I wondered, seeing the cover for The Sleepover, if it was inspired by Adrian McKinty’s new best-seller, The Chain. or an example of the hive mind at work. The chains in McKinty’s book have nothing to do with literal chains, of course, and I didn’t warm to that book’s cover (though the book is great).
Then I saw this pairing. Though the new Through a Daughter’s Eyes is apparently nothing at all like Eimear McBride’s eye-opening The Lesser Bohemians, it sure conjures it. Cover copy for the latter says it “glows with the eddies and anxieties of growing up, and the transformative intensity of a powerful new love.” And lots of sex.
Sleeping with the windows open to catch the late-summer breezes is one of life’s pure pleasures. But here lately, we’ve been catching more than cool air—the night noises.
A screech owl has made itself heard several times, and I was able to identify its strange cry from audio clips posted on the excellent website of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
Apparently they make several sounds, but the one in the trees outside our house went for the whinny. When I heard that in the middle of the night, I wasn’t sure whether it was a bird or some other kind of critter. Very distinctive. We’ve not seen the screech owl. The Cornell Lab photos show the superb camouflage of these robin-sized owls.
For a story I’m writing I wanted to say something about the nighttime insects that keep up that steady late-summer buzz. Like a lot of people, I lumped those nocturnal music-makers in with the cicadas. No. Back in 2015, NPR did a nice piece on “telling crickets, cicadas, and katydids apart.” Cicadas are active in the daytime, I learned. Those night insects are tree crickets and katydids.
I was doubtful, thinking of the dark brown and black crickets that make individual chirps and like to hide in some obscure place and drive you nuts with their ventriloquism. Tree crickets are pale green and look like skinny grasshoppers. I’ve seen them, but I never realized they were serenading me nightly. When there are a lot of them, you get that constant sound. NPR has the sound clips to prove it! Or, listen to this!
And when to expect the steamroller of cicada noise? A few states will have broods of 13- or 17-year locusts next year, but for the eastern third of the country, 2021 will be amazing, when Brood X (ten) emerges. When and where.
Photo by Andy Reago & Chrissy McClarren Resized and cropped for this use, under this creative commons license.
By Michael Aloisi and Rebecca Rowland – Serial killer Dennis
Sweeney had a really bad idea: kill a young woman, divide her into parts, and
mail them to 30 randomly selected, unsuspecting people all across the United
States. Who doesn’t like a surprise package? There’s 30 people in this novel who
would never open another one.
Sweeney sends an anonymous letter to over-the-hill reporter Jackson Matthews, whom he admires, describing what he’s done and proving it with pictures. He invites Jax to cover the story, “to be the voice of my actions.”
If all the pieces of the girl are found, Sweeney promises to turn himself in. If not? He says, “All the King’s horses and All the King’s men, will force me to start all over again.” Jax calls the police. It seems the letter isn’t a hoax, and reports of the macabre parcels begin to appear in the news media.
Bizarrely and, you may think, predictably, only eighteen of
the grisly packages are turned in to the authorities. That’s 12 people who
received a body part and did something else with it. The stories of what
happened to these dozen packages make up most of the book. The authors treat
those twelve chapters as short stories, with quirky back-stories for the
recipients—character studies of people who, for wildly varied reasons, are incapable
of the correct response. (Apparently none of them listen to the news to know
there’s a bigger picture here.)
In between these stories are chapters that let you catch up with Jax and his efforts to identify Sweeney, and what else Sweeney is up to. The stakes increase dramatically when Sweeney threatens Jax’s wife, if the reporter doesn’t start writing about him. Early on Jax is approached by a young man who introduces himself as a police detective. Jax soon unmasks him as the creator of a serial killer website with lagging viewership who hopes the inside scoop on this story can renew its popularity. He claims to have an algorithm that can find the killer, and it certainly unearths some unsavory folk.
Between the chapters about the missing body parts, Jax’s investigations, and Sweeney’s story, past and present, the authors have a lot of balls to keep in the air, yet the tale is never confusing. I liked the diabolically varied missing pieces stories, although perhaps two or three fewer would have worked as well, as the rhythm of the chapters gets a little exhausting. On the whole, Pieces has a clever premise, innovative format, and quite capable writing that kept me engaged. Not for the faint of heart.
This A J Eaton documentary (trailer), released so
close in time to Echo in the Canyon, covers some of the same ground and
personalities, but in a totally different way. Echo is about the musician-heavy Laurel Canyon area in a brief
period of the mid-sixties. This film, by contrast, examines one man’s career
and his musical and cultural influence over a lifetime, and it shares a fair
amount of that music with you.
