Book a Week with Jen

I first learned about Nine Perfect Strangers by Liane Moriarty via the Hulu adaptation. Yes, I'd read Big Little Lies and thought it was fine (perfectly fine!) but not fine enough that I sought out her other books. I didn't watch the show because it looked incredibly creepy — almost Stephen King-like. It's a really weird time, and I'm not one to watch horror, so I said no thanks and went on with watching other shows. But I did pick up a copy of Nine Perfect Strangers when I saw it in a Little Free Library. I've long read creepy books because they don't seem as scary when I am processing it through the written word as images, and I was feeling in the mood for something different. I knew I'd be on my couch for a bit after my bivalent COVID booster (which just gave me a bit of a headache). Why not give it a shot. Nine Perfect Strangers is about nine people (duh) who check into a Tranquillum House in Australia for a 10-day detox and wellness retreat. The pl

I am back from my trip to the National Parks of the upper midwest, which was lovely. Please see this photo. I took Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel with me because I wanted to read it, and also because I associate Michigan with Station Eleven (both the book and show ).  Michigan was more beautiful than I could ever have imagined, especially the deep blue waters of Lake Superior. However........I did not like this book.  I think we'll look back on it after she continues to have a very long and successful career (which I think she will have!) as a swing and a miss, one prompted by trying to put this current pandemic into another novel that also has a pandemic. At times, the observations of a specific character read like St. John Mandel's COVID-19 diary (if she kept one). It doesn't translate well. Sea of Tranquility is about a people in different times connected to what appears to be a paranormal experience: a British ex-pat in 1912 Canada walks into a forest a

After discovering that the Murder, She Wrote mystery novel series not only exists but is still active , I figured I should try one of the newer titles to see if it's changed over time. After reading Debonair in Death , I can say....not much. But that's what genre fiction, especially series, is supposed to be, right? Like putting on your old running sweatsuit, as Jessica Fletcher still apparently does in 2021 when this book was published.  In this one, the crime is the murder of Nelson, a "from away" co-owner of a Cabot Cove shop. He's found covered in blood, with a young woman who works at the local salon standing over him, also covered in blood. It doesn't make sense that young Coreen could or would have done this, but who else could it be? Well, anyone! As Jessica both tries to finish her next book's synopsis and clear Coreen's name, smuggling and MI6 also somehow get involved. It all gets a bit silly, but I wouldn't expect anything less.  I am

Another boat, another Carl Hiassen book.  Hiassen's Stormy Weather was book five in this series , from alllllll the way back in January. I snapped a picture of it from the back of a boat speeding off to Dry Tortugas National Park . In that review, I mentioned that Hiassen's work was ripe for a TV series or movie, especially since he hadn't had that many. One was a 2006 movie version of his 2002 middle grade novel  Hoot . It starred a lot famous people, including Brie Larson, Luke Wilson and...Jimmy Buffett, but wasn't well received . Hopefully the upcoming Apple TV+ series  Bad Monkey , starring Vince Vaughn and Ashley Nicole Black, will fare better. So when I saw a copy of Hoot in a Little Free Library, I figured why not, and took it with me on vacation. That picture is from Miller's Ferry to Put-in-Bay, Ohio (when I got on the boat, I realized that most people were going there to party, not to see Perry's Victory & International Peace Memorial . It was a

I listened to the audiobook of Jennette McCurdy's I'm Glad My Mom Died while packing for and then starting my road trip to the national parks of Minnesota and Michigan, and often had to stop the recording to process what I'd just heard.  It is one of the most harrowing celebrity memoirs I've ever read. It comes with every kind of content warning you could imagine. I'm going to share some of what she wrote about here, so if you need to click out of this one, I completely understand. McCurdy was a child star pushed into show business by her mother, an abusive narcissist who taught her daughter how to be anorexic, did "exams" on her into her late teens, didn't let McCurdy shower herself (and often showered her together with her teenage brother), and didn't even let her wipe herself after she went to the bathroom until she was at least eight years old (she describes the behavior at that age but if she said when it ended, I didn't catch it).  The b

Fly Girl by Ann Hood is a "look behind the curtain" type memoir. After college, and before becoming a successful novelist, Hood worked as a flight attendant for TWA, "at the end of those glamour days," she writes, starting her job a time when flying was something you dressed up for, and ending after deregulation started to shrink prices but also amenities, seats and leg room.  Those glamour days were also more sexist, where flight attendants couldn't be married, couldn't have children, were chosen in large part based on their looks, and had to maintain a specific weight (and could be fired for going over, especially in their first six months of "probation"). That didn't discourage women though. At the time Hood applied, TWA had acceptance rates lower than Harvard. It was an in demand job.  It was a big change from when the role was "courier" and only open to men. In 1930, Ellen Church, a registered nurse, convinced United Airlines to