Bookin' It My Way

Here you will find book related contests, links to reviews, and other fun, book related stuff.

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Location: Minneapolis, Minnesota

I can't imagine a world with no books in it, which is why I read and write so much.

Sunday, November 25, 2007

Lesson of a Lifetime (Movies for Women) 3 - It Was One of Us




It Was One of Us tells the story of five old college roommates at their 10 year reunion. When the ladies break into their old suite (which is nicer than anything I ever stayed in while at college), and catch up, they decide to reveal their deepest, darkest secrets. Of course the women all are very different – there’s the successful but lonely business woman, the college professor with commitment issues, the (slightly) overweight married mom/doctor who runs her practice from her home, the yoga/man obsessed stay-at-home mom, and the exotic party-girl who has just returned from overseas.
Their secrets are also varied. They include adultery, addiction, plagiarism, illegal selling of prescription drugs, and insider trading. These secrets are of course told in the strictest of confidence, so imagine the ladies’ surprise when they each get an anonymous letter demanding $20,000 within a week or their secrets will be revealed and their lives will be ruined. They reconvene to figure out how this could have happened, was their old dorm room bugged, and if so, who could be blackmailing them? “It was one of us!” one of them cries. But who? The rest of the movie is about the five former friends spying on each other in an effort to figure that out.
I won’t tell you the details about who did it and why, but I will say that it was indeed one of the five (not who you’d expect, which I liked) but it all turns out okay anyway. After watching nearly two hours of these women lie, go behind each other’s backs, and in one case, pull out a gun and threaten to shoot, the movie ends with a montage of the five of them hugging each other and smiling, while some sappy song about friendship plays in the background.
Hmm… I remember college, and I remember thinking I would maintain the friendships I formed there indefinitely. Now, fifteen years later, I talk to one person I met there on a semi-regular basis, and that’s it. She was never a roommate. My roommates changed every year, and they included an alcoholic with a stalker-type boyfriend, and a group of three girls who already knew each other while I was the odd-one-out. What I remember most about them was that they decorated our entire suite in beer signs. It was horrendous. Other roommates were friends, but due to things like geography, changed priorities, or some deep-rooted emotional issues (theirs, not mine), we fell out of touch.
So who am I to judge? But it seems to me that these women had it all wrong. Amid all the terrible secrets and the eventual bribery that followed, do you want to know the one act committed that was deemed unforgivable? The doctor/mom gained weight during her second pregnancy and never took it off! Every time she wanted a cookie or something that wasn’t a carrot stick, she received reprimands from her size two friends (she was probably a size 10 or 12 herself), and nobody seemed to care that she was a doctor with her own practice.
So what did I learn? It’s okay to lie, cheat, steal, or maybe even kill, but before I go to my next reunion I’d better make sure I’m not carrying any extra weight around. That said, I’d love to reconnect with some old-college friends, if I only had the time and energy to do so. I’d even be willing to be a stereotype if it meant I could have a movie type of life where I’d be part of a group of tight female friends. I’d be the tired working mom with aspirations of a writing career one.


Copyright 2007 by Laurel Osterkamp. All rights reserved.

Sunday, November 11, 2007

Book Review - Picture Perfect


Picture Perfect, by Jodi Picoult, tells the story of Cassie, an anthropologist who’s married to the famous Alex Rivers, a movie star as talented as Daniel Day Lewis, as desired as George Clooney, and as handsome as both of those guys put together. However, things are not as great as they seem, because soon Alex begins to beat Cassie. Of course, there are reasons why he beats her (he suffered abuse as a child, his parents never loved him) and reasons why she puts up with it (she had an alcoholic mother who depended on her, her first love was shot and killed), but ultimately, Cassie must decide if love should be as forgiving as she has spent her life being. When she can no longer handle the punishment that loving Alex brings, she turns to Will, a Native American cop who has his own demons to battle. A love triangle is established that will ultimately test the power of their love and the strength of their own identities.
Jodi Picoult, as always, is an excellent story-teller, and one of my favorite writers. Reading her books is like taking a class on how to write fiction that’s at once compelling, entertaining, and moving. There are some extremely effective passages in this book that demonstrate her mastery with words, and I would recommend Picture Perfect to anyone who enjoys a good story about the complexities of love and the imperfections of the human race.
That said, there was one thing that bugged me. I started to get really annoyed with Cassie for staying with Alex as long as she did, to the point where I almost didn’t care anymore about what happened to her. Also, I failed to understand what both Alex and Will saw in her, why they both were so hopelessly in love with this woman.
Yet, despite my complaint, I still think Picture Perfect is a great story. I have read other books about abuse, and I’ve seen movies as well, and in each one the abuser is always the ultimate evil bad-guy, the woman is the martyred victim, forced to find her strength, and the other guy (the guy she finds once she leaves her husband) is nice and predictably perfect for her. Picoult never stoops to such cliché’s. All of her characters have strengths and weaknesses, no one is a true sinner or a saint.


By Laurel Osterkamp
2007. All rights reserved

Saturday, November 03, 2007

Lesson of a Lifetime (Movies for Women) #2 - Fatal Lessons: The Good Teacher




Victoria Page is an aspiring authoress, who gets her material by assuming new identities, then swooping down on a happy family and destroying them through lies, manipulation, and poison. In Fatal Lessons: The Good Teacher, she gets a job as a middle school teacher, and worms her way into the family of one of her students by cozying up to the mother, Samantha Stevens. She starts to poison Samantha by slowly giving her homegrown lethal herbs, and that makes Samantha spacey and forgetful. Her husband starts to get pissed of at this, and her life and marriage come apart.
Meanwhile, Victoria records everything that happens into her manuscript, and positions herself to fill Samantha’s shoes as wife and mother after she successfully kills Samantha by giving some herbs that will make it look like she had a heart attack. After it’s all over, she’ll have a great family and a potential best-seller that she’ll never be able to publish because it will be proof of her guilt, so I’m unsure why she goes to so much trouble to execute her evil plan.
About half-way through the movie a sleazy looking guy who knows Victoria shows up and tries to blackmail her, because I guess she’s done this before to other families, and she just kills the husband and kids once she gets tired of them, then moves on. Yet she records EVERYTHING, and we know this because she refers to other “chapters” during her voice-overs, (like the good ski-instructor or the good accountant), but why she does this completely baffles me. Why write a manuscript that you know you’ll never be able to sell?
Also, I have to wonder how Victoria landed such a plum teaching job in the idyllic mountain town where the film takes place. And, assuming she faked her credentials, how she knows so much about teaching that she can successfully do her job. (I know – anyone can teach, right?)
I guess my lesson here is I’m Just Bitter. I actually am a teacher, and I’d like to think – a writer, and I have the sort happy family she aims to infiltrate, yet I’m not nearly as disciplined as Victoria (who was played Erika Elenaik). I don’t look nearly as good in a bathing suit, and my nails aren’t manicured like hers are, and I’m not one of those people who always seem composed and sure of themselves. I’m more like Patricia Kalember’s character, Samantha, who always wears cardigan sweaters, and whose hair is always a little messy, and who seems to find herself apologizing for things she didn’t necessarily do.
Oh well. It is of course Samantha who not only makes it out of the movie alive, but who saves herself and her family in the process, thus proving her innocence and her self-worth. In the end it’s Samantha’s husband who is apologizing, and Samantha’s a lot more forgiving than I would have been.
The moral? It’s okay to be bitter as long as you’re forgiving as well. But don’t be one without the other. Oh – and if an extremely attractive new friend starts offering you odd looking herbs, don’t take them.