A Chorus Line (5)

Conceived by Michael Bennett

Book by James Kirkwood & Nicholas Dante

Music by Marvin Hamlisch

Lyrics by Edward Kleban

This book is everything. I’ve listened to the cast recording countless times. I’ve choreographed to “One” for my musical theatre classes, and I’ve danced to “I Hope I Get It,” but I’ve never seen it. And the next best thing is reading it, right? (wrong. but. I spend a lot more time on a bus than I do in front of a tv)

If you DON’T know what A Chorus Line is LET ME TELL YOU REAL QUICK. Michael Bennett had some long conversations with some of his dancer friends about what life is like for a Broadway chorus dancer. The interviews were turned into this musical. In A Chorus Line, a room full of dancers are auditioning for a musical, and are told by the director that not only their dancing will be judged, but their personalities, and he tries to get them to open up. What follows is a story of love, loss, and theatre. Will watching it help you understand why we crazies do these shows? Maybe.  

CASSIE: “But I don’t want to prove anything anymore. I want to do what I love as much as I can and as long as I can. But at least, now – I’m doing it for me.”

For me, this new path I am taking, diving into teaching and studying child development and learning is so fascinating. Teaching is rewarding to me in the way that I think making art should feel. If you've missed this in the past, I'm an actress. I've wanted to be an actress since I was five, but have pursued it timidly, never being the child who desperately wanted to move to LA or New York. I wanted LA to want me so badly they made me move because that's where I was going to be working. But the nomadic reality of becoming an actor, doing touring shows (if you're lucky!) before you break into Broadway, going from LA to New York, to a regional house that will pay you.... I just don’t want that enough. I want to do the shows and the roles I want to do and not worry about whose watching or how doing show A might get me to theatre Z at some point maybe.

Reading this play was like hearing a resounding "that's ok!" from the artistic community. "Do what you love! Love what you do!" I am so proud of all of my friends who are literally chasing their dreams to New York or Broadway, and I am equally excited about my next year studying teaching. Who knows what the future holds.

I Am Livia by Phyllis T. Smith (4)

Ok, first off: I liked this book way more than I thought I would. I mean, the cover? First glance: it’s kind of mosaic-y with leaves falling on her face, kinda making her look all disheveled and lying there with her mouth slightly open. It SAYS it’s about one of the most powerful women in the history of Rome but….it looks like a romance novel. On closer inspection, she's standing there defiantly, wind whipping her hair, with her mouth parted in a provocative way...still looks like a romance novel, but one with a likable character. First glance at the cover was on my phone while I was getting ready to spend 30 minutes crimping my hair for a play. And it was the perfect book to read while crimping my stupid hair, except the one night I got too into the book and almost missed my entrance because I was super slow at getting my hair did.

What I Did For Love, indeed
photo cred: Jeff Carpenter Photography

It’s written as though Livia is writing her own memoir in her old age, and she starts by talking about how infamous she became, which is weird because I have no idea who she is. I don’t even recognize the guy that ends up being in charge of Rome, probably because he’s Julius Caesar’s heir – also called Caesar – which means I probably lumped their histories together into one story. This is why history is confusing: everyone has the same names.

Julius Caesar

Caesar, the adopted heir

The story begins with Livia, age 14, overhearing her beloved father discussing Julius Caesar’s assassination. Which we all know is going to happen. (I mean, even I remember that much of history class.) As part of the plot, her father marries Livia to one of this fellow senators. And blah, blah, blah…history. A lot of things happen. Read the book. Or be familiar with history. Eventually she meets Octavianus (Julius Caesar's heir, also called Caesar) and more things happen. And she meets him again, while pregnant with her husband's second child, and more things happen. Intrigue. Scandal. (Spoilers?)

I LOVE historical fiction when I can trust that it is remotely historically accurate. It helps me keep all the facts and players straight when I have a linear story with a hero I find relateable. It makes me feel smart and like I learned something. Plus, it helps to keep history in perspective, that all humans that live now and have lived in the past have possessed human emotions. And the #1 reason to read fiction is to cultivate your sense of empathy. (I’m not kidding, people study this: Scientific American, The Guardian, Science, The NewYorker.) And, as I’ve mentioned before, if there’s a good love story I am 95% more likely to like the book. We all have our weaknesses. This love story was very "aww" worthy.

