Nathan Field is selected to play Puck in The Company of Boy’s production of  A Midsummer’s Night Dream. No-nonsense director Arby assembled his company of the boys from all over the US and arranged for them to perform in London at the Globe, a mere couple hundred feet away from the location of the original Globe–Shakespeare’s theatre. Nat throws himself wholeheartedly into acting, not just because Arby is demanding, but because when he plays Puck in London, he can remove himself far enough from Nat, the grieving orphan from South Carolina.

And like that, Cooper sets the stage for Nat to go to bed one night with the flu and awake the next day in London, 1599, having swapped places with another Nathan Field, an apprentice actor on loan from St. Paul’s to play Puck with the Chamberlain’s Men–Shakespeare’s acting company. Which Shakespeare acts in as well as writes for. For the record, he’s playing Oberon. What mischief is this?

Rather than get hung up on the technicalities and the likelihood of such a glitch-free time swap, Cooper draws readers in by bringing to life sixteenth century London and Shakespeare’s Globe. The difference in language, lack of proper sanitation, barbaric choices in popular entertainment, Nat’s confusion and his ability to adapt–we experience it all in vivid detail. Even the smells are viscerally putrid.

And then there is Nat’s unique friendship with William Shakespeare. Right away, Shakespeare is able to see Nat’s talent, his other-worldliness, and his deep grief. Meanwhile, Nat trusts Shakespeare implicitly and views him as a surrogate father figure. Through their relationship, Shakespeare helps Nat begin to address his bereavement and heartache. These weighty moments are written with complexity and finesse, without being overly sentimental or histrionic.

Still, all journeys come to an end, even the best ones, and Nat has no choice but to return to modern day London. However, there are still issues for Nat to work through and one last surprise waiting for him. As a reader, it was a delight to tag along for the ride.

Here’s what the cover looks like:

We tried to recreate the pensive, depressing mood, but we shot on a beautiful sunny day. You be the judge–we even included two versions.

And here’s the secret to our sophisticated lighting (Jen was behind the camera. Lisa held the all-important posterboard).

ETA: for more pictures from the shoot, visit here.

So…..drumroll…..the final report:

Books read: Obsidian Mirror + Invincible Louisa + Anansi Boys + Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease

Hours reading: 4 hours + 2 hours + 1 hour + 1.5 hours = 8.5 hours

Pages read: 378 pages + 197 pages + 83 pages + 39 pages = 697 pages

And now, a BIG thanks to Ms. Yingling for organizing this fun event and for stopping by to check out our TBR piles. I didn’t keep track how much time I spent writing up reviews and following the #48HBC Twitter feed (maybe 1.5 hours?), but to all the #48HBC participants, I had a great time chatting with you and, at times, envying your TBR pile. Keep in touch!

And now, back to the Tonys….

Stats

Started: 8:30pm Friday

Ended: 8:30pm Sunday

6.25 hours reading

1.25 hours blogging/commenting etc.

1 finished book (Hattie Big Sky)

3 partly read books (Bilbo le Hobbit, Toms River, Applewhites at Wit’s End)

Total number of pages: 542 (includes 21 pages in French, which slowed my pace to a sluglike crawl)

Though I didn’t get to read as much as last year, this year’s #48HBC was just as fun. In fact, I’m going to keep reading so I can finish Applewhites tonight…thank you to Ms. Yingling for hosting the challenge, and  I hope to do this again next year.

While Invincible Louisa is filed under biography and author Meigs did mention her source names and titles, unlike the non-fiction of today, Meigs does not include a bibliography or cite her quotes. Please take these fun Louisa facts with a grain of salt.

• even though Louisa May Alcott is associated with the towns of Concord and Harvard, she was actually born in Germantown, Pennsylvania.
• Louisa’s father, Bronson Alcott, was an eccentric and principled man who believed in a model of simple living akin to the Shakers’, but without the separation of men and women, so the Alcotts never had much money and moved around a LOT
• young Louisa listed “love of cats” as her worst sin
• as a teenager, Louisa had a huge crush on family friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, and would leave little poems, wrapped around rocks, on his doorstep
• Louisa was a nurse in DC during the Civil War. She wrote about the patients she met, and unlike other war writers, she did not romanticize any of it
• as a nurse, Louisa caught typhoid fever and when she was ill, she had to cut off her floor length hair–her only vanity
• Mr. Niles, of Roberts Brothers publishing house, first gave Louisa the idea to write about girls. She replied that she could only write about boys.
• while most characters in Little Women are based on Louisa’s family and friends, Jo’s love interest, Mr. Bhaer, is based on……nobody.
• when Mr. Niles read Louisa’s manuscript, he wasn’t sold on Little Women, so he gave it to his neice for her opinion. The rest is history.

