The Thousand-Dollar Tan Line

WARNING: This is a giant spoiler of the movie. 

Veronica Mars is back! She's traded in her fancypants law degree to move back to Neptune to become a private detective. It's spring break and college kids have descended like locusts, turning the quiet beachfront into a giant all-hours rave. Even after one girl goes missing, the party slows but doesn't stop. And Veronica steps in to find the missing girl, who disappeared from a house owned by a man with serious criminal ties, and ends up finding herself in more danger than she planned on.

"Ah, the twin pillars of outrage journalism: slut shaming and victim blaming." - The Thousand Dollar Tan Line 

I loved it. This is the book all the cool bloggers were blogging about a year ago. The book series launched after the movie launched by the most successful Kickstarter ever. The movie that came out 11 years after the show ended. But don't worry, if this is where you want to start your relationship with Veronica Mars, I think you'll be ok. I love Veronica Mars, but I wouldn't say it's like, my main fandom. I read it when I should have been writing papers and I definitely meant to read "just one chapter" before going back to work and then finished the last 1/4 of the book and had to stay up until 2am finishing the paper. This was the story of winter quarter. A bunch of people gave me Amazon cards for Christmas/my birthday and I spent them on books I kept meaning to read but never got from the library at just the right time.  I read so many books. It was glorious. (Speaking of which, I do still have the second book on hold at the library right...? I do. Oh good. OMG I have 21/25 digital holds*...Why can I only have 25 holds?? It's not like I get to read them! I'm like 128th in line on some of them! This is a great injustice.)

Back to the "cool bloggers"...is that a thing? I think vloggers are the in thing. I keep being like, "yeah, I should make a vlog..." and then I realize that I can't do that in my pajamas while my roommates are sleeping. I tried once, to make a vlog post, and realized that the lighting everywhere in my house was the worst. Because it was 10pm and that's when I work best. Maybe one day I will try again. But then I'd have to shower, and do my hair, and makeup, and find a physical version of the book instead of my kindle. Just thinking about it makes me want to run away from my responsibilities. Which reminds me, I should probably go running. But I've been sick and I can't tell if it would make me feel better or worse. But I have a 5k in a week so I should probably go...ughhhhh.

The Silkworm (4.5), Robert Galbraith

If you know anything about me (besides that I read, I guess) it’s that I am not a morning person. I say this because it is important to the further understanding of this review. When I wake up, I am a demon Jana from another planet. I might bite your head off for asking me how my morning’s going. I’ve burst into tears just because I didn’t want to be awake. I’m basically a four-year-old until I’ve had coffee.

On Monday at 5am I woke up with a start. A few weeks ago I slept through my alarm and missed an hour and a half of class so and I’m still a little nervous every time I wake up that I’ve forgotten something very important. But after a quick glance at my phone’s calendar, I fall back asleep no problem. Except on the 17^th I woke up and went, “Crap! I fell asleep! The Silkworm’s due today. Did they take it off my Kindle already?” and in a panic I unlocked my Kindle. And instead of going back to sleep, I finished reading the book. I just had to know who did it!

“The whole world’s writing novels, but nobody’s reading them.”

- The Silkworm

The Silkworm is the second in the Cormoran Strike series by Robert Galbraith/J.K.Rowling. Feel free to go read about book one, TheCuckoo’s Calling if you want to hear more about that and don’t want me to spoil a couple things. I liked this book infinitely more than the first one, probably because I finally let go of Strike being grown up muggle Harry Potter. It was hard.

Strike's more like Mad Eye, really.

In The Silkworm, Strike’s rise to fame after solving Lula Landry’s murder in The Cuckoo’s Calling is finally starting to ebb, and so is his patience with his endless stream of rich, spoiled clients hiring him to spy on their spouses and lovers. When Leonora Quine, the mousy, frazzled wife of author Owen Quine, asks Strike to find her wandering husband, he accepts gladly. Owen Quine is a reclusive and eccentric author, and has been known to disappear for days on end to work on a novel or shack up with a mistress, but he has been gone for an exceptional amount of time and Mrs. Quine is beginning to run out of money.

If you haven’t hopped on the Robert Galbraith/J. K. Rowling bandwagon, you probably should. There are only two books now, but you can bet there are going to be dozens more. Knowing how Rowling likes to write, you can bet that there’s some little details in books 1 and 2 that are going to make all the difference and have a huge payout in like book 16 because that’s what she does.

SOS There is no news that she is writing a third book. Where is my third book Jo? I may not wait five years like I did for Order of the Phoenix. I may find a new favorite author. Jk I will read everything Rowling writes because I’m obsessed.

