A Drowned Maiden's Hair: A Melodrama

Book Description

A feisty orphan is taken in by a band of phony spiritualists in this intriguing, engaging novel.

Maud Flynn is known at the orphanage for her impertinence, so when the charming Miss Hyacinth and her sister choose Maud to take home with them, the girl is as baffled as anyone. It seems the sisters need Maud to help stage elaborate séances for bereaved, wealthy patrons. As Maud is drawn deeper into the deception, playing her role as a "secret child," she is torn between her need to please and her growing conscience — until a shocking betrayal makes clear just how heartless her so-called guardians are. Filled with tantalizing details of turn-of-the-century spiritualism and
page-turning suspense, this lively historical novel features a winning heroine whom readers will not soon forget.

Customer Reviews:

Fantastically Original.......2007-08-24

Another fantastic read to mark down for this year! I really think this book should win some type of award for originality...though I'm not very sure if it will. Never do the books I think should win ever actually win anything! At any rate, I really enjoyed this book, from an author I had never read before, and I look forward to seeing more from her.

A Drowned Maiden's Hair: A Melodrama was written by Laura Amy Schlitz, a first book for this author, follows 11 year old Maud Mary Flynn, an orphan residing at an academy for girls. Maud is a troublemaker, never stepping down to authority, often finding herself being punished and always being passed over for adoption. When Hyacinth, a rich old woman, arrives at the orphanage in search of a young girl to adopt, Maud has no hope that she'll be chosen, however, she is exactly the girl Hyacinth picks.

Maud is stunned, having been chosen as the girl Hyacinth and her two sisters want to adopt and remains in that state when she arrives at their stately home. At first, life now seems luxurious to Maud and she is determined to be a very good girl, doing whatever the sisters ask of her. When she learns that she was adopted in order to help them perfect the family business, she is still very willing to do whatever she has to, to make the sisters happy. When secrets about what the family business actually is begin to come out, Maud is all to happy to participate...at first. As she gets more and more involved, the readers see Maud's inner conscience begin to work against her and she isn't entirely sure that life at Hyacinth's house is as good as she first thought.

This novel was lovely. Fast paced, original, and exciting. The first sentence: "On the morning of the best day of her life, Maud Flynn was locked in the outhouse, singing, The Battle Hymn of the Republic" reeled me in and I was hooked until the last page. I immediately brought the book to my boss in the children's room (and fellow children's book lover) and told her she absolutely had to read it. Children and adults will be entranced with Maud's story and I definitely recommend you read it...soon!

Is it Wrong to Lie, Even in a Good Cause?.......2007-07-04

A Drowned Maiden's Hair is a delightful find, an original story with an irresistible set of characters: a love-starved orphan, a trio of sisters who operate a seance business (much like the Fox Sisters), a deaf-mute servant, and a rich woman grieving for her lost child. Maud is astonished to be adopted from the orphanage over other, more "good" children and is anxious to please the Hawthorne Sisters, her new guardians, even if that means participating in their seance deceptions and impersonating the spirit of a dead child. She views the adult cast of the book through young and naive eyes: Hyacinth is loving and charming; Judith is proper; Victoria is fussy; Muffet the servant is stupid and ugly; and Mrs. Lambert is rich, silly, and spoiled. As the plot progresses, however, Maud gradually comes to realize that these people are not what they seem at first to be, and each adult's character is more fully revealed over the course of the story.

Is it right to lie, even in a good cause? Can you actually console a grieving person by deceiving them? Do you have to be a perfectly good person in order to be worthy of love? While the reader ponders these questions, she/he will also be entertained by the seance tricks revealed in the book and eager to learn the true details behind the death of Caroline Lambert.

This is an engaging read. I plan to use it as a read aloud with my fifth grade class in the fall. They will love it.

