The 19th Wife (4)

       So, here’s the thing. I am randomly picky about books and I have no idea why I like the ones I like. And this one, I liked. Not read in one sitting like The Hunger Games like, but I liked it nonetheless. I came back to it, even though I was busy and would kind of forget about it. But I actually had a conversation with someone about it that went like this.

            “What are you reading?”

            “The 19^th Wife.”

            “Is it any good?”

            “I don’t know?”

            He laughs, “how far are you?”

            “Almost done.”

            He looks confused.

            “I mean, I’m enjoying it, I just don’t know if it’s any good, you know?”

            Like, I really needed to have someone tell me that this is an acceptable book to be reading. Everyone else likes it too or critics are just raving about it. I mean, I gave a bad review to a Pulitzer-prize winning author, clearly I have no idea what I’m talking about, right? I think I feel especially uncomfortable with historical fiction because I’m not enough of a history buff to know how historically accurate it is. Like when I was in 8^th grade and I loved Gone with the Wind, but then found out it was racist and according to the battles Scarlett was pregnant for 18 months or something (ask a history buff, I don’t remember). It took me years and a couple re-reads to realize that I was just desperately in love with Rhett Butler and was skimming the book until he showed up again. So, why am I even writing this blog? Because I have a lot of opinions and I like to share them.

 

"It's cool Scarlett, I want to be your slave" - every line of Mammy's

            The 19^th Wife, by David Ebershoff tells two stories, one set in present day Utah, where Jordan Scott returns to his hometown after his mom, (his dad's nineteenth wife) has allegedly shot her husband. The evidence is stacked against her, yet when his mom says she didn’t do it, Jordan begins to delve into the mystery behind who shot his father.

Ann Eliza

            The other tale is of the most famous 19^th Wife, Ann Eliza, 19^th wife to Brigham Young in the 1800s. I loved her story. Which kind of makes me feel like there’s something wrong with me, because what happens to her is awful. Ann Eliza’s story shows in full detail what life would truly be like for a plural wife. There is no romanticizing it like Big Love and Sister Wives does. She sees it as an institution that enslaves women and abuses children because what father can love 19 wives and 200 children equally? What made Ann Eliza famous, though, is that she wrote a tell-all memoir about polygamy and went on a crusade to make it illegal in the US. And who doesn’t love a story of someone taking something horrible that happened to her and using it as a crusade to save the world? (Ok. Good, I’m not a bad person. I did not enjoy seeing her abused, I just wanted to see her break the shackles of the institution).

            I totally didn’t figure out who the murderer was. I’m not sure I totally cared, because I didn’t really love Jordan or his mom and I definitely wasn’t upset that his dad was dead. And, like I've said before, I rarely figure out who it was.  

Read this book if you like historical fiction, are comfortable with a gay protagonist (Jordan) with a love interest, and if you're ok with reading an entire book filled with characters that are pretty anti-Mormon, although I would argue that the novel is not anti-Mormon, just anti polygamy. 

*shivers*

A note on historical accuracy:

According to Wikipedia (which is totally 100% accurate), Ann Eliza Webb Dee Young was totally a real person. She was a wife of Brigham Young, though her rank varies (which the novel touches upon, including a potential reason why the number may change). She did, in fact, write an autiobiography titled Wife No. 19 and after divorcing Brigham Young, became extremely opposed to Mormonism due to their practice of polygamy. 

In doing this very minimal research, I found out that there is a Lifetime movie based on this book. So, take that as you will. 

OH MY GOD IS THAT LOGAN? Yes it is. Oh how the mighty have fallen. I wonder if I could make every book review come back to Gilmore Girls? Did I mention Lauren Graham wrote a book? You should totally read that one because it's the best! 

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?

 

Jana's List of Books You Should Have Already Read (and some othersuggestions)

A current list of myfavorite recent-reads in the order you should read them (in case you’re overwhelmed…wait now I’m overwhelmed justtrying to put them in some sort of order.)

...can you ever just be "whelmed"?

