Last week was terrible for the PTA I run. The event coordinator for one of our biggest fundraisers of the year quit, and the event coordinator for the annual talent show also quit. By Friday, I was ready to curl up on the coach with a bottle of rosé and a book, so I drove over to the library and hit the romance section hard. My first selection — and the novel I’m reviewing here — was called Agnes and the Hitman. This book was […]
Can We Talk About What Happened?
I didn’t want to read Hillary Clinton’s take on the 2016 election. I didn’t want to relive November 9th, 2016, the day I woke up with tears in my eyes and my stomach in my throat because I knew that an unmitigated jackass had won the U.S. presidency the night before. I didn’t want to relive the gut-churning fear I felt for my children and the grief I felt for my country that day. But I’ve admired Hillary Clinton since I was in elementary school, […]
The Parisians Used to Poison Each Other With Menstrual Blood, and Other Weird Facts
Nicolas de la Reynie has the distinction of being Paris’s first police chief, a position he stepped into during the reign of King Louis XIV. Paris was a nasty cesspool full of criminals at the time, and de la Reynie turned things around by putting lamps up everywhere (which is how Paris came to be known as “the City of Light”). But not everything in Paris could be cured with a well-placed lamp. During de la Reynie’s tenure, people in Paris were getting poisoned left […]
Putting the Blitz in Blitzkreig
Do you think you know a lot about World War Two? I think I know a lot about World War Two. I’ve read a lot of books, I’ve watched a lot of movies, I’ve listened to my husband natter on and on and on about his enormous mental collection of World War Two facts. But you know what I didn’t know? That the Nazis were on drugs the whole time! And that this explains literally everything about the war! Before I get into that, though, […]
So Much Small-Town Drama
If you have ever lived in a small town, where everyone knows everyone and everyone knows everyone’s darkest secrets, then Amgash, Illinois and its cast of characters will seem really familiar to you. In a series of short stories, Elizabeth Strout moves from one character to another — most of the time the people in the tales being told are linked by blood or friendship, and so over the course of about a year, the lives of Strout’s characters weave together, with Strout checking back […]
“Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.”
Hedy Lamarr was a fascinating woman. She was billed as “the most beautiful woman in the world”, and she truly was gorgeous, but she was also brilliant, creative, and confident. Not that men wanted her for anything but her looks while she was alive. Hedy was born in Vienna in 1914 to a wealthy banker and his wife. She knew from a young age that she wanted to be an actress, and by the time she was a teenager, she was on the stage. After […]