You’d Look Better as a Ghost by Joanna Wallace

Posted on March 11, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Plot twists and a weirdly relatable serial killer offer readers a wild ride in this darkly comic thriller of grief and murder.

Joanna Wallace’s first novel, You’d Look Better as a Ghost, combines black humor and a realistic portrayal of grief with a serial killer, with whom readers are surprisingly inclined to empathize. This oddball story is both grim and unexpectedly entertaining.

When readers first meet narrator Claire, she is standing awkwardly at her father’s funeral, wondering at the strange behavior of the “serious-looking men in serious black suits… standing seriously too close and staring at me. Are they waiting for me to talk?” She assesses their comments, taking everything literally, contemplating human idiosyncrasies. She’s not all that good with people, and she’s also deeply grieving.

It’s not just grief. Claire has always struggled with the habits of those she calls “ordinary people,” a group she does not identify with. “Whenever I’m unsure of how I’m expected to respond, I use a cliché. Even if I’m not sure what it means, even if I use it incorrectly, no one ever seems to mind.” She lives alone outside of London, painting, running on her treadmill, and now wrestling with the loss of her father following a painful battle with early-onset dementia, psych wards, and abusive care homes. Her late father seems to be the one person she’s ever felt close to; flashbacks to childhood sketch a chilly if not disturbing portrait of her mother. Plagued by migraines, Claire gets a doctor’s referral to a bereavement counseling group. “I may not have cried, drunk to excess or wrung my hands in disbelief since Dad died but I’ve definitely become more reckless with my kills.”

Oh, yes: Claire is also a serial killer. She struggles with “ordinary people” to the extent that she often feels the need to end their lives, a process for which she enjoys taking her time. Her new bereavement group offers her potential outlets for her creativity, as well as new challenges.

In Claire’s witty, deadpan voice, You’d Look Better as a Ghost revels in dark humor. A new acquaintance “asks whether I want anything to eat. A slice of chocolate cake. That’s what I really want. But I’m mindful of the fact that I killed this woman’s sister fairly recently and the cake is ridiculously overpriced. So, I order a shortbread biscuit instead. Feels like the decent thing to do.” Claire has some very firm ideas of propriety; for example, pairing wellies with a kilt bothers her considerably more than dismemberment does. But the novel also deals seriously with the protracted grief of losing a loved one to dementia, and the potentially redemptive power of true friendship. Amid much irreverence, its themes are genuinely heartfelt and even sweet. This debut is fresh and unforgettable.

This review originally ran in the January 29, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 mugs of soup.

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Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto

Posted on July 10, 2023 by pagesofjulia

This is a very cute, sweet, pleasurable story: a cozy mystery, a loving family tale, with rom-com style matchups and a loveable amateur sleuth. Vera Wong is an older lady – in the world of this novel, she’s just sixty but also an ‘old lady,’ all things being relative, I guess. (Despite Vera’s starring role, the rest of the perspectives are decidedly youthful.) She’s widowed, and she misses her beloved husband, but it is in her personality (and, implied, part of her ‘Chinese mother’ culture) to soldier on. She has a small business she’s very proud of: Vera Wang’s World-Famous Teahouse, in San Francisco’s Chinatown. (Yes, she’s taking advantage of the more famous Vera Wang’s name recognition.) She lives upstairs, and wakes every morning precisely at four-thirty to start her day with a brisk walk and a text to her adult son, Tilly, who receives a number of these texts every daily, exhorting him to proper behaviors; he rarely responds. The voice of Vera’s chapters (in close third person) is resolute and cheerfully bossy; but we understand that she is very lonely. Despite its name, her teahouse is far from famous. She knows it will soon have to be shut down.

Then something terribly exciting happens: she comes downstairs one morning to find a dead body in the teahouse. Vera is thrilled! She calls the police, but they do not seem nearly as worked up about the possible murder as they should be, and they are not at all appreciative that she has helpfully outlined the body for them in Sharpie. “Vera knows they won’t do anything… but… nobody sniffs out wrongdoing quite like a suspicious Chinese mother with time on her hands, and what does Vera have but time?” And so the nosy, overbearing, but somehow magnetic Vera is on the case. If there is a case – the dead man, Marshall Chen, is originally ruled an accidental death. But Vera won’t let this stop her.