If you like _________read __________:

1. The Hunger GamesàCinder (if you haven’t read The Hunger Games, read that because it’sbetter)

2. A Casual VacancyàGone Girl (Gone Girl’s the quicker, more palatable of the two)

3. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince à Night Circus(magic is pretty much the only thing that connects these two stories.

4. The Thirteenth TaleàThe Blind Assassin (though if youhaven’t read anything by Margaret Atwood, start with The Handmaid’s Tale which is possibly more disturbing than Gone Girl)

5. Farenheit 451 àHandmaid’s Tale

6. A Stolen Life àLolita (I’m sorry. I know, I know, I’m going to hell…you can’t really like Lolita, can you?)

7. Gone Girl àWe Need to Talk About Kevin

8. Cinder   à Ella Enchanted (though if you're not a 14-year-old girl, I make no promises on either of these)

And if you haven't read ______ do it. Now.

Previously mentioned #s 1, 2, and 5

Ender's Game

Harry Potter

War Brides (4)

Alice Osbourne, Evangeline Fountaine, Elsie Pigeon, Tanni Zaymen, and Frances Falconleigh are five women from very different backgrounds who end up in the small town of Crowmarsh Priors and become life long friends.

            I enjoyed the story, but I felt that the beginning and the end were unnecessary. The novel starts with Tanni Zaymen carting her two grandchildren back to England. Or something? It’s weird and gives this very strange oh no what is she hiding feeling that then got really confusing when it switched to the past.

            “The past” happens in the 1930s, at the beginning of World War II and through most of the war. We are introduced to each of the women one by one. My favorite is Tanni Zaymen, a young Jewish woman living in Germany with her mother, father, and two little twin sisters. Tanni’s parents have realized that Germany is getting to be very unsafe for Jews, and without telling Tanni, constructs a plan to get her out of the country. The twins will follow on the Kindertransport, and hopefully they would follow later. As a mob comes down on their street, Tanni’s family throws her a wedding to a family friend so that she can get out of the country safely.

            I have to say, I have this weird fascination with WWII. Jewish internment camps and all the creepy scientific experiments they did just feel like something straight out of a horror movie, it amazes and disgusts me that that is a real part of world history.

And the end rips you out of the story just when everything is finally really interesting and gives all the reveals a less-exciting tone.

            How can I say it without spoiling the book? Let’s use Harry Potter! What if, at the end of book 7 we think Harry’s dead and then we go straight to the epilogue? And in the epilogue Harry, Hermione, and Ron get together and explain to each other why Harry didn’t actually die and we find out Fred and Tonks and Lupin and everyone died and oh yeah Voldemort has Horcruxes and once we find the last one we can FINALLY kill him! Why would that take you 50 years to figure out?

            So is it my new favorite book? Probably not. Was it bad? Not really. I’d read Atonement instead, but if you already read that then War Brides is ok I guess. 

Someday, Someday Maybe (5)

Why do we read books? Is it to learn something? Is it to go on an adventure? Is it to get to know somebody who may not be real but to you are more real than anyone on earth? Or is it something else?

Someday, Someday, Maybe is a new novel by actress Lauren Graham, best known for her roles as Lorelai Gilmore in Gilmore Girls and Sarah Braverman in Parenthood, the first of which is my favorite show that has ever been made in the entire world. Seriously, Freshman year of college I was basically like “this is what you need to know about me: I love coffee, the color pink, Harry Potter, and Gilmore Girls,” that was the sum of my personality in four items. Later it became clear that there was one thing that far surpassed my love of any of these four things...acting. What is this book about? A young actress trying to make it in New York City.

Now there are two ways that me reading this book can go: either it’s amazing, and so inspirational I immediately want to move to New York OR I want to quit acting forever because she gets something that I don’t. In reality, Lauren Graham peered into my soul and wrote a book about all my insecurities and why they are ridiculous.

Franny Banks is a struggling actress trying to make it in New York City in the 90s. She gave herself three years to move to New York and make it as an actress before she would give up and return home…to face the fact that she has no actual skills to enter the job force. We follow her on the adventures and misadventures of trying to balance a job, class, and the bloodthirsty world of auditions.

