Saving the world, one Cheeto at a time

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Probably more of a 3.5, but I rounded up due to originality--Hollow Kingdom is the story of a post-apocalyptic world told from the point of view of animals, mostly that of S.T., a domesticated crow who's lived with Big Jim (and a hound named Dennis) in Seattle. Somethings has affected humans, and S.T. starts a quest to help pets escape the homes they're trapped in now that their humans aren't caring for them.

I don't know that I would've picked up a post-apocalyptic book right (this was a book club choice), but it's a lot funnier and heart-warming than it might first appear. I appreciated S.T.'s journey of accepting the crow part of himself after a lifetime of living with a Mofo (as he calls humans) and learning to join the animal world. I also loved the glimpses into his life in the Before Times, finding out how he gained the knowledge that he has and seeing the misconceptions he has. Author Kira Jane Buxton also intersperses shorter chapters from other animals' POVs, some of them in Seattle and some around the world, giving us a broader perspective on what happened and what is happening.

I knocked it down a bit, though, because I found it slightly repetitive (though in a way that seems pretty realistic; there were a lot of fight scenes, some animal/animal, some animal/human, and I just tend to not attend to battle scenes very well) and I felt like it could've been tightened up a bit.

Ultimately, a book I enjoyed reading but not one I was ever particularly itching to pick back up and continue. There is a sequel, but I don't know that I'll ever feel motivated to read it.

Living the retired life

Capers in fabulous retirement communities seem to be having a moment, between Netflix's A Man on the Inside and The Thursday Murder Club book series and Netflix movie. And honestly, I am here for it. It's good to see that kind of age representation on screen, and also for people to see life in senior living communities.

I've seen some people say that Pacific View Retirement Community isn't realistic. It seems a lot of people--and, indeed, some of the media surrounding Inside--think that it's a nursing home. And it isn't. At nursing homes, people are generally getting a lot more care; it's generally even more than what you'd get in an assisted living facility. Rather, retirement communities tend to offer a continuum of care, where residents can live independently and, if needed, eventually move to assisted living (generally still with very nice apartments and amenities) and/or memory care. They're not nursing homes.

(Coopers Chase, in Thursday Night, is possibly unrealistic. The thing is, like, a castle. It was filmed where Pippa Middleton got married, for heaven's sake! And the apartments the characters live in match the setting. Pacific View is nice, but in a way that matches my experiences. But I also certainly don't know anyone in England in a fancy retirement community.)

What really struck me with Inside is how well it showed the different levels of care in the community (though it did generally skip over assisted living; there barely was anyone even with a cane, much less a walker or wheelchair), and I loved the depiction of life for the residents. Particularly, though Ted Danson's Charles moves in and immediately starts getting to know everyone and make friends (as part of his assignment to hunt down a jewelry thief), it shows that that's not the case for everyone. And the residents talk about how they handle the knowledge that they're in a community where many of them will die, where people will deteriorate physically and mentally. 

But these are communities! The activities we see at Pacific View and Cooper's Chase are accurate. There are happy hours and classes and sports and excursions. There's gossip and cliques. There are routines and resident committees. 

There were so many little moments in the show that hit him for me. Both of my grandmothers lived in retirement communities; my dad's mother lived in a couple before winding up in an assisted living facility. My mother has lived in all parts of a retirement community--independent living, assisted living, and memory care.

Colleen E. Hayes/Netflix

Both Man and Thursday Night deal quite directly with adults with memory loss and both were so well done. In both, a main character has a spouse with memory loss (both presumably Alzheimer's, but I don't remember whether it was specified in either); I feel like the portrayal in Thursday Night is a bit more idealized, perhaps, but everyone's journey is different (and I only hope Stephen stays at that plateau for a long, long time). Man, being a series, has a bit more time to spend, so we get to not only learn about Charles's experience as a caregiver, but also experience not only residents experiencing memory loss but also, again, how the other residents handle that situation.

None of it is easy. Charles and his daughter have a conversation near the end of the series that pretty much broke me. It all rings incredibly true.