Soon other characters (suspects!) surface: there is Julia, Marshall’s widow, worn into submissive passivity by his years of verbal abuse, and her sweet toddler daughter, Emma. There’s Oliver, Marshall’s twin (who gives everyone a start when he first shows up on scene), long estranged from his bully of a brother. And then there are Sana and Riki, both of whom pose as reporters but who are each hiding a secret connection to the dead (murdered?) man. In her usual domineering manner, Vera takes each of these younger people under her wing, even charming the somewhat troubled Emma into calling her Grandma. It helps that Vera never stops cooking up wild, wonderful feasts of traditional Chinese food anytime they gather. Even as she’s befriending them and improving their lives (with a little insistent advice, not to say pushing), Vera is investigating each of the foursome as murder suspects. But as they come together to form an unusual little family of their own, she is less and less pleased at the thought of turning one of them into the police (incompetents!), especially as it is increasingly obvious that the late Marshall was not a nice man at all.

Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers trades rather heavily on stereotypes about Chinese mothers, to an extent that I think would be problematic if the author did not herself come from that culture. She pokes fun in a loving manner. Does her in-group status excuse using stereotypes as the punchline? I don’t consider myself qualified to make a firm call on this, especially as I am not in-group; I’m cautiously okay with this case, but mine is not perhaps the final judgment that matters most. I will say the book is intended in good fun and comes off as such. Jesse Sutanto has published an impressive number of adult, young adult, and middle grade novels, and the writing style of this one leans toward the cute rather than the literary. Some constructions feel quickly slapped off. It’s fine for an easy, entertaining read, and this one hits the mark.

Rating: 7 bowls of congee.

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Murder Your Employer: The McMasters Guide to Homicide by Rupert Holmes

Posted on April 24, 2023 by pagesofjulia

So you’ve decided to commit a murder.

Congratulations.

Murder Your Employer is a genre mash-up, and great fun. It purports to be a how-to manual on how to commit a murder (the Conservatory prefers “deletion”) without getting caught – in this case, specifically the deletion of one’s employer, with future volumes promised. (Other popular deletions include work rivals, financial advisors and spouses.) The book’s narrator is Dean Harbinger Harrow – Dean being not a first name but a title, as he serves as Dean of the McMasters Conservatory for the Applied Arts, a top-secret institution that trains would-be deletists to remain successful and forever unknown. It contains narratives within, however: short on actual training-manual-style directives, instead the bulk is made up of examples in the form of the stories of three McMasters students, all majoring in employer deletions.

The central protagonist is Cliff Iverson, who botched his first attempt to murder the toxic, womanizing, belligerent boss at his aircraft manufacturing job. Instead of criminal charges, he faces involuntary admission to McMasters (for very mysterious reasons). We are treated to his journal throughout, as well as the Dean’s notes on the progress of Cliff and two fellow students: Gemma Lindley, who needs to get rid of her blackmailing boss, and a woman known at the school as Dulcie Mown, although everyone finds her dimly familiar (the reader knows why).

So we have a how-to-manual, framing an epistolary novel (journal entries and other documents), in an idyllic boarding school milieu, on the absurdist subject of ‘an education in murder,’ filled with wordplay, puns and humor, with a certain amount of suspense as our three students aim to successfully complete their theses (intended deletions), wrapped up in a mystery (who is responsible for Cliff’s enrollment at McMasters in the first place?). Oh and the setting is historical, in the 1950s, so bookies and bad guys have a certain style and type. It is a mad, beautiful mess of genres, and I found it enormous fun (despite a rather crabby review from Kirkus, who does not think it cute). Yes: it does require a fair amount of suspension of disbelief; I would think that would be obvious, since it’s a slightly unhinged promotion of the murderous arts. (Somewhat in their defense, McMasters does have some moral standards. Make sure your target is deserving and all other options have been exhausted; no innocent bystanders; certainly no serial killings or mass murders; etc.) It’s ridiculous and it knows it (think The Princess Bride).

