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Summary
Summary
"Anyone can break your heart--Jeff Zentner can also make you laugh out loud!" --RAINBOW ROWELL, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Carry On and Eleanor & Park
From the award winning author of The Serpent King comes a contemporary novel about two best friends who must make tough decisions about their futures--and the TV show they host--in their senior year of high school. And don't miss the author's highly anticipated new book, In the Wild Light !
Every Friday night, best friends Delia and Josie become Rayne Ravenscroft and Delilah Darkwood, hosts of the campy creature feature show Midnite Matinee on the local cable station TV Six.
But with the end of senior year quickly approaching, the girls face tough decisions about their futures. Josie has been dreading graduation, as she tries to decide whether to leave for a big university and chase her dream career in mainstream TV. And Lawson, one of the show's guest performers, a talented MMA fighter with weaknesses for pancakes, fantasy novels, and Josie, is making her tough decision even harder.
Scary movies are the last connection Delia has to her dad, who abandoned the family years ago. If Midnite Matinee becomes a hit, maybe he'll see it and want to be a part of her life again. And maybe Josie will stay with the show instead of leaving her behind, too.
As the tug-of-war between growing up and growing apart tests the bonds of their friendship, Josie and Delia start to realize that an uncertain future can be both monstrous...and momentous.
"I laughed, cried, and fell over-the-moon in love with Rayne & Delilah's Midnite Matinee ." --JENNIFER NIVEN, New York Times bestselling author of All the Bright Places and Holding Up the Universe
Author Notes
Jeff Zentner is the author of The Serpent King, a New York Times Notable Book, winner of the William C. Morris Award, and recipient of many other accolades; and Goodbye Days , named an ALA-YALSA Top Ten Best Fiction for Young Adults title. Jeff was a Publishers Weekly Flying Start and an Indies Introduce pick. Before becoming a writer, he was a musician who recorded with Iggy Pop, Nick Cave, and Debbie Harry. Rayne & Delilah's Midnite Matinee is his ode to best friends who make things together. He lives in Nashville with his wife and son. You can follow him on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, or visit him at jeffzentnerbooks.com.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Jackson, Tenn., best friends and high school seniors Josie and Delia host a public access show called Midnight Matinee. Every Friday night, their alter egos, Rayne Ravenscroft and Delilah Darkwood, screen low-budget horror films, hamming it up in comedic segments. Delia's father left the videos behind when he abandoned the family, and she's eager to both track him down and make the show a success. Meanwhile, Josie's family is pressuring her to attend college and accept a television internship in Knoxville-something she'd have to quit the show to do. When the girls get a flyer to ShiverCon in Orlando, Fla., they agree to attend. If they can persuade creature-feature legend Jack Devine to help them take their show to the next level, Josie will go to college close to home. But things go awry in Orlando, and Delia learns her father is also in Florida. Zentner (The Serpent King) expertly channels the voices of two young women, one convinced she will always be left behind and one certain she is destined for greatness. Written in alternating perspectives, Zentner's quick-witted, charming characters tackle real-life issues with snappy dialogue and engaging levity. Ages 14-up. Agent: Charlie Olsen, Inkwell Management. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
Rayne Ravenscroft and Delilah Darkwood, the alter egos of high-school seniors Josie and Delia, are hosts of the campy public-access show Midnite Matinee. Every Saturday night at their Jackson, Tennessee, television station, the girls don Goth garb and introduce a low-budget horror or sci-fi movie. Producing the show helps each girl cope with her own real-life drama. Delia, who suffers from depression, has hired a private eye to track down her dad, who abandoned the family when she was eight. Josie, who dreams of a TV career, is trying to decide whether to go away to college and accept a Food Network internship or stay local and make a go of Midnite Matinee. Theres also the issue of Lawson, a mixed-martial-arts fighter and Josies new boyfriend, whos arrived just in time to make her choice harder. When the three of them take a road trip to Orlando to attend ShiverCon, the already-quirky narrative begins to verge on the absurd, with the appearance of the Russian mob and an enraged Austrian Olympic womens shotput medalist. Readers with patience for the layers of gratuitous eccentric detail that permeate this plot will, however, be rewarded with a heartfelt story of a friendship in transition, fueled by funny, rapid-fire dialogue. jennifer hubert swan January/February 2019 p 108(c) Copyright 2018. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Josie and Delia are the hosts of cable television's delightfully cornball Midnite Matinee, which features hokey horror movies bracketed by humorous banter and goofy skits. For Delia, the show is her heart and soul, resurrecting the old movies that she shared with her long-absent father. Josie, however, could leave their small town to take an internship with the Food Network if she chooses to pursue a serious television career. Further complications ensue when the girls meet Lawson, a young MMA practitioner who brings his beagle to the studio to star in a staged wedding with Josie's basset hound (long story), and sparks fly between the dogs' owners. The story reaches a perfect road trip crescendo when Delia, Josie, and Lawson travel to Orlando for ShiverCon, presenting Delia with a chance to track down her missing dad. At the same time, Josie gets a look at the uglier side of show business. As in his award-winning The Serpent King (2016), Zentner serves up a poignantly satisfying blend of wit and pathos with lovable and unpredictable characters. The banter between the characters is smart and funny, and even the text messages capture full nuances of emotion. Readers looking for an unforgettable slice of small-town angst will love this one.--Diane Colson Copyright 2018 Booklist
School Library Journal Review
Gr 9 Up-Friday nights are booked for best friends Josie and Delia. The two high school seniors record their public access TV show about old terrible horror movies. After graduation, Josie wants a career in the TV industry while Delia simply wants things to remain the same. She's planning to upgrade their TV show in hopes that Josie will decide to stay and not leave her, like her father did. Delia sets up a meeting at a horror convention in Florida. Little does she know, the whole future of the TV show rides on this convention. Zentner has crafted a book filled with tension about relationships and the future. Promises, secrets, and betrayals fuel the relationships in this narrative. The girls have a deep bond and showcase their affection toward each other with witty comments, random questions, and sassy attitudes. While the friendship between them remains at the forefront, sideplots include Josie beginning a romantic relationship and Delia confronting her long-lost father. Secondary characters are fleshed out and add depth. This work tackles mental health, depression, abandonment, and chasing your dreams. VERDICT This is a quirky fun, read that will give teens all the feels. A good selection where contemporary fