As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales From The Making Of The Princess Bride by Carey Elwes with Joe Layden

First and foremost, I am a huge fan of the Princess Bride.  I discovered it in 1988 when it came out on VHS, like most people.  I can quote entire passages to this movie, which is totally faithful to the book, probably since Goldman wrote the script.  After the book came out there was a demand for a movie, so Goldman, a screenwriter of such hits as Marathon Man and All the President's Men calls this work his best and favorite.  Many famous names tried to make a movie out of it, including Robert Redford, but none succeeded until Rob Reiner came along and got backing from Norman Lear.  This was early in his career, but he was a hot ticket and this book was near and dear to his heart.

Reiner wanted a mostly English cast and automatically signed up his friends Christopher Guest to play Count Rogan and Billy Chrystal to play Miracle Max.  Someone suggested this unknown actor, Carey Elwes who had just been in a movie called Lady Jane Gray, about the ill-fated Queen of England.  Elwes, who had loved the book, himself, for years, was thrilled but scared of screwing up the audition.  He had nothing to worry about, though, Rob loved him.  Robin Wright, whose step-father is British, raised her on British comedy, and she developed a natural English accent.  Luckily they were able to borrow her from the soap Santa Barbara to play the part.

Andre the Giant was an easy cast and a good one.  He was a very kind man, who suffered severely from his disease that caused him to be so tall and big.  He ate and drank alcohol (for the pain in his back) like a horse, but rarely got drunk and he always paid for others.  Wallace Shawn was told that Danny DeVito was supposed to be in the movie as the Sicilian and spent the whole movie scared to death that he was going to be replaced, no matter what Reiner said to him.  In the battle of wits scene, Reiner had to help him through it.  He says he was 40% Reiner, 40% DeVito, and 20% him.

Mandy Patikin and Carey Elwes were going to have to do all of the sword fights themselves, rather than have stunt doubles to some of the harder stuff, like most movies do.  They spent every waking moment practicing with two of the best fencers in the business: Peter Diamond (who worked with Errol Flynn and Burt Lancaster, was the stunt coordinator on the Star Wars trilogy, played the Tusken Raider that surprised Luke in New Hope, he was a German soldier in the Raiders, as well as stunt coordinator in that movie, and worked on Highlander) and Bob Anderson (Olympic winner, coached Errol Flynn, choreographed scenes for several Bond movies and the Star Wars trilogy, as well as playing Vader during his fight scenes and working on the Lord of the Rings trilogy).  The book describes the Sword Fight as the "Greatest Swordfight in Modern Times". Peter and Bob intended to do their best to make this so and train them hard to not only fight but fight both handed.  I'll leave the story of the filming of the swordfight for you to discover.

Elwes got injured twice during the filming of this movie and both were his fault.  He broke his toe on the day they were to spend one day at the site of the giant hill where Wesley talks about being the Dred Pirate Roberts and what happened to Wesley, which contains one of my favorite lines: Life is pain.  Anyone who tells you differently is trying to sell you something.  If you watch as they walk across the top of the hill you can tell he is careful about his left foot.  Also, after they reach the bottom of the hill and run off, he is more hopping than running.

The second time, was when Christopher Guest was supposed to hit him over the head with his sword, which was a real medieval sword hilt and knock him out.  Guest, the nicest guy ever, was scared of hurting him, so he came nowhere near Elwes' head when he struck, which meant that Elwes was falling at the wrong time.  Finally, Elwes tells him to just tap him on the head with it.  Guest does more than tap it on his head.  When Wesley falls down unconscious, he really was unconscious.  He woke up in the hospital with stitches in his head.  Later on, when he has to knock out Patinkin with his sword, he does it from the back, so the camera does not show him not touching his head.

In the fire swamp, they have to do a stunt, where Buttercup falls into Lightening Sand and Wesley goes in to save her.  For safety sake, they wanted him to jump in feet first.  There was a hidden trap door and a short drop onto Styrofoam and two people to help catch you.  Cary was not satisfied with this.  It was not heroic enough.  Flynn would not do it this way.  No hero would.  He wanted to dive head first.  After a very lengthy discussion, Cary finally convinced Reiner.  After carefully practicing it with stunt doubles who showed Cary how to do it, it was done in one take.