As to cultural influences, in a poignant coincidence, the
film tells how Dennis Hopper modeled the character of Billy in the film Easy Rider on Crosby. It was bittersweet
seeing clips from the film so soon after its star Peter Fonda died (a young
Jack Nicholson too).
In the documentary, David Crosby says he’s 76 years old, has
eight stents in his heart, diabetes, a liver transplant—in short, a load of
health problems. “How is it you’re still alive?” he’s asked, when so many
others are not. There’s no answer to that, and he doesn’t attempt one.
Yet he’s still making music, still releasing albums as
recently as last year. He’s touring. His life is music. It’s too bad he shot himself in the foot so many times
with his band mates in the Byrds, and Crosby Stills Nash, with and without
Young. His behavior was terrible, but it was in Echo that he said point-blank that Stills, Nash, and Young dumped
him “because I was an a——.” Subsequently, acrimony has repeatedly thwarted the
group’s attempts to reassemble.
He doesn’t spare himself or make excuses. What emerges from the
many hours of interviews with Cameron Crowe, who’s known the musician for 45
years, is compelling viewing. Jon
Bream in the Minneapolis Star Tribune
says, “Rarely have we seen such an unvarnished, unflattering and revealingly
real portrait of a music star.”
Echo was dinged
for not including Joni Mitchell (she came later, the filmmakers said), but you
see plenty of her here. Crosby saw her perform in Florida and brought her to
Los Angeles, but as with most of his relationships with women, theirs was
fraught. He blames himself. In 1969, his girlfriend Christine Hinton was killed
in an auto accident, and Graham Nash (if I remember correctly) said that after
Crosby identified her body, he was never the same. Since 1987, he’s been
married to Jan Dance.
Asked whether he has regrets, he admitted to big ones, mainly
the wasted decade as a junkie, which led to lost music and lost potential.
Time, he says, is the ultimate currency. “Be careful how you spend it.”
Don’t ask me why these pictures are upside down. They are correct on my WordPress editing screen! ?
This jigsaw puzzle has been calling me since I received it
as a gift last year. It depicts Thomas Moran’s famous painting, The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone,
which our family had just seen. Moran’s Yellowstone paintings were so admired,
they helped lead to the declaration and preservation of Yellowstone as the
first national park in the United States and, probably, the world.
And, here is the completed puzzle. Perhaps you’re struck with how different it is from the painting, how much redder and, in person, how much darker. All those murky reddish blacks on the right, those murky greenish blacks on the left (hidden by the light reflection), those murky blacks, and acres of taupe. Granted it’s weird, but I don’t consult the box when assembling a puzzle, just to make it that little bit harder; in this case, the picture on the box wouldn’t have been much help. But maybe it holds a clue to why the difference between the picture and the pieces. Oh, yes. Here it is: “Printed in China.”
Perhaps it wasn’t merely printed in China. Perhaps it was
also cut with a jigsaw in China, its 1000 pieces disassembled, and 1001 of them
sealed in their plastic bag. That would go a ways to solving another puzzle. See
that extra blue piece? It’s a dupe. If you’re working on this puzzle and
missing a bit of sky, I have it.
At the same time, you may have noticed the finished puzzle is missing three pieces. I have three pieces left over. But they don’t fit those spots. Maybe they’re dupes too. In the hundred or so puzzles I’ve assembled in my lifetime, I have never seen this before.
Where was quality control? Did the manufacturer think bagging
up any old 1000 (or 1001, in this case) pieces would be good enough? After all,
wasn’t that a 99.6% accuracy rate?
I realize that a jigsaw puzzle is not a fate-of-the-world
consumer item, but you have to wonder about a mindset that allows the sloppy
handling of something so simple, yet precise, and what happens when something
critical, yet precise, isn’t quite right. Like a component for your driverless
car or nuclear power plant or corporate computer system. I think we
know the answer to that.
In the movie Puzzle, the character Agnes says the rewarding thing about doing a jigsaw puzzle is, when you get to the end, you know you’ve made “all the right choices.” The folks involved in the supply chain for this product did just the opposite.
By Judy Penz Sheluk – A
Fool’s Journey is the third cozy mystery in Canadian author Judy Penz
Sheluk’s entertaining Marketville Mystery series. Protagonist Callie Barnstable
has assembled an interesting team that works for Past and Present
Investigations, to find missing persons.
