Today, the day after Thanksgiving, is a day to rest and regroup, and await my son's 22nd birthday tomorrow. However, today is also the day we lost famed musical theater master Stephen Sondheim, who was 91. We also lost the famed poet/writer Robert Bly. So there is heartbreak among the gratitude and grief along with the turkey gravy. Some of the reading I've been doing has been heavier than I'd like, but still, I'm enjoying the cold late fall days and the early dark, because it gives me the perfect excuse to cuddle up under the comforter and read.
I've always loved the song Bread and Roses as sung by Judy Collins, so I was delighted to read of this award, given to a female writer whose book is about disabled people and their struggle for equal rights. My favorite line from the song is "hearts starve as well as bodies, give us bread but give us roses..."
Awards: Bread & Roses Radical Publishing Winner
The Alliance of Radical Booksellers named Ellen Clifford's book The War on Disabled People: Capitalism, Welfare and the Making of a Human Catastrophe winner of the 2021 Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing https://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/uz3642037Biz50420951.
Speaking for the judges, Karen Shook said the winning title is "a hugely revelatory account of the one-quarter of U.K. society whose struggle for justice is literally a matter of life and death, and of the determined, defiant disabled activists whose resistance holds important lessons for everyone on the Left."
Calling it "an absolute honor" to win the prize, Clifford said: "The Bread and Roses Award is the only award I have ever aspired to win because it validates exactly what I aspire to do--which is to use writing to explore ideas that can make the world a better place. I am grateful that the Award and that Radical Booksellers exist."
Though I was never a fan of the "mens movement" which contained more than a few misogynists and a very sour and antiquated view of women as being soft and weak and worthless, and having a deleterious effect on men by "feminizing" them (as if that were some kind of curse, and as if women were not as strong and fierce as men!), I did admire some of Bly's poetry and his pacifist writings. RIP, to the original "Bro"
Obituary Note: Robert Bly
Robert Bly https://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/uz3642037Biz50430803, the Minnesota poet, author and translator "who articulated the solitude of landscapes, galvanized protests against the Vietnam War and started a controversial men's movement with a bestseller that called for a restoration of primal male audacity," died November 21, the New York Times reported. He was 94. Bly's work included more than 50 books of poetry, translations of European and Latin American writers, and nonfiction commentaries on literature, gender roles and social ills, as well as poetry magazines he edited for decades.
In 1966, Bly co-founded American Writers Against the Vietnam War and toured the country, rallying the opposition with poetry "read-ins" on campuses and in town halls. He won the National Book Award for poetry for The Light Around the Body (1967), and donated his $1,000 prize to the draft resistance.
"Taking another abrupt turn in 1990, he published what was to become his most famous work, Iron John: A Book About Men, which drew on myths, legends, poetry and science of a sort to make a case that American men had grown soft and feminized and needed to rediscover their primitive virtues of ferocity and audacity and thus regain the self-confidence to be nurturing fathers and mentors," the Times wrote. The book was on the Times's bestseller list for 62 weeks, including 10 weeks at number one, and was translated into many languages.
Among the many media profiles of him was a 90-minute PBS special by Bill Moyers, who called Bly "arguably the most influential poet writing today." During the 1970s, he wrote 11 books of poetry, essays and translations. In the '80s and '90s, he produced 27 books, including The Man in the Black Coat Turns (1981), Loving a Woman in Two Worlds (1985) and Selected Poems (1986). His most recent book was Robert Bly: Collected Poems (2018).
"In recent years, he traveled widely, lecturing, reading poems and joining discussion panels, and in 2008 he was named Minnesota's first poet laureate by Gov. Tim Pawlenty," the Times noted. In 2004, he published The Insanity of Empire: A Book of Poems Against the War in Iraq, and in an introduction noted wryly that little had changed since Vietnam. "We are still in a blindfold," he wrote, "still being led by the wise of this world."
The Star Tribune noted that "in his heyday, Bly was known for making theater of poetry readings--reading poems twice, or three times, just because he loved their sound; reading other writers' work; wearing a rubber fright mask or an embroidered vest on stage; reading to the background music of drums and sitars. But despite his theatrics, he was always intensely serious about poetry and its importance in the cultural and political landscape. He was besotted by words."
