strange and random happenstance

Bright Young Dead by Jessica Fellowes
Published by: Minotaur Books
Publication Date: October 30th, 2018
Format: Hardcover, 400 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy

Pamela may be turning eighteen, but she isn't one of the fast bright young things like her sister Nancy. Pamela would far prefer a quiet and sedate birthday party, perhaps with a nice ride through the country on her horse, but does Nancy listen? Oh no. Nancy and her friends have descended on Asthall Manor and have concocted quite a delicious scavenger hunt, because it is the done thing! Though most scavenger hunts don't end in a dead body at the base of the local church tower. Because if they did, this scavenger hunt would make all the partygoers winners. Adrian Curtis has been murdered and his sister's maid Dulcie is arrested. Dulcie's shadowy past working for Alice Diamond, the Queen of the Forty Thieves, makes her guilty because of her past. But Louisa Cannon is someone who was given a second chance from her own criminal past thanks to the Mitfords and she can't see someone else who has worked so hard trying to go straight to go down for a crime she didn't commit. Therefore it's time for Louisa to dust off her rusty detective skills and get to work. As luck would have it her old crime solving partner Guy Sullivan is now a Sergeant in the actual police force, no more of this railway police thank you very much! Even more of a coincidence is that he is working with his colleague, Constable Mary Moon, investigating Alice Diamond and her latest shoplifting spree. Who knows, the two cases could be connected! One thing is certain, they both need information the other has. As they flit through the underground of London's nightlife, from dance halls to pubs, responding to the thumping urgency of the music thrumming through the clubs, emotions will run high and relationships will be strained as a murderer is lured out into the open. Can they catch a killer before everything implodes?

The ability of humans to adapt shouldn't surprise me given everything we've all been through during the pandemic, but still it sneaks up on me occasionally. Case in point is this series. I can unreservedly say that I hate these books and yet I gave this one two stars. Meaning I didn't hate it as much as I thought I did, at least when I was rating it. I've often thought that a book should have two ratings, the one you give right after reading it and the one you give a few months later as to how your memories have either favored or soured to it. In this case they have soured, more and more. The reason this book got two stars is I have already adapted after reading only one book in this series to the fact they aren't good and any improvement, no matter how slight, means it's not complete shit. Perhaps there's a song here, "I've Grown Accustomed to Your Crap?" The main reason is I wasn't shocked this time around by the fact that there are basically no Mitfords in this series despite being "A Mitford Murders Mystery." In fact half way through Bright Young Dead Jessica Fellowes completely gives up on the Mitford pretense altogether and it's just Louisa, off doing stupid things, in particular abandoning herself to Jazz music, a trope that always annoys the hell out of me and makes me want to scratch out the author's eyes, until Jessica finally remembers she's writing a series with a veneer of Mitfords and drags them hastily back on scene for the denouement. A denouement I might add that is just ripping of the movie Clue. So watch Clue instead is my recommendation. Because besides being just boring and unoriginal, this book also talks down to the reader in a way that made me want to shake some sense into the author. You really had to tell us what a fence is in such a condescending manner? Because I think at this point you need all the good will you can get to have any reader pick up the next volume.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Alice Diamond, Bright Young Dead, Bright Young Things, Clue, Jessica Fellowes, Jessica Mitford, Louisa Cannon, Mitfords, Murder Most Foul, My Fair Lady, Nancy Mitford, Scavenger Hunt, The Mitford Murders

My mom died earlier this year after a long battle with Parkinson's. If you knew one thing about my mom you knew she loved books. She also loved gardening and musicals and NCIS, but above all, books. She had different books she was reading in each room of our house. She'd be reading about genealogy in the living room and her latest obsession which would most likely turn into a display at the school where she was the librarian in the TV room and she'd be reading murder mysteries up in her bedroom usually until right before she went to sleep, which could be late in the night depending on the quality of the killing. Really the only way to celebrate my mom's life was to share her favorite books with everyone. Because what we love, what we read, informs us and becomes part of our DNA. Therefore for November and December I'm going to share with you the books she shared with me in order to mold me into the reader I am today, even if I tend to usually give the credit to Timothy Zahn and his Star Wars books over anyone else. The truth is my mom was there from day one, sorry Timothy, reading to me and making me watch The Sound of Music on Christmas while I lay on the couch with the chicken pox, because I had to see her second favorite musical, her first being My Fair Lady. That's when I was eleven. But there's also the time I was nineteen and she shoved Harry Potter at me long before he became the sensation he is today. And the time I was so young that I can't remember how old I was but she let me put food in the wall for the Borrowers because I got it out of a book she loved. So here's to my mom and her love of literature.     

