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Secrets!

Half-baked but fully fun Verity

Anne Hathaway understands how to do the most. In Verity (in theaters), Hathaway plays Verity Crawford, a famous and wealthy author, as a cartoon Disney wicked stepmother-type, all arched eyebrows and devious glares. It’s a big, fun, campy performance and I wish the movie could have given it even more room to do its big campy thing.

Verity has suffered traumatic injury from a car accident and can no longer move or talk or communicate in any way. Cared for in her home by her husband, Jeremy (Josh Hartnett), and a nurse, Anna (Irina Dvorovenko), Verity has left behind enough notes that her publisher believes ghostwriter Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) will be able to piece together three new novels. Lowen goes to Verity and Jeremy’s secluded Vermont lake house — where Jeremy lives with his young son Crew (Brady Warner) — to dig through Verity’s notes. The couple also had a daughter, Harper (Sienna Kulovitz), Crew’s twin, who recently drowned in the nearby lake. Also, Lowen’s mother, with whom she had a difficult relationship, recently died of cancer. Also, as the movie starts, Lowen is walking to her publisher’s office when she is showered with the blood of a bicyclist who is killed just steps away from her. The absurdity of how all this is presented was, for me, “ha!”-inducing and really set the tone for the operatic wail of a movie to follow.

When Lowen gets to Vermont, she paws through Verity’s things and finds a secret — secret! — manuscript which we hear/see Hathaway narrating as though it is an entry in some sort of “It was a dark and stormy night” contest for Most Dramatic! Was Verity harboring deep dark secrets — secrets! — or is something else behind the sinister vibe in the family’s home?

The fun part of a movie like this is that for any of this to work, everybody needs to seem a little bit like a serial killer and we, in the audience, get to guess who is the killeriest. Hathaway and Hartnett both walk this line — maybe a killer? — pretty well. Johnson, who the movie even pegs as having “resting bored face,” is probably less successful, with her built in “cool girl” quality pushing her just out of phase with the playing-it-straight performances that Hathaway and Hartnett are giving. When Lowen takes an earnest turn toward the end of the movie, it also feels sort of jarring and not quite fitting.

But also, so what? This movie is amusing even when it doesn’t entirely make sense. There is a dishiness, a smooth peanut butter richness to the movie that could use more bite but goes down easy enough that I didn’t really mind the smarter, stronger structure it was missing.

Featured photo: Verity.

Immortal Rose by Alexandra Bracken

(Avon, 496 pages)

I may have picked up Alexandra Bracken’s Immortal Rose for its gorgeous cover and pretty stenciled edges, but I stayed for the story. The romantasy follows the very common enemies-to-lovers trope, but there’s not much else that’s common about this book, from the use of scent as a source of magic to the vastly disparate cast of characters.

The book centers around Viola Lockwood, the final — and illegitimate — heir of House Rosebourne, who has inherited the family’s fairy-born gift of creating fragrances with a touch of magic that can heal or hurt, emotionally and physically. Her sense of smell is so intense that she can tell who’s approaching before she sees them and often knows if someone is lying, or what kind of person they are, based on their essence alone.

Viola is living on the streets when we meet her, forced to sell her concoctions illegally, and during a raid she’s thrown into jail with ruthless guards who have no qualms about abusing women. She’s saved, though, by a stranger: royal spymaster Hugh Thornton, Earl of Foxcourt.

This unexpected act of kindness is anything but — Hugh is the one who had her thrown into jail in the first place. King Alfred III has been poisoned, and Viola is the only person alive who can create Immortal Rose, a magical perfume that can act as an antidote to save the king. If the king dies, his throne will be overtaken by the Duke of Glenmoor, a villain — such a villain — who wants nothing more than to bring down the kingdom for his own gain. Viola begrudgingly agrees to create Immortal Rose, in exchange for her eventual freedom and the rights to her Rosebourne inheritance.

And so begins her tenuous alliance with Hugh. Viola has a fraught, violent past and has learned to take care of herself, so she wants nothing to do with a male “keeper.” Unfortunately for her, Hugh has just as much at stake in this quest, so they team up to search for the magical ingredient to make Immortal Rose, facing danger every step of the way.

As with any good romantasy, there is growing chemistry between these two “enemies,” much to Viola’s frustration. Can she trust Hugh? Does she want to?

“I could feel myself softening to the possibility of this place, to these people, to him, and there were few things more dangerous to a woman than an unguarded heart,” she thinks.

