Book one for 2023 is notched on my Goodreads scorecard! I read Hooked: How Crafting Saved My Life by Sutton Foster.
She’s apparently been a major actress for a few decades, winning multiple Tony awards and acting in TV shows. But I don’t watch TV and only recently started paying attention to theater, so the first I heard of her was when she was cast opposite Hugh Jackman in the Broadway revival of “The Music Man.”
So when I came across her book at the library, I picked it up. It was less about crafting and more about her life offstage, particularly her relationship with her mother. That had to have been hard to write – it was very vulnerable and candid, and even though she didn’t trash on her mother, I was kind of glad that her mother didn’t ever see this because she has passed on.
The book had an awful lot of name dropping – actors and singers throughout. But hey, that’s who she’s been associating with since she was 17, so what else is she supposed to do? Those people really are her friends and coworkers.
The name dropping that annoyed me, however, was the restaurants and clubs and other odd locations. “We ate dinner at [location] and then went to …” It added nothing to the story, and was an annoying distraction in a lot of cases. I have no idea what all these places are, so there’s no reason to list the name of the restaurant unless it’s to brag that you ate there. And sometimes, it could have been assumed that she ate dinner before she went to such-and-such event because it was an unnecessary detail – she didn’t need to tell us every time she had a meal.
Overall it was a good book – I would rather give it three stars than four, but there’s no half, so I rounded up.