Spirited, A Christmas Carol Movie Musical, The Copper Bell Bookshop Opens in WA, Dune the Sisterhood Comes to TV, Legends and Lattes Pro Review, Plain: A Memoir of a Mennonite Girlhood Review, Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree, The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna, Spells for Lost Things by Jenna Evans Welch and Be the Serpent by Seanan McGuire

It's getting spooky and misty in here, fellow book lovers! Welcome to the end of the first week of October! I've gone on a reading binge, so I have 4 books to review today. But first, news of books, bookstores and adaptations!

This looks hilarious and fun, just because it has some funny people in it, like Ryan Reynolds. I will have to watch it in November.

Movies: Spirited, A Christmas Carol Movie Musical

AppleTV+ has set a release date for its upcoming holiday movie musical Spirited https://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/x/pjJscAeAleoI6almdU92Gw~k1yJoKXv-hs8x6jAUpSipoMLg-gVdw, a new adaptation of the Charles Dickens classic story A Christmas Carol, Playbill reported. Directed by Sean Anders and written by Anders and John Morris, the film will hit theaters November 11 and stream on AppleTV+ beginning November 18.

Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds lead a cast that includes Patrick Page, Joe Tippett, Octavia Spencer, Sunita Mani, Loren Woods, Marlow Barkley and Jen Tullock. The film will feature new songs written by Dear Evan Hansen team Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, along with Khiyon Hursey, Sukari Jones and Mark Sonnenblick.

 This sounds like my kind of place! Art supplies, journals, candles AND books? Heaven!

The Copper Bell Bookshop Comes to Ridgefield, Wash.

The Copper Bell Bookshop opened October 1 in Ridgefield, Wash., the Reflector reported https://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/x/pjJscAeAkOoI6allIxpwGg~k1yJoKXv-hs8x6jAUpGipoMLg-gVdw.

The store sells general-interest titles for all ages, along with gifts and nonbook items like art supplies, journals and candles.

Prior to opening Copper Bell Bookshop, owner Debra Warnock worked as a realtor for more than 30 years. She told the Reflector that she's been planning to open a bookstore for nearly 10 years, though "in the beginning, it was more like dreaming about it and kind of laying out what I would do."

The longer she thought about it, the more serious the idea became, and eventually she joined the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association and started learning the ropes of running an independent bookstore. She spent three years as a prospective PNBA member while "trying to pull everything together and get a location." She noted that after the Covid-19 pandemic began, she and her husband, Paul Warnock, nearly dropped the idea, but decided instead to keep forging ahead.

Warnock plans to host a variety of community-focused events, including book club meetings and storytime sessions. The store's initial author events will be with local authors, with Warnock looking to gradually expand from there. "Our goal is to keep building the community involvement and our level of events that we offer." She added that her aim has been to make the bookstore warm, comfortable and welcoming, where "people can come in and visit and shop and talk books."

This is going to be a smash hit, I think, and I can hardly wait to see it. The Bene Gesserit were based on the Jesuit priests sect of  the Catholic church back when they were considered the intelligent, ninja-like arm of Catholicism. 

TV: Dune: The Sisterhood

Dune: The Sisterhood https://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/x/pjJscAeAkOoI6allIxp-Sw~k1yJoKXv-hs8x6jAUpGipoMLg-gVdw, the HBO Max prequel series from Legendary Television, has cast Emily Watson (Chernobyl, The Book Thief) and Shirley Henderson (Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire) in lead roles, Variety reported. The project is based on the novel Sisterhood of Dune by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson.

Watson will play Valya Harkonnen and Henderson Tula Harkonnen, two sisters who "have risen to power in the Sisterhood, a secret organization of women who will go on to become the Bene Gesserit," according to the logline.

Diane Ademu-John is the creator, co-showrunner, and executive producer on Dune: The Sisterhood. Alison Schapker serves as co-showrunner and executive producer. Johan Renck (Chernobyl) will direct the premiere episode and executive produce. Also exec producing are Denis Villeneuve, Jon Spaihts, Scott Z. Burns, Matthew King, John Cameron and Cait Collins, along with Brian Herbert, Byron Merritt and Kim Herbert for the Frank Herbert estate.

 I just finished reading this book, and will review it below, but it exceeded my expectations.

Review: Legends & Lattes

Professional audiobook narrator and game developer Travis Baldree initially self-published his "high fantasy and low stakes" first novel, Legends & Lattes, which became a social-media sensation. This slice-of-life comfort read stars an unlikely coffee shop owner as she vies for business, builds a supportive social circle and quests for the perfect hot drink.

