10. The Court of Shadows by Victor Dixen

#1 Vampyria

listened on Audible

translated from French by Francoise Bui

364 pgs.
copyright 2020
Adult Fantasy/Vampires

Finished 1/29/24
Goodreads rating: 3.80
My rating: 3.5
Setting: Versailles, France, 300 years after Louis XIV was on the throne

My comments:  The minute I saw Victor Dixen's name, I decided I must read this book.  I read the Phobos series and loved it.  It always takes a bit for his books to be translated, and I'm ever so glad this was put into an audio book.  The reading was lovely, except for when the names were read - all with a very quick, totally French accent.  Couldn't understand them.  At all.  And I took French for years!

     I'm not certain I ever really liked Jeanne/Diane, the protagonist.   The beginning was a bit boring, typical Vampire stuff.  The second part of the books was much more creative and interesting, with an unexpected ending to be savored.  Looking forward to number two in the series, which should be in America around July.

Goodreads synopsis:  A fiery heroine seeks vengeance against a royal court of deadly vampires in this epic alternate history set in lavish Versailles.

Louis XIV transformed from the Sun King into the King of Shadows when he embraced immortality and became the world’s first vampire. For the last three centuries, he has been ruling the kingdom from the decadent Court of Shadows in Versailles, demanding the blood of his subjects to sate his nobles’ thirst and maintain their loyalty.

In the heart of rural France, commoner Jeanne Froidelac witnesses the king’s soldiers murder her family and learns of her parents’ role in a brewing rebellion involving the forbidden secrets of alchemy. To seek her revenge, Jeanne disguises herself as an aristocrat and enrolls in a prestigious school for aspiring courtiers. She soon finds herself at the doors of the palace of Versailles.

But Jeanne, of course, is no aristocrat.
She dreams not of court but of blood.
The blood of a king.

Movie - Stillwater

R (2:19)

Wide release 7/30/2021

Viewed 8/8/2021 at Regal Harrisburg

IMBd: 6.9/10

RT Critic: 74   Audience:  72

Critic's Consensus:  Stillwater isn't perfect, but its thoughtful approach to intelligent themes -- and strong performances from its leads -- give this timely drama a steadily building power. 

Cag:   5/Loved it 

Directed by Tom McCarthy

setting:  mostly Marseilles, France

Actors: Matt Damon, Camille Cottin, Abigail Breslin

My comments:  First movie-in-a-theater in a year and a half!! Super exciting!  And this was a good choice. Very interesting piece of storytelling.  Equally the story of a father doing anything to keep his daughter happy and a character study of the part that Matt Damon plays. It's about the characters and their relationships, what drives them, what makes them do the things they've done in their lives.  Can we be predisposed to be a fuck up?  I think that's the actual theme of the movie, which I really liked a lot.  Matt Damon was really wonderful (side note:  it looked like he put on a few pounds for this part).  What I saw of the setting, Marseilles, was nothing like what I have e er pictured Marseilles to be like.  I loved the way he learned to speak French and I loved the relationship between him and the nine-year-old girl, Maya.

RT/ IMDb Summary:  Unemployed roughneck Bill Baker (Academy Award® winner Matt Damon) travels from Oklahoma to Marseilles to visit his estranged daughter Allison (Academy Award® nominee Abigail Breslin). Imprisoned for a murder she claims she did not commit. Allison seizes on a new tip that could exonerate her and presses Bill to engage her legal team But Bill eager to prove his worth and regain his daughters trust, takes matters into his own hands. He is quickly stymied by language barriers, cultural differences, and a complicated legal system until he meets French actress Virginie (Camille Cottin), mother to eight-year-old Maya (Lilou Siauvaud). Together, these unlikely allies embark on a journey of discovery, truth, love and liberation.

MOVIE - Paris Can Wait

PG (1:32)

Limited release 5/12/17

Viewed 6/17 at Carlisle Theater
IMBd: 6/10

RT Critic:  48   Audience:  46
Critic's Consensus:  None

Cag:  3 liked it, but that's all

Directed by Eleanor Coppola

Sony Pictures Classics

Diane Lane, Alec Baldwin

My comments:  Other than getting to travel a little bit through France and enjoying Diane Lane's performance, this movie didn't do much for me.  I wasn't turned on even the tiniest bit by the French guy who ended up sweeping her off her feet, which made what might have been a good ending a bit blah.....

RT/ IMDb Summary:  When her director husband is occupied with work in Paris, an American woman takes a jaunt with his business associate, a charming Gallic rogue who is happy to squire her on a tour of some of the finest meals in Provence. The first feature directed by Eleanor Coppola, wife of Francis and director of the "Apocalypse Now" documentary "Hearts of Darkness".

MOVIE - Hundred-Foot Journey

PG (2:02)

Wide release 8/8/14

Viewed 8/31/2014 at the Ahwatukee 24 in Phoenix (comfiest seats ever!)

RT Critic: 65  Audience: 85

Cag: 4 Liked it a lot

Directed by Lasse Hallstrom

Walt Disney Pictures

Helen Mirren

My comments:  Cute, fun, a taste of India, and a happy ending.  What's not to like?

RT Review:  In "The Hundred-Foot Journey," Hassan Kadam (Manish Dayal) is a culinary ingénue with the gastronomic equivalent of perfect pitch. Displaced from their native India, the Kadam family, led by Papa (Om Puri), settles in the quaint village of Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val in the south of France. Filled with charm, it is both picturesque and elegant - the ideal place to settle down and open an Indian restaurant, the Maison Mumbai. That is, until the chilly chef proprietress of Le Saule Pleureur, a Michelin starred, classical French restaurant run by Madame Mallory (Academy Award (R)-winner Helen Mirren), gets wind of it. Her icy protests against the new Indian restaurant a hundred feet from her own, escalate to all out war between the two establishments - until Hassan's passion for French haute cuisine and for Mme. Mallory's enchanting sous chef, Marguerite (Charlotte Le Bon), combine with his mysteriously delicious talent to weave magic between their two cultures and imbue Saint-Antonin with the flavors of life that even Mme. Mallory cannot ignore. At first Mme. Mallory's culinary rival, she eventually recognizes Hassan's gift as a chef and takes him under her wing. 

Sepulchre - Kate Mosse

Audio read by Donada Peters

16 discs - I made it through 6 of them

2008 Penguin Audio

560 pgs. - I read 205

Adult - Switched back and forth between 1891 and the present

Historical Fiction & CRF

Goodreads Rating: 3.68

My Rating: 1 (Didn't like it)

Acquired through PBS

Set in France - Paris and the countryside

My comments: I listened attentively to the first six cds.  Since it takes place in France, the reader did a wonderful job using French accents, and I enjoyed her reading.  But the story dragged.  Switching back and forth in time, there are two protagonists.  The 1891 protagonist, Leonie - is a spoiled idiot.  The 2000 protagonist isn't too irritating (yet), but her primary interest - Claude Debussy - is of no interest to me. Ten more discs to go?  Sorry, life's not long enough.....

Goodreads:  In 1891, young Léonie Vernier and her brother Anatole arrive in the beautiful town of Rennes-les-Bains, in southwest France. They've come at the invitation of their widowed aunt, whose mountain estate, Domain de la Cade, is famous in the region. But it soon becomes clear that their aunt Isolde-and the Domain-are not what Léonie had imagined. The villagers claim that Isolde's late husband died after summoning a demon from the old Visigoth sepulchre high on the mountainside. A book from the Domain's cavernous library describes the strange tarot pack that mysteriously disappeared following the uncle's death. But while Léonie delves deeper into the ancient mysteries of the Domain, a different evil stalks her family-one which may explain why Léonie and Anatole were invited to the sinister Domain in the first place.
          More than a century later, Meredith Martin, an American graduate student, arrives in France to study the life of Claude Debussy, the nineteenth century French composer. In Rennesles- Bains, Meredith checks into a grand old hotel-the Domain de la Cade. Something about the hotel feels eerily familiar, and strange dreams and visions begin to haunt Meredith's waking hours. A chance encounter leads her to a pack of tarot cards painted by Léonie Vernier, which may hold the key to this twenty-first century American's fate . . . just as they did to the fate of Léonie Vernier more than a century earlier.

41. Shadow of Night - Deborah Harkness

#2 in All Soul's Trilogy
2012, Viking
for Adults
584 pgs.
HC $28.95
Genre:  Fantasy/Historical Fiction
Rating:  2.5 It was okay....

Setting:  for the most part, 1591 England, France, and Prague, with bits and pieces of contemporary America and parts of Europe
OSS:  Historian/researcher/reluctant witch Diana Bishop and her vampire lover Matthew deClermont Roydon time travel back to Elizabethan England, France, and Prague for two reasons - to help Diana learn how to deal with her until-now-hidden witch talents, and to look for a very old book, Ashmole 782, that could be the secret of vampire, daemon, and witch past and future.

Okay, so Diana and Matthew have traveled back to relive Matthew's life in 1591, where he is spy for Queen Elizabeth, and friends with Walter Raleigh and Christopher Marlowe.  Christoper Marlowe is his closest, friend and also a daemon creep.  They "adopt" two waifs, argue a lot, dabble in alchemy, look for the hidden book Ashmole 784, and try to find teachers for Diana, to help her learn to use her powers, without any of the witches they encounter trying to kill her.

