Bossypants / Tina Fey

Tina Fey didn’t really cross my radar screen until I became a fan of "30 Rock" in its first few seasons (thanks mostly to time-delayed viewings via Hulu). The quirky sitcom featured such quick, smart, off-the-wall humor that it sort of defied comparison to anything else I’d seen on network TV. Then there were Tina Fey's Sarah Palin impersonations which were inspired and still inspire laughter today. Bossypants has been in high demand in the library, and my curiosity finally got the better of me and I checked it out.

Tina Fey is just one of those smart funny women that you have to admire. Her self-deprecating view of herself and her day-to-day life play in stark contrast to her confident entertainment persona and her many professional successes. The chapters describing her father and her annual Christmas visits to her Youngstown inlaws provide an interesting glimpse into her groundedness and precious ordinariness, and in other chapters she makes her “glamorous” TV lifestyle seem almost like just another job.

There’s a lot of talk here about women’s body issues, breastfeeding, and the angst of being a mother and balancing a demanding job. I got the feeling that the primary intended reader was meant to be a woman. But liberated males can absorb this information too, or at least skim through it until the next chapter takes up a more gender-neutral topic. This is a light book that will provide laughs and just a little bit of insight (but not too much) into the comic genius that is Tina Fey. Gotta love her.

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Murder in Passy, An Aimée Leduc Investigation / Cara Black

If you like your mysteries set in European locales, here’s a Parisian detective series that is sure to please. Aimée Leduc is a private eye, born of a French career detective and an absentee American mother (brief hints of angst over this in this installment). She’s appeared in about ten adventures, always set in iconic Parisian neighborhoods : Murder in the Marais, Murder in the Bastille, Murder in Montmartre, and Murder in the Latin Quarter , to name a few. In Murder in Passy (Paris’s tony XVIe arrondissement), Aimée finds herself mixed up in a murderous intrigue involving the French arm of the Basque nationalist movement. The final chase involves the kidnapping of a Spanish princess, a secret torture chamber used by the Gestapo in WWII, and a rooftop escape. The author sprinkles enough French words into the dialogue to either annoy you or make you feel your French 101 was not for nothing— Zut alors! très chic, c’est parfait, désolé, c’est tout! Oh, and Aimée’s frequent stop...

Addie Pray / Joe David Brown (more recently published as Paper Moon ) Click here to check for availability at AFPLS This 1971 novel was the inspiration for the Peter Bogdanovich movie Paper Moon . Eleven-year-old Addie and her maybe-father “Long Boy” Moses Pray crisscross the Deep South “ramifying” (scamming) people during the Great Depression. Addie’s street smarts and perceived girlish innocence, along with Long Boy’s cleverness and shrewd business acumen build their operation until they are dealing in millions. The movie remained pretty true to the first half of the book (though it moved the location from Alabama to Kansas), but the adventures continue far beyond where the movie left off. The decades haven’t dimmed the magic of this rollicking adventure, either in the film or the book. ©Ken Vesey, 17 June 2010

The Silent Patient / Alex Michaelides

A woman viciously murders her seemingly doting husband. We meet up with her several years later in a mental facility, where a therapist tries to get her to speak and to reveal her story. Who is innocent and who is the victim? The answer isn’t straightforward. The resolution to the novel features a real twist that will have the reader questioning the chronology of the different narrative threads in the book. A real page-turner.

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