In addition to the National Book Award, his many honors include the 2013 Robert Frost Medal, the Transtromer Poetry Prize in Sweden, and Guggenheim, Rockefeller and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships; and a McKnight Distinguished Artist Award in 2000.
From "Keeping Our Small Boat Afloat":
It's hard to grasp how much generosity
Is involved in letting us go on breathing,
When we contribute nothing valuable but our grief.
Each of us deserves to be forgiven, if only for
Our persistence in keeping our small boat afloat
When so many have gone down in the storm.
This looks
irresistible! I must get a copy, as I studied Method acting (and several other styles) during my time at Clarke College back in the 80s.
Book Review: The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act
What a production! Isaac Butler has packed The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act, his essential history of America's hallmark acting style, with tales of political intrigue, stories of stratospheric triumphs and epic failures, and scenes of backstabbing and petulance played out by--and this should go without saying--a first-rate cast.
Before the Method, an acting performance wasn't evaluated in terms of how "true" it felt. As Butler tells it, the seeds of change were planted in Russia in 1897 during a meeting between playwright and acting teacher Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko and theater director and actor Konstantin Stanislavski, the visionary of the two and namesake of the future acting technique. The pair spent what turned into an 18-hour lunch "plotting a theatrical revolution": disappointed with the performances they were seeing onstage, they decided to start a theater company devoted to teaching actors to work toward a more naturalistic style.
When New Yorker and theater devotee Harold Clurman was visiting Paris in 1922, he was bowled over by a touring production of The Cherry Orchard put on by Nemirovich and Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre. Without realizing it, Clurman "had found his purpose," Butler writes. "In a few years, he would study the Moscow Art Theatre's techniques, and help dream a new era of American theater into being." With Lee Strasberg and Cheryl Crawford, Clurman founded the Group Theatre in New York in 1931, attracting a roster of formidable teachers, among them the legends Stella Adler and Elia Kazan. Disagreements could turn so fiery that some instructors stormed off to teach elsewhere, but each remained committed to steering actors toward a more true-to-life style that would become, in Butler's words, "a transformative, revolutionary, modernist art movement, one of the Big Ideas of the twentieth century."
There were Big Egos to match. Butler, who coauthored The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America , doesn't skimp on the backstage dramas of the technique's best-known practitioners. The actors featured in The Method--among them John Garfield, Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Kim Stanley and Marilyn Monroe--call to mind siblings bent on supporting and undermining one another in equal measure. Brando, for one, "responded to Dean's entreaties for advice with a recommendation that the younger man see an analyst." Too bad Dean couldn't have sought advice from Butler: his book amounts to a print-form master class in the Method. --Nell Beram , author and freelance writer
I wholeheartedly agree with Ellen Stimson that there are some backlist books that should not fade into obscurity. I love that she talks about Jan Karon's and Pam Houston's books, both of which I've enjoyed in the past. I will have to check out Michael Malone, though I might have already read some of his titles, too, and I just don't remember them.
Comfort Reading: Highlighting Backlist Treasures
Ellen Stimson https://www.shelfawareness.com/ct/uz3642037Biz50430842, author of Mud Season and Good Grief, has spent most of her life in and around the book industry.
Before she started writing her own books, she owned the first female-owned book wholesaling company so she has always understood the importance of booksellers. She is blessed with a wild pack of mostly grown children, not-so-wild but completely adorable husband, and a very civilized group of chickens, dogs and cats. She writes about the whole catastrophe from an old farmhouse in Vermont. And she plans to write occasionally for Shelf Awareness about some of her favorite books: backlist.
Ordering from gardening catalogs was a balm during the first long winter of Covid. I wanted lots of color come spring and butterflies come summer. Something I read about those much-desired butterflies during that frenzy of shopping stuck with me. If a butterfly comes out of its chrysalis too soon, it will not be able to fly. It will look like a butterfly in every way. It will actually be a butterfly, albeit one who cannot fly (which sort of defeats the whole point of butterflying). That resonated with me, especially as we all emerge from our pandemic chrysalis, many of us faster, but more of us slower than we expected. There seems to be some internal clock that needs tending, and that was even before the Delta variant came along.
