Stacy Abrams Rules of Engagement

 

Abrams has written other novels under the name Selina Montgomery. It would appear this re-publishing under her now more recognizable name as a Georgia prosecutor is intended to squeeze more money out of a losing proposition. This story of super spies tracking down a doomsday weapon goes nowhere fast.  Every other page is full of hyper-sexual panting with no return on your investment. I finally quit around p. 100 with the jousting still underway and no real interest developed in the characters or the apparent plot.

Into the trash pile and give it a rating of

 Zilch out of 5   

 

The Conditions of Unconditional Love by Andrew McCall Smith

 

Alexander McCall Smith writes books (a lot of books) and they are the kind that are needed when you are under duress and ready to shout “STOP” to the universe.  There is a soothing quality about his prose and the characters who utter it.  The villains are more pompous or unconscious rather than evil and the good folks always seem to be able to solve their problems by practicing some element of unconditional love. That keeps them and you going.  

This brings us to Isabel Dalhousie the main character in McCall Smith’s The Conditions of Unconditional Love. She is well-off, happily married with two children, and the editor of an academic philosophical journal. She says early on, “. . . we have to accept people for what they are and not spend our time looking for perfection in them.” Now, according to her husband Jamie, Isabel also has a penchant for taking on the troubles of the people around her.  He would like her not to do that, but she is persistent and he finally gives up and just watches. For the reader, it is exactly those gently quirky and often humorous problems that draw you in.  

Four troubles are featured in the book. Isabel’s scholarly nemesis has tried to set up a conference that will result in giving him a way too large a paycheck for organizing it. Second, her husband has suggested offering a spare room to a woman who has run into a bad patch. Third, Isabel is maneuvered into participating in a book group comprised of women who hate each other.  And finally, her niece, Cat, has had another troublesome love affair. These problems throw a monkey wrench into Isabel’s normally comfortable and ordered life. By the end, each has been put into the rearview mirror. Isabel feels better. Her husband Jamie is happier. The troubled person or persons feel better and McCall Smith has worked his erudite, poetic, and gently humorous magic once again. He is the ultimate feel-good author.

I give it four out of five.   

 

 

 

Book Review Anne Hillerman LOST BIRDS

I fell in love with Tony Hillerman’s books a long time ago. When his daughter Anne picked up the franchise after his death, I was not expecting a lot. Sequels written by children or ghostwriters often fall short. Lost Birds is now Ms. Hillerman’s ninth book featuring the familiar characters of Joe Leaphorn, Bernadette Manuelito, and Jim Chee whom her father created. I can say unequivocally I have transferred my membership in the Tony fan club to his daughter Anne. Most of her first eight books increased the stage time given to Bernadette Manuelito and her husband Jim Chee (Cheeseburger) with Joe Leaphorn retired but lurking in the background as a helper.  Lost Birds now brings him back into well-deserved prominence.

It opens with Leaphorn receiving a phone call from a Navaho, Cecil Bowlegs, who asks for help in locating his wife. She had been working at the Indian School where Bowlegs was a janitor and now has vanished. Before the call can be completed, a loud explosion cuts it off.  The explosion pretty much destroys a building at the school and inside it is a car that contains a body. Bowlegs fears the bomb was aimed at him because he was in arrears on some gambling debts and goes on a runner himself.  Meanwhile, Joe Leaphorn has another client who has been adopted out of the native community and is now trying to re-find her roots. She is one of the lost birds alluded to in the title. While Leaphorn looks for Bowlegs and tries to help the woman, Chee, and Manuelito become involved in the bombing investigation and apparent murder. In another subplot, Leaphorn’s significant other meets with her estranged son and finds that pulse-pounding danger can lurk even for elderly cops and their loved ones.

The tragic history of the "lost birds" is the glue that holds all this together. It added new information for me. I was aware of the problems with Reservation Schools of the past that tried to eliminate tribal history in favor of Western European culture, but I had little knowledge of the program that removed Native children from their natural tribal communities and offered them up for adoption by Non-Native couples.  

