Emily Wilde's Map of the Otherlands; Meet the Newmans

 

Book two was just as fun and charming as "Emily Wilde's Encyclopedia of Faeries". 

At the end of the first book, Wendell proposed to Emily. She hasn't made up her mind yet, but she does want to help him find a backdoor into his realm so he can reclaim his rightful place as King. His stepmother, the sitting Queen, is sending assassins after Wendell to ensure she keeps her power. 

Emily, Wendell, Emily's niece Ariadne (side note: how on earth do you pronounce that?! I kept reading it as "Adriane"), and their department chair (who invites himself along) Dr. Ferris Rose, journey to the Alps to look for a nexus, which is supposed to be a spot with doors leading to many different fairy realms. A scholar named Danielle de Grey disappeared in that part of the world decades earlier while searching for a nexus. Emily hopes to succeed where she failed. 

Wendell is poisoned and Emily needs to figure out how to cure him and fast, before any other assassins show up. He's too weak to fight them off. She realizes she has to find her way to Wendell's kingdom and bring him back his cat, Orga. All without running into his stepmother. Sounds totally doable. 

It was a lot of fun and I'm looking forward to the third book. 

I wanted to like this one. Truly, I really did. 

And it was okay. Kind of like Niven's Velva Jean books. I read two,  but they didn't interest me enough to go to the effort of reading the rest of them. I loved "All the Bright Places", her YA book, and "The Aqua Net Diaries", her autobiography about high school in Indiana. 

The Newmans have been on CBS for twelve successful seasons. But it's now 1964, and their brand of corny, feel good television is no longer resonating with an America in upheaval. Del, Dinah, and their two sons, Guy and Shep, play the perfect family on TV, but in real life, they're all hiding things. Del moved out of their bedroom and Dinah suspects he's having an affair. Guy can't let anyone know his roommate and best pal, Kelly, is actually his boyfriend. And sixteen year old Shep, a rising pop star who is only topped in the charts by the Beatles, got one of his girlfriends pregnant but he's in love with Eileen, who plays Guy's girlfriend on the show. 

Things are a mess. And Del is convinced that CBS is not going to renew their contract, so with only a few episodes left, he's determined to make the Newmans relevant. 

Then Del is in a car accident and ends up in a coma, so it's up to Dinah and the boys to make the last episode of the show a success. 

The premise was good and I completely understand that there was a lot of terrible things going on in the world at the time, but the book felt like it was smacking me over the head with all of it. Page after page after page of preaching and complaining. 

I get it. I do. You want to make a point. Great. Subtlety seems to be a lost art in entertainment these days. First and foremost, I read fiction to be entertained. A book with a cover like this says (to me): fun! Light escapism! Charming and cute and bubbly! It was none of these things. So I was disappointed. It wasn't bad, per se, it just wasn't what I was expecting. 

Emily Wilde's Encyclopedia of Faeries

 

I don't know why I don't read more fantasy novels. I always enjoy them. I'll have to make more of an effort to seek them out. On the plus side, this was the first book in a series, so I have more to look forward to. Huzzah!

Emily Wilde is a professor at Cambridge who studies the Fae. She's quite the expert, having traveled all over the world and met many Folk. 

Emily and her dog, Shadow, go to a cold, remote village in the North so she can catalog the legends of that area and hopefully meet some of their Folk. A few days after they arrive, Emily's colleague from Cambridge comes to town. Wendell Bambleby is very charming and handsome and easily wins the townspeople over. Emily has long suspected that he's fae (he is, we find out pretty early on, so it's not too much of a spoiler). She reluctantly lets Wendell help her with her goal after he dangles a prize in front of her: coauthorship of a paper to be delivered at a prestigious conference on Folk. Emily never gets invited to these conferences so she agrees. 

It was a fun story and Fawcett did an amazing job of spinning a world of faeries. It was very vivid and enchanting. I thoroughly enjoyed it. 

Maltese Falcon; The Impossible Fortune

 

After reading Max Allan Collins' sequel, I wanted to give the Hammett version another chance. I read it many years ago and didn't really care for it, but I've found sometimes if I go back and reread something that I read when I was young, now that I'm older it's better ("Pride and Prejudice" immediately leaps to mind--I love that book now. Thirty years ago? Not so much). 

At any rate, no, it didn't work. I still didn't like it. I guess I just don't care for Hammett's writing style. 

Spade's partner Miles is murdered while they're working the case to try to find the falcon statue, which is supposed to be worth a lot of money. There are about twenty other people looking for it, too (I'm exaggerating a bit. It wasn't really twenty, it just felt like it). More people die, Spade proves to be a real jerk, and in the end no one has the falcon. 

Enough said. Moving on. 

The next Thursday Murder Club mystery was much better. I love when a series keeps its original charm. It's hard to do after so many books (I'm thinking of Stephanie Plum, but to be fair, the last dozen or so have been better). 

Joyce's daughter, Joanna, is getting married! Joyce is, of course, beside herself with happiness. Her fiancé, Paul, is a nice guy. His best man, Nick, confides to Elizabeth that someone is trying to kill him--there was a bomb strapped to his car that morning. Elizabeth is intrigued, even more so when the Club interviews Nick's business partner, Holly, who is promptly blown up with a car bomb. 