These are both very much worth watching. Man is from Michael Shur, who did the Good Place and Parks and Rec and Brooklyn Nine Nine; it is very funny. (Bonus: One of the characters is an Orioles fan!) Shur is incredibly good at finding the balance of humor and poignancy. Thursday Night is less funny--though it certainly has its moments--but is a very fun whodunit. 

And they're both excellent reminders that life doesn't end at 30...or 40...or 70.  

More war against Spiritualism, less...whatever the rest of that was

 

⭐⭐

Boy, this book has promise that it just absolutely does not live up to. I was vaguely aware of Harry Houdini's crusade against Spiritualism (a system of beliefs/maybe a religion that's based on being able to communicate with the dead in various ways) and his disagreements with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the topic, so when Lincoln's Ghost: Houdini's War on Spiritualism and the Dark Conspiracy Against the American Presidency popped up, I was interested--particularly with the hook about Lincoln and the presidency.

I can tell you right off the bat that there's very very little about a "dark conspiracy against the American presidency" in this book. Author Brad Ricca uses a series of Congressional hearings about a Spiritualism-related bill, one in which Houdini seemingly played a large part, as a framing device for the book, and in those sections are snippets about various First Ladies and members of Congress attending seances--and even seances occurring in the White House itself. There are also some mentions of mediums perhaps foretelling the deaths of some Presidents. But...that's about it.

Mostly, the book bounces around in the 1910s and 1920s, focusing mostly on various ways Houdini went after Spiritualists. But sometimes it's about other people going after Spiritualists. And sometimes there's a long digression about whether John Wilkes Booth died at the Garrett farm in Virginia in April of 1865. (He did.) It is a very long digression and it's obviously right in my wheelhouse, but Ricca never actually connects it to Spiritualism, other than noting that Mary Todd Lincoln was into it. (Spiritualism. Not Booth surviving.) There is a recurring question about how much Abraham Lincoln was into Spiritualism, but it was hardly the driving story of the book.

Part of my problem is the way Ricca wrote the book. It's very much written like a novel, with dialogue that he couldn't possibly know and inclusions of what people were thinking and feeling at the time. It almost borders on historical fiction at times, with Ricca even noting at the end of the book that "This book is not meant to be a chronological transcript of history but a narrative built around it" and that he has "characterized certain scenes and even, in a few spots, dialogue that I have taken from other sources of the same speaker or imagined around facts" (loc. 4524).

I think I would've preferred just a chronological laying out of facts, particularly since he includes some things throughout the book that are confusing, until he explains them much later on. For example, there are excerpts of letters from Houdini to his wife, and one mentions his son becoming President. It's only at the end of the book that Ricca explains that the couple made up imaginary children and had them live imaginary lives.

This is partially so he can end with some, I guess, "gotchas" about Houdini and his wife, who may or may not have had a particularly medical disorder. Which isn't discussed until the Epilogue and is clearly something Ricca thinks should completely change how we view Houdini and has absolutely nothing to do with Spiritualism. (Or Lincoln. Or the presidency.)

There is a lot of jumping around in time, which has been annoying me in many books lately anyway and Ricca does not handle with any sort of aplomb. It's hard to remember when anything happens, particularly because there's a time jump between chapters and then there are random anecdotes with time jumps within chapters before we wind up back where we began. I couldn't tell you whether certain events happened before or after that Congressional hearing. And just so many names.

Ricca also winds up...I'm not going to say "alluding to," because that implies that he didn't spend a lot of time with these topics, which he did. He goes a bit into immigration, and anti-immigration sentiment in the late 1800s and early 1900s. He discusses the KKK a bit. There's a digression into one of the mediums being the president of an organization called the Patriotic Order of America, which did things like try to "end ballot manipulation" and "fight against 'discrimination' of white men" (loc. 3633). He implies that the man who gave Houdini that fateful punch did it because he was anti-Semitic, but I'm left wondering if that was actually the case. He spends a decent amount of time here, undoubtedly in response to, you know, *gestures at the world.* But it comes across awkwardly, even as I'm sympathetic to what he's saying.

