Hello June, the beginning of Summer and Summer reading! I'm very excited about all the great "beach" reads coming out, as well as the spring reads still languishing on my TBR. I did manage to gulp down a bunch of books recently, so lets get the tidbits and reviews underway.
Oh heck yeah, another Margaret Atwood adaptation! I loved reading so many of Atwoods insightful novels, now they're bringing another one of her important stories on women's rights to the screen, and a story of older women at that...thank goddess for Atwood and the team who are adapting Stone Mattress.
Movies: Stone Mattress
Lynne Ramsay (You Were Never Really Here) will direct Stone Mattress https://www.shelfawareness.com/ct/x/pjJscAOPwewI6ao2IUp3Ew~k1yJoKXv-hs8x6jEXcCkpoMLg-gVdw, an adaptation of Margaret Atwood's 2011 New Yorker short story, Deadline reported. Starring Julianne Moore and Sandra Oh, the film is being adapted by Ramsay with Tom Townend, with production set to begin this September in Greenland and Iceland.
"With the current repeal in women's rights across the world, particularly regarding the overturning of Roe v Wade in America, this story, with its themes of stolen motherhood and unaccounted sexual abuse, feels more important than ever," Ramsay said. "I first read Margaret Atwood when I was a teenager, and her work has gripped me ever since. She is simply one of the most intelligent, prophetic and engaging writers around and 'Stone Mattress' is another perfect illustration of that. I was immediately gripped by the way it framed the deeply buried trauma of a post-menopausal woman--an age group we hear from all too rarely--through the dynamic and multifaceted character of Verna."
Wow, nearly 50 years of bookselling...All hail Michael Coy! Job well done! Third Place is a wonderful store.
Image of the Day: Third Place Books Honors Michael Coy
In honor of Michael Coy's 48-year career in bookselling, his contributions to the greater Seattle book community and his lasting impact as the manager at Third Place Books, Ravenna, Wash., Third Place Books https://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/x/pjJscAOAk-UI6ao2IBl1Hw~k1yJoKXv-hs8x6jEUpKtpoMLg-gVdw> has named its entrance to its Ravenna location "Michael Coy Way." A street sign bearing the Seattle bookselling legend's name has been permanently installed at the entrance to the Ravenna parking lot.
Coy opened the iconic Bailey Coy Books in Seattle with Barbara Bailey in 1981 and then opened and ran M Coy Books in Seattle from 1990 to 2009 (when the store lost its lease).
Third Place Books' managing partner Robert Sindelar recalled, "When I heard Michael's store lost its lease, we were in the midst of reinventing our Ravenna location. I knew it was a long shot, asking this bookselling legend if he'd want to work for someone else (me), but I had to ask. Lucky for me, Third Place Books and the Ravenna community, he said yes." Coy managed Third Place Books Ravenna for 11 years until he retired in 2020, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Sindelar added, "We couldn't celebrate Michael's retirement properly at the time (for health and safety issues). So I was thrilled we were able to host a party recently for the Seattle book community to honor Michael and finally give him his retirement gift--his own street sign at the store he helped build."
Having seen all the movies and read most of the books, I'm looking forward to this new movie edition to the franchise, and I hope that it will be as engaging as the previous movies have been.
Movies: The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
Rachel Zegler (West Side Story) will play the lead female role of Lucy Gray Baird, joining recently announced Tom Blyth as the young Coriolanus Snow, in Lionsgate's The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes https://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/x/pjJscAOAk-UI6ao2IBlzGw~k1yJoKXv-hs8x6jEUpKtpoMLg-gVdw, based on the novel by Suzanne Collins, Deadline reported. Directed by Francis Lawrence, the latest draft of the screenplay is by Michael Lesslie, who is building on the work of Collins and Michael Arndt. The movie will hit theaters around the world on November 17, 2023.
"When you read Suzanne's book, Lucy Gray's emotional intelligence, physical agility, and fiercely powerful, determined singing voice shine through. Rachel embodies all of those skills--she is the perfect choice for our Lucy Gray," said Nathan Kahane, president, Lionsgate Motion Picture Group.
Lawrence commented: "Like everybody, I first saw Rachel Zegler in West Side Story, and like everybody, I knew I was watching a star who would command the screen for a generation. Lucy Gray is a perfect match for her as an actress: the character is bold, independent, and defiant, but also vulnerable, emotional, and loving. Rachel will make this character unforgettable."
