(Two warnings:  I didn’t watch the entire movie, so there may be some brilliance in the middle. And, spoilers abound.)

A Sticky Wicket

The original Wicker Man, back in 1973, was… well, original. It was true horror. The 1973 version is set in Scotland, and puts a devout Christian believer up against an ancient pagan cult.  The effect of a true-believer who isn’t saved by the “true religion” made the seventies version of this movie unsettling, disturbing and scary.

The remake is faithful to the original except for changing the location, changing the gender of the cult leader and eliminating the element of religious belief for the Nick Cage character. Other than that, it’s almost exactly the same.

Our story begins… here

Nick plays Edward Milus, who is some kind of cop or highway patrolman in the desert somewhere. I’m going to saw Arizona, because I don’t know. Early in the movie, Milus fails to save a cute little blond girl and her mother from dying in a fiery car crash. There’s an implication that if it weren’t for the bratty behavior of the little girl, who throws her doll out the window (Milus goes to fetch it) Milus would have been killed in the same crash. That’s never developed though. After the crash, on leave and recovering, popping pills like a fiend, Milus gets a letter from his former fiancé Willow, who says her daughter has disappeared and no one will help her. Willow lives in a place called Summersisle (Summer’s Isle), in Puget Sound.

Summersisle is privately owned and sells honey. Apparently that’s the only source of income to the island, although there are some pretty gorgeous homes for a simple organic farming operation. Milus tries to get to the island, (riding on a ferry that is a type the Washington State Department of Transportation doesn’t use in the Sound) only to discover that you can’t get there from anywhere. He finally bribes an old man with a float plane who delivers supplies –Edward Woodward, in a cameo, since he played the policeman in the original – and barges onto Summersisle. Two mean-teacher old women meet him and are unwelcoming. A parade of pregnant women waddle past him, smiling coyly. The few men seem subservient and kind of dim, but not as dim as Milus. Milus apparently doesn’t quite grasp the concept of “jurisdiction” as he flashes his Arizona badge around right and left claiming that his search for a little girl is “a police matter.”

Milus finds Willow, who is virtually incomprehensible. I mean the character, not the actress. She says Rowan, her daughter, is missing, even though other women say various things; that there never was a Rowan, that Rowan is fine, or that Rowan is dead. An hour in, Willow drops the Reveal – Rowan is Milus’s daughter! What a shocking revelation that none of us saw coming since the point where Milus opened Willow’s letter back in Arizona!

There’s no way off the island. There is no cell reception on the island. (Most of the subservient men hang out at “the tavern,” but since there’s no satellite reception, this is not paradise for them because they can’t watch sports.) Milus peddles around on a stolen bike, jerking and twitching, flashing his useless badge, gulping useless pills, asking useless questions and finding carefully planted clues. The harvest last year was bad. There is a ritual festival that involves a pretty little blond girl. There’s a book called The Ancient Rituals. Lots of things are burned. Milus flashes back to the fiery car. The scenery is pretty.

Who’s In Charge Here?

Eventually he has a conversation with Sister Summerisle, matriarch of the island, played by Ellen Burstyn, looking just great. I know Nick owes about $14 million and therefore will do anything that offers a paycheck. What do they have on Burstyn? Milus rags on her about how men are called “drones” and are subservient and Sister Summerisle smiles faux-sweetly and mouths all the usual platitudes about how they honor and respect their men, but they have their place in the world and it’s a specific place. (Get it? It’s social commentary! How funny!) Milus wanders down to the beehives, gets stung, and now we find out that he’s allergic and carries an epi-pen. Why didn’t we know this? Why didn’t Milus think about this problem before coming to Summersisle? Not that is matters –in the final cut of this movie, any significance this life-threatening allergy had is removed.

Rule of Four

Now, we reach the part of the movie where Cage, as Milus, says everything four times. He’s yelling at Willow about Rowan’s doll, which he found. It’s burned. “How did it get burned?” he yells. “How did it get burned? How did it get burned? How did it get burned?”

Later he hijacks Sister Rose’s bicycle, threatening her impotently with his gun. “Get off the bike! Get off the bike! Get off the bike! Get off the bike!”

Later still he crashes through Sister Summerisle’s beautiful craftsman mansion, hurling open doors and finding strange things, just not the sister. “Sister Summersisle! Sister Summersisle! Sister Summersisle! Sister Summersisle!”