This book is one of the best I've read all year.  I could go on and on about all of its hidden secrets, but that would spoil it for you, the reader.  Making this movie, was a great highlight to many who worked on this film.  Sadly, when it came out, Fox did not know how to market it.  The poster pictured Fred Savage and Peter Faulk on it, leading people to think it was a kiddie movie, which it was not, really.  They had no trailer, no print ads, and no TV ads.  If the internet had been around, perhaps it would have been more successful in theaters.  Everyone was disappointed in the response.

Later, when people started catching it on VHS, everyone, including President Clinton, who told him it was his and Chelsea's favorite movie and Pope John Paul II who, in a chance meeting, told him how much he loved it.  People began to quote lines to the actors on the street.  Reiner tells the tale of when he went out to a restaurant Gotti went to, who happened to show up that night.  When Reiner stepped outside for a moment, one of Gotti's men looked at him and said "You killed my father. Prepare to die."  For a moment Reiner froze and was scared out of his mind before he realized what the man was talking about.  It has become a phenomenon and a classic that will be loved down through the ages, even without CGI special effects that might have made the ROUSs look more real, but would have ruined the movie.  Beware, after reading this book, you will want to immediately grab the movie and watch it again with new eyes as you look for the secrets hidden within.

Link to Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/As-You-Wish-Inconceivable-Princess/dp/1476764026/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1467033088&sr=1-1&keywords=as+you+wish+inconceivable+tales+from+the+making+of+the+princess+bride

Monday Mourning by Kathy Reichs

Unlike the Bones in the TV series, this forensic anthropologist, Tempe Brennan, has a college-aged daughter, is a recovering alcoholic (a fallout from the end of a twenty-year marriage), and spends her time between working in Charlotte, North Carolina and Quebec.  This is an excellent series.  I have loved ever book I have read so far, but I don't know if I can tell you to read this one or not, because, even though I only read it maybe a month ago, I remember very little of the book.  This does not say much for the book, or my memory.  So you're on your own.

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

First of all, let me say that this book has been lauded in many reviews as a great book and is still on the New York Times best-seller list.  That said, I have to confess, that after two weeks and only getting through half of it, I gave up.  That is not to say that I will not try to read this book again.  I just might give it another chance later on.  That is what I did when I did not like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and see how that turned out.

This book is set in during World War II and involve two sixteen-year-olds, Marie-Laure, a blind French girl who lives with her father, who works at a Paris museum.  He buys her on her birthday each year a book in braille and builds a puzzle box of the city of Paris, in scale, so she can find her way around it in her mind.  The museum is home to many priceless art pieces, but one in particular is worth more that the others.  It is the Sea of Flame, a cursed gem, that is said to provide immortality to its owner.  When the Nazis invade France, the French box up the valuables and send them off to be hid.  The gem, however, they make three copies of it and send two of the copies along with the real one, off to different points to try to keep it safe.  Marie-Laure's father is one who is given a stone and they set off on a journey to find the man they are to give it to, who will get it out of the country.  By the time they arrive, he has left his home.  It is not far to her great-uncle's house in Saint-Malo.  Her uncle, an eccentric who never got over World War I, has a housekeeper who works for the underground.

Soon, Marie-Laure's father is sent back to Paris, but he leaves the stone and a puzzle box of the streets of Saint-Malo with her in the care of her Uncle and the housekeeper.  The book bounces back and forth between time periods and at one point, she is alone in the house, when a Nazi, whose purpose is to hunt down Europe's treasure's for Hitler, goes to the house to find the stone, with only Marie-Laure in the house that we know of, because she has heard from no one and is hiding with the stone.

The other teenager, is Werner, an orphaned German boy who, with his sister, Jutta, live with a sweet French woman and other children.  Werner is a self-taught intelligent young man, who figures out how to fix radios.  He learns math and mechanics from an old book, that is eventually taken from him by the Nazis, because the book was written by a Jew.  He builds a radio and the children all spend their evenings listening to it.  He can even get stations as far away as France, which how he and Jutta learn of what the Germans are doing to the French.  Jutta is against this.  But Werner does not know what to think.  His bleak future consists of working in the mines when he turns sixteen, but chance intervenes.  A Nazi official hears about his prowess and sends for him to fix his fancy radio, which he does, easily.  This official gets Werner enrolled in a Nazi boy's school where he is taught how to be a soldier as well as spending special time with a professor who is trying to make a better radio for the war.  His best friend, Fredrick, is a rich kid who, because of his position in society is sent to this school, even though he is as blind as a bat and cheats the eye exam to get in.  He is a dreamer who  loves birds and looks out for the unfortunate.  He is smart, but weak, and his ideals get him into horrific trouble that Werner cannot seem to protect him from, though he feels as though he should.  In one of the flash forwards, we see that Werner and two other soldiers are under a building with a broken radio in Saint-Malo, with the Americans coming and no way out.  It is here that his life intersects with Marie-Laure somehow.  I never got that far.

