Book Retorts

Sam brings Danielle the show’s first middle grade novel with the Donna Jo Napoli book Shark Shock. Adam is your typical eleven-year-old boy: he likes video games and playing soccer, and is absolutely terrified of sharks. This really isn’t a problem until his family plans a three-week vacation to the New Jersey shore in the same place where the shark attacks that Jaws were based on happened. Adam quickly comes up with a plan to keep himself safe while swimming in the ocean: His talking freckles can keep a lookout and warn him about sharks. Yes, there are talking freckles living on Adam, and no, Sam hasn’t read the first book in this series, Soccer Shock, which may explain some of this. Unfortunately, divisive political squabbling amongst the freckles means they won’t be able to help. Danielle has questions, but even if Sam had answers there’s no time as Adam makes a new friend at the beach by the name of Seth, who was blinded in a boating accident a few years earlier. Adam thinks maybe he can help Seth listen to his own freckles so they can help see for him. Sam is annoyed with Adam’s parents for some pretty blatantly sexist behavior by giving Adam his own room instead of his older sister. Danielle just wants to know where the heck are all the freaking sharks.

Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.

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This week Danielle brings Sam the explosive finale of the Libbra Bray novel Beauty Queens. The “pirates” from the Captains Bodacious reality show find our stranded beauty pageant contestants on their island and immediately do what attractive young people do everywhere. Soon, however, their fun is cut short as MoMo B. ChaCha is about to arrive to complete the arms deal the Corporation has arranged on the island. Still, the show must go on, and for reason too convoluted to go into here, the beauty pageant is back on, live from the island, with MoMo B. ChaCha as a special surprise judge. The girls, finally suspicious of the Corporation and its megalomaniacal leader Ladybird Hope, decide to stage their daring escape live on television, for some reason. There are giant snakes, tanks of piranhas inside volcano caves, and somehow still enough time to make a PowerPoint presentation. The biggest tragedy by far, though, is the loss of MoMo’s trusted confidant and stuffed lemur General Good Times, but fortunately Sam plans to open a chain of family restaurants/arcades in his honor.

Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.

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This week Danielle brings Sam the start of a truly weird novel in Beauty Queens by Libba Bray. When a plane loaded with beauty pageant contestants decides to crash land on a deserted island, the surviving contestants must fend for themselves until rescue comes. Unfortunately, the sinister Corporation that runs the pageant has no interest in their rescue, as the island is planned to be used as the site for an arms deal between The Corporation and MoMo B. ChaCha, an eccentric dictator with a pet stuffed lemur. The stranded beauty pageant contestants soon learn that there’s something off about the island, and not just the hallucinogenic berries. If you ever wanted to see a besashed Miss Texas roundhouse kicking guards and being absolutely riddled with tranquilizer darts, this book delivers. Fortunately, despite their dire circumstances, Captains Bodacious arrives with his sexy pirate crew to maybe save the day!

Featuring a promo for the book discussion podcast Touch Your Shelf; find them on Twitter, Instagram, and at Libsyn.

Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.

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In the first full episode of the new year, Sam shares with Danielle the 1999 Antonio Banderas film The 13th Warrior. When Ahmad, an Arabic poet, is caught canoodling with a courtier’s wife, he is exiled in the form of being sent out of his home as an ambassador. An ambassador to where? That doesn’t matter, because he immediately hooks up with a band of Vikings who are called on a quest to stop an ancient evil from destroying some other Vikings. Sam doesn’t really get it either. The point is, Ahmad will have to learn to get along with his new friends if they’re to accomplish their mission. In his journey, Ahmad will get to know the Viking people, more than Sam at least, who still can’t remember a single one of their names. Ahmad will find love, hear tales of dragons, and deal with Viking political intrigue, and if you think all of those things aren’t immediately discarded by the movie as irrelevant, then this movie will surprise you. Don’t worry though, the film has plenty of cave bear-people who love retreating through the mist while hissing to keep things wacky.

Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.

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In the final Book Reshorts of the winter season, and the first of the new year, Sam surprises Danielle by expressing his consternation with a particular aspect of the 2010 Scooby-Doo show Mystery Incorporated: Scooby-Doo’s love life. In the show, Scooby-Doo acquires a romantic partner who is a regular Cocker Spaniel dog, and Sam wrestles with the ethical and logistical questions of this pairing. While the show was filled with ridiculous choices, from Nazi robots to inter-dimensional aliens, listen to Sam breeze past those insanities to remain laser-focused on the aspect of the show that confuses him the most.

Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.

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In the final installment of this year’s Winter Bizarre, Danielle brings in the big guns with the John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale rom-com Serendipity. A chance encounter in a New York department store brings Sara and Jonathan together. Even though they’re both happily seeing other people, Jonathan seems determined to find a way to be with Sara. Sara dodges his advances by setting up elaborate tests of fate that will tell them if they are meant to be together. Sam has exactly zero patience for Sara’s fate-based abdication of personal responsibility, Danielle, meanwhile, is mostly just amused by his frustration. Regardless, see our “heroes” eventually brutally dump their perfectly lovely partners to be with each other because apparently fate told them to. Danielle and Sam are forced by this movie to grapple with some existential questions that are, honestly, pretty stupid. Luckily, the leads have enough charisma and charm to make everyone forget the bad philosophy and enjoy their lovelorn shenanigans.

Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.

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In this week’s Book Reshorts it’s Sam’s turn to test Danielle’s powers of recall. Sam takes Danielle all the way back to their very first episode and sees how well she can remember all the dense science fiction and weird alien sex from the Isaac Asimov book The Gods Themselves. While the science, and character names, may elude her, she does recall some of the more outlandish plans the characters try to execute, if not exactly why someone might want to fly the moon off into space. So listen to find out exactly which parts of that story are forgotten and which are lodged forever in our brains.

Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.

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This week’s Winter Bizarre lives up to the name as Sam explains the 2017 movie Pottersville. If you love holiday classics like It’s a Wonderful Life then Pottersville really wants to trick you into thinking it’s going to be your new favorite. Maynard Greiger is a general store shopkeeper living in Pottersville, a small, economically depressed town. When he discovers his wife is having an affair, of sorts, Maynard deals with this in the only rational and healthy way possible: By dressing up as a Sasquatch to try and win her back. The side-effect is that now the town’s prospects are looking up as news spreads and Bigfoot tourists roll in. Maynard must struggle to keep the ruse up to save the town, and maybe his marriage, as more attention, and monster hunters, focus-in on him. What, exactly, this has to do with the holidays, or really anything, is spectacularly unclear. Just remember: Whenever a bell rings a Sasquatch gets its feet.

Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.

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In this week’s Book Reshorts, Danielle puts Sam’s memory skills to the test! This time she challenges Sam to recall everything he can about Sweet Valley High and Margo’s murder spree from all those months ago. However, he struggles to remember the names of everyone, or that there is, in fact, more than one cute but otherwise nondescript boy in the book. See how well he does, and if you can do better, in Partial Recall!

Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.

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Danielle kicks off this year’s Winter Bizarre with the Syfy original film Snowmageddon. A mysterious steam-punk snow globe, which has a perfect representation of their home town, is left at the door of a rural Alaskan family. Abruptly, a lava spewing chasm opens in the middle of the town, and in the snow globe the same chasm appears in miniature. Soon ice shards are raining from the sky, people are trapped on an electrified school bus, and a hunky snowboarder sees his friend killed in an avalanche, but isn’t that bothered about it. How the snow globe is responsible for all these non-snow related disasters remains unclear to the characters, our podcast hosts, and likely the film’s writers as well. The solution to all these problems lies with a poorly named board game that is a ripoff of The Lord of the Rings and also, somehow, Pandora’s box. Sam demands more murderous snow and less nonsense; he is disappointed.

Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.

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If you like our content and want more of it, please consider supporting us on Patreon.