Category Archives: Dayle Loves This

Dayle Loves This: The Magicians (TV)

By Dayle Loves This

This post was funded by my wonderful supporters at Patreon.

Welcome to Dayle Loves This, wherein I recommend books, TV, and movies (and maybe other things) that rocked my world.

If they don’t rock your world, that’s okay. We all have reader/watcher cookies as well as triggers. If you have questions, ask. And please make your own suggestions, and discuss!

 

Okay, I’m just going to say this up front: The Magicians may be my favorite TV show ever. Ever. There are many shows I’ve loved, and many I miss, and some I continue to rewatch, but The Magicians hit all of my viewer cookies in a big way.

The series is based on a series of books by Lev Grossman, The Magicians Trilogy. I haven’t yet read the books, although I’ve picked up the first one. I intended to wait until the show ended, and it did a while ago now, and I still haven’t indulged. (One reason being that my desired reading during this pandemic has not been fantasy.)

I’ve spoken many times about my love for portal fantasy (and even edited an anthology of it, Doorways to Enchantment). The Magicians is a portal fantasy within a portal fantasy. Score!

Slight spoilers for the first episode. Quentin Coldwater and his best friend, Julia, have loved a series of books about a magical land of Fillory since they were children. Now applying for grad school, Quentin still retreats to reading about Fillory while Julia is trying to move on.

First, Quentin stumbles upon (is led to) the very secret and hidden Brakebills University for Magical Pedagogy, and is tested for an aptitude in magic. Real magic, not stage magic (which he’s already mastered). If I could go to Brakebills, I’d leave my life in less than a heartbeat. It’s perfect. And it’s portal number one.

Because Fillory also exists….

Another thing I love about this show is that the protagonists are adults. They have sex, they swear, the stakes are real. This is not a show for kids. Some have called it a reaction to the Narnia books (to some degree, I can see that) or an adult Harry Potter (not so much).

Warning: the first season is a bit dodgy. I’m actually rewatching it as I write this, and while I’m seeing nuances I missed the first two times, I can also see the cracks. One character, Margo, is just not the Margo of later seasons. Our Lodger wonders if this is a growth arc, but honestly, the actress portrays Margo very differently. Her whole manner of speaking changes.

Warning the second: awful things happen. Animals are killed. (This is usually a nope, I’m leaving, fuck you, for me, but (a) I love the show so very much and (b) the deaths are essentially off-screen and not played for laughs.) People get maimed and attacked and brutalized. (If you want specific trigger warnings, contact me privately.)

The Magicians has made me laugh, cry, hide behind a pillow, and fall in love with the characters. (Most of them, anyway. I challenged Ken and the Lodger to a “fuck, marry, kill” scenario and we all killed the same main character without hesitation.) The glorious, heart-wrenching episode “A Life in a Day” is one of the best moments in television.

If you decide to watch The Magicians, let me know. Right now I’m only five or so episodes into my rewatch, so we can chat!

Want to chat about this post? Join me on Facebook or Twitter.

I’m able to continue writing and publishing thanks to my wonderful supporters on Patreon.

Dayle Loves This: Simone St. James (author)

By Dayle Loves This

This post was funded by my wonderful supporters at Patreon.

Welcome to Dayle Loves This, wherein I recommend books, TV, and movies (and maybe other things) that rocked my world.

If they don’t rock your world, that’s okay. We all have reader/watcher cookies as well as triggers. If you have questions, ask. And please make your own suggestions, and discuss!

Okay, technically, I don’t love Simone St. James, at least not on a personal level. Although she seems pleasant enough online, I’ve never met her and know nothing about her. I just love a number of her books, and it makes sense to group them all into one post.

Her first five books, of which I’ve read four*, are set in the 1920s. I read the first one, The Haunting of Maddy Clare, a few years ago now, and while it was okay, it didn’t grab me. I don’t remember why, so take that with a grain of salt. (I should probably re-read it.) I got hooked when I read her most recent, The Sun Down Motel.

In 2017, a woman goes to upstate New York** and takes a job at the run-down Sun Down Motel, where her aunt disappeared from in 1982. It’s not a spoiler to say the place is haunted, okay? But the haunting is…very, very well done. It’s sometimes subtle, it’s sometimes a returning guest…. I tore through it.

Then I read the book before that, The Broken Girls, which takes place in Vermont in 2014 and 1950. In this one, a woman tries to figure out what happened to her sister who was found dead on the grounds of a shuttered girls’ school twenty years ago. The girls’ school, as we learn from the 1950 sections, was a place for “girls whom no one wants.” I loved how these time periods interwove, and while Idlewild Hall is creepy as hell, I still want to go there and poke around.

Because St. James isn’t writing novels fast enough for me, and because my gothic-loving partner in crime friend, Kris, was enjoying the 1920s ones, I put them on my library list. (2020 and thus far 2021 for me has been all about women’s thrillers and gothics, so why not?)

Of the five, I’ve discussed one above and am waiting for another, my favorite was probably An Inquiry Into Love and Death because it was set in Cornwall, but honestly, I loved them all.

If you like strong women, creepy settings (with ghosts or similar paranormal activity), Simone St. James is your woman. Er, her books are for you.

1920s-set novels

The Haunting of Maddy Clare
An Inquiry into Love and Death
Silence for the Dead
The Other Side of MidnightLost Among the Living

Currently set (for the most part) novels

The Broken Girls (1950 and 2014, Vermont)
The Sun Down Motel (1982 and 2017, upstate New York)

Want to chat about this post? Join me on Facebook or Twitter.

