Scalzi on TV, Two Movies Adapted From Books, Bonfire by Krysten Ritter, The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin, and The Santa Claus Man by Alex Palmer

I've made no secret of the fact that I adore John Scalzi, the witty and wonderful author of the amazing Old Man's War series (and of many other great novels, including Lock In, which is also being made into a series for Netflix, I believe), so I am delighted to read that things are movie forward with a TV movie. I just hope they stay faithful to the novels, which are action packed and thoughtful, and have some insights into the future of mankind and warfare.

TV: Old Man's War

 

Netflix has acquired John Scalzi's Old Man's War

http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/uz3642037Biz35299324,

which is the first novel "in a bestselling six-book series and is

considered to be one of the best of the genre over the past two

decades," to develop as an original film, Deadline reported. Jon

Shestack Productions and Madhouse Entertainment will produce. Scalzi

also has projects in development with FX and Working Title.

I started reading James Baldwin novels when I was 13 years old, though I think my parents would have been concerned had they known how brutally honest his books were about life as a gay black man. I remember the prose being a revelation to me, because it was so elegant and silken while outlining such horrific subject matter. But I am looking forward to seeing what they will do with a movie of such a classic novel. Ready Player One was a novel that both my son and I enjoyed, and I found it so visual as I read it that I am not at all surprised it has been made into a movie. I hope that Nick will accompany me to go see it when it comes out in theaters.

Movies: Ready Player One; If Beale Street Could Talk

http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/uz3642037Biz35332920Warner Bros. revealed its first

full-length trailer for Steven Spielberg's adaptation of Ernest Cline's

novel Ready Player One

http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/uz3642037Biz35332921.

Deadline reported that the author "debuted the trailer at an event at

the Alamo Drafthouse in his hometown of Austin which was live streamed

with a Q&A afterward." The movie, which opens March 30, was written by

Cline and Zak Penn. The cast includes Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben

Mendelsohn, T. J. Miller, Simon Pegg and Mark Rylance.

Cline's description of the film: "If Willy Wonka was a video game

designer instead of a candy maker and he held his golden ticket contest

inside the worlds greatest video game--that's the essence of what the

story is."

Emily Rios (Breaking Bad, Snowfall) has landed the role of Victoria in

If Beale Street Could Talk

http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/uz3642037Biz35332922,

based on James Baldwin's novel and directed by Barry Jenkins

(Moonlight), Deadline reported. The project also stars KiKi Layne,

Stephan James, Colman Domingo, Brian Tyree Henry, Dave Franco, Ed

Skrein, Pedro Pascal and Regina King. Jenkins wrote the script and is

producing under his Pastel label with Annapurna Pictures and Plan B.

I'm going to post a Shelf Awareness review of Bonfire before I add my own thoughts, because to be honest, I was expecting the beautiful actress who plays Jessica Jones to have little or no writing talent at all, and I was secretly kind of hoping she'd fail miserably at creating a novel that stood on its own merits and wasn't read just because it was written by a celebrity. I am chagrined to report that I was wrong. Ritter is a talented prose stylist whose book was a page turner full of twists and turns that I never saw coming.

 

Bonfire: A Novel by Krysten Ritter "In this fast-paced thriller, successful environmental

lawyer Abby Williams is brought back to her small Indiana town for work,

where Optimal Plastics, a company that has helped rebuild the town and

its economy, is under suspicion for water pollution. While investigating

the pollution claims, Abby also becomes obsessed with discovering what

happened to a classmate who disappeared 10 years earlier after a scandal

that left many unanswered questions--a disappearance that has haunted

her for years. In both cases, the search for truth leads Abby down a

dark path of corruption and secrets. This is a remarkable debut novel

and the must-read thriller of this fall." --Rebecca Olson, Saturn

Booksellers, Gaylord, Mich.

Abby, the protagonist, comes off as kind of Jessica Jones "lite" with the same snarky sense of humor and the same drinking problem. Still, she's persistent and fierce, and refuses to give up, even when everyone else thinks she's nuts and won't help her. Here's the official blurb: It has been ten years since Abby Williams left home and scrubbed away all visible evidence of her small town roots. Now working as an environmental lawyer in Chicago, she has a thriving career, a modern apartment, and her pick of meaningless one-night stands.

But when a new case takes her back home to Barrens, Indiana, the life Abby painstakingly created begins to crack. Tasked with investigating Optimal Plastics, the town's most high-profile company and economic heart, Abby begins to find strange connections to Barrens’ biggest scandal from more than a decade ago involving the popular Kaycee Mitchell and her closest friends—just before Kaycee disappeared for good.

Abby knows the key to solving any case lies in the weak spots, the unanswered questions. But as she tries desperately to find out what really happened to Kaycee, troubling memories begin to resurface and she begins to doubt her own observations. And when she unearths an even more disturbing secret—a ritual called “The Game,” it will threaten the reputations, and lives, of the community and risk exposing a darkness that may consume her.

With tantalizing twists, slow-burning suspense, and a remote, rural town of just five claustrophobic miles, Bonfire is a dark exploration of what happens when your past and present collide. 