Dianne K. Salerni
Author of High Spirits: A Tale of Ghostly Rapping and Romance

A wonderful, engrossing read!.......2007-06-27

The premise of this book is pure fun, and the protagonist a wonderful mixture of spunk, sadness, intelligence, and yearning. The story churns along, makes you bite your nails, laugh, get knots in your stomach, want to slap certain characters, and even cry. The writing is wonderful, too. All in all, one of my favorite young reader titles in a long time!

Fantastic start to our summer reading frenzy.......2007-06-13

This is a marvelously written, incredibly captivating, impossible-to-put-down book. An absolute gem in our search for original and thought-provoking stories.

Great book!!!.......2007-06-11

I work in a library and one of the childrens librarians said this was a great book. I see a lot of books come in and Id never read a juvenile book, but the cover art and the plot summary caught my attention. I am so glad I checked this one out. Great atmosphere and lively characters make this one of those books where you're sorry when you finish it. Wonderful book for adults and kids alike. Check this one out at your local library or buy your own copy, but read this book.

Average customer rating:

Great but...
A Great Resource!
Hillarious Fun!!!
My Kids Love This Resource
An AWESOME Youth Ministry Resource!!

Spontaneous Melodramas
Doug Fields , Laurie Polich , and Duffy Robbins
Manufacturer: Zondervan/Youth Specialties
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0310207754

Book Description

Humorous, lively, and effective, these impromptu skits help performers and observers see, experience, and understand the meaning of stories from the Bible in new and innovative ways.

Customer Reviews:

Great but..........2006-10-31

Creative and fun, but many stories are outdated... Still worth the price...

A Great Resource!.......2005-07-27

Spontabeous Melodramas is a great reasource for any church youth group! We love "acting out" these neat skits and we learn from them too. The skits are made so that youth groups of most any size can incorporate them.

Hillarious Fun!!!.......2003-01-23

I have used this book many, many times and it never fails to get the teens attention, get them laughing, and enable the adult team to easily segway to the message of the night.

My Kids Love This Resource.......2001-05-25

Do you ever have one of those nights when you want to start your meeting off in a unique way but are out of ideas? This book could be the answer to your needs. In SPONTANEOUS MELODRAMAS, you find a treasure chest full of fun, group involving stories that drive home solid Biblical truths. With next to no preparation, this book can be brought into a youth meeting and get the kids excited! The book put a humorous spin on familliar Bible stories and offers fun interactive ways to learn. My students can't get enough of the silly skits and fun that this book proivides. We have also used this book to bridge the gap between adults and teens. We pulled it out at our last Thnksgiving banquet and even the "staunchist" elders we intears of laughter after watching the stories unfold. You will enjoy this resource and will keep it to use time and time again!

An AWESOME Youth Ministry Resource!!.......1999-01-12

This book is ideal for 5th graders and above. Even adults would enjoy some of these skits. We have used it extensively in our 5th and 6th grade youth group; with astonishing success.

The skits are relevant, entertaining, humorous, and well written. They are easy and fun to perform, require almost no prep time, and use few props.

The kids are exicted about the opportunity to be a part of the show. Our main challenge has been to distribute the "roles" evenly. Every kid in the group would like to be part of every skit!

My only complaint...24 skits is NOT enough. Volume two is being eagerly anticipated.

Book Description

How do people make sense of their world in the face of the breakneck speed of contemporary social change? Through the lives and narratives of eight women, The Melodrama of Mobility chronicles South Korea's experience of just such dizzyingly rapid development. Abelmann captures the mood, feeling, and language of a generation and an era while providing a rare window on the personal and social struggles of South Korean modernity. Drawing also from television soap operas and films, she argues that a melodramatic sensibility speaks to South Korea's transformation because it preserves the tension and ambivalence of daily life in unsettled times. The melodramatic mode helps people to wonder: Can individuals be blamed for their social fates? How should we live? Who can say who is good or bad? By combining the ethnographic tools of anthropology, an engagement with prevailing sociological questions, and a literary approach to personal narratives, The Melodrama of Mobility offers a rich portrait of the experience of compressed modernity in the non-West.