Will it be another winter of comfort shopping, comfort foods, and, best of all, comfort reading? Rereading is likely the most comforting kind of reading there is. You know exactly what you are going to get with an old favorite author: you will likely be pleased again by the gorgeous geography, clever dialogue, relentless pacing... whatever drew you to the book the first time. Can booksellers highlight backlist titles just like new ones? Is it smart to offer bookseller recommendations for the backlist? Can the backlist be just as seasonal as any holiday list? I think so.
Michael Malone, remember him? There is practically nothin' better than a fall road trip with Michael. The geniuses at Sourcebooks repackaged them all a while ago so they are, first of all, beautiful to look at, but also hilarious as always. Dingley Falls is a character-driven romp. Quirky characters, bawdy nights and clever dialogue make for a pretty good way to ride out a stormy weekend. It's a long but fast 400 pages with a necessary four-page alphabetical listing of all the characters: Sidney Blossom, town librarian and former hippie; Louie Daytona, gorgeous bisexual sculptor and ex-convict. I mean, come on! Handling Sin, Foolscap and Time's Witness would be terrific for a series of chilly fall weekends.
Jan Karon's Mitford series is filled with characters who treat one another with kindness, dignity, and respect. Remember those? Yeah, me neither, which is why these books are such a balm, especially during election season. The first two, At Home in Mitford and A Light in the Window, were originally released by Penguin in paper but then Karon became such a phenomenon that the Mitford books became an annual big-budget treat for millions of readers. That success story maybe made us forget about the novelty and sweetness of the first two. You'll meet a dozen or so small-town characters who will remind you of your own favorite locals. These are the people we missed most during our Covid lockdown, and Mitford will bring them right back. These first Mitford books were quiet and wise, and it's time to introduce a new generation of readers to them this fall.
That reminds me. The original Pam Houston--Cowboys Are My Weakness--is a series of short stories with the interconnected themes of bad men, good country, and brave women. On the wild rivers of Colorado or deep in the rugged alpines of Alaska, our ballsy narrator falls for cowboys who are never worth the trip. Luckily she tells the stories with a sure and gutsy voice so we can bear them too. Houston's lyrical descriptions of the natural world are just right for autumn when nature lifts its skirts. So you can add in Waltzing the Cat and A Little More About Me, all from Norton. But the original, more than a quarter of a century old, was ahead of its time. It could have been written this year for the Me Too era and we need to be putting this book into young women's hands every day. Come election season they might just be ready.
I absolutely ADORE this idea, and I wish the Sequel Bookstore in Enumclaw would adopt it, so people like me, who buy so many books a year, could get a freebie now and then!
Cool Idea of the Day: 'Give & Take Wall'
"Come visit our queer give and take wall today! https://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/uz3642037Biz50465814 You can pledge something for someone else or pick up an item if you fit the description," Under the Umbrella Bookstore, Salt Lake City, Utah, posted on Facebook yesterday. "Seeing people give to and take from this wall has been one of the most joyful parts of running the store so far!
"ID: a brown bulletin board called the Give & Take Wall." The process: "Give: Pledge anything in the shop to someone else. Pay at the counter and tape your pledge here. Take: If you fit the description on a card, bring it to the counter to receive the item free, no questions asked."
RIP to the master of musical theater. God go with you, Mr Sondheim.
Obituary: The Legendary Stephen Sondheim has died today at the age of 91.
https://apnews.com/article/stephen-sondheim-musical-theater-a4ef685dd49259648991ebfbcef8bbbd
NEW YORK (AP) — Stephen Sondheim, the songwriter who reshaped the American musical theater in the second half of the 20th century with his intelligent, intricately rhymed lyrics, his use of evocative melodies and his willingness to tackle unusual subjects, has died. He was 91.
Sondheim influenced several generations of theater songwriters, particularly with such landmark musicals as “Company,” “Follies” and “Sweeney Todd,” which are considered among his best work. His most famous ballad, “Send in the Clowns,” has been recorded hundreds of times, including by Frank Sinatra and Judy Collins.
The artist refused to repeat himself, finding inspiration for his shows in such diverse subjects as an Ingmar Bergman movie (“A Little Night Music”), the opening of Japan to the West (“Pacific Overtures”), French painter Georges Seurat (“Sunday in the Park With George”), Grimm’s fairy tales (“Into the Woods”) and even the killers of American presidents (“Assassins”), among others.