 

Harry Potter forever

More Books

fans of Harry

fans of Galbraith

something old

something new

            

The Hangman's Daughter (4)

Jakob Kuisl is the Hangman of Schongau, a small village in Germany.  When the local midwife is accused of witchcraft after an orphan is found murdered with a mysterious mark on his shoulder, Kuisl teams up with the local doctor's son to find out who is really out to kill a pack of orphans.

I mean...I expected the book to center a little more around The Hangman's Daughter for some reason...but once I got used to the fact that Magdelena (Kuisl's Daughter) wasn't going to be the main narrator, I got pretty into it. It has everything you need in a book: possible witchcraft, serial killer, the killer possibly being an actual demon, young star-crossed lovers, buried treasure...

While it can be a little slow at places, especially the beginning, once things get going at the end you can't put it down.

Probably the most fun thing about this book is that Oliver Potzsch, the other, is actually a decedent of the Kuisls, who are apparently a very famous clan of executioners in Germany. I don't know how historically accurate this story actually is, but its pretty cute that he basically wrote fanfiction about his ancestors. 

Night Film (4.5)

Sovereign. Deadly. Perfect.

That is how they describe the films of famous director Cordova, not necessarily how I would describe Marisha Pessel’s Night Film. The book was fabulous and met all expectations it created which made it both satisfying and a bit easy to guess.

Ashley Cordova, age 24, is found dead in a warehouse in lower Manhattan. Everyone believes that she jumped. She was, after all, the daughter of Stanislas Cordova, the director of movies so terrifying they have been banned from theaters. His most devoted fans hold underground viewings, but even they have not seen Stanislas in 30 years. No one has.

Journalist Scott McGrath lost his career the last time he tried to expose Cordova, but Ashley’s death brings him back on the case and deeper and deeper into the secret, dark world surrounding Cordova’s supposed retirement.

I loved how it took you on the journey, the slow build into mysticism, broken just long enough that you begged to bring it back. Anything but the simplicity you were being offered. You wanted the darkness to be real.

I also loved how Pessel interspersed internet articles and pictures, because it made the book feel so real. In addition, if you download an app to use to scan hidden elements of the book you can watch movies. Or something. I haven’t tried it, because I’m lazy.

Do you dare? 

An Expected Absence

Well friends, as with so many things in my life, I got cast in a show and completely quit this blog. It's been three weeks since I've posted and probably two months since I've annoyed my facebook friends with posts about posting. Which I'd apologize for, but acting is what gets me to wake up in the morning, and it's all I want to do, ever. So I can't apologize. But, I can give a bit of a recap of what has been happening in my life and what you can expect to see in the next couple of blog posts!

Wargrave suspects me, I mean Vera...

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie was the play, though I linked to the novel, which I hear is quite good. Our end was a little happier then the original, which I liked because my character had a much more satisfying ending. Now, for this show I was extra busy because I had NO down time during rehearsals. I was off stage for about five pages in Act One (to change) and then was just on stage running around and generally freaking out, which was great fun.
Ten people are brought to an island, where they are accused of murder, and start to get killed off one by one.

(***SPOILERS AHEAD,*** skip to the next picture if you don't want things spoiled :) )
Now, a few extra exciting things happen in this one, as we get killed off, tensions of course get higher, and by the last five each character suspects another in a perfect circle. And finally, it's just me and Philip Lombard, who was previously Vera's love interest, and neither of us can convince the other that we didn't kill off the last guy, so we finally get in a tussle over his gun and I shoot him. Which is awesome, except for preview, where in front of our first ever audience the gun doesn't go off. I just stared at Scot (playing Philip) and he just refused to drop. So then I stared out into the audience, right where I knew our director was sitting, and realized that I was mugging the audience and we had to do something. The show must go on.

And that is when Scot grabbed the gun out of my hands. Which makes sense, since I shot him because he was going after me in the first place. But this is very bad because he has to get shot and drop so the murderer can come in and give his big speech. But now he has the gun. So I lunge for the gun, and he just hands it to me so I shoot him. We almost made it look ok. Almost. So then we had to have a pep talk before the last scene every night, where we held hands and went through our just-in-case fight choreography and reminded each other that no, we could not just give up and go home, because the audience was still there and the show was almost over. Use it, as my Junior year acting professor would say.

OH THANK GOD THIS PLAY IS OVER, is what we were thinking.
Vera was, of course, thinking OH THANK GOD I GET TO LIVE,
which is basically the same thing.

The next thing that has taken up a lot of my time is National Novel Writing Month, which I won in 2011 and have promptly failed at ever since. I am currently sitting just under Day 10's word count. Whooops. You see, the thing about 2011 is that I had this idea that if I finished a novel I could become an author and make a living writing stories and then I wouldn't have to work as a waitress anymore. Which would be great, if that's how life worked. I even took a writing class afterwards so I could edit my brilliant first novel. And then I woke up to the realization that my novel wasn't brilliant and I still had to work. And then I got cast in six shows back-to-back and didn't have time to do anything.

