Book Review - What Lies in the Woods by Kate Alice Marshall

Title: What Lies in the Woods
Author: Kate Alice Marshall
Genre: Mystery/ Thriller
Published: 2023
 
Description: Naomi Shaw used to believe in magic. Twenty-two years ago, she and her two best friends, Casiddy and Olivia, spent the summer roaming the woods, imagining a world of ceremony and wonder. They called it the Goddess Game. The summer ended suddenly when Naomi was attacked. Miraculously, she survived her seventeen stab wounds and lived to identify the man who had hurt her. The girls’ testimony put away a serial killer, wanted for murdering six women. They were heroes.
 
For decades afterwards, the friends have kept a secret worth killing for. But now Olivia wants to tell, and Naomi sets out to find out what really happened in the woods – no matter how dangerous the truth turns out to be.
 
Review: “What Lies in the Woods” is  slow-burn mystery that is hard to put down. Before this, I only read one other book by Kate Alice Marshall, which was “Rules for Vanishing”, a young adult. “What Lies in the Woods” is an adult thriller.
 
Naomi survived a brutal attack when she was only eleven years old. She and her two best friends Olivia and Cassidy where exploring the woods when it happened. Cassidy and Olivia manages to identify the attacker as Alan Michael Stahl and he went to prison for it. Now, over twenty years later, Stahl has died in prison and it bring the three friends back together. But back in the woods, so many years ago, the girls discovered something that they have kept a secret. And now Naomi is doubting her memories from the attack.
 
Marshall shows us that, as time goes by, you can convince yourself that certain memories are true, even when they aren’t. Naomi starts doubting her own memory and doesn’t know whether Stahl was the man that Olivia and saw that night.
 
The characters in the book are interesting and have depth, although you never really get to like or love any of them. They are all very flawed, but also damaged and dealing with their trauma each in a different way.
 
The story had some predictable moments, and some obvious red herrings, but the twist in the end was really good.
 
Rating: 4/ 5

20s Movie Review - Call Jane

Director: Phyllis Nagy
Genre: Drama
Runtime: 121 minutes
Year: 2022
Starring: Elizabeth Banks, Sigourney Weaver, Chris Messina, Kate Mara

Description: Joy (Elizabeth Banks) is a married woman with a pregnancy endangering her life, in a time in America when she can’t get a legal abortion and works with a group of suburban women to find help.

Review: 1968. Joy is an exemplary housewife. She married her college sweetheart, a lawyer, a lives in the suburbs of Chicago, together with their 15-year-old daughter. She is pregnant, but the pregnancy endangers her life due to a heart condition. Being pregnant might cost Joy her life. Terminating her pregnancy is the only way to make Joy better, but in 1968 this was still illegal. Only if it was a life-threatening situation, she is allowed to have an abortion. The hospital board, all men, are the ones to decide if Joy’s pregnancy can be terminated. But the 50/ 50 chance of her surviving this pregnancy, is not urgent enough. She is denied the abortion. Joy takes matters in own hands.

Jane rolls into a network of activist women, who arrange women with unwanted pregnancies to have an abortion.

The message of the film is very clear. I loved that about “Call Jane”. Especially since the current elections, it’s still a very topical film. Many Americans are still strongly against abortion and in several states it’s still illegal. By creating a fictional main character, a model housewife, the creators try to reach a broader audience. I don’t think this message will sit well with the more conservative Americans. The story is based on the real “The Jane Collective”, but the characters are fictional and not based on specific people.

The ending of the film feels a bit rushed, but the overall message and the story is very gripping, powerful and strong. I really loved this film that sadly still is very topical.

Rating: 4/ 5

90s Movie Review - The Virgin Suicides

Director: Sofia Coppola
Genre: Drama
Runtime: 97 minutes
Year: 1999
Starring: Kirsten Dunst, James Woods, Kathleen Turner, Josh Hartnett, Danny DeVito, A.J. Cook, Hanna Hall, Leslie Hayman, Chelse Swain

I WATCHED THIS MOVIE FOR MY 2024 MOVIE CHALLENGE
WEEK 45: A FILM FROM A DIRECTOR KNOW FOR THEIR CHARACTER-DRIVEN NARRATIVE
 
Description: A group a male friends become obsessed with five mysterious sisters who are sheltered by their strict, religious parents (James Woods, Kathleen Turner) in suburban Detroit in the mid-1970s.

Review: Cecilia Lisbon is only 13-years-old when she attempts suicide for the first time. She and her four sisters live a very protected life with their strict and religious parents.

Director Sofia Coppola manages to show the audience what this strict life can do to teenage girls. The five sister all deal with it in a different way, eventually ending in the same fate.

It’s beautifully filmed and it focused on the sisters. The story told from the perspective of the boy next door, twenty five years later.

Rating: 3,5/ 5

Book Review - Happiness Falls by Angie Kim

Title: Happiness Fall
Author: Angie Kim
Genre: Mystery/ Fiction
Published: 2023
 
Description: When a father goes missing, his family’s desperate search leads them to question everything they know about him and one another.
 
Mia, the irreverent, hyperanalytical twenty-year-old daughter, has an explanation for everything – which is why she isn’t initially concerned when her father and younger brother Eugene don’t return from a walk in a nearby park. They must have lost their phone. Or stopped for an errand somewhere. But by the time Mia’d brother runs through the frond door bloody and alone, it becomes clear that the father in the tight-knit family is missing and the only witness is Eugene, who has the rare genetic condition Angelman syndrome and cannot speak.
 