Meanwhile, Ron's daughter's husband, Danny, has beaten her black and blue for the last time. Suzi pulls a gun on him and orders him to leave, which he does, but of course he's planning on killing her. And her brother Jason and Ron too. 

There was a lot going on, but it all tied together and was a lot of fun. I'm all caught up now, so I'll be over here, impatiently waiting for the next one 😄 

You With the Sad Eyes

 

This one was sad 😢I really feel for her. Her life has been rough. 

I loved "Married with Children", I used to watch it with my Dad when I was a kid. I thought Kelly (Christina's character) was so pretty. It's heartbreaking to hear how she thought she was overweight and "plain". She's anything but plain! My goodness. 

Christina grew up in Laurel Canyon with her mom. Her dad left when she was a baby but they ended up having a good relationship before he passed away. Her mom had abusive boyfriends, she was abused, she had abusive boyfriends, the whole nine yards. 

She had a double mastectomy after being diagnosed with breast cancer, and then the MS diagnosis came. It sounds like she really struggles with it and is in constant pain. 

It never fails to amaze me what human beings are capable of withstanding. You think we'd break, but the human spirit and will to live is strong in so many. Of course some folks do break, and that's tragic. It was a tough one to read but I couldn't put it down. 

The Last Kings of Hollywood

 

In the 1970s, a fresh crop of film school graduates were looking to shake up the old Hollywood system of having to beg studios for financing and distribution. They had a vision of doing things their way and helping other inspiring directors and writers. 

Leading the pack was Francis Ford Coppola. He and George Lucas became friends. Steven Spielberg was a few years younger than them and looked up to and admired them. Coppola started his own movie studio production in the Bay Area, but lack of administrative oversight quickly brought that to a close. 

Lucas learned from Coppola's mistakes and made some extremely smart business decisions in the beginning regarding his films, mainly keeping a large percentage of the gross profits and retaining the right to merchandising. In turn, each of them would shatter previous records for the biggest movie ever: Coppola with "The Godfather", Spielberg with "Jaws", and Lucas with "Star Wars". Spielberg shattered Lucas's record with "E.T." And so on. Each movie was bigger and better and it ended up changing the old Hollywood system. Maybe not for the better: thanks to these giant blockbusters, movie theaters no longer wanted to show the kind of smaller, more independent films they used to. The takeaway (for me, anyway) was that they ended up inadvertently destroying the things they wanted to nurture. Coppola almost lost everything and Lucas became a recluse who walked away from his "Star Wars" franchise, selling it to Disney. I've read some about the early days of Hollywood so it was really interesting to read about a different time. 

When the Wolf Comes Home

 

Jess, an aspiring actress in L.A., is having a terrible day. She's working the late shift at a crappy diner when one of their regulars makes a mess in the bathroom. She and her coworker make a deal: if Jess goes and cleans it up, she can go home. While cleaning the bathroom (which was described in all too graphic detail), she accidentally pricks her finger on the used needle the customer hid behind the toilet. 

Well that sucks.

Jess goes home and tries to work up the courage to go to the hospital to get checked out, but then all Hell breaks loose. A giant wolf rampages through the apartment complex, killing a bunch of people. Jess manages to escape, taking along a little boy she found hiding in the bushes. 

Jess and the nameless boy (he claims he doesn't have a name) go on the run but unfortunately, everywhere they go the wolf follows and kills. Soon Jess realizes that the little boy can make things happen by believing in them. His fears come true (hence the big bad wolf, who is actually just his dad). He watches a cartoon on TV and the characters jump out of the TV and start terrorizing the hotel they're at. Jess isn't sure how to keep him (and the rest of the world) safe from his own mind. 

It was really good, I enjoyed it, even if the ending felt a little anticlimactic. It's really hard with these types of stories. I've read a lot of them where the ending just falls flat. 

Black Dahlia

 

A friend at work asked me about my favorite true crime stories and I mentioned the Black Dahlia. Elizabeth Short's unsolved 1947 murder is one of my OG true crime interests. Manson, Dahlia, Lindbergh, and Lizzie Borden. Those are the four that I read everything I can get my hands on. 

About a decade ago, Mann wrote a book called "Tinseltown" about the unsolved murder of Hollywood director William Desmond Taylor. Mann starts out by saying that he's not trying to solve the Dahlia case, but of course he does have his favorite suspect: Marvin Margolis. Marvin was a USC medical student and a known boyfriend of Betty's (despite being married). His wife's family were butchers. As a Jewish man, Marvin faced antisemitism at USC. Most likely due to his horrifying experiences in WWII as well as the trauma of being harassed for his ethnicity, Mann theorizes that he probably had a lot of rage in general. Combined with some knowledge of anatomy (it's pretty much a given that Dahlia's murdered knew something about dissection, given how neatly her body was sawed in half) and access to USC's medical labs, which were deserted at the time of year Betty was murdered, he makes a fairly compelling argument. 

The point of the book, however, was to rehumanize Betty. Teach us about the real life young woman behind the myth. Betty was an adventurous young woman who didn't want to stay home and follow the more conventional path of marriage and children, she wanted to see the world. She lived by her wits and made friends easily, friends who she could call on for a place to crash for a night or two, friends who could help her out with rent or food money in a pinch.

It was an interesting book, I enjoyed it. It is a shame that we'll probably never know for sure who killed this poor young woman whose life was just beginning.