The pacing is not snappy, but I thought it was nice to linger with each of our characters – Harrow rather silly, Cliff earnest and serious, Gemma haunted, Dulcie driven – and in the slightly cartoonish historical setting. The McMasters world itself is a sort of madcap Opposite Day, and the ‘real’ world features caricatures. Dean Harrow is a bit of a buffoon (and yes, pun-obsessed). It was fun and, I admit, relaxing. The whole conceit is ludicrous enough that it let me let go. I don’t think real life murders are cute, but this book surely is.

Rating: 7 MacArthur-style sunglasses.

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Revenge of the Librarians by Tom Gauld

Posted on November 14, 2022 by pagesofjulia

This is a completely delightful collection of cartoons by Tom Gauld, originally published in The Guardian. All have a literary theme and a dry sense of humor, poking fun mostly at bibliophiles, book collectors and writers, and exalting librarians (a safe move!). I am just absolutely charmed & won over, and inclined to just share a few of my favorite strips here in place of review…

At 180 pages, this is very much the sort of thing you can read cover to cover (I did in two sittings) or leave on a side table for joyful browsing in between other activities. For the book lover in your life? This is pretty much a must-have. Consider it for a holiday gift. I loved it.

Rating: 9 stacks.

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Changing Places by David Lodge

Posted on October 24, 2022 by pagesofjulia

This book was a gift to me from a family friend who has had a lengthy career in college-level teaching, when I was one semester in to that job, three years ago now. I’m sorry I waited so long; it was hysterical! I ate it up in just over a day. Thank you, David!

Further confession: I have been using this opening sentence for class writing prompts for a few semesters and never reading beyond it.

High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour.

Changing Places is a bit of a situation comedy, in which two universities exchange professors, who then experience culture shock, joy, and eye-opening changes. The setting in time is significant: 1969 offers women’s liberation, the sexual revolution, experimentation with pot, and other fun. The settings in place are significant, too. Rummidge is a mid-sized, industrial, English city without much to recommend it, and the University of Rummidge is not particularly well-regarded. The American state of Euphoria is located on the west coast, between Northern and Southern California; this state, and the State University of Euphoria, are known to be gorgeous, scenic, climactically sublime, rarified, and filled with protests and strife in this spring of ’69. Similarly, Rummidge’s professor Philip Swallow is mild, retiring, unambitious, and a bit bumbling, while Euphoria’s Morris Zapp is accomplished, arrogant, and considers himself entitled to both accolades and undergraduates’ sexual favors. This last is why he’s willing to take the stepdown to Rummidge for six months: his wife, finally fed up, has asked him to vacate, and a posting to Europe (however disappointing a version thereof Rummidge may be) seems the least undignified option. Swallow, on the other hand, is honored, if uneasy about leaving his own wife and children behind for half a year. (His department chair wants him far away while a junior faculty member receives a promotion.)

There’s the situation, then. Zapp is taken down a peg, and nonplussed by the failures of England to make a big deal of him. (Also the lack of heat and entertainment.) He will eventually find opportunities in the absence of structure in Rummidge’s English department, however. Swallow is blown back by Euphoria’s gusto and apparently limitless, all-color chances to get into every kind of trouble (sex, drugs and political protests being just the beginning). He will eventually begin to ‘find himself’ therein. Even the unlikeable Zapp achieves growth and a note of redemption at some point (still unlikeable, though). The wives (and other women) are less central and less developed, but actually deep, complex, realistic character development isn’t the point here. And the women have some ass-kicking attitude that I appreciate. No, this is a novel of caricature and satire, poking fun at English departments, at academia, at the changing cultures of 1969, and at types – centrally, the mild-and-retiring professor and the arrogant, womanizing one, although there are certainly others. Originally published in 1975, this does not count as historical fiction but contemporary (in relation to its authorship), and one might fear stereotypes that would offend today’s readers, but I didn’t find it problematic in that way at all. Just good, solid fun.

