect in the growing number of unsavory deaths that follow.
Despite the claims on her time and talents, Miriam is determined to save Alma from such allegations but can she discover the true killer before another goose is permanently cooked?
Cozy mysteries are my jam, particularly with foodie themes and this one has gotten some great word of mouth praise there. Nice to get a first taste of what may be a feast of fun reading yet to come:
I do hope that many of you out there will take a dip in this literary pool and refresh your thoughts during this most heated time span of summer. Sign-up spots are still available and a thank you in advance to Michelle Miller for setting up this shady spot of reading.
My late summer plans are quiet ones, due to my Autumn in August movie series (which puts my regular Series-ous Reading posts on break until September) that’s starts with Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World.
Quite the nautical adventure with perhaps a sea shanty or two to keep things on an entertainingly even keel there, we shall see! Stay cool, everyone and set sail for some calmer waters to come:
My apologies for being late with this Series-ous Reading review but as one of my comedians would say, things have just been crazy!
Nevertheless, I did finish my latest Sisters in Sleuthing selection in good time and did have fun along the way.
Queen of Hearts by Rhys Bowen is the eighth entry in the Her Royal Spyness series and has our 1930s leading lady Georgiana “Georgie” Rannoch once again at financial odds.
While she is number thirty five in line for the British throne. Georgie has no independent wealth of her own and throughly discouraged from making her own way in the world except via marriage. While she is in love with Darcy O’Mara(who is a similar boat, money wise), marrying for love isn’t as simple as it seems.
In sweeps her mother, Claire , a much married woman and former actress hoping to snare a wealthy German into wealthy wedded bliss. She insists that Georgie accompany her to America to divorce her unsuitable current spouse in Reno.
They travel by cruise ship, where Claire meets Cy Goodman, a big time Hollywood producer who thinks that she would be perfect for his next major movie and Georgie is happy to run into Darcy, who is one of his secret missions onboard.
He’s in search of a jewel thief and suspects Stella Brightwell, famous actress and current paramour of Cy’s since she happens to be around whenever these robberies take place:
By the time they get to America, another theft has occurred but no proof that Stella was involved. Georgie does keep an eye out for trouble, which is not easy to do with her mother looking for some of her own, on and off the set of the movie that she’s co-starring with Stella in.
When Cy invites everyone to his elaborate country estate for the weekend(including a way too friendly Charlie Chaplin)more problems crop up as his estranged wife decides to make a surprise visit as well.
Things become truly out of hand when Cy is found bludgeoned to death in his library, possibly interrupting the theft of the murder weapon, a gem encrusted candlestick. Could the jewel thief that Darcy’s been after be here with ruby red blood on their hands?
I did enjoy this book as I have the others in this series as Georgie is delightful company and the screwball comedy vibes of these stories are well done. However I just wish that Georgie would take less nonsense from her self centered mother and stuck up for Queenie, her own lady’s maid who Claire cruelly mocks at one point.
Granted, Queenie is not the best at her job(she tends to iron delicate clothes, causing fabric meltdowns) but she is a dutiful soul and felt rightly insulted when Claire laughs at her clad in a red bathing suit(she was going to take a swim in the hotel pool during her off hours, another bone of contention there).
Georgie just let that happen and it lead to a brief separation between the two and yes, I knew they were going to make up yet I truly despise Claire, who only bothers with her daughter when it’s convenient for her to do so and is the worst kind of phony!
Perhaps in a future outing, Georgie will stand up to Claire but it was annoying to see her mother get all Emily Gilmore at poor Queenie there:
Anyhow, my next Series-ous Reading pick is Stephanie Barron’s Jane and the Madness of Lord Byron.
While I was less than thrilled with the new film adaptation of Austen’s Persuasion(the script has a big plot hole in the third act due to the omission of a certain character), it did at least give us all a good excuse to talk about Jane Austen and perhaps enjoy more creative takes on her work such as this sleuthing series.
This time around, Austen is visiting Brighton with her newly widowed brother Henry, hoping to ease their mutual loss at this popular seaside retreat. However, a run-in with the infamous Byron proves to be more than a one time encounter as his Lordship is accused of the murder of a young woman, something that not even the “mad,bad and dangerous to know” nobleman is thought to be capable of.
While they were contemporaries, Austen and Byron didn’t really run in the same social circles and yet it is still fun to imagine the two of them facing off. It’s a notion that Northanger Abbey’s Gothic novel fan Catherine Morland would certainly be frantically page turning by very late candlelight there:
Despite being more of a cat person, I do appreciate the dog days of summer when it comes to catching up on reading.
At the moment, my current reading rotation is a blend of new releases and backlist titles, starting with the former via Not All Supermen by Tim Hanley.