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Books, Chicken Pox, DEATH, Gardening, Genealogy, Harry Potter, Librarian, Libraries, Literature, Mom, My Fair Lady, NCIS, Star Wars, The Sound of Music, These Are a Few of My Favorite Things, Timothy Zahn

Bright Young Dead by Jessica Fellowes
Published by: Minotaur Books
Publication Date: October 30th, 2018
Format: Hardcover, 400 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy

Pamela may be turning eighteen, but she isn't one of the fast bright young things like her sister Nancy. Pamela would far prefer a quiet and sedate birthday party, perhaps with a nice ride through the country on her horse, but does Nancy listen? Oh no. Nancy and her friends have descended on Asthall Manor and have concocted quite a delicious scavenger hunt, because it is the done thing! Though most scavenger hunts don't end in a dead body at the base of the local church tower. Because if they did, this scavenger hunt would make all the partygoers winners. Adrian Curtis has been murdered and his sister's maid Dulcie is arrested. Dulcie's shadowy past working for Alice Diamond, the Queen of the Forty Thieves, makes her guilty because of her past. But Louisa Cannon is someone who was given a second chance from her own criminal past thanks to the Mitfords and she can't see someone else who has worked so hard trying to go straight to go down for a crime she didn't commit. Therefore it's time for Louisa to dust off her rusty detective skills and get to work. As luck would have it her old crime solving partner Guy Sullivan is now a Sergeant in the actual police force, no more of this railway police thank you very much! Even more of a coincidence is that he is working with his colleague, Constable Mary Moon, investigating Alice Diamond and her latest shoplifting spree. Who knows, the two cases could be connected! One thing is certain, they both need information the other has. As they flit through the underground of London's nightlife, from dance halls to pubs, responding the the thumping urgency of the music thrumming through the clubs, emotions will run high and relationships will be strained as a murderer is lured out into the open. Can they catch a killer before everything implodes?

The ability of humans to adapt shouldn't surprise me given everything we've all been through this year, but still it sneaks up on me occasionally. Case in point is this series. I can unreservedly say that I hate these books and yet I gave this one two stars. Meaning I didn't hate it as much as I thought I did, at least when I was rating it. I've often thought that a book should have two ratings, the one you give right after reading it and the one you give a few months later as to how your memories have either favored or soured to it. In this case they have soured, more and more. The reason this book got two stars is I have already adapted after reading only one book in this series to the fact they aren't good and any improvement, no matter how slight, means it's not complete shit. Perhaps there's a song here, "I've Grown Accustomed to Your Crap?" The main reason is I wasn't shocked this time around by the fact that there are basically no Mitfords in this series despite being "A Mitford Murders Mystery." In fact half way through Bright Young Dead Jessica Fellowes completely gives up on the Mitford pretense altogether and it's just Louisa, off doing stupid things, in particular abandoning herself to Jazz music, a trope that always annoys the hell out of me and makes me want to scratch out the author's eyes, until Jessica finally remembers she's writing a series with a veneer of Mitfords and drags them hastily back on scene for the denouement. A denouement I might add that is just ripping of the movie Clue. So watch Clue instead is my recommendation. Because besides being just boring and unoriginal, this book also talks down to the reader in a way that made me want to shake some sense into the author. You really had to tell us what a fence is in such a condescending manner? Because I think at this point you need all the good will you can get to have any reader pick up the next volume.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Alice Diamond, Bright Young Dead, Bright Young Things, Clue, Jessica Fellowes, Jessica Mitford, Louisa Cannon, Mitfords, My Fair Lady, Nancy Mitford, Roaring Back to Reading, Scavenger Hunt, The Mitford Murders

Jamaica Inn
Based on the book by Daphne Du Maurier
Starring: Jessica Brown Findlay, Matthew McNulty, Sean Harris, Joanne Whalley, Ben Daniels, Shirley Henderson, and Andrew Scarboroug
Release Date: 2014
Rating: ★
To Buy

Mary Yellan's mother has died suddenly and she is forced to go live with her Aunt at Jamaica Inn because she doesn't want to take the offered hand of her childhood sweetheart Ned. Life at the inn is brutish and hard, filled with rough men and dangerous living. Mary has every reason to hate smugglers, as they killed her father, but soon she is one of them, part of a network hidden in plain sight throughout Cornwall. Jamaica Inn is a den of thieves and yet, despite her better judgment, she is falling for one of them, the younger brother of her uncle Joss, Jem Merlyn. The only place she knows safety away from the brutes and horse thieves is at the home of the local vicar, Francis Davey, where he and his sister Hannah offer Mary hope that her uncle will be caught and her and her Aunt Patience can forge a new life together. But no one is as they seem and everyone has some dark secret that haunts their dreams.