We end with a scene (written as a screenplay, unlike the rest of the novel) in a New York hotel room, with both professors and their wives gathered to try and sort out their futures. Lodge finishes with a thorough cliffhanger, which I frankly appreciate, even if the lack of answers hurts a bit. This is the first in a trilogy, so there’s that.

David, solid gift. Thank you.

Rating: 7 chicken dinners.

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Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead by Emily Austin

Posted on June 30, 2021 by pagesofjulia

This strangely delightful debut novel, with its charming, anxious, bumbling hero, crackles with warmth.

Emily Austin’s spellbinding and unforgettable first novel, Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead, stars an unusual hero: Gilda is so profoundly socially awkward, anxious and depressed as to be practically nonfunctioning as an adult. She is perhaps too kind for her own good.

The story begins with a car wreck, when Gilda, who narrates, is struck from behind by a beige van. When she arrives at the emergency room (having driven herself, with a broken arm, because “I do not like to be a spectacle”), she is told, “You are a lot calmer than you usually are when you come in here.” Readers begin to understand that Gilda is a little odd.

From this misfortune, she follows an ad for free counseling and is dismayed to find that it is being offered at a Catholic church (Gilda is an atheist). She is too polite to disappoint the priest who thinks she’s there for a job interview, and finds herself working as the church’s new receptionist–therefore living a double life, posing as a Catholic and sort-of-dating a parishioner’s abhorrent brother-in-law (Gilda is a lesbian). While keeping up this increasingly complicated act she also finds time to worry about her brother (drinking too much) and a missing neighborhood cat, among countless other stressors; topping that list may be the fate of the church’s previous receptionist, Grace, who died under suspicious circumstances. Gilda is obsessed with death, her mind on an endless loop: hit by a bus, choke on a piece of bread, clogged arteries, cancer, apartment fire, malaria, carbon monoxide, lightning strike. Almost without meaning to, Gilda begins investigating Grace’s death, and because she doesn’t have the heart to break bad news, posing as Grace in e-mails to the woman’s old friend. What could go wrong?

Gilda’s anxiety and social ineptitude could hardly be overstated, and she bumbles through life with such painful clumsiness that her story should be hard to read. But somehow, Austin’s remarkable narrative is engaging and snappily paced even when its first-person narrator is lying in a dry, empty bathtub without the will to move. Gilda’s voice is frequently extremely funny, with gut-laugh punchlines made more effective because they are so surprising.

Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead is disarmingly sweet even in its grimness. Gilda is a singularly memorable character. She ponders big questions–“I feel simultaneously intensely insignificant and hyperaware of how important everyone is”–and remains open to all possibilities, sometimes even the good ones.

This review originally ran in the June 7, 2021 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 pots of macaroni.

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Rabbit Cake by Annie Hartnett

Posted on March 26, 2021 by pagesofjulia

Thanks to blog reader Annie Long for the excellent recommendation.

This is a sad, sweet book with an accurately written first-person child protagonist struggling with loss and grief, and with a decidedly odd view of the world, possibly reflecting neurodivergence. (Someone at school calls her ‘retarded.’) If this sounds a lot like the mad originality of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, I thought so too. That earlier novel was so unprecedented it blew readers’ minds; and while this one has a lot in common with that one, I don’t think that makes it a bit unoriginal. It’s still a pretty wild (and wildly unusual) model; there’s plenty of room for more surprises in this area.

“On my tenth birthday, six months before she sleepwalked into the river, Mom burned the rabbit cake.” It was one of the wonderful things about her mother Eva that she made rabbit cakes for all occasions – believed in celebrating all the small events of life. Elvis is ten-and-a-half when her mother dies, and she has questions. For one thing, how could such a good swimmer have drowned? Her mother was a frequent if not constant sleepwalker, and “she was an excellent swimmer in her sleep.” Her mother was a gifted scientist. And besides, her mother’s psychic had always been very clear that Eva would die by suicide.