My favorite parts are when something good happens to Franny and it sends her into a pit of despair because that one good thing is still not the thing that was needed so that she could become a working actress. Yes, it moved her in the right direction, but that can get lost in the shuffle when you’re concerned about your audition and the shoot you wrapped and if you’re ever going to get cast in anything ever again because, face it, your agent probably already forgot about you. And of course, by favorite I mean I think I was actually worrying about Franny’s plight when I left home.

Don’t worry, there’s also a love story. It’s pretty satisfying.

I hated the ending because it meant the book was over. I actually had a hard time starting the next one because I was so involved in Franny’s world

maybe someday I'll end up on a wall like this

Brilliance (4.5)

I don’t know why everyone isn’t reading this book. Brilliance is basically the book that Michael Crichton would write about the X-men. Several of the reviews I read were like “blah blah blah, it’s basically about the X-men, blah blah blah not creative,” if that’s your criteria, technically Harry Potter wasn’t that groundbreaking. Technically, it’s just a book about a wizard, coming of age, and going on a hero’s journey. Technically that stories been told.

Brilliance, by Marcus Sakey takes place in the modern day of an alternate future, where 1% of people born since 1980 are ‘brilliants.’ Brilliants don’t shoot lasers out of their eyes or control the weather or anything super cool, they’re just really, really smart. And that manifests itself into minor powers. A little girl who can always tell if someone’s lying, a man who can sense patterns in the stock market,  a woman who can go invisible by being where no one is looking, and Nick Cooper (our hero) who can read what people are going to do by the tiniest movement of their muscles. Ok, maybe this isn’t Crichton-level science fiction, but it definitely makes sense.

not that I'm knocking these guys

Nick Cooper is a brilliant working for the government to find and track brilliants, namely John Smith, a terrorist who has killed hundreds already and is working on something even worse…

What I loved about this novel was the social commentary that came along with the action-packed plot. There were news articles, copies of speeches, and even advertisements in between some chapters. Not so many that it distracted from the story, but just enough to create a fully realized world.

It started a bit slow, so don’t let that fool you. I was reading it at the same time as Atonement, which complimented it well since Atonement is all about characters with some action and Brilliance is all about action with some character development. I also finished it in the middle of a thunderstorm so I LITERALLY jumped out of my seat a few times. 

Atonement (5)

          I mentioned before that I have a hoarding problem, with my stacks of books everywhere, some cracked open, others half-finished, some laying there for years, possibly forever because I bought it on a whim thinking the subject was interesting. I read it eagerly for 10 pages and then went back to Harry Potter.

Once I have heard of a book and “mean” to read it, it probably goes on a list somewhere (thank God for Goodreads). One of these books is Atonement, which has been on my to-read list since the movie came out in 2007. I am not the biggest fan of Kiera Knightly so casting her in Atonement was basically a death sentence to the book for me, but I heard it was amazing and if that were the case then I could just read the book and I wouldn’t have to bother with Kiera at all!

But I didn’t get it right away, and the longer a book is on my list, the less likely I am to read it. There’s always something new and shiny to catch my attention, and the book grows stale on my shelf. The only way for it to re-gain my attention is if someone mentions it. Fortunately for me, Atonement is one of my friend’s favorite books. So I finally read it.  

            Atonement is simply a work of art. It starts on a summer day in 1934 as we follow 13-year-old Briony Tallis worry about her cousins coming to stay, her newest play, and what exactly her sister is doing in the garden with the servant’s son.

mostly moping

            Briony’s descriptions of everything are fabulous. McEwan crafts a brilliant story around this very young girl and whose misunderstanding of the adult world leads to disaster. After the first half, we see a first-hand view of World War II first through the eyes of a soldier, then a nurse. McEwan moves from a slow summer’s day into the middle of a retreating army and into a busy wartime hospital with effortless prose. Each could be a story unto itself. But altogether, the finished piece is perfect. I don’t know what to tell you except if you haven’t read it yet you should.

Ah, Briony. I love you. I hate you. I want to be you.