A love letter to friendship

⭐⭐⭐⭐
 

I wasn't as in love with this book as I was with Maame, but I still really really liked this.

Remy has written a bestseller based on her relationship with her three close friends, but life has pulled them in different directions (one had a baby, one moved to New York, etc.). She bumps into Simone, with whom she went to school (though they weren't close), and the two manage to become friends--even though Simone keeps herself closed off from the world after her family finds out that she has a side hustle as an escort. It's sort of a black cat/golden retriever trope situation.

Author Jessica George does an amazing job exploring friendships--making new ones, uncertainty about established ones. Remy finds herself adrift; she quit her job after the success of her book and now is trying to deal with writer's block while also not having anything (or anyone, other than her mother) to anchor herself. Simone's sister was her best friend, but after becoming estranged from her family, Simone's talked herself into believing that she doesn't need anyone. George's depiction of adult loneliness struck home over and over; I certainly remember having the same revelation as Remy: "I'm not the priority. Their own families and careers will come before me, of course they will" (loc. 304).

The book focuses pretty much exclusively on friendship, not romance, which I appreciate. I've dealt with the loss of friendships over the years (who hasn't), some with blow-up endings and some drifting. We get older and people make different choices about their lives and relationships and careers and children and it's hard to maintain friendships, and there's a lot of reflection on that that I so appreciated:

"I keep debating whether I'm being overly emotional and that this is an expected part of life, that I'm just supposed to move on. The girls all seem to be doing exactly that, and it breaks my heart that I'm the only one reacting like this. I'm the only one who seems hurt and impacted by their absence. It makes me feel like my friendship wasn't meaningful enough. You only miss what you truly loved, right?" I look away. "Maybe that's on me, maybe I loved harder than I can be loved." (loc. 2513)

---

I decided I'd much rather devote time and emotional energy to my friends, rather than to a romantic partner. It had never fully occurred to me that, someday, my friends would not do the same. (loc. 519)

---

Or maybe it's comparable to romantic relationships, where after years together, it's less about trying to replicate what you once had an more about growing alongside each other, and allowing the other person to change. Maybe the answer lies in figuring out how we maintain what we have with distance and new priorities between us? (loc. 2132)

Not that that 100% describes me--I am not as good a friend as Remy is, to be sure--but it resonated as I reflected on my relationships over the years.

There's also a decent amount of discussion about having children or not having children, (view spoiler) There's acknowledgment that women aren't necessarily meant to have children, and that there's a middle ground between women who want children and women who don't want children. There's so much nuance and grace given permeating the book.

One minor quibble is that while the actual plot ending worked for me, it dragged on a bit too long. I didn't need a "6 months later" AND a "1 year later" AND an epilogue. We did need that information to wrap up these stories--or, at least, these parts of these stories--but I can't help but feel like it could've been handled a different way.

Still, highly recommend. George manages to take a lot of nuanced relationships and situations and bring them to a satisfying place. This book hasn't even released yet and I'm already looking forward to what Jessica George does next.

Thank you to the St. Martin's Press and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Hallmark Movie Roundup: The Way to You

Title: The Way to You (2026)

Actor(s) You Know: 
Leads Kim Matula and Aaron O'Connell have both been in a bunch of Hallmark movies, but nobody really recognizable outside the Hallmark Cinematic Universe.

Plot: 
New Yorkers Emma and Conrad each have meet-cutes on the New York subway during a blackout. Conrad places an ad to try to find the woman he was talking to, but Emma is the one who answers the ad. She realizes she can probably help him find his missing lady, and he agrees to help her try to find a date amongst his coworkers. (They work in finance, so the script makes Conrad extra nice to make up for it.)

Trope(s):
    Royalty
    Alternate reality
    Small town 
    Fake relationship
    Family business getting sold/going bankrupt
    Enemies-to-lovers
    Best friends-to-lovers
    Second chance
    Stranded

Meet Cute: 
The cutest meet is Conrad and the woman he meets on the subway--she drops her copy of The Count of Monte Cristo, he returns it to her, and they chat on the subway.

Rundown:
    Dead parents
    Montage(s) ✔
    Christmas-related name(s) 
    Animals
    Returns to hometown
    Is Santa a character? 
        Secretly or overtly?
    Cookie baking ✔
    Tree decorating
    Somebody hates Christmas
    Christmas festival in a small town 
    A literal competition
    Child plays matchmaker
    All work, no romance/life
    Kiss before the end of the movie
    Interrupted kiss 
    Flashback to childhood
    The leads literally run into each other
    Gratuitous shirtless scene
    Big Secret
    Wacky misunderstanding
    Just. Talk. To. Each. Other.
    Someone pushing the leads together 
    Real family = chaos / bad families = cold and not chaotic
    Learns the meaning of Christmas
    Stranded by snowstorm
    Hot chocolate 
    Ice skating
    D-list celebrity
    Enemy-to-friend storyline
    The love interest is an ex
    Career change
    Lying to each other
    Tries to apologize, but keeps getting cut off
    Christmas pageant 
    End with a flash-forward

Did I actually like/root for the heroine? How do the lead(s) annoy me?
Both Conrad and Emma are pretty likable. Conrad is perhaps a bit too perfect (unless you count being an early bird a flaw); Emma is a bit more balanced, but still likable.

