I've been procrastinating for the past week because of pain in my back, knees and abdomen, and the fatigue that comes with taking pain meds to survive. Though I realize naps aren't great for a clean sleep schedule, I still can't help myself from nodding off while reading a book in bed, either on my Kindle or a regular hardback or paperback. It is frustrating, but this evening, armed with caffeinated tea and a few snacks, I'm going to attempt to get through this post and put up at least 5 reviews. Please have patience with me, I will continue writing for as long as I'm able.
I read the first couple of AF books, and while I enjoyed them I'm not a huge fan of the anti-hero trope, where the main character is evil but quirky enough that you're supposed to forgive him for being an asshat. Still, I imagine Disney will bleach out some of AF's more egregious qualities and make the books into something kids will enjoy and their parents buy merch from.
TV:
Artemis Fowl
More than 25 years after introducing
the world to Artemis Fowl, author Eoin Colfer is teaming up with
Disney for an animated series adaptation, Deadline reported. At New
York Comic-Con last weekend, Colfer announced during the "25
Years of Artemis Fowl" panel that the project has been greenlit for Disney
Channel and Disney+, and he will serve as executive producer alongside
Ben Juwono and Colleen Evanson.
"I am proud and delighted to be
part of the formidable team that is putting the Artemis Fowl animation on
screen," said Colfer. "Everyone is so talented and so positive that I feel
certain the fairy world is in excellent hands."
Ayo Davis, president of Disney Kids &
Family, added: "For more than two decades, Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl
books have captivated readers around the world with unforgettable
characters, imaginative world-building, and gripping adventures. Bringing this
beloved franchise to life as an animated series gives us the
opportunity to introduce a new generation to Artemis's world while honoring the
longtime fans who have cherished these stories for years."
I read the Chronicles of Narnia all the way through before I realized (okay, someone told me, but still...) that the books were basically Christian allegory, and Aslan the lion was a stand-in for Jesus. I was gobsmacked. I was also angry at CS Lewis for prostelytizing to children under the guise of a good fantasy story. His prose, in all of his books, is so beautifully wrought, so engaging, that I find it hard to believe he would stoop to this level to get children into Christianity. I imagine that this GG version will be a real ripper, though.
Movies:
Narnia: The Magician's Nephew
The first trailer has been released for
the Greta Gerwig-directed adaptation of Narnia: The Magician's
Nephew, "a modernized retelling of C.S. Lewis's first book in
The Chronicles of Narnia," Deadline reported. The film hits
theaters February 12 and Netflix on April 2.
The cast includes David McKenna as
Digory Kirke, Beatrice Campbell (Polly Plummer), Emma Mackey (White
Witch/Jadis), Daniel Craig (Andrew Ketterley), Meryl Streep (voice of
Aslan), and Carey Mulligan (Mabel Kirke), along with Kobna
Holdbrook-Smith, Denise Gough, and Susan Wokoma.
Narnia: The Magician's Nephew is
produced by Mark Gordon, Amy Pascal, Vincent Sieber-Smith, and Gerwig.
Executive producers include Patricia Whitcher, Racheline Benveniste,
Christine Crais, and Douglas Gresham and Melvin Adams for the C.S. Lewis Estate.
Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt wrote an original score, and George
Drakoulias serves as music director.
I didn't even know that this bookstore existed! Shame on me! Now I will have to get Nick to take me on a trek up Cap Hill to see the newly expanded store, and support their LGBTQ+ efforts. Go Charlies!
Charlie's
Queer Books, Seattle, Wash., Expanding
Charlie's Queer Books in Seattle,
Wash., will open a new, larger location in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood
this fall, KIRO7 reported.
Store owners Charlie Hunts and Madeline
Burchard told the Stranger the new store will occupy a two-story
space on E. Pike St. and include a cafe and wine bar as well as a
children's reading nook and a loft for hosting events. It will be roughly
twice the size of the original Charlie's Queer Books in Fremont and is
expected to be open in November.
Hunts said the expansion came about due
to the bookstore outgrowing its home at 465 N. 36th St., in which it
opened in November 2023. Hunts recalled that at the time of the
opening, "there were barely any books on the shelf. Now, we don't have enough
wall space to even add bookcases if we wanted to."
"I feel honored to have something
that Seattle embraced and that they took and ran with," Hunts told
KIRO7. "The queer community embraced this thing and then grew it
into what we know today."
Hunts pointed out that many of the
books on the store's shelves have been banned or challenged in public
libraries and schools, and it is "really important to us" to
get queer stories to a wider audience during these times.
Hunts further emphasized that the store
"isn't just for the LGBT community; it's for everyone. The store
should be full of good stories for everyone and I hope that everyone
feels welcome to come check it out."
The Forget-Me-Not Library by Heather Webber is a lovely magical realism novel filled with hope, warmth and intelligence. Here's the blurb: A detour. A chance encounter. Two women who alter the pages of each other’s story.