Hanley is a comic book historian who has written about such well known and yet under appreciated female icons in this genre such as Wonder Women, Lois Lane and Catwoman. The subtitle of his latest book, “Sexism,Toxic Masculinity and the Complex History of Superheroes “ explores even further into those topics with a broader range than his earlier works did.
From the beginning of the superhero genre where strong female characters were sidelined or meant to be arm candy for the male hero to the rise of the feminist movement that brought about reluctant change, Hanley shows us how even though superhero characters were intend to showcase the best in humanity, they also hold up a powerful mirror to our worst natures as well.
I’m at the halfway mark with this book and since I’ve read his other titles before, Hanley’s entertaining educational style is always engaging to me. It’s like hanging out with a cool teacher in a comic book shop for extra credit.
One on my favorite chapters so far draws comparisons between the classic Dark Phoenix Saga in X-Men to Teen Titans’ The Judas Contract, the latter being a story line that doesn’t get as much coverage in my opinion (plus, I do own a Terra/Tara Markov action figure!).
Not All Supermen is due out on July 15(I was lucky enough to receive a review copy) and I highly recommend it to not only comic book/superhero fans but to those interested in seeing how influential our ongoing debates about gender roles in society are showcased in such a public forum. Even Superman is as vulnerable to these cultural forces as he is to Kyptonite:
Meanwhile, my latest Book of the Month Club selections are from a couple of years ago but still very much on the forefront of the literary scene.
Along with Bringing Down the Duke by Evie Dunmore, I chose Angie Thomas’ On The Come Up, which is about to have the film adaptation be available for streaming very soon.
This YA novel stars Brianna “Bri” Jackson, who is determined to follow in her late father’s footsteps as a rap singer yet be seen as her own person to make her own mark upon the world.
That’s hard to do in so many ways as Bri discovers upon releasing a song online that grows popular and gives her a fan base yet gains negative attention from unwelcome corners. Wanting to also help her family out financially is another strong incentive but her mother prefers that Bri focus on school first, plus Supreme, her father’s former manager, offers plenty of career opportunities but at what artistic price?
I haven’t read Thomas’ The Hate U Give but did like the movie a lot and upon hearing that OTCU was about to on screen soon, I thought it would be good to read the book first.
The story is as engagingly energetic as a good song that you add to your permanent playlist is, with heartfelt characters that deal with real world problems as well as personal challenges along the way. I’m nearly finished with the book and hope to see the movie sometime soon :
For my summer library haul, I went with a pair of books by authors I haven’t read before such as Stacey Abrams’ While Justice Sleeps and Normal People by Sally Rooney.
The Rooney novel starts in a small Irish town where popular teen sports star Connell has a secret relationship with quiet upper class Marianne, a connection that he is more invested in concealing than she is.
When they part ways to attend college in Dublin and yet are thrown back into each other’s community, their social roles as reversed. Marianne is the one shining in the spotlight while Connell is standing on the sidelines ,uncertain of what his place in the world is truly meant to be. Can they find love again or is their time together a thing of the past?
I have heard nothing but wonderful things about Sally Rooney’s writing but was unsure of where to start with her books. Normal People seems to be a good setting off point here(did hear good word about the Hulu miniseries adaptation) and this story has a bit of a Jane Austen vibe, perhaps a modern day Persuasion if you will. Definitely worth a try:
Speaking of Persuasion, I am looking forward to seeing the newest entry on Netflix this upcoming weekend, despite the mixed reviews that have come out already.
While it does appear that my concerns about Anne Eliot being given a Bridget Jones makeover have been unfortunately well warranted, I still want to give it a fair chance.
There are very good actors in the cast and if this leads to other Austen adaptations that are more complimentary to the source material, it’ll be worth the fuss. Goodness knows, there are worse things to worry about outside of our silver screens so let us engage in lively yet friendly discussion on this front!:
Welcome back, folks, to the regular routine of LRG and while the world outside has been riff with chaos, the reading waters have been just fine.
Speaking of reading, the Sci-Fi Summer readathon hosted by Michelle Miller at Seasons of Reading has ended and per my usual, I finished two out of the three books chosen for this challenge. Considering the amazing quality of this particular pair, this was a great achievement indeed!
First up was Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow , the latest from Gabrielle Zevin. Yes. the title does refer to a Shakespeare quote but the overall theme is the resilience of friendship and video games as storytelling realms.
The center of the plot forms when Sam Madurai runs into Sadie Green during their college days, renewing a broken childhood connection, and upon playing one of Sadie’s prototype game, convinces her to team up with him to become video game creators together.