Don't let the fact that I didn't finish this book effect your idea of whether or not to read it.  Like I said before, it has garnered incredible reviews and maybe I was just not in the mood to read a book like this now.  If this overview of the book interests, by all means pick it up and give it a whirl.  I myself just might one day finish it too.

Valley of Silence: Book Three of the Circle Trilogy by Nora Roberts

This is the final book in the Circle Trilogy and I have to say they saved the best for last.  Maybe its because I can really relate to the bookish and curious nature of Moira and the cynical, sarcastic, been-there-done-it attitude of Cian.  This book will culminate in the ultimate battle against Lilith on the Valley of Shadows, where blood is soaked into the ground from when the gods battled against each other ages ago.

The people of Gael watch as Moira pulls out the sword of destiny, which determines if that person will be the ruler.  When she pulled it out, a streak of wild lightening flashed up her arm and through the sword into the sky, which heightens Moira's small amount of magical powers.  She works with Glenna to make them even stronger as the others continue to practice fighting.  At her coronation ceremony feast, one of Lilith's half-vampires shoots an arrow at her and Cian pushes her down and gets stabbed instead.  She declares, much to his discontent, that he is now Sir Cian.  It helps to cement the people to like and trust Cian more.  They decide to use the friendly dragons in the area, who have never had much to do with the people of Gael, but whom Larkin can talk to.  They plan to reign fire bombs and fire arrows from the skies.

Moira, tired of waiting for Cian to come to her goes to him and seduces him into taking her virginity, something he has refused to do, since they have no hope for a future.  He will live on after her and can not provide her with children.  They only have this short period of time together, before he will leave and go back to his world where he belongs. 

Lilith, meanwhile, sends her six-year-old vampire child, Davey, to have his first hunt.  He is protected from steel and wood by her magician's spell and goes out and convinces one of her men to leave the encampment to try to save him, only to be viciously killed.  Moira is having a hard time with her role as queen as she has to offer comfort to the families who have lost loved ones.  So, when her ladies-in-waiting demand to go and fight alongside their men, she gives in and lets them.

On a side note, there is one of the most sexy love scenes I have ever encountered in either a romance or vampire book and it involves mirrors.  I'd have never thought of it.  Hats off to you Nora Roberts for thinking outside the box.

The end of the book culminates in the battle and the secret weapon the six are planning to use to hopefully wipe out all of the vampires.  This was truly a satisfying read and a wonderfully grand ending to a very enjoyable trilogy.  These books, and this one in particular, will take you far away from your own world, into a magical one where anything is possible. 

A Marked Man by Barbra Hamilton

In this second mystery set in Revolutionary  Boston and featuring Abigail Adams, the Boston tea party has just happened and the colonists are awaiting the king's reprisal.  Abigail notices in the paper that a slave girl named Bathsheba has gone missing, leaving behind a young babe and a toddler.  Abigail knows in her heart that this woman would never leave her children behind and must be dead.  She is soon distracted from this by the arrest of Henry Knox, a bookstore owner and printer of seditious material, for the death of an Army officer and friend of the Governor's.  It is said that Henry and Lucy Fluckner, from the first book, whose maid was a target for a madman, were meeting and in love.  Sir Jonathan Cottrell tried to touch Lucy in a very inappropriate manner, in order to dishonor her into a marriage with him so he could get a lot of land in Maine from her father.  Henry gave him a black eye and threatened to kill him if he touched her again.

Cottrell, then went to Maine to oversee Mr. Fluckner's properties and try to get the people off the land to make way for new people.  The night he got back he was supposed to go to the Fluckner's ball where Lucy's father was going to announce her engagement to him, against her wishes, but he never showed up.  Instead, his body is found beaten and frozen on the ground outside the house the next morning.  Mr. Fluckner, not realizing the gravity of the situation and just wanting Henry away from his daughter, has one of his employees say they saw Henry in the alley that night with the scarf that was found on the scene.  Henry is to be tried in military court after being questioned on the Sons of Liberty and everything he knows, and then likely found guilty of murder and hung.  Luckily the weather is keeping the ship from arriving, giving Abigail Adams and her sleuth in arms (sort of) Lieutenant Coldstone.