And my biggest takeaway: it’s still uncanny just how much Little Women is basically just Louisa’s entire life.

necromancer = Nécromancien (it looks a lot more threatening in French)

Thorin, Balin, Dwalin all get accents, becoming Thorïn, Balïn, Dwalïn

“burrahobbit”–Bilbo’s mishmash of burglar and hobbit when he’s caught by the trolls–becomes “un camb…un hobbit” or cambunhobbit (un cambrioleur = a burglar)

The inebriated Rivendell song: in English, one of the lines is “O! Tril-lil-lil-lolly.” In French, they’ve given up on the dashes and connected everything, so it’s “Ah! trillillilolly.” Looks rather cramped.

The goblins’ song is much more satisfying:

Clap! Snap! the black crack!
Grip, grab! Pinch, nab!
And down down to Goblin-town
You go, my lad! …

=

Crac ! clac ! La crevasse noire !
Tiens, serre ! Pince, chope !
Et tout en bas, tout en bas, à Gobelinville
Tu vas, mon gars ! …

total read time: 4 hours (I had to go back and re-read certain sections)

length of book: 378 pages

• Jack Wilde, you are NOT Inigo Montoya. Now stop stabbing other kids with your fencing blade. #OBSIDIANMIRROR #48HBC
• OBSIDIAN BLADE* chap 2 introduces mystery girl running thru 13 pages of woods like a high school horror flick. Need more info to care #48HBC
• OBSIDIAN MIRROR pg.171: calling it right now. Piers the manservant is a pixie-chef! #48HBC
• OBSIDIAN MIRROR pg. 273: I was right! His biscuits are magic! #48HBC
• OBSIDIAN MIRROR: I might have read too quickly, but I don’t buy this Replicant time travel business. Go back, go back, go back! #48HBC
• OBSIDIAN MIRROR: Still not sold about the time travel, the coin business is action flick silly, did NOT expect the reveal at the end #48HBC

So…now that I’ve had a good night’s sleep to think about Obsidian‘s time travel. The obsidian mirror is a (not very precise) time machine. According to Sarah, the mystery girl being hunted in the woods, if you time travel and botch your return trip by arriving before you left, you create a Replicant of yourself because there are now two of you at this point in time. The Replicant is immortal, because the real you is safe in a steel bunker in the future.

But the you that has free will is the you that has already traveled, not the pre-travel-you, which is on a fixed timeline and should vanish on the day you time travel. If that “replicant” goes AWOL and starts antagonizing people like Sarah instead of time traveling, then you’ve got a paradox, because then you’ve never traveled.

So lets assume that we’re not working on a fixed timeline, but on a fluid one. So, the Replicant go AWOL and doesn’t time travel, but he or she would have to create a parallel universe to do so. And voila, you have two versions of the same person, but they should be autonomous, so how does the original control them from the steel bunker in the future?

Now I’m so confused. Anyone want to comment or discuss?

*whoops, that should read MIRROR.

The first time I read it several years ago, it was for the story. This time I paid more attention to the details, and have concluded I wouldn’t last a day in Hattie’s shoes. The fence building, the cold, the mad horses/wolves, the cold, and did I mention the cold? I like snow, but not blizzards that force you to cling onto a rope line to walk from the house to the barn (it’s very Laura Ingalls Wilder and The Long Winter).

Anyway, I’ve just reserved the sequel from the library. (Hattie becomes a journalist! This is excellent).

And now it’s time for bed. Tomorrow I need to get started on the French Hobbit. I don’t expect to finish that anytime soon, and Toms River is also quite long, so Hattie is probably the only book I’ll finish this weekend. But judging from twitter, I seem to be enjoying my books more than Jen…

48HBC TBR pile

Looking forward to experiencing my second 48HBC. Behold my reading list:

• Invincible Louisa by Cornelia Meigs (for the Newbery Challenge)
• Obsidian Mirror by Catherine Fisher (recommended by Lee the Librarian)
• Endangered by Eliot Schrefer (which finally came after being in transit since January)
• From Cover to Cover by Kathleen T. Horning (kind of meta, but…)
• Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman (which has been in my TBR pile since May)

Start time: 9:00 pm.

My book pile is also less exciting because I’m overdue for a trip to the library. Still:

Tom’s River by Dan Fagin (adult, nonfiction, about something depressing. But it reads like a thriller and Fagin does that amazing thing where he makes the writing look easy.)

Bilbo le Hobbit by J.R. R. Tolkien (The Hobbit, translated into French by Francis Ledoux. Must keep up my French skills.)

Hattie Big Sky by Kirby Larson (a re-read, to get ready for checking out the sequel. Can’t wait!)

Start time: 8:30pm today, Friday.