While they do make for a good artistic partnership, their goals in the field often clash, especially since Sadie’s talents are taken for granted by the male dominated industry and media.
Nevertheless, they do persist in part due to Marx, their mutual friend and business partner (who becomes more than a friend to Sadie over time). However, when an unforeseen event takes Marx out of that equation, can Sam and Sadie heal from this ultimate breach?
Zevin is a wonderful writer as well as a video gamer and it shows in the gorgeous geek prose when talking about that virtual world. One section of the book takes place entirely in a game that’s a cross between The Sims and Oregon Trail, which blends seamlessly into the narrative whole of the story.
This is the third novel that I’ve read by Zevin (Young Jane Young, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry) and so far, she does not miss a beat, book wise. It’s fair to say TATAT is one of the best things that I’ve read this or any other year:
I followed that up with Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility , another mind blower of a book to be sure!
While the plot points are stretched over different places in time, what connects them is Gaspery, a man of the future seeking out witnesses to a temporal event that could explain the true national of reality.
From an exiled British man in Canada of the 1800s to a writer living on a moon colony doing a book tour on Earth in the year 2203, this strange incident that these random people stumbled onto does haunt them in small ways. Yet it is Gaspery whose fate is truly bound by what happened and the answer he seeks is far from expected.
This may sound like a complicated story but it’s not at all. Mandel glides through these vast connections with a gentle ease that smoothly carries the reader along for an epic ride. The tender depictions of humanity are the strength of the book, making such questions about the nature of our world very down to earth and attainable.
We’re getting a lot of multiverse stories these days and while SOT is perhaps more of a time travel tale, it does hold some of those elements rather well. Definitely a best of the year read , especially if you like the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once:
Much thanks to Michelle Miller for setting the table for another readathon feast and hope everyone who took part in Sci-Fi Summer had as grand a time as I had with their books.
As I said earlier, we are caught up in serious troubled times these days but I do believe in radical hope in that we can still change things for the better. Staying true to our family and friends is a part of that, along with reviving our spirits with a good book or two.
With that in mind, the next readathon will be High Summer in August and I do have a trio of relaxing reads on deck for that occasion. Summer is meant to be a period of mellow relief and we should do that as much as possible for the benefit of all to gather our strength for what lies ahead:
As some of you may know, I usually devote the month of August to a full on themed film focus and while Bad Movie Month was fun while it lasted, it’s time to embrace the new.
With that in mind, I am happy to announce the lineup for the second outing of Autumn in August , which brings a touch of fall into the latter half of the summer season.
I didn’t intend to add another theme here but British books seem to be the main connection for me here. First up is 2003’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, a title that is quite the mouthful due to being based on two books in the late Patrick O’Brian’s historical fiction series known as the Aubrey-Maturin novels.
Russell Crowe plays Captain Jack Aubrey, a renowned seaman in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars whose talents at the helm of a ship don’t match up with his dislike for authority.
Paul Bethany is Stephen Maturin, a surgeon taking a navel commission for the first time, hoping to collect some interesting samples from nature during the voyage. These rather unlikely companions become good friends as they and their crew face off against fearsome forces both from and sailing on the sea.
I remember watching this movie when it was first released and how quiet the audience was, since this is the type of story that demands your full undivided attention, something we don’t always get these days. It was well worth it and should be so yet again:
Since M&C:TFSOW is set during the Regency period and Jane Austen fans do like those books as well, it only made sense to select Sense and Sensibility from 1995 as a follow up.
While I have liked other versions of this first of Austen’s works(the recent BBC miniseries was nicely done), this one is an absolute favorite of mine.
Emma Thompson, who also won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, as the sensible Elinor restraining her passion for Edward Ferrars(a rather bashful Hugh Grant!) with Kate Winslet playing her openly emotional sister Marianne are sheer delights on screen.
There is so much to savor in this elegantly made film directed by Ang Lee, with the late great Alan Rickman as the lovelorn Col.Brandon, Harriet Walter as the artfully awful sister in law Fanny and Hugh Laurie as the drolly beleaguered Mr. Palmer. A true treasure of a movie as welcome as a fresh cup of tea:
Speaking of Emma Thompson and sister stories, she does have a knack for them as her role in the 1992 adaptation of E.M. Forester’s Howard’s End proves in abundance.
The title refers to a country house owned by the Wilcox family , a prim and proper set who find themselves interacting with the bohemian Schlegal sisters Helen(Helena Bonham Carter) and Margaret (Thompson).
Margaret is the more mainstream of the two, which is why the late matriarch of the Wilcox family connected with her so much that she wanted Margaret to have the house after her death.