Stick through it to the end, I know it gets a little lost, but I promise the end is worth the journey. I wasn’t wholly convinced that Rome found Livia as conniving and infamous as she started the book saying she was, BUT a book has to have a hook, so I’ll let that go. 

Livia

The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey

Out TODAY! 6/10/14

"Melanie is a very special girl. Dr Caldwell calls her 'our little genius'. Every morning, Melanie waits in her cell to be collected for class. When they come for her, Sergeant keeps his gun pointing at her while two of his people strap her into the wheelchair. She thinks they don't like her. She jokes that she won't bite, but they don't laugh. Melanie loves school. She loves learning about spelling and sums and the world outside the classroom and the children's cells. She tells her favourite teacher all the things she'll do when she grows up. Melanie doesn't know why this makes Miss Justineau look sad."                                                               - Goodreads description, because it's too good to try and do my own.

So, this is pretty uncharacteristic of me, but I haven't actually finished this book yet.

Wait, that is actually SUPER characteristic of me. Once I went on this LONG rant about how AMAZING Angels & Demons was and how much I appreciated that Dan Brown was depicting a priest as a good guy (as opposed to The Da Vinci Code)...and then the next page I read all insanity broke loose and everything I said was wrong.

Whatever, take this with a grain of salt because I only read the 10 chapter excerpt that's free on GoodReads right now. But I was just browsing Goodreads, deciding what to read next while taking a break from all of the three books I'm currently reading (more if you count the ones I haven't admitted to myself I've abandoned). The Girl with All the Gifts looked interesting, and I saw there was an excerpt, so like any good procrastinator, I clicked on it. And WHOOPS looks like I'm not getting anything done till I read this lengthy excerpt of a generous 10 chapters.

It's so good you guys. It kind of reminds me of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, but with more of a horror/SciFi element. It's got the perfect amounts of thriller oh-god-whats-going-to-happen-next and actually-makes-you-question-society-and-humankind.

*Real review out tomorrow 8am! Historical fiction/romance*

June Books For (& About) Kids

(for the littlest readers)

Cute little story about a little panda named Chu who might have to sneeze. Bad things happened when Chu sneezes. 

(slightly older)

A fun nonfiction read about the life of mathematician Paul Erdos. What I love about it is that it shows math as being a) creative and b) social and NOT c) boring. The illustrations are filled with colorful numbers and real-life uses for math. Its all about why math is cool. 

For more picture books check out my May recommendations

(middle reader)

When mom leaves dad with the kids for the week, disaster strikes at breakfast. There is no milk. Not for breakfast cereal, and not for dad’s tea. Dad goes out to get milk but takes ages and ages to get back. Upon his arrival, he regales the epic story of his hunt for the milk, filled with time-travelling dinosaurs, aliens, wumpires (NOT the sparkly kind), and other mayhem.

Verdict: A fun bedtime story for the kiddos. It reminds me of a Shel Silverstein poem that I memorized in elementary school. If they liked it, try reading Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to them. If YOU liked it, try TheOcean at the End of the Lane, also by Neil Gaiman, which I would not recommend reading to the kiddos.

The book was also gorgeous, and used all of the illustrations (and even the fonts) to tell the story and add emotional colors to the book. It’s definitely worth getting the physical book as opposed to the kindle version. 

For Grown Ups, but About Kids

In How Children Succeed, journalist Paul Tough explores the education system and current research on what factors make a child grow into a successful adult. The story told to children now is that if you study hard and get good grades AND good test scores, you will get into a good college and then you will get a good job and be a successful adult. According to Tough's research, intelligence and a good SAT score will only get you so far, and children who are well equipped with skills like grit, curiosity, conscientiousness, and optimism will be more successful in college and beyond. Having these skills can help a child/adult more than raw intelligence or even growing up in a more financially stable home. Tough discusses how we can teach children these skills and how they will help them in later life.

I don't know if you've heard yet, but I'm going to grad school to get my Masters in Teaching. I've always been very interested in teaching, but that whole being super interested in acting thing took over my life for a little while. I always assumed I would one day be a teacher, but what and where I was going to teach were questions that kept me from getting my BA in Education.

