strange and random happenstance

Uzo Aduba's performance as Cordelia Cupp will go down among the great fictional detectives of all time. This amateur ornithologist deserves a place alongside Benoit Blanc, Hercule Poirot, and Jacques Clouseau. Unfortunately she's not the star of the show, the White House is. Because this show is perplexingly based on a non-fiction book about life in the White House. Kate Andersen Brower's 2015 book The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House takes a deep dive into what makes the White House function and for some reason all those excruciating infinitesimal details of what makes the White House work are the backbone of this series. While yes, this does give the show a grounding, the verisimilitude is off the charts, the problem is the show became so enamored of these details and how many cooks and chefs there are that is was repetitive. I do not need to hear what everyone was supposed to be doing and where and when for the hundredth time based on "protocol." I need to have some forward momentum. And to have a show with only eight episodes seem overly long, that signifies you are doing something wrong. They blundered cameos, they underutilized Australian red herrings, and, in the end, sure, I got a good, nostalgic Jason Lee rant, be he didn't even seem to be feeling it. They should have asked Jane Curtain in the first episode who did it and been done in five minutes. But instead the show limps on, they release the suspects and have a hearing only to have to bring everyone back. And all the while they never even explained the calligrapher! By the end I didn't care. I just wanted it over. But for me the biggest misstep was Al Franken. Al Franken is supposed to add to the verisimilitude. He's playing a Senator from Washington and was a Senator of Minnesota until he was forced to resign in 2018 due to sexual misconduct allegations. And while what Al Franken was accused of is nothing compared to what is happening right now in the government that doesn't mean that he should be forgiven because his crimes were minor in comparison. Yes, discount the suffering of his victims because it could have been worse. That's a great stance to take. MSNBC seems to take that stance as well because they've been trying to rehab his image for years which I find simply repugnant. And that's what The Residence is doing, it's helping to rehab his image. Look, he was so good as a senator, don't you want him back? No. No I absolutely do not. And every single time I saw his face on this show or heard his voice I was enraged. He is an abuser given this platform and that is just unacceptable. Shonda Rhimes should be ashamed of herself. Resigning from the Kennedy Center Board doesn't make it right. For once I was glad a show I watched was cancelled. They wanted verisimilitude but all they got was my ire. And the ire of my friend who studies the habitat of birds. Yeah. They might have got the details of the White House bang on, but they did not do so with the birds. 

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Al Franken, And the Emmy Goes To, Australia, Benoit Blanc, Birds, Cancelled, Cordelia Cupp, Jane Curtain, Jason Lee, Kate Andersen Brower, MSNBC, Ornithology, Senator, Shonda Rhimes, The Residence, The White House, Uzo Aduba

We Are the Beasts by Gigi Griffis
Published by: Delacorte Press
Publication Date: December 10th, 2024
Format: Hardcover, 352 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
"Deaths and disappearances pile up as a mysterious beast stalks the French countryside and two girls seize an unlikely opportunity that just might save them all - or serve them up on a platter.

Step into this chilling, historical horror inspired by the unsolved mystery of the Beast of Gévaudan.

When a series of brutal, mysterious deaths start plaguing the countryside and whispers of a beast in the mountains reach the quiet French hamlet of Mende, most people believe it's a curse - God's punishment for their sins.

But to sixteen-year-old Joséphine and her best friend, Clara, the beast isn't a curse. It's an opportunity.

For years, the girls of Mende have been living in a nightmare - fathers who drink, brothers who punch, homes that feel like prisons - and this is a chance to get them out.

Using the creature's attacks as cover, Joséphine and Clara set out to fake their friends' deaths and hide them away until it's safe to run. But escape is harder than they thought. If they can't brave a harsh winter with little food... If the villagers discover what they're doing... If the beast finds them first...

Those fake deaths might just become real ones."

You gotta take what opportunities you're given!

What the Woods Took by Courtney Gould
Published by: Wednesday Books
Publication Date: December 10th, 2024
Format: Hardcover, 336 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
"Yellowjackets meets Girl, Interrupted when a group of troubled teens in a wilderness therapy program find themselves stranded in a forest full of monsters eager to take their place.

Devin Green wakes in the middle of the night to find two men in her bedroom. No stranger to a fight, she calls to her foster parents for help, but it soon becomes clear this is a planned abduction - one everyone but Devin signed up for. She's shoved in a van and driven deep into the Idaho woods, where she's dropped off with a cohort of equally confused teens. Finally, two camp counselors inform them that they've all been enrolled in an experimental therapy program. If the campers can learn to change their self-destructive ways - and survive a fifty-days hike through the wilderness - they'll come out the other side as better versions of themselves. Or so the counselors say.