Is it in any way not completely generic? 
I thought they did the new-friends-who-grow-to-like-each-other plot quite well; the progression worked. Good side characters. That said, Emma works in an art gallery. However, working in finance didn't make Conrad evil, so there's that. (His parents got caught in a Ponzi scheme, so he's a Good Finance Guy.) (Note that my father also worked in finance, so I don't default to finance guys = evil, but I get the stereotype.) But no bad finance bros. Even the guy Emma winds up dating a bit isn't bad; they just don't click as a couple.

Is the BFF actually the best? Do they need their own movie?
Emma's sister and brother-in-law are adorable and I love them. Would 100% watch their movie. Probably also one about Conrad's boss Lance and his wife.

How is the romantic alternative wrong for the heroine? 
Emma goes on a date with one of Conrad's coworkers and there's no spark; after Conrad finds his Mysterious Subway Lady, she gives dating the coworker another guy. He's totally fine! (Except something of a lack of sense of humor.) But it's nicely realistic! Sometimes people are OK but you just don't have that spark.

Thoughts/Other Notes:
This was cute! I liked that there were some good book discussions in there and I liked Conrad getting interested in art. Good chemistry, good side characters. Recommend.

Rating:
🧀🧀🧀🧀

A history that breaks the heart: How the Tulsa Massacre was shaped by history—and memory

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 

I think the first time I heard about the Tulsa riot/massacre was a news story that was about the effort to find mass graves. If I recall, the people doing the searching didn't find what they were looking for, but it did make an impression on me.

Riot and Remembrance: The Tulsa Race War and Its Legacy was first published in 2002; the edition I read had a preface in 2021, written for the 100th anniversary of the event, when the massacre was very much on people's minds after the summer of 2020. Author James S. Hirsch begins the new preface by noting "Anytime you write a book about a historical event, the question inevitably arises: What relevance does that event have today? No one is asking that anymore about the Tulsa race massacre of 1921" (p. 6).

This is an excellent book. Hirsch goes through the history of Tulsa, describing how the city developed and the attitudes of the residents and how those led to the events of May 31-June 1, 1921 ("Even in its early boom years, the city's lawlessness was virtually impossible to stop" [p. 33]); I was surprised to learn how new a city Tulsa is and how ingrained racism was in Oklahoma and Tulsa itself ("The ascendancy of the Democratic Party at statehood . . . meant the denial of civil liberties to blacks, but Oklahoma was determined to out-Jim Crow the other southern states" [p. 44]). Hirsch goes into racial violence and lynching and the tropes that white people believed about Black people being happy during slavery and how that affected race relations in the 1920s:

The "new Negro" was the malevolent counterpart of the "old Negro," or "Sambo," whom whites invented during slavery and later romanticized in merchandise as a simple, carefree "darky" who lived in an antebellum racial utopia. The "new Negro," according to this view, lacked the civilizing restraints of slavery and was therefore regressing to a state of barbarism. Physical force was the only way to restrain him. (p. 62)

Hirsch describes the precipitating events and what happened in Tulsa during the massacre, but it took up less of the book than I expected. It's still hard to read. Part of the issue goes hand-in-hand with the second part of the book title: "remembrance." Because in the years after the massacre, a lot of the primary documents disappear. There's debate about whether a newspaper published an editorial "To Lynch a Negro Tonight"; the editorial page and front-page story about the inciting incident were both cut from the newspaper's bound volumes. Even the official documentation has disappeared. So mostly what we're left with is what participants and victims told their descendants.

Hirsch details what happened after the massacre, what happened to the residents of Greenwood (which was awful and incredibly degrading, which shouldn't have surprised me but still did) in the immediate aftermath and as time went on. He talks about the town rebuilding and what happened to various people involved, and then how it was remembered--or denied.

Essentially, white people believed that Black people invaded their side of town and they had to defend themselves. Black people believed that a Black teenager was going to be lynched for assaulting a white woman--a white woman who pretty quickly denied that she was assaulted and said she wouldn't pretty charges--and so they went to where he was being held to prevent that from happening. In the time to come, both groups came to believe certain things, whether or not those were factual.