Tributes quickly flooded social media as performers and writers alike saluted a giant of the theater. “We shall be singing your songs forever,” wrote Lea Salonga. Aaron Tveit wrote: “We are so lucky to have what you’ve given the world.”
“The theater has lost one of its greatest geniuses and the world has lost one of its greatest and most original writers. Sadly, there is now a giant in the sky,” producer Cameron Mackintosh wrote in tribute. Music supervisor, arranger and orchestrator Alex Lacamoire tweeted: “For those of us who love new musical theater: we live in a world that Sondheim built.”
Six of Sondheim’s musicals won Tony Awards for best score, and he also received a Pulitzer Prize (“Sunday in the Park”), an Academy Award (for the song “Sooner or Later” from the film “Dick Tracy”), five Olivier Awards and the Presidential Medal of Honor. In 2008, he received a Tony Award for lifetime achievement.
A supreme wordsmith — and an avid player of word games — Sondheim’s joy of language shone through. “The opposite of left is right/The opposite of right is wrong/So anyone who’s left is wrong, right?” he wrote in “Anyone Can Whistle.” In “Company,” he penned the lines: “Good things get better/Bad gets worse/Wait — I think I meant that in reverse.”
He offered the three principles necessary for a songwriter in his first volume of collected lyrics — Content Dictates Form, Less Is More, and God Is in the Details. All these truisms, he wrote, were “in the service of Clarity, without which nothing else matters.” Together they led to stunning lines like: “It’s a very short road from the pinch and the punch to the paunch and the pouch and the pension.”
Taught by no less a genius than Oscar Hammerstein, Sondheim pushed the musical into a darker, richer and more intellectual place. “If you think of a theater lyric as a short story, as I do, then every line has the weight of a paragraph,” he wrote in his 2010 book, “Finishing the Hat,” the first volume of his collection of lyrics and comments.
Early in his career, Sondheim wrote the lyrics for two shows considered to be classics of the American stage, “West Side Story” (1957) and “Gypsy” (1959). “West Side Story,” with music by Leonard Bernstein, transplanted Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” to the streets and gangs of modern-day New York. “Gypsy,” with music by Jule Styne, told the backstage story of the ultimate stage mother and the daughter who grew up to be Gypsy Rose Lee.
It was not until 1962 that Sondheim wrote both music and lyrics for a Broadway show, and it turned out to be a smash — the bawdy “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” starring Zero Mostel as a wily slave in ancient Rome yearning to be free.
It was “Company,” which opened on Broadway in April 1970, that cemented Sondheim’s reputation. The episodic adventures of a bachelor (played by Dean Jones) with an inability to commit to a relationship was hailed as capturing the obsessive nature of striving, self-centered New Yorkers. The show, produced and directed by Hal Prince, won Sondheim his first Tony for best score. “The Ladies Who Lunch” became a standard for Elaine Stritch.
In 1973, “A Little Night Music,” starring Glynis Johns and Len Cariou, opened. Based on Bergman’s “Smiles of a Summer Night,” this rueful romance of middle-age lovers contains the song “Send in the Clowns,” which gained popularity outside the show. A revival in 2009 starred Angela Lansbury and Catherine Zeta-Jones was nominated for a best revival Tony.
In 1979, Sondheim and Prince collaborated on what many believe to be Sondheim’s masterpiece, the bloody yet often darkly funny “Sweeney Todd.” An ambitious work, it starred Len Cariou in the title role as a murderous barber whose customers end up in meat pies baked by Todd’s willing accomplice, played by Angela Lansbury.
“Sunday in the Park,” written with James Lapine, may be Sondheim’s most personal show. A tale of uncompromising artistic creation, it told the story of artist Georges Seurat, played by Mandy Patinkin. The painter submerges everything in his life, including his relationship with his model (Bernadette Peters), for his art.) It was most recently revived on Broadway in 2017 with Jake Gyllenhaal.)
Three years after “Sunday” debuted, Sondheim collaborated again with Lapine, this time on the fairy-tale musical “Into the Woods.” The show starred Peters as a glamorous witch and dealt primarily with the turbulent relationships between parents and children, using such famous fairy-tale characters as Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood and Rapunzel. It was most recently revived in the summer of 2012 in Central Park by The Public Theater.
Sondheim was born March 22, 1930, into a wealthy family, the only son of dress manufacturer Herbert Sondheim and Helen Fox Sondheim. At 10, his parents divorced and Sondheim’s mother bought a house in Doylestown, Pa., where one of their Bucks County neighbors was lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, whose son, James, was Sondheim’s roommate at boarding school. It was Oscar Hammerstein who became the young man’s professional mentor and a good friend.
He had a solitary childhood, one that involved verbal abuse from his chilly mother. He received a letter in his 40s from her telling him that she regretted giving birth to him. He continued to support her financially and to see her occasionally but didn’t attend her funeral. Sondheim attended Williams College in Massachusetts, where he majored in music. After graduation, he received a two-year fellowship to study with avant-garde composer Milton Babbitt.
An HBO documentary directed by Lapine, “Six by Sondheim,” aired in 2013 and revealed that he liked to compose lying down and sometimes enjoyed a cocktail to loosen up as he wrote. He even revealed that he really only fell in love after reaching 60, first with the dramatist Peter Jones and then in his last years with Jeff Romley.
“Every so often someone comes along that fundamentally shifts an entire art form. Stephen Sondheim was one of those. As millions mourn his passing I also want to express my gratitude for all he has given to me and so many more,” singer and actor Hugh Jackman wrote via Twitter.
The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles is the second novel of his that I've read, the first being his bestseller A Gentleman in Moscow, which I read with my book group. Though "Gentleman" received rave reviews and sold millions of copies, I didn't really think it was worth all of the hype...it was extremely well written, so that earned the story just accolades, but there were parts of the book that fell flat with me as a reader. This novel has the same classic style prose, as if it were written by Charles Dickens or Henry James or Herman Melville or Ralph Waldo Emerson. Plenty of 10 cent word choices and long, rambling sentences full of references to Greek myths and legends are the style here, with paragraphs that are nearly endless. Long, dense chapters and a nearly 600 page count means that this book is a marathon, not a sprint. The characters are also classic good guys and innocent boys vs evil greedy men matchups, so that makes the long plot easier to swallow. Here's the blurb: The bestselling author of A Gentleman in Moscow and Rules of Civility and master of absorbing, sophisticated fiction returns with a stylish and propulsive novel set in 1950s America
In
June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska
by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen
months for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father
recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank,
Emmett's intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother, Billy, and
head to California where they can start their lives anew. But when the
warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm
have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden's car. Together, they
have hatched an altogether different plan for Emmett's future, one that
will take them all on a fateful journey in the opposite direction—to
the City of New York.
Spanning just ten days and told from
multiple points of view, Towles's third novel will satisfy fans of his
multi-layered literary styling while providing them an array of new and
richly imagined settings, characters, and themes.
First of all, the multiple POVs become really annoying when there's more than two of them. When Towles starts throwing in characters we don't even meet until the last third of the book, it becomes unnecessarily confusing. My second main problem, other than the length of the chapters and the redundancy of the prose (are there no good editors in publishing houses anymore?) is the stereotyping of the characters, which makes them seem one dimensional. No 8 year old is as sweet and good and studious as Billy, who is either a late bloomer or he is someone with Down Syndrome and unable to mentally process reality in all it's gray areas. His brother Emmett also seems a bit too "goody two shoes" and totally misses the obvious flirtation of Sally, who wants to marry him and take care of Billy. The character of Duchess, who is a guy, is a reprehensible, greedy and cunning criminal whom I gather we are supposed to fall in love with as the "handsome rogue" stereotype, but though his childhood was filled with terrible abuse and abandonment, I didn't really feel much sympathy for him, as he was always out for himself, and if others got hurt or killed as a result of his actions, he didn't care. "Woolly" was another character we're supposed to love, but whose ridiculous actions and stupidity made him irritating, and I felt that again, readers were dealing with someone who was mentally deficient (yet the author never tells us that Billy or Woolly have mental problems). Though it had a satisfying ending, I still couldn't give this massive book more than a B-, and recommend it to anyone who likes stories with 50s caricatures.
