Snow, by Tracy Lynn

From the jacket: “In a tiny Welsh estate, a duke and duchess lived happily, lacking only a chil — or, more importantly, a son and heir to the estate. Childbirth ultimately proved fatal for the young duchess. After she died, the duke was dismayed to discover that he was not only a widower, but also father to a tiny baby girl. He vowed to begin afresh with a new wife, abandoning his daughter in search of elusive contentment. Independent — virtually ignored — and finding only little animals and a lonely servant boy as her companions, Jessica is pale, lonely, and headstrong … and quick to learn that she has an enemy in her stepmother. ‘Snow,’ as she comes to be known, flees the estate to London and finds herself embraced by a band of urban outcasts. But stepmother isn’t finished with her…”

My take: This was one of the novels I picked up from Riverby Books last month. I’m always interested in retellings of classic tales and this one sounded like it had potential for being a compelling version of “Snow White.”

Although the story takes place in 1920s Great Britain, Jessica (and her stepmother, Anne, for that matter) is a heroine with modern sensibilities, placing it firmly in the category of steampunk fiction.

Jessica is still a young girl when her father, a man from whom she is mostly estranged, remarries a woman from far away. She looks forward to the idea of finally having a mother, but is disappointed when the English duchess seems more interested in spending time with her new husband and behind closed doors than with caring for her. Yet with Anne’s arrival also comes Alan, a boy musician only a few years older than Jessica, who is kind and interested in chatting with her when he isn’t helping the Duchess with her scientific experiments.

As with the original tale, Jessica, or “Snow,” as she becomes known, angers her stepmother, who is unsuccessful at giving her husband another child, by growing more and more beautiful as she matures. Eventually, Anne, whose earlier diabolical science experiments are merely hinted at, decides the only way to become pregnant is to create a Frankenstein’s monster-style child. The key to this is to procure a human heart — and the Duchess has a specific one in mind.

Alan, who wears a magical charm that forbids both his lying to the Duchess or to telling others of her madness, convinces Jessica that she must flee if she values her life. She makes for London, where, this being a fairy tale, she is promptly pickpocketed and left penniless and hungry.

When she is discovered squatting on turf belonging to a gang of five (not seven) misfits, she must begin to build a new life for herself, to learn to trust again, and to decide what — and who — makes a family.

Snow isn’t of the same caliber as some other fantasy stories, and it inconsistently crosses that line between storytelling and breaking down the barrier between reader and narrator. As an interesting retelling of a story we all know forward and back, though, it’s definitely worth the couple hours necessary to read it. I’d recommend it as a library loan for those who love fantasy and fairy tales.

Pages: 259

No Way to Treat a First Lady, by Christopher Buckley

From the jacket: “Elizabeth Tyler MacMann, the First Lady of the United States, has been charged with killing her philandering husband, the President of the United States. In the midst of a bedroom spat, she allegedly hurled a historic Paul Revere spittoon at him, with tragic results. The attorney general has no choice but to put the First Lady on trial for assassination.”

My take: When you’re the First Lady and charged with murder, to whom do you turn? In the case of Beth MacMann, you call up your law school sparring partner, Boyce Baylor, now a sleazy but successful celebrity attorney whom you last saw when you jilted him for the man who’d become your husband. When sparks still fly as you work together to unravel the President’s death, is there any doubt that eventually you’ll find yourself fighting not just for your life but also for a second chance at love?

I picked this up at my grandmother’s suggestion earlier this year and was pleased to have done so. The story pulls you along quickly, the surroundings are peppered with my familiar D.C. scenery, and if the characters aren’t always likable, they do seem realistic. You end up rooting for Beth and Boyce to solve things quickly and to sort out their various entanglements. Plus the secondary characters, which include Babette Van Anka, the president’s paramour and a former B-grade singer/actress, are laugh-out-loud-worthy.

Want to read a book that epitomizes the ’90s, that combines the media circuses of the O.J. trial and the Monica Lewinsky scandal? This is the tale for you.

Buckley also wrote Thank You for Smoking, a hilarious parody of D.C. lobbyists, which I saw on film a few years back.

Pages: 288

I’ve been reading the blog Weekly Geeks for a while now. The concept behind it is a thought-provoking, weekly literature blogging meme.

Last week’s post asked readers to share “a podcast [or three] you love, preferably book related, but not necessarily so. Give us the link, of course, and share with us details about that podcast and why you enjoy it so much.”

I have enjoyed podcasts, which are similar to online radio shows available for download, for many years and have listened to a variety of them. Some are done by single people. Others have a group format. Some are actual radio broadcasts, while others record from their living rooms. Their foci range from knitting, food, and books to baseball, old time radio programming, and music.

For those who are interested, here are several of the podcasts I download (and listen to) regularly:

1. The Writer’s Almanac
   You might be familiar with this 5-minute segment if you listen to NPR during the day. Hosted by Garrison Keillor, it offers listeners a few literary “this day in history” highlights and concludes with a poem, often from modern poets. This is a great podcast if you have just a few minutes a day to spare or if you want more poetry in your life.
2. CraftLit
   Hosted by crafter extraordinaire Heather Ordover, CraftLit provides public domain classics read aloud (often as a part of Librivox). Heather, an English professor and former high school English teacher, starts each episode with a bit of crafty talk before moving on to the analysis of the previous week’s reading and a preview of the current episode’s material. We’ve read a variety of works this way so far, ranging from A Tale of Two Cities to Frankenstein to our most recent novel, The Scarlet Letter. Whether I’ve read them before or if they’re new-to-me, I almost always enjoy and learn from listening to these weekly podcasts.
3. Stash and Burn
   This podcast, hosted by San Francisco residents Jenny and Nicole, purportedly exists to help knitters work their way through their overflowing stashes, but instead is really just bimonthly love song to friendship and yarn. I like to listen to certain podcasts at certain times: CraftLit while I’m knitting and The Writer’s Almanac while I’m getting ready for work or on my way to the metro. Stash and Burn is my dishwashing podcast. Nicole and Jenny make excellent company while I’m doing tedious late-night chores, and I greatly appreciate their laughter and camaraderie.