Devin is immediately determined to escape. She's also determined to ignore Sheridan, the cruel-mouthed, lavender-haired bully who mocks every group exercise. But there's something strange about these woods - inhuman faces appearing between the trees, visions of people who shouldn't be there flashing in the leaves - and when the campers wake up to find both counselors missing, therapy becomes the least of their problems. Stranded and left to fend for themselves, the teens quickly realize they'll have to trust each other if they want to survive. But what lies in the woods may not be as dangerous as what the campers are hiding from each other - and if the monsters have their way, no one will leave the woods alive.

Atmospheric and sharp, What the Woods Took is a poignant story of transformation that explores the price of becoming someone - or something - new."

As long as there isn't cannibalism right? 

The Intruders by Louise Jensen
Published by: HQ
Publication Date: December 10th, 2024
Format: Paperback, 416 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
"They were told to leave. They should have listened.

The perfect opportunity...

A manor house available rent-free to house-sitters is an offer too good to miss for Cass and James, who have been saving for a deposit on their own home for so long.

Although it had been abandoned for almost thirty years, after a home invasion left almost all the inhabitants dead, it is an amazing chance for them to build their future.

But is it worth the price?

Shortly after moving in things take a sinister turn. Objects disappear and turn up in odd places, the clock always stops at the same time, the house is strangely oppressive and sometimes it feels like Cass and James are not alone.

Newington House may have bad energy, and a dark reputation. But surely there's no reason for history to repeat itself, is there?"

I don't think I'd say cause it's rent-free... Now if I got the house for staying that might be a different matter...

Pretty Dead Things by Lilian West
Published by: Crooked Lane Books
Publication Date: December 10th, 2024
Format: Hardcover, 272 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
"A bride-to-be's discovery of long-lost wedding rings at an estate sale reveals the key to a decades-old cold case in a small-town mystery perfect for fans of Louise Penny.

2024. Recently-engaged city girl Cora is new to the small town of Hickory Falls. Still adjusting to the change in pace, she's delighted when she stumbles upon a quaint estate sale. Drawn in by the knickknacks, she buys a jar of colorful baubles and is surprised to find two rings at the bottom of the jar. When she innocently sets out to find the original owner of the rings, she instead stumbles upon a decades-old mystery.

1953. Clarity Grey should've known better than to get involved with a married man, but their connection went too deep to ignore. When he divorces his wife for her, they marry, and she gets the family life she's always dreamed of, with a new stepdaughter and a child of her own. But just as suddenly, her new life slips out of her hands when she simply vanishes, never to be seen or heard of again.

Clarity is labeled as flakey and a homewrecker, so nobody in town takes her disappearance seriously - until Cora, seventy years later.

Told in dual timelines, this engrossing novel exposes one family's secrets and the twisted lies that are hidden in small towns."

Jumble sales to the rescue of cold cases!

The Birdcage Library by Freya Berry
Published by: Union Square and Co.
Publication Date: December 10th, 2024
Format: Paperback, 368 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
"Spanning Gilded Age New York society to the 1930s Scottish Highlands, this Gothic novel is a mystery within a mystery, featuring a compelling heroine, an engrossing puzzle with fiendish clues, and not one but three big twists.

It's 1932: Scottish adventuress and plant-hunter (and surviving twin) Emily Blackwood, now living in Australia, accepts a commission from Heinrich Vogel, a former dealer of exotic animals in Manhattan. Vogel now lives with his macabre collection of taxidermy in a remote Scottish castle. Emily is tasked with finding a long-lost treasure that Heinrich believes has been hidden within the castle walls. But instead, she discovers the pages of a diary written by Hester Vogel, who died after falling from the Brooklyn Bridge on the eve of its opening in 1883. Hester's diary leads Emily to an old book, The Birdcage Library, and into a treasure hunt of another kind - one that will take her down a dangerous path for clues, and force her to confront her own darkest secret..."

I mean, you can't overstate how important rare birds were once upon a time. Mainly for their feathers and as specimens to show off your wealth... But still, important!

No Ordinary Duchess by Elizabeth Hoyt
Published by: Forever
Publication Date: December 10th, 2024
Format: Paperback, 352 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
"From a New York Times bestselling author, the much-anticipated third novel in the Greycourt series.

Cold and brooding, Julian Greycourt, the heir to the Windemere dukedom, has always known that his uncle the duke was responsible for his mother's death. Now he's determined to exact revenge against his uncle - if he can find the proof. But Julian hides a secret so explosive it will destroy him if it's ever revealed, and the duke is watching. The last thing he needs is a distractingly sensual woman whose very presence threatens to destroy his plans.

