DVD Review: Instant Family

Instant Family
[DVD Instant]

This one is a mild, family, comedic drama, with occasional forays into serious social commentary and occasional descents into almost slapstick comedy. Mark Wahlburg and Rose Byrne play Pete and Ellie, a married couple with busy lives, who’ve never gotten around to have kids of their own. A series of comical incidents, and family/peer pressures, lead them down the path towards becoming foster parents. But instead of a single youth child to help provide a stable home for, they end up taking on the challenge of raising three siblings — sarcastic teenager Lizzy, accident-prone pre-teen Juan, and precocious but emotionally temperamental Lita.

Instant Family is funny, with a sentimental touch. The entire cast is quite excellent, particularly Isabela Merced as teenager Lizzy, who’s had to serve as a surrogate parent to her two young siblings, and who desperately wants to be reunited with her drug-addicted biological mother. Octavia Spencer and Tig Notaro provide extreme comic relief as two welfare workers who put Pete and Ellie through foster parent boot camp and remain advisors to the new family. This is a fun, poignant, inspiring little film — perhaps it glosses over the inherent difficulties and challenges in becoming foster parents a bit in search of its humor, but it definitely has its heart in the right place, and leaves you feeling “up” by the end.

[ Internet Movie Database entry for this film ] | [ official Instant Family web site ]

Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library

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Book Review: To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers

To Be Taught, If Fortunate
by Becky Chambers (ebook)

To Be Taught, If Fortunate is a science fiction novella by Becky Chambers, who is best known for her Wayfarers series beginning with The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet.

To Be Taught [etc.] takes place in a much closer future than the Wayfarers series, when humanity has just begun to send expeditions to other stars that are likely to support life. The story is in the form of a mission report from one astronaut on a team of four who are in this first wave of interstellar explorers. Ariadne O’Neill, the crew’s engineer, chronicles what they discover on four planned landing spots in the same system.

This story leans heavily toward the hard science fiction side of the spectrum, as opposed to space fantasy. As with any hard science fiction involving interstellar travel, something beyond current capabilities is needed. In this case, it’s a state of medical hibernation combined with an engine that accelerates their ship to a significant fraction of the speed of light for a decade or two. Thanks to special relativity, it’s a formula that adds up to never seeing the people they love on Earth again, and knowing Earth society will have changed significantly when they come back. During hibernation, their bodies are also “somaformed” to produce moderate enhancements like additional muscle mass for a higher gravity planet. Taken together, this is a reflective narrative about loss, and change, and the joy of encountering new worlds. These themes are echoed large with regard to Earth and small as Ariadne wrestles with personal identity.

If you like the immediate newness and strangeness of brave explorers first touching down on a planet, this is a book for you. But it’s more than that. Chambers writes from a personal and family connection to science as a slow community project. The interstellar missions are not being carried out by a government, but by a global support network of people who wanted to make space exploration by humans happen again, without regard to profits or nationalistic pride. Our four astronaut-scientists don’t just take pictures for a few days and leave. They spend years on these worlds, developing study methods and carrying them out meticulously.

To Be Taught, If Fortunate is also a deeply queer book. These four astronauts have been training together for years before their mission to the stars. They come off, overall, like a communal partnership. Fans of Chambers’ Wayfarers series will see something of Aandrisk culture in them. In this small crew there is–at least–bisexual rep, trans masculine rep, and asexual representation.

Recommended to fans of exploration science fiction, literary fiction, and queer fiction of any genre.

[If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, The Forever War by Joe Haldeman, Blindsight by Peter Watts, or Dawn by Octavia Butler.]

[ official To Be Taught, If Fortunate page on the official Becky Chambers web site ]

Recommended by Garren H.
Bennett Martin Public Library

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New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

Book Review: Caught Dead Handed by Carol J. Perry

Caught Dead Handed
by Carol J. Perry (eBook)

These cozy mysteries have a paranormal twist. When Lee Barrett comes home to Salem, Massachusetts she’s expecting to become a TV reporter. Instead she becomes a TV psychic and adopts the former psychic’s familiar after finding the murdered psychic’s body. What else could possible go wrong. Available through Hoopla as both an e-book and downloadable audio. Book 1 of 9 with book 10 due out in Aug. 2020.

[If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Sophie Kelly’s Curiosity Killed the Cat — Book 1 of the Magical Cats Mysteries finds librarian Kathleen Paulsen in a new job and a new town. Who knew that the two kittens she adopted had unexpected skills that would help her solve a murder?]

[ official Carol J. Perry web site ]

Recommended by Sandy W.
Gere Branch Library

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New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

Music Book Review: I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp by Richard Hell

I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp
by Richard Hell (Music 781.66 Hel)

This book, a document of the nascent late 1970s punk scene in Manhattan by one of its most influential participants, describes a world I am completely unfamiliar with except for the musical recordings and books like these that emerged from it. Therefore, it provides the same reader experience and immersion into another realm that I get from reading The Lord of the Rings. It is another legend in the larger story, written in fevered confessional from the author who escaped to tell the tale. Fans of the bands Television, Blondie, The Ramones, and early Talking Heads who also like biographical context and historical backstory to their cherished songs will enjoy this autobiography.

[If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Just Kids by Patti Smith, or Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain.]

[ publisher’s official I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp web site ] | [ official Richard Hell web site ]

Recommended by Eric S.
Walt Branch Library

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New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

DVD Review: Zombieland: Double Tap

Zombieland: Double Tap
[DVD Zombieland]

Zombieland: Double Tap (2019) came out ten years after the original, Zombieland (2009). This sequel returns the entire original quartet of zombie apocalypse survivors — Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg), Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin). In the years since the end of the first film, they’ve continued to travel, ending up residing in the White House for quite a while. For better or worse, they’ve become a dysfunctional family. But when Columbus tries to get Wichita to marry him, commitment-phobic Wichita hits the road with Little Rock, who’s looking to find another male human survivor for companionship.

The film becomes a road trip, with stops in Nashville, where Tallahassee briefly hooks up with a tough woman (Nevada) over a mutual love of Elvis, and Columbus connects with vapid mallrat Madison. There’s also amusing cameos from some recognizable faces as a pair of dopplegangers to Tallahassee and Columbus. Things all come to a head with the quartet eventually reunited in a peacenik commune, where a horde of zombies descends on the weaponless human survivors. It’s blood and guts and cursing and absurd humor, and it’s all way over-the-top. But if you liked the first Zombieland, you’ll definitely like this second one. The in-jokes about Columbus’ lists of “rules” for surviving the zombie apocalypse are hilarious.

If you can’t handle “R”-rated language and violence, this one definitely isn’t for you. And if you enjoyed Bill Murray’s part in the first film, and are disappointed that he’s not in this one (since our heroes accidentally killed him), never fear — check out the “extra features” on this DVD!

[If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try the original 2009 Zombieland.]

[ Internet Movie Database entry for this film ] | [ official Zombieland: Double Tap web site ]

Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library

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New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!