Hugh, meanwhile, is frustrated with Viola’s stubbornness and unwillingness to accept help, and also because she continues to engage with Oliver Radcliffe, her childhood friend who proposed marriage to get her out of prison. But despite his air of haughty arrogance, we see over time that he’s committed to keeping Viola safe, no matter the cost.

The book gets off to a slow start. You really have to be locked in to understand what’s going on as the Regency-era world unfolds with its complicated political system and family histories, and the mysteries start to build. I had to go back a page or two more than once, trying to identify all the pieces in a complex but very intriguing puzzle.

The pace picks up in the second half, with more action and unraveling backstories. Along with the many battles and interpersonal conflicts, we also watch Viola’s development as she tries to figure out who she is within the confines of her family history. She’s given some advice about this, an exquisitely written line spoken by Felicity, aka Fizzy, a maid at Foxcourt House (Hugh’s residence and, reluctantly, Viola’s temporary home): “The past is only a backstory, unless you allow it to wield the quill.”

Fizzy is actually a wonderful side character all around; she isn’t afraid to call Hugh out on his behavior, adding a level of comfort to Viola’s stay and revealing a more fallible and compassionate side of Hugh. Brecken gifts us with other compelling supporting characters too, like the rest of the gang of “servants” at Foxcourt House, each with a distinct personality and questionable background.

This is a character-driven story from the start; really, the magic and mysteries feel like a bonus, as do some unexpected plot twists at the end. Immortal Rose is the first in a duology, and thank god, because no book should be allowed to end the way this does without the promise of a follow-up. A-

Featured Photo: Immortal Rose by Alexandra Bracken

Album Reviews 26/10/08

Remy Wolf, Mud (Island Records)

There’s a possibility that Sia Furler’s voice is too obscure (or dated; after all, it’s been a whole two years and four months since her last record) to be cited as a soundalike for this Palo Alto-bred pop diva; most music journos throw out Lola Young as a reference and call it an article, but either way she’s in the same pew with, you know, Chappell Roan and such. The days when she was singing pure unadulterated bubblegum on 2024’s Big Ideas are long past, never mind her early taste of fame as a teen contestant on American Idol as a high school senior; these days this singer’s trying to cleanse her emotional palate of the taste of tour burnout, addiction problems and a few disastrous relationships; this one focuses instead on something of a soul cleanse. The bloopy, laid-back, Lorde-pilfering, self-body-shaming “Twiggy” is precisely the sort of angst-wringing, swear-filled, arena-ready singalong that’s been the only sort of thing that’s seemingly able to make a buck these days; “Bottle” gets its edge from an acoustic guitar arpeggio that’s not hideously common in the (now ridiculously overcrowded) genre. Another country heard from, as they used to say. A

Foghat, Live & Loud Across The U.S.A. (Foghat Records)

Boomers — the generation that Generation Z only recently stopped making insulting TikToks about, mostly because they’re their doting, cookie-baking grandparents and not their naggy parents, who are mostly Generation X, the generation that’s currently getting no respect at all online despite all the life-triage they’re doing for their whippersnappers — remember this British blues-rock band quite vividly for their 1977 Foghat Live album, which catapulted them into superstar status. Everyone had a copy of the thing, a gigantic record that sounds like all-out war on party poopers: You can practically hear the giant beach balls bouncing off people’s heads while they play hits like “Fool For The City” and “Slow Ride.” Hyper-aggressive blues rock with brain-squeezing guitar solos was the thing back then, and the album was as ’70s as it got, and then time went on. There’s an unfortunate New Hampshire connection to the band’s most recent chapter, namely the death of guitarist Rod Price in Wilton in 2005, according to Wikipedia, whose mastery over slide guitar has never faced a serious challenge until, well, this LP. Along with singer Dave Peverett, Price’s “bottleneck” sound was instantly identifiable, but drummer Roger Earl, the last remaining original member, has done an amazing job putting together a very similar sounding band, led by slide guitarist Bryan Bassett. This collection of live performances takes a minute to explode, but yeah, the same party-up energy is there. I’m not exaggerating, either; their 2023 album Sonic Mojo remained on the Billboard Top 10 Blues Albums chart for 34 weeks, quite deservedly. Give it a shot. A+