This book was waaaay too long...about 200 pages too long.  It was divided into six parts (though the sixth part was so much shorter than the others, it was like an afterthought).  The only one I really relished was the second part, at Saint-Tours.  The rest was all so similar that I found it very tedious. Too many characters, and many from the first book, The Discovery of Witches, were talked about without any hints as to why we were supposed to remember them.  I read a lot of books, I finished The Discovery of Witches ages ago, and I truly couldn't remember the details that Deborah Harkness took for granted I'd remember.  I had to go to the bookstore and read the last 50 pages of the first book to remind myself what was going on before I could restart this second book.  My opinion?  Interesting....but tedious.  Will I read Book 3?  Probably.  Maybe.  Possibly. I rated this a 2 ("it was okay") on Goodreads- I'd probably rate it a 2.5 if there was a way to.

65. A Discovery of Witches - Deborah Harkness

Viking, 2011
43 chapters, 580 pgs.
HC $28.95
for: adults
Rating:  5 (I really don't want to give it a 5, but it was lovely writing, a hard-to-put-down plot and storyline, characters that were so well defined I felt as if I knew them,  and a strong, smart, librarian/scholar protagonist.  Everything I love in a book.  And I loved this book.....)

First line/lines:  The leather-bound volume was nothing remarkable.  To an ordinary historian, it would have looked no different from hundreds of other manuscripts in Oxford's Bodleian Library, ancient and worn.  But I knew there was something odd about it from the moment I collected it.

Setting: Contemporary Oxford, for the first third of the book; in the countryside near Lyon, France for the second third; and upstate New York for the third third.
OSS:  Diana Bishop, a noted American historian and college professor who has always tried to ignore her roots as a witch, becomes involved with a vampire while trying to unravel the secret of an ancient book of alchemy.

As I read the last page, I was quite disappointed that I didn't know the final, "final," outcome, but decided to like the ending because of the hugely entertaining possibilities, and started to examine the fine print of the book.   A DISCOVER OF WITCHES IS PART ONE IN THE ALL SOULS TRILOGY.  LOOK FOR THE NEXT NOVEL IN 2012.  NO NO NO NO NO !!!!!

How will I ever remember every character and their part in the story between now and when a sequel comes out?

Witches and vampires and daemons.  All hate each other and have for millenniums.  Humans factor very little in this book (if at all), all the main players are creatures - namely witches, vampires, and daemons.  They are not supposed to mix, to fraternize, and a natural animosity usually even keeps them from being friends.  Until Diana Bishop and Matthew Clairmont meet.  KABOOM!  Sparks fly.  Literally.

Diana has always suppressed her witch tendencies.  She wants to be ordinary.  But a subhuman amount of adrenaline keep her running, rowing, and doing yoga whenever she's not researching.  She has no close friends (oddly), and the two aunts that raised her after her parents' murder worry obsessively about her. Although she is very attractive and has had lovers before, there are no males in her life. She has kept herself aloof emotionally, which is the perfect for what is about to happen.

Diana is no wimp.  She is no Bella - thankfully.  She is more of a Hermione, with a touch more determination and spunk (though Hermione did gather those possessions as she matured.)  Diana comes from a long line of Bishops, originating, she thinks, from Bridget Bishop who was killed during the Salem witch trials in the late 15th century.

I loved the first third of the book, the part that took place in Oxford.  The French part was really interesting, the American third had so much change and new information to absorb that I didn't enjoy it quite as much.  I can't believe that I decided to read an almost 600 page novel, but I'm really glad I did!

MOVIE - Queen to Play (Joueuse)

Wonderful lead actress!
in French with subtitles
Limited release 4-1-11 (made in 2008/2009)
unrated (1:41)
7-16-11 at The Loft by myself (not a seat left in the upstairs theater!)
RT:  67% cag 79%
Director:  Caroline Bottaro
Sandrine Bonnaire, Kevin Kline, Jennifer Beals

This was a very lovely movie.  The setting was the island of Corsica, and it was a bout a mom who discovers the game of chess.  She's a house cleaner, and she sees Jennifer Beals playing chess while sitting on the balcony of a b & b that overlooks the ocean.  It's a lovely, somewhat sexy scene, and Helene is mesmerized by the memory of it.  So much so that she buys her husband an electronic chess set for his birthday, even though neither of them have in any way encountered the game before.

Now...although the movie does not really focus on the actual game of chess, most of the rest of the movie revolves around learning it and playing it.  Got a little too much chess-y for me.  Kevin Kline plays the reclusive chess player that teachers her how to play - and who gives her the confidence in herself to go farther.  This is another movie about a woman who breaks free of her long-standing cocoon and emerges as a butterfly.  Sandrine Bonnaire plays the protagonist beautifully.  What a lovely smile she has!