Also, there were a handful of factual errors (no, Robert Todd Lincoln was not at Ford's Theatre with his father the night of the assassination [loc. 3526]) that I sure hope got changed before this book was published. But they're enough--along with Ricca's writing style, honestly, and note about imagining things--to kind of make me question other things in the book. And I hate to say that, as someone who has published books with an error (...or two) and gotten angry emails saying that now the reader can't believe anything in the book.

Honestly, if Ricca had taken his research and given a good (chronological!) history of the more well-known Spiritualists and how the religion worked (there's a chapter about a journalist infiltrating a Spiritualist camp that was particularly fascinating), with details about Houdini turning on it and how he crusaded against it--his reward for anyone who had a reading he couldn't prove was a trick, his showing up at Spiritualist events, even, yes, the proposed bill in Congress--I would've loved it. It doesn't make a book more interesting to mess around with timelines, and authors, you can't include all of your research, because research is full of digressions that aren't germane to your thesis.

I honestly can't really recommend it, though there are very interesting stories within.

Many thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for the advance reader copy. 

A gripping, heart-wrenching, little known story that needs to be told

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 

Not much kept this from being a 5-star review.

In The Zorg: A Tale of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery, Siddharth Kara explores the Zorg, a ship that transported slaves across the Atlantic around the time of the American Revolution. On one fateful journey in 1781, a number of factors came together that led to the massacre of more than a hundred enslaved people. The story was horrifying enough to make it a rallying cry in England that helped lead to the end of the slave trade and, indeed, the end of slavery in the UK. And it came to prominence because of an insurance claim.

I learned so much from this book, especially about the slave trade, from when Africans were captured through their journeys to the coast, their stays at the coast, the trips across the ocean, and auctions upon arriving at their destinations, and how abolition happened in the UK. But there's a LOT more in there. You're reading along and suddenly you get to something like "By the time independence was won, nearly half of all munitions used by the Americans had shipped through Sint Eustatius, and about half of all American communications with allies in Europe also passed through the island" (loc. 566). I had never even heard of Sint Eustasius! The British currency "guinea" comes from the slave trade, which makes SO much sense if you think about it. And while I was familiar with a lot of the abolitionist writings (largely thanks to having written my undergrad thesis on the effect of abolitionist writings on the Constitution and yes, thank you, Kara did name authors I recognized and was like "I read that pamphlet!"), the ramifications of the American Revolution on the slave trade were all new as well.

So why did I knock it down? The way Kara told the story didn't quite work for me. There was a lot of jumping among characters--and there were a lot of characters, which made sense, but it was sometimes hard to remember who was who and their place in the story. He also tended to fall back on "This decision would have disastrous consequences down the line" or "Who knows how things may have happened differently had this not happened" and the like, which I hate. This story doesn't particularly need foreshadowing.

That said, it was shocking the number of things that had to have happened in a certain way to allow for this atrocity to have happened, and Kara's research shines as he details it. He manages to balance the story of what happened and why without losing sight of the fact that the slaves who died were people. The book is a hard read, but Kara manages to find a balance; he writes about many egregiously awful details in a fairly straightforward way, but you can feel his horror at everything he learned. Is he at times clearly judgmental of people in this? He is, and who can blame him? If anyone deserves harsh judgment, it's these men profiting off the slave trade.

His utter contempt for Robert Stubbs, a former slave ship captain and former governor of a British African fortification, is both unmistakable and warranted. This man brought his 12-year-old son with him to Africa and then kind of just...left him there. Kara has many Thoughts about Stubbs and you don't have to wonder why. (Sample: "Robert Stubbs--a 'scoundrel' who brought his twelve-year-old son to Africa and abandoned him there, who used his position as governor at Anomabu to deal in slaves for personal profit, and who was 'wicked enough to say what he cannot justify.'" [loc. 3204])

The last third or so of the book is focused on how the horrors of the Zorg came into the public consciousness, the building of the abolitionist movement, and how progress was won in Parliament. The various trials include some details that Kara left out earlier in the book, probably for shock value when they come up in the trial, and let me tell you, it works. I gasped out loud, the way I have no doubt the spectators did. But I also found it reassuring, how progress can build and coincidences can bring people together. And also how people can change.