Juliet Nightingale is lucky to be alive. Months after a freak accident involving lightning, she’s fully recovered but is left feeling that something is missing from her life. Something big. Impulsively, she decides to take a solo summer road trip, hoping that the journey will lead her down a path that will help her discover exactly what it is that she’s searching for.
Newly single mom Tallulah Byrd Mayfield is hanging by a thread after her neat, tidy world was completely undone when her husband decided that their marriage was over. In the aftermath of the breakup, she and her two daughters move in with her eighty-year-old grandfather. Tallulah starts a new job at the Forget-Me-Not Library, where old, treasured memories can be found within the books―and where Lu must learn to adapt to the many changes thrown her way.
When a road detour leads Juliet to Forget-Me-Not, Alabama, and straight into Tallulah’s life, the two women soon discover there’s magic in between the pages of where you’ve been and where you still need to go. And that happiness, even when lost, can always be found again. The Spoon Stealer by Lesley Crewe is a historical family saga that I felt deals with the myriad and often unusual ways people deal with grief and family (abusive) pain. Here's the blurb: Born into a basket of clean sheets―ruining a perfectly good load of laundry―Emmeline never quite fit in on her family's rural Nova Scotian farm. After suffering multiple losses in the First World War, her family became so heavy with grief, toxicity, and mental illness that Emmeline felt their weight smothering her. And so, she fled across the Atlantic and built her life in England. Now she is retired and living in a small coastal town with her best friend, Vera, an excellent conversationalist. Vera is also a small white dog, and so Emmeline is making an effort to talk to more humans. When she joins a memoir-writing course at the library, her classmates don't know what to make of her. Funny, loud, and with a riveting memoir, she charms the lot. As her past unfolds for her audience, friendships form, a bonus in a rather lonely life. She even shares with them her third-biggest secret: she has liberated hundreds of spoons over her lifetime―from the local library, Cary Grant, Winston Churchill. She is a compulsive spoon stealer.
When Emmeline unexpectedly inherits the farm she grew up on, she knows she needs to leave her new friends and go see the farm and what remains of her family one last time. She arrives like a tornado in their lives, an off-kilter Mary Poppins bossing everyone around and getting quite a lot wrong. But with her generosity and hard-earned wisdom, she gets an awful lot right too. A pinball ricocheting between people, offending and inspiring in equal measure, Emmeline, in her final years, believes that a spoonful―perhaps several spoonfuls―of kindness can set to rights the family so broken by loss and secrecy. The Spoon Stealer is a classic Crewe book: full of humour, family secrets, women's friendship, lovable animals, and immense heart.
I felt compelled to follow Emmeline's story from the first pages onward, just to find out what happened to her family and what she'd done with all those spoons she stole from everyone. Fascinating insights into the mind of a kleptomaniac who is just looking for love and acceptance (and to be seen, for crying out loud, something I, as a middle child, can certainly relate to!) in a world that has routinely rejected her. I also adored the dialogue between Vera the dog (who is so wise!) and Emmeline, and I found it heartening that Em's story helped others in her group deal with their own traumas. A good warm read, I'd give it an A, and recommend it to anyone seeking "their people" out in the great wide world.
The Villainous Aunties of Ember Row by Maggie O'Connor is a fantasy mystery with a sweet romance (not at all spicy) woven throughout. Here's the blurb: Her father was murdered. His alehouse is now hers. And the retired detective asking questions has no idea Iris can change her face.
For more than two thousand years, Iris has survived by leaving before anyone gets close enough to know her. Emberville is supposed to be temporary. She intends to keep the alehouse, solve her father’s murder, and disappear again before one nosy magical town can start feeling like home.
Silvestro Vale is supposed to be helping her find her father's killer. But the closer they get to the truth, the harder it becomes to tell which mystery has captured the legendary detective’s attention more: the murder or Iris herself.
The villainous aunties who summoned Iris to Emberville still want Number Fourteen, while an unsolved case could cost her the alehouse altogether. The trouble is, it no longer feels like a piece of property. Somewhere along the way, Iris has acquired something dangerously close to a life.
Apparently, a life comes with regular dinner invitations.
A standalone, warm, whimsical cozy fantasy mystery with found family and a gentle, zero-spice, slow-burn romance.
Though I liked and understood Iris's "otherness" (being a changeling-style shapeshifter who feels her real self is too hideous to love), I felt that she underestimated herself and was way too surprised when the male protagonist, a Sherlock Holmes style detective, falls in love with her mind and her heart and soul. She had a funny way to relate to her extra chonky cat, who was magical and able to help her when she needed it, and she also developed some genuine friendships with people who didn't care what she looked like on the outside. All in all I found this book a warm and fun Autumnal read, and I'd give it a B+ and recommend it to anyone who likes offbeat magical main characters who aren't pretty or perfect-looking, but who are amazing all the same.
Bloomsbury Girls by Natalie Jenner is a sort of marriage between the movie "9 to 5" and a prequel to Mad Men with some interesting publishing and bookseller background added on...there's even a touch of Breakfast at Tiffany's in the novel. Here's the blurb: Natalie Jenner, the author of The Jane Austen Society, returns with a compelling and heartwarming story of post-war London, a century-old bookstore, and three women determined to find their way in a fast-changing world in Bloomsbury Girls.
Bloomsbury Books is an old-fashioned new and rare book store that has persisted and resisted change for a hundred years, run by men and guided by the general manager's unbreakable fifty-one rules. But in 1950, the world is changing, especially the world of books and publishing, and at Bloomsbury Books, the girls in the shop have plans:
Vivien Lowry: Single since her aristocratic fiance was killed in action during World War II, the brilliant and stylish Vivien has a long list of grievances--most of them well justified and the biggest of which is Alec McDonough, the Head of Fiction.
Grace Perkins: Married with two sons, she's been working to support the family following her husband's breakdown in the aftermath of the war. Torn between duty to her family and dreams of her own.
Evie Stone: In the first class of female students from Cambridge permitted to earn a degree, Evie was denied an academic position in favor of her less accomplished male rival. Now she's working at Bloomsbury Books while she plans to remake her own future.
As they interact with various literary figures of the time--Daphne Du Maurier, Ellen Doubleday, Sonia Blair (widow of George Orwell), Samuel Beckett, Peggy Guggenheim, and others--these three women with their complex web of relationships, goals and dreams are all working to plot out a future that is richer and more rewarding than anything society will allow.
Like Lessons in Chemistry, this novel highlights the prevalence of misogyny and the horrible sexist treatment of women that was pervasive in the 1950s, after women had done so much for the war effort on the home front, and learned that whatever men could do, women could do better. Viv and Grace and Evie are navigating the strict rules of the patriarchy, which mostly only apply to women, never to men, who get a pass to do whatever they please, no matter who it hurts. I enjoyed the rich prose and the highlighting of famous women as characters who interacted with the fictional book store clercs and gave them inspiration to push back and make their part of the working world a better place for women then and now. The plot rarely slowed, and the characters were 3 dimensional and fascinating, though I was expecting a better HEA than I got. Still, I would give this zippy novel a B, and recommend it to those who think the 50s were an ideal time in American history, when that couldn't be further from the truth.
The Lies That Summon the Night by Tessonja Odette is a dark magical romance (read horror/torture fiction disguised as romantasy), that provides and tense and somewhat horrific story arc of a young creative woman who is kidnapped from a venue where she prostitutes her sewing and storytelling art for the rich and awful, people who get a break from indulging in the "sins" that get practitioners killed. She's kidnapped by Dominic, who needs her and two of her fellow performers (a musician and a gal who was a prostitute who tells tales) to help him as summoners to get by all the monsters outside of the villages. Here's the blurb: From the art of liars, the monsters came . . .
Ever since art gave life to bloodthirsty shadows, creative works have been forbidden and talented creators sacrificed to the Sinless—the immortal royals who feast on human blood in return for their protection.
Inana’s secret storytelling nearly got her killed once, and she’ll be damned if she’s ever caught again. With a bounty on her head, she keeps to the city’s dark underbelly, where she earns a meager living from thrill-seeking patrons desperate to hear her illicit fiction. Until Dominic, a Shadowbane, catches one of her performances.
Dominic is a half-Sinless monster hunter as fearsome as his prey. But to complete his hunt, he needs an artist to summon the shadows . . . he needs Inana. Dominic delivers an ultimatum: Serve him or he’ll claim her bounty. When survival is all Inana has left, the choice is clear—at least until she can betray him and leave him for dead.
As their tense alliance leads them into the heart of danger, dark secrets unravel—about each other, their world, and the threats they face. But the greatest risk of all is the desire growing between them. There’s something more sinful than lust at play, and it could bring the world to its knees.
This was a fascinating take on what happens when politics and royalty and other powers that be intersect with religion to control the populace through fear and lies about creativity and individual thought. If even using colored thread to mend a piece of clothing is punishable by death, people will live sad, colorless and entertainment/creativity free lives in order to survive...but of course they won't truly be living. The three creatives Dom kidnaps refuse to give up their stories and music because its an intrinsic part of their souls, their beings, yet it brands them as lowly sinners, who must live hand to mouth. Inana is a canny storyteller, and as her story unfolds, Dom becomes even more enraptured with her. So the trope of enemies to lovers comes into play immediately. There's more than a bit of "scar comparison" in the later half of the book, as well as some torture porn through flashbacks, but it all comes to a head and then is cleared up for the HFN. I'd give this book a B+ and recommend it to anyone who is crafty and loves Arabian Nights style settings for their romantasy.
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