I honestly could not put the book down once I started reading it. And I couldn't find fault with the prose or the storytelling or the characters, because they were all solid. This strikes me as somewhat unfair, overall, that Ritter should be so adept at acting and writing, but then, Kate Mulgrew, of Orange is the New Black and Star Trek Voyager wrote a fantastic memoir called Born With Teeth that proved she's also a brilliant actress and prose stylist. I'd give Bonfire an A, and recommend it to anyone who likes thrillers.

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin is a Hugo award winning science fiction novel that I've been hearing about for at least a year. It was recommended to me by several friends and websites, so I put it on my list for books for my birthday and managed to get a copy before Thanksgiving, prior to my birthday by weeks. Though it is somewhat measured and deliberate to start, once the characters get going and the pace of the plot picks up, it's a toboggan ride of a novel. Here's the blurb from Publisher's Weekly: Humans struggle to survive on a ruined world in this elegiac, complex, and intriguing story, the first in the Broken Earth series from acclaimed author Jemisin (the Inheritance Trilogy). The Stillness is a quiet and bitter land, sparsely populated by subsistence communities called comms. Essun lived quietly in a comm with her husband and children until her secret got out: she—and her children—are orogenes, those who have the ability to control Earth forces. They can quell or start earthquakes, open veins of magma, and generally cause or rein in geological chaos. Authorities keep a brutal hold on orogenes, controlling everything about their lives, including whom they breed with. Those who escape servitude and seek safety in the comms face expulsion and execution at the hands of the fearful. Soon after Essun’s secret is revealed, her husband kills their son, and her daughter goes missing. Essun sets off to find the girl, undertaking a journey that will force her to face unfinished business from her own secret past. Jemisin’s graceful prose and gritty setting provide the perfect backdrop for this fascinating tale of determined characters fighting to save a doomed world. Readers hungry for the next installment will also find ample satisfaction in rereading this one. 

I was not aware that the other two storylines (with two other female characters) were just the past history of the main protagonist, Essun. Essun has had to reinvent herself from childhood on, and her brutal upbringing at the hands of the Guardians (who are sadistic and controlling, treating their young charges like disposable slaves) was chilling, and left me amazed that this bright child managed to survive the school for orogenes. Once she escapes as a young woman, and despite being forced to breed the next generation of orogenes with a gay man of tremendous power, she sets up a life for herself that seemed satisfying and happy. Unfortunately, it doesn't last, and Essun ends up having to reinvent herself again, remarrying a man who kills her young son when it becomes obvious he's an orogene, and abducting their daughter. Essun journeys the length and breadth of this destroyed land with a "stone eater" and a transgender woman whom she met up with in her youth, as the three find a community of orogenes and stone eaters and others living underground in a giant geode. Though it wasn't a hopeful novel, and brutality, cruelty and violence are everywhere in this ruined world, I was captivated by the characters and their hopes and fears and strength. I am not surprised that this book won the Hugo last year. I'd give it an A and recommend it to anyone who is a fan of George RR Martin and Ursula LeGuin and Octavia Butler.

The Santa Claus Man by Alex Palmer was our library book group choice for December.  It was recommended to me by a Barnes and Noble online book concierge, who thought it would be an uplifting read for the holiday season. This was probably the least uplifting non fiction book I've ever read, to be honest, and I found many parts of the book dragged because the author included reams of research on the Jazz age in New York City from the end of WW1 through the 1920s until the Great Depression. Here's the blurb:

Before the charismatic John Duval Gluck, Jr. came along, letters from New York City children to Santa Claus were destroyed, unopened, by the U.S. Post Office. Gluck saw an opportunity, and created the Santa Claus Association. The effort delighted the public, and for 15 years money and gifts flowed to the only group authorized to answer Santa’s mail. Gluck became a Jazz Age celebrity, rubbing shoulders with the era’s movie stars and politicians, and even planned to erect a vast Santa Claus monument in the center of Manhattan — until Gotham’s crusading charity commissioner discovered some dark secrets in Santa’s workshop.

The rise and fall of the Santa Claus Association is a caper both heartwarming and hardboiled, involving stolen art, phony Boy Scouts, a kidnapping, pursuit by the FBI, a Coney Island bullfight, and above all, the thrills and dangers of a wild imagination. It’s also the larger story of how Christmas became the extravagant holiday we celebrate today, from Santa’s early beginnings in New York to the country’s first citywide Christmas tree and Macy’s first grand holiday parade. The Santa Claus Man is a holiday tale with a dark underbelly, and an essential read for lovers of Christmas stories, true crime, and New York City history.

I really didn't like JD Gluck, who was a shyster from the get go, always looking for a way to line his pockets from his charities and public relations schemes.  We had quite a rousing discussion during book group as to whether Gluck started out with ill intentions, or whether money and power corrupted him into the con man he became. What flabbergasted me was that he got away with it time and again, and never seemed to get any jail time or even a thorough investigation into his finances over the course of years, when he was soliciting money for his Santa Claus Association, but really most of the money was going to his lavish lifestyle. The author of the book is his great grand-nephew, who remembers Gluck as everyone's favorite uncle who told wonderful stories and was retired to Florida with his second wife. This book was certainly a cautionary tale about doing your due diligence in giving to charities to make sure that the money is actually going to those who need it, vs lining the pockets of the fundraisers and promoters. I'd give the book a C, and recommend it to those interested in New York Christmas history.