(Not Stubbs. Stubbs doesn't change.)

It's a hard book to read, but it's definitely worth your time.

Thanks to St. Martin's Press and NetGalley for the free advance copy in exchange for my honest opinion.  

At least they didn't get the Fabulous Baseball Diamond

We're all kind of obsessed with the Louvre heist, right? I mean, sure, it's probably because we collectively need something to distract us. I was going to say "something fun," but "fun" probably isn't the right word. It's bad that the people of France have lost their crown jewels! That's not OK! (And if you want a good visualization of what happened, the BBC has you covered.)

But honestly, ever detail about this heist is amazing. Which has led to some amazing memes, and honestly what more can we ask for?  

The fact that the Louvre heist didn’t take place at dawn, but at the very reasonable hour of 9:30 a.m. shows that even French jewel thieves have a better work-life balance than us.

— Leslie Gaar (@thelesliegaar.bsky.social) October 19, 2025 at 7:09 PM

hang this in the louvre (there's room now)

— derek guy (@dieworkwear.bsky.social) October 19, 2025 at 10:57 PM

I spend a year plotting a mystery novel and then this happens.

[image or embed]

— Maureen Johnson (@maureenjohnsonbooks.com) October 19, 2025 at 9:56 PM

This photo accompanying a news story about the heist at the Louvre is perfection.

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— Carrie Tait (@carrietait.bsky.social) October 19, 2025 at 5:56 PM

And, of course, I'd be remiss in neglecting to mention the other prominent jewel heist of a European museum. 

I think part of it, too, is that it's the French crown jewels. Had you asked me a week ago whether France even had crown jewels, I would've assumed no. I can't believe they made it through the Revolution! And I feel like people don't talk about them the way they talk about the British crown jewels...probably because the Brits still have a monarchy, so the jewels make appearances somewhat regularly.

I will say, having been to the Louvre and the Hermitage and other palaces in Russia, the level of monarchical ostentation in France and Russia is beyond anything I've seen at palaces in the UK. Going to the Peterhof, you look around and are like, "Yes. I can see why people revolted." It all fascinates me, but at the same time, I think that's part of the reason I can't be too upset. Though the thought of the individual pieces being broken up is sad; they truly are works of art.

Cats do cure problems. Even if you're allergic.

 

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Excellent timing for me to read Syou Ishida's We'll Prescribe You a Cat; I had to say goodbye to my second cat at the end of last year and a few weeks ago, my husband and I adopted a mother and kitten (who are now sleeping, piled up in a hammock next to the couch). Cats are special.

 

In Kyoto, a handful of people find themselves at a clinic that treats the soul that they heard about from a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-coworker's-brother's-cousin. Once there, the taciturn nurse and friendly-if-possibly-a-bit-vacant doctor prescribe each a cat. (One of my favorite bits of the book are the directions that come with the cats.) (Also the zoomies description.) Naturally, each person finds their life upended in small or large ways by the cat.

Is there magical realism? You better believe it.

The book is charming. The characters aren't necessarily likeable--even with the additions of the cats they're prescribed--but they are real. I was particularly moved by the young girl trying to deal with cliques at school and her mother. I also liked that not everyone wound up keeping their cats, which I didn't expect; I appreciated it being handled differently for each of the characters.

I kind of feel like I either wanted all of the characters somehow related, or none of them, and I could've done without the ending of the book. I liked what the geisha's story was trying to convey, but I didn't love that story itself. I wanted it to be left more ambiguously. Ah well.

They're all good cats.

Cute concept brought down by some poor characterization

⭐⭐⭐ 

Summer Reading, by Jenn McKinlay, is a cute enough read; my rating was definitely helped by the setting (Martha's Vineyard, where my husband and I spent a day on our honeymoon) and some trope-flipping (the male love interest, Bennett, is a librarian; the female main character, Samantha, doesn't read at all) (she is a chef, though, but one can only hope for so much when in a rom-com).