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Like a wicker Hobby Lobby cornucopia filled with rotten cabbages (and that reminds me, I need to put an alert on my phone for next year so I don’t miss the five whole weeks of late summer when Bartlett pears are in season, all yellow and soft and tasty, not hard, green, pear-shaped things that taste like someone’s desk), Friday, Oct. 9, will arrive with a smorgasbord of new albums, for your ears! Like every week, there are some that interest me, but let’s get the other stuff out of the way first, starting with the new one from Michigan’s most shameless Led Zeppelin wannabe band, Greta Van Fleet, called Palace For The People! I hope that by now they’ve finally gotten tired of ripping off Zep’s 1975 album Physical Graffiti (back when Zep was ripping off tunes from people like Sleepy John Estes) and have graduated to ripping off Zeppelin in their Led Zeppelin III era (when they were ripping off Stephen Foster and various obscure singers from the 1800s), but I’m sure I’ll be disappointed; I’m betting the new single “Tear It Down” will be what they imagine punk is supposed to sound like, some fast number like Zep’s “Communication Breakdown” or something, but let me go peek. Ah, it sounds pretty cool for the first part, but then it digs around in the trash for some second-generation depleted-soil Zep with a Southern rock flavor, in this case Heart’s “Crazy For You,” and why did they get so cheap with the background vocals? They sound like they were singing through a (totally vintage!) toaster. You know, it’s really lucky for these imbeciles that the real Led Zeppelin guys already own all the medieval castles they could ever want and have been pretending to encourage them, because they could sue them to Jupiter and any judge who’s ever had a radio in their car would throw them in the slammer for eleventy billion years (I’d place a joke about Sammy Davis Jr.’s old “Here Comes The Judge” Laugh-In bit here but all you twerking Bieber brats would just look at me like I stepped on one of your day-glo orange Crocs; trust me, the ’Fleets would probably sound a lot less like a tribute band if they all received a few giant foam-gavel blows to their heads).

• Aaand continuing, ugh, I suppose I could give a listen to the new Sheryl Crow album Pick You Up but I don’t wanna, OK, actually why not, we’ll get to something decent, just chill. The lyrics to the single “Freedom Bus” are completely calorie-free, something about “hate is bad”; form-wise the tune uses the second template of the only three she ever uses, the slow, really boring one where she microwaves something from The Beatles, in this case “Don’t Let Me Down,” will it ever end.

• But without further ado we should move onto something that’s practically guaranteed not to get me reaching for my big gallon jug of Pepto Bismol, because look, it’s A Man From The Future, the newest album from English synth-pop kings Pet Shop Boys, a concept album focused on mathematician Alan Turing! Yup, the single “Let The Music Play” is indeed awesome, a re-drawn low-key/gloom-pop version of the original 1984 neo-disco hit from Shannon, vocals courtesy of 66-year-old Carroll Thompson, known as “the queen of lovers’ rock.” Nothing to hate here.

• We’ll end with British drone/space-rock kooks Gnod, whose new LP, Chronicles of Gnowt Vol 2, will surely appeal to fans of crazed noise-rock. “Old Gold” is a Rickenbacker bass-driven assault on the senses, if that’s your jam.

Featured Photo: Remy Wolf, Mud and Foghat, Live & Loud Across The U.S.A.

Fall Fruit Crumble

You’ve got your crisps, your crumbles, your slumps (yes, I know, but they are delicious), your brown bettys, your cobblers and even your pandowdies. And while there are, of course, differences, and enthusiasts who take them Very Seriously, when you get right down to it you have to admit that they are all variations on Baked Fruit with a Topping.

Crisps and crumbles are almost unnervingly easy to pull off. They can be made by a drunken koala bear. They call for fruit and butter and brown sugar and flour. Did you spend an overly ambitious afternoon apple-picking? Did a neighbor leave a shopping bag full of pears on your front step in the middle of the night, ring the doorbell and run away? Did you find some forgotten rhubarb hiding behind a bag of peas in the back of your freezer?

Boom! A crumble has your back.

Fruit

4 cups (roughly 575 g) of chopped fall fruit – I’ve made this with pears, apples, rhubarb, cranberries, and even mangos. This past week I used two large stalks of rhubarb and a couple of Honeycrisp apples.
½ cup (100 g) brown sugar
A splash (probably two teaspoons) vanilla

Topping

1 cup (120 g) flour
¼ cup (50 g) more brown sugar
Large pinch of coarse sea salt or kosher salt
1/3 cup (2/3 stick) cold butter
¼ cup chopped nuts – purists use chopped walnuts, but though I can’t prove it, I feel like walnuts are part of a secret-but-evil conspiracy. I use chopped pecans.

