The Olympics Opening Ceremony takes place in Paris on Friday, but actually the first bits of action happen today with the start of the football and rugby 7s pool games, so for this Recommendsday I’m reminding you of some of the sports romances that I’ve enjoyed – although full disclaimer, a lot of these sports aren’t in the olympics.
The men’s 100m at the weekend
But I’m going to start with one that is – football of the soccer variety and recent BotW pick When Grumpy met Sunshine which has a bad boy of football in a fake relationship with his ghost writer. There’s also Chloe Liese’s Bergman Brothers series, which has a couple of soccer stars among the heroes and heroines – like in If Only You, which has the double whammy of a soccer-playing heroine and an ice hockey player hero.
In fact ice hockey romances seem to have overtaken NFL players as the sport you’re most likely to see in a romance novel, possibly because the word puck rhymes so usefully for a title. Before the ice hockey romance craze, most of the sports romances were about NFL players, like Susan Elizabeth Philips’ Chicago Stars series or Alexa Martin’s Playbook series. And now we’ve got a growing group of baseball romances too, so I can only assume that we’re a year max away from a load of basketball player romances.
I have read more baseball romances than other sports recently – but that’s not saying much because it’s basically just Cat Sebastian’s two historical ones – You Should Be So Lucky and We Could Be So Good. It’s not quite a straight romance-romance, but Linda Holmes’s Evvie Drake Starts Over remains among my favourite novels of recent years.
I often find it quite tricky to recommend some of the more recently published sports romances, because everything is tending very New Adult and that is not my bag at all. I’ve read at least two NFL romances in the last six months where the blurb has seemed like it was right up my street and then in the reading I’ve wanted to throw them across the room* because they’ve annoyed me so much. And no I’m not going to tell you who that is, but I’m sure you can work it out if you look through my Goodreads reviews!
In terms of my own to-read pile, I’ve got Let The Games Beginwhich is actually set at an Olympics, Match Point which is tennis, Tessa Bailey’s Fan Girl Down which is about golf and Cross the Line which is about Formula One on my to-read pile.
Happy Wednesday everyone
*but I didn’t because they were ebooks and I might have damaged my Kindle if it hit something.
As I said yesterday, a busy week in life and also a fairly busy week in reading. And I’m back with a British Library Crime classic pick today, because this is really good – and also has a beautiful cover.
It’s just after the war and Inspector MacDonald is hunting for a coupon racketeer who has gone missing in London, reported missing by his fiancée. In Lancashire Giles Hoggett, a book dealer turned cow farmer, has found something strange and potentially sinister in his fishing cottage. His wife is sceptical but he writes to a Scotland Yard detective who solved another case locally not that long before. Soon MacDonald is visiting for the weekend and it seems that his coupon case may be connected to the missing items at the cottage.
I really like E C R Lorac. Almost every time I read one her books it’s up there for Book of the Week – and it was a surprise to me that it’s been a year since I picked one. She is so good at writing about Lancashire and the communities there, and this really evokes the tight-knit community in the countryside as well as the immediate aftermath of the war. As the granddaughter of farming families (on both sides!) I really love the way she writes about people who know their land, the rhythms of the seasons and that you have to respect nature. Oh and the mystery is pretty good too!
The Theft of the Iron Dogs is available as a paperback in the British Library Crime Classics range and it is in Kindle Unlimited at the moment, which means it’s not on Kobo right now, but as I’ve said before the BLCC titles rotate in and out of that still be back on Kobo at some point.
A really busy week again – busy at work and busy out of work. And it seems like the sun has appeared – how long it stays for and whether this is the entirety of summer remains to be seen! And this week is another busy one. I’ve got at least one night at the theatre – and have you seen the news agenda?!
The Hazelbourne Ladies’ Motorcycle and Flying Club by Helen Simonson*
The Cracked Mirror by Chris Brookmire*
One pre-order dropped onto my Kindle – the new K J Charles, which I have been very good and haven’t started yet!
Bonus picture: Saturday back at the Olympic stadium for the Diamond League. My first time back since watching Mo Farah win at the Worlds in 2017, and I can’t believe it’s 12 years since we were here for the Olympics!
*next to a book book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley.
Back to the streaming services this Sunday and a documentary that I actually watched basically as soon as it came out – but which has taken a few weeks to actually get posted because of things that were slightly more pressing on a time front. But actually it’s been really interesting to watch the conversations about this series over the last few weeks as well.
America’s Sweethearts is a seven part documentary series about the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. It follows them across the course of one season – with auditions to join the team, the training camp that follows and then the actual football season. It picks out a couple of the women in particular to highlight – Victoria and to a lesser degree Madeleine, veterans whose mothers were also on the squad; Caroline, newly retired and trying to adjust to the post-DCC world and her sister Anna-Kate who is auditioning for the team herself this year; Kelcey, a senior veteran on the team in her final season and Reese, a rookie candidate looking to make the team for the first time. Using those women it explores the impact of being on the team – physically and mentally, the sisterhood of the women who have been a part of it, and the squad’s place in the multi-billion dollar brand that is the Dallas Cowboys.
This is not the first series about the team – there were previously 14 seasons of Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making the Team produced by the CMT channel. Both series were authorised by the organisation itself, the people running the team are the same – DCC director Kelli Finglass, chief choreographer Judy Trammell – both former DCC themselves – and their boss Charlotte Jones Anderson, daughter of Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones. Even some of the cheerleaders on the squad are the same – the CMT show finished with the 2021 season and some of those women were still cheering last seaons – but the actual shows are very different.
Making the Team was very much a reality tv series in many ways – each season followed a similar structure: you started with the preliminary auditions and semi finals, it moved on to finals weekend where the re-auditioning veterans join the new hopefuls, then you move to training camp where across the next episodes the girls will learn the “signature dance” complete with kickline ending in the infamous jump splits, get make overs, be fitted for their uniforms, have their publicity photos taken and watch the rookie hopefuls get cut one by one to make a team of around 36. Some years you’ll also get to see auditions for the team’s show group – who get to do extra dance performances beyond the football games – or watch the veterans trip to a holiday resort to shoot the squad’s swimsuit calendar. The main focus of the show is on the fresh rookies – some will be completely new, others might be returners who were cut in previous years – and get a few glimpses of the cheerleaders you’ve followed in recent seasons.
And as you’ve probably guessed by comparing my descriptions of the two shows, they are quite different beasts. And not just because Netflix has paid for the music rights so you can finally be told that the “Signature dance” is actually known as Thunderstruck – because that’s the song that it is danced to*. The team behind America’s Sweethearts are using the structure of the season as a way of examining the idea of the squad as a whole.
And the appeal of the series goes way beyond the viewers of the old CMT series (something which the series’s subreddit is yet to come to terms with). What do I mean by that? well Him Indoors hated MTT with a burning passion – my sister and I watched it when he was out of the room – but he said he wanted to take a look at this series and see what it was like – and ended up watching the whole thing. A colleague at work who is a sports and documentary fan but not someone I would have expected to have watched it, had already watched it when I went to recommend it to him and described it as the best documentary series he’s watched this year.
I could write paragraphs more about the show – but this post is already massively long, so I’m going to wrap it up here and hope that this is enough to get you to take a look at the series, no matter what your views on cheerleaders or American sport!
Have a great Sunday everyone.
*and for long-time viewers of MTT who (like me) have never made it to a Cowboys game, this does have a pretty much complete performance of Thunderstruck for you to enjoy and see how it all the various parts fit together. And yes, Kelli does also explain her Yes, No, Maybe scoring system for auditions. You’re welcome.
We are a couple of weeks out from Book Con and that means that I need to start thinking about what I might take to sell this year. Although it’s a conference about fiction for girls, it doesn’t just have to be books that fit that genre – last time I got some British Library Crime Classics in the sale for example. And we all know I’m always running out of shelf space so I’ve got my name down to sell a few and now I just need to figure out what, how much I’m going to charge and how people are going to pay me. Wish me luck.
The third book in the Three Dahlia mysteries came out this week, and there is a fourth coming in November, so it seems like a good time to talk about Katy Watson’s mystery series.
So as I wrote in my Book of the Week Post about the first book, The Three Dahlias, the Dahlias of the title are three actresses who have all played the same character – Dahlia Lively, the heroine of a series of 1930s murder mysteries. Rosalind was the first to play her in the original movies, Caro played her in a long running TV adaptation and now Posy is taking the lead in a new movie. In the first book the women are all at a convention at the home of the author who wrote the series when a murder happens. In the second book, A Very Lively Murder, the murder happens on the set of the new movie. And now, in the third, Seven Lively Suspects, the trio are at a crime festival where Caro is due to speak about her new book about their first investigation. But before they arrive a podcast team asks them to be part of their new series about a murder five years ago where they are convinced that the wrong man was convicted.
I really like this series. I was sceptical about how Katy Watson was going to find more ways for the Dalhias to get tangled up in murders, but this third instalment is actually pretty ingenious and makes sense without it feeling like they’re bringing murder wherever they go (a la Jessica Fletcher!). We have a fourth coming in November – A Lively Midwinter Wedding – which is teed up at the end of Seven Lively Suspects.
These are hardback first releases – so the first two are in paperback now, and the latest is a hardback. And of course they’re on Kindle and Kobo too. I bought the first two (in hardback!) but I got the latest via NetGalley, which may mean at some point I end up buying the third in hardback as well because I do like a matching set…
This is billed as a cross genre hybrid of Agatha Christie and Michael Connelly – with an elderly village lady sleuth and a doesn’t play by the rules LA homicide detective whose worlds collide. I haven’t read any Chris Brookmyre before but I was lucky enough to get an advance of this – and I have got it underway so I’ll report back on whether or not it’s too hard boiled for me!
After writing about some Hollywood-set fiction yesterday, I thought this week might be a great opportunity for a round up of some of the Hollywood-set or related non-fiction I’ve read over the years. This has got a couple of things that I’ve not mentioned before, but also some that have been to a greater or lesser extent.
Let’s start with one of those new things: I read Shawn Levy’s TheCastle on Sunset a couple of years ago, but I can’t find that I really wrote much about it here, so I can rectify that now. This is a history of the Chateau Marmont, possibly the most famous hotel in Hollywood, used by generations of stars for all sorts of things. Depending on your age you may remember it as where John Belushi died, or the hotel Lindsay Lohan got kicked out of – and both of those are in this, along with a lot more.
I’ve reorganised this bookshelf since this picture was taken, but there are a few here that might be of interest. Helen O’Hara’s Women vs Hollywood look at female pioneers in the early days of the movies and how women were then pushed out. I don’t know what it’s not on this shelf, but if you want Golden Age Hollywood of a similar era to Loretta, then Karina Longworth’s Seduction: Sex, Lies and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywoodwhich focuses on the women pursued by themillionaire movie mogul from the 1920s through til the 1950s. And from a similar era there is Trumbo about the screenwriter who was blacklisted in the communist panic.
There are loads of books about individual stars too. I remember Gerald Clarke’s Get Happy about Jusy Garland as being pretty good, but it’s been closer to 15 years than ten. And I don’t know where my copy is but J Randy Taraborrelli’s The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe was a good read when I read it even longer ago – I wonder how it holds up! Taraborrelli has a fair line in Kennedy-related books, some of which I keep meaning to get hold of, because we all know I like a good book about that particular dysfunctional family. He’s also written about Elizabeth Taylor – who is another frequent books subject. I’ve read Furious Love about her relationship with Richard Burton, Elizabeth and Monty about her friendship with Montgomery Clift – and I’ve got Kate Anderson Brower‘s biography on my to read pile too.
And then there’s the other stuff I want to read – Laurence Leamer’s Hitchcock’s Blondes – which came out last year, just as the adaptation of his book about Capote’s Women was appearing on streaming services. I’ve got another Marilyn book on the kindle too – this time about Bobby Kennedy and Marilyn. I also want to read Oscar Wars, Michael Schulman’s history of the Academy Awards and Katie Gee Salisbury’s Not Your China Doll about Anna May Wong.
It’s Tuesday again and as I promised last week, I’m back with a Book of the Week pick – and we’re back in old Hollywood for Katherine Blake’s The Unforgettable Loretta, Darling.
It’s the early 1950s and the titular Loretta is a Brit abroad, escaping from her past in Lancashire by reinventing herself in Hollywood, not as an actress but behind the scenes in the make-up department. She’s new to Hollywood and its machinations, but she’s a fast learner and she has got some weapons of her own as she fights her way through the studio system in the hunt for success.
It’s quite hard to describe what actually happens in this, or give it a genre. It’s historical fiction, but there’s a dash of mystery in there and it’s witty too. But there’s also some sexual violence that I need to warn you about because I know that’s a hard no for some people. I love a book that features Golden Age and studio system Hollywood and this has plenty of that – with faded starlets, up and coming ingenues and plenty of awful men. If you liked The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo this has some similar vibes – but with a darker edge.
This is a relatively new release – it came out in the UK last month, but in the US last week. I haven’t seen it in the shops yet, but it may be that I’ve been looking in the wrong places because of that genre thing I mentioned – or simply that I haven’t been in a big enough bookshop. My copy came from NetGalley but you can also get it on Kindle or Kobo and on Audible.
Another massively busy week – but actually a reasonable list of reading, and I’ve got nothing on the ongoing list, which is always a nice (and unusual) position to be in. There are quite a few books out this week that I have from NetGalley, so I’ve started a lot of those to try and be timely for once in my life – we’ll see how that goes…
Bonus picture: A rare picture of me because I did Cancer Research UK’s Race for Life on Sunday. This year has been particularly terrible one in my extended family and friendship groups for cancer, and I lost a very dear friend to cancer on Election Day so despite my incredible lack of ability at anything athletic, I rage-ran my way around Abington Park on Sunday. I was hoping to raise £200, but I’ve more than tripled that – so that really helped propel me around the course, which was much hillier than my regular route around the Racecourse. I’m just going to leave my donation link here, just in case anyone else wants to take pity on me and my tremendously red post-run face.
*next to a book book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 