Margaret Atwood Live, RIP Dan Jenkins and WS Merwin, Devil Wears Prada Musical, Gentleman Jack TV Show, Today I Am Carey by Martin Shoemaker, King of Scars by Leigh Bardugo, and Courting Darkness by Robin LaFevers

Again, it has been 10 days since my last post, dear readers, and I lament that I am so overwhelmed by emotion that there are days, like this past Tuesday, when I can't even bring myself to turn on my computer and read my emails or check Facebook and it's messages, for fear of being caught in another tsunami of grief and laughter in remembering my dad, and in remembering, on St Patrick's Day, my friend Muff Larson's joy in all things Celtic and Irish, prior to her untimely demise 10 years ago. One of the obituary notes below is for an author my dad loved, Dan Jenkins and his sports books, especially Semi-Tough, which was made into a movie that dad insisted the whole family watch with him, as he shouted with laughter and recalled his college football glory days. I was 17 when the movie came out, and I remember dad sharing popcorn and jujubees with me as we watched Burt Reynolds, always a favorite of my mothers (he was quite a hunk back then) smirk his way through Billy Clyde Puckett's lines. I bought dad a copy of Dead Solid Perfect for Christmas that year, and he insisted that I read it with him, which surprised me, as it was hardly appropriate reading material for someone just barely 18. Still, here I am, doing my best to catch up.

I watched season 1 of The Handmaid's Take on Hulu this past week, and on watching the first three episodes of the second season, it finally occurred to me that I couldn't take any more of this grim, horrific and painful serial based on Atwood's magnificent classic book, which I read in my early 20s. There are a number of things that have been "updated" about the story arc to more clearly reflect the horrible political environment of the last two years under the reign of right-wing Christian republican white men who seem bent on making this fascist vision of the future of America a reality. It's terrifying how much is true today about this fictional future world of Gilead, and I'm not in an emotional place right now where I can do much about it except pray that people like my parents and the young women of today fight hard to save us all from the Handmaid's fate.

Margaret Atwood: Live in Cinemas

The highly anticipated publication next fall of The Testaments, a sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, will include a launch event featuring a live interview with author Margaret Atwood that will be broadcast globally to more than 1,000 cinemas. Deadline reported that Margaret Atwood: Live in Cinemas  http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/uz3642037Biz40018567, presented September 10 as a live-stream in some venues and tape-delayed in others, "will originate from London's National Theatre, where BBC journalist Samira Ahmed will interview the author about her career and her reasons for returning to the Handmaid story after 34 years."Expressing delight that the novel's launch event will take place worldwide, Atwood said, "I can't be in all the places at once in my analogue body, but I look forward to being with so many readers via the big screen."

Obituary Note: Dan Jenkins

http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/uz3642037Biz40046849,

"a sportswriter whose rollicking irreverence enlivened Sports

Illustrated's pages for nearly 25 years and animated several novels,

including Semi-Tough, a sendup of the steroidal appetites, attitudes and

hype in pro football that became a classic of sports lit," died March 7,

the New York Times reported. He was 90. Semi-Tough was ranked #7 on SI's

2002 list of the top 100 sports books of all time and was adapted into a

1978 movie starring Burt Reynolds as Billy Clyde Puckett.

Joining the magazine in 1962, Jenkins was one of a select group of

writers, including Roy Blount Jr., Mark Kram and Frank Deford, recruited

by managing editor Andre Laguerre, "who oversaw the magazine's

emergence as a leader in literate, and occasionally literary, sports

journalism as well as a powerhouse in the Time Inc. stable," the Times

wrote, adding that his main beats were golf and college football, sports

he grew up with in Fort Worth, Tex.

Jenkins's other books include His Ownself: A Semi-Memoir (2014), Dead

Solid Perfect (1974), You Gotta Play Hurt (1991), and Baja Oklahoma

(1981). The Times noted that none of his novels after the first had the

same impact, "partly because the bawdy audacity that characterized

Semi-Tough seemed less audacious in later books, and partly because the

characters espousing the attitudes and employing the language favored by

Billy Clyde and friends struck many readers as much less appealing as

public attitudes changed," a "societal swivel" that Jenkins openly

criticized.

In a tribute to her father, Sally Jenkins

http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/uz3642037Biz40046850,

a sports columnist for the Washington Post, wrote: "A new manuscript of

a novel my father just finished is still open on his desk--he was

working on it on his last day at home before he fell and broke his hip

and the congestive heart failure had its final say, from all the bacon

and cigarettes. The novel, titled The Reunion at Herb's Café,

tells readers where his major fictional characters ended up. (It will be

published by TCU Press.) His most famous and true creation was Billy

Clyde Puckett, a sort of composite of all the dashing NFLers he knew. I

stood over the manuscript this morning in tears, then read a line and

almost spit my coffee."