Genealogical research is the domain of her friend Chantelle
Marchand. Former librarian Shirley Harrington conducts online and archival
research—if something was ever published, Shirley will track it down. Antique
shop owner Arabella Carpenter is occasionally called upon to evaluate a
client’s physical evidence, such as old letters, jewelry, and, in this story,
tattoo art. Oddest member of the team is Misty Rivers, a tarot reader, who
posts surprisingly popular insights drawn from tarot cards on the Past &
Present website.
The team’s current case comes to Callie via what a gentle
bribe. In her will, Callie’s great-grandmother has asked her to investigate the
disappearance of Brandon Colbeck, grandson of great-grandma’s best friend in
the nursing home. In 2000, 20-year-old Colbeck left home “to find himself,”
taking very little with him and, significantly, leaving behind his
identification. If Callie gives her search a good effort, regardless of whether
she actually finds Colbeck, she’ll receive her great-grandmother’s legacy.
Over the years, Colbeck’s family has made numerous fruitless
attempts to locate him. Nevertheless, they have agreed to cooperate with Callie
as she gives it one last try. Their willingness arises in part from a recent
telephone call Colbeck’s grandmother received from someone claiming to be the
long-lost grandson. Was it Colbeck? Or a scam?
Brandon had a tattoo, which tarot expert Misty recognizes as
a portion of the tarot card “The Fool.” Sheluk artfully weaves interesting
information about tattooing, tattoo art, and tarot into her story, telling you
what you need to know without hindering the action.
In her initial interviews, Callie is convinced each family member is holding out on her. With the help of her team, she determinedly goes about discovering these secrets with determination and considerable savvy and skill. In Callie, author Sheluk has created a competent, conscientious protagonist—the kind of super-responsible person her clients can entrust their secrets to. You learn her likes and dislikes, her strengths and weaknesses, how she spends her day. Sheluk’s clear writing style helps the plot and the discoveries move along briskly, and it’s fun to see how every team member makes her unique and valuable contribution to the investigation.
Author Kathryn
Kraft in Writer Unboxed says book clubs have “the potential to serve as a
word-of-mouth marketing machine for novelists.” We’re all familiar with the
marketing boost books have received thanks to the endorsement of Oprah’s book
club and now Reese Witherspoon’s (with more than 800,000 followers), among
many others.
Millions of Americans belong to book clubs—the formal kind
that have regular meetings in libraries and living rooms—and the loosely
organized kind that operate through social media, including GoodReads, with its
90 million members. A 2015 BookBrowse
survey of people who read at least one book per month found that over half belong
to at least one book club, with the percentage of readers who are book club members
rising with age.
Another BookBrowse
survey of more than 5000 book club members, conducted last year, found that
“overwhelmingly, book club members want to read books that will promote good
discussion.” In other words, they’re looking for books whose features intrigue
them.
Recognizing a learning opportunity here, Kraft analyzed a
number of book club reading guides to discover major topics presumed to promote
book club discussions. They relate to issues writers ponder all the time, and
it’s encouraging to know they get readers talking too. Here they are:
1. A protagonist with a unique perspective – Think Maggie Gee’s new book Blood, with its unforgettable narrator Monica Ludd or Rice Moore in the Appalachian noir prize-winner Bearskin by James A. McLaughlin. Characters with strong voices like these give book club members “a chance to look at life in a new way,” Kraft says.
2. A character or characters readers can relate to – I have nothing in common with manipulative New Orleans gangster Frank Guidry in Lou Berney’s November Road, but I certainly related to him. A character doesn’t have to be exactly like me (please, no!) for that to happen; the character just needs to be richly portrayed.
3. A story that reflects some larger issue – In this way, the character’s deeply personal experience can become “universal and political,” Kraft says. Gin Phillips’s thriller Fierce Kingdom begins with a mother wanting to take her toddler home, and the rest of the book is about that thwarted journey. Home is always more than an address.
4. A structure that helps set expectations and convey meaning – Denise Mina’s Conviction, with its story-within-a-story format not only engages the reader in two plots, the relevance of the second story gives the protagonist a chance to reflect on her past and motivates her current actions. Think Dov Alfon’s A Long Night in Paris or Chris Pavone’s new The Paris Diversion that puts the time of day at the head of each chapter in this fast-paced thriller that takes place over a jam-packed 11 hours. The ticking clock is one of the thriller genre’s most popular structural devices. It sure sets expectations.
5. Endings that are tidy or open-ended? I’m sure there’s lots of discussion on this point. Kraft comes down on leaving endings looser, which gives readers a chance to think about all the novel’s foregoing elements and, in an act of co-creation, what’s most likely to happen next. “Imaginations are not constrained to what occurred between the covers of the book,” Kraft says. It’s like movies that end with a “where are they now?” feature as the credits roll, which evoke that same feeling of limiting the possibilities I might prefer. I believe Delia Owens’s Where the Crawdads Sing would have been stronger without Tate’s final discoveries. Let readers puzzle it out.
