Category: Entertainment

Thoughts on The Girl Who Fell Into Myth

Are you looking for a new high fantasy series with rich worldbuilding and strong female characters? This is the perfect time to jump into Kay Kenyon’s The Arisen Worlds series, at the very beginning. The Girl Who Fell Into Myth was just published on March 1st, so you can read it before the second book (due in September) is published. This review was originally published in the January 1, 2023 issue of Booklist.

Kay Kenyon launches The Arisen Worlds high fantasy series with The Girl Who Fell Into Myth, as Liesa is reluctantly summoned from her father’s Numinasi “consulate” in rural Oklahoma to her ancestral home of Osta Kiya to learn the way of her parents’ people. Literally adding insult to injury – she is struck by lightning en route to Osta Kiya –  Liesa is immediately greeted with intolerance, forced to change her name to Yevliesza, a proper Numinasi name, and generally ostracized while learning about the culture. Her father, already ill, is imprisoned, primarily for his crime of not returning with her sooner. Despite unearned enmity from powerful members of the court, Yevliesza thrives, discovering her hereditary magic and joins a triad of young ladies learning to control the same power. When disaster inevitably strikes, Yezliesza learns who her friends and enemies are, and where her true power lies. Kenyon masterfully creates a world adjacent to our own that balances their fear of technology with the use of magic, creating a civilization that is both advanced and medieval.

Thoughts on The Lost City

Within the first minute of The Lost City, starring Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum, it became obvious that this movie was not going to take itself seriously. The protagonists’ of author Loretta Sage’s latest adventure romance novel expressions of admiration for each other as they’re tied up in an ancient temple quickly pan out to a gloating villain, followed by the hero, Dash, asking “Hold up. Are these- Are these your snakes?” This line of questioning continues… who feeds the snakes and why one snake is wrapping itself on a henchman’s leg and not biting the guy? Then the author kicks in with “Delete” on several aspects of the scene, switching to the reality of Loretta struggling to write the ending of her story and still coming to the terms of her husband’s death a few years before.

Minutes later, having found her ending, Loretta is on a book tour with her agent, reading awful online reviews before facing a live audience, and to her surprise, Alan, the cover model for her novels. Her agent, Beth, confiscates Loretta’s phone and sends her on stage in an uncomfortable pink sequined outfit, where she ultimately concedes to the audience’s demand to rip off Alan’s shirt, accidentally removing his wig. Arguments ensue and Loretta storms out into the waiting car of kidnappers employed by Abigail (a gender neutral name, she’s assured) Fairfax, played by Daniel Radcliffe, who noticed that her new book includes real translations for an archaeological site he’s excavating and wants her to travel to the Isla Hundida (“Sunken Island”). She declines; he takes her there anyways.

Meanwhile, Alan, having seen the car Loretta left in, tries to hop into her Uber with the stereotypical “follow that car” line; the Uber driver locks his doors. Police won’t help due to lack of evidence, so Alan reaches out to Jack Trainer (played by Brad Pitt), an ex-Navy Seal he met at a meditation retreat, and they track Loretta’s location using her smart watch (which had snagged on Alan’s wig earlier).

And then the real movie starts, with crazy rescue attempts and corny villain bits. There are a few serious moments as Alan and Loretta figure out how they fit into each other’s lives, but mostly this movie kept us laughing.

Thoughts on A Killing Moon

I made a mistake at Capricon: I bought A Killing Moon, the first book in Alexis D. Craig’s Winged Guardians series.

I read the first couple chapters at the convention, along with pages 119 through 121 to be sure I’d be comfortable reading them out loud to an audience. The panel’s title was judging a book by page 119; the presenters skipped to 119 or thereabouts and read a couple pages, then the audience gauged whether they’d be interested in reading the book before the title was revealed. As I explained after revealing the cover, the book kicks off (in the prologue) with a sex scene, so I skipped ahead to see if the page selection was going to be appropriate for all ages attending the panel.

I can’t reiterate this enough: when given the opportunity to buy books directly from the author at an event, buy the whole damn series. I had to set A Killing Moon down for a couple review books, then breezed through it and wanted more… you know, those other three books that I failed to buy at the convention.

The book itself is a paranormal romance filled with shapeshifters, along with some assassination attempts and palace intrigue. The protagonists are a werewolf and were-crow, and many other were-species are mentioned in this robust hidden world intertwined with ours. Craig clearly has a knack for writing characters that obviously belong together both in and out of the bedroom (living room, and other places) and showing the character evolution as they reach that realization.

If you’ll excuse me, I have to go place a book order.

The Paramount Theatre presents Into the Woods

The third show of the Paramount Theatre’s 2022/2023 season is Into the Woods, which starts off with familiar fairy tales: Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Ridinghood, and Rapunzel, with a bonus story about Rapunzel’s brother, The Baker. The basic premise to the first half of the show has each of the main characters working towards their happily ever after. The second half covers the ramifications of those happily ever afters, including two princes in Agony (it’s a song), and the giant’s wife searching for Jack to avenge her husband’s death. There are, as always, a plethora of terrible character decisions needed to make a good story.

As a longtime Paramount subscriber, I am completely in awe of their ability to stun me with their set design. As we walked into the theatre, I paused to gape at the forest on stage. Wow.

During the show, the forest moves, so you feel the difference as the actors run through the forest or pause in clearings. When Rapunzel lets down her hair from the tower, it continues down into the forest for the prince to climb, ascending among those trees. And when the giant – who is never actually on stage (size different, you know?) – comes stomping through, you hear the splintering of the trees.

Into the Woods is playing at the Paramount through March 19th, so you have plenty of time to go see it.

Another delightful Capricon

What makes a delightful convention? Seeing as how I’m not on staff for Capricon, it’s mostly about seeing friends, making some new friends, and since 2019, helping to host a Box Fort-themed party.

An archway made of shipping boxes as the entrance to a hotel suite.

The Box Fort parties are always hosted at Capricon; our first two were at a hotel in Wheeling. I built a box fort in my living room in 2021, when the convention went virtual because of the pandemic, and we built our box forts in a downtown Chicago hotel this year and last. Our space this year was humongous: a Presidential Suite, which has about 2,400 square feet (almost twice the size of my house!). We didn’t use all that space, the bedroom and master bathroom were reserved for the group members staying in the room. That still left us with four distinct areas: the entry from the hall (which is where the arch appeared), the bar area (placed by the attached kitchen), the center area (with a low table, perfect for coloring or drawing), and the lounge side where we ran movies.

Assorted boxes and cat cutouts along the walk and window. In the distance, the Ferris wheel at Chicago's Navy Pier is just visible.

The convention theme was the afterlife, so our party theme was Schrödinger’s Box Fort, which meant there were cat cutouts (paper and cardboard) spread throughout the boxes. By the end of the weekend, some of them had been colored by attendees.

In addition to the parties, I volunteered to be on some panels, managed to attend a couple panels and a concert, and did a little bit of shopping. And a decent amount of walking – only about 3 miles a day, down from the Chicon average of 5 miles a day. (To be fair, the hotel layouts were different.)

I have made myself a mental note to take the Monday after Capricon off next year to recover. We estimate it took about 9 hours to build the box fort; disassembling all of the boxes on Sunday morning took about 3. (That doesn’t even include the other clean-up.) All in all, I had a great time and look forward to next year’s Box Fort, when we celebrate our 5th anniversary. (We’re not counting the virtual one, OK?)

Inventing Spanglish terminology

We have a strangely multilingual household, since Cassandra and I both speak English (obviously) and Spanish (at different levels) and are both using Duolingo to pick up at least tidbits of other languages. When she tells a cat to get off the counter, she usually says it in Hawaiian; I frequently say it in Spanish. If I’m trying to say something in German (which is not the language I’m currently focused on) and don’t know a word, I’m more likely to fill in with the Spanish equivalent instead of the English.

It’s probably not surprising that sometimes we invent words to fill in some of the gaps. Having spent a decent amount of time in fandom, I’ve been familiar with the term “glomp” for well over a decade, but Dictionary.com and Google Translate don’t recognize the word. Since cats are frequently glomped (carefully) in this house, knowing the Spanish equivalent seemed useful. So Cassandra invented one when she said “estoy glompeando a Zuko.” Or was it “estoy glompando a Zuko“?

After some consideration, I believe the root verb should be glompear, and it’s treated as a regular verb for conjugation: yo glompeo, tu glompeas, nosotros glompeamos, etc. But it could also be a root verb of glompar, conjugated to yo glompo, tu glompas, nosotros glompamos, etc. Which do you think is the most appropriate translation?

If you don’t like it, que-ever, don’t use it. For my part, necesito glompear un gato antes de trabajar.

A tale of Christmas Adam

Twas the day before the night before Christmas (also known as “Christmas Adam”), when all through the house, not a creature was stirring… probably because the furnace wasn’t keeping up with the sudden temperature drop, so all the cats were curled up with me on my bed. I would love to have called our HVAC company that morning, but we had tickets to see Dear Evan Hansen in downtown Chicago, and I was rapidly adjusting our plan because of the weather.

Typically, when we see a show in Chicago, we take the Metra in and walk from the train station to the theatre. It’s usually a comfortable walk of about a mile, though the last show we saw (The Twenty-Sided Tavern) was just over two. But that temperature drop had the forecasted high of 2 degrees Fahrenheit, and the wind chills were pushing it into the negative thirties.