I feel like it got a little lost near the end, when we got so involved in the chess world I sort of forgot what was actually being discussed. Overall, this book reminded me of all the reasons I want to get involved with the public school system.

For more on teaching, read The Book Whisperer

Divergent by Veronica Roth (4)

I was told that this book was “The next Hunger Games!” which immediately made me skeptical. I do not want to read the “new” Hunger Games, I’ll just read THE Hunger Games eight more times thankyouverymuch. AND since I was told it was “the next Hunger Games,” obviously I had to compare it to The Hunger Games every moment I could.

The story starts with sixteen-year-old Beatrice (Tris) Prior who lives with her family in post-apocalyptic Chicago. Their city has been divided into five six factions: Candor (the honest), Abnegation (the selfless), Dauntless (the brave), Amity (the peaceful), Erudite (the intelligent), and the Factionless (the outcasts). At sixteen, Beatrice gets to decide what faction to choose to live her life in. Once she has chosen, there is no going back, and if she chooses Not Abnegation, then she will leave her family forever (except for visiting days). So naturally there’s a test where the kid goes on an LSD-trip-spirit-journey to figure out where they are Meant To Be, but Beatrice is Different Than Everyone Else. And thus our story starts.  

Beatrice vs. Katniss: the film actresses

Similarities to The Hunger Games:

-dystopian world where people are sorted

-Book 1 (Divergent) will be consumed in a 24-72 hour period, depending on how much time you have on your hands.

-you must immediately begin Book 2 (Insurgent/Catching Fire) upon finishing Book 1 (Divergent/The Hunger Games) AND even more pressing is the need to read the third book (Allegiant/Mockingjay)

-The third book is the worst, but you realize that that is the only way to end the series. Mockingjay was a struggle because I read it in one sitting, and the end felt disjointed (you know why if you’ve read it), I had the same problem with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7) because I wanted to know WHAT WAS GOING TO HAPPEN as opposed to what the characters were thinking and feeling. In HP, I felt like they were stuck in that tent in the woods for ETERNITY. On the second read of both Mockingjay and HP7, everything made sense and felt Right. Allegiant took me two weeks to read. There was a lot of things I wanted to happen in Insurgent that then were fixed in Allegiant, but then…I got bored. And the end…

Differences from The Hunger Games:

-In Divergent, the city-state is divided into factions, as opposed to The Hunger Games, where the country of Panem was split into districts. Factions are divided by a personality trait, and jobs are given based on that trait, as opposed to The Hunger Games where the country was divided based on industry

-no love triangle (HOLD THE PHONES, WHAT?! A YA book with no love triangle????). Yes, really.

-By Book 3 Tris actually has a real relationship with a boyfriend where they talk and work through things instead of breaking up at every freakout like teenagers (which I appreciated)

-Tris actually cares about her relationship unlike Katniss who is a badass and is really confused why everyone’s worried about who her boyfriend is when she’s seventeen and the face of a rebellion, which is one of my favorite things about The Hunger Games series, because it’s a discussion with the reader. Why do you care about who your boyfriend is? Does it matter? You could be solving world hunger. I’m not saying its not ok to have a boyfriend, I have a boyfriend. I like my boyfriend. But I don’t like him because he’s my boyfriend, he’s my boyfriend because I like him. In high school (and after…), I feel like there can be pressure on girls to Have A Boyfriend, and that’s not really healthy. I’m totally getting on a tangent but to wrap it up, in the Divergent series Tris actually learns how to communicate within a relationship, and is still a badass, and that is awesome too. Things can be different and still awesome.

-In Divergent, once the rebellion starts, war is happening basically all the time, as opposed to the Boy Troubles/Normal Life à The Games/War conceit that is in a lot of YA (also see Harry Potter: Happy Magic School à oh it’s halfway through the book, time to fight Voldemort!)

THE VERDICT

I read these books in JANUARY and haven’t posted this because I had too many thoughts on the books, and my main problem with them is that they are NOT The Hunger Games, which isn’t REALLY a fair assessment. A friend of mine likes them better because it presents war in a more realistic light. I think the most fair thing to say about the books is that they are clearly a reaction to The Hunger Games, but I wouldn’t say that it talks about as many things as The Hunger Games does. Where Collins is discussing war, the media, and how women are viewed. (You can read a super smart interview with her here.) Roth seems to have a Strong Female Character dealing with war and rebellion. And while I think that Divergent is extremely entertaining, I’m not sure that I would get much more out of it on a second or third read. So I have to say that is DEFINITELY worth reading but NOT as good as The Hunger Games, but I love The Hunger Games too much to give anything but a biased verdict.