After losing out at a promotion at work, 28-year-old chef Sam returns home to Martha's Vineyard to watch her teenage half-brother Tyler for a few weeks while her dad and stepmom do some traveling in Europe. On the ferry, she accidentally knocks the book out of Ben's hand--right into the water. Ben, it turns out, is a temporary library director on the island for the summer to try to find out who his father is. Sam winds up balancing trying to bond with a 14-year-old, taking on some part-time chef work, catching up with her best friend Emily, and Ben and his search for his dad.

It's a cute concept and there's a lot to like. The island truly comes to life, and I loved the developing relationship between Sam and Tyler as well as Sam and Emily's friendship. You could feel their history, and it was nice getting mentions of their hijinks as kids without having to go into full-blown flashbacks (it IS possible, authors!).

However. Sam's defining characteristic is her dyslexia. That she has dyslexia interested, to see the world through that lens. (The print version of this book uses a dyslexia-friendly font, which is what my ereader defaulted to; since I don't like reading sans serif when I'm reading full books, I could happily switch to a serif font, but I love that the choices were made there.) Unfortunately, it overpowers the story. I liked learning about her coping mechanisms and seeing how dyslexia tied into her career--both why she became a chef and how it affected her work. But I got annoyed at both how she saw it hampering her life (Multiple men dumped her because of it!) (It's why she didn't get that promotion at work, even though she also talked about her boss being a raging misogynist!) (Kids called her "Simple Sam," a nickname I refuse to believe would have been used during the Obama administration!) and how over-the-top Ben was in supporting her ("You can problem solve in ways that my tiny brain can't even come up with" and "You intuit things that the rest of us can't even imagine because you are extraordinary" being the ones that really got to me).

Don't get me wrong. I love how he lifted her up and helped her self-esteem. (I didn't love how he didn't have a personality other than "loves books" and "rides a motorcycle.") I love that he got her into books by reading to her. She mentioned audiobooks at one point, but it doesn't seem that she ever actually tried them, and like, fine, but her hostility to books was somewhat off-putting, if understandable. You know what I would've loved? If she had been really into podcasts. That would've worked so well! Of course, that probably would've made her feel more confident in herself and her intellect, so that wouldn't work in the story. But she is so deep into how she and Ben could never be together because he's a librarian! And she has dyslexia! Even though Ben himself doesn't mind and falls all over himself to apologize after her sends her a bunch of texts and she ignores them! (Also, after one time of mentioning that she uses voice-to-text for texting, we didn't need to hear that explained every. time. she used her phone.)

There was also some cringey dancing that kept popping up throughout the book in a way that felt awkward, not cute.

Overall, the story itself was good. I just kept getting frustrated by it. It looks like McKinlay's next book is about Sam's friend Emily--in Ireland!--and I can see myself checking that one out.

Ford's Theatre's trip to the March on Washington is more than worth your time

The American Five culminates with images and videos of the March on Washington in August of 1963. The 2+ hours leading up to that moment are captivating.

The play, making its premiere after being done as a reading in Ford's Theatre's 2024 First Look festival of new plays, is the story of what led up to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. (The words "I have a dream" aren't uttered in the play; those words were ad libbed on the day.) We see Martin (Ro Boddie) and Coretta Scott King (Renea S. Brown) early in their relationship (the reaction to Martin's line “I can see you speaking for me when I can’t speak for myself…” was strong); we see Bayard Rustin (Stephen Conrad Moore) preach to Martin about nonviolence; we see Martin rise in prominence and become friends with Stanley Levison (Aaron Bliden) and Clarence B. Jones (Yao Dogbe) and have them join his inner circle. We see Martin in the Birmingham jail and the idea for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom form.

The brilliance of the play is that while it revolves around Martin, we get to spend time with the other characters and see how they deal with each other, without Martin, and who they are. There's a reason the play is titled The American Five and doesn't mention Martin Luther King, Jr. The relationship between Stanley (who frequently points out that he's not white, he's Jewish!) and Clarence was particularly fascinating, particularly toward the end of the play as they hash out what the focus of Martin's speech should be.

The cast of The American Five at Ford's Theatre. Photo by Scott Suchman.

 

Another notable scene that's gotten a lot of mentions in reviews is one between Martin and Coretta. Martin has just met with President Kennedy and is trying to cope with that pressure, plus knowing that this huge march is coming up, plus all of his other obligations as a leader and a minister. Coretta stands up for herself as the one who does the work so he can do the work. It really lands in a way that it probably wouldn't have in 1963, when the scene is set. There's another part later in the show that touches on intersectionality--Coretta being a woman, Stanley being Jewish, and Bayard being gay.

I love that the play doesn't shy away from showing Martin Luther King, Jr., as a person with flaws. Yes, it acknowledges his affairs in a scene where you both profoundly empathize with him even as you roll your eyes at his excuses. The weight of his knowledge of his own place in history clearly hangs heavy on his shoulders.

And let me tell you, the acting in this show is phenomenal, all five of them. I've seen all of them except Moore in other shows; this is my second time seeing Boddie as King--the other being in The Mountaintop, which he starred in with Brown. I also saw Boddie and Dogbe in Topdog/Underdog, which, woof. They blew me away in that, too; such a powerful show that I am still gutted by. Boddie continues to be a fantastic King; I obviously never got a chance to see King speak myself, but seeing Boddie play him feels like the next best thing. Listening to him, you can understand why people were drawn to him, and it made me want to pull up and read more of King's speeches and writings. 

Honestly, they were all amazing. Brown absolutely owns the stage as Coretta and her chemistry with Boddie is strong. Moore disappears into Bayard Rustin; the pain of his life as a gay Black man in mid-century American shines through even as he jokes around and spurs Martin on. The cast clicks completely; I could've watched them for a much longer show.

It's depressing how much of this show still hits home today. A fantastic debut from playwright Chess Jakobs; here's hoping it has a strong life in theaters across the country.  

Compelling and thought-provoking...but with an annoying main character. Can't have it all.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

More of a 3.5, but the ending helped. Also, even though I didn't really like the main characters, I found the story and writing compelling. Also, it's told chronologically! Huzzah!

From a young age, Steph knows that she wants to go to space. She's being raised by a single mother in Oklahoma; a Cherokee, she's focused on this quest while those around her deal with their history, both as Native Americans and their own personal journeys and the history of their specific people. The book is mostly told from Steph's point of view, but we get a bunch of chapters from that of her college girlfriend, and we later have interspersed emails and social media posts from others to get glimpses into their lives.

Steph is laser-focused on her goal; it makes it hard for the people around her (from a friend/love interest: "We eat snacks, I talk, and you sit here giving me absolutely nothing, like you're in the witness protection program" and "You're funny. At least, I've decided you are. You're cute. You mean well, I think") and it makes her hard to like ("It's good to be well-rounded, I thought, when you are a person with no dreams"), though her discipline is admirable. She does eventually grow, but it takes the vast, vast majority of the book...and a shark attack, which is about the last thing I expected in this book 

We also get a lot of Kayla, Steph's sister. Young Kayla is into art and is very interested in her Native ancestry. She doesn't have the dreams Steph does and lives a completely different life. A lot of the book is dealing with your personal history, about how Steph and Kayla's mother tells the story of their ancestors, and gave me a lot to reflect on, about how we think of our ancestors:

• "He said to stop thinking of our tribe as its history"
• "Kayla still looked to our ancestors as fighters, people whose every complexity could be forgiven in their fight to survive"
• "...these people didn't live for you to use them for whatever point you're out to make. If we met them today, I think we'd disagree on a lot of things"
• "I've been trying to learn more about them, to understand them not as the ancestors, but as people"

This hit particularly close to home for me; I recently visited the house of an ancestor who was killed on the first day of the American Revolution, a story I knew. When my husband and I got a tour of his house, we learned that evidence shows that an enslaved person lived there, too. I'm still grappling with that.

So while I didn't like Steph, I liked a lot of what she was dealing with. She never grappled with being gay, per se, but there was a lot of trying to figure out if other people were gay and the period where civil unions were a thing but gay marriage wasn't, and how she felt about that. (It also gave us this quote from Steph's mom: "I know haircuts like that are sacred to the lesbian people.") I liked seeing her relationship with her heritage in contrast with her sister's, and how both seemed extreme, if in opposite ways. Dealing with our own stories and traumas and history was central to the book.