Abigail, with the help of Lucy and her chaperone, Mrs. Sandhayes, help to figure out who was in the ball where and when in order to see who could have slipped out of the house to kill Cottrell, but this gets them nowhere.  Cottrell's servant, who didn't go with him to Maine because he was too ill, is found to have been poisoned by two actors from Barbados, where Cottrell was stationed and sullied a girl's reputation, who had committed suicide, and had to buy off her parents.  Needless to say, everywhere he went, Cottrell made enemies, but sorting through them and finding the killer is going to be tough.

As Abigail and Coldstone get closer their lives are threatened.  Coldstone is lured to a secret place and is shot and Abigail interrupts an intruder set on poisoning her food stores.  Cottrell is said to have been seen at a house rented by a mysterious Mr. Elkins, whom no one can find.  An inspection of the house results in the sense that someone has died there, but there is no proof of this, only an empty well in the cellar, used to keep wine cooled.

As time grows close for Henry's departure, Abigail finally realizes who the killer is, but may be too late to save her life or Henry's, as the most ingenious nemesis steps forward and shocks the reader with their identity.  I did not see the ending coming.  This book was a really great read and kept me on the edge of my seat.  As I flew through the last pages of the book, I was hoping for the killer to  be caught and taken in.  The ending will surprise you.  This series really delves into what life was like at that time in history (including the use of a French version of a chamber pot in church because the sermons are so long and having to deal with frozen laundry) and lets a woman, who in today's time could have been a lawyer like her husband John, or anything she wanted to be, but is put into the part of mother and wife.  This series lets her spread her wings and become something extra and lets her use her sharp mind to unmask killers.   By the way, Henry Knox and Lucy Fluckner were real people.  They will marry and have a ton of kids and fight in the war.  Fort Knox and Knoxville is named after Henry.

Quotes:

Honestly, I understand why ladies are never the heroines of anything, they simply cannot get away from their kitchens long enough to rescue anyone.

--Barbara Hamilton (A Marked Man p 281)

Link to Amazon:  https://www.amazon.com/Marked-Man-Abigail-Adams-Mystery/dp/0425237087/ref=sr_1_17?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1475501257&sr=1-17&keywords=a+marked+man

This Dark Road to Mercy by Wiley Cash

This New York Times bestselling author has written a novel about two girls and their lives during the time when Sammy Sousa was battling McGuire for the most home runs and beat Maris's record.  Years ago, their father legally gave all rights to being a parent to Easter and Ruby Quillby.  Wade was a minor league player who once played with Sousa and is now washed up.  Afterward, her mother began a quick spiral downward into drugs and depression until finally one day, when Easter was twelve and Ruby six, their mother overdoses on drugs.

They are then sent to a foster home to stay while their mother's parents in Alaska start the process of getting custody of them.  But Easter doesn't want to go to Alaska.  She's happy in Gastonia, where she has a safe home and a boyfriend, who knocks on her window and they spend time talking to each other all night.

Everything changes one night, when their father, Wade Chesterfield, who has been denied access to the girls, knocks on their window.  Easter thinks it's her boyfriend, so she opens it, only to see her father coming through the window.  Before she can stop her, Ruby runs to him.  Ruby doesn't remember that he was a bad father and husband to their mother.  Wade threatens to take off with Ruby if Easter calls the alarm, so she decides to go quietly with him.

But Wade isn't the only one looking for the girls.  A man hired by a mob boss who robbed an armored car and stole a lot of money, part of which Wade stole from him, when he was in his house doing construction repairs.  But this is also the story of Brady, Easter and Ruby's guardian ad litem, who knows Wade has the money and the bad guys are after them, but can't get the police interested.  They only care about the catching the mobster, not the lives of two innocent girls. The Brady had an unfortunate incident that got him booted off the police force and caused him to lose his family.  Helping these two girls becomes a mission for him.

Easter doesn't know what to make of Wade.  She feels so conflicted.  He left, but now he's back, but she knows that trouble is looking for them.  She wants to hold on to the resentment she has for her father, but she also desperately wants his love and attention.  This book will hit you in the gut when you think about what these poor girls have gone through and what their fate may be.  This is one not to be missed.

*Addendum: This novel won the 2014 Golden Dagger Award for Best Novel by the Crime Writers Associates.  This is a very high honor.