POSSIBLY one day I’ll read it again or see the movie and realize how brilliant it is.

If you didn’t like The Hunger Games, DON’T read it. If you loved Divergent, tell me about how wrong I am and what brilliance I’m missing. 

A Mad, Wicked Folly (3.5)

1909, an art class in France, a young, wealthy English finishing student named Vicky decides that to be a real artist, to be taken seriously by her peers, it is absolutely necessary for her to pose nude in front of her classmates. (You can skip the next paragraph if you just want to hear my opinions.)

So she gets kicked out of finishing school and sent home to parents that are way-less-than thrilled and give her two choices: marry a man of their choosing, or go live in a desolate countryside with her Aunt Spinster the Cat Lady. She decides it would be super fun to marry a rich man and then be able to do whatever she wants because she will no longer be under her parents thumb....but THEN she meets a super hot (but poor) cop after she gets kind of arrested while drawing some suffragettes. What follows is a story about love and a young woman learning how to be her own person.

I don't have much to say about this except that it's cute. If you have any passing knowledge about feminism or suffragettes, want to learn more, and are already a feminist this book certainly won't open your eyes to any new information. If you want a love story and a woman who is more feminist-friendly than Bella, you're probably good to go. If this book BLOWS YOUR FREAKING MIND that things used to be that way, you should go read/see A Doll's House IMMEDIATELY.

My shiny new rating system:

Entertainment value: 5

Love Story: 4

Value as Feminist Literature: 2

More Feminist than Cosmo? probably

Better than Twilight? yes

More aww-inspiring than the end of Pride and Prejudice? nope

The Line (4)

I loved this book. The only reason I didn't give it five stars is because it didn't change my life in some profound way, but it was a perfectly fun book. I binge read the second half of instead of sleeping last night. (I mean, I slept, but not for a proper 8-hour length of time.)

Twenty-year-old Mercy has been following in her twin sister, Maisie’s, footsteps ever since they were born. Pretty, smart, and powerful Maisie is sure to be the next matriarch of their family. Mercy, on the other hand, is a redheaded tomboy who received none of her family’s powers. When disaster strikes her family, the twins are separated, and Mercy has to learn to rely on her own brand of power.

On the surface, this book has everything every other paranormal YA book has: a young woman whose mother died giving birth to her and has never known her father, being raised by a family who despises her for being different. AND she’s dating her best friend from birth but is actually in love with her sister’s boyfriend, and is torn between him and her love for her twin. But author J.D. Horn takes all of those paranormal YA stereotypes and turns them on their head and breaks them. Right when I think it’s turned all sappy BAM! You thought that was the direction the book was going but NOPE, isn’t this more fun? (Yes, it is. No one needs another cut and dry Edward-Bella-Jacob(-Bella’s Daugther???) novel ever again.) Yes, there was some stuff I saw coming, but it was framed nicely. Every character and every situation was put into the novel for a specific purpose, and it all tied together nicely.

Renesmee?? This is definitely how I named one of my characters when I was 15.
Also, creepy. I almost want to watch this movie now to see how they made this work.
(If you don't know what I'm talking about you don't want to. ...but google "Jacob & Renesmee" and you'll figure it out)

I did feel like the end dragged on a bit. I kept expecting it to be over with a nice “to-be-continued” swoosh so you have to go read the next book to see what happens, but unlike most YA series, I felt that this could be a stand alone novel, kind of like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s (Philosopher’s) Stone. You come back to the next book for the pure enjoyment of reading and attachment to the character, not because you have to see if Bella and Edward get back together*. And I really appreciated that.

*I feel like I just ragged on Twilight a lot, which is silly because I totally binge read all four of those books and definitely enjoyed them. I get that the writing style felt like reading my 14-year-old journal but it was super entertaining and I was totally Team Edward. The end of the last book was RIDICULOUS. The movies were ridiculous. That being said, I found the whole story very satisfying.