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Inzanesville by Jo Ann Beard - I loved this book, but I don't know if everyone else will. It's a book about being a 14 year old 9th grade girl in Junior High in the 1970s. She's the narrator, and she and her friends are kind of nerdy in the times before we had the word nerdy to describe ourselves. So they were unpopular. Because the cheerleaders and girls who have money and/or confidence are popular. Just like today, except maybe not, because in today's times all the adults care so much. In our day, if they were caring that much, most of us didn't know it. It was the 70s, it was just that once, and it won't be coming back. But maybe everyone feels that way about their 14 year old selves and their place in time at that time. Just like in Midnight in Paris, if you connected with it. I love this girl's voice, and loved this book. It's conversational, not sarcastic, honest, sometimes funny and wry.
Star Dust (1940) - I'm loving my old movies lately. The black and white modern times were the ones I'd go back to (ala Midnight in Paris- again), and this one starred Linda Darnell as a small town girl from Arkansas who longs to go to Hollywood. A Hollywood scout comes to town to look for talent, but tells her that she's too young. What he doesn't know is that she's very clever, so she gets there. She's so pretty, and the landscape and interiors of 1940 are real 1940, so I loved it. I love to think about how old my mom and dad and grandparents and aunts and uncles were when the movie was showing at the theaters and how Auntie Kaye and Uncle Bob would have remembered the movie and the names of the stars and supporting actors. I think about where they were in their lives and what they were feeling, especially now that I know the family secrets that may or may not have been secrets then, but were definitely affecting their lives, and were things they didn't bring with them as they grew into adulthood. Those times I want to go back to were dark times, too. I wonder if my 14 year old narrator of Inzanesville watched old movies. I'll bet she did. She just didn't get around to talking about them.
Stories I Only Tell My Friends An Autobiography by Rob Lowe - I love the occasional celebrity autobio, and wasn't sure how much I cared about Rob Lowe in terms of investing the time to read an entire book of his stories, but he's a good writer and a dedicated actor. It's a sweet book and Rob includes lots of stuff about his famous friends and acquaintances.
Life As We Know It - This is a darling movie starring Katherine Heigl and Josh Duhamel. I only knew Josh by name from my magazines, but he is very sweet to watch, so I'm happy to know him now! He's a younger cuter Vince Vaughn. I'm not sure Vince has to play the married guy already, but since that's what he's doing, Josh can be the single guy. In this movie, the Katherine character and the Josh character can't stand each other, but are thrown into a circumstance where they are raising a 1 year old baby girl together. You know the rest. But it's great mindless entertainment when you want to slow down that thinking brain and veg.
Midnight in Paris - Finally! It rained yesterday morning and then was overcast....the perfect afternoon for a matinee, and I saw the perfect movie. Midnight in Paris was like a magical little treat. It helps to love Woody Allen movies, and it helps to love Paris, and if you love the 1920s and wished you could have lived then instead of now (I confess to such madness - not as much as when I was younger, but still), then here's a movie for you. I didn't know anything about the story, and don't want to give anything away. Just know that Owen's character Gil, lives in California, and he's engaged to a girl, and they are in Paris with her parents. The cinematography is beautiful, the story is charming and quirky, and I would like to live in this movie.
13 Rue Therese - Somehow writing about 13 Rue Therese requires a different font. When my friend Brenda gave me a list of book titles, this is the one that most intrigued. 13 Rue Therese is a story constructed around a box of momentos saved by a woman named Louise Brunet. When Louise died, she had no relatives, so her landlord cleared out her apartment by letting the other tenants have her possessions. The author's mother saved this box, and the author always knew that she would write a book about the box of treasures. That much seems to be the truth. The story is about a woman who leaves the box for a man to find, and when he finds it he decides to study and reconstruct the history of the items in the box. It's a bit disjointed, and goes all over the board. There is a World War I story here, there are a few love stories here, there is some religious this or that, there is family, there are some friendships, there is time travel, there is something almost existentialist that pops up at the end out of nowhere, (maybe to make it all the more french?)(was there existentialism in the middle and I missed it?), and there is the feeling that this author knows her book, and knows her themes. This one didn't flow through the author's mind and through her body and then fly out of her pen in a burst. But it's OK, and really interesting. Old photos are mirrors, and I can spend lots of time with them. This book is about the author analyzing the photos and going way way out there with them. Did I like it? Yes. I liked Louise with her pretty smile. Maybe it's that some of the speculation was presented so strongly, all the while admitting to being speculation. I think I wanted to feel a little more humility from both the fictional characters and the characters who were presented as not fictional. This is a wild little book!
