My review of Netflix romance movie A Castle for Christmas, but mostly musings on my admiration for Brooke Shields

 

 Brooke Shields and I the same age.  Which is to say, much like the kid in my grade who lived around the corner from me when I  was growing up but I was never friends with, she was always there, part of the warp and weave of my life, but also (like any celebrity to a commoner) utterly unknown to me in any real way.

There is no equivalent to Brooke Shields in my kids' generation.  She was a child star, but not a Disney or Nickelodeon star.  In her first big movie, Pretty Baby, she played a child prostitute and as a 12 year old girl did her own fully nude scenes.  This was a serious movie, directed by serious director Louis Malle and starring Susan Sarandon.  For some reason the adults in Shields' life, including her mother, had no problem with the movie.  For some reason I was able to watch an unedited version on mainstream TV.

Shields never took a detour into screechy, muggy roles.  The closest she came was a fairly silly movie she made with George Burns, whose plot I don't recall.  And then there was The Blue Lagoon, which sounds like a Disney kid movie but really wasn't.  She played a teenage girl who had been shipwrecked on an island with a very cute teenage boy since they were children.  Shields used a body double for the nude scenes in this role.  My father hated this movie.  "They never would have developed language skills like that!"  "They never would have figured out sex on their own!"  

Around that time there were the infamous Calvin Klein underwear ads.  A semi-nude mid-teen Shields arched her back on a giant poster in Times Square, with the caption, "Nothing comes between me and my Calvins."  

When Shields applied to Princeton there were rumors that her application was on the precondition that she would be accepted.  I don't know if that's true.  I do know that I happened to be visiting a friend at Princeton on the weekend that admissions letters went out, and that a movie society there aired a screening of Endless Love, a thriller that she starred in.  My friend and I went, and gossiped about how many changes of outfits she brought when she visited campus.  We didn't give much thought to what it would be like for Shields, the actual incoming freshman, to arrive at campus with the hope of just being a student. 

Shields did attend Princeton, where she immediately bragged about getting straight As before any grades had come out, and wrote (or "wrote") a memoir proclaiming her virginity.  Much like Emma Watson a generation later at Brown University, she complained to magazines that no one would speak to her because they didn't want her to think they were only talking to her because of who she was.

I have no idea what kind of student Shields the real person was.  But I do know that as she continued on in life she became . . . awesome.  It's possible that she always was, of course.  As an adult she said that one of her biggest regrets was waiting too long to have sex.  (Me too, sister.)  She reinvented herself in sitcom land, starting with a guest spot on Friends and then in her own middling show, Suddenly Susan.  She spoke publicly about suffering from post-partum depression, and blasted back at Tom Cruise, her Endless Love costar, for belittling her for it.  Then she spoke publicly about caring for her mother, who suffered from Alzheimer's disease.  

Which brings us to the new Netflix movie, A Castle for Christmas, which Shields starred in and has a producers credit for.  In some ways it's a generic romance:  American woman takes a trip to Scotland, makes friends with strong accents, falls for a duke, and throws a Christmas party.

But, like Shields, parts of the movie are awesome, including:

*    Brooks' character, Sophie, is a bestselling romance novelist at least some of whose books have titles similar to Judith Krantz novels (another throwback to the generation Shields and I belong to).  She is successful enough to have become filthy rich -- filthy rich enough to buy a castle.  Yay for romance writers!

*    To the extent that the movie has any conflict, it's over whether Sophie should be able to control what she writes.  Can she kill off a popular character just because she wants to?  Can she get away from the series that has made her rich and famous, against her publisher's wishes? It's the beginning of an interesting conversation. 

*   The Scottish village where Sophie finds herself seems to be entirely devoid of children.  Except for Sophie, who has a daughter in college, none of the characters appear to have kids.  They were not missed.  I wonder if Shields used her power to keep children actors out of the movie -- and out of at least one opportunity to be exploited as child stars.  If she did, more power to her.  

*  The movie is a love story about people in their fifties who never say, "We're so old, maybe too old to have sex, maybe sex at our age is gross, I look old, I feel old."  It was just a regular love story, with characters who are my age.  Yay!  (Although the  movie is 100 percent clean, with nothing more than a few chaste kisses on screen, I will nevertheless plug my new book of erotic short stories about people my age having good sex, The Mature Woman's Guide to Desire.)

*  The movie had me grinning all the way through.  Some of it had to to with the plot, and the characters, and the scenery.  A lot of it had to do with fun radiating off of Shields.  She seemed to be really enjoying herself, and that made me happy.

I do have a few nitpicks (of course, because I'm me):

*  This is just personal preference, but when I entered the dating world after my divorce I had a few rules for who I would swipe right on on dating apps.  No one who owns a boat -- that's a sign that they have too much free time and therefore would expect too much of my time.  No one who smokes, because ugh, my marriage was ash, I'm not interested in dating someone who tastes like ash.  And no one who never had kids (their own, step, foster, whatever, I don't care, as long as they helped raise them), because anyone who has not had to take children into account when choosing a job, choosing health insurance, deciding what to have for dinner for years on end, trying to figure out whether it's safe to buy tickets for an event more than three hours in the future, can't possibly understand what my life has been like.  So I don't entirely like the romance between Sophie and the childless Duke.  