Orc barbarian and career adventurer Viv is ready to hang up her broadsword and live out her dreams of opening a cafe serving the exotic gnomish beverage coffee. Her research leads her to the city of Thune and an abandoned livery building that will need considerable work to pass as a cafe. Viv faces the challenge, wanting "something she built up, rather than cut down," and launches the city's first coffee shop. Helping her out are carpenter Calamity the hob, cafe assistant Tandri the succubus and baking genius Thimble the rattkin.

Business gets off to a less than promising start, but little by little, the cafe begins to take off. The menu expands as Viv begins to form a customer base, but challenges arise when a local crime boss sends thugs to extort protection money, leaving Viv struggling to keep to her new nonviolent way of life. To make matters worse, Viv has a deep secret about the cafe's success, and someone from her old life has figured it out. She'll need to use all her wits and newfound connections to keep from losing everything she's built, including her growing relationship with Tandri.

Baldree's combination of humor, fantasy elements and gentle plot lends itself to a comforting story that's something like a cross between Terry Pratchett's Discworld series and Becky Chambers's Monk and Robot novellas, with a dash of cafe simulator games thrown in for good measure. Stalwart, disarmingly uncertain Viv shows both the frightening and rewarding sides of starting over. When she falters, her found family are nearby to bolster her spirits and lend their help. The subtle romance between Tandri and Viv will warm hearts as the two steadily grow closer. The cafe's regular customers are based on stock coffee shop customers with a fantasy twist, such as a college student studying ley lines and a bard with a rock-and-roll lute. Even the conflicts resolve in ways that bolster the book's message of inclusion and nonviolent solutions. Fans of comforting stories, tabletop fantasy RPGs and unlikely heroes should find much to love in this charming outing. --Jaclyn Fulwood , blogger at Infinite Reads

 My paternal grandparents lived in the SE part of Iowa, where their farm was surrounded by Amish and Mennonite farms and families. My grandmother had a quilting bee/circle of Amish and Mennonite women who used a barter system to keep all their families well fed and clothed and blanketed. Whenever I'd go visit my grandparents my grandmother would have jars of honey, piles of fabric or fabric scraps, or baked goods provided in trade from her Amish and Mennonite friends (since they had their own meat processing plant, my grandparents had a fairly brisk trade in meats). Anyway, this sounds like a fascinating story.

Review: Plain: A Memoir of Mennonite Girlhood

Mary Alice Hostetter tells an authentic and evocative story about her early years entrenched in strict Mennonite religious traditions and her experiences when, at the age of 18, she decided to leave the community.

In 2008, Mary Alice edited and published The Measure of a Life, a book that chronicled the diaries of her mother, Ruth Martin Hostetter, who recorded details of being a Mennonite wife and mother, living and farming in a tight-knit church community in Gap, Pa., from 1920 to 2000. In Plain, Mary Alice continues writing about farm life, family and its meaning. However, she more deeply probes emotional truths from the past, exploring what her Mennonite upbringing meant to--and for--her own life.

Hostetter grew up the 10th of 12 children. For 18 years, she toed the line, being good, obedient and God-fearing. She conformed and strove to fit in. However, yearnings beyond what she considered the limitations of her patriarchal community--especially watching schoolmates enjoy worldly pleasures--raised questions that lured her away from the traditions and expectations of her birthright.

Twenty-one beautifully captured essays comprise the book. Hostetter digs deep into her childhood working on a farm, tending house and churchgoing; school experiences; rebellions such as sneaking off to movies; early paid jobs like a stint as a local tour guide of the Mennonite and Amish communities; her quest to go to college and become a teacher; breaking many rules of her upbringing in pursuit of cultural activities; changing her wardrobe; frequenting happy hours; and traveling stateside and abroad. Hostetter's journey to a very small town in West Virginia--a sabbatical taken from teaching to write a book--changes her life unexpectedly.

Intrigued by welcoming townsfolk, she ends up learning how to make cheese. In many ways, her West Virginia experiences bring her back to her roots, while they also widen the scope of her world as she finally recognizes and embraces being a lesbian.

These moving, tenderly rendered essays straddle the line between Hostetter expressing a fervent desire to leave her upbringing and way of life, while also finding pride and nostalgia for where she came from. The two pathways ultimately merge and come to reflect how Mennonite influences will always infuse Hostetter's being. Readers are the blessed beneficiaries of her early formations and experiences, as without them, she would not have become such a sensitive, perceptive and wise writer. -- Kathleen Gerard,  blogger at Reading Between the Lines

Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree was an ebook that I just had to have, as the more I read about this book, the more I wanted to read it ASAP. I was NOT at all disappointed, as this book reads like Fannie Flagg married to TJ Klune's House on the Cerulean Sea and Under the Whispering Door with a bit of Neil Gaiman's fantasy tales and Terry Pratchett's Discworld books added for fun. The story is lovely, moving and tender and laugh out loud funny while also being a story of resilience and strength and hope. I loved every moment, and the romance between the protagonists was especially sweet. Here's the blurb: The much-beloved BookTok sensation from Travis Baldree, Legends & Lattes is a novel of high fantasy and low stakes.
Come take a load off at Viv's cafe, the first & only coffee shop in Thune. Grand opening!

