Monday’s Reviews Today: More ‘Spellmans’ & Andrews’ ‘Home’
-- Publishers Weekly, 1/10/2008 3:55:00 PM
In Curse of the Spellmans, Lisa Lutz’s follow-up to her 2007 debut, The Spellman Files, local San Francisco PI Isabel Spellman, who works for her family’s detective agency, returns with charming results. As our reviewer notes: “Fans of The Spellman Files will laugh just as loudly at the comic antics chronicled in this sparkling sequel.” And in the new memoir from Julie Andrews, Home, the actress-turned-bestselling-children’s-author delivers an account of her formative years and early career that “readers will rejoice” over.
Curse of the Spellmans
Lisa Lutz. Simon & Schuster, $25 (416p) ISBN 978-1-4165-3241-5
In the two years that have passed since the action in Lutz’s hit debut, The Spellman Files (2007), zany Isabel Spellman, who works for the family PI firm in San Francisco, has become “a somewhat responsible member of society.” Unfortunately, she’s also become obsessed with “Subject” (aka John Brown), a next-door neighbor who she’s convinced has an evil secret she must expose, even if it means losing her PI license. Adding further hilarity is “The Stone and Spellman Show,” transcripts of recordings revealing 15-year-old sister Rae’s fascination with her middle-aged “best friend,” stoic SFPD inspector Henry Stone, who endures Rae’s adoration with liberal doses of Doctor Who watching. Henry’s link to the Spellman family’s fortunes suggests he might be a good candidate for Isabel’s “Ex-boyfriend #11” when Subject fails to make the grade. Fans of The Spellman Files will laugh just as loudly at the comic antics chronicled in this sparkling sequel. (Mar.)
Home: A Memoir of My Early Years
Julie Andrews. Hyperion, $26.95 (352p) ISBN 978-0-7868-6565-9
Andrews, who has written a full shelf of bestselling children’s books (The Great American Mousical; Mandy), both solo and with her daughter, now dances in a different direction with this delightful remembrance of her own childhood and engrossing prelude to her cinematic career. Spanning events from her 1935 birth to the early 1960s, she covers her rise to fame and ends with Walt Disney casting her in Mary Poppins (1963). Setting the stage with a family tree backdrop, she balances the sad struggles of relatives and hard drinkers with mirthful family tales and youthful vocal lessons amid rationing and the London Blitz: “My mother pulled back the blackout curtains and gasped—for there, snuggly settled in the concrete square of the courtyard, was the incendiary bomb.” A BBC show led to a London musical at age 12: “My song literally stopped the show. People rose to their feet and would not stop clapping.” Her mother’s revelation of her true father left her reeling when she was 15, but she continued touring, did weekly BBC broadcasts and was Broadway-bound by 1954 to do The Boyfriend. The heart of her book documents the rehearsals, tryouts and smash 1956 opening of My Fair Lady. Readers will rejoice, since Andrews is an accomplished writer who holds back nothing while adding a patina of poetry to the antics and anecdotes throughout this memoir of bittersweet backstage encounters and theatrical triumphs. (Apr. 1)