Nick, I speak from the heart when I say this to your character, “Milus, shut up! Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

It’s Unbearable

Having come to the inescapable conclusion that the cult intends to sacrifice his little girl, Milus knocks out a woman and steals her bear costume—yes, that’s right, her bear costume – and, in disguise, joins the parade to the lovely meadow where the sacrifice is held. It’s like a Renn Faire gone wrong; all the woman have pretty floaty dresses and antique-lookin’ masks and nobody thinks anything about the guy in a bear costume galumphing along with them. He finds Rowan tied to a structure. He frees her and they run into the woods. His cell phone rings! He answers it while running and yells, “Tom, Tom, help me!” Tom’s a guy back in Arizona.  Spoiler alert: Tom’s not going to help him.

Rowan leads him through the woods… back to the meadow where all the women stand waiting. Because… surprise! Rowan isn’t the sacrifice! Milus is! Rowan and Willow were in on it! The whole time! Sorry to spoil it for you.

Lost in Translation

There is no movie so horrid that Syfy can’t make it worse by bad editing for commercials, and Wicker Man is no exception. Midway through the movie, Milus confronts Sister Rose and a group of students (girls) in the rustic little one room school-house. Outside, Sister Rose tells him that Rowan died. The dialogue goes like this:

Milus:  How did she die?

Sister Rose:  She burned to death. (Walks past Milus)

Milus: What did you say?

Sister Rose: (Turns at door) What I meant to say.

Okay, so… huh? What’s that about? Well, when you check Wikipedia, you find out that the uncut scene reads more like this:

Milus:  How did she die?

Sister Rose:  She’ll burn to death.

Milus:  What?

Sister Rose:  She burned to death. (Walks past Milus.)

Milus:  What did you say?

Sister Rose: (Turns at door) What I meant to say.

A clue! A threat! Suspense! Syfy can’t leave any of that in place, so the ominous, “She’ll burn to death” line gets cut. I am not good at math, but even I can see that if they shaved one iteration off of each of Cage’s Group of Four incantations, they could have left the scary line in.

Spoiler Alert

Milus dies. They sacrifice him. It’s not all a dream.

Possessed?

The scariest thing about Wicker Man isn’t in Wicker Man. It’s that this director, Neil Labute, adapted one of my favorite books, Possession, into a movie. I will never be able to watch it. I can’t see that story and those wonderful characters tortured in the hands of this director.

Last week I saw two good movies, and one of them, Cabin in the Woods, was horror. In that movie, what characters did mattered. Actions carried through, advanced the plot or revealed character. If someone had popped pills in Cabin, there would have been a reason. Cabin, like Wicker Man, is a movie about the horror of sacrifice. In Cabin, the sacrifice matters. In Wicker Man, it doesn’t. Neil Labute, who directed this monstrosity, should watch Cabin in the Woods. He might learn something.

Dr. Wendy said it was a busy food week and weekend for the Vista clinic folks. She had already put in fourteen hours overtime and it was only Saturday morning. Alisha was her Vista clinic helper, with Suzanne on hand to chop up strawberries. I set up tables, unloaded books and played gopher.

The market is moving next weekend. It will now be at the Luther Burbank Center, the south parking lot. I’m happy they found a spot. I’m worried that we will lose contact with the low income families in Roseland who are familiar with the farmers and the ways of the market. The new market that is moving into the Veteran’s Building parking lot have said they are interested in accepting CalFresh and once they are certified they will start the process to become vendors.

Nancy of Middletom Farms will be moving to the LBC. Her comment about the rental dispute and the move was, “Fifty thousand a year to rent a prison exercise yard is too much.” The LBC is charging less and offering more amenities – at least that’s what they said in the paper.

We gave away children’s books. The table behind Alisha there, with the red coverings, that’s the book table. I staffed this table and watched kids and parents walk away with three of four books each. Very heartening. I exercised some editorial control and did not put out the Twilight series books, just because there were others that looked more interesting. The second box I opened had a shrink-wrapped set of eight copies of a young adult novel called Cut, about a girl who cuts herself and ends up in a group home. It’s probably great, but geez… and most of the books were for little kids, so I put out one, towards the back, and left the others under the table. Later a woman stopped by who is the children’s librarian in Novato! She was very knowledgeable about the books we had out. She knew about Cut. She said it was good for older readers, but not really right for the ages of kids we were getting.