Worn out after decades of packing steel and raising hell, Viv, the orc barbarian, cashes out of the warrior’s life with one final score. A forgotten legend, a fabled artifact, and an unreasonable amount of hope lead her to the streets of Thune, where she plans to open the first coffee shop the city has ever seen.

However, her dreams of a fresh start filling mugs instead of swinging swords are hardly a sure bet. Old frenemies and Thune’s shady underbelly may just upset her plans. To finally build something that will last, Viv will need some new partners, and a different kind of resolve.

“Take a break from epic battles and saving the world. Legends & Lattes is a wholesome, cozy novel that feels like a warm hug. This is my new comfort read.”—Genevieve Gornichec, author of The Witch's Heart
 

The prose was as delicious as the cinnamon rolls served at L&L, which swept along the full bodied, aromatic plot at a racing pace. I could not put it down, so I read this engaging book in 4 hours, one sitting. Kudos to Travis Baldree for creating such a warm and fuzzy hug of a book. I just can't spoil the story or plot any more than I did with the review from Shelf Awareness, above, so I will just say that this is an A+ book and should be read by all fantasy fans everywhere.

The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna is a rousing and delightful fantasy romance, its pages sprinkled with a sweet/smart tale of blended and diverse families. It reminded me of Bewitched and Different Strokes (TV shows) combined with the Sound of Music (movie) and Alice Hoffman's magical books with TJ Klune's found family tales. The pristine prose and curvy but sensible plot keep the narrative moving. Here's the blurb:

A warm and uplifting novel about an isolated witch whose opportunity to embrace a quirky new family—and a new love—changes the course of her life.

As one of the few witches in Britain, Mika Moon knows she has to hide her magic, keep her head down, and stay away from other witches so their powers don’t mingle and draw attention. And as an orphan who lost her parents at a young age and was raised by strangers, she’s used to being alone and she follows the rules...with one exception: an online account, where she posts videos "pretending" to be a witch. She thinks no one will take it seriously.
 
But someone does. An unexpected message arrives, begging her to travel to the remote and mysterious Nowhere House to teach three young witches how to control their magic. It breaks all of the rules, but Mika goes anyway, and is immediately tangled up in the lives and secrets of not only her three charges, but also an absent archaeologist, a retired actor, two long-suffering caretakers, and…Jamie. The handsome and prickly librarian of Nowhere House would do anything to protect the children, and as far as he’s concerned, a stranger like Mika is a threat. An irritatingly appealing threat.
 
As Mika begins to find her place at Nowhere House, the thought of belonging somewhere begins to feel like a real possibility. But magic isn't the only danger in the world, and when peril comes knocking at their door, Mika will need to decide whether to risk everything to protect a found family she didn’t know she was looking for.
 

Fair warning there's a little bit of Jane Eyre swirling around the main character, Mika, who is looking for a place to belong and finds a family to give her heart to, and of course their curmudgeonly caretaker Jamie falls in love with her and they begin a happy vs grumpy romance that is by turns frustrating and endearing. Though you can see the HEA coming a mile away, it doesn't go down exactly the way most readers think it will, and the surprises in the last third of the book left me breathless. I'd give this book an A, and recommend it to anyone who loved Jane Eyre and who love stories of found and diverse families with a magical twist.

Spells For Lost Things by Jenna Evans Welch is a fun and sweetly awkward YA romance novel that had me hooked from page one on. (And I also read Love & Gelato and enjoyed it). Willow and Mason are both teenagers who have problematic parents, especially their mothers, who are cold and distant and disapproving (Willow) and a missing drug addict who left her son to fend for himself in foster care, and now in the care of her best friend (Mason). Both teens are searching for love and guidance, but they're also searching for a place that feels like home. Here's the blurb:

From the New York Times bestselling author of Love & Gelato comes a poignant and romantic novel about two teens trying to find their place in the world after being unceremoniously dragged to Salem, Massachusetts, for the summer.

Willow has never felt like she belonged anywhere and is convinced that the only way to find a true home is to travel the world. But her plans to act on her dream are put on hold when her aloof and often absent mother drags Willow to Salem, Massachusetts, to wrap up the affairs of an aunt Willow didn’t even know she had. An aunt who may or may not have been a witch.

There, she meets Mason, a loner who’s always felt out of place and has been in and out of foster homes his entire life. He’s been classified as one of the runaways, constantly searching for ways to make it back to his mom; even if she can’t take care of him, it’s his job to try and take care of her. Isn’t it?

Naturally pulled to one another, Willow and Mason set out across Salem to discover the secret past of Willow’s mother, her aunt, and the ambiguous history of her family. During all of this, the two can’t help but act on their natural connection. But with the amount of baggage between them—and Willow’s growing conviction her family might be cursed—can they manage to hold onto each other?

Though the witches in Willows family come off as caricatures of witches (kind of like the witches in Hocus Pocus...exaggerated insanity and amusing weirdness) they serve as a kind of deus ex machina here to keep the plot and characters moving in the right direction, toward their fate or destiny. I found myself worried about Mason and his deep desire to see his mother and reunite with her under the false belief that she would have kicked her drug habit and wanted to parent him. It was devastating to him to learn that she chose her addiction over her child. Less devastating but equally harsh is Willow's cruel, cold mother who has lied to her about her heritage her entire life, and who says she doesn't believe in witches or magic, yet stays away from her daughter, emotionally starving her because she fears an old curse will tear them apart. Sadly, only one of the teenagers realizes their hopes of parental reconciliation. But it all makes for a very satisfying ending. I'd give this book an A, and recommend it to those who like fish out of water YA romances, and found family stories.

Be The Serpent by Seanan McGuire is the 16th book in her October Daye series. I've read all of the previous novels, of course, but I noticed that they all had one thing in common that became a trope of her work. The protagonist, Toby, always gets carved up and dies or nearly dies in every incarnation of the series, and her squire, her boyfriend turned fiancee turned husband, and all her magical friends, from kings and queens to immortal gods of the Fae, never seem to be able to help her in her battle to save them all from the latest insane big bad Fae monster. Here are all these amazing folks with all this power and what, they can't summon enough strength to help Toby out in her time of need? Or at least keep her from being stabbed to death, hit with lethal magic, beaten and imprisoned, etc? It's always Toby alone fighting for her life and vanquishing the monster of the month. Much as I admire her commitment to being a hero, what is the point of building, over the course of 15 books, a group of people she loves, respects and admires, who tend to feel the same about her, if all they can do is occaisionally growl at those threatening Toby, or mill around mindlessly while Toby figures it out on her own? At least in this book, there's relatively little in the way of violence or blood, and Toby tries to settle into her life with her Caith Sidhe husband. Yet while we are lulled into a stupor with half the book dedicated to reviewing everything that happened in the previous novels (So boring, if you've read them all and you already know this stuff...and few people will start a series on the 16th book, so I don't know what McGuire's thinking, but it seems lazy to me, like she only had enough original material for a short story so she used her past exploits as padding), McGuire rams a startling and horrible ending on to the book that left me groaning "Not again!" Here's the blurb:

Now in hardcover, the sixteenth novel of the Hugo-nominated, New York Times-bestselling October Daye urban fantasy series.

October Daye is finally something she never expected to be: married. All the trials and turmoils and terrors of a hero’s life have done very little to prepare her for the expectation that she will actually share her life with someone else, the good parts and the bad ones alike, not just allow them to dabble around the edges in the things she wants to share. But with an official break from hero duties from the Queen in the Mists, and her family wholly on board with this new version of “normal,” she’s doing her best to adjust.
 
It isn’t always easy, but she’s a hero, right? She’s done harder.
 
Until an old friend and ally turns out to have been an enemy in disguise for this entire time, and October’s brief respite turns into a battle for her life, her community, and everything she has ever believed to be true. 
 
The debts of the Broken Ride are coming due, and whether she incurred them or not, she’s going to be the one who has to pay.

At least readers don't have to read about Toby vomiting every time she eats anything, which is rarely, as she seemed in previous novels, to live on coffee and air and blood. This time she has one of those relatively "worthless in a fight" family friends forcing her to eat sandwiches or some other food every time they see her...and she seems able to keep them down, which is the opposite of what you'd think she'd do...but that's as far as I'm going to spoil that plot point. The prose is clean but doesn't help the plodding plot much at all. I was so uninterested by the time I read the awful ending that I couldn't bring myself to read the "All new novella" which I believed to be more of the same, and I'm not up for extended plodding. I'd give this book a C+, and I would only recommend it to those who have read her other October Daye stories, because this is just one more stepping stone in a long trail of them.