Category: Reviews

Book Review(s): Pastrix and Accidental Saints

On By cherylmahoneyIn Reviews1 Comment

Appropriately enough, I stumbled accidentally onto Accidental Saints: Finding God in all the wrong people by Nadia Bolz-Weber.  I have a thing I do when I want a type of book but don’t know what specifically–I look up a similar book in the library catalog, find that shelf, and see what else is nearby.  That brought me to Accidental Saints, and after I loved that one, I went backwards and read Nadia’s first book, Pastrix.

Nadia is a Lutheran pastor.  She is also unconventional, heavily tattooed, honest about her flaws and kind of brilliant.  Pastrix tells Nadia’s story, from early days as a sarcastic, alcoholic stand-up comic, to finding her faith in God (with a side-trip into Wiccan goddess worship before becoming Lutheran–she doesn’t find the two in contradiction), to founding her church, the House for All Sinners and Saints.  Accidental Saints tells the story of her church, sharing about some of the individuals there and how she has learned from them.  They’re known as the inclusive church for the people who don’t look churchy–drag queens, prostitutes, former (?) con artists, cynics and alcoholics.

Nadia is funny, insightful, inclusive and somehow both deeply reverent and deeply irreverent at the same time.  (Maybe it’s a question of what’s considered irreverence.)  I think Nadia speaks to me where I live because she, like many authors I gravitate to, is another driven, sometimes self-critical woman.  She also shares a concept of God that really resonated with me, one focused on love, compassion (the core of my personal morality), and acceptance. Continue reading “Book Review(s): Pastrix and Accidental Saints” →

Book Review: The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher

On By cherylmahoneyIn Reviews2 Comments

Remember when I listened to the audiobook of Cary Elwes reading his memoir of filming The Princess Bride, and it was everything I wanted it to be and one of the best books I read all year?  Well–I did not manage to repeat the magic by listening to the audiobook of Carrie Fisher reading The Princess Diarist, her memoir of filming Star Wars.

It sounded great–I’d been meaning to explore Carrie Fisher’s writing ever since her death (which still makes me sad), and this promised to be reminiscences of filming the first Star Wars movie, plus excerpts from her journals of the time.  Wonderful!  And it was, for about the first quarter.  She talks a little about her life growing up, her very early film career, and how she first was cast as Princess Leia.  I loved the anecdotes of the first time she read the script, and how Leia got her iconic hairstyle.

But then, as she says, she met him.  I vaguely heard some while ago that Fisher had recently revealed her long ago affair with Harrison Ford–and here I stumbled right into the book that must have done it.  A solid half of the book (albeit in the middle) is devoted to “Carrison,” 19 year old Carrie’s affair with the then-married, mid-thirties Harrison Ford during the filming of the first Star Wars.  It was a remarkably unsentimental affair, probably some form of friends with benefits except they didn’t even appear especially friendly, and whole passages are devoted to how little he talked. Continue reading “Book Review: The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher” →

Book Review: All Our Wrong Todays

On By cherylmahoneyIn Reviews, Science FictionLeave a comment

What if the world you and I are living in is, in fact, a dystopia?  That could (tragically) be the beginning of a review of a nonfiction book, but instead today I’m talking about another parallel universe book: All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai.  What if the world we think is real is actually the product of meddling with time travel, and we’re living in the universe gone wrong?

Tom Barren lives in a 2016 that looks a lot like the future envisaged in the 1950s.  Flying cars, high-tech medicine, an endless supply of free, non-polluting energy, universal peace.  It’s all because of a new, energy-generating technology discovered in 1966.  When Tom travels back 50 years to the dawn of his age, he inadvertently meddles in that key point in time–and wakes up to find himself in our 2016.  But then he has a dilemma–because while the world might be happier in his original universe, his life is significantly better over here.