This lovely new film written and directed by Lulu Wang starts
with that staple of family dramas, assembling the clan (trailer). In this case, a
woman’s sons and their wives and children are returning to Changchun, China,
from Japan and America on the pretext of a family wedding, but in reality because
the family matriarch, Nai Nai, is dying. Though widely dispersed, they are
united in a conspiracy to keep that truth from her as long as possible.
All except Billi (Awkwafina). She immigrated to America with
her parents at age four and has adopted this country’s attitudes toward
personal autonomy. This secret is too big, too consequential, too awful to
keep. So, when her young poleaxed-looking cousin moves up his wedding to a
Japanese woman as a ploy to get the family together, Billi is discouraged from
attending. She doesn’t have the poker face necessary to maintain the deception.
She goes anyway.
And what do families do when they get together? They eat!
Over a series of meals, including the eerily familiar wedding reception, the
food serves as a distraction when discussions become too intense and personal.
Grandma Nai Nai (Zhao Shuzhen) is lively and charming, and the mutual love
between her and a devastated Billi is beautifully portrayed. They tell her she
isn’t sick, and that’s the attitude she adopts. And, really, she manages the
family and the wedding minutiae with energy. The family keeps trying to take on
various tasks, but she’ll have none of it.
I especially liked the portrayal of Billi’s parents, her
stunned father (Tzi Ma) and chilly, no-nonsense mother (Diana Lin), as well as
the poor Japanese bride (Aoi Mizuhara), gamely participating in everything
without understanding a word.
The movie delves deeply into cultural differences and, by
exploring them in such vivid detail, establishes bona fide universals. Given
the subject matter, you would not expect this film to have a nice dose of
comedy, but it does. Families closely examined almost always do, in the midst
of whatever chaos surrounds them—painful wedding toasts eliciting surefire groans.
Christy Lemire
for RogerEbert.com, nails it when she
says Wang has “made a film about death that’s light on its feet and never
mawkish. She’s told a story about cultural clashes without ever leaning on
wacky stereotypes or lazy clichés.” See it!, then go out for Chinese food. You will be in the mood.Rotten Tomatoes
critics’ rating 99%; audiences 88%.
Once the nominees and winners for the many, many awards in the crime/mystery/thriller genre are out, I listen to some of the ones I haven’t read. A talented narrator can really put a story into your head! Here are five I’ve heard lately, all (except one) with excellent narration. Three are nominees for Anthony Awards, which will be announced later this year.
*****Bearskin
Written by James A McLaughlin, narrated by MacLeod Andres – Oddly, Bearskin had some of the same appeal as the very different Where the Crawdads Sing, because part of the narrator’s challenge is dealing with a heavy dose of the natural world. Rice Moore is hiding out in an Appalachian Virginia nature preserve, living pretty much off the grid and hoping an assassin from the Mexican drug cartel whose younger brother he killed doesn’t find him. Meanwhile, he must deal with bear poachers, motorcycle outlaws, and an interesting parade of Old Dominion miscreants. Winner: 2019 Edgar Award for Best First Novel; Nominee: 2019 Anthony Award for Best Novel
*****November Road
In November Road,written by Lou Berney, narrated by Johnathan McClain – President Kennedy has been shot and New Orleans player Frank Guidry realizes the errand a local crime boss sent him on is connected to that crime. It sounded simple: drive this sky-blue Cadillac Eldorado to Dallas and park it in a particular place. It was the assassin’s getaway car. Now Guidry is supposed to dispose of the vehicle and rightly worries he’ll be disposed of next. Meanwhile, an Oklahoma housewife leaves her alcoholic husband and hits the road with her two daughters, never expecting to meet a man like Guidry. Winner: 2019 Left Coast Crime Award for Best Mystery Novel and a “Best Book of the Year” by at least 13 publications; Nominee: 2019 Anthony Award for Best Novel
****House Witness
Written by Mike Lawson, narrated by Joe Barrett – A powerful member of Congress has a secret: years ago his mistress bore him a son. When that son is shot dead in a Manhattan bar, he sends his fixer, Joe DeMarco, to make sure the culprit—son of a wealthy businessman—goes to jail. The case in House Witnessshould be a slam-dunk. There were five witnesses, after all. But as the witnesses start disappearing, the prosecutor suspects a campaign to get rid of them. She enlists DeMarco in a desperate cat-and-mouse game with a beautiful sociopath. Nominee: Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best Novel