*    Spoiler on this one:

Sophie's daughter skips her dad's wedding to come to Sophie's Christmas party.  This is the Duke's Christmas present to Sophie.  It is not okay. The daughter should go to the dad's wedding.  If the Duke had children of his own,  he would understand that sometimes kids have to choose one parent's more important event over a party the other parent throws, even if they don't want to, and it's the job of the other parent -- and their lover -- to support them in that.  

 Nitpicks aside, this is is a lovely holiday movie starring a lovely person.  More power to both of them.  

 

I have a new book of smutty short stories out! "The Mature Woman's Guide to Desire"

 

If you only know my writing from Mindgames, The Mature Woman's Guide to Desire might be a bit of a surprise.  No naked sex slaves, fully consensual sex -- but of course still kinky.  

Here's the blurb:

Great sex with hot partners who treat them well. In these short stories women move past divorce, the burdens of single motherhood, financial concerns, and self-doubt to the realization that they are worthy of having their sexual fantasies fulfilled. All they have to do is say yes.

Speaking of saying yes, the holidays are coming up.  Say yes to yourself.  Get yourself a present that you know you will really enjoy.  Nothing beats the gift of erotica.  Buy my book.  You know you want to! 

Review of charming, brand new Regency romance The Perks of Loving a Wallflower by Erica Ridley

 Mild spoilers in this review.

The Perks of Loving a Wallflower by Erica Ridley is utterly charming, and a must-read for anyone who loves well-written Regency romances. (If you read a lot of my reviews, I'm pleased to report that this book just came out.  It's not one of my thrift store finds.  In fact, I pre-ordered and paid full price for it.  Support authors, y'all.) 

The first main character of the book is Philippa, whose situation is the standard Regency trope of wallflower whose unloving parents want her to marry a lord (pretty much any lord) to further her father's political career.  Philippa wants to be a dutiful daughter but finds men generally uninteresting and the objects of her parents' ambition specifically loathsome.

The second main character is Tommy, who in today's vocabulary might call themself genderfluid or nonbinary.  When first explaining to Philippa, Tommy says, "Sometimes I'm more like a man, and sometimes I'm  more like a woman, but mostly I feel like . . . both  And neither."  As the book progresses, Tommy becomes frustrated with wordy explanations and says they're just Tommy.  

Tommy comes from an Umbrella Academy-like family of motley orphans adopted together. They don't exactly have superpowers but it's pretty close, with each sibling having trained in a skill set -- disguises, climbing walls, integrating scads of information, etc. -- to an uncanny level.  Unlike in The Umbrella Academy they're nice, and nice to each other, and there's no incest.  

I was worried when I began reading The Perks of Loving a Wallflower that this was going to be a dreadful book in which Tommy first appears to Philippa as a man with an assumed identity and puts off revealing who they really are out of fear of not being accepted, with annoying hijinks to hide the deceit, a reveal from which the relationship is saved only by a kidnapping or life-threatening illness, and general unpleasantness ensuing.  

I am pleased to say that none of that happened.  Tommy revealed their true identity at the first opportunity.  Philippa was fine with it.  The conflict of the story is whether Philippa will be an obedient daughter to parents who don't deserve her loyalty, or be true to herself.  

This book is at times so funny that I burst out laughing.  It is always sweet.  If I have one criticism, it's that the MacGuffin made little sense -- but that's the nature of MacGuffins.  

If it's not clear, I  highly recommend this book. 

My review of The Starter Wife, a truly terrible trashy novel from 2005

 

 

Spoilers in this review

About halfway through my thrift shop purchase of The Starter Wife by Gigi Levangie Grazer I realized I had read it before -- unless there were two novels where the ex-husband dates Britney Spears.  I recalled that even when I first read the novel around the time it came out in 2005 I thought that it was utterly in poor taste to bring Britney -- who by that time was clearly and publicly very troubled -- into this.

Nothing else about the book was familiar as I re-read it.  Not the confusion I felt in the opening chapter about whether I was supposed to like the main character, Gracie, or if she was an anti-hero.  In the first half of the chapter she's at a party, unhappy because the women she's hanging out with there are judging other people by their looks.  In the second half she has an internal monologue devoted to . . . judging other people by their looks.

Gracie continues to be an enigma wrapped up in an idiot.  She is at the end of a marriage that had no reason to start, except that her husband was rich and once bought her a nice meal.  Throughout the book she has nothing kind to say about him, no indication that she ever had any real feelings for him, no mention that the relationship added anything to her life except for a daughter who spends most of the book napping.

 Of course Gracie has a gay bff.  And a couple of other friends with no discernible characteristics.  One has kids and one drinks.  Or are they the same person?  

And then . . . enter the well-groomed, healthy, kind, smart, handsome homeless person with no substance abuse or mental health issues.  (Spoiler: he's also super rich.)  They have one night of sex and then move in together.  The end.  

Sigh.