Diane and I had so much fun going to the Shaw Festival with Patti and Phil to see An Ideal Husband that we decided to return and see The Women, a play about women and divorce. First presented on stage in 1936, The Women went on to have a couple of movie incarnations. This Shaw Festival version brought out plenty of laughter from the audience. The all female cast captured Clare Booth Luce’s wisdom and frivolity. If you get a chance to see a stage version of The Women, take it. This insightful play holds up. GRADE: A
THE WOMEN By Clare Booth Luce
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Last week I reviewed Thrillers: 100 Must Reads edited by David Morrell and Hank Wagner. Now, I’m reviewing James N. Frey’s How to Write a Damn Good Thriller: A Step-by-Step Guide for Novelists and Screenwriters. There’s plenty of overlap between the two books. The main difference comes down to the variety of opinions on thrillers in Morrell’s book vs. Frey’s focused analysis of how thrillers work and how to write them. Frey analyzes an impressive number of books and movies to show how the effects are achieved. My only quibble is that Frey sometimes tells you more than you want to know about works you may not have read or seen yet: too many spoilers! If I was Frey’s editor, I would have suggested WARNINGS to prevent readers from learning information that would spoil their reading or viewing experience. Other than that, I recommend Frey’s book if you’re a fan of thrillers. You’ll learn a lot! GRADE: B+
DEDICATION: To my parents. For everything.* We’ll get back to that “dedication” in a few moments. Sloane Crosley is a thirty-something New Yorker with learning disabilities and a snarky personality. These personal essays explore Crosley’s trips to Paris and Portugal (disaster lurks!), her adventures with pets, her encounter with a grizzly cub in Alaska, and a romantic relationship that goes Wrong. I enjoyed Sloane Crosley’s first book of essays, I Was Told There’d Be Cake where we found out about Crosley’s tribulations at an all-girls summer camp. The world of women mystifies me so these reports from the Other Side enlighten me. Now, back to that “dedication”: 
Most readers know Georges Simenon’s great Maigret mysteries. And some have read Simenon’s stand-alone novels. But, I’m guessing few people have read Simenon’s fictional autobiography, Pedigree. Pedigree is Georges Simenon’s longest (560 pages!) and most compelling novel. “In the early 1940s, Simenon began work on a memoir of his Belgian childhood. He showed the initial pages to André Gide, who urged him turn them into a novel. The result was, Simenon later remarked, a book in which everything is true but nothing is accurate.” Simeon wrote Pedigree so his own son, Marc, would understand the bizarre circumstances that shaped his life. If you’re a fan of Maigret or have any interest in Georges Simenon, don’t miss this great book!
I’m a sucker for books like Morrell & Wagner’s Thrillers: 100 Must Reads. Morrell & Wagner came up with a list of 100 thrillers and asked authors of thrillers to write essays about them. From “Theseus and the Minotaur” (1500 B. C.), essay by Lee Child, to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003), essay by Steve Berry, you’ll find a broad cross-section of thrillers in this collection. Of course, I have my favorites. I really liked Max Allan Collins’ essay on Mickey Spillane’s One Lonely Night 1951). Joe R. Lansdale’s essay on James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) almost motivated me to drop everything and reread Cain’s classic. One of the more surprising inclusions was R. L. Stine’s essay on P. G. Wodehouse’s Summer Lightning (1929), a book I hadn’t considered in the thriller category. Of the 100 thrillers listed, I’d read 76. Now I have to find time to read those last 24 thrillers. GRADE: A