No Hillerman book, father or daughter, would be complete without a reverence for the Dine community and the land on which they live. If you have traveled to the Four Corners area or even if you have just seen pictures of it, you will find Anne Hillerman's geography faithful and her description of the land as captivating as her father's. I recommend you start her series now and bet you will be hooked and start looking for copies of the first eight as soon as you finish this one. 

Definitely a 5 out of 5

 

 

Book Review of ORWELL'S GHOST by Laura Beers

 

Orwell’s Ghost-- Wisdom and Warnings for the 21^st Century by Laura Beers--

I happened upon this title in the Marion Library and it reminded me that I had not read 1984 in some fifty years. I also had been seeing his name and books bandied. All sorts of talking heads and essayists seemed to be shouting that this or that is “ Orwellian”.  I wondered what that label meant to modern readers.

First, it does carry enough meaning to still place 1984 on best-seller lists in multiple languages some seventy years after its publication.

Second, I re-learned that George Orwell was a pen name and not his real name. That was Arthur Blair. His father was an imperial administrator in India and Arthur had a pretty typical upper-middle-class childhood,  which included pricy prep schools and the very upper crust Eton. Critical to his later development, he did decide to eschew Oxford or Cambridge and went instead off to fight in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930’s.

Third I learned that Orwell was a major-league misogynist. He had little use for women even though he married two of them. He expected them for the most part to stay home, do housework, and take care of any children. He wrote reams about the plight of the working man, but had little to say about the working woman. In the same vein he was also adamantly against any and all forms of abortion. 

Even though he was not a very pleasant human being, his philosophy on government holds up well. He considered the “will to power” universal and believed it could exist on the left or the the right political spectrum. His indictment of totalitarianism in 1984 is alive and well in 2024 and the work remains readable today even though in his time his main attacks were aimed at colonial empires and Communism. Today we can easily see that cancel culture, disinformation, and fake news are just new names for Orwell’s Ministry of Truth?

Our present access to the internet may have increased our individual powers, but along with that has come increased surveillance capacity on us by the state and multinational corporations. In his day Orwell never reached the point where he claimed freedom could exist without some form of restraint. There must be some social responsibility to speak the truth.  As Ms. Beers said, “Freedom is the right to say 2+2=4, but not to claim that 2+2=5.”  A life can be censored and someone who continues to insist that 2+2=5 cannot be tolerated. “Double think,” Russia calling its invasion of Ukraine “a special operation” for instance must be corrected.  The scary thing about information today is that an idea deplatformed in one space can find plenty of alternative spaces on which to continue. .   

Give it a 3 of 5  Not for all souls.

Review of THE LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA by Theatre Cedar Rapids

 

The Light in the Piazza, Theatre Cedar Rapids Brucemore offering for 2024 takes a noble crack at a clearly Sondheim inspired musical. It doesn’t match Sondheim in music or plot, but falling a bit short of genius is still pretty damn good. Piazza debuted in 2003 and was based on an earlier book. It has gone through further tummy tucks for later successful New York and London runs. In London, the role of Margaret was played by semi-retired opera diva Rene Flemming.

This leads me to remind readers that you have to work a bit harder to appreciate many of today’s musicals. Hummable tunes and chorus casts large enough to fill a small hall have been left in the dust. In this rendering the four-member chorus is relegated to a few ballet moves and posing like statues in the stage set’s niches. Even with the splash limited to lush lighting and more limited tete a tetes, that isn’t the biggest problem with The Light in the Piazza. For me, it was that it is almost half-spoken or sung in Italian and there are no operatic sub-titles to help an audience over this linguistic hump. I admire the time that the acting company must have devoted to mastering both real Italian and the accents of non-native people attempting to speak English or Italian. Yet, I must admit to losing where the story was going on occasion.  It didn’t kill the piece for me, but I would have been helped by some better translation.