This is one of those books I picked up because it had such an interesting premise–and it largely delivered on the promise, even if it didn’t turn out to be exactly what I expected.  I was so fascinated by Tom’s world and the events that led to its creation.  There was quite a bit of that, although the world is presented more through contrast with ours then by spending a lot of time in it–which kind of makes sense.  For Tom, replicators (or the equivalent) are normal, so they probably aren’t going to come up until he’s trying to make sense of a microwave.  We saw the alternate path of history and how a small shift could change it much more clearly, and that was very cool to explore. Continue reading “Book Review: All Our Wrong Todays” →

TV Review: Anne with an E

On By cherylmahoneyIn Reviews5 Comments

Because I evidently have not written enough about L.M. Montgomery lately…today I have a review of the recent Netflix special, Anne with an E, a six-hour miniseries.  This retelling of Anne of Green Gables was billed as a darker version–and it was.  Some aspects of it were wonderful and compelling.  Others, not so much, and I do mean the darkness.  It all gave me some new insights into the themes of Montgomery’s books though, and I’m always pleased about that!

The miniseries drew me in with a very good first episode (90 minutes–the rest are 45).  It followed very closely to the original story, as orphan Anne is mistakenly sent to Prince Edward Island and Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, who had wanted a boy.  They decide to keep the talkative, impetuous Anne, who wants so much to be good and accepted but just keep running into problems.  That much is exactly the same as the original, though this version included occasional, PTSD-like flashbacks to Anne’s earlier life, where she was verbally and physically abused by the people she worked for (more on that later).  After the first episode, well, the series diverges farther from the book.  Glimmers and elements are drawn from the original, but great swathes of new things arise too.

Aside from having a thing about completion, I think I kept watching because of the characters (and to see how it would all develop).  Matthew, Marilla, Diana, Gilbert, Mrs. Rachel Lynde–all were wonderfully cast and portrayed, very much the book characters come to life (barring a few actions the plot forced them into).  It probably helped that I already knew them, but it also seemed like the series did a very good job giving us insights and understandings into the characters.  Even some of the minor characters came through in their essential elements: Josie Pye, nasty and mean; Jane Andrews, nice if forgettable; Ruby Gillis, silly and sweet (and sweet on Gilbert).

And how about Anne (with her E)?  Well.  The good and the muddled intersect in Anne.  She looked the part, probably more than most, as Anne is usually very Hollywood pretty for being a scrawny, freckled orphan.  She blooms over the course of the book, suggesting she started without much physical beauty.  (Although I have to say, I was bothered throughout to a ridiculous degree by the thinness of Anne’s braids.  She hates the redness of her hair, yes, but she has plenty of it!)  As to character, she uses all the big words and goes into delighted raptures and has all the starved desire for love that the character should have–great swathes of her dialogue come straight out of the book.  But. Continue reading “TV Review: Anne with an E” →

Book Review: Rainbow Valley by L. M. Montgomery

On By cherylmahoneyIn Reviews2 Comments

I’m continuing my way through a reread of the Anne of Green Gables series, and continue to have more thoughts.  This time I’m thinking about Book 7, Rainbow Valley.  Rather like certain Oz books, this is the Anne book that isn’t an Anne book.  But it’s very much a Montgomery book, with certain of her attitudes on full display.

By the time Montgomery wrote Rainbow Valley, I really don’t think she wanted to write about the Blythes anymore.  This was her fifth book (4 and 6 were written later), and because she wrote it before Anne of Ingleside, it was the first with Anne and Gilbert’s children.  With the partial exception of Walter, Montgomery doesn’t seem very interested in the Blythe children.  She gave Anne a happy ending, Anne’s children grow up in the midst of said-happy ending, and Montgomery was not yet at a point in her life when taking refuge in that happy ending was welcome to her (as in Anne of Ingleside).

So she did what other authors have done–billed the book as next in a popular series, then proceeded to write an almost original novel.  We get about two chapters of Anne and her family, then the focus shifts irrevocably to elsewhere in the neighborhood, to tell the story of the less fortunate and more interesting (to Montgomery, and by narrative convention) Meredith family.  I have to admit, the bait and switch has taken me many reads to get over.  I think this is the first time I’ve managed to really accept that this is not and was never going to be a Blythe novel, rather than feeling that we somehow got cheated out of the story that was meant to be here in the series.  And you know, after getting past that, this is a good novel! Continue reading “Book Review: Rainbow Valley by L. M. Montgomery” →