Preheat your oven to 350°F.

If you’ve already peeled and chopped your fruit, this might be the simplest, most straightforward thing you’ve done this week. Put a small baking dish — I use a soufflé dish — on your scale. Dump your fruit into the dish. Tare (zero out) the scale, and spoon or sprinkle the brown sugar over the top, then add a splash of vanilla. Stir it all together, and set it aside.

Add the flour, salt, brown sugar and chopped nuts to a mixing bowl and stir to combine. If you want to use the same spoon you just used for the fruit, nobody will narc you out to the Crumble Cops.

Chop the butter into chunks, then add it to the flour mixture.

This is the part that will make you feel like you know what you’re doing:

Wash and dry your hands, then stir the butter chunks around with your fingers. Pinch the butter pieces with floury hands, and rub your fingers and thumbs together. Keep doing this until the butter is in what bakers describe as “pea-sized pieces.” That doesn’t seem very specific; peas come in a lot of different sizes. Crumbles are really forgiving, though, and as long as the butter is in small pieces it will work well.

Dump the topping on top of the fruit in the baking dish and spread it out more or less evenly. You can use your friend the Fruit Spoon for this, but your fingers will work just as well.

Put your proto-crumble in the oven and bake it for 45 to 50 minutes. When the topping is lightly browned and develops cracks with fruit lava showing through, it’s ready. Set it aside to cool enough to not destroy your mouth, then serve it warm with ice cream, or room temperature the next morning for breakfast.

Featured photo. Photo by John Fladd.

When life gives you cucumbers

Pickles are the point at Provocative Pickle Co.

The story of how Whitney Leyland started The Provocative Pickle Co. is one as old as time: There was a woman, and a man, and too many cucumbers.

“It was kind of one of those Bob Ross, happy accident type of deals,” Leyland said. Through a string of overlapping unexpected circumstances, she found herself with a constant flood of fresh cucumbers. “And you know,” she said, “there is honestly only a certain amount of cucumbers you can rationally eat. We had massive bowls full — at one point we had three giant bowls of cucumbers in our kitchen. And I was staring at my partner Dave [business and life-partner David Bennett], and I said, ‘What am I going to do with all these?’”

“He was like, ‘I just can’t. I can’t eat any more cucumbers.’ And we just sat there, kind of laughing about it for a minute, until it dawned on me — how do you preserve a cucumber?” One thing led to another, Leyland said, and now they own a pickle company, based in Salem.

By the end of October, Leyland said, there will be two varieties of Provocative Pickles. “Currently approved, we have our Dirty Dillies, which is a spicy garlic dill pickle. We have also finished the approval process for our Honey Mustard Pickles. In my opinion, you can have a great bread and butter pickle, but I’m very picky. That’s why we do a honey mustard [pickle]. It’s my take on the bread and butter [and] still gives you that sweetness, but honey-mustard is actually a New England-based flavor, so I thought it was very fitting for us as a New England-based company to do our own take on the honey mustard pickle. We also just did a test batch for a [third] pickle that will be our jalapeño-lime pickle.” Leyland and Bennett anticipate that will be available for sale by the end of the year.

Provocative Pickles are crisp, refrigerated, sliced pickles, Leyland said.

“I’m constantly test-batching and seeing what I can do. We’re hoping to expand from just having the pickle chips — kind of having those circle cuts — to being able to do spears. Any time I change the cut of the pickle, though, I actually have to send it back out for testing. It changes the ratios of things when they’re testing it. So that’s going to be a winter project for us as well, because I personally love a spear pickle when I’m eating a sandwich in the summer.” Crispness was another important consideration when developing the recipe, she said. “They are extra-crispy. There has to be a little acidity in there, a nice, balanced bite, and you need that texture. A floppy, soggy pickle doesn’t work for anyone.”

So far Leyland and Bennett have sold all their pickles at farmers markets and festivals, Leyland said. “Currently we’re doing all in-person sales. In order to do store sales, there’s one additional course that I need to take as a manager who oversees all the processes. So that’s in my winter to-do list, once our market season wraps up. We just finished applying for a lot of our winter markets, which we’ll be doing on an every-other-week schedule. That way folks can still find us in person while I’m still working on, you know, getting my certifications; that way we can start our sales in stores.”