Hirsch spends a lot of the book going into the remembrance of the event, how people try to deny it, how it was discussed or not, how it was researched, how the threat of another one loomed over the residents of Tulsa, both Black and white, how it was commemorated. A commission was assembled in the 1990s to study it and make recommendations, including about reparations. He gets into what actually happened as well as he can.

I appreciated how even-handed he was. The horrors of the destruction of Greenwood aren't denied; he delves a lot into issues like whether the area was firebombed and whether there were mass graves of victims. (Having read this, I feel like planes definitely flew over the area but didn't bomb it; there were definitely more victims that the official tally, but I'm unsure about the mass graves.) He tells the stories of victims with respect and my heart absolutely broke for them, but he doesn't accept everything they say at face value. He does tell their story, sharing things, for example, like the idea that the massacre was planned by white city officials; my impression is more that these people took advantage of what was going on to destroy Greenwood, but they didn't plan it. Circumstances were definitely in their favor. He follows Don Ross, a Black journalist-turned-politician (who fought to get the Confederate flag off the capitol grounds) throughout the remembrance section. Ross is a fascinating figure and this from him really struck me:

When a white interviewer suggested that race relations had improved since the 1950s, [Ross] leaned forward and glared. "How in the hell can you tell me that?" he demanded. "You know, you talk about privilege and entitlement. The biggest entitlement white folks have is the entitlement of being white. Break that for me . . . I mean, it don't make sense to me, the white folks' attitude, that somehow I ought to be appreciative that you don't hate me as much. That's the progress. Once you would physically kill me, and I have evidence of that, and now you just choke me to death economically and politically and socially, and you want me to say that's progress from dying! 'Because you sonofabitch you, we coulda killed your black a**,' that's what you're telling me. But now we let you live, and I'm proud of that progress. White folks let me live. Until I get the same entitlement irrespective of skin color, f**k you . . . But I love you. (p. 228)

I feel like I learned a lot from this book, and as a history major, the discussion of how events are remembered, officially and unofficially, fascinated me. But ultimately, the book just broke my heart over and over again.

Recommend.

Helen Hayes nominations reaction post

Washington had a really solid theater year (if we, um, completely ignore everything that happened with the management of the Kennedy Center, which certainly cast a dark shadow over the city). The Helen Hayes nominations were recently announced and honestly, I have no idea how I'd vote in some of the categories.

If you're unfamiliar, the Helen Hayes Awards are for DC-area theaters and are divided into categories based on the number of Equity members involved in the production; the Hayes awards are for productions with more Equity members and Helen awards are for those with fewer. There are also some separate categories for resident and non-resident productions, so touring productions can get nominated but aren't always up against local productions. Interestingly, the acting categories are:

• Outstanding Performer, Non-Resident Production
• Outstanding Supporting Performer in a Musical 
• Outstanding Supporting Performer in a Play
• Outstanding Lead Performer in a Musical
• Outstanding Lead Performer in a Play
• Outstanding Ensemble in a Musical
• Outstanding Ensemble in a Play 

and then the overall production awards are:

• Outstanding Production, Theatre for Young Audiences
• Outstanding Non-Resident Production
• Outstanding Production - Musical
• Outstanding Production - Play

The nominees for ensemble in a musical (Hayes) are Damn Yankees (Arena), Guys and Dolls (Shakespeare), In the Heights (Signature), Sister Act (Ford's), and The Untitled Unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson Musical (Signature). Outstanding production of a musical (Hayes) nominees are Damn Yankees, Fiddler on the Roof (Signature), Guys and Dolls, Hedwig and the Angry Inch (Signature), Play On! (Signature), and The Untitled Unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson Musical. I was fortunate enough to have seen all of these productions.

(Also, shout-out to Ford's for its nominations for not just Sister Act, but also The American Five, which was fantastic and also got a bunch of nominations. Other shows I saw that got nominated for outstanding production and/or performers: Kunene and the King [Shakepeare], Merry Wives [Shakespeare], Waitress [Olney] and What the Constitution Means to Me [Round House], plus the touring production of Some Like It Hot. I'm surprised that Parade, which went through the Kennedy Center, didn't get any awards; perhaps an unofficial ineligibility? I wouldn't have been surprised at nominations for for Frankenstein [Shakespeare], Uncle Vanya [Shakespeare], or Schmigadoon [touring at the Kennedy Center], all of which were also great.)

I do appreciate that there are separate categories for outstanding ensemble and outstanding production, because there are certainly some shows I've seen in the past where I've loved the cast but wouldn't be able to give the show itself an award. I think my award for Best Ensemble would be In the Heights, but Best Production is probably Fiddler. Clearly, Signature had an amazing year.

I loved Guys & Dolls and thought that Sister Act was super fun, and found Hunter S. Thompson both really enjoyable and thought-provoking. Damn Yankees was an absolute delight and Hedwig was really well done. But Fiddler absolutely blew me away and In the Heights was also just magical. For me, Fiddler, particularly, was a transformative production; it changed how I saw the show itself. And if a production does that, I want to throw awards at it.

A solidly Plot-ted thriller

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 

More of a 3.75; The Plot is definitely closer to 4 stars than 3 stars.

Jacob Bonner had a promising debut novel, a disappointing follow-up, and then found himself wandering the world of a novelist who doesn't really have another one in him...but doesn't have the skills for anything else. So he winds up teaching at a program where a student tells him the plot for the novel he's working on; Bonner realizes that the student is right, the plot is guaranteed to be a hit, but over the years, the novel never appears. After finding the student died, Bonner writes the book himself (using just the central conceit of the book) and becomes a celebrity novelist, getting the fame, fortune, and even love he didn't really think was possible. But he's living with the guilt of having stolen the idea.

Of course, ideas can't be stolen; as is detailed in the book, you can only copyright actual written material. Even so, Bonner has a hard time living with himself. He knows that he did the work of writing the book himself, and after years of teaching and doing online writing consulting, he is very well aware that someone having an idea for a book is very different than actually writing it. I wonder how much of the guilt was because the student was a competent writer; not a great one, but decent.

We do learn the big twist of the plot eventually, for which I was very relieved; there's a lot of talk in the book about how it's this huge can't miss idea, guaranteed to be picked up and directed by a big name, will definitely sell millions, etc. And when I got to the twist, it was...you know, good. It's a solid story. It's not something that's never been done before, certainly (and I listen to and read enough true crime to know that it's something that has happened in real life many times). Is it a good story? Yes. I don't know that it would help Bonner to realize that the book probably wouldn't have been as big a hit if the student had written it; Bonner has the training and experience of being a good writer to turn the book into a hit. Like, I'm sure other people had probably written Gone Girl-like books before Gillian Flynn did; they just didn't go anywhere.

So I found the beginning of the book more interesting than the rest, when Bonner starts poking around the student's life after getting "You're a thief" messages from someone online. I loved the look into the writing program where he taught and how it just kept getting sadder over the years; I loved him setting himself up as a writing consultant online and working at a hotel-turned-writer's-retreat. I honestly probably would've been happy with a book about him working at that hotel, trying to eke out a life that way.

The ending worked for me, though I got a bit frustrated with Bonner not putting certain pieces together sooner in the story. Of course, it is hard when you're the main character in a story because you don't realize you are the main character of a story, and that your life will involve twists of its own.

A compelling thriller. I'll probably pick up The Sequel at some point.

Romance round up

⭐⭐⭐ 

I enjoy author Olivia Dade's writing and particularly enjoyed At First Spite, the first book in this series, so I was very excited for Second Chance Romance to come out. Unfortunately, I was a bit disappointed.

Molly moved a ton growing up, so she learned not to put down roots and make attachments. But in high school, she wound up in Harlot's Bay, Maryland, where she became friends with Karl. They liked each other and almost kissed, but neither pursued it and Molly abruptly moved across the country. They stayed in touch for a bit, but eventually, 20 years have passed and Molly and Karl haven't spoken. Then Molly hears Karl died, so she heads back to Maryland. He's very much alive, very much wants her to stick around, and they are both very very bad at communicating.

The basic conflict is good. Molly and Karl both suck at communicating. Molly has some pretty solid reasons; Karl shows his feelings via actions, but is truly terrible at actually talking to people. I probably would have liked this a bit more if Karl were literally better at talking; a lot of his dialogue is in sentence fragments, which just grated on me after a while. And I guess some people are just like this, but it kind of bothered me that there wasn't any backstory about why Karl, for example, was sick with flu for a week and told literally nobody about it, even though they were checking in on him. He doesn't listen when people try to tell him things, and I was a bit turned off when, very early into Molly's time in Harlot's Bay, he told her that he wanted her to move across the country for him. (But not saying it would be "for him," of course.) At that point, he didn't know much about her life in LA and it just struck me as incredibly presumptuous.

Molly, happily, is much more likeable, even if she is also a grump. Her backstory made sense to bring her to the place where she is in the book. She spends the book trying to figure out whether she trusts Karl and examining her feelings and trying to determine what could change her mind (and heart). Her journey felt real to me. Karl, on the other hand, naturally has some revelations late in the book, but I just never really warmed up to him.

Still, I like the world of Harlot's Bay. I'd love to read a book about Lise.

