A moving, well-rendered keepsake and a must-purchase for fans.
The companion volume to the stage adaptation of Morissette’s Grammy-winning album.
In 2019, fans of the 1995 megahit Jagged Little Pill were blessed with a Broadway jukebox musical adaptation (the production premiered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2018). This complementary book, co-written by Morissette and screenwriter Cody, with photos by Murphy, vividly combines song lyrics and cast stories with bright collages, eye-catching imagery, and effectively captured stage photography from pre-pandemic performances in Manhattan. The musical follows the affluent Healy family: pill-popping mother Mary Jane; distant, workaholic father Steve; and teenage brother and sister Nick and Frankie. Nick is a Harvard-bound senior with an overinflated ego. Frankie, the adopted, bisexual, feminist Black daughter, emerges as the most politically charged character, thrust into a predominantly White community that’s not always racially tolerant. As hidden secrets, sexual assault, opioid dependency, denial, and youthful angst consume the family, lyrics to the album’s hits interweave through the narrative. Two resonant essays capture the essence of the drama: Cultural critic Rachel Syme expresses her high hopes that the book will provide a fitting place marker during the Covid-19 era while the theater is dark and the sets and props are “gathering dust, waiting for the day that the show can go on.” In her commentary, Morissette chronicles the album’s genesis and enduring relevance, and she remarks on how the production has impacted her on a personal healing level. The book provides a line-by-line script of the production along with behind-the-scenes footnotes and directorial and cast commentary, resulting in a colorful assembly of art, music, and activist messaging. “I didn’t make it any easier by deciding the show would deal with the opioid epidemic, sexual assault, political activism, and religion,” writes Cody in the afterword. “This was not a dance-in-the-aisles jukebox musical with a featherweight story; as much as I enjoy those shows, I wanted [this one] to be as real and provocative as the album that inspired it.”
A moving, well-rendered keepsake and a must-purchase for fans.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5387-3699-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
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