Leyland described her perfect sandwich-and-pickle combination: “I like to keep it nice and classic,” she said. “I like a nice turkey and cheese with our signature Dirty Dilly Spicy Garlic Dill Pickles in the sandwich and on the side. There should be yellow mustard on my bun, and then on the side I’ll have a spear of my Dirty Dillys once those are approved, and some salt and vinegar chips, which have to be very crunchy — kettle chips.”

The Provocative Pickle Co. is online at theprovocativepickleco.com.

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

Grab your cloak and head to the brewery

Oktoberfest Ren Faire returns to Sunstone

Because it is a Viking-themed brewpub, Sunstone Brewing in Londonderry threw a combination renaissance faire and Oktoberfest last fall. Sunstone’s Jessica Cotto said it went extremely well, so they’re doing it again.

“We just want people to come and enjoy themselves,” Cotto said. “It was a great time last year … so we’re hoping to make this annual Oktoberfest just grow and grow and become a much bigger thing.”

Co-owners Camaron Carter and Bryan Link are excited, too, especially about the beer.

“For the special, we’ll have our Oktoberfest Ale on draft,” Link said, “and we’ll have our pumpkin ale back on draft as well. Our Oktoberfest is a traditional Marzen [a medium-bodied amber lager], so it’s got those nice little bits of malty notes.”

“There’s some nice Vienna malt in there, too.” Carter added. “You get a little bit of caramel flavor to it, but there’s no caramel malt, so it’s got some nice little biscuit flavor. It’s one of our favorite beers. That takes a month to brew. We monitor that one pretty closely when that one comes out. The Pumpkin Ale is considerably faster; that takes about two weeks. So that one’s got cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger and vanilla. And of course pumpkin. Yeah. But it’s got the warm fall flavors. It’s got a nice caramel maltiness to it that pairs perfectly with all of those spices and the pumpkin flavor. We use a pumpkin puree.”

Cotto said the pumpkin provides a bridge to some of the food at the event. Candia Homecraft from Candia will be one of the vendors, she said. “They [make] jams and they actually make bread with a lot of our spent grain. Hopefully she’ll be able to have some pumpkin from our spent grain, like a pumpkin bread, which would be really nice. We work together with her a lot.”

“We’ll have our pumpkin Danishes that everyone really loves,” Link said. “It’s really good. It’s almost like a pumpkin pie filling. One of the [other] food items will obviously be brats [grilled bratwurst sausages] with either sauerkraut [or] some peppers and onions on a bun. Last year people loved it, so we’ll do that again. We’re trying to figure out another snacky item, but we haven’t landed on that one yet.”

In addition to the beer and food, Cotto said, there will be activities both days of the festival, as well as fun vendors; she mentioned the stein-holding competition to be held both days on the stage.

“We … do a mystery grab bag, too,” she said, “so there will be small bags filled with different gems and you can win a sunstone in some of those.” Sunstone is a glittery type of pink feldspar that was valued by the Norse people, who believed it had mystical properties, including helping them navigate. It’s what the name Sunstone Brewing refers to.

“On Saturday there will be around 13 different local vendors,” Cotto said. “We’ll have Bookish Bliss, which is a mobile book bus that’s going to be stopping by. We have The Knights Hall coming. They’re out of Nashua, and they’ll be doing full-on, full-armor sword fighting at 2 p.m. on Saturday. And then we have Earthly Enchantments, which [deals in] lots of cottage-core kinds of stuff. We’ll have Jan Andrea Handmade; [that vendor] makes chain mail earrings and necklaces and jewelry. And then we’ll have a hair braider and a face painter. We have someone who does glow-in-the-dark resin art, and also a tarot reader.”

“We always encourage people to come in costume or dress up as if you’re going to a renaissance fair,” Cotto said. “We’ll all surely be dressed up ourselves, and we’ll have photo op areas, and it’ll be really fun. Dogs are always allowed and invited. And yeah, it’ll be a really good time.”

Oktoberfest Renaissance Faire Weekend
Where: Sunstone Brewing Co., 298 Rockingham Road, Londonderry, 216-1808, sunstonebrewing.com
When: Saturday, Oct. 10, and Sunday, Oct. 11, from 1 to 9 p.m.
More: Admission is free. Visit sunstonebrewing.com/events.