I loved this book, and the movie with Meryl Streep was iconic and fabulous. (I always hear Stanley Tucci in my head saying "Gird your loins, everyone" before Streep's editor makes her appearance.) I think the musical version will be even better, especially with Elton John on board for the score.

On Stage: The Devil Wears Prada Musical

Anna D. Shapiro, a 2008 Tony winner for her direction of August: Osage County, will direct the musical version of The Devil Wears Prada http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/uz3642037Biz40074037, based on Lauren Weisberger's bestselling 2003 novel and the 2006 film, Playbill reported. The production features music by Sir Elton John, lyrics by Shaina Taub, and book by Paul Rudnick. A production timeline and casting will be announced at a later date.

"I am truly honored to be a part of this incredible project," Shapiro said, "Working with Shaina, Paul, and Sir Elton has already proven to be one of the great thrills of my career, and I look forward to bringing Lauren's beloved world to the stage."

I loved this man's poetry. RIP to a hardcore wordsmith.

Obituary Note: W.S. Merwin

http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/uz3642037Biz40103006, "a formidable American poet who for more than 60 years labored under a formidable poetic yoke: the imperative of using language--an inescapably concrete presence on the printed page--to conjure absence, silence and nothingness," died March 15, the New York Times reported. He was 91. Merwin "was equally known for his work as a conservationist--in particular for his painstaking restoration of depleted flora, including hundreds of species of palm, on the remote former pineapple plantation in Hawaii where he made his home."

One of the "most highly decorated poets in the nation, and very likely the world," Merwin was the U.S. poet laureate from 2010 to 2011; won two Pulitzer Prizes; a National Book Award; the inaugural Tanning Prize from the Academy of American Poets; the Bollingen Prize for Poetry; the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award; the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation; and the PEN Translation Prize, the Times noted.In a tribute posted on the Paris Review blog, Edward Hirsch wrote http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/uz3642037Biz40103008

that Merwin was "a poet, a prose writer, and a translator. He was completely sure about his vocation. He was the most international of American poets, and the most down to earth, literally: he knew more about the natural world than anyone else I've ever known.... He was over 50 when he moved to Hawaii. He discovered it and it discovered something in him. He found a place, a way of being to believe in. I found the landscape too overwhelming to write in. He dug in--tending the land, tending his poetry.... William Merwin was an American original. He is like a great pine tree that has fallen. His work is going to live on, but I can't get over his loss."

From Merwin's poem "For the Anniversary of My Death 

http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/uz3642037Biz40103011

Then I will no longer

Find myself in life as in a strange garment

Surprised at the earth

And the love of one woman

And the shamelessness of men

As today writing after three days of rain

Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease

And bowing not knowing to what.

I have watched this trailer several times, and each time I yearn to see more of what will prove to be a classic series in the making. Unfortunately, we do not have HBO at our house, so I can only hope that Netflix or Xfinity picks it up.

TV: Gentleman Jack

A trailer has been released for the HBO/BBC series Gentleman Jack http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/uz3642037Biz40133008, based on the diaries of 19th century landowner and social rebel Anne Lister. Indiewire reported that Suranne Jones "plays the black-clad

businesswoman, who not only sought to develop industrial projects on her family's land, but made her intentions known to marry a wife in the process. The series combines a central romance between Lister and her intended, Ann Walker (Sophie Rundle), and Lister's attempts to reinvigorate the coal-mining efforts on her family property at Shibden Hall."

The series is from Sally Wainwright, who also wrote and created the hit British police drama Happy Valley. The cast includes Gemma Whelan, Gemma  Jones, Timothy West, and Peter Davison. The eight-episode season premieres April 22 on HBO.

Today I am Carey by Martin L Shoemaker is one of those rare books that moves me so profoundly that I can't read anything else for at least two days afterward. It's not just the gentle, "soft as a kitten's belly" prose, or the engaging characters that reel you into the book, but the brilliant storytelling that follows a classic journey of personal growth that kept me turning pages all day and into the evening. I was unable to put this book down, and I read it in one fell swoop. Somehow, though the protagonist, Carey, is an android who becomes sentient and self aware, he becomes more human the longer he functions as a home care assistant to a family whose matriarch is dying of dementia. That I read this after learning that my own father had just died of Lewy Body Dementia only made it more poignant. 

Here's the blurb via Publisher'sWeekly: In this meditative debut, Shoemaker unravels the story of Carey, a medical droid who gains sentience over the course of living with three generations of the Owens family. Carey begins life as a nameless caretaker android for elderly Mildred Owens, but soon finds itself repurposed when Mildred dies and Carey is assigned to stay on with her family. Carey is special; it is the only android to ever display sentience, and soon the Owenses consider it family. Carey is tasked with caring for Mildred’s granddaughter, Millie, a rambunctious girl who has an abiding obsession with frogs. Through Carey’s eyes, the Owens family can be seen traversing the milestones of life: empty nest syndrome, marriage, and, always, the inevitable creep of death. Some minor pacing issues and redundancies do little to take away from the fully developed cast of characters that drive the novel to its heartbreaking ending. Kindness, love, and compassion make Carey an empathetic character through which to view Shoemaker’s complex, beautiful world. 

