You Were Baffled by the Olympic Opening Ceremony's Marie Antoinette

Are looking for a legal thriller or followed the Manti Te'o saga

Hi friends,

Hope your week is off to a good start. I saw “Thelma” over the weekend, a movie about a 93-year-old grandmother who gets scammed out of $10,000 and sets out — on a motorized scooter — to get her money back. I can’t remember the last time a movie made me laugh this hard, and it’s perfect for fans of The Thursday Murder Club and Killers of a Certain Age.

And, now, what to read if …

You’re Still Confused About the Singing Marie Antoinette

Little by Edward Carey

Last Friday morning, I said to a coworker, ‘I hope there’s a viral moment at the Opening Ceremonies that will give me a book pick for my newsletter.’ I should have known it was a virtual guarantee.

If you missed it, the Olympic Opening Ceremonies featured a celebration (?) of the French Revolution complete with Marie Antoinette holding her severed head, singing “The aristocrats, we’ll hang them,” as a heavy metal band played. It was wild.

Anyway, the whole experience reminded me of Edward Carey’s Little, a fictionalized take on the life of Madame Tussaud, of wax museum fame. After her mother’s death, six-year-old Anne Marie Grosholtz, nicknamed “Little” for her stature, is apprenticed to Doctor Curtius, who makes wax replicas of organs and body parts. The pair move to Paris, where they build a tiny museum featuring wax heads of philosophers, murderers and eventually victims of the guillotine. When word of her talent reaches Versailles, she is summoned to tutor a princess and later saves Marie Antoinette’s life during childbirth. Outside the gate, though, the revolution is growing and demanding heads — both wax and real.

Little is a weird gem of a book, written like it’s a memoir. As Gregory Maguire of Wicked fame said, “A compulsively readable novel, so canny and weird and surfeited with the reality of human capacity and ingenuity that I am stymied for comparison. Dickens and David Lynch? Defoe meets Margaret Atwood? Judge for yourself."

You’re a John Grisham Fan, Pt. 2

The Out-of-Town Lawyer by Robert Rotstein

For the John Grisham/legal thriller fans, I’ve previously spotlighted Joey Hartstone’s The Local (a book I’m still hoping we get a sequel for). This time, instead of a hometown lawyer who’s never left, we have an attorney who’s returning home for the first time in decades to take on a controversial case.

Elvis Henderson is a traveling criminal defense attorney who takes cases assigned by Hazel Curnow, an iconic lawyer-turned-recluse. When Hazel tells Elvis his next case is in Quartz County, the hometown he left when he was 18 under suspicious circumstances, he tries to get out of it but ultimately caves. His client, Destiny Grace Harper, stands accused of murdering her unborn twins — a capital offense — because she declined life-saving surgery for them, saying her religion prohibited the procedure.

Elvis takes on the case, knowing the deck is stacked against him. He’s facing not just a deeply pro-life jury, but a sheriff that might want him dead, the powerful pastor of a megachurch pulling strings, a DA with political ambitions and a judge that seems to have already decided his client is guilty.

I devoured The Out-of-Town Lawyer, which features a few twists that kept me guessing. Summer is the perfect season for legal thrillers and this one feels fresh and timely.

You Watched MTV’s “Catfish”

There is No Ethan by Anna Akbari

Throughout the 2010s, MTV aired “Catfish,” a show where Americans, engaged in online relationships with someone who seemed to good-to-be-true, worked with producers to discover if their beau was legitimate or running some sort of long con. (I learned after googling the show to make sure I was remembering the gist of it correctly that it’s back.) If you watched the show — or got caught up in the Manti Te’o hoax — check out Anna Akbari’s There is No Ethan.

In 2011, Anna Akbari, a professor of sociology, met Ethan Schuman on an early dating website. She began staying up till the wee hours of the morning exchanging messages with Ethan through text, gchat and emails. In just a few weeks of correspondence, Akbari felt like Ethan could be The One. There was just one problem: Every time they made plans to meet in person or even talk on the phone or video chat, he’d cancel last minute. There was always a legitimate-sounding excuse, an urgent medical crisis, a broken webcam or the complexities of international calling plans. And, Anna thought, he hadn’t asked for money, so it couldn’t be a scam, could it?

The longer their relationship went on without a virtual or in-person meetup, the more suspicious she became that something wasn’t right with Ethan. Eventually, after asking around friends of friends informally, she learned another woman asking the same questions. When the two women met, they knew for certain that Ethan wasn’t who he said — and teamed up to expose him.

I was surprised that the bulk of the book focused on Akbari’s relationship with Ethan, with only the last bit depicting the “John Tucker Must Die” efforts of his victims to take him down. I ended up appreciating the structure though because it shows how easy it is for anyone — even successful, highly educated people — to get caught up in a web of lies.  It’s a stark reminder that we could all be conned someday.

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Thanks for reading! Hope you have a great week.

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