Elvis is clearly a young person who craves control, and so she sets out to take care of things around the house, because her father surely isn’t; he’s taken to wearing Eva’s lipstick and her bathrobe around the house, and mostly ignoring his daughters. Elvis’s fifteen-year-old sister Lizzie has moved on from beer drinking and breaking her best friend’s jaw (in three places) to a particularly self-destructive sort of sleepwalking (although no sleepswimming). Elvis dutifully sees the counselor at school once a week during recess, until she says something especially disturbing and gets upgraded to daily sessions. Ms. Bernstein instructs her that the grieving process generally takes eighteen months, and so dutiful Elvis marks her chart counting down the days until she will not grieve her mother any more. She also works on finishing her mother’s massive book (working title: The Sleep Habits of Animals and What They Tell Us about Our Own Slumber). Elvis knows a lot about animals – enough to annoy everyone around her, until she gets a volunteer posting at the zoo. She comes across an entry in The Reference Guide to Porcupine Anatomy and Behavior in the zoo’s library that mistakenly relates the echidna to the porcupine when it is closer to the platypus. She makes a note to write to the publisher.

You get the picture: this is a child precocious in some areas and a bit hopeless in others. She indulges in magical thinking, but what child doesn’t? and for that matter, who in the throes of grief? Despite Elvis’s story being completely heartbreaking at every turn (warning, friends: this family also has an old dog. Will it never cease? Don’t ask what happens to the giraffe), it’s also frequently hilarious. There is a strong current of absurdism running through it. Lizzie the sleepwalker and breaker of jaws is institutionalized, and returns home with a pathological liar who the distant and negligent father allows to move in. Lizzie decides what she needs is to set the Guinness World Record for most number of rabbit cakes baked. Most, but not all of them, will need to be decorated. Elvis is driven mad by the delicious smell of baking cakes – which she associates with happy memories of their mother – but she is not allowed to eat any of the cakes, which Lizzie must preserve for her world record. I won’t even tell you about the troubles Elvis gets into at the zoo. Or what she discovers about her mother’s sex life.

Delightful, absurdist, ridiculous, heartbreaking; laugh-out-loud funny in the most morbid ways, if you’re into that sort of thing. (Case in point: the reason Elvis’s school counseling gets upped to daily sessions.) I was frequently quite angry at the adults in this child’s life who consistently, near-criminally fail her; I usually keep my cool with fictional characters better than this. In other words, it’s a deeply involving story, with some very wise points to make about grief in the end. That ending is surprisingly upbeat – or maybe it’s not surprising at all.

I’ll be thinking about Elvis for a long time, and about this singular, weird, troubled, endearing little family. I’m remembering Have You Seen Marie?, another gorgeous meditation on grief in fictional form. Cisneros said about that book that she did not conceive of it as being for children. And even though Rabbit Cake‘s star is a child, I don’t think this is a children’s or YA book, except to the extent that any book is right for the reader who’s ready for it. (Tin House, who does not publish children’s books, has marketed it as simply fiction. Although these labels may be worth less than we think they are.) It’s quite a deep-thinking novel, with nuances to satisfy readers of all levels of maturity, especially those who may need to laugh and cry in the same sitting.

Rating: 9 librarians aptly named Reasoner.

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Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh

Posted on January 27, 2021 by pagesofjulia

I used to follow Allie Brosh’s blog, Hyperbole and a Half. (I always loved that name.) I did not read her first book, by the same name, but I love the blog. This is her second.

Solutions and Other Problems is brilliant. Brosh is so vulnerable, honest, willing to share, and hilarious. Her openness is disarming and I think healthy both for her and for her readers who are comforted by knowing that they’re not alone in their struggles. And some of what she has to share is raw and painful. But also, she makes me laugh harder than almost anything, ever. I mean I laughed until I cried, gasping, couldn’t breathe, peed on myself. I was oxygen-deprived; she nearly killed me, I laughed so hard. (The funniest bits, for me, are anything about pets, and the chapter about the car stereo system and the smartphone trying to boss her around.) I would love to be able to spend a few minutes every day laughing this hard. I guess I need to re-follow her blog.