While that wish was kept hidden from Margaret (who had no clue about that idea anyway), widower Henry played by Anthony Hopkins, winds up falling in love with her and proposing marriage.
Margaret accepts but this is no fairy tale romance as Helen’s involvement with a troubled young man sets off a chain of events that alters the course of many lives in their wake.
This is a somberly elegant film that offers subtle food for thought, making it very autumnal indeed:
To round this all out, we follow Anthony Hopkins to 84, Charing Cross Road, a delightful real life tale told through letters.
Anne Bancroft stars as Helene Hanff, a NYC freelance writer during post WWII, whose “antiquarian “ literary preferences causes her to order from London bookshop Marks and Company as well begin a lively correspondence with shop manger Frank Noel(Hopkins).
Hanff had their letters published as a memoir and adapted into a stage play which caught the eye of Bancroft and the rest, as they say, is history. I’ve read several of Hanff’s books and she was a witty and warm hearted person who is well remembered for this long term literary friendship by fans the world over:
I do hope you all tune in for this frightfully British film festival of mine later this summer. Meanwhile I’m taking a brief blog break for the next couple of weeks just to get my bearings with everything going on in the world at the moment.
I do plan to return to LRG after July 4th, with a wrap up of my Sci Fi Summer reading, my Series-ous Reading review and possibly a write up on the new version of Jane Austen’s Persuasion , set to arrive on Netflix by July 15.
Now, I must confess that this particular book is the one that got me into Jane Austen in the first place, partly due to the 1995 film adaptation that I talked about for the first Autumn in August. Granted, I may be partial to that movie as it imprinted Austen onto me but I am willing to give a new take a fair chance.
The trailer that dropped this week for it is giving me and many others pause due to Anne Eliot being show as in a very goofy romcom fashion.
Having Anne address the audience with sly witticisms about her obnoxious family is fine but smearing jam on her face to imitate her former beau Wentworth is a bit too wacky for me.
Also, waving to him from the window and then diving down from view to dump a glass of wine on her head makes Anne look more like a Regency Bridget Jones than an Austen heroine( and I do like Bridget Jones!).
Sure, there is plenty of humor to be found in Persuasion (casting Richard E. Grant as the incredibly vain Sir Walter is brilliant) but the theme of the story is reliving regrets and seeing if you can reasonably get a second chance is not meant to be your average Hollywood meet cute there.
There are other positive points such as Henry Golding playing the smooth talking Mr. Eliot is fun and the visuals look lovely. I just wish that film makers would stop thinking that all Austen heroines must be Elizabeth Bennet or Emma Woodhouse.
Austen created quieter leading ladies such as Elinor Dashwood, Fanny Price and Anne Eliot as contrasts to the likes of Lizzie, Emma and Catherine Morland because not all characters have to be stamped out of the same cookie cutter cliche mold in order to engage the audience on screen! With a good script and well cast actors, a low key lead can be just as compelling as a lively one in my opinion.
However, this is only a trailer intended to attract attention towards the finished project so I do plan to watch it and hopefully these silly moments are few and far between in the entire film. Let’s give this version of Persuasion a fair chance, folks and hopefully we’ll all be pleasantly surprised:
Between the horrid heat of the season and less than stellar headlines in the news, staying inside with some good books is becoming more and enticing there.
With that in mind, my latest library visit not only had me pick up another Christina Baker Kline novel(A Piece of the World) but a chunky new book from Marian Keyes as well.
Again,Rachel is a follow-up to her 1997 novel Rachel’s Holiday, where our title character Rachel Walsh is now a counselor at the very rehab center that ended her addiction cycle back in the day.
While she feels that her life is pretty much in order,despite a tendency to buy too many sneakers, Rachel finds that she is not over her former love Luke, who she divorced several years ago.
Luke is brought back into her world upon a death in his family and even she tries to maintain minimal contact , Rachel has to admit to herself the truth about her feelings both then and now.
I literally stumbled over this book at the library, taking a seat and pleasantly surprised to find it on a nearby display table. It’s been a long time since I’ve read Marian Keyes(did read Rachel ‘s Holiday as well as other stories about the Walsh family) and getting reacquainted with Keyes’ blend of engaging humor and well crafted drama has been well worth the wait indeed:
Meanwhile, I got a bit splurge-y and bought from both Book of the Month Club AND the Literary Guild! Yeah, feeling slightly guilty for that but I do intend to read most of them before Labor Day.
From BOMC, I chose The Wedding Dress Sewing Circle by Jennifer Ryan plus Elin Hilderbrand’s new beach read, The Hotel Nantucket.
The latter location is a newly renovated establishment bought by a rich Londoner and opening up under the hopefully steady hand of Lizbet Keaton, determined to make sure that everything goes smoothly.