The Help - This summer has been one of extremes. I keep waiting for blah overcast days on which to go to matinees, but all we've gotten has been gorgeous sunny days or absolute deluges of thunderstorms. I like to be one of the only people in the theatre with a front and center seat, but not when it's a beautiful bright and sunny day outside. I really wanted to see The Help, though, so the other night, I went with my friend Liz and her sister to the Evanston Theater which was packed, and we were late, but we found three seats on the floor with a wide aisle in front of us, so it was almost like we were the only ones there, and the screen filled our vision. The Help lived up to the hype. I read the book long enough ago to have forgotten details, so as the story unfolded, it was still new to me. The Help is about the lives of southern women in the early 1960s. The white women hired black women to cook, clean and take care of their children for them. The black women were paid a pittance for the long hours and love that they brought to their jobs. It's a story with universal appeal and there is no way to describe it that will measure up to simply seeing it and enjoying it.
Falling Angels by Tracy Chevalier - Just go get this one and read it. It's the best book I've read since The Kitchen House. Falling Angels is about two girls who meet in a London cemetery in 1901. It's told in separate chapters by all of the characters in the book, takes place in one time frame in history, and moves along chronologically. It was a pleasure to read a book this way after reading so many of them with the present day/past history format. Falling Angels is a wonderful story with endearing characters.
The Hand That First Held Mine by Maggie O'Farrell - This was one of our five for a dollar books purchased at a garage sale with Debby and Barbara a few weeks ago. It's written in the present tense, in that one time frame present, one time frame past genre, and I loved the story in the past time frame, but was just biding my time through the present until somehow this thing would come together. When it finally did, or when some of the foreshadowing started to be known, it got really really good. It turned out to be a great story, but a lot of words were wasted on the characters in the present time. Overall an OK read because of all that had to be gone through before it finally came together. This book had six different covers, but what it really needed was strict editing on the present-time story. Oh, and what was it about exactly? A woman in the present time, Elina and her husband, except they aren't married, have a new baby. In the past time, the story is about a woman named Lexie Sinclair who leaves her quiet home at 18 to go get a life in London. I could read about Lexie forever. I was done with Elina on practically the first page, but you have to keep up with the Elina/Ted story in order to have it all come together at the end.
Three on a Match - I've been feeling like watching movies lately, especially the old ones on TMC, (Turner Movie Channel) and the other night was Ann Dvorak night on TMC, and this was a 1932 movie about three girls who went to grade school together, then lost track of each other until they met up again in their twenties. It was really really good. Bette Davis and Joan Blondell played the other two girls. They were all very young, very beautiful, and the fashions and interiors were wonderful. In this scene, they've just rediscovered each other.
Flipped - This was a sweet movie I stumbled onto the other night. Directed by Rob Reiner, it's a coming of age movie about a boy and a girl who live across the street from each other in the 1950s. It's sweet and a little predictable, and I fell asleep at the end, so maybe it wasn't predictable. I'm going to try to find it again, tape it and watch the ending.
Soul Kitchen - I recorded this German movie about a Greek German guy, Zinos, who owns a restaurant called Soul Kitchen. That's him standing in the middle of this great cast of characters. He's got a wacky brother who can get out of jail for a few hours a day and a girlfriend who is moving to China, and has just hired a wild chef to cook for Soul Kitchen. It's a funny little movie, but Zinos holds it together. Somehow we really like he and his nutty brother, and that crazy chef. It's fun to watch if you happen across it on Sundance and there's nothing else on TV.
The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton - This was recommended by my Meals at Home delivery partner, Laura, so I got it right away, because she knows which books I'll love, and as usual, she was right. The Forgotten Garden is a beautiful story about a woman who never knew her true identity, her grand daughter Cassandra, and an authoress named Eliza Makepeace who wrote fairy tales. Like so many of my favorite books recently, this one takes place in both the past and the present, where the present day main character, usually a young woman, sets out to solve a secret or mystery among her ancestors who lived hundreds of years ago. Chapter by chapter, the author takes us forward and backward in time, and often the stories parallel each other in some way. The young woman in the past was often hurt or powerless in some way, while the young woman in the present has every freedom at her disposal. I loved the landscape of this story as well as the characters and the story itself, and am off to the online library to see whether Kate Morton has written anything else....
The Virgin Blue by Tracy Chevalier - I found this book last weekend at a yard sale with Debby and Barbara. Books were 5 for a dollar, and this was brand new and the cover intrigued me for some reason. I'm so happy it did, because it was wonderful and I've read it in two days! It's that same genre I just wrote about, only in this case, it takes place in France and Switzerland in the 1500s and the present. A young woman moves to a small picturesque but gossipy french town, and decides to investigate her family tree. I hadn't remembered or completely understood the Huguenot/Catholic French history, although I remember hearing about it in history class at some point. This story will help to clear that up, too. Too bad history books aren't written as fictionalized accounts of women solving family mysteries. I would've aced every class!