The ending was, indeed, heartbreaking, and yet somehow, I found it soothing my own grief and broken heart over dad's death. The book reminded me of Flowers For Algernon, another novel that had me crying for days about its heartbreaking protagonist. This novel deserves an A, and I would recommend it to anyone dealing with grief, dementia or the inevitable questions of what makes us human, and the role of memory in keeping our loved ones alive. I will keep this book on my permanent "books I love down to my soul" shelf, and treasure it forever.

King of Scars by Leigh Bardugo is the first book in a new series by the author of the Shadow and Bone trilogy and the Six of Crows duology (all of which I've read with great interest).  Though it started slowly, the book gained momentum after the first 50 pages and rushed to a satisfactory conclusion. Bardugo's prose is always military-precision clean, while her plots, once they get going, don't flag at all. Here's the blurb:

Face your demons...or feed them.
Nikolai Lantsov has always had a gift for the impossible. No one knows what he endured in his country’s bloody civil war—and he intends to keep it that way. Now, as enemies gather at his weakened borders, the young king must find a way to refill Ravka’s coffers, forge new alliances, and stop a rising threat to the once-great Grisha Army.
Yet with every day a dark magic within him grows stronger, threatening to destroy all he has built. With the help of a young monk and a legendary Grisha Squaller, Nikolai will journey to the places in Ravka where the deepest magic survives to vanquish the terrible legacy inside him. He will risk everything to save his country and himself. But some secrets aren’t meant to stay buried—and some wounds aren’t meant to heal.

This novel of the Grishaverse is not really a stand-alone, so if you haven't read any of her other series, it won't make any sense to you. While I realize we're all meant to swoon over poor King Nikolai, I found him to be kind of a egotistical dick. Zoya, his loyal guard and assistant was much more interesting, as was Nina with her powers to see and hear the souls of the dead. Bardugo's kick-ass women are where the money lies in her novels, and I was not surprised that the only female "goddess" in evidence turned out to be evil, but brilliant. Still, this was a novel that could have used just a bit of an editorial trimming. The plot had some bumps that didn't need to be there, and we don't need to know protagonist's every insecure thought. That said, I'd give the book a B, and recommend it to anyone who has enjoyed Bardugo's other Grisha novels.

Courting Darkeness by Robin Lafevers is also a new series based in her "My Fair Assassin" universe (Grave Mercy, Dark Triumph, Mortal Heart). Still focused on the Daughters of Mortain (the God of Death), who grow up in his convent and learn to deal with the various magical "gifts" bestowed by their father (as well as training to be assassins), this story revolves around the appointments of Sybella and Genevieve  to various French courts, where they are both caught up in political schemes and machinations surrounding the king and queen of France in the 15th century. 

Here's the blurb: First in a duology, this darkly thrilling page-turner is set in the world of the best-selling His Fair Assassin series. Told in alternating perspectives, when Sybella discovers there is another trained assassin from St. Mortain’s convent deep undercover in the French court, she must use every skill in her arsenal to navigate the deadly royal politics and find her sister in arms before her time—and that of the newly crowned queen—runs out. 

When Sybella accompanies the Duchess to France, she expects trouble, but she isn’t expecting a deadly trap. Surrounded by enemies both known and unknown, Sybella searches for the undercover assassins from the convent of St. Mortain who were placed in the French court years ago.

Genevieve has been undercover for so many years, she no longer knows who she is or what she’s supposed to be fighting for. When she discovers a hidden prisoner who may be of importance, she takes matters into her own hands. As these two worlds collide, the fate of the Duchess, Brittany, and everything Sybella and Genevieve have come to love hangs in the balance. 

While again, this book took about 25 pages to get moving, once it the plot began to glide along there was no stopping it. The prose was silky and beautifully wrought, and the characters utterly fascinating, particularly Sybella and her beloved "Beast," a massive, ugly soldier whose rough exterior belies his gloriously romantic and sweet soul. He loves and accepts Sybella for her strength as a warrior and assassin, and he understands her need to connect with him in a positive, life affirming way to keep her from the darker aspects of Mortain's gift to her of seeing souls and hearing heartbeats.  I eagerly await the next installment of this series, as we are left with something of an abrupt ending to this book. Still, it deserves a B+, and I would recommend it to anyone who has enjoyed her previous books, and those intrigued by young women trained at a convent dedicated to the deadly arts.