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Lyndsey Gollogly (2893 KP) rated The One in Books
Dec 21, 2023
202 of 235
Kindle
The One
By John Marrs
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
How far would you go to find The One?
A simple DNA test is all it takes. Just a quick mouth swab and soon you’ll be matched with your perfect partner—the one you’re genetically made for.
That’s the promise made by Match Your DNA. A decade ago, the company announced that they had found the gene that pairs each of us with our soul mate. Since then, millions of people around the world have been matched. But the discovery has its downsides: test results have led to the breakup of countless relationships and upended the traditional ideas of dating, romance and love.
Now five very different people have received the notification that they’ve been “Matched.” They’re each about to meet their one true love. But “happily ever after” isn’t guaranteed for everyone. Because even soul mates have secrets. And some are more shocking than others…
Brilliant the only word for it! We follow a group of people that have put faith in a DNA test that matches you with that one true love that biological match that makes you perfect for each other. We see different lives and how they are affected. We even follow a serial killer who finds his match with a police woman in the middle of a 30 women killing spree! Yea victim 27 is heartbreaking. I couldn’t put this down I even spent 20mins talking about it to my husband. So would you? Would you give up everything to have that One person? Do you believe there is one person for everyone? Do you think science should pick our mates?
Kindle
The One
By John Marrs
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
How far would you go to find The One?
A simple DNA test is all it takes. Just a quick mouth swab and soon you’ll be matched with your perfect partner—the one you’re genetically made for.
That’s the promise made by Match Your DNA. A decade ago, the company announced that they had found the gene that pairs each of us with our soul mate. Since then, millions of people around the world have been matched. But the discovery has its downsides: test results have led to the breakup of countless relationships and upended the traditional ideas of dating, romance and love.
Now five very different people have received the notification that they’ve been “Matched.” They’re each about to meet their one true love. But “happily ever after” isn’t guaranteed for everyone. Because even soul mates have secrets. And some are more shocking than others…
Brilliant the only word for it! We follow a group of people that have put faith in a DNA test that matches you with that one true love that biological match that makes you perfect for each other. We see different lives and how they are affected. We even follow a serial killer who finds his match with a police woman in the middle of a 30 women killing spree! Yea victim 27 is heartbreaking. I couldn’t put this down I even spent 20mins talking about it to my husband. So would you? Would you give up everything to have that One person? Do you believe there is one person for everyone? Do you think science should pick our mates?
Mandy and G.D. Burkhead (26 KP) rated Sir Apropos of Nothing in Books
May 20, 2018
Shelf Life – Sir Apropos of Nothing Skewers the Hero’s Journey
Contains spoilers, click to show
Fantasy and satire are two of my favorite genres in any medium, but especially so in books. Satirical fantasy, then, holds a special place on my shelves. I grew up on Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, and desire to imitate him and his style is what led me in middle school to begin writing in earnest, for fun, and for myself rather than just for my teachers and their assignments.
So when I picked up Sir Apropos of Nothing, I did so based on the title pun and the back-of-the-book synopsis that promised “a berserk phoenix, murderous unicorns, mutated harpies, homicidal warrior kings, and – most problematic of all – a princess who may or may not be a psychotic arsonist.” I expected another lighthearted riff on the familiar archetypes. Murderous unicorns? Unicorns are not typically described as such! Oh teehee, how unexpectedly humorous!
Sir Apropos of Nothing is a satirical fantasy, just like it promised, though at times it’s hard to tell how much of the story is played for laughs and how much is played straight. See, the thing about satire that’s easy to forget at times is that it’s not synonymous with buffoonery. Make no mistake – Apropos is a funny book, full of witty dialogue and groan-inducing puns. It’s a book that takes great delight in lampshading traditional fantasy tropes and archetypes, as well as the entirety of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey idea. But it is not always a silly lampshade; sometimes a cliche or trope is pointed out to have its inherit ridiculousness laughed at, and sometimes it is pointed out because it is causing real and lasting pain or damage, either to the society in which it is set or, more often, to the titular Apropos himself and his ever-degrading esteem of both the people around him and himself.
The tone, at first, is hard to pin down. The story starts in media res with the main character being caught by a knight while in mid-coitus with that knight’s wife and escalates from there. The second chapter opens with a fourth wall-breaking narrative admission by Apropos himself that this was done with the express purpose of catching your attention, and now we’re going back to cover Apropos’s childhood, which ends up being equal parts dark, tragic, punny, and conveniently trope-filled – all of which Apropos, as narrator, approaches with the same resigned, blasé outlook.