This is particularly true for Della, Steph's college girlfriend. Her parents (or maybe just father?) was Native American, but her birth mother gave her up for adoption, and she spent her earliest years caught up in court battles between her adoptive, Mormon parents and her Indian father. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and Della winds up spending a lot of time grappling with her religion and upbringing and beliefs and family, and what they all mean to her. I found her story compelling, possibly moreso than Steph's. I was very very happy to have a check-in with Della late in the book, to see where she wound up.

I also liked Steph and Della's college story, spending time with NASA (the Native American student group at their school; Steph's mother's reaction to the name was perfection) and seeing how everyone there interacted, with their different backgrounds. What about their college experience was like mine, if a few years later, what was different?

So while the book (i.e., Steph herself) was frustrating, it's a book worth picking up. It goes some unexpected places and I'm bummed there are scenes we didn't get to see and it gave me a lot to think about.

Thank you to Avid Reader Press and NetGalley for the advance copy in exchange for my opinion.

A Merry old time at Shakespeare

One of my absolute favorite DC actresses is Felicia Curry. I saw her as Eponine in Les Mis at Signature back in 2008 and was blown away. I've been fortunate to see her in many shows and roles since then, and was delighted when I saw that she'd be in Merry Wives at Shakespeare Theatre. Further, Merry Wives of Windsor is a Shakespeare play with which I have basically zero familiarity; I know it involves Falstaff, from the Henry IV plays, but that's about all. So I was excited to see the play.

I was rewarded, because Merry Wives was a delight. It's a very typical Shakespeare comedy. Like Play On, it features an all-Black cast and is set in Harlem (though in present day, not in the 1920s, which is appropriate--Merry Wives of Windsor is apparently the only contemporary play Shakespeare wrote). It clocks in at a bit under 2 hours and is kept to a single act, which I appreciate; this kind of farce works better when momentum is allowed to build and play out quickly. (It also benefits from audience members not getting a ton of time to contemplate plot points.)

Jacob Ming-Trent and Felicia Curry in Merry Wives at Shakespeare Theatre Company. Photo by Teresa Castracane Photography.

In the play, Falstaff (Jacob Ming-Trent) tries to seduce two wealthy women, Madam Page (Oneika Phillips) and Madam Ford (Curry), both of whom are happily married. He decides to do this by sending them identical love letters. They're best friends, so immediately realize what he's done, but decide to mess with him. Mr. Page is a jealous guy and gets wind of Falstaff's plan, so decides to pretend he's someone else to see if he can find out if his wife is cheating on him. Meanwhile, a bunch of people want to marry Anne Page (Peyton Rowe), partly because she's beautiful and partly because her dad is rich. 

The play was adapted by Jocelyn Bioh; over 90% of the text is Shakespeare and while some of what was added by Bioh is obvious (mentions of LeBron James, etc.), it isn't always super clear where Shakespeare ends and Bioh begins. The program notes that the original play is 88% prose, unusually high for Shakespeare. It all flows together incredibly well. 

One standout for me is Shaka Zu, who begins the play with some African drumming, drawing the audience into the play and messing with us at the same time: the perfect combination for this farce. He pops up throughout the play and is an absolute delight.

The play itself is delightfully gay, only some of which is a slight stray from the original text. Anne's true love is played by a woman, and the show ends with two of her other suitors unintentionally marrying other men. Nobody seems upset about it (and it seems that's how the original play ends as well). There's a lot of excellent physical humor, plus an excellent African dance sequence.

I didn't love the many comments throughout the play about how fat Falstaff is, though of course that's one of his defining characteristics. It's all derogatory and unnecessary, in my opinion, and I wouldn't have been upset if Bioh had edited those out. It did make it interesting to me that the actress playing Anne Page--the object of many people's desire, described numerous times as beautiful and attractive--is plus-sized. If that's how the creative team chose to counter the negative depiction of Falstaff's size, I'm pretty good with that. Though again...I could've just done without the fat jokes.

As people exited the theater after the show, the talk was unanimously of what a good time they had and how fun the show was. It's definitely worth checking out.