What follows is both a ticking-clock investigation into the whereabouts of a father and an emotionally rich portrait of a family whose most personal secrets just may be at the heart of his disappearance.

Review: When Mia’s younger brother Eugene comes back home alone from a walk with their dad, she doesn’t think much of it. He is probably behind. But when her mom and her twin brother John return home, questions start arising. Their dad is clearly missing. And nothing is at it seem. The only person who knows what happened is Eugene, but he has a rare condition called Angelman syndrome, he cannot speak.
 
“Happiness Falls” is not your standard mystery. The book focuses on the characters, the family we follow in this book.
 
The story is told through the perspective of twenty-year-old Mia, the daughter of the Korean-American Park family. Mia is not a typical narrator, nor is this a typical family. The building and exploring of these characters is the heart of the book. If you’re not a character driven reader, this book may not be for you. I’m not either, most of the time, but the way this story was told did captivate me. And the mystery is one I wanted to see solved. But still, I would have loved it more when I did enjoy character driven books more.
 
The novel goes in several different directions, because Mia and her family also do some investigating of their own. And the way Angie Kim treated the character of Eugene was so beautiful. I never heard about Angelman syndrome before. I read, from people who are more familiar with this condition, that Kim was very respectful about it.
 
I really liked this book, but never got to the point of loving it.
 
Rating: 3,5/ 5

20s Movie Review - Poisoned: The Dirty Truth About Your Food

Director: Stephanie Soechting
Genre: Documentary
Runtime: 83 minutes
Year: 2023
Starring: -

I WATCHED THIS MOVIE FOR MY 2024 MOVIE CHALLENGE
WEEK 44: A FILM WITH A STRONG ENVIRONMENTAL MESSAGE
 
Description: A call to action for the officials who have the power to mitigate the danger caused by foodborne pathogens that kill thousands of people in the U.S. every year.

Review: Stephanie Soechting’s documentary is focused entirely on the food industry of the United States, where there seems to be separate inspectorate for each food group, and they work nicely alongside each other. For however safe and controlled our food chain may seem: the danger lurks in every supermarket.

In 1992, customers of the fast-food chain Jack in the Box  could be hospitalized after taking a bite out of their burgers. For some, it even turned into a tragic death. The E. coli bacteria found in the meat sickened hundreds of people as the bacteria poisoned their own bodies. Four children died.

The cause lay in the restaurant chain’s policy of not heating their burgers properly, something the CEO vehemently denied. Unfortunately, it did not stop there, because after eating contaminated meat, children in particular were found to be able to take the bacteria from each other as well. In fact, the E. coli contamination was only the beginning, because after burgers, lettuce turned out to be a pathogen because it was heated. This was followed by salmonella poisoning at a peanut butter manufacturer.

Scientist, victims, relatives, doctors, lawyers and journalists speak up about all this. There is too little awareness among food producers that their products are actually consumed and can therefore pose public health hazards.

Its clear that Soechting is on the side of the scientists and the food industry is the ‘bad guy’. The documentary lacks nuance and the prospect of improvement is also largely abandoned. It does have an important message to proclaim and it is powerful, due to the people who experienced it and who did the research are the focus.   

Rating: 3/ 5

Book Review - We Spread by Iain Reid

Title: We Spread
Author: Iain Redi
Genre: Horror/ Fiction
Published: 2022
 
Description: Penny, an artist, has lived in the same apartment for decades, surrounded by the artifacts and keepsakes of her long life. She is resigned to the mundane rituals of old age, until things start to slip. Before her longtime partner passed away years earlier, provisions were made, unbeknownst to her, for a room in a unique long-term care residence, where Penny finds herself after one too many “incidents”
 
Initially, surrounded by peers, conversing, eating, sleeping, looking out at the beautiful woods that surround the house, all is well. She even begins to paint again. But as the days start to blur together, Penny – with a growing sense of unrest and distrust – starts to lose her grip on the passage of time and on her place in the world. Is she succumbing to the subtly destructive effects of aging, or is she an unknowing participant in something more unsettling?
 
Review: I already couldn’t fault Iain Reid’s “Foe”, which I believe to be a masterful piece of literature. I kept reading that “We Spread” was his best book or at least it was the favorite of Reid’s book for many readers. And I now know why. What an amazing book! And it’s a possibility it will be my favorite of the year.
 
Penny lives alone after her long-term partner has passed. She is content with her life as is, but after a fall she is being placed in a care facility her partner had arranged for, right before his passing. Soon after settling in, Penny starts to lose her grip on time and reality.
 
“We Spread” is an incredibly tense story. It’s horror how I like it: psychological, fear of everyday things, not knowing whether you can trust your own observations. Penny has difficulties with aging, loneliness and forgetfulness, but she still feels sane enough to trust her own instincts. But when moving to Six Cedars, even that becomes un uncertainty. You feel her fear and because we follow the story through her perspective we never know what is real and what’s not.
 
Iain Reid keeps ups guessing until the end. I could not put this book down. I loved everything about this and, like “Foe”, I can’t fault this book. It’s perfection.
 
Rating: 5/ 5