I also enjoy and recommend several other podcasts, including Cast On, Quirky Nomads, Sticks and String, and The News from Lake Wobegon, a segment from Garrison Keillor’s popular A Prairie Home Companion.

What podcasts, if any, do you enjoy listening to?

One of the best things about living in D.C. is the proximity of great bookstores, especially Politics & Prose.

A couple weeks ago, Barbara Kingsolver came to town. Knowing how popular she is, the store arranged for her to do her reading at a local church.

She started off behind the pulpit, but after a little while moved to center stage.

I have enjoyed her work since sophomore year when I took a class on contemporary women’s writing. We read The Bean Trees and I fell in love. More recent books have merely reinforced the sentiment. I especially enjoyed Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which was one of the best books I read last year.

Her new novel, The Lacuna, focuses on the first half of the 20th century. It sounds great, and I’m eager to start reading it.

After reading for half an hour or so, Barbara took questions from the audience, including interesting ones about whether she felt sad leaving her characters behind when she was done working on a book.

She also signed books.

I managed not to fall down in front of her when it was my turn. But I did stumble all over myself in a fangirlish effort to thank her for her writing. She was gracious, in just that way I knew she would be.

Oh, and she did say she liked my shirt.

I will own that shirt forever.

Do you ever get into jags with your hobbies? Periods where you just spend hours and hours doing the same thing?

I’ve been on a reading kick recently and have been finishing books left and right. I get home from work and head to the bedroom to curl up with my latest novel. It’s not a bad thing (although Rudi might disagree), but it’s just odd.

Sometimes, I feel that way about knitting, too. I can feel a knitting jag off in the wings, waiting its turn. Right now, it’s just manifesting itself in a strong desire to wind yarn for upcoming projects, but I know that one day soon it’s going to elbow its way to the front and demand I pick up the needles and start casting things on.

How about you? Do you have obsessive relationships with your hobbies, too?

Bedknobs and Broomsticks (©, Walt Disney Productions)

From the fly leaf: “From Screen to Book

“Two modern classics for children are The Magic Bedknob and Bonfires and Broomsticks by Mary Norton. Recently Walt Disney Productions purchased these two books and set about making them into a single motion picture.

“Bill Walsh and Don DaGradi wrote the screenplay for Bedknobs and Broomsticks, and Robert B. Sherman and Richard M. Sherman composed the music and wrote the lyrics. (These are the same four men who wrote the screenplay and songs for Mary Poppins.) The screen story is built around that fabulous apprentice witch Eglantine Price (played in the film by Angela Lansbury), but all the adventures are new. This book is based entirely on the screenplay.”

My take: When I last visited Karen, she took me to a local used bookstore that was going out of business and selling off their wares for $5 a bag. Clearly when you have that kind of incentive, you pick up some odd choices. (I once, for instance, picked up during Middletown’s buck a bag sale a book based on The Partridge Family.) This wasn’t particularly odd, but I didn’t peruse it as carefully as I might have otherwise and merely added it to the pile.

So I didn’t notice the above caveat, which now means I will have to seek out Norton’s source material and to see how certain details were Disnified. I have some things that I’ll be keeping my eyes open for, but it could be that Norton (who also wrote The Borrowers series) included them in the original novels.

That said, this was a cute enough story about three orphans evacuated to the countryside from London during World War II. Carrie, Charlie, and Paul are foisted upon a local single woman living alone in a large house when she comes into town to collect her mail.

Unable to refuse what she is informed is her patriotic duty, Eglantine Price takes the children home and feeds them all sorts of healthy and natural foods that would probably make a modern vegetarian proud. (I assume cabbage buds are Brussels sprouts. She also feeds them rose hips, glyssop seed, elm bark, whortle yeast, stewed nettles, squill tea, and mangel-wurzel jam (a type of beet which the children assure this modern American reader is generally considered cattle food).

Unexcited to discover they’ve been placed with someone so ill-fitting as a surrogate parent, the children plan to escape back to London. That is until they witness Eglantine crash landing her broom in the back yard. Realizing she might not want this episode broadcast to the neighbors, Charlie decides they are going to stick around to blackmail her instead.

Hoping to get cash, the children instead end up with a magic bedknob that will take them anywhere they like. Accompanied by Eglantine, their journey takes them to London to find her witchcraft correspondence course teacher. When he turns out to be a second-rate con man, where will she turn to find the elusive spell that will finally enable her to contribute substantively to the war effort? Will the children stay in London or will the lure of magical travel lure them back to the countryside? And will Eglantine turn Hitler into a white rabbit or something worse?

The story isn’t particularly well written and, as I noted above, there were some aspects that felt a little too Disney-like to ignore. But it was a quick read, provided you with a definite feel for a specific time in history, and fueled my curiosity to seek out the original Norton novels. I can think of a worse way to spend an evening.

Pages: 212