---

 ⭐⭐⭐⭐

I had already gotten A Novel Love Story home from the library when I noticed it's by, Ashley Poston, the author of The Dead Romantics, which I quite enjoyed. The premise intrigued me--lost in a storm in New York's Catskills, Elsy takes an exit and winds up in what she realizes is the town from her favorite romance series. Everything and everyone is familiar, except Anders, the town's bookstore owner...who also happens to be the only other one to know that they're in a fictional town.

I really liked this. The romance series isn't done--the author died in a car crash between books 4 and 5--and Elsy finds a town that's stuck. Poston explores whether happily ever afters actually are and the perils of a town in stasis. She grapples with grief, over the death of a loved one and the death of a relationship. She examines how people need to be careful to remain themselves in relationships, both romantic and friendship, and how easy it can be to just try to be go along and coast in the wake of someone else.

I loved Elsy getting to interact with her favorite characters and I think Poston did a good job handling the details of the magical fictional town (e.g., details like WiFi and cell coverage). Elsy has to deal with the fact that she's interacting with people whom she knows intimately but has to act like she doesn't; she has to try not to butterfly effect anything, but it's hard to not blurt out what you think after spending years reading and re-reading and discussing. And getting comments from the various characters on what their lives are actually like was great; glimpses of authorial intent vs. reality for the characters. And I liked the reveal at the end of the book about Anders, as well as Elsy figuring out what to do with her own life. I liked how much this was about friendship.

That said, I do wish we had actually seen some of the minor characters; they were mentioned, and there were a few group scenes, but I don't think any of them even had a line in the book. I also got frustrated with Elsy a few times in the book for not figuring out a few things more quickly (mostly just about where she has cell service in town). I think Poston managed to make Eloraton come across as less twee than the town in Dead Romantics--though it probably is that twee in the actual series--there were a still a few elements that were a bit much. But the artifice of the premise helped.

Still, I read the vast majority of this book in one sitting. A good balance of high-concept and real emotion. 

Looking back to King for a road ahead

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

I never know whether it's encouraging or depressing to read books about history and feel hit over the head again and again with parallels to what we're dealing with today.

This biography of Martin Luther King, Jr., is fantastic. Author Jonathan Eig does an amazing job truly bringing King to life. He never puts King up on a pedestal; his King is fully human and his more problematic traits--particularly his womanizing and his plagiarizing--are addressed throughout the book. (Also, and it comes up a lot, King was not tall. He was 5'7". People throughout the book are like, "He was shorter than I expected.")

Eig brings home that King never really planned what wound up being his career in civil rights; he wanted to preach, maybe go into academia. (I wonder how that would've affected his plagiarism?) He basically wound up caught up in events; he knew he wanted to preach in a Southern church, but it was luck or fate or what-have-you that brought him to a church in Montgomery, Alabama to be there for the bus boycott.

Reading the book, it also hit home how much King (and other leaders) were winging it. They'd try to create organizations but didn't really have much in the way of plans or goals or methodology. Decisions frequently were made spontaneously, which was understandably frustrating for many people involved. And King wound up walking a tightrope of the fight for civil rights while trying to leverage his relationship with the Kennedys/LBJ. He was blasted by other activists as not doing enough; he was blasted by many as being too radical. And there was no clear path for what he was trying to do.

His commitment to nonviolence was striking. He was attacked and literally kept his arms at his sides. Eig takes us on King's journey; his thoughts weren't always on nonviolence being the best path, but when he committed, he committed. His acceptance of his own death also made an impression. There was just so much violence all around him, from the violence during marches to bombs being thrown into people's home and churches to activists getting murdered, King knew his own murder was inevitable, particularly as the 1960s progressed. He was under so much stress, felt all the pressure of winning the Nobel Peace Prize and being Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the leader everyone looked to, agonized over the knowledge that the FBI was trying to plant stories in the media about his adultery and what that could mean for him (not to mention the FBI trying to get him to kill himself, good Lord, J. Edgar Hoover really was the worst). It all weighed on him as he took the civil rights battle to the north, where he discovered people were just as bad as in the South. Some people thought his job was done, with various civil rights bills signed into law, but he saw more and more how much needed to change. He became more radical in his thinking, speaking out against the Vietnam War, which Eig points out again and again was still fairly popular with the general population, and more people hated him and he felt he wasn't doing enough and he was tired. There was so much to do, and he knew he didn't have much time.

King's gift was in his words, both spoken and written. The story of "Letter From Birmingham Jail" was fascinating, but what impressed me about Eig's storytelling is how he managed to convey King's speeches and preaching via the written word. His descriptions of how King actually spoke was stellar. And I just wanted to go through and underline so much of what King said because it remains powerful and applicable. His words resonate today as they did 60 years ago.