Customer Reviews:

Developing Ajummas.......2004-06-08

"Dynamic Korea" is the local government's official slogan used to promote the country as an international tourist destination and would-be "Hub of Asia," and might also serve as the rallying cry of those cheerleaders of South Korea's breakneck development ethos. For those more skeptical of the country's ideology of development as it has manifested itself over the past four decades or so, "melodrama of mobility" perhaps more accurately and succinctly describes the mood and condition of South Korean society in the modern era. After reading Nancy Abelmann's "The Melodrama of Mobility," the utopian thinking expressed in such phrases as "Dynamic Korea" and the "Hub of Asia" ring all the more hollow.

Any foreigner who has lived in South Korea for a while has no doubt noticed the confusion and anxiety that seem to permeate just about every level and aspect of Korea society. Change, after all, is the only constant in South Korea. "The Melodrama of Mobility" is a satisfying exploration and analysis of some of the root causes of such confusion and anxiety, specifically from the gendered viewpoints of eight middle-aged South Korean women. The next time the visiting foreigner is elbowed brutally in the side by an ajumma ("auntie") rushing onto a subway car to occupy the last free seat, while they may not quite forgive her, at least they can better understand her.

"The Melodrama of Mobilty" uses the concept of social mobilty to trace the lives of these women as they travel back and forth from countryside to city, across class lines and generational divides, across ever-shifting landscapes of memory and desire. A kind of poststructuralist approach to ethnography and anthropology, the author's main aim is to show that these women's social and personal lives are in constant flux, and cannot be neatly "fixed" or "reified" into static categories of class, status, gender and identity. In this, she largely suceeds.

All in all, I enjoyed this book, but had a few problems with the form or structure of it, as well as deployment of the notion of "melodrama" as displayed prominently in the title.

First of all, it's hard to tell who this book's target audience is, beyond some nebulous "Korean Studies" or "Women's Studies" community. At times the book is overloaded with all the usual academic apendages such as constant citations of other academics including page number and year within the text, as well as constant definitions of critical terms and an overly self-concious attention paid to the writer's working methodology. And at the same time, the book is often theoretically dense, befitting a poststructuralist approach, all of which suggests this is a book geared for academics and perhaps undergraduates. However, the book is overly simple in parts and seems to treat the reader like a high school student who needs his or her hand held to get the author's points. Every chapter begins and concludes with summaries of the points made in the chapter, and often includes summaries and restatements already made in previous chapters, as well as teasers advertising points to be made in later chapters, etc., etc. This gets to be tedious after a while, and one wonders why readers capable enough to read poststructuralist enthnography need such "help" in getting the point. Again I ask, who are the intended readers? Personally, I could have done without all the constant summarizing and explications of methodolgy (which take up at least a third of the text) and done with more ethnographic observations of the women represented. One of the main women in the book deals privately in the real estate market in Seoul, for example, but there is little discussion of the networks she navigates while undertaking such work, focusing instead largely on her familial relations. For a book arguing that the division between the personal and the social is artificial, such an ommision is unsatisfying to say the least.

I also found the theme of "melodrama" insufficiently explored. Clearly melodrama is one of the most popular film and TV genres in Korea, and Korean society is indeed often melodramatic (witness weeping politicians hurling shoes in the National Assembly just a few months ago, televised around the world). This is an intriguing framework through which to view Korean society, yet the theoretics of melodrama as well as its application to Korean society and the women in the book are cursory and remain largely unexplored. Again, I would have preferred less self-conscious explication of methodology, and more solid theoretical insights.

One of the most interesting aspects of this book is the emphasis on retelling the stories and narratives of mobility of these women, as originally told to the author. Strip away the academic elements, the theory and emphasis on detailing methodology, and the book comes to resemble a novel of sorts, or at least a collection of interrelated short stories. I had no luck finding this book in Korea and had to order it online. Adopting more overtly the techniques of narrative, or at least restraining somewhat the distracting "academic" elements, would no doubt guarrantee a much wider readership in the future--which such individuals as appear in this book truly deserve. But then again, I am not an academic, so what do I know? If you're going to play that game, I guess you have to play by those rules.

Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman's Film
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Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman's Film

Manufacturer: British Film Institute
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Imitations of Life: A Reader of Film and Television Melodrama (Contemporary Film and Television Series)

ASIN: 0851702007

Book Description

Since the early 70s, film theory has focused on melodrama as a particularly challenging genre. Feminism, in particular, has claimed a stake in re-examination of the form, raising many critical questions about the relation between gender and culture. This collection contains the most exciting contributions from nearly two decades of critical endeavor to come to terms with these questions. Christine Gledhill's overview precedes essays that range from classics by Thomas Elsaesser, Laura Mulvey, and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith to newly commissioned perspectives covering Hollywood's output from the early 20s to the 60s. Home is Where the Heart Is constitutes invaluable reading for anyone interested in the role of melodrama in the history of cinema, feminist film criticism, and analyses of popular culture.

Average customer rating:

Spontaneous Melodramas 2
Not quite as good as the first one

Spontaneous Melodramas 2
Doug Fields , Laurie Polich , and Duffy Robbins
Manufacturer: Zondervan/Youth Specialties
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0310233003

Book Description

This volume from Youth Specialties contains 24 more impromptu skits from the Old and New Testaments (with a modern, humorous twist) that help bring Bible stories to life.

Customer Reviews:

Spontaneous Melodramas 2.......2006-03-16

This is a very good resource for quick fun dramas - for any age!!

Not quite as good as the first one.......2001-05-25

As is the case with many sequels, SM2 is not as great as its predecdessor. However, the book is a fun time and offers a lot of the same great interaction as the first book. THis one relies more heavily on Jesus stories. Personally I find difficult to make fun of Jesus! My students still love to get in the game and act out the parts in the dramas. It stillg ets us laughing and going. I just prefer the first set of stories.

Average customer rating:

Fantastic book on silent cliffhanger serials!
Readable introduction

Melodrama and Modernity
Ben Singer
Manufacturer: Columbia University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0231113293

Book Description

In this groundbreaking investigation into the nature and meanings of melodrama in American culture between 1880 and 1920, Ben Singer offers a challenging new reevaluation of early American cinema and the era that spawned it. Singer looks back to the sensational or "blood and thunder" melodramas (e.g., The Perils of Pauline, The Hazards of Helen, etc.) and uncovers a fundamentally modern cultural expression, one reflecting spectacular transformations in the sensory environment of the metropolis, in the experience of capitalism, in the popular imagination of gender, and in the exploitation of the thrill in popular amusement. Written with verve and panache, and illustrated with 100 striking photos and drawings, Singer's study provides an invaluable historical and conceptual map both of melodrama as a genre on stage and screen and of modernity as a pivotal idea in social theory.

Customer Reviews:

Fantastic book on silent cliffhanger serials!.......2004-08-12

This book is a well written description of the origins and history of the silent cliffhanger serials. The author explains how the chapterplays are similar to and an expansion on the "melodrama" genre of stageplays and 1 reel films popular in the early 1900's.

The second half of the book is the heart of it, focusing on the serials themselves. The book has a number of old trade magazine advertisements for serials that show the excitement and drama serials conveyed to those theater patrons so many years ago.

This is a good companion to the books on silent serials by Kalton Lahue published back in the 1960's.

Readable introduction.......2002-11-14

This study has many of the earmarks of a Ph. D. dissertation--muted claims and qualifiers, allusions to the Frankfort School, periodic summaries--but it's a lucid, jargon-free beginning of a conversation that's long overdue. Many great American texts (literary as well as cinematic) have been excluded from academic canons and college reading lists on the grounds that they don't belong in the ironic, modernist tradition. By showing that melodrama is modernity's child, not its antithesis, Singer invites us to pay serious attention to texts whose only crime may be full disclosure of meaning and undeniable influencing of the witness.