While a main worry of Lizbet and her boss is getting a top notch review from hotel blogger Shelly Carpenter, there are other issues of concern such as a new employee trying to cover up a misdeed of his recent past, Lizbet’s ex showing up to rekindle their freshly ended relationship and a ghost.
I must confess that ghost character ( a young chambermaid named Grace who perished in a hotel fire or did she…?) is what sealed the deal for me on this one.
One of my favorite TV shows this year is Ghosts , the sitcom set at a old manor house being turned into a B&B by the current living owners with one of them being able to see their eternally present guests, making me so eager to meet the dearly departed Grace as soon as can be:
Also got a similar duo from The Literary Guild with Alison Weir’s The Last White Rose and The Summer Place by Jennifer Weiner.
When twenty two year old Ruby announces her engagement to her rather new boyfriend Gabe, things are in an uproar among her loved ones for many different reasons.
Her stepmother Sarah is worried about the haste of this impending marriage while step grandmother Veronica is thrilled to have the perfect send off to her Cape Cod house that she’s planning to sell after so many years.
Sarah’s is equally concerned about her husband’s steady distancing from her(which might be a cover for an affair) and as both sides of the family converge upon Veronica’s summer house, she begins to wonder if holding this wedding there was a good idea after all.
Weiner has been putting out a set of Cape Cod themed novels the last few years, with this one being the third, and while they are stand alone stories, it’s hard to not complete the series so to speak.
Plus, this whole summer wedding setting is irresistible for heartfelt drama and relatable laughs, a page turning package of entertainment that Weiner excels at. Much like the upcoming HBO Max remake of Father of the Bride, The Summer Place is a welcome sight to see this hectic heatwave season:
Definitely, my book shelves are overflowing with potential ports of printed delight and yes, I am thankful for that privilege.
While the fact that the real world is in a bit of a mess on numerous fronts at the moment, I am doing my best not to despair at the state of things right now.
Instead I chose to hold onto to the notion of radical hope, that folks will work to make our collective future one that we can all look forward to with a sense of joy and achievement.
With that in mind, my stress relief includes good books and positive pop culture events like the upcoming Tony Awards this weekend. I may not be able to attend the theater yet the clips that I’ve seen of Six, the musical about the wives of Henry VIII, has me rooting for those royal rock stars to win big.
Plus, my favorite number is Anna of Cleves with “Get Down” as she revels over her divorced status with unabashed delight, something that hopefully the cast and crew of Six share in that night:
One of the reasons that I started this whole Series-ous Reading feature in the first place was to catch up on some of my TBR piles and get further acquainted with certain authors and their work.
Well, so far every time I’ve read on of Susan Elia MacNeal’s entries in her Maggie Hope Mystery series, such as my recent SR pick His Majesty’s Hope, my desire to read more increases abundantly.
Maggie Hope is a newly recruited British spy during the dark days of WWII and at last, she’s been given her first overseas assignment. She is secretly airdropped into Germany to be meet up with a member of the resistance movement for two reasons: deliver a pair of radio crystals and plant a listening device in the home of a prominent German agent.
For the latter, Maggie needs the help of her contact Gottlieb Lerner, who is less than thrilled about working with a rookie but is able to pass her off as his girlfriend to gain entrance to the home of Clara Hess, former star singer and vicious enemy agent.
While Clara’s connection to Maggie is more intimate than she’d like, that doesn’t stop her from carrying out her assignment or making plans to stay longer in Germany once a prime opportunity to spy on a major Nazi party figure is ripe for the plucking.
Lerner insists that she stick to the original plan but Maggie is determined to take this risk with or without him. When that initial opportunity doesn’t work out, another one is presented to her that leads to some horrifying discoveries about the ultimate goals of the current Reich.
Nevertheless, Maggie is able to get what she needs while avoiding the advances of the man she’s working for who has no idea of her true agenda and plans to escape before being found out by Clara Hess and company:
Little does Maggie know that there is a secret ally in her midst.
Elise Hess, Clara’s daughter whose nursing work leads her to work with the resistance, is helping to hide two people in her family’s attic from being captured by the Nazis.
When Maggie is in need of refuge herself, Elise is ready to assist her along with the
men hidden away right underneath the watchful eye of her devious mother. Despite how solid their plan is, can Maggie and her new friends get to safety before it’s too late?
Reading one of these Maggie Hope novels is like binge watching a great season of smartly written TV. There are plenty of solid supporting characters given full story arcs and nuance within these well paced pages and Maggie is such a steadfast yet mortal heroine that you would follow anywhere.