If this sounds a bit jarring, well, it kind of is. Early on, I wasn’t sure what to think of where the story was trying to go or what I was expected to feel about it. After the first turn from cliché to dark and visceral to light and punny, all within a few pages, I caught myself thinking, “Crap, is this book gonna try and mix goofy jokes with serious drama and thoughtful moral quandary?”
The answer is yes. And it pulls it off fantastically.
This is due in large part to the interesting depths of the antihero, Apropos, who seems to be so named purely for the joke in the title. In Apropos we see a deep sense of justice and rightness that is entirely eclipsed by an even deeper cynicism and an unshakeable instinct for self-preservation. His life is objectively terrible, but rather than brood and lament, he adjusts. He keeps his head down when he can, weathers abuse when he can’t, and learns to deal with the constant shit storm, all the while bottling his growing anger and resentment at a world that would allow such amounts of suffering and hypocrisy to go unchecked. The fact that he himself becomes a selfish, hypocritical, and generally awful person is not lost on him, and the result is a flawed, unheroic, pathetic coward of a protagonist, a magnificently multifaceted bastard who doesn’t spare even himself from his vast and withering contempt.
And it’s a blast. It really is. Apropos is refreshingly pragmatic and unabashedly pessimistic, a welcome change from the typical righteous-yet-humble heroes of traditional fantasy, or even the loveable and untalented everyman in over his head of traditional fantasy spoofs. Despite a portentous birthmark (on his ass, no less) and beginnings that are not “humble” so much as “poverty of the dirtiest kind,” Apropos is everything a hero should not be short of outright evil.
And this, as it turns out, is entirely the point. This is where the satire, funny or otherwise, really shines through. This is the crux that elevates Sir Apropos of Nothing from a generically self-aware fantasy story to an original and memorable subversion of storytelling as a whole.
Without giving too much away, there comes a point in the plot where Apropos realizes that the events surrounding his miserable life are part of a heroic tale that has been preordained by Fate and is now being epically written out by Destiny. And despite his birthmark, his tragic past, and his mother’s constant reassurances that he has some sort of great destiny hovering over him, he is not the hero. He is only a minor character. A walk-on role on the hero’s stage. A brief pit-stop along the hero’s journey. An NPC whose dreams, desires, and continued existence are so far below importance to the story as to be utterly negligible.
And once this finally clicks with him, he violently, brazenly rebels against it. He gives an emphatic middle finger to Fate’s ideas and sets about making Destiny sit up and take notice of him again. He momentarily and violently overcomes his own abject cowardice just long enough to find a way to completely wreck the traditional heroic ballad in which he lives, all on the basis that, dammit, the world owes him more than this, and nobody should be so miserably cursed as to live their entire life as a foil character.
At this point in my own reading, I didn’t know whether to cheer him on or worry about the repercussions of his actions, because he doesn’t suddenly become heroic when this happens. He’s exactly as much of a selfish, lying bastard as before, and however bad you feel for him, you can completely understand why he was never cast for this role in the first place. Add to this the complete disregard of the author for following what seems to be the obvious progression of events in favor of twists that take you completely by surprise, but still make complete sense and arise organically from the story itself, and you eventually give up thinking that you have any sense of where the story’s going or how any event is going to play out. From beginning to end, it feeds you familiar ideas and then completely subverts them, introduces clichés and then proceeds to tear them apart, and you laugh and pity and feel something the entire way through.
In short, Sir Apropos of Nothing is a book that will keep you turning page after page – not necessarily because of the gripping drama (although it has that) or because of any breezy humor (although it has that too), or because the narration itself oozes suspense (although it often does), but because, with the rapid infusion of new and creative ideas and the hidden depths of character constantly bubbling to the surface in everyone involved, you honestly never know what’s going to happen next. If you like fantasy and can stand to have your expectations messed with, Apropos is certainly apropos.
So when I picked up Sir Apropos of Nothing, I did so based on the title pun and the back-of-the-book synopsis that promised “a berserk phoenix, murderous unicorns, mutated harpies, homicidal warrior kings, and – most problematic of all – a princess who may or may not be a psychotic arsonist.” I expected another lighthearted riff on the familiar archetypes. Murderous unicorns? Unicorns are not typically described as such! Oh teehee, how unexpectedly humorous!
Sir Apropos of Nothing is a satirical fantasy, just like it promised, though at times it’s hard to tell how much of the story is played for laughs and how much is played straight. See, the thing about satire that’s easy to forget at times is that it’s not synonymous with buffoonery. Make no mistake – Apropos is a funny book, full of witty dialogue and groan-inducing puns. It’s a book that takes great delight in lampshading traditional fantasy tropes and archetypes, as well as the entirety of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey idea. But it is not always a silly lampshade; sometimes a cliche or trope is pointed out to have its inherit ridiculousness laughed at, and sometimes it is pointed out because it is causing real and lasting pain or damage, either to the society in which it is set or, more often, to the titular Apropos himself and his ever-degrading esteem of both the people around him and himself.