Famed Seattle Bookstore Elliott Bay is now under new ownership, and I personally can't wait to see what they'll be doing with the place! I hope there will be less of a "book snob" vibe and more emphasis on stocking and recommending new hybrid genres and books that are exciting for readers new and old.
Seattle's Elliott Bay Book Co. Bought by GM Tracy Taylor & Two Partners
Elliott Bay Book Company https://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/x/pjJscAOAwe4I6ao2IB4gHA~k1yJoKXv-hs8x6jEUsCmpoMLg-gVdw, Seattle, Wash., has been purchased from Peter Aaron by Tracy Taylor, the store's general manager for the past 32 years, and Murf Hall and Joey Burgess of Burgess Hall Group. (Hall and Burgess are married.) The new co-owners also own the newsstand Big Little News, which they opened in 2021 in the nearby Pike/Pine neighborhood.
One of the largest, best bookstores in the country, Elliott Bay was founded in 1973 on Main Street in Seattle's Pioneer Square neighborhood by Walter and Maggie Carr. Peter Aaron joined Elliott Bay in 1999 and became the sole owner in 2001. The store moved to its current 20,000-square-foot location in the Capitol Hill area in 2010.
Aaron said, "It has been an honor and a privilege to serve as steward of this unique and wonderful haven of literature and civility for the past 23 years. I am deeply grateful to our customers, suppliers, and most emphatically to the scores of dedicated and talented booksellers who have sustained and supported the bookstore since its inception. In planning for my exit, my primary concern has been to pass that stewardship on to the right hands, and in Tracy, Murf, and Joey, I'm confident in having succeeded. Their experience, energy, and talents make them ideally suited to ensure that the bookstore will continue to thrive and to maintain the standards and traditions which have been hallmarks of the business throughout the years. I wish them all success and happiness."
Hall commented: "Our intention is to continue much of what Peter has done so successfully during his ownership. Tracy's wealth of institutional knowledge and experience, having worked for more than three decades with the previous owners, is invaluable. Her expertise, combined with the fresh perspective Joey and I bring, will ensure that Elliott Bay will continue to grow and flourish for current and future generations of customers. I'm especially looking forward to bringing new ideas from the world of retail that I've been immersed in for 20 years running."
Hall, former store design director at Nordstrom, also said that opening Big Little News "gave us a great opportunity to solidify our partnership in preparation for the ownership transition at Elliott Bay. Through the success and love of that project, we quickly came to realize just how passionate we were about owning Elliott Bay and knew we were ready for the larger leap when Peter began succession planning."
Taylor, who served with Burgess on Seattle's Small Business Advisory Council, said, too: "We are all deeply committed to the neighborhood. Capitol Hill has experienced explosive growth in recent years, and Elliott Bay has had tremendous opportunities as the neighborhood has changed around it. Amidst the development, Murf and Joey have made thoughtful and intentional investments in the community."
She continued, "We will always be looking at ways to expand and serve the local community through brick and mortar, online sales, author readings, and community events." The new co-owners don't plan on any immediate changes, she noted. Hall added: "Well, maybe a fresh coat of paint right out of the gate."
This sounds utterly fascinating, and I really want to read a copy ASAP. I love musical theater/theater tell-alls, and this sounds particularly juicy!
Book Review: Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers
The composer (Once Upon a Mattress) and children's book author (Freaky Friday) Mary Rodgers (1931-2014) had this to say of her decision to work on a syrupy television musical in the early 1960s: "In my defense, that was during the period when I would basically do anything. And that period has been my whole life." Her whole life is on dazzling display in Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers, in which her more dispiriting undertakings are just as enthusiastically recollected as her sporadic but stratospheric triumphs.
The daughter of musical theater titan Richard Rodgers and decorator and inventor Dorothy, Mary Rodgers turns her clashes with her human-briar-patch-like mother into a sort of percussion that rumbles beneath Shy's more melodic memories. Rodgers relives her personal highs and lows and her artistic hits, misses and close calls, as when her father had her standing by to finish the lyrics for The Sound of Music in case the then-ailing Oscar Hammerstein didn't pull through. (He did.)