This book is incredibly worth the read. Eig's narrative is engaging; it's a big book, but it goes quickly. And the acknowledgments and notes are also worth a look.

I'll end with how Eig ends his story:

Young people hear his dream of brotherhood and his wish for children to be judged by the content of their character, but not his call for fundamental change in the nation's character, not his cry for an end to the triple evils of materials, militarism, and racism.

...Where do we go from here? In spite of the way America treated him, King still had faith when he asked that question. Today, his words might help us make our way through these troubled times, but only if we actually read them; only if we embrace the complicated King, the flawed King, the human King, the radical King; only if we see and hear him clearly again, as America saw and heard him once before.

"Our very survival," he wrote, "depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change."

Amen. (pp. 556-557)

Hallmark Movie Roundup: The Weekend of Hallmark Movies

A friend and I got an Airbnb for the weekend and pretty much spent the entire time just watching Hallmark movies (and snacking). It was glorious and I highly recommend it to everyone. I don't have the energy to do full posts about each movies, but obviously I must share some thoughts.

For Love & Honey (2024): Andrew Walker is an archaeology professor in Malta, looking for something mentioned in an old manuscript. The treasure is bees, which he discovers with the help of a local beekeeper who runs a successful apiary. Whatever money the Malta tourism board paid for this movie was well worth it; Malta looked gorgeous. And Andrew Walker looks hot in sunglasses, so it's a win-win.
Dead Mother: Yes 

The Magic of Lemon Drops (2024): Lolly works at a restaurant with her father, who won't let her alter the menu in literally any way. Her aunt, who is #LifeGoals, gives Lolly four magic lemon drops--she can use three to see what her life could be and the fourth to choose to stay in one of those lives. The moral of this story is that if you manage to save one of your parents by a wish, the other will be dead in the alternate timeline. I appreciate that she rejected one timeline because it meant stifling her love interest's goals. That said, the logistics of the movie were confusing (the love interest worked for the Columbus Blue Jackets but was moving to a "cottage" in upstate Michigan). 
Dead Mother: Yes

The Snow Must Go On (2025): Isaiah had starred in an original Broadway production unspecified years ago, but he's now down on his luck, so agrees to spend Christmas with his sister and niece upstate...and then agrees to write and direct his niece's Christmas pageant in hopes of catching the eye of a Broadway producer. I kept going back and forth on whether I thought Isaiah was the worst and they dropped a subplot with a kid that I thought was going somewhere, but they did hire an actual Broadway actor and allowed him to sing.
Dead Mother: It probably mentioned the siblings' parents, but I don't remember the details. I'll just assume dead. Or retired in Florida. But probably dead.

Beverly Lewis' The Reckoning (2015): It turned out this was the third movie in a trilogy, but we just powered through. Katie/Katherine was raised Amish, fell in love with Daniel, was supposed to marry a bishop but didn't after she thought Daniel died, found her (non-Amish) birth mother, inherited her mother's many money and huge house, got shunned from the Amish, and is now running a charitable foundation with boyfriend Justin...when Daniel returns from the dead. This movie was nuts and Katie just needed a lot of therapy and to choose herself, but naturally that isn't what happened, even though Daniel came off as a creepy, incel stalker. Also, her household staff were probably a bit too overly involved in her life.
Dead Mother: Yes

Cozy Hallmark-watching vibes.

The Professional Bridesmaid (2023): Maggie is a professional bridesmaid (do we ever learn how she became one? No. Did it bother me the whole time? Yes. At least in Stacy Birchall's The Secret Bridesmaid, you get the full backstory) who gets hired to be a bridesmaid for the daughter of the mayor of Columbus, so she has to juggle fairly normal professional bridesmaid stuff with trying to keep a reporter covering the wedding from questioning the mayor about his views on a proposed condo development. Honestly pretty cute and enjoyable except for my annoyance at not having her backstory and the usual annoyance at writers not really thinking about what scaling her business would actually look like.
Dead Mother: Yes

Blind Date Book Club (2024): Meg runs a bookstore on Nantucket that's become known for doing a book club that uses that "wrapped in brown paper so you don't know the title, just a pithy description" method. Again, we have no idea what the logistics of this are--it honestly makes no sense how it's presented in the movie--and they also somehow seem to have multiple book clubs a week, and those book clubs involved free food and alcohol and activities like flower arranging or painting. Anyway, she's featured on NPR and YA bestselling author Graham Sterling decides to try to get the club to read his new book, which is a historical romance. I quite liked the discussion of what makes a book successful, and Meg was able to point to Graham why his books worked even though she herself wasn't particularly a fan. Also, Meg is debating whether she actually wants to run the bookstore; she was good at selling real estate in Boston, and she enjoyed it. I mean, obviously she's going to keep the bookstore on Nantucket, but the movie made her questioning believable. My other quibble is how much they were outside in a Nantucket winter.
Dead Mother: Yes