I’m able to continue writing and publishing thanks to my wonderful supporters on Patreon.
*I thought my county library chain didn’t have one of them, but I just checked and it’s only in audiobook or large-print version. I’ve put the latter on hold.
**I’m unclear on whether it was really set in upstate NY or some place north of New York City. Upstate NY doesn’t start until after Albany, but most people assume anything north of NYC is upstate, and that makes me cranky. Don’t get me started on Northern California, either.

Dayle Loves This: This: Folk of the Air trilogy, Holly Black (novels)

By Dayle Loves This, ,
This post was funded by my wonderful supporters at Patreon.
 
Welcome to Dayle Loves This, wherein I recommend books, TV, and movies (and maybe other things) that rocked my world.
 
If they don’t rock your world, that’s okay. We all have reader/watcher cookies as well as triggers. If you have questions, ask. And please make your own suggestions, and discuss!
 
Holly Black has that rare ability to write characters and worlds in such a way that they’re real. As in, I believe they’re real. I’m not reading a story; I’m immersed in this place and…well, maybe not friends with the people, but experiencing things with them, rather than about them. I can believe they exist.
 
It’s hard to describe.
 
I read The Cruel Prince, the first book in the trilogy, and loved it. When the second book came out, I reread the first book. When the third book came out, I reread the first two. Just talking about them here makes me want to go back and read them again, dammit.
 
The premise—which is made clear in the first chapter and is basically in the blurb, so it’s not really a spoiler—is that our heroine, Jude, was a normal seven-year-old until a general from Faerie murders her parents to get to his daughter, Jude’s older sister (half-sister, it turns out; Mom was intimate with the general before she turned her back on Faerie and married her human husband.
 
The general sweeps Jude and her twin up, too, in some weird sense of honor.
 
Faeries don’t have the same concept of honor as we do. Black makes that very clear; they are an alien species in many ways. Being immortal apparently does that to a person.
 
Of course I want to be like them. They’re beautiful as blades forged in some divine fire. They will live forever.
 
And Cardan is even more beautiful than the rest. I hate him more than all the others. I hate him so much that sometimes when I look at him, I can hardly breathe.
 
Cardan is wicked and cruel (hence the title of the first book, The Cruel Prince), and Jude wants to belong to Faerie even though she’s mortal. She’ll stand up to the mean pranks that almost kill her, pretend they don’t affect her. She’ll align herself with horrible creatures. And that makes her…fascinating.
 
I could go on, but I won’t, because I don’t want to give too much away. If you want to be sucked into another world that’s magical and dangerous and so blindingly beautiful you almost can’t look at it, read these books.
 
Want to chat about this post? Join me on Facebook or Twitter.
 
I’m able to continue writing and publishing thanks to my wonderful supporters on Patreon.
 

Dayle Loves This: Ted Lasso (TV show)

By Dayle Loves This,
This post was funded by my wonderful supporters at Patreon.
 
Welcome to Dayle Loves This, wherein I recommend books, TV, and movies (and maybe other things) that rocked my world.
 
If they don’t rock your world, that’s okay. We all have reader/watcher cookies as well as triggers. If you have questions, ask. And please make your own suggestions, and discuss!
 
Ted Lasso is the show we need right now. It’s on Apple TV, which I know makes it unavailable to some of you, and I’m sorry for that. I wish I could shove it into all of my friends’ faces.
 
Ted Lasso, our main character, is a successful football coach who takes a job coaching a failing soccer—i.e. football—team in the UK.  Now, this description would not interest me at all. Thank goodness for my husband for saying the show was getting good buzz and let’s check it out.
 
Ted is kind of a good ol’ boy from the Midwest. He’s ridiculously positive—but it’s genuine. He learns everyone’s names, and gets a sense of who they are. It becomes clear over time that he’s an expert at reading people. Still, his good-naturedness is genuine; he’s not using it as a weapon (okay, kind of maybe once, but it was deserved, and he did it in a way that made my heart sing). He sincerely wants to make people happy, and show them how they can be better than they are.
 
Fact is, I aspire to be like Ted. To bring positivity and joy wherever I go. Watching the show—which is more complex and hard-hitting that I’m describing here—leaves me deliriously happy. If you can find a way to watch it, do. It’s the kind of positive shit we need right now.
Want to chat about this post? Join me on Facebook or Twitter.
 
I’m able to continue writing and publishing thanks to my wonderful supporters on Patreon.
 

Dayle Loves This: Derry Girls

By Dayle Loves This, ,

This post was funded by my wonderful supporters at Patreon.

Welcome to Dayle Loves This, wherein I recommend books, TV, and movies (and maybe other things) that rocked my world.

(If they don’t rock your world, that’s okay. We all have reader/watcher cookies as well as triggers. No pressure here!) I have watched the first season of Derry Girls (all of six episodes) a ridiculous number of times. I watched it on my own, had to show it to Ken, then our Lodger, then again when the second season came out. And then the second season at least once more.

Derry Girls is about a group of high school students in Northern Ireland in the 1990s—during the Troubles. But it’s not about the Troubles. For the average citizen, the Troubles were more a nuisance. In the first episode, there’s a bomb threat that closes a major bridge, and one of the character laments that it’ll affect getting to her tanning appointment.

Derry Girls is about friendship, and loyalty, and being true to who you are and what you believe. The characters are all clearly and delightful individuals, but in the end, they have each others’ backs. The final episode of Season 1 is tear-worthy, and there’s several other bits in Season 2….

The creator and writer of the show, Lisa McGee, lived in Derry in the 1990s and some of the storylines come from her life, which I think adds to the authentic emotion.

The actors have done some funny bits in character online, once you’ve watched the two seasons obsessively (why have you not?). And I’ve heard Season 3 is filmed and will come out in mid-2021, plus there may be a tie-in book!

Want to chat about this post? Join me on Facebook or Twitter. I’m able to continue writing and publishing thanks to my wonderful supporters on Patreon.