This is a graphic work – as in graphic novel, but nonfiction. A graphic memoir-in-essays, if you will; it’s not linear, but a sampling of experiences that have been especially funny or painful or moving. Because she jumps around so much and generally gets a little silly (in all the best ways), I thought it was neatly appropriate that (as noted by a brief “Explanation” following chapter 1) Brosh’s chapters are numbered but there is no chapter four. “Because sometimes things don’t go like they should,” she explains, and because she’s exercising a little power here, and we should be grateful she didn’t take it further than she did. It’s a random little bit of ridiculousness; but it’s also expressive of the kind of fun and angst I think she excels at.

Brosh’s illustrations are also a little ridiculous, fanciful, hilarious, and distinctive. I love them. She explains the world as she experiences it, in part, through fictional monsters and fantasies. Her drawings capture the mystery and awkwardness of life in a way that feels precisely right. (And I think she has dogs down pat.) (The Oatmeal‘s pretty good at this too.)

At one point she notes,

Experiencing real loneliness for the first time is like realizing the only thing you’ve ever loved is your home planet after migrating to the moon.

and I think that’s just perfect. I recognize this feeling. I had to migrate to the moon to find out just how place mattered to me.

I find Allie Brosh’s work comforting, as well as so funny that it leaves me a little breathless and wrung out. I recommend her so strongly, and I guess I need to go back and find the first book now too. Thanks, Liz, for the recommendation.

Rating: 9 sneakponies.

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National Theatre Live at Home presents One Man, Two Guvnors (2011)

Posted on April 6, 2020 by pagesofjulia

PSA: The amount of arts & culture that has become available online, in our homes, for free during this pandemic is glorious and frankly, overwhelming. (The pandemic is a horror, but let’s still recognize a boon when it occurs. And let’s please note the clear importance of the arts, and keep that lesson in mind ever after. Fund the arts! Support artists!) I am impressed and humbled and glad; also overwhelmed. But for me at least, the best thing to come along yet is this: National Theatre Live At Home. Every Thursday night for at least the next several weeks (and, I’d imagine, to continue beyond that), they’ll show one of their greatest productions on YouTube, free to stream until the following Thursday night. That means that the first free production, reviewed here, will stay available at this link until this Thursday night when we get a new one. Oh joy! Do take advantage. (And if you’re able, you might consider making a donation to support NT Live, too.)

One Man, Two Guvnors premiered at the National Theatre’s Lyttelton Theatre in 2011. The play is an adaptation of the commedia dell’arte Servant of Two Masters, resetting the plot in 1960s Brighton, England. It has many classic elements of comedic theatre, not to say Shakespeare: a woman disguises herself as her own twin brother (gender-bending); mistaken identities lead to heartbreak (love triangles and squares); abundant slapstick/physical humor; and the servant with two masters, which is reminiscent of the twin bosses and twin servants of The Comedy of Errors. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it all brings me back around to Shakespeare. There’s also an actor playing a character who wants to be an actor (and thereby making fun of actors), and I’m always tickled by meta-humor like that.

Quick plot run-down: Francis Henshall has taken on two jobs at once, gofer for both gangster Roscoe Crabbe and upper-crusty Stanley Stubbers, and he has to keep them both unawares. Except Roscoe is really Rachel disguised as her twin, who is dead, murdered by Rachel’s boyfriend, who is Stanley. Roscoe is gay, but engaged to the daughter of another criminal type, Mr. Duck, even though said daughter would rather marry a (terrible) aspiring actor. Francis attempts to court Mr. Duck’s bookkeeper, but his chief concern is food: the chubby “man with two guvnors” hasn’t eaten all day and he’s famished. Key scenes include the one in which he must act as waiter to both “Roscoe” and Mr. Duck (in one room) and Stanley (in the other). This one involves a geriatric waiter-in-training and Francis’s scheme to waylay as much food as possible for himself. There’s another in which Francis’s good and bad angels (if you will) get into an altercation, so that he flails and rolls around the stage, a one-man fistfight. The ending I’ll just say is also typical of Shakespeare.