Sunny and cheerful, Lady Elspeth de Moray doesn't know why her brother and Julian fell out all those years ago, but she can't let the autocratic man get in the way of her mission: to retrieve an ancient family text that she believes is in one of the Windemere libraries. Locating the tome, however, proves trickier than she anticipated, and at each turn, she's thrown together with the maddingly mysterious Julian. And the temptation to give in to her family's greatest enemy grows stronger with each intriguing encounter..."

So much yes!

UPROAR!: Staire, Scandal and Printmakers in Georgian London by Alice Loxton
Published by: Icon Books
Publication Date: December 10th, 2024
Format: Paperback, 416 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
"London, 1772: a young artist called Thomas Rowlandson is making his way through the grimy backstreets of the capital, on his way to begin his studies at the Royal Academy Schools. Within a few years, James Gillray and Isaac Cruikshank would join him in Piccadilly, turning satire into an artform, taking on the British establishment, and forever changing the way we view power.

Set against a backdrop of royal madness, political intrigue, the birth of modern celebrity, French revolution, American independence and the Napoleonic Wars, UPROAR! follows the satirists as they lampoon those in power, from the Prince Regent to Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. Their prints and illustrations deconstruct the political and social landscape with surreal and razor-sharp wit, as the three men vie with each other to create the most iconic images of the day.

Alice Loxton's writing fizzes with energy on every page, and never fails to convince us that Gillray and his gang profoundly altered British humor, setting the stage for everything from Gilbert and Sullivan to Private Eye and Spitting Image today. This is a book that will cause readers to reappraise everything they think they know about genteel Georgian London, and see it for what it was - a time of UPROAR!"

The rise of the political print was so influential that it has its own section in British history. And I argue it should also have its own section in art history...

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Alice Loxton, Beast of Gévaudan, Birds, Courtney Gould, Elizabeth Hoyt, France, Freya Berry, Georgian London, Gigi Griffis, Gilded Age, Greycourt, Lilian West, Louise Jensen, Manor House, Printmaking, Yellowjackets

The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson
Published by: Penguin Books
Publication Date: April 24th, 2018
Format: Paperback, 336 Pages
Rating: ★★★
To Buy

The Natural History Museum at Tring started it's life as the private museum of the 2nd Baron Rothschild who was often seen riding his zebra-drawn carriage around the estate. On his death the Rothschild family donated the museum and its contents to the nation. This suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History has many taxidermied specimens on display but its real wealth isn't for the public to see. This wealth consists of one of the largest orinthological collections in the world. Some of the bird skins within the museum were collected by Alfred Russel Wallace, a contemporary of Darwin. Which makes the crime that was about to happen not just egomaniacal but incalculably horrific in its impact to the study of the natural world. On June 24th, 2009, the museum was broken into and 299 specimens were stolen. Even if the specimens were recovered their scientific value was now worthless. The perpetrator was an American student, a flautist, Edwin Rist, who was caught and pled guilty over a year after the crime was committed. But why did Edwin break into an inconspicuous outpost of the British Natural History Museum? Edwin was a master fly-tier and had come up against the problem all master fly-tiers do in the modern era; what do you do when you want to recreate a specific salmon fly from the Victorian era but the bird feathers needed come from extinct species? There are those who find substitutions, but there are those, like Edwin, who would accept no substitutes and he figured out a way to get his hands on Victorian birds. It just so happened it was very illegal. Not to mention immoral. He could possibly have gotten away with it if he hadn't become greedy. The internet is full of people looking for illegal goods, it just so happens that Edwin was willing to share his. For a price. A retired detective at a fly-tier convention thought the bird skins he saw were suspect. They looked to be museum quality because they were. They had been a part of the Tring Heist. To protect themselves the fly-tier community turned on Edwin, much to his surprise. But he had a good lawyer, a willing doctor, and, in the end, to the uneducated, it was only dead birds after all. Yet one question remained, what happened to the specimens that were never recovered? Kirk Wallace Johnson was determined to find out.