I plan to read a couple more books in this series later this year and yes, the wait will be worth it. Having the Maggie Hope novels almost makes up for the loss of the Agent Carter series (almost! Marvel, come on, right this wrong there!):
Speaking of books to catch up with, my new selection in this Sisterhood of Sleuthing is Queen of Hearts by Rhys Bowen.
This eighth entry in the Her Royal Spyness series has hapless noblewoman Georgiana Rannoch being whisked off to 1930s America with Claire, her diva mother, who is in pursuit of a quickie divorce in Reno.
During their ocean voyage, Claire is offered an audition in Hollywood so a side trip is made that leads to yet another murder for Georgiana to solve.
I do love the screwball comedy energy of these books with their special guest star appearances from famous fans like Coco Chanel, Noel Coward and Wallis Simpson. This time around promises to throw Charlie Chaplin into the mix , which should be amusing in more ways than one:
The first big holiday weekend of the summer is soon to be upon us and so is the next Seasons of Reading readathon, Sci-Fi Summer. For the month of June, both science fiction and fantasy books are encouraged to be on your literary docket.
Sticking to my rule of three, I have a trio of titles that should fit the bill nicely with two being prizes from a Discord giveaway that I gratefully won awhile back. Talk about books as the gift that keeps on giving there!
Sea of Tranquility: Emily St. John Mandel’s latest novel crosses many points in time as a self appointed detective seeks witnesses to a strange yet brief event involving music.
From a newly exiled man sent to Canada in 1912 to 1994 where a young woman records an odd moment in the woods and all the way to a book tour in the year 2203, where author Olive Llwellyn has left her family bat their moon colony home to promote her new novel on earth, all of them have shared this odd incident yet no one quite knows what it truly means.
Pulling these errant pieces together is the work of Gaspery, who wants to connect these dots before the whole puzzle is complete as a last request of sorts to his late mother. Even if he succeeds,however, will the true solution be found?
While I’ve only read Station Eleven, Mandel’s work is well known for it’s seemingly simple designs that do slowly but surely reveal a wider story landscape. Have to say that I am intrigued indeed:
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow: One thing that you can definitely count on with author Gabrielle Zevin is that she never writes the same book twice.
From The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry to Young Jane Young, she zigs where most would zag and this tale of friendship and video games is both the most and the least expected story from her.
We met Sam and Sadie as kids in 1986, with the two of them bonding over video games while he’s in hospital and she is visiting her ailing sister.
Years later, Sam runs into Sadie at college where she’s developing a game that challenges the player to consider their moral stances in life. Impressed by her creativity, he offers to work with her on other such innovative games inspired by Shakespeare and the poems of Emily Dickinson.
While their gaming fortunes rise and fall(as well as draw unwelcome ire from self appointed crusaders), it’s the power of their friendship that becomes the ultimate quest of their lives.
This promises to be one of the best reads of the summer, I suspect, and hopefully others will be happy to take this page turning journey with me:
Ariadne: The leading title lady of this mythological retelling is a princess of Crete, whose mother was used by the gods to punish her royal father’s acts of hubris.
As a result, Ariadne has witnessed many gruesome sacrifices made to the dreaded Minotaur dwelling in the labyrinth created by her father, King Minos ,but this year’s champion Theseus, an Athenian prince, moves her to help him survive the deadly challenge and flee with him to safety.
Sadly, her devotion is not at all rewarded and while she does her best to deal with the options left before her, Ariadne refuses to remain a pawn in someone else’s game, divine or mortal.
I’ve always liked Greek mythology and this sounds like a great take on the role of women in these murky magical waters:
Sci-Fi Summer officially starts on June 1 and ends on the 30th, so there is more than plenty of time to sign up
and join in the fun. Much thanks to Michelle Miller at Seasons of Reading for making this chance to catch up on this genre possible.
Summer seems to be prime real estate for science fiction/fantasy fare, with the new season of Stranger Things coming out as well as Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness taking the box office by storm, plus word of a new Star Wars series on the horizon.
Just goes to show that no matter how harsh the real world is at the moment, there’s always a great flight of creative fancy to make those times a touch more bearable out there.
Enjoy your Memorial Day weekend,folks and I’ll see you in June with hopefully a happy song in my heart:
One of the joys of reading is discovering new authors who seem to know exactly the charming type of story you need to dive into right now and a couple of years ago, Natalie Jenner’s The Jane Austen Society did just that for me.
It’s a delightful fictional look at the possible origins of a group devoted to preserving the Chawton home of Jane Austen and bringing more attention to her wonderful books(highly recommend it!) but today, I am here to share with you all my delight with her fabulous follow-up,Bloomsbury Girls , on this book blog tour.