The Wedding Cottage (2023): Vanessa runs a wedding...guide...website...thing? and has published a wedding guidebook. To promote her site/service/thing, her company has a contest for a free wedding; the winners want to have their wedding a cottage in Vermont that has hosted weddings for generations. Only problem is that it closed 5 years ago, and the current owner, Evan, a Fancy New York Artist Who's Hiding, has let it go to pot and has no interest in reopening. But naturally he does. The Vermont location was cute, the third-act conflict was annoying, and the vagueness of what Vanessa's business actually is was beyond frustrating. Too twee, all around.
Dead Mother: Unclear, but since Evan inherited the cottage from his grandparents, I can only assume his parents are dead

3 Bed, 2 Bath, 1 Ghost (2023): Anna and Elliot broke up and dissolved their business, so now Anna is trying to be a real estate agent in her dad's agency while Elliot works to get a local building designated as being historic. Anna's first listing is a 100-year-old house that's been uninhabited since the 1950s and is haunted by the owners' daughter, Ruby, who died in 1923. The relationship between Ruby and Anna was honestly fun, but Anna was frustrating to watch. It's clear she shouldn't be a real estate agent, but it isn't clear what she should be, and I get that's how life is for a lot of people, but I don't really feel the movie handled her journey well. Elliot was great, though.
Dead Mother:Again, I can only assume. Anna's mother isn't around and wasn't mentioned that I remember.

The Wish Swap (2025): Casey and Henry have the same birthday; at a restaurant, they wind up blowing out their birthday candles into each other's faces and then the other's birthday wish comes true...for them. So Casey, an executive recruiter, winds up inheriting a farm (with goats!), while Henry gets cast on a television dancing competition. Kudos for executing the set-up; they quickly realize what's happened and Casey having Henry run the inherited farm and Henry agrees to partner with Casey. The dancing contest premise doesn't really make sense, nor does the timeline, nor do some of the details of Casey's job (and the distances between places and also where is the dancing show filed?), but it was cute. I may have been swayed by the choreographed dances.
Dead Mother: Yes

Netflix's show about President Garfield is Lightning in a bottle

I've spent the last 10 years recommending Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard to people, particularly when I'm volunteering at Ford's Theatre. Most people don't know anything about President James A. Garfield, much less about his assassin; before reading that book, I only really knew what I had learned from Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell and the musical Assassins. The book is fantastic; go read it.

So naturally I was VERY excited when I saw that Netflix was released a limited-run series based on it, titled Death by Lightning (from a letter written by Garfield, in which he noted that "Assassination can no more be guarded against than death by lightning"), and prayed that it would be better than Apple TV's Manhunt. Of course, being much less versed in Garfield assassination lore than in Lincoln, I knew I wouldn't be turning quite the same critical eye on it--particularly since it has been almost 10 years since I read the book.

Matthew Macfadyen (Charles Guiteau) and Michael Shannon (James Garfield). (Larry Horicks/Netflix)

I was struck that, like Manhunt, the tv adaptation told a pretty different story than the book did. There's maybe 40 minutes left in the series when Charles Guiteau shoots President Garfield, which seems like an odd choice, because one of the remarkable things about the Garfield assassination is how very long it took Garfield to die (more than 2 months). Another fascinating piece is the Guiteau trial, one of the first major trials where it looked like the insanity defense could come into play.

One of the biggest things I remember from Destiny is the involvement of Alexander Graham Bell--his history, his inventions, his motivation to try to help find the bullet lodged inside of the President. In Lightning, he's basically a cameo.

I do wish the show had spent more time after the shooting. But the story the show wanted to tell was, for some reason, the clash between Garfield and Roscoe Conkling. It makes some sense, in today's world, to want to tell the story of Garfield, who seems to have been an excellent person, fighting the political machine and winning. If there's a takeaway from this story, it's that the spoils system is bad. And especially right now, it's good that people (a) learn what the spoils system is and (b) learn that it's bad.

The show does a good job of weaving Guiteau through the story. We only get flashes of his life before 1880, but it's enough. Macfadyen's portrayal is pretty much exactly as I've picture Charles Guiteau--enthusiastic and off-putting and sometimes charming but a bit strange. It's truly a fantastic performance. The flashes of anger, of betrayal; his convictions; the way he writes his story in his head, it's all there. There are moments when you feel bad for him, but then he goes and does something and you're out.

Honestly, the entire cast is fantastic. There's a lot of great performances, including Michael Shannon as Garfield, Nick Offerman as Chester Arthur (and I feel like Arthur historians undoubtedly were yelling at their televisions throughout the show; I know virtually nothing about the man and still feel like liberties were clearly taken with his story), Bradley Whitford as James Blaine, Betty Gilpin as Lucretia Garfield. Like, yes, thank you, I do want to watch Josh Lyman and Ron Swanson go at it! And when Gilpin's Crete confronts Macfadyen's Guiteau while he's in jail...that scene was amazing. I'm sure it never happened, but I don't care. 

Do I wish the show reflected Millard's book better? Absolutely. Do I plan on recommending it to anyone and everyone, particularly when I'm volunteering at Ford's Theatre? Also yes. Seriously, go watch this show; it's only four episodes and is well worth your time. 

On change and book-tracking

In which you get to work through my thought process with me. 

Like many others, I'm trying to use Amazon less. For a long time, my line in the sand in buying stuff from Amazon was books; as someone who works in publishing, and who deals with the fulfillment and distribution side of it, I know how bad Amazon is for publishers. (And just to work with, in general, from that side. Ugh! My go-to answer for "What's the least favorite part of your job?" in interviews has been "Dealing with Amazon," and it pretty much always gets a knowing laugh.)

But there's a book-related entity that's owned by Amazon that I use regularly and keep trying to ignore its ownership: Goodreads. I joined Goodreads in 2010, three years before its purchase by Amazon. And it's always had its controversies, but still. At some point I got bored and inputted my reading history, going back to 2004. 

There are alternatives, I know, the most prominent being The StoryGraph, which I try not to judge too much for the "The" in its name. (I'm sure it was so they could get the web domain or some other valid reason.) I tried to do StoryGraph maybe a year or so ago. I ported over all my data, so I wouldn't lose everything. But I just find it incredibly not user-friendly. Some of that undoubtedly is my own resistance to change.

I admit I like re-reading the reviews I've written for books; someone mentions a book and I'm like, "Oh, I've read that! What did I think about it?" (which is why I write reviews for pretty much everything I read nowadays; I'm mad at my past self for not writing down my thoughts and now I don't remember anything about the book). On Goodreads, if I pull up a book that I've written a review of, it pops right up, followed by reviews from other people.

On StoryGraph, the review is there. You just have to hunt for it.

And I'm sure I'd get used to clicking on the little "see review" in the upper right. It's just that I'd rather see that--or others' comments on the book--than what they actually have on the main page:

I...do not particularly care about any of that. Or, I do, but I definitely will not consult StoryGraph when I'm figuring out what to read, though I'm sure many do. There are times when I'm more in the mood for plot-driven than character-driven, and I'm sure rating this kind of thing is helpful for many other readers. It really comes down to wishing that I could customize the page. 

I'm also annoyed that if I go to thestorygraph.com on my browser, it assumes I'm not logged in, so I sign in--in a new window--and it's all, "You're already signed it." Dude, I know. I just need to learn to go to app.thestorygraph.com.

That said, even just playing around on the site has gotten me more familiar with how it works, which is good. I also quite like the Stats page they have and that you can give books half (or quarter!) stars. 

Honestly, the biggest hurdle to totally switching is that pretty much all my friends are on Goodreads. I like seeing what they're reading and reading their reviews. Right now I only have one friend on Storygraph; I guess if you want to join there, feel free to friend me--my handle there is @editbarb. We can all see whether I get bored enough to load the books I've read since...um, November 2024. Sigh. And then stay active.

It's also interesting seeing what other options are out there. For example, NetGalley, which I sometimes use to get advance reader copies of books, has launched Booktrovert. They aren't really going for the same vibe; they're less about tracking books and more about discovering books through giveaways or sweepstakes, getting preorder offers, actually reading books through their platform, playing games, participating in reading challenges, and that kind of thing (per their "About" page). You can track books there (and categorize them in "Stacks"), but it doesn't look like you can even rate them, much less write reviews.

It is kind of neat. I'm always pro offers of free books, and you can create cute virtual bookshelves and do bingo cards for reading challenges. They also have book-related merch, which is also fun. It's probably smart of them to not challenge Goodreads in the book tracking sector but instead offer something adjacent with the reach they have of NetGalley. 

There are other sites/apps, too, like Fable, Bookmory (seems to be app-only), Hardcover, LibraryThing, Bookwyrm, Bookly, and more. It's enough to make me wish I had the energy to evaluate all of them to see what matches best for what I want.

Though as I said, one of the biggest drawbacks to leaving Goodreads would be losing my friends there. I could always just keep getting the Goodreads emails to see what people are up to...we'll see.