****The Chalk Man
Written by C J Tudor, narrated by Euan Morton. Years ago, in a small English town, a tight-knit gang of four twelve-year-olds communicated with each other via coded messages chalked on the sidewalk. One day a strange chalk message leads them to the body of a missing girl and a teacher–The Chalk Man–is blamed. Thirty years on, Eddie drinks too much, fuzzing his thinking about the new appearance of chalk men and the mysterious letter he and each of his friends have received. Is he creating these messages in a drunken blackout? When one of the four dies, Eddie must find out what happened so long ago in order to save them all. Winner: 2019 International Thriller Writers’ Award for Best First Novel; Strand Magazine Award for Best Debut Novel
***Jar of Hearts
Written by Jennifer Hillier, narrated by January LaVoy – In Jar of Hearts, sixteen-year-old Georgina Shaw’s boyfriend, Calvin James, kills her best friend, and buries the dismembered corpse in the woods behind Geo’s house. Twenty years later, Angela’s body is found, and Calvin is convicted of her murder, but he soon escapes from prison. Geo is incarcerated for five years, derailing her lucrative career and high-profile engagement. As she is about to be released, new bodies are found in the same woods. Calvin is the chief suspect, and Geo may be the next victim. This thriller loses a star mainly because the narration didn’t work for me. The print book might be a better choice. Winner:2019 International Thriller Writers’ Award for Best Hardcover Novel; Nominee: 2019 Anthony Award for Best Novel
The final production of the 2019
season at Princeton Summer
Theater is Suzan-Lori Parks’s 2002
Pulitzer Prize winning Top Dog/Underdog, directed by Lori
Elizabeth Parquet. The show premiered August 8 and runs through August 18
at Princeton University’s Hamilton Murray Theater.
Sibling rivalry that boils over
into violence is as old as Cain and Abel, with the line between love and hate
ever-shifting. African American brothers Booth (Travis Raeburn) and Lincoln (Nathaniel J. Ryan), five years
older, have an uneasy relationship made more acute by their dwindling life
prospects. Despite Booth’s determination to change his name to Three-Card, the
brothers seem constrained by the names their father chose for them as a cruel
joke.
Booth has a one-room apartment and
a girlfriend whom we never see (and who may be apocryphal); Lincoln has come to
live with him after his wife threw him out, and Booth would like to get rid of
him too, but Lincoln has a job and income, even if paltry. In a tangle of
symbolism, he works in a carnival, in whiteface and dressed up as Abraham
Lincoln. People pay to come into his booth and shoot him with a gun filled with
blanks. They carnival hired him because they can pay him less, but even that
meager income is threatened, because management plans to replace him with a wax
dummy.
In the old days, Lincoln made a
good living fleecing tourists with the Three-card Monte con, but initially
refuses to take up the cards again. Booth would like to develop a Three-card Monte
racket of his own. In the opening scene, he’s practicing his card-handling
skills and patter at the front of the stage, when his brother enters, in full
Lincoln regalia. Startled by Lincoln’s entrance, Booth pulls his gun, then lies
about what he was doing. Playing solitaire, he says.
Throughout the course of the play,
much comes out about the brothers’ reaction to being abandoned by their parents
when they were 16 and 11 and their uneasy relationship in the ensuing twenty
years or so. Which of them is the top dog and which the underdog shifts back
and forth many times.
Raeburn gives an energetic
performance as Booth, ever the kid brother, teasing and bouncing to keep
Lincoln’s attention. Much of the comedy in the production comes from his
portrayal. Ryan starts out as the ghostly Lincoln, morose and beaten down not
just by his bizarre job but the even more awful prospect that he may lose it.
He resists Booth’s importuning to go back to his Three-card Monte days, and
finally, alone in the apartment, really comes to life when he takes up the
cards again.
Rakesh Potluri produced the set
(the vividly floral wallcoverings were inspired by the work of artist Kehinde
Wiley, who created the portrait of Barack Obama at the National Portrait
Gallery). Music from the hip-hop duo Outkast’s 1998 album Aquemini, which like the play is thematically influenced by
differences between the two principals.
Princeton Summer Theater
productions are staged in Hamilton Murray Theater on the university campus,
easily reached from New York by car or train. Take New Jersey Transit to the
Princeton Junction station, then the shuttle train into Princeton. The shuttle
ends a short walk from the theater, which is also walking distance from
numerous restaurants.
For tickets, call the box office at
732-997-0205 or visit the ticket office online.