While there is one character from The Jane Austen Society included here, you can enjoy this novel first on it’s own engaging merits. The ladies of the title work together at Bloomsbury Books in post WWII London , a rather new development for the shop that has long been run by men.
In this except from the novel, you can meet all three of them; Vivien whose rivalry with co-worker Alec is more than professional, Grace, a busy mother and wife hoping to do more with her love of books and Evie, the new girl looking for a change of scene and getting more than she ever expected:
Excerpt from Chapter Two of Bloomsbury Girls,
by Natalie Jenner
The Tyrant was Alec McDonough, a bachelor in his early thirties who ran the New Books, Fiction & Art Department on the ground floor of Bloomsbury Books. He had read literature and fine art at the University of Bristol and been planning on a career in something big—Vivien accused him of wanting to run a small colony—when the war had intervened.
Following his honourable discharge in 1945, Alec had joined the shop on the exact same day as Vivien. “By an hour ahead. Like a dominant twin,” she would quip whenever Alec was rewarded with anything first.
From the start Alec and Vivien were rivals, and not just for increasing control of the fiction floor. Every editor that wandered in, every literary guest speaker, was a chance for them to have access to the powers that be in the publishing industry. As two secretly aspiring writers, they had each come to London and taken the position at Bloomsbury Books for this reason.
But they were also both savvy enough to know that the men in charge—from the rigid Mr. Dutton and then-head-of-fiction Graham Kingsley, to the restless Frank Allen and crusty Master Mariner Scott—were whom they first needed to please. Alec had a clear and distinct advantage when it came to that. Between the tales of wartime service, shared grammar schools, and past cricket-match victories, Vivien grew quickly dismayed at her own possibility for promotion.
Sure enough, within weeks Alec had quickly entrenched himself with both the long-standing general manager, Herbert Dutton, and his right-hand man, Frank Allen. By 1948, upon the retirement of Graham Kingsley, Alec had ascended to the post of head of fiction, and within the year had added new books and art to his oversight—an achievement which Vivien still referred to as the Annexation.
She had been first to call him the Tyrant; he called her nothing at all. Vivien’s issues with Alec ranged from the titles they stocked on the shelves, to his preference for booking events exclusively with male authors who had served in war. With her own degree in literature from Durham (Cambridge, her dream university, still refusing in 1941 to graduate women), Vivien had rigorously informed views on the types of books the fiction department should carry. Not surprisingly, Alec disputed these views.
“But he doesn’t even read women,” Vivien would bemoan to Grace, who would nod back in sympathy while trying to remember her grocery list before the bus journey home. “I mean, what—one Jane Austen on the shelves? No Katherine Mansfield. No Porter. I mean, I read that Salinger story in The New Yorker he keeps going on about: shell-shocked soldiers and children all over the place, and I don’t see what’s so masculine about that.”
Unlike Vivien, Grace did not have much time for personal reading, an irony her husband often pointed out. But Grace did not work at the shop for the books. She worked there because the bus journey into Bloomsbury took only twenty minutes, she could drop the children off at school on the way, and she could take the shop newspapers home at the end of the day. Grace had been the one to suggest that they also carry import magazines, in particular The New Yorker. Being so close to the British Museum and the theatre district, Bloomsbury Books received its share of wealthy American tourists. Grace was convinced that such touches from home would increase
their time spent browsing, along with jazz music on the wireless by the front cash, one of many ideas that Mr. Dutton was still managing to resist.
Vivien and Alec had manned the ground floor of the shop together for over four years, circling each other within the front cash counter like wary lions inside a very small coliseum. The square, enclosed counter had been placed in the centre of the fiction department in an effort to contain an old electrical outlet box protruding from the floor.
Mr. Dutton could not look at this eyesore without seeing a customer lawsuit for damages caused by accidental tripping. Upon his promotion to general manager in the 1930s, Dutton had immediately ordained that the front cash area be relocated and built around the box.
This configuration had turned out to be of great benefit to the staff. One could always spot a customer coming from any direction, prepare the appropriate response to expressions ranging from confused to hostile, and even catch the surreptitious slip of an unpurchased book into a handbag. Other bookshops had taken note of Bloomsbury Books’ ground-floor design and started refurbishing their own.
The entire neighbourhood was, in this way, full of spies. Grace and Vivien were not the only two bookstore employees out and about, checking on other stores’ window displays. London was starting to boom again, after five long years of postwar rationing and recovery, and new bookshops were popping up all over. Bloomsbury was home to the British Museum, the University of London, and many famous authors past and present, including the prewar circle of Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, and Lytton Strachey. This made the district a particularly ideal location for readers, authors, and customers alike.