Shy is a treasure chest of goodies for fans of the New York performing arts world at mid-century and just beyond. The narrative is piled high and wide with stories about the likes of Leonard Bernstein, for whom Rodgers worked on CBS's Young People's Concerts, and Stephen Sondheim, with whom she collaborated and for whom she pined. Readers besotted with Old Broadway would probably inhale Rodgers's memoir no matter its quality, but Sky has the added bonus of being note-perfect. About having formidable parents, Rodgers writes, "I spent my entire childhood with everyone mad at me. All two of them." Broadway producer and occasional romantic prospect Hal Prince "was born clasping a list of people he wanted to meet." The chapter in which Rodgers recounts losing her virginity is titled "More than Once Upon a Mattress."
In Shy's final chapter, the book's coauthor, Jesse Green (O Beautiful; The Velveteen Father), chief theater critic for the New York Times, relays that due to Rodgers's flagging health as she was dictating her memoirs, some of the words in the main text aren't hers. But Green is more than a sentence doctor: his plentiful footnotes--clarifying and corrective but also witty and wisecracking--give Shy the call-and-response playfulness of a duet. Confiding, blunt, cruel, ribald, dishy and blackly humorous, Shy has all the entertainment value of a first-rate Broadway production, the book's 70-odd photos and reproductions the set dressing. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer
My Reviews:
Bravely by Maggie Stiefvater is an authorized (by Disney) book about the later teenage to 20-something years of the character Merida from the animated movie "Brave" which debuted to much acclaim back about 10 years ago. Stiefvater is a well known writer of fantasy and YA novels, so this isn't her first rodeo, and it shows. The prose is crisp and smart and the plot moves along like mercury on a glass floor. I read through this page-turner in 8 hours, and I would have not stopped had I not had to attend to bodily requirements. Here's the blurb: What if you had one year to save everything you loved? ONE PRINCESS. Merida of DunBroch needs a change. She loves her family—jovial King Fergus, proper Queen Elinor, the mischievous triplets— and her peaceful kingdom. But she's frustrated by its sluggishness; each day, the same. Merida longs for adventure, purpose, challenge - maybe even, someday, love. TWO GODS. But the fiery Princess never expects her disquiet to manifest by way of Feradach, an uncanny supernatural being tasked with rooting out rot and stagnation, who appears in DunBroch on Christmas Eve with the intent to demolish the realm - and everyone within. Only the intervention of the Cailleach, an ancient entity of creation, gives Merida a shred of hope: convince her family to change within the year - or suffer the eternal consequences. THREE VOYAGES. Under the watchful eyes of the gods, Merida leads a series of epic journeys to kingdoms near and far in an attempt to inspire revolution within her family. But in her efforts to save those she loves from ruin, has Merida lost sight of the Clan member grown most stagnant of all - herself? FOUR SEASONS TO SAVE DUNBROCH - OR SEE IT DESTROYED, FOREVER.
The old Celtic gods and their war to keep the balance (while also playing fast and loose with the truth and reality and people's lives) were almost fae-like and felt like a LOTR subplot. Yet Merida was more fully fleshed out than she's ever been on the movie screen, and her parents and triplet brothers also get more of a background and personalities that help readers realize why they behave as they do (and why they're not called on it, or disciplined for their transgressions). All in all, a satisfying read and one that deserves an A, and a recommendation to anyone who wonders what happened to one of the most independent and competent of the Disney Princesses.
Book of Night by Holly Black is a very dark contemporary fantasy that, though blurbists claim is like Neil Gaiman and Stephen King, is really more HP Lovecraft with a bit of S. King thrown in for contemporary fear factor. I've never been a fan of the horror genre, and do my best to avoid it, so I'm rather disappointed that this novel was packaged as "dark fantasy" instead of horror, where it belongs. The characters are a mess, the world they live in is dark and depressing and there seems to be nothing good or uplifting or interesting about the life of the protagonist, Charlie Hall, the queen of bad luck. Here's the blurb: Holly Black makes her stunning adult debut with Book of Night,
a modern dark fantasy of betrayals, secret societies, and a dissolute
thief of shadows, in the vein of Neil Gaiman and Erin Morgenstern.
Charlie Hall has never found a lock she couldn’t pick, a book she couldn’t steal, or a bad decision she wouldn’t make.
She's
spent half her life working for gloamists, magicians who manipulate
shadows to peer into locked rooms, strangle people in their beds, or
worse. Gloamists guard their secrets greedily, creating an underground
economy of grimoires. And to rob their fellow magicians, they need
Charlie Hall.