While I’ll confess this play started off a little slowly for me, it soon had me laughing so hard I cried, and at one point snorted beer on a sleeping dog who was most displeased. The acting was excellent: James Corden deserves the accolades he’s received for the role of Francis, which he fully embodies. Musical acts between scenes add to the period feel, in the style of early Beatles (whom Francis claims to have assisted in their founding); the musicians are joined by various cast members.

It’s also worth nothing that, not without its problems, this play engages in the odd bit of racism and plenty of sexism and even a rape joke – that last I would take right out. We make certain allowances for period drama, but I don’t think there’s any excuse for rape jokes.

One of the most remarkable elements of this play is that the fourth wall is thoroughly broken down; actors look to the audience for effect and pause mid-dialogue for laughter, which only increases it. Most importantly, there are several points at which audience members are solicited for sandwiches or dragged onstage to participate in the action. One such participant, “Christine Patterson,” gets quite deeply involved, and winds up, well, the brunt of some physical humor herself, shall we say. (I’m quite sure she was a plant, but the others, I’m unclear.) This was perhaps the best and cleverest bit of the whole thing. It was the Christine sequence that had me snorting beer.

I had a massively fun time watching Corden’s antics and the quite silly but thoroughly amusing plot of One Man, Two Guvnors. And for free! Thoroughly recommended (although future productions will be just fine without the rape joke).

Rating: 8 soup tureens.

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in a surprising departure: television

Posted on November 13, 2019 by pagesofjulia

This post is long overdue, I guess, but it occurred to me rather late in the game to tell you about television series. During the van trip, strangely, I got into watching TV series that I could get through Amazon Prime.

This blog began, back in 2011, as a way for me to keep track of my reading for my own sake. I’m deeply grateful that other people read it and appreciate it, too. But on some level it remains a record I keep for myself, and so here we are. I wanted to remember what shows I’ve watched, and which ones I’ve especially liked.

Bones

The one that got me completely hooked is Bones, a mystery-per-episode (or often several) crime-solving drama series based in the fictional Jeffersonian Institute and starring a world-famous forensic anthropologist. It’s fairly silly, and relies too heavily on the sexual tension of a certain couple that we wait way too many seasons to see actually hook up. But I was thoroughly, entirely taken in; I watched all 246 episodes with relish and and someday, if laid up for months with nothing to do, I may watch them again. It’s goofy but I love it. (Based on the Temperance Brennan series of novels by Kathy Reichs, which I have not read, so there’s another project.)

Mystery series based on book series: you will note a theme. Also, lots of Brits.

I was quite impressed by Bosch, based on Michael Connelly‘s novels starring LAPD Detective Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch, which I have loved since I was a teenager. They’ve done a good job of capturing the title character, and the soundtrack (based on Harry’s love of jazz) is quite good. I’ll be on the lookout for future seasons; well done, Amazon.

Jackson Brodie of Case Histories

Case Histories is based on the novels of Kate Atkinson which star Jackson Brodie. Set and filmed in Edinburgh, this series features an excellent soundtrack of female country singer-songwriters (seriously, I would follow this show just for the music); Edinburgh itself is compelling and beautiful, but it’s also easy to fall for Jackson himself, who is a runner as well as a detective whose life is filled with ill-conceived sexual liaisons, a delightfully salty assistant, and the cutest, most precocious, wittiest young daughter imaginable, as well as interesting cases. Give me more Case Histories! And these are books I’ll need to read, obviously. (It’s always nice to get a two-for-one like that.)

Unforgotten is a modern London-set series which I appreciate for its two lead detectives, DCI Cassie Stuart and DI Sunny Khan. They are a likeable pair whose lives feel realistically imperfect, something not always true of our stars. Not everyone on this show is supermodel-beautiful, which again, is nice for reality’s sake. The narrative structure of each episode is interesting and a bit unusual: we switch around between the lives of various characters, including Cassie and Sunny but also including a number of others who at first have no apparent connection to the case at hand – although, of course, they will. I’ll keep watching this one.

Seattle PD’s Sarah Linden and Stephen Holder of The Killing

The Killing is based on a Danish series; this one is set in Seattle. It may seem formulaic at this point that there our two lead detectives are a man and a woman with perhaps a hint of sexual tension? but it still feels original here; I like these two and would continue with them, given the chance.

DCI Banks is another British mystery series, set in the more-or-less present, and one that kept me occupied for a time, but my rating would be only so-so. I found the characters I was meant to identify with only mildly appealing; I was often frustrated with them, and (slight spoiler) killing off one of them only served to engage me less. Meh. (Maybe it was just the one guy’s voice as he plaintively cries “Annie!” over and over that got to me.)

The ABC Murders is based on Agatha Christie’s novel of the same name, and stars John Malkovich as Hercule Poirot. I’m sure he did a fine job, but I was raised on David Suchet’s Poirot and it is too late for me to convert to a new version. While I suspect I would still enjoy reading Christie (a theory I should test!), this onscreen version dragged on. It felt dated by unusually slow pacing, but was made in 2018. Another series that was okay but not one I’m wild about.

DC Endeavor Morse and DCI Fred Thursday of Endeavor

Set in 1960s Oxford, Endeavor has my heart. I’m just in the middle of this one now, and I’m devoted to the title character, DC Morse (first name Endeavor. Which is weird, but not as weird as Hieronymus Bosch). This serves as a prequel to the long-running 1980s-90s series Inspector Morse; I have not seen that one. DC Morse is a prodigy within the department, but his odd methods, failure to bow to authority, and general nerdiness don’t play well with his superintendent. He does have a good relationship with DI Fred Thursday, and that relationship’s development seems to be part of the arc of the series overall. I’m having a good time with this one.

A few outliers are not mysteries.

Catastrophe is a comedy about a several-night stand between a visiting American businessman and an Irish primary school teacher living in London which results in a pregnancy and, surprisingly, marriage. A second child follows the first as the couple turns out to quite like each other, but (yes) catastrophes follow one upon another. Silly but good fun.

My Mother and Other Strangers caught me with its name, and this Masterpiece Theatre production has a charming, evocative, specific setting in a small Irish village during World War II. American soldiers are stationed in a village that does not appreciate their presence. The series is narrated (minimally) by an old man, years after the fact; he is the small son of the mother in question, and this is the story of his family (mom, dad, two kids) firstly, and of the village. I love the details of time and place, the sense of a small specific setting and its place in much larger historic events. The backward-looking perspective has elements of elegy and of nostalgia, and that mystery of the mother–she is present, but enigmatic–is compelling.

The Durrells in Corfu

And then The Durrells in Corfu, an absolutely addictive series based on three memoirs by Gerald Durrell: My Family and Other Animals, Birds, Beasts, and Relatives, and The Garden of the Gods. (More books to read! If they’re half as loveable as this series, I’m in.) British widow Louisa Durrell decides all of a sudden to move her four children from Bournemouth to the Greek island of Corfu, where the financially strained family will have a better chance of scraping by. Antics ensue. Corfu has no electricity, there are animals everywhere, and the Greeks vary in their willingness to accept strangers. But delightful characters abound. The four Durrell kids (ranging from teens to early twenties) are a hoot; the youngest (Gerald himself) adopts every creature he can put his hands on. I would follow this series anywhere.

Old news, but in the interest of completeness: I am up to date on The Walking Dead which I have long loved, although yes, they frustrate me more every season. I think I’m in to the end, but the producers seem determined to test the bounds of my love. And I’ve seen all of Breaking Bad, but had mixed feelings. I found Walter White a little less ambiguous than I think he was intended to be – I didn’t like him enough (even within the bounds of ambivalence, and I do love ambivalence) to be entirely patient with the extended length of his torture of the more-loveable Jesse.

What excellent series am I missing that would fit into this list?

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