At the kids’ booth, many children made Mother’s Day cards, but as always, the big favorite was coloring.

Siskiyou County is in extreme northern California, right up against the Oregon border. Recently a group of humans went to the county Board of Supervisors with a petition requesting that the Board forbid wolves to live in Siskiyou County. I’m not making this up. Here’s the article.

My inner bureaucrat had a lot of fun with this idea. Do you post this on the county limit signs?  ”Welcome to Siskiyou County– Except for you, Mr. Wolf!” Does the wolf get a citation if it moves into the county? Does it get a first warning? All silliness aside, of course that’s not the intent at all. These people want permission to shoot wolves.

Before we write them off completely as cranks or entitled hunters who can’t stand the competition, let’s analyse the problem. The concern is that wolves are predators. They eat things. The eat elk, which humans hunt for sport, and they also eat sheep, which humans raise for profit. The sheep thing could be pretty serious. And the California gray wolf population is exploding. I mean it. In the last two years the population has grown from zero wolves in the wild to… one. One. And he only lives here part-time. His designation is OR7 and he is a lone wolf — no pun intended –who wanders across the California-Oregon boarder from time to time. One part time wolf. Lock up your daughters.

Of course, he’ll probably bring some friends and family, so those Siskiyou folks are worried. Is OR7 eating a lot of sheep? It seems unlikely, because wolves hunt in packs. OR7 doesn’t have a pack. He may pull down the occasional lamb, but it’s more probably that he is eating mice, voles, rabbits and gophers. In fact, I think the Siskiyou organic farmers should put together a petition to hire wolves as their organic pest control solution. Of course the wolves would have to rent apartments in a neighboring county.

(And, by the way, a bonus for me! Last Monday I went to the Sebastopol Cinema to see Cabin in the Woods. Today I went to the same theater to find out — it’s the Rialto! The old Rialto, Ky’s Rialto, the one that closed in Santa Rosa about two years ago. In addition to first run movies, they’ll show indies, classics and international films just like they used to when they were on Summerfield Drive.)

Back to Marvel’s The Avengers. This is a very long movie, running nearly 2 1/2 hours. Lots of things blow up and get crunched. And I have to say that while I have seen Ironman and Thor, I don’t remember reading The Avengers when it was a comic book — although I did read Thor — and I’ve never seen Scarlett Johansson in anything before today. So those are my credentials, or lack thereof.

I whole-heartedly enjoyed this movie. I’m still trying to figure out how writer/director Joss Whedon managed to pack so much story and so many relationships into a movie where everything is also blowing up and people are punching each other. Or, in the case of the Hulk, hurling each other about.

Basically, there are six Avengers plus Nick Fury. And they are:

Ironman — Arrogant, irreverent genius Tony Stark in a suit of his own devising.

Captain America –a WWII science experiment who got frozen in the ice somewhere, but has super strength and a giant metal Frisbee weapon that doubles as a shield.

Thor — an Aesir, or a god from Asgard, with awesome blond hair and a hammer.

Black Widow — Natasha Romanoff. In addition to probably being a descendent of the Czar, she is an accomplished spy and an assassin. That last occupation got downplayed in this movie.

Hawkeye — Clint Barton. He is a solar-system-class archer.

Hulk — David Banner is a scientist almost as smart as Tony Stark, with some major anger management issues.

They are arrayed against Thor’s adopted brother Loki, played by Tom Hiddleston. He is perfectly cast for this role and a superb performer. You will love to hate him.

When Loki breaks into a top secret laboratory in New Mexico and steals SHIELD’s tesseract (a really pretty glowing blue cube), the lab implodes and Nick Fury puts out a call for the six extraordinary individuals he had started to pull together for the Avengers Initiative. A few of these players are reluctant, and one, David Banner/the Hulk, doesn’t even know he’s on the team.  Hawkeye is  not very interested in working for them  for at least the first half of the movie.

When they do get together, there’s quite a bit of tension. Captain America is a soldier, used to following orders, big on duty and sacrifice. Stark is an irreverent loner. Thor knows that Loki is evil, but he still bristles at the thought that mere humans might dare to attack him. He also still has brother issues with Loki. David Banner mistrusts himself, fearing that the Hulk will break out. The beauty of these conflicts is that they happen  while the action is happening.

It takes a shocking event to cohere this group of eccentrics into a fighting force and when they do, they have their work cut out for them. New York City is under attack from the mercenary army Loki is bringing through  a portal created by the tesseract.

Scarlett Johansson was great as Natasha, even if her accent doesn’t make sense. Is she American? Russian, but raised as a spy from a very young age so that her accent was erased? I don’t know. Her best scene is with Loki. Her second-best scene is with David Banner, but her opening is pretty good too. Robert Downey is almost old-shoe comfortable as Tony Stark, but the surprise here for me was Mark Ruffalo,  completely convincing as Banner.

The story melds cataclysmic special effects with powerful characters and convincing dialogue. This is what super-hero movies should be like.

Another mini-spoiler. If you don’t already know what schwarma is, Google it before you see the movie, just for the fun of it.

Yeah, I think it’s that last one.

Five smart, carefree college students decide to take off for the weekend, going “off the grid,” at a cabin in the woods. They are:

The Nice Girl—Dana (Kristen Connolly)

The New Guy—Holden (Jesse Williams)

The Slut—Jules (Anna Hutchison)

The Jock – Curt (Chris Hemsworth)

The Conspiracy Theorist – Marty (Fran Kranz)
Guess who dies first. Just guess.

You guessed right because you already know the horror movie rules. The sexually active girl dies first. And the movie follows the rules, completely, while from somewhere else, two middle-aged guys in a high-tech lab watch every move our five lambs-to-the-slaughter make on a series of screens, controlling the environment in order to influence our five. The rules, it turns out, are important. And they’re old.

The internet ads for this movie made much of the rules. There were taglines like, “They’re after us. Let’s split up,” and “We’re being watched. Have sex.” Let’s include a couple more.

 Go down into the dark cellar by yourself.

If there’s anything with an enigmatic Latin inscription, read it out loud.

If the creepy local at the derelict gas station calls your girlfriend a whore and makes frightening remarks about what’s ahead, go on ahead anyway.

The creepy local, Mordeccai, makes a phone call to the guys in the lab later. As the two lab guys, Hadley and Sitterson (Bradley Whitford and Richard Jenkins, making evil seem as ubiquitous and banal as stale coffee in an office break-room) and Lin, the gal from Chem (Amy Acker) choke back their giggles at his ominous monologing, he says, suspiciously, “Am I on speaker phone?”

Our five primaries seem slightly brighter than the average horror-movie fodder, at least at first, but there is some tension in the ranks, and at least two of them are not behaving normally. Pothead Marty tries to discuss this with Dana. He asks her, “Since when is Curt such an alpha male? And since when does Jules act like a celebutard?” Dana says that they’re just drunk, but Marty isn’t so sure.

The pivotal scene, of course, is in that creepy earthen cellar. The cellar is filled with horror-movie stuff. There are weird porcelain doll heads; a canister of movie film; a jewelry box with a dancing ballerina inside; a dress form with a faded lace dress and a strange pendant; there is a conch shell, a mosaic orb that is a puzzle box, and then there are the more usual things; rusty cutting and slashing tools, animal traps, cobwebs. Each of the five is drawn to something, until they are distracted by Dana, who starts reading from a diary she’s found; kept by the daughter of a family of twisted pain-worshipping cultists who tortured visitors, and finally each other. And the diary ends with… an enigmatic inscription in Latin.

The cellar scene is important, but what is going on under the cellar is even more important. This is a movie about levels, vertical and horizontal; we on the other side of the 4^th wall watch the watchers, and through the watchers, watch our primaries. “I’m rooting for that kid,” Hadley says, as Dana thrashes away from a twisted-pain-worshipping-cultist-zombie who’s swinging a bear trap on a chain. The lab-coat guy starts a monologue about her courage, her heart, her purity –and then gets distracted at the thought of making margaritas.

The final act of the movie plays out in scenes so blood-drenched I thought I’d wandered into a “Blade” movie by mistake. That’s okay though; it’s intentional. I wouldn’t have thought that there was a fresh sight gag left with elevators. I was wrong, and the gentle chiming of the elevators in the monolithic facility acts as timing for the catastrophic final sequences, as we reach the big climactic scene at the end. This is also one of the best pro-drug movies I’ve seen in a while. Marty, the pothead, who lights up constantly, (his bong collapses into a coffee travel-mug) is the only one who even comes close to figuring out what is happening. (“I’m on a reality show,” he marvels. “My mom’s going to think I’m such a burn-out.”) But the basic question is, “Why?” Why is it only young people who have to suffer and be killed in this particular way?

Joss Whedon co-wrote this film and directed the second unit. It has Whedonisms all over it; which is to the good as far as I’m concerned. Fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel will see many familiar faces on the screen. The final sequence is reminiscent of the UC Sunnydale season of Buffy, with the Initiative. Being Whedon, he can’t resist the whole destiny/free will question. As influenced as they are, do our five employ free will? By doing so, are they heroic, or selfish, since their deaths are purportedly part of a bigger purpose? Are they like Spartacus, or Iphigenia? Well, I don’t know, because I was covering my eyes and peering out between my fingers at that part.

If you like horror movies, I recommend this one.

Some commenters on the internet were worried about whether there were rape scenes. There are not. There is a pretty and sexy sex scene that ends badly (because, let’s review… who dies first?). One internet commenter stated that there is a sexual assault against a dead, taxidermy-ed wolf, but I will leave you do draw your own conclusions.

I can see my house from here. That’s what I thought when my secretary brought in the map to the lunch event I was covering for my boss. I said, “If someone had told the Mary Agatha Furth Center was near Our Lady of Guadalupe Center I would have found it.”

She said, “It’s right next to the church, on the same grounds.”

Our Lady of Guadalupe was my church. It wasn’t a church when I was growing up three blocks away. It was an Apostolic Center. In fact, it wasn’t an Apostolic Center; it wasn’t even there. We helped build it.  I mean literally; my dad and I went over there on several weekends. I carried stuff, (mostly I played around the gnarled fig tree in the back, or hung out under a group of oak trees with some of the kids from the trailer park behind it) and my dad measured and sawed timber and hammered nails. The original building was single story, with cinderblock walls. There were no pews; just hard metal folding chairs that lived in a long closet in the back and got pulled out and set up before mass. There was no jewel-toned stained glass, just an amateurish but lovingly created mosaic of Our Lady of Guadalupe. I know it was “lovingly created” because my mother made it.

As the name implied, the Guadalupe Center wasn’t just a church. They held well-child clinics there, and I worked at a TB inoculation workshop one time, after school until nine o’clock. The priest and brothers worked with immigrant agricultural workers, held literacy classes and did voter registration drives. There was a bible study group my parents joined with six other couples. From the study group, they branched out, running a food pantry (we stored the canned goods in an outbuilding on our property) and even adding a used-clothing “free-store.” The local welfare department and the parish would refer families to our house. We delivered meals to families the day before Christmas. We helped with food drives and clothing drives.

I remember walking to church in spring and summer, through the knee high wild oats, across the gravel parking lot into that little room on Saturday evenings. I remember Easter service there. I remember the kitchen doubling as the confessional (because it didn’t have a confessional) and being uncomfortable going to confession because I had to look at Father Ken while I talked.

This was the 1970s. Nuns at my Catholic school were traveling in buses to the Central Valley to work with the United Farm Workers. Nuns and priests engaged in community organizing, practiced social justice. Priests were getting married and keeping it a secret – in fact, Father Ken was married the entire time he was at Guadalupe Center, and just didn’t tell anybody.

When he did come forward and share this with the congregation, he was immediately sent away. The Bishop sent in an old-school priest who ended a lot of the non-church events. He invited himself to the bible study group. After a couple of weeks, he suggested that he should lead the group and direct the content. The group politely declined this generous offer. Two weeks later, during his sermon, he read out our names, and ended the list by saying, “These families are no longer members of this parish.”

I should have been shocked or devastated. I was a teenager – I was jazzed. Elated. I was a rebel! How many kids at St Ursuline’s could claim they’d been read out of their parish? None, that’s how many. Did it disillusion me? Sure. Even at fifteen I recognized a naked power play when I saw it. My parents started driving up to the town north of us to go to church, but I didn’t go with them. And I haven’t gone back.

Our Lady of Guadalupe is different now. The old building probably held seventy-five people at best; the new church holds three times that. It’s white and airy, with pretty stained glass, an altar that draws all eyes and a fountain in the courtyard. The knobby fig tree and the cluster of oaks are gone, turned into parking, although the decrepit trailer park is still right behind it. The Mary Agatha Furth Center is nearly the size of the church, with a good sound system and nice acoustics.

The field we used to walk through on our way to church is a strip mall now; the pear orchard across the street from my house is a subdivision of large stucco homes. The two-lane road I took my horse down is four lanes now, checked by stoplights.

In 1982, the little cinderblock building burned. The cause of the fire was arson. At the time I could not understand why anyone would burn a place of comfort and refuge like a church. Now, of course, I can easily imagine why someone might have enough anger toward the Catholic institution to want to cleanse it with fire.

The diocese is different too. It has weathered, but not too well, numerous scandals; a bishop who covered up for his lover, a fellow priest, who embezzled money; several child molesters moved from church to church, given access to more children; a handful of expensive lawsuits that have depleted the treasury and jeopardized at least one parish’s building fund. Our Lady of Guadalupe church is a building of light and elegant beauty, but I didn’t feel welcomed or comfortable in it. I didn’t feel at home.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking “Who’s Kim Kardashian?” That’s because you have a life and don’t watch so-called reality TV. Well, here’s everything I know, or think I know, about Kim Kardashian: 1) she has a reality TV show; 2) she is the Paris Hilton of this decade, Paris being sooooo 2005; 3) she has a couple of sisters whose names all start with K; 4)her stepfather is an Olympian; 5) from every tabloid picture and commercial I’ve seen, she has great hair.

Apparently on her TV show recently, Kim was musing that she would make a good mayor of Glendale because it’s, “like, Armenian town.” Yes, that’s right; Kim Kardashian is a landsman! for those of you who don’t know very much about Armenia, here are some interesting facts.

(I will now admit that up until yesterday I often pronounced Kim K’s last name as if it were the name of these guys from Star Trek: Deep Space 9.)

Apparently, Kim’s campaign hit a snag. Well, a couple of snags, actually. The first setback is that you can’t really run for mayor in Glendale.  You must run for, and win, a seat on the city council. Then the position of mayor rotates among city council members. Kim might have to wait a year or two to get to be mayor. Does she have the attention span for it?

Glendale also has this picky, bureaucratic, so-unfair rule that, to run for city council, you have to live in the town of Glendale.

I’m sure one of Kim’s minions can find her a house in Glendale. I’m sure the voters of that town will embrace her. She’s demonstrated such a clear understanding of the democratic process, and she’s so well-informed on so many topics. And she really cares about the core issues of Glendale, whatever those are.

And she’s got  such great hair.

If you don’t track Elizabethan (technically, pre-Elizabethan) history, you may have some trouble following this book, because it’s hard to tell the players without a scorecard. After Henry VIII’s death, his young and sickly son Edward (Henry had a legitimate son, with his third wife, Jane Seymour) ascended the throne. Edward VI was too young to rule but his father’s will had not specified a regent, so ambitious men came out of the woodwork to “help” the young king. The first batch of these were the Seymours, including Edward Seymour and his brother Thomas, who in addition to having been King Henry’s brother-in-law until Jane died, also married Henry’s widow Katherine Parr and was the guardian of the Princess Elizabeth. (Yes, there will be a quiz later.) Thomas Seymour overstepped, embezzled from the Crown and was beheaded. The ambitious Dudley clan, headed by John Dudley, plotted against Edward Seymour, the Lord Protector, and got him removed and ultimately beheaded too. This meant, of course, that the Dudleys now had control of Edward.

Totally disempowered but not quite ignored during this time period were the two princesses; Mary Tudor, Henry’s daughter from his first marriage to Katherine of Aragon, and Elizabeth Tudor, Henry’s daughter from his second marriage to Anne Boleyn.

All of this happens before The Tudor Secret starts. Edward VI is still alive, although barely, when the book opens, and a young squire named Brendan Prescott is heading, with the Dudleys’ steward, to London. Brendan is being sent to be Robert Dudley’s squire. Brendan is an orphan, a foundling, discovered by the Dudley housekeeper, Dame Alice, in the abandoned priest’s house, when he was only an infant. Intrigue starts in the first chapter with rumors that Princess Elizabeth has come to town, also, to visit her beloved brother. Brendan catches a glimpse of the princess, although he doesn’t know it at the time. Shortly afterward he is introduced to William Cecil, a secretary who works for the Dudleys but is loyal to Elizabeth. The book glitched for me a bit here, when we discover that our wide-eyed youth Brendan, who should be about fourteen based on his station and his innocence, is actually twenty. The discrepancy in age and skill set is a problem; a foundling, Brendan is taught to read, write and do sums, apparently a clerk’s training, but he can also fence and shoot a bow; but, at twenty, he was never sent off to be a soldier.

Brendan agrees to work for Cecil, who hints that he knows something of Brendan’s lineage. Robert Dudley gives Brendan a token with orders to deliver it to the princess. Brendan meets Elizabeth and is smitten. I would criticize this as a failure to capture Elizabeth’s character—how does she captivate people so quickly? – if there weren’t contemporary accounts of people having exactly that reaction. Elizabeth, whose claim to the throne was the most precarious of Henry’s children’s, figured out intuitively how to both endear herself to the “common people” and win over key political players. This got her the throne. It also kept her alive during the time period in which this book is set.

In short order, Brendan is sparring verbally with the Dudley boys, particularly the prideful, arrogant Robert and the weak-willed Guileford, who is set to marry Jane Grey, the king’s cousin. He meets the sinister and well-dressed Francis Walsingham, who reads like a Disney villain; he befriends a scrappy stableboy; he has his life threatened several times. He also takes his life in his hands by helping Elizabeth sneak into the royal apartments at Greenwich to say good-bye to her dying brother. In the king’s bedchamber Brendan makes a shocking and deeply personal discovery, but has little time to figure things out because he is now sent to make contact with Princess Mary. John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, pressured Edward into disinheriting Mary, and now he’s sending Robert to find and imprison the princess. Northumberland plans to have Jane Grey crowned queen.

The action moves just fast enough. Gortner slows the pacing to allow for a lovely and sensuous romance between Brendan and Kate, one of Elizabeth’s servants. Brendan’s personal story is clear to the reader before it’s clear to him, and some of the details of it are a little shaky. It’s still a nice complication that could play out through the series, if there is one. The  most baffling scene comes early in the book, in the court,  a meet-and-greet scene where great secrets and whispered deals are being made by people you don’t know but think you should know about – Duchess Suffolk! Her Grace Princess Elizabeth! Lady Jane Grey! Duke of Northumberland! Kate! Kat Ashley! A dog! It’s hard to know what to pay attention to.

Speaking not as a critic but as an engaged reader and a partisan of William Cecil, I do not care for Gortner’s portrayal of this historical character, although his interpretation certainly powers the plot. It feels to me like Gortner moved a bunch of Francis Walsingham’s traits to Cecil, like a borrowed suit of clothes. It’s clear that the real-life Cecil was a conniver and a manipulator, but here’s the thing; they all were. You didn’t survive in a royal court –literally; see Paragraph Two above—if you weren’t. He was, however, fiercely loyal to Elizabeth.

Now speaking as a critic, Elizabeth comes across in this book as purely noble, stubborn in a good cause; courageous and loyal. Oh, please. Even during this time period, when she was not yet queen, Elizabeth was very much a player, and The Tudor Secret’s depiction of her fairness to Princess Mary is unbelievable. Mary and Elizabeth’s relationship was complicated even by the standards of a 21^st century blended family, and Elizabeth sounds disingenuous in this book when she says, “I’ve never done anything but be the daughter of her mother’s rival.” Really? Just the daughter of the rival who had her mother deposed and kept under house arrest the rest of her life? That rival, you mean? A tiny but irritating detail is that of Elizabeth’s dog, Urian. Anne Boleyn had a wolfhound named Urian. Elizabeth spent her life distancing herself from her mother; she would not flaunt the Boleyn connection by giving her dog this name. Gortner does not convince me that Elizabeth would indulge in this life-threatening caprice out of defiance or some deeply-held love for a mother she didn’t even remember.

The book is set against the background of the “Nine-day Queen,” (Jane Grey, record-holder for shortest reign in British history) but unless you already knew about that, you might completely miss that it happened. In fact, it was never clear to me in this book that Jane had already suffered through her rushed “coronation,” since Brendan was out of town when it happened.

To understand the secret of Brendan’s birth, a family tree would have helped. St Martin’s Press could have put a nice one in the front of the book. It’s like a feature, really. Some of us like them, and the people who are new to the byzantine family connections of the royal courts of 16^th century Europe would appreciate it.

The book ends just before the beginning of the most fraught period of Elizabeth’s life; and Brendan is poised to be one of Cecil’s intelligencers. Where’s the next book? Mary and Felipe of Spain? Elizabeth and Dudley imprisoned in the tower? Hey, I’m waiting!

The book has some interesting concepts for a traditional epic fantasy. Elizabethan fans are sure to enjoy it.