American Domesticity: From How-To Manual to Hollywood Melodrama

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19th Century Film Studies!

American Domesticity: From How-To Manual to Hollywood Melodrama
Kathleen Anne McHugh
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0195122615

Book Description

From the cult of domesticity to the Semiotics of the Kitchen, housekeeping has been central to both constructing and critiquing the role of women in American society. Frequently domesticity's style has been to make invisible the labor that produces it, allowing woman to be asserted or argued about in universal terms that downplay race, class, and material relations. American Domesticity considers this relationship in representations of domesticity and domestic labor over the last two centuries in didactic, cinematic, and feminist texts. While the domestic is usually conceived of as the antithesis of the public, economical, and political, Kathleen McHugh demonstrates how domestic discourse established the terms within which the most crucial national issues--the market economy, universal white male suffrage, slavery, the construction of racial difference, consumerism, spectatorship, desire, and even feminism--were conceived, assimilated, and understood. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the book investigates the historical roots of domestic labors invisibility in widely circulated didactic housekeeping manuals written by Lydia Child, Catherine Beecher, Mary Pattison, and Christine Frederick. It then considers how pedagogical discourses became entertainment discourses, their focus shifting from the silent era of film to the twilight of the classical period. The book concludes with an examination of the return of a pedagogical impulse within feminist film production concerning domesticity, comparing it to the concurrent rise of feminist film theory in the academy. Looking at this wide range of print and film texts, McHugh traces the outlines of a discourse of domesticity that claims to be private and universal but instead brokers difference within the public sphere.

Customer Reviews:

19th Century Film Studies!.......2000-06-02

This book examines the discourse on domestic labor across the 19th and 20th centuries, focusing on how-to manuals, classical Hollywood films, and more recent avant-garde works. The author provides an engaging, sophisticated and well-written history of how we have understood (or, more accurately, obscured) domestic labor as a key component of American national identity. By taking the 19th century into account, the author provides one of the more insightful analyses of American film melodrama and women's cinema. This book is crucial for anyone wanting to understand the role of gender in American modern culture and cinema.

Acting Out: Invented Melodrama In Contemporary Photography

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Acting Out: Invented Melodrama In Contemporary Photography
Kathleen A. Edwards
Manufacturer: University of Iowa Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0874141494

Book Description

Acting Out examines the enduring presence of melodrama in fine art photography, considering photographs that make use of the long-standing language of melodrama inspired by literature, theatre, cinema, television, advertising, film stills, photo-journalism, and earlier photography. In her essay Kathleen Edwards discusses melodrama as an aesthetic perceptual system stemming from the development of modern society in Western Europe and the United States. Considering melodrama as a time-honored system for making sense of experience, Edwards looks at how the expressionist body works to appeal to the emotions of the viewer and offers ways to recognize and release feelings.

Customer Reviews:

Melodrama and Modernity.......2001-01-07

Peter Brooks' book, "The Melodramatic Imagination," would be helpful even due only to its serious examination of the structural and philosophical underpinnings of traditional French melodramatic theatre. However, what makes this study necessary reading is its convincing argument that melodrama exists as a driving force, not a distracting or somehow 'lower' element, in the creation of the modern novel. The melodramatic structure, shaped by high moral conflict and determined by its motion towards a final revelation of virtue as innocence, and is held together by a system of characters, images and actions become part of a signifying code that opens onto a moral world more cohesively meaningful than the literal world that can be represented by a more straightforward, perhaps more materialist realism. Authors of the nineteenth century novel needed this structure to retain urgency and significance in works from which motivations based on the sacred or the mythic had been discarded, and to make 'interesting' stories seeking to represent the lives of human beings in time rather than the explanatory deeds of timeless, imortal figures. A willingness to historicize a bit more, to relate an explanation of changing modes of representation to changing modes of production, would have made this work even stronger.

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