The Blue Fairy's Bookshelf

In the Country We Love Diane Guerrero with Michelle Burford, 2016 Premise: Actress Diane Guerrero shares her family's experiences with being undocumented in America. When Diane Guerrero was just fourteen, her parents were deported. She was overlooked by the child welfare system and stayed with friends and neighbors until she finished high school. There are the bones of a really fascinating, moving story here, but that isn't quite what this book ended up as. There were parts I really liked. I found her parents' lives interesting. It was moving how hard they tried to become American citizens, although all the while the knowledge of their status stole some of the joy from their lives. I was moved by her feeling pulled between two worlds, especially after her parents were deported. She is an American citizen, and America was her only home, and her parents both knew that and were happy for her and at the same time wanted her with them in Columbia. All of the chapt...

Hamilton: The Revolution Lin-Manuel Miranda, Jeremy McCarter, 2016 Challenge Book! Book Riot Read Harder Challenge 2016 - Read a play (Yes, I'm cheating a little.) Premise: The complete annotated libretto of the smash musical Hamilton , along with short articles about the writing, production, and cast. I loved the cast album for Hamilton , but I wasn’t planning on reading this book anytime soon until it occurred to me that I could use it for the challenge. It does contain all the words spoken on stage, so I think it counts as a play. First: the style of the book is lovely. It’s full of photos, big color production shots and candid dressing room black and white snaps. The design of the book itself evokes the duality in the show. The articles - about hip-hop, about the writing of the show, about President Obama’s visit - are each introduced with a header in the style of a pamphlet or a newspaper from the 1780s. The book contains both photos of composer and star Lin-Ma...

Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) Stephen Sondheim, 2010 First off, this feels almost like a reference work, so don't expect to just sit down and read through it unless you're an even bigger musical theater geek than I am. Most of the text is lyrics, just as it says, surrounded by annotation, photos and additional information. It's an interesting hybrid: there is information about the development of some of the shows, but a large amount of the commentary is either self-deprecating nitpicking about his own lyrics or tangents about the merits and flaws of many classic Broadway composers and lyricists. I think someone with an exhaustive knowledge of classic Broadway composers would get more out of his opinions of them than I did. It's still an interesting series of pieces detailing various techniques or habits, but without the ability to mentally call up obscure works of the other artists immediately, comprehension sometimes got a bit muddy for me. ...