I had a family event this week so my schedule is all off. But I recommended a book I hadn't read in a while that was on sale over on Blue sky and then reread it and remembered why I don't usually recommend books I haven't read in a while.
It's because of nostalgia glasses. The thing I find is that even when you think you remember a book super well, you often don't remember large parts of it. I re-read Helen Macinnes' While Still We Live a while back and I had read it multiple times before. I remembered that the main character was a British woman in Poland in the late 1930's who kept extending her trip. And then, well, the town she was in got taken over and so she hid in the woods with some rebels and fell in love and then snuck out. And yes, all of that is true. I forgot before she got to the woods she went to Warsaw to try to leave, but then ended up staying in Warsaw and working for a German man who then tried to assault her and she ended up killing him which was why she ended up being taken to hide in the woods. Basically the book is like one third woods and I mostly had just remembered woods.
And so this book I recommended was Heart Throb by Suzanne Brockmann. I remembered that a woman was directing her first movie and everyone thought she was all boobs no brains, but she had also written the movie. I remembered that the actor had had some substance issues and this was the kind of thing he hoped would remind people he was a great actor. I remembered that she got accidentally drugged and he sat through it with her until the high wore off.
Here's what I had forgotten. I had forgotten the movie was a plantation era historical. Sure the main characters are good whites, who have realized that slavery is bad and are sneaking some slaves off on the underground railroad. I had forgotten there was a fifteen year old actress with an abusive and racist dad. I forgot that one of the actors who was young, but not a teen fell in love with this teen character, though he does realize that nothing can come of it right now. And I had forgotten that the actor with the substance abuse issue gets handcuffed and left in a trailer by his minder.
I still like the book. It has a single male narrator, but he doesn't do a bad job narrating. I still recommend the book. But I would have been way more up front with the content warnings had I remembered all this.