The tone, at first, is hard to pin down. The story starts in media res with the main character being caught by a knight while in mid-coitus with that knight’s wife and escalates from there. The second chapter opens with a fourth wall-breaking narrative admission by Apropos himself that this was done with the express purpose of catching your attention, and now we’re going back to cover Apropos’s childhood, which ends up being equal parts dark, tragic, punny, and conveniently trope-filled – all of which Apropos, as narrator, approaches with the same resigned, blasé outlook.
If this sounds a bit jarring, well, it kind of is. Early on, I wasn’t sure what to think of where the story was trying to go or what I was expected to feel about it. After the first turn from cliché to dark and visceral to light and punny, all within a few pages, I caught myself thinking, “Crap, is this book gonna try and mix goofy jokes with serious drama and thoughtful moral quandary?”
The answer is yes. And it pulls it off fantastically.
This is due in large part to the interesting depths of the antihero, Apropos, who seems to be so named purely for the joke in the title. In Apropos we see a deep sense of justice and rightness that is entirely eclipsed by an even deeper cynicism and an unshakeable instinct for self-preservation. His life is objectively terrible, but rather than brood and lament, he adjusts. He keeps his head down when he can, weathers abuse when he can’t, and learns to deal with the constant shit storm, all the while bottling his growing anger and resentment at a world that would allow such amounts of suffering and hypocrisy to go unchecked. The fact that he himself becomes a selfish, hypocritical, and generally awful person is not lost on him, and the result is a flawed, unheroic, pathetic coward of a protagonist, a magnificently multifaceted bastard who doesn’t spare even himself from his vast and withering contempt.
And it’s a blast. It really is. Apropos is refreshingly pragmatic and unabashedly pessimistic, a welcome change from the typical righteous-yet-humble heroes of traditional fantasy, or even the loveable and untalented everyman in over his head of traditional fantasy spoofs. Despite a portentous birthmark (on his ass, no less) and beginnings that are not “humble” so much as “poverty of the dirtiest kind,” Apropos is everything a hero should not be short of outright evil.
And this, as it turns out, is entirely the point. This is where the satire, funny or otherwise, really shines through. This is the crux that elevates Sir Apropos of Nothing from a generically self-aware fantasy story to an original and memorable subversion of storytelling as a whole.
Without giving too much away, there comes a point in the plot where Apropos realizes that the events surrounding his miserable life are part of a heroic tale that has been preordained by Fate and is now being epically written out by Destiny. And despite his birthmark, his tragic past, and his mother’s constant reassurances that he has some sort of great destiny hovering over him, he is not the hero. He is only a minor character. A walk-on role on the hero’s stage. A brief pit-stop along the hero’s journey. An NPC whose dreams, desires, and continued existence are so far below importance to the story as to be utterly negligible.
And once this finally clicks with him, he violently, brazenly rebels against it. He gives an emphatic middle finger to Fate’s ideas and sets about making Destiny sit up and take notice of him again. He momentarily and violently overcomes his own abject cowardice just long enough to find a way to completely wreck the traditional heroic ballad in which he lives, all on the basis that, dammit, the world owes him more than this, and nobody should be so miserably cursed as to live their entire life as a foil character.
At this point in my own reading, I didn’t know whether to cheer him on or worry about the repercussions of his actions, because he doesn’t suddenly become heroic when this happens. He’s exactly as much of a selfish, lying bastard as before, and however bad you feel for him, you can completely understand why he was never cast for this role in the first place. Add to this the complete disregard of the author for following what seems to be the obvious progression of events in favor of twists that take you completely by surprise, but still make complete sense and arise organically from the story itself, and you eventually give up thinking that you have any sense of where the story’s going or how any event is going to play out. From beginning to end, it feeds you familiar ideas and then completely subverts them, introduces clichés and then proceeds to tear them apart, and you laugh and pity and feel something the entire way through.
In short, Sir Apropos of Nothing is a book that will keep you turning page after page – not necessarily because of the gripping drama (although it has that) or because of any breezy humor (although it has that too), or because the narration itself oozes suspense (although it often does), but because, with the rapid infusion of new and creative ideas and the hidden depths of character constantly bubbling to the surface in everyone involved, you honestly never know what’s going to happen next. If you like fantasy and can stand to have your expectations messed with, Apropos is certainly apropos.