The King of Koraha by Maria V Snyder was the third and final book in her Archives of the Invisible Sword series. I've read not only the first two books in this series, but all of Maria V Snyder's books, and I've loved them all. Snyder's prose is golden, full of bright and shining moments and beautifully drawn characters in exotic locales, while her plots move at such a swift pace that it's nearly impossible for me to put the book down once I've started it. Here's the blurb: You can join me or you can die.
Hard on the heels
of trouble in Zirdai city, Shyla Sun-Kissed and Rendor are ordered to
report to the King of Koraha - a summons that is deadly to ignore. The
King holds the key to Koraha's existence, but a formidable new enemy
threatens Koraha's very survival and the King desperately needs Shyla
and Rendor's help.
Wielding a terrifying and unknown magical
power that can convert opponents into devoted soldiers, the mysterious
army is hellbent on usurping the crown. Shyla and Rendor are tasked with
discovering who in the seven hells these insurgents are. And what their
real endgame is.
Trekking through the punishing conditions
across the searing surface of Koraha, and facing numerous unseen foes
and untold danger, they must follow the clues to uncover the truth
before it's too late. The fate of the King and all the citizens of
Koraha rests in their hands.
There's more action in this book than most "action packed thriller" movies! It seems that Shyla and Rendor can't get a break from the crooked counselors or blood thirsty military men in this installment, and even though Shyla has a great deal of magic going for her, she still gets caught in Xerxes net, as does Rendor, her beloved. I must say that I saw the fascination with water and drowning by the desert dwellers hilarious and interesting, in that they've never experienced immersion in a body of water before (they must all stink to high heaven!). At any rate, it was a delicious ending to a riveting series, and I'd give it an A, and recommend it to anyone who has read the first two books in the series.
Wayward Moon by Devon Monk was a low priced ebook that I snatched up because it is the second book in Monk's latest paranormal romance/fantasy series, and I loved the first book so much that I've been waiting for this one with baited breath! Monk is my go-to author for perfect prose and riveting stories starring unique and fascinating characters...she never fails to deliver a good read. Here's the blurb: A deal with a god comes with deadly strings attached...
Lovers
Brogan and Lula Gauge have traveled the haunted byways of Route 66 for
almost a hundred years. Their deal with the god Cupid has brought Brogan
back to life, but the return to the living world hasn’t been easy for
him. What’s more, that deal left them deeply indebted to the god.
Now the god is demanding his due.
To
honor their side of the deal, Brogan and Lula must find what Cupid
wants found. The god hasn’t given them much to go on other than: find
the rabbit that is not a rabbit. Do the right thing.
If the right
thing involves facing down feuding werewolves, banishing vengeful
ghosts, and venturing into the deep, ancient caverns beneath the
Missouri hills, then Brogan and Lula might be on the right path.
But lurking deep within those caverns is an evil older than the gods. It is clever. It is waiting. It is hungry.
Monks book series are like Doctor Who (with the exception of the Capaldi or the 6th Doctor years) in that I will always watch and enjoy them, no matter when they're on TV, even if it's a rerun from decades earlier. Mainly because the Doctor is always entertaining and fun, and you know you're in for a good time, every time. Monks characters are so real, you almost think you could walk down the street and meet them for a cup of coffee or tea. Her plots never flag or slow down, and in this installment, the characters were so unique I couldn't wait to see what would happen to the "rabbit in the moon." I love Lula, the female protagonist, though Brogan seems a bit too possessive and controlling for him to be the perfect mate...yet Lula faithfully loves him through thick and thin. I'd give this page turning tale an A, and recommend it to anyone who read the first book in the series.
Sunrise By the Sea by Jenny Colgan is an ebook that I paid more than I usually do for Kindle novels, but in this case I was glad that I did. A romantic finding-yourself fiction novel, this book was sweet but slow in getting the characters from point A to B. Still, the prose was clean and the plot didn't meander too much. Here's the blurb:
I liked the interconnectedness of the village of Mount Polbearne, and I liked the way that slowly Marisa opened up and let herself love again. Though some of the side characters were irritating, I found that most of them were like old relatives by the end of the book, in that you just learned to deal with them eventually. Plus, ever since I watched Poldark on PBS, I've wanted to know more about the windswept beauty of the Cornwall area of England. I'd give this book a B, and recommend it to anyone who enjoys cozy mysteries and second chance at romance books.
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