What I did get was that sometime in the 1950’s a well-off southern mother (Margaret), who has some long standing marital problems herself, brings her daughter (Clara) to Florence for a vacation. A wayward wind blows Clara’s hat right into the hands of a young Italian (Fabrizo) and bingo “attraction at first sight.” Clara is bowled over and mother Margaret goes into protective mode.  It is then revealed that Clara has been kicked by a horse at a young age and is now physically a woman but is lacking in normal mental and emotional development. Margaret is afraid if Clara is allowed to fall in love, she will be jilted as soon as the young man or his family discovers her disability. I think you can imagine the rest of the story without any help from me.      

Don’t get me wrong. This is still a production well worth seeing. The performance takes place outdoors in a natural amphitheater. The set, composed of beautiful Renaissance arches and stairs, takes on with lighting  gorgeous shades of golden Florentine sunshine as well as moody violet-tinted evening hours. A neat little working fountain held the left side of the stage and had a tiny copy of Michaelangelo’s David at its center. This supplies a somewhat ironic comment on the lover's developing relationship. In other words, the stage design was perfecto.  

Although the young lovers are important, the glue that holds the piece together is the mother (Margaret), played by Rebecca Fields Moffitt. She takes over the part with authority and along the way  is both physically and vocally more convincing than the young lovers. She manages to fold her own unhappy marriage into her desire to protect her daughter while recognizing and playing the comic moments nicely.

The bittersweet semi-operatic score is ideal for this dark romance, although it would help if Catharine Blades (Clara) could find a way to indicating her affliction in manner as well as in song. She has a lovely voice, but seems so perfectly normal that if we had not been told we might not think she has the problem her mother says she has. Fabrizio, played by Tegas Gururaja, also manages the difficult vocals well and does display the physical tentativeness of a young Italian who is not quite the typical smooth Italian Roue often depicted in films. Max Moreno, (Signor Naccarelli), Fabrizo’s very Italian haberdasher father, was solid right down the line.  Fabrizio’s older brother had some potential comic contrasts to his more sedate younger brother that were never quite realized. Perhaps, he was not given enough latitude by the director to exploit this contrast and thereby lightening the mood a bit more often. 

Audience reaction at the performance we saw was polite, but did not capture the spontaneous joy that occurred at the end of Sondheim’s A little Night Music last year. The Light in the Piazza was still pleasurable and definitely a fine entertainment for a summer evening. TCR is to be admired for choosing and presenting it.  

 

DEATH IN A GHOSTLY HUE by Susan Van Kirk

 

I’ll start with my bias warning. Susan Van Kirk was our next-door neighbor. My wife is one of her beta readers. While teaching English at our local high school, Sue taught both of our children and my wife taught her kids in elementary school. Sue was and remains one of my wife’s best friends. This also means there are identifiable local references throughout the book that can only be enjoyed by a real resident of the fictional town used as a setting. These are meaningless to a general reader, but they are sure delightful for us.  

“So, say it ain’t so Sue!”  Not the final Art Center Mystery! Just because Jill banished the ghost, there are plenty of other loose ends to tie up. The love affair with Sam is just getting going, the personality change in Ivan Truelove needs explaining, Louise’s dating habits could bring on catastrophe at any moment, and Jill’s family cannot stay out of trouble for more than twenty minutes. All those valuable paintings from the judge might be a target for thieves and surely the Babbling Brook Community Church must be ripe for another foray. I admit finding another body in the basement of the art center might be pushing it, but what might Jill do with a body found frozen inside the big freezer plant next to the slaughterhouse?  Just a thought.

Back to business. Death in a Ghostly Hue, is Sue’s third art center mystery and I really do hope not the last.  All of the first three are set in a small midwestern town and take place in and around its Art Center. Jill Madison, the main character, runs the enterprise and the ins and outs of mounting exhibitions and the problems of working with a board of directors are given full shrift. The center itself has been endowed by Jill’s mother, who was a talented and successful painter.

The beginning of the book seemed a bit too obvious as a conflict set-up for me. We learn of a man named Quinn Parsons, who killed Jill Madison’s parents eight years ago in a drunk driving incident and has now suddenly returned to town to make amends publicly. From there the plot moves on so quickly that before I could worry about my initial doubts, the killer is himself killed.