The Feather Thief is an odd book. I say odd because it's built on a three act structure that should and traditionally does work but here falls flat. We start with the history, move onto the crime, and then round it out with the hunt for answers. And the problem lies in Kirk Wallace Johnson's hunt for answers. He latched onto this case because he took up fly-fishing to help with his PTSD from doing years of aid work in Iraq and it gave him an escape from his own problems. Which means he had a vested interest in tracking down Edwin Rist and the missing specimens. While he has worked as a journalist his writing in the third act felt very amateurish. His drive didn't spark in me a desire for resolution, it sparked in me a desire that the book should have been edited a little better. Because, don't get me wrong, this is a really good book, the first two acts are wonderful. Which makes his naivete about the true crime genre that much more glaring. But seriously, I don't want to focus on the negative in this review, I want to focus on the positive. Because, damn, I really should have known more about "feather fever." I watch enough costume dramas and read enough books that I can see with my own eyes the fetish for feathers that the Victorians engendered. I just had no idea it was this crazy. When the Titanic went down the most valuable thing they were carrying in their hull was feathers. That is just crazy to me. Tons and tons of feathers are down at the bottom of the ocean with all those lost souls and that one crazy billionaire and his family. My Dad used to tell the tale of an artist his gallery represented. Owen J. Gromme, while being a painter of the natural world, started out working for various museums and took several trips to Africa. On one trip he was with a member of the royal family of Britain and the carcasses of animals and birds was so vast that he was overcome with disgust. This story is why I shouldn't have been surprised by Edwin Rist. Humans will always seek to kill what is beautiful to claim it as theirs. Be it beasts or birds, they are covetous and horrible. The only justification for all the dead birds that Alfred Russel Wallace brought back was the scientific developments that could arise from the wholesale slaughter of now extinct birds. But Edwin Rist took that all away. He was a selfish boy who did not get punished as he should have. Where he is now matters not. Only the void he left matters.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Alfred Russel Wallace, Birds, Edwin Rist, Feather Fever, Fly Fishing, For the Love of Book Clubs, Kirk Wallace Johnson, Owen J. Gromme, The Feather Thief, The Natural History Museum at Tring, Titanic, True Crime

Where the Forest Meets the Stars by Glendy Vanderah
Published by: Lake Union Publishing
Publication Date: March 1st, 2019
Format: Kindle, 304 Pages
Rating: ★★★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)

Joanna Teale is alive because her mother is dead. Her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer too late. But it wasn't too late for Jo. After a radical double mastectomy Jo wants her life to get back to some semblance of normality. Cancer put her life on hold so she's trying to get back to that life. And that life means grad school. Therefore she is burying herself in her graduate work in the wilds of southern Illinois studying birds. She has her routine. It's solitary but restorative to work from dawn until dusk until all you can do is collapse into bed. Or drink a nice cold beer in the backyard of her white clapboard student housing before collapsing into bed, banging on the window AC to show a little life. But her life is about to change radically once again. A young shoeless girl appears battered and bruised outside her house. The girl claims to be an alien child named Ursa, sent from the stars to witness five miracles. Obviously the kid is running away from something and has created this mythology to cope. But the more time Jo spends with Ursa the more she questions what is possible. She can't do this on her own, and there's something about the police that she just doesn't trust, so she turns to her neighbor Gabe. He runs the roadside stand selling eggs while coming to terms with his own existential problems. Gabe agrees that Ursa is special. Maybe she is some sort of extraterrestrial. They can't deny that Ursa brings a strange sort of luck with her wherever she goes. As the three unlikely souls form a ragtag family time passes and Jo realizes that it will be harder and harder to explain to the authorities why she has kept someone else's child for an entire summer. But when Ursa's real life finally catches up to her and shows Jo and Gabe the dark underbelly of human existence they will do anything to save this little girl. It might just take a miracle, but as humans who are they to judge what an alien would view as a miracle?

You know the phenomenon of the last great book you read? Where it was so amazing and transformative that anything that came after would pale in comparison Well, I had the exact opposite experience with this book. I was suffering from last shit book I read. The book I had read previously was possibly the worst book I have ever read. It was Devil House by John Darnielle if you're interested. So anything would have been better than Devil House. Anything at all. While my friends were lamenting that this book used the alien angle as a kind of bait and switch all I could say was at least there wasn't fake ye olde english. So what if this is Northern Exposure meets Law and Order: Special Victims Unit verging towards the almost completely unrealistic? It wasn't Devil House. Where the Forest Meets the Stars is competently written if completely quixotic. But for me it was a place I could escape into. I felt just like Jo, I needed a reprieve from reality, I needed to swim in the rivers, I needed to bath in the forests, I needed to purge the stank of Devil House from my being and Where the Forest Meets the Stars did that for me. But it was Jo's graduate work that intrigued me the most. Glendy Vanderah was a field biologist who got her MS in the Cerulean Warbler so the insight she brought to the character of Jo made her research spot on. And the reason I connected so strongly to this is because of one of my best friends. She's now a Biometrician for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service but every summer for more years than I can count I remember her going out into the field somewhere to do research. She'd be in Ohio in prime Mothman country studying riparian zones or just slightly north of home looking into the impact of windmills on birds. Actually I think she didn't actually get the windmill summer job, but I remember proofing her resume. As well as her paper on riparian zones. What Glendy Vanderah gave me was a glimpse into my best friend's life for all those summers she was away from me and for that I am grateful. I can see her and Jo hanging out a sharing a beer.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Aliens, Birds, Breast Cancer, Devil House, For the Love of Book Clubs, Glendy Vanderah, Illinois, Joanna Teale, John Darnielle, Law and Order SVU, Northern Exposure, Summer, Ursa, Where the Forest Meets the Stars