In this Unabridged episode, Jen and Sara share their thoughts about the pilot episode of the CW series The 100, which is now available on Netflix. Ashley joins Sara and Jen for the Bookish Check-In and the Give Me One.
Bookish Check-in
Ashley - Evie Dunmore’s Bringing Down the Duke (Amazon | Bookshop.org)
Jen - Alison Hammer’s Little Pieces of Me (Amazon | Bookshop.org)
Sara - Samantha Irby’s We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.: Essays (Amazon | Bookshop.org)
Main Segment - The 100 Book-to-Movie Adaptation
Kass Morgan's The 100 (Amazon | Bookshop.org) and The 100 Complete Boxed Set (Amazon | Bookshop.org)
The 100 television adaptation (available on Netflix)
Mentioned in Episode
Dani Shapiro’s Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love (Amazon | Bookshop.org)
Lindy West's Shrill (Amazon | Bookshop.org) and the Hulu adaptation
Lost
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul - the movie and the book (Amazon | Bookshop.org)
Give Me One - Favorite Amusement Park Rides
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Bookish Check-in
Ashley said, "So one of the books I'm reading this week is Evie Dunmore's Bringing Down the Duke. This is a 'bookstagram made me do it' book, and I saw it all over the place, and it sounded really intriguing. Then I grabbed it on a Kindle deal, so it's just been patiently waiting in my Kindle closet, and I was looking for something lighter to read the other night before I went to bed. I was happy to start this one, though I didn't know much about it. I mean, the fact that it had a duke suggested that it was taking place in the past, but I really didn't know much about it. It is set in the late 1800s, and Annabelle is the main female character, and she is very intelligent and well educated, but destitute. She's trying to find a way to have some financial security. At the time when the book starts, she's really dependent on her cousin, as her kind of male security, so she's looking for a way to navigate that so that she can stand on her own better. As the book is opening, she becomes aware that Oxford is taking women for the first time, so she is strategizing in the very beginning about how to best lay things out so that she can convince her cousin—kind of trick her cousin—into agreeing to let her go and study at Oxford. But when she goes—and she does, she does work that out—so then when she gets there, she has to take part in one of the causes: that's part of the arrangement for her scholarship. The cause that she gets involved with is the women's suffrage movement, and a big focus that they have is on property and the fact that when women are married, they lose their property to the man., so they're advocating really hard and lobbying to make it where women don't always lose their property upon marriage and that they can maintain their property when they go into a marriage agreement. That is the premise on her side.
"Then we quickly see Sebastian, who is a very prominent duke in in England and who has a lot of connection to the queen, and he is curmudgeonly and seems a lot older, but he's actually in his 30s and just has had to manage the family's finances for a long time. His family has come from a long line of money and property, but they made a series of bad decisions over a lot of generations, and his father essentially squandered his property. Part of it was in a betting game, and he just lost the property on cards, so just recklessness as far as management. I think that's part of why Sebastian's character is the way that he is early on is just that he has a lot of responsibility, and he's working hard to re-establish that connection of security that his family had in the past. For the women's side, it becomes apparent quickly that they are going to need men to support their cause, and they need men with influence and property, so you can imagine how Sebastian becomes a desirable target. Because of that, the women are plotting and planning how to navigate that, and Annabelle doesn't really know anything about life there. Early on when she is assigned some tasks as far as lobbying, she goes right up to Sebastian, the Duke, and approaches him and tries to lobby to him. All the other women are amazed that she's so courageous and brazen, but she had no idea who he was, so she's just like, well, I could tell he was wealthy and influential, and so I went up to him. So it was kind of a series of things where they saw her to suddenly be really amazing. She's like, ah, I didn't necessarily know what I was doing, but then they're trying to find their way in, and Sebastian has a younger brother who is not nearly as responsible and tight laced as he is, so they're thinking that that may be their pathway. That's where I am in the book now, as they're trying to navigate their way in with the younger brother and figure out how to make things work. I am absolutely fascinated by it. So far, I'm really loving it. I am blown away by how little rights the women have, and it is humbling to read the way that, for example, Annabelle can't be around town without a chaperone, and so she has to go everywhere in the chapter, and then she has to pay for that. But she doesn't have any money, so she's constantly frantic to earn enough money to pay for things like a chaperone so that she can keep going; she has to pay for her cousin's hired help because she's not there to take care of his children for free. So it's all this stuff that just shows how difficult it is in society for women to find their way, and it is, like I said, it's pretty shocking to me to think that it was really just not that long ago that things were like that and to think about what it would be like to be living during that time. So again, that is Evie Dunmore's Bringing Down the Duke."
Jen said, "I'm reading an egalley from NetGalley. It's Alison Hammer's Little Pieces of Me, and this one will have been out by the time this episode releases. I'm about halfway through this one, and it is so compelling: I had to stop for a chat and I really wanted to keep going. But this is about Paige Meyer who signs up for a DNA testing website and gets an unexpected email that says her father is on the website and wants to connect. And her father is dead. So she understandably is a little shocked, and as she's investigating further, she finds out that the DNA testing website has said that the man that she thought was her father was not and that her mother had never told her that this other man is her biological father and that the father who raised her also likely did not know. She's upset, understandably, and is just trying to figure everything out. Her mother is just very closed mouthed and does not want to talk about it at all. She is just desperate to find out what actually happened, what the true story is. She has sisters who she now realizes are her half-sisters. Her life is just in turmoil. So that's one half of the book.
"Then in the other half, it flashes back to 1975 when her mom Betsy is in college, and we know very early on that Paige's biological father is Andy Abrams. He is this very handsome, very popular man on campus, and that's her biological father: he knew both of her parents, who were dating at the time. So I still don't know exactly what happened, but they are yet just kind of swirling around each other at these different parties. You see as it moves back and forth, Paige is just trying to wrestle with what this means for her identity and what this means for who she thinks she is and the things she's always questioned about herself. She's always been very different from her siblings and from her mom, and now she feels like she kind of understands that. So she's trying to reach out to Andy Abrams to get some answers, but he's not responding yet. So yeah, we'll see what happens. It's great. . . . So again, that's Alison Hammer's Little Pieces of Me."
Sara said, "I'm continuing with my 2021 streak of reading nonfiction by women, and I'm reading right now Samantha Irby's We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. It's an essay collection. I've really enjoyed Lindy West's essay collections. And Samantha Irby actually writes on Hulu's Shrill, which is based on one of Lindy West's books, one of her memoirs. I was just really interested: I've had this book for a long time, and that's just kind of where where my heart's leading me this year. I started, and is great. It's very funny. It is matter of fact, but I will tell you, if you are sensitive to language, like in profanity, she uses a lot of curse words, which that doesn't bother me that much. So it's fine, but if you are sensitive to that, I would maybe not read this book. Otherwise, it's really funny. She writes essays about her life: you learn about her life when she was growing up and then how she kind of handles different situations as an adult. It's hilarious. One thing that is really interesting is she—I didn't realize but she runs kind of like the front desk at an animal hospital, so if you look on the front of the book, there's this picture of this angry cat, and there's an essay, and you will get to know why that was a choice. It's really funny. I really highly recommend it."
Main Segment - The 100 Book-to-Movie Adaptation
Here, Sara and Jen share their overall impressions of the pilot episode of The 100 series.
Sara said, "Well, the first time I watched it, I mean, I was totally riveted, because for one thing, I am a fan of dystopian books, and the premise of the show is that 97 years ago, there has been a nuclear apocalypse, and all these people are living on this space station called the ark. I was riveted the first time, so it was really super interesting to go back and watch the pilot again, knowing the character arcs of a lot of the characters and how things go, it was really interesting to see their origin because I had forgotten . . . you know, when you get into four or five seasons of a show, you are tending to look forward and not backward, so it gave me a chance to look backward. It also gave me to a chance to see some of the characters that are no longer there. I mean, there were a couple I had totally forgotten about. So I really enjoyed it. I was still riveted; it still felt fresh; and I still would recommend it. . . ."
Jen said, "I had the same reaction. I just, I kind of want to rewatch it again, too, in advance of the final season, and I want to make my husband watch it with me because he has never watched any of the episodes even though I've told him how good it is. When I had that thought, I did wonder—I think that teen soapy stuff that does decrease as the series goes on might be a turnoff for him in the first episode, but I think it just so quickly turns, and that is always a part of it because that's—part of life is relationships that we have with people, but I think it becomes proportionally smaller as you go. . . ."
Give Me One - Favorite Amusement Park Rides
Listen in to hear our favorite rides, and be sure to share your favorite rides with us on Instagram with Give Me One Mondays!
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