Madison’s brother becomes the prime suspect and the novel now really begins. Jill and her quirky friend Angie (all good detectives need a second fiddle) now concentrate on what might explain the behavior of Mr. Parsons and what might be the hidden motive of a new murderer. Undergirding this is an exploration of the nature of forgiveness in the form of the presence of a Civil War ghost meandering about in the art center rafters. Only Jill can see and hear him and he turns out to be the most interesting character in the book as he provides the key to understanding his own 19^th century demise, the killing of Jill’s parents, and the difficulty of forgiveness for an act that continues to haunt long after it has been committed.   

Van Kirk’s work is definitely becoming more sophisticated with each succeeding book she publishes. She shows better and more deft plotting, more interesting characters, and now a definite sense of playful humor. This is a fun read. It goes quickly and we get just enough serious thought about a significant moral issue to give the book more depth than the average cozy mystery.     

Within its genre this offering gets a solid 5 out of 5.     

Review of WAITRESS at Theatre Cedar Rapids

 Waitress by Lots o people

Marita May O’Connell has a wonderful voice and a lithe winsomeness in the title role of Jenna in Waitress at the Theatre Cedar Rapids (TCR), Still, she cannot carry a flawed book and a director who had a hard time controlling focus and keeping the supporting characters from going wild.

It is hard to know where to start here, but let’s note this adaptation from a long-shot winner at the Sundance Festival has been meddled with by a later film (which was pretty successful) and at least two Broadway re-incarnations. I haven’t seen any of them, but I find the coherence of the central image--a young woman from the south who has a lousy marriage and a penchant for making pies lacking. 

Think for a minute. Why pies? They are creamy sweet and happy. But a woman whose major goal in life is to bake them is consigned to the kitchen and apparently a group of men who want them to stay there and be pregnant. What would change in this piece if Jenna wanted to be a computer programmer? Earl remains a stupid redneck asshole with or without confining Jenna to the kitchen. Oogie would be an intolerable boor all the same. It is hard to believe that sensitive Jenna and shy little Dawn would find them attractive with or without a slice of pie, but if the women all had ambitions beyond waitress, those male creeps would be gone in a flash. And then there is our adultery-fueled sexual predator doctor. I am sure he would have jumped at the opportunity for some office nooky even if Jenna’s irrational smooch had not been offered? Pie does not deepen or help explain the plight of a pregnant woman in a bad relationship who tries to work through her issues by sleeping with her doctor? Is pie an aphrodisiac since her best friends are still copulating up a storm with nasty or looney men?  Let’s face it, this ship was leaking before it left the port. And that was before Jenna had apparently got drunk and been impregnated by her unprotected slob of a husband. 

I’ll mention two other areas briefly that contributed to my negative reaction. In the first act, the sound of the orchestra was so loud that it was hurting my wife’s ears. The amped-up mikes of the actors increased the din to the point that when I checked with several people in our group at the intermission, none of them could understand the lyrics or dialogue. Had we not been with the group, my wife and I would probably have left then and there. Thank goodness the sound engineer got that issue under better control in Act II and we could understand a bit more of what was going on and being sung about. 

I am still also bothered by the problem of figuring out what year this all took place. Pretty much before cell phones, but then Earl pulls one out to take a photo. Wierd! Certainly the woman's movement did not seem to have reached this southern town. Not much clue in the costumes either as the hemlines were all over the place. Dawn goes lime green stripes and pulls focus wherever she moves in the second act. Then there is the wedding in the cafe rather than a church. Maybe love is a table, but Evangelical Christianity which is a strong feature of the South, only gets a cursory treatment and a teenage pastor. . 

That brings me to the chorus or ensemble that meanders in and out at various times. They seemed to be more of a distracting background of unmotivated movement than a critical part of the action. Their contributions were limited to providing a desultory dance or two and some occasional backup vocals. The director appeared to have little interest in spending time with them. Most were young and needed a stronger hand on how focus works on a stage. My sense they were often marking time while waiting for their next contribution.     

TCR has done much better work than this.