Now, she’s trying to distance herself from past
mistakes, but getting out isn’t easy. Bartending at a dive, she’s still
entirely too close to the corrupt underbelly of the Berkshires. Not to
mention that her sister Posey is desperate for magic, and that Charlie's
shadowless, and possibly soulless, boyfriend has been hiding things
from her. When a terrible figure from her past returns, Charlie descends
into a maelstrom of murder and lies.
Determined to survive,
she’s up against a cast of doppelgangers, mercurial billionaires,
gloamists, and the people she loves best in the world—all trying to
steal a secret that will give them vast and terrible power.
Nothing is completely resolved in this book, and all the uber villains are rich guys who are into every kind of evil imaginable. Charlie doesn't care about anyone but herself and her nasty, nosy mooch of a sister, who is willing to steal or take anything from Charlie that she can, because, like her sister, she's a selfish brat. Add to that her loathesome parents and her mother's rancid abusive boyfriend, and things only go downhill from there. The prose is fine, if a bit cloudy, and the plot manages to ramble on, though it feels as if its held together with tongue depressors and chewing gum. Since there's really no one who is as they seem, and no one decent enough to root for here, I'd give this messy and only slightly cohesive novel a C, and recommend it to those who like ramshackle horror novels that have a mouldering goth air to them.
A Magic Steeped in Poison by Judy I. Lin is a beautiful Asian YA fantasy that is so engrossing you will find yourself reading into the wee hours to find out what happens next to the fantastic Ning. Here's the blurb:
Judy I. Lin's sweeping debut A Magic Steeped in Poison, first in a duology, is sure to enchant fans of Adrienne Young and Leigh Bardugo.
I used to look at my hands with pride. Now all I can think is, "These are the hands that buried my mother."
For
Ning, the only thing worse than losing her mother is knowing that it's
her own fault. She was the one who unknowingly brewed the poison tea
that killed her—the poison tea that now threatens to also take her
sister, Shu.
When Ning hears of a competition to find the
kingdom's greatest shennong-shi—masters of the ancient and magical art
of tea-making—she travels to the imperial city to compete. The winner
will receive a favor from the princess, which may be Ning's only chance
to save her sister's life.
But between the backstabbing
competitors, bloody court politics, and a mysterious (and handsome) boy
with a shocking secret, Ning might actually be the one in more danger.
Ning is brilliant but very self-effacing and feels guilty for things that are actually beyond her control. What I loved most about this novel and Ning was that it read like one of the Chinese or Japanese folktales that I used to read in college, which were so intricate you could read them several times and come away with something new and fascinating every time. The thing about Chinese or Japanese folktales or fables is that they were often used to teach people lessons in morality or wisdom or even common sense. Nings tale is no exception, as she learns, through the tea competition, that cheaters never win in the end, that there is no substitute for persistence and hard work, etc. The prose is somewhat formal, but the plot will be familiar to anyone who has read myths and legends. I look forward to the next book in the duology, because warning, this one ends on a cliffhanger! I also love tea, so all the talk of making different kinds of tea was delicious reading for a fan of the leaf that refreshes. I'd give this splendid book an A, and recommend it to anyone who loves Asian myths and legends.
Dead Ahead by Annie Anderson is the 5th book in the Grave Talker series, and though I promised myself I'd give up my addiction to this urban paranormal fantasy series, there I was, reading DA into the wee hours on my Kindle Paperwhite. Here's the blurb:
You have to read novels 1-4 in order to understand this one, so don't skip around in the series. There are some huge bombs that go off in this story, enough so that I can't even spoil them all for you, except to say (SPOILER, one of many) that I just KNEW her mage boyfriend was a lying creep right from the get-go, as he was presented as too perfect to be real. I was rooting for Darby to crush this asshat within the first few chapters of the novel...so it was gratifying that she recognized how she'd been used by him. One of the many things that I like about this strong female protagonist is that she keeps fighting for her family, friends and what is right long after anyone sane would have given up the ghost, so to speak (yeah, I know, bad pun). She also eats a lot on a regular basis, which is normal and healthy, when you consider all the energy she expends fighting evil, and she swears a lot and fights dirty...gotta love a gal who can talk smack and kick the shite out of the bad guys/gals. Also, I love her gay bestie and his boyfriend the elf...and the ghost grandpa who is full of beans. Anderson's prose is whip smart and clean, while her plots are razor sharp and move along without hesitation. I'd give this novel an A, and recommend it to anyone who has read any other books in this series...you won't BELIEVE what happens next!
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