And so, it was here, on a lightly snowing day on the second of January, 1950, that a young Evie Stone arrived, Mr. Allen’s trading card in one pocket, and a one-way train ticket to London in the other.
I hope that this look at Bloomsbury Girls, now available at a bookseller near you, encourages any lover of bookstores to add this delightful book to their spring into summer reading list.
In addition to print and ebook, Bloomsbury Girls is also in audio format with narration by actress Juliet Stevenson. Truly a bounty of ways to engage with the lovely literary style of Natalie Jenner here!
My thanks to Laurel Ann Nattress at Austenprose for including me on this wonderful tour as well as to author Natalie Jenner for this most welcome breath of bookish air:
While my TBR piles are getting tricky to manage (yes, I have more than one or two there), I can’t entirely resist the urge to buy something new to read, especially when the daily headlines are getting worse every day (more on that later).
Truly, I did think that I would just skip the Book of the Month club selections for May but my literary eye was caught by Love & Other Disasters by Anita Kelly, which combines romance with cooking competition shows so how could I pass that on by?
The show in question is called Chef’s Special and intended for amateur cooks like Dahlia, who is feeling unfocused in life after her divorce.
She finds a friendly rival in London, who has enough troubles of their own as the first openly non binary competitor on the culinary series dealing with rather tasteless online scrutiny.
Word of mouth about this novel has been excellent to say the least. A nicely told romance like this sounds ideal for a spring to summer bookish menu indeed:
I paired that up with Jennifer Close’s latest release, Marrying the Ketchups.
Set in Chicago, the story lines follow the Sullivan family as they deal with the recent loss of their patriarch Bud, who ran a restaurant in Oak Park.
While new widow Rose adjusts to her relocated life at an assisted living center, two of her grandchildren are reconsidering their situations as well. Gretchen is having serious doubts regarding her rock and roll career while her sister Jane harbors suspicions about her husband’s fidelity.
It’s their cousin Teddy, however, who is determined to keep the family diner going even though his ex-boyfriend constantly shows up there for the dinner hour on the regular (talk about pouring salt into a wound there!).
Dealing with change is the ultimate theme of the book and having read an earlier novel of Close’s(The Hopefuls) awhile back , I know that her delightful low key story telling is built upon well honed character development worth it’s weight in page turning gold:
Meanwhile, on my recent birthday, I decided to get a physical copy of an ebook by Christina Lauren (The Soulmate Equation) that I was reading and it only made sense to add another book by that author as a proper gift.
The Unhoneymooners has a classic romcom premise as Olive Torres finds herself on a dream vacation with the one man in the world she can’t stand to be around.
With her twin sister Amelia coming down with food poisoning, along with her new husband, their already paid for honeymoon in Hawaii will go to waste unless Olive goes in her stead. The only catch is that Ethan Thomas, her new brother in law, has to join her.
At first, Olive plans to have fun on her own but when she and Ethan run into a pair of acquaintances from back home, they have no choice but to pretend to be their newlywed siblings or lose out on their vacation accommodations.
Despite these ruses, Olive finds herself liking Ethan much more than she had bargained for. Is that feeling mutual or is this just a potential fling and nothing more?
I’ll probably save this one for summer reading but rest assured that Lauren’s engaging romcom energy enhanced by lively developed characters is definitely a year round enjoyment:
Before I go, I do have something to say about those troubling headlines, especially the recent attack on reproductive rights by the Supreme Court. Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a huge rant, just an affirmation of what we should stand for.
Freedom is a term that gets bandied about a lot but not very well understood by many, particularly those who think that imposing their beliefs onto the rest of us is their sacrosanct right.
Freedom means not only making choices but allowing others to do the same without impediment.
What we’re seeing right now( and have been for far too long) is an entitlement mindset that wants everything convenient for themselves and no consequences whatsoever for any negative results of their actions.
Well, as a MTV show used to say, it’s time for people to stop being polite and start getting real. Putting up with this nonsense is not how bullies like this are stopped and if being loud is necessary, then let’s get loud.
We see this in the increasing prohibitive laws attacking voters, the LBTQIA community, immigration and book banning, which targets everyone overall. Whether you sign a petition, join in a protest or just tell that rude person in your social circle to knock it off with the hate speech, every bit counts.
These oppressors love to justify their actions by insisting that “This is what the Founding Fathers of our country wanted!” but they -perhaps intentionally-forget that those folks were out and out rebels against the established authority, the very one that caused them to leave their former country for a fresh start in the first place.
The important thing here is to take a stand for the future of our country to progress forward for all concerned and not fall back into an outdated oppression that benefits the few. Regardless of century, we shouldn’t hesitate to take our shot for a better world:
