Larry Grieco, Librarian. Danielle Steel, a little bit like MacDonald’s Hamburgers, just keeps racking up the millions—she now has over 650 million copies of her novels sold, and the numbers keep rising. Her latest is called Property of a Noblewoman, and is the ninety-ninth title in her long list of fiction books. A safe-deposit box in a New York City bank triggers a search for the truth about then “enigmatic life” of Marguerite Pearson. The safe-deposit box contains “faded photographs…old letters…and a breathtaking array of magnificent jewelry, spectacular stones in exquisite settings.” In other words, it constitutes a long-abandoned treasure trove, a legacy without an heir. Two people are drawn together to unravel the mystery of the box owner’s life. One is a law clerk, Jane Willoughby, who works at the surrogate’s court, and the other, Phillip Lawton, a fine arts expert. Their search for understanding of the life of the woman who left this treasure behind, takes them around the world—New York to London and Paris, to Rome and Naples—where they try to piece together the puzzle of who Marguerite Pearson really was.
Steel’s fans will rejoice, as they always do, at the prospect of tackling a new novel by one of the most popular authors in the world.
Now we come to a couple of offbeat autobiographies, from two women in the music business. Lindsey Stirling has written The Only Pirate at the Party, about her unconventional pursuit of success.
Lindsey was a classically trained musician who “went rogue” in ways that are truly unique. She is a “dancing electronic violinist” who was “voted off the set of America’s Got Talent, went on to garner more than ten million social media fans, record two full-length albums, release multiple hits with billions of YouTube views, and top it all off by going on tour to sold-out venues around the world. She knew rejection early, and often, by talent scouts and music reps, before being rejected on national television. None of that seemed to slow her down, much less stop her.
This memoir, written with Brooke S. Passey, tells the whole story of her “humble but charmed” childhood, her humorous adolescence, and struggles as a young musician. She had bouts with anorexia, and overcame it in the end. Finally, she became a successful world-class entertainer. On top of that, she is also a motivational speaker who uses her own story to help others “build confidence, hope, and passion.”
Then there’s Carrie Brownstein with her candid and inspiring memoir, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl. From out of the Pacific Northwest there came “one of the most important movements in rock history.” Bubbling to the top of “the burgeoning underground feminist punk-rock movement that would define music and pop culture in the 1990s” was Sleator-Kinney, that music critic Greil Marcus called “America’s best rock band.” Brownstein was the guitarist and vocalist of the band, known for its “defiant, exuberant brand of punk that resisted labels and limitations and redefined notions of gender in rock.”
Coming, not surprisingly, from a turbulent family life, she entered a world where “music was the means toward self-invention, community, and rescue.” Later on, some of her experiences became the basis for the “observational satire” of the popular television series Portlandia. Punkrocker Kim Gordon: “Carrie has written the book everyone has been waiting for. It looks inside the Riot Grrrl scent in Olympia from the outside in—from a fan to the stage, and what happens when your dream becomes your nightmare. So many times while reading this book I screamed ‘Yes!’ inside. You can feel Carrie’s visceral guitar-swirling energy on every page. An amazing writer.”
The schedule is set for the new film series. Join film critic Walter Chaw and myself on April 30 for The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, the first of five films by the legendary team known as “The Archers,” the name used by collaborators Michael Powell and Emeric Press-burger, who made some of the finest films in the history of cinema. In the weeks to follow, we’ll be showing A Matter of Life and Death, The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, and Gone to Earth. A complete schedule, with dates and times, will be available in the library as well as on the library’s website and Facebook page.