Link to Amazon:  https://www.amazon.com/This-Dark-Road-Mercy-Novel/dp/0062088262/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1477057014&sr=8-1&keywords=the+dark+road+to+mercy

Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil by Deborah Rodriguez

In 2001, right before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Rodriguez, a hairdresser, joined an humanitarian aid group to go to Kabul, Afghanistan and try to help.  The country was in chaos after driving out the Russians, surviving the tribal wars, and the driving out of the Taliban.  When she arrives she's with doctors and such who are setting up clinics and doing "important things", but no one seems to know what to do with this woman with spiky dyed bright red hair that can't be contained under a scarf, until she goes to a big party held by aid group for everyone to meet each other, and when she is introduced as a hairdresser, a wild cheer goes up.  It turns out that the Taliban closed all of the salons because they believed they were brothels, which a few were.  Very few salons were open now and they didn't know how to do much.  One woman had to drive to Pakistan to get her hair colored, because no one in Afghanistan knew how to do it.  Soon she is swamped with requests to cut and do hair.

This is when she gets the idea to open up a beauty school to train Afghan women to do better hair (they didn't even have real curlers for perms and had the customer leave the solution in overnight, which resulted in frizzy hair) and to train new ones in the profession so they could earn their own money for themselves and their family.

Soon she is back home with her mean and abusive second husband and two boys, and she decides to call Paul Mitchell on a whim and they agree to send her whatever she wants.  They suggest she call other companies to donate items as well.  Soon the boxes start to arrive and there are so many she has to rent a storage shed.  While she gets up the courage to finally leave her husband, partly in thanks to the friends she made in Afghanistan and what she saw there, she finds out about an aid organization that plans to open up a beauty school and she offers to teach it.

The organization provides the salon and she has the materials to work with.  She is soon swamped with over a hundred applicants for her first class and she can only take twenty.  Her Dari is limited so she has to speak through her best friend, Roshanna, who teaches her much about the Afghan culture.  She is soon tearing her hair out trying to teach them about the color wheel that is essential to highlighting and coloring hair, when after days of this, she finally manages to reach one student, who explains it in her own way, and soon they are on their way to learning how to do hair.

Two of her Americanized Afghan friends are determined to get her an Afghan husband.  She thinks this is silly, after all, she has already failed at two marriages.  Soon, however, they find the perfect man, Sam.  Only he speaks very little English and already has a first wife with seven daughters.  After only knowing him for about twenty days, and being ten years older than he is, she marries him.  Things are rocky due to culture and language barriers.  In Afghanistan, men may hold hands or put an arm around another man walking down the street, but they don't hold the hands of their women, ever, or show affection.

When Roshanna's family has a man's mother asks for her to marry her son (it's the mother who finds the first wife in Afghan culture), they are thrilled, because, Roshanna had been engaged once, when the Taliban was in rule and they were afraid they would take her and marry her by force, they set up a marriage to a German Afghan.  After the marriage certificate is signed at the engagement party, unbeknownst to her family he rapes her and then leaves for Germany and the family soon finds out he has divorced her.  No one knows she is not a virgin.  Wedding are a very big deal in Afghanistan.  The women put on enough make-up and pile their hair up as high as possible on their head that they look like drag queens.  On the night of the wedding, there is a sheet put up between the two sexes, as men and women do not mingle at official parties.  On both sides, however, everyone is doing something beyond dirty dancing, it's so sensual.  Panic soon ensues, however, when the handkerchief is brought out with no blood on it.  She won't let him completely enter her because it hurts.  So, Debbie has a talk with her and cuts her fingernail to the quick and forces blood to come from her finger in order to smear it on the handkerchief.  Everyone is happy.

Finding funding for her second and third classes becomes hard, so Debbie opens up a beauty salon at her new home with her husband and hires the top four girls from her first class to not only work there, but to also teach the class, with the idea that in the future, these women would be teaching the classes themselves.  Each member of the class leaves with a complete kit to set up shop anywhere, including brushes, combs, curlers, curling irons, hair dryers, etc...Word spreads among the Westerners, as well as the Afghan women about the school and her salon and soon they are swamped with customers, including some men, who sneak in after hours, because it is illegal for a woman to do a man's hair, for a style and manicure.

While there are many problems that occur in her marriage, with keeping the beauty school open, and with some of the dangerous Afghan people who are still pro-Taliban, she keeps going determined to give these women their freedom to make it on their own and to finally have a say in the family's finances.  This program is changing the lives of not only the women but of the men in their lives

Link to Amazon:  https://www.amazon.com/Kabul-Beauty-School-American-Behind/dp/0812976738/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1479136574&sr=1-1&keywords=kabul+beauty+school+by+deborah+rodriguez