Seriously, this miniseries is not my fault. When I said I really wanted Jamaica Inn made into a miniseries after I first read it I didn't mean this! Let's go wreck a ship in broad daylight said no smuggler ever! Daphne Du Maurier is probably rolling in her grave right about now, but I'm sure after the Charles Laughton version she has no expectations at all and is used to disappointment. There is just so much wrong going on I was tempted on re-watching this painful miniseries to just do a Mystery Science Theater 3000 type review, but even that would have been too much effort and after a certain point there are so many major gaffe's that my brain shut down and I just tried to lie back and think of England while occasionally bemoaning the unlikelihood that anyone could get that much mud on their dress ever. Seriously. Was Mary rolling in the pig sty?

What is really grating is that this version obviously tried to keep the overall plot in tact to some degree but that it kept making little changes for no reason that kept adding up and resulted in changing everything. Now, I understand that this is an "adaptation" and that purity of the story is changed for a new medium, but seriously, why randomly make Mary have this long backstory with her father being killed by smuggler's but then have the twist that he was a smuggler!?! What does this add? Mary's mother hiding her illness from her daughter... it takes away Mary caring for her mother and showing what a strong independent young woman she is. In fact a lot of the changes chip away at Mary's independence. Instead of her not caring about love and wanting to return home to have her own farm, enter Ned, her love that was left behind that wanted to make a good wife of her. Ugh.

Why you're at it give Aunt Patience more of a backbone, make Joss less of a physically imposing giant of a man, add some new characters for no reason, change Harry the peddler from a creep and a rapist to a nice doddering smuggler. Oh, and why not take all suspense away and have Mary learn about the smuggling at Jamaica Inn in two seconds flat and have her helping out five minutes later! Then throw Jem in every scene you can, make Davey's housekeeper Hannah into his psycho sister, and on and on and on. Strip away everything little by little and what do you have? Three hours of my life I want back... or, by this point, six!

But nothing can ever beat the bad casting and dialect! The casting of Sean Harris as Joss is a joke. You need someone tall, imposing, like Clive Russell is at 6'6". But that is nothing to Sean Harris's mush mouth. I swear, I don't think he's actually saying real words. There's even a good chance he can't speak given the evidence of this miniseries. He is the worse perpetrator, but not the only one by a long shot! All the mumbling and grumbling of the dialogue led to a fair few complaints to the BBC back in April when this first aired, as in thousands of people called to complain. What the dialogue reminds me of most is that scene in My Fair Lady when Henry Higgins is filling Eliza Doolittle's mouth full of marbles and telling her to speak and enunciate and she can't. Everyone in this miniseries must have had a mouth full of marbles, it's the only explanation. The worst result of this is that the scene where Joss bares his soul and tells Mary that he is a wrecker, instead of coming across as riveting and horrific and sad all at the same time, it comes across as a mumbling drunk in front of a fire like a drunken uncle at the holidays you'd ignore. This direction and acting wouldn't inspire the horror in Mary, it would just be shrugged off as just another rant.

Finally, Mary Yellan herself cannot be exempted from the train wreck, or should I say shipwreck (oh naughty) that this miniseries is. She's supposed to carry the narrative on her shoulders and instead she spends all her time moaning and looking like she's constipated or drugged or both. Perhaps she's on drugs for her constipation? This role is yet another step in the downward trajectory that is the career path of Jessica Brown Finlay. Let's see where she went wrong. Firstly she's on like the most popular television series ever and she quits. Strike one, you don't leave Downton Abbey. Then she goes on to "star" in the cheesy television adaptation of the Kate Mosse book Labyrinth which was abominably boring and didn't even show up in the US till two years after it premiered in England to lackluster reviews. Next she stared as the fair damsel in the box office flop Winter's Tale, which didn't even make back one fifth of what it cost to make it and got an astonishingly low ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. I didn't know a movie could get only 13%! Oh, even better, top critics gave in only 10%! And then, oh joy of joys, came Jamaica Inn! Here's a hint. If you're going to leave a big show get something bankable as your followup, like Lily James and Cinderella. It's Disney! Oh, and she didn't have her character killed off so she can come back to Downton Abbey whenever she wants!

But underneath all that mud. Seriously, what's with all the mud!?! This adaptation got a few things right. Mainly they hired Matthew McNulty. A regular face for fans of Bill Gallagher's shows Lark Rise to Candleford and The Paradise, he is perfectly cast as Jem Merlyn. I defy anyone to make the phrase "come to market" sound sexier then he did. Also the duality of humans and their male and female aspects that Du Maurier wrote extensively about in the book was touched on with Mary crossdressing, which I thought was a nice touch. If only they had stayed true to the spirit of the text and stopped mumbling about things that didn't matter perhaps this would have been watchable. As it is you're better off turning off the volume and just pretending it's a nature documentary with lots of pretty scenery that occasionally muddy people walk through.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Charles Laughton, Cinderella, Cornwall, Daphne Du Maurier, Downton Abbey, Eliza Doolittle, Henry Higgins, Jamaica Inn, Jessica Brown Findlay, Lark Rise to Candleford, Mary Yellan, MST3K, My Fair Lady, The Paradise