We had already tentatively selected a sushi restaurant a couple blocks away from the theatre, and Google showed a parking option in the same block, so I decided we would drive into Chicago instead. If you’ve ever driven in downtown Chicago, you understand that this is not a decision I made lightly: the roads tend to be crowded with drivers who have no objection to darting across multiple lanes to turn at the next light or stop suddenly to let their passengers out. The Chicago taxi drivers mock the Uber drivers as poor drivers, and I suspect the reverse is also true.

Nevertheless, the roads near me looked almost clear of the snow that had fallen the previous afternoon and overnight, so we bundled up with multiple layers and ventured into the city. Between the weather and the holidays, the Chicago roads were the emptiest I have ever seen them. Though we couldn’t spot it at the time, Google’s directions to the sushi restaurant were accurate; it was buried in a food court with just a sign on the window along with several other restaurants. Unfortunately, there was nothing even vaguely resembling the entrance to a parking garage that we could see. We looped the block a couple of times, then headed towards the theatre to find their parking lot instead.

Successfully parked, we trudged through the slushy sidewalks and bitter winds to find that the sushi restaurant – and the rest of the food court – had a sign on the door saying they were closed through the weekend because of the winter storm and holidays. We huddled in their doorway briefly scoping out other nearby restaurants, deciding that the Mediterranean place we had just passed was our top choice… mainly because having walked past it already, we knew it was open.

After a tasty lunch and entrancing show, we reached home to find out that the house was still cold, and cold water was not running from our kitchen sink. After a brief panic, I realized that only the kitchen sink had an issue, and we directed a space heater towards its pipes, which sit against an exterior wall. On Christmas Eve, targeted space heater use brought the house up to a reasonable temperature until our HVAC company could come out.

All’s well that ends well.

What’s your favorite holiday tradition?

Advent calendars, Christmas crackers, chocolate coins for Chanukah, that delicious pork skin at the Noche Buena celebration after the whole pig has been cooking all day… there’s are so many delightful (and delicious!) traditions around the winter holidays. Last year, we learned about an Icelandic tradition of giving books on Christmas Eve, and pairing that with hot chocolate to curl up and read. In a house of bookworms, that was an easy tradition to adopt. In fact, we’ve expanded on the idea by exchanging book recommendations throughout the year, though Christmas Eve is the only one that’s expected to be acquired specifically for each person. (Book recommendations so far have either been already owned or available through the library.)

What favorite – or new – tradition are you looking forward to this year?

Broadway in Chicago presents The Twenty-Sided Tavern

Occasionally, we venture into Chicago to see a live performance somewhere other than the Paramount Theatre, and The Twenty-Sided Tavern has a level of geek appeal that most stage performances don’t: it’s essentially a role-playing adventure on stage. In fact, it includes some of the randomness of your average tabletop game… specifically, dice. Oh, and audience participation. There are no real spoilers, it’s improv with reactions to the dice and audience decisions, so each show will be different.

As you enter the theatre, after scanning your tickets, you are told to scan a QR code to access an important feature of the performance: the audience interaction. Your playbill includes a sticker which links you to one of the three character classes: fighter, mage, or rogue. Keep your phone out – you’re going to need it, and please do take photos, they said.

One of the first audience actions is to pick the character for their class between three offered characters. The results are displayed as the votes are still coming in, and you’ll see this functionality at various points throughout the show. You’ll also see the dice as they’re rolled, zoomed in on each character’s dice tray.

The cast clearly enjoys what they’re doing, though the photo above may be when two of them lost the rest of their hit points due to some overzealous audience participation. To be fair, the natural 20 rolled in the fiery skeletal giraffe’s favor a couple minutes earlier set the stage for that crisis.

Twenty-Sided Tavern is playing in Chicago through January 15th, so you still have a chance to see it!

BULL: a love story, parte de Destinos, Chicago’s International Latino Theater Festival

Anybody who has lived in a multilingual household knows that sometimes your brain decides to finish a sentence in a language that’s different from the one it started in. Sometimes it switches a single word, pero you never know until it comes out, and even then you may not notice because it happens so often. The world premiere of BULL: a love story, the last show in this inaugural season of the Paramount’s Bold series, captures this perfectly with a fully bilingual cast bouncing between English and Spanish. Opening weekend was perfectly timed for inclusion in the 5th Destinos: Chicago International Latino Theater Festival.

The story is set in Lakeview, a community within Chicago, back in 2005-2006, when our cell phones were still dumb. The main character, Bull, is just returning to Lakeview after a decade in prison and trying to reestablish his life, including building a relationship with his daughter who barely remembers him. As expected in live theatre, the story has its ups and downs, making you hope things turn out alright yet unsure until you reach the end which type of alright that will be.

It’s playing through November 20th, and the page that I linked to above has a promo code for discounted tickets. If you see it, let me know what you think.