The thing about NaNoWriMo that I'm trying to focus on this year, is that creating is important, and opening up my imagination is important. By the end of NaNo the year I won, I was churning out short scripts at an ostentatious rate. I had silenced my inner critic and was ready to take on the world. And as a theatre educator, I write a lot. And as an actor, I get rejected a lot, so that giddy freedom of NaNo, where you took something that seemed so impossible and finished it, seems nice.

Although, it would be a bit nicer if anyone but me cared what happens to my heroine. Because I'm starting to really like her, and I'm really worried about what's happening to her right now, and I can't talk about it with anyone because no one else has read my book.

Upcoming books?

 

The Cuckoo's Calling (4.5)

If you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past couple of weeks (or perhaps watching television instead of reading book blogs), perhaps you didn’t hear: J.K. Rowling wrote a new book. It was published at the end of April under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. Recently it was leaked via twitter that Jo wrote it, so now everyone has to read it.

I’ve heard speculation that Jo leaked it herself because it wasn’t doing well enough or whatever, but according to some of her statements, I don’t buy it. It sold rather well, and had two offers from television producers. If anything it seems as though it was inevitably going to come out because someone was going to want to meet the real Robert Galbraith.

The Cuckoo’s Calling is a classic whodunit. Popular model Lula Landry plunges off her balcony to her death, everyone rules it a suicide, but her brother reopens the case by hiring detective Cormoran Strike. At some point you think just about everyone could have done it.

This was everything I could have asked for from a crime novel, with the exception that I could put it down. The detective, Cormoran Strike was interesting, yes, and unique, probably, though I’ve read very few crime novels.

I did not guess the villain, though I rarely ever do, so the final confrontation was a surprise, but I didn’t feel the danger. At no moment was I really afraid for anyone’s life. And in a thriller/mystery/whatever, I feel like I should have been.

I can’t blame Jo for all of this. Honestly, it might be that I’m really in the mood to read some love story and since this book didn’t have one, I just wasn’t that invested. It might have been that this is not really my genre. This could have been the best mystery novel written in a century and I might still not have loved it.

            

I’ll probably read the sequel. But I won't go to the midnight release.

 

I'm still upset HP is over. I will never love again

J.K. Rowling has a new book!

Well, I have a stack of books as tall as me that I want to read but it looks like a new one has risen to the top of the list.

Published in April under pseudonym Robert Galbraith and receiving some acclaim, it was recently revealed that J. K. Rowling was in fact the author. She sounds a bit sad that the pseudonym only lasted this long, but apparently there will be a new book in the series next year!

"I had hoped to keep this secret a little longer because being Robert Galbraith has been such a liberating experience. It has been wonderful to publish without hype or expectation and pure pleasure to get feedback under a different name." -Jo on being found out

Clearly I was not the first to figure it out. I went to my trusty library and there are already over 100 hold requests on six copies.

Anyone read it before it became famous?

I found the news here after my friend Kristina Horner posted it to her facebook.

Bonus: have a picture of Jo
looking like a Hogwarts teacher

Pottermore article "How J.K. Rowling Was Uncovered as the Author of "The Cuckoo's Calling"
 "The newly released crime novel, The Cuckoo’s Calling, was believed to be written by ex British Army officer Robert Galbraith until yesterday, when the Sunday Times broke a story that is arguably one of the greatest literary cover-ups ever and a mystery that’s as intriguing as a detective story."

NY Times This Detective Novel’s Story Doesn’t Add Up
"“The Cuckoo’s Calling,” in which a war veteran turned private detective investigates the possibly suspicious suicide of a young model in London, made barely a ripple in the commercial world but received lavish praise. "

According to the NY Times, it was an anonymous Twitter account that first said Jo was the actual author of The Cuckoo's Calling. My money's on one of her kids as an act of rebellion.
Jessica: Mom, buy me a house.
Jo: No honey, my new book isn't selling that well. After Casual Vacancy I may never have another best seller* so we have to make smart investments.
Jessica: Fine
(JESSICA runs upstairs to her room, slams the door, and makes a Twitter account)
Jessica: Now she'll have no excuses.

*I don't actually think this. I also have no idea if her daughter still lives at home. This is a joke. I hope Jessica doesn't get grounded for my lowly accusations. haha. Like J.K.Rowling would ever read my blog. BUT WHO KNOWS, Lynn Cullen liked my review of The Creation of Eve on Goodreads, so I'm basically famous.