Lee (2222 KP) rated Military Wives (2020) in Movies
Mar 9, 2020
Based on true events, Military Wives tells the story of how the very first military wives charity group came to be formed. That initial group was soon followed by more Military Wives groups, with some of the earlier ones even starring in 2011 BBC reality show 'The Choir', led by Gareth Malone. The Military Wives choirs have continued to grow since then and now comprise of 2000 women, located at over 70 military bases around the world, producing hit singles and albums as they go from strength to strength. The movie is directed by Peter Cattaneo, who directed The Full Monty, and the trailer really does have that traditional feel-good British comedy vibe which we seem to churn out year after year in an attempt to be "this years Full Monty". I wasn't sure if this was going to be for me, but after I found myself thoroughly enjoying Fisherman's Friends last year, I went in with an open mind.
At a UK army base, soldiers are preparing to leave for another tour in Afghanistan. As they say goodbye, we're given a chance to be introduced to the wives and families who will remain in the houses located on the base while the soldiers are away. Straight away, we get real insight into the lives of these women - trying to maintain some kind of normality, while constantly living in fear of the phone call or the knock at the door that might come at any time and turn their lives upside down. The women all vary in their experience of army life - from young, newly married wives to wives who are old hands at moving from base to base and country to country, coping without their husband for long periods of time.
Kate (Kristin Scott Thomas) is married to the regiment's colonel and assumes that she is therefore superior to all the other women on the base - jumping the queue in the small on-site grocery store and generally looking down her nose at the others. Lisa (Sharon Horgan) is much more laid back than Kate, happy to just go with the flow. She has been charged with pastoral care for the wives while their partners are away, and is more than happy just to organise the odd coffee morning or a few glasses of wine rather than anything more productive and engaging for the group. With her husband away, and having to deal with a past tragedy that we learn more about as the story unfolds, Kate decides to try and poke her nose in and organise Lisa and the other wives. Consequently, Kate and Lisa clash... regularly.
After unsuccessfully trying out knitting as a suggested activity, one of the wives suggests singing. Unfortunately though, none of the women appear to be very good at singing and the bickering between Kate and Lisa doesn't really help improve them either. While Kate reads up on vocal warm-ups and learning how to conduct a choir, Lisa digs out her old electronic keyboard and is happy just to have the group try and sing along to a few old pop songs.
Military Wives does manage to follow that traditional Full Monty template I described earlier - with a mismatched bunch of inexperienced singers who eventually manage to get it together enough to be able to perform their own song at the Royal Albert Hall. However, I did feel that the emotion and the drama surrounding these women, who could lose their husband/wife at any moment, really brought something different to the movie, something which I don't feel the trailer accurately portrays. The comedy and the feel-good factor that these trailers like to put across was a lot more subtle, and as a result I enjoyed it far more than I was expecting to.
At a UK army base, soldiers are preparing to leave for another tour in Afghanistan. As they say goodbye, we're given a chance to be introduced to the wives and families who will remain in the houses located on the base while the soldiers are away. Straight away, we get real insight into the lives of these women - trying to maintain some kind of normality, while constantly living in fear of the phone call or the knock at the door that might come at any time and turn their lives upside down. The women all vary in their experience of army life - from young, newly married wives to wives who are old hands at moving from base to base and country to country, coping without their husband for long periods of time.
Kate (Kristin Scott Thomas) is married to the regiment's colonel and assumes that she is therefore superior to all the other women on the base - jumping the queue in the small on-site grocery store and generally looking down her nose at the others. Lisa (Sharon Horgan) is much more laid back than Kate, happy to just go with the flow. She has been charged with pastoral care for the wives while their partners are away, and is more than happy just to organise the odd coffee morning or a few glasses of wine rather than anything more productive and engaging for the group. With her husband away, and having to deal with a past tragedy that we learn more about as the story unfolds, Kate decides to try and poke her nose in and organise Lisa and the other wives. Consequently, Kate and Lisa clash... regularly.
After unsuccessfully trying out knitting as a suggested activity, one of the wives suggests singing. Unfortunately though, none of the women appear to be very good at singing and the bickering between Kate and Lisa doesn't really help improve them either. While Kate reads up on vocal warm-ups and learning how to conduct a choir, Lisa digs out her old electronic keyboard and is happy just to have the group try and sing along to a few old pop songs.
Military Wives does manage to follow that traditional Full Monty template I described earlier - with a mismatched bunch of inexperienced singers who eventually manage to get it together enough to be able to perform their own song at the Royal Albert Hall. However, I did feel that the emotion and the drama surrounding these women, who could lose their husband/wife at any moment, really brought something different to the movie, something which I don't feel the trailer accurately portrays. The comedy and the feel-good factor that these trailers like to put across was a lot more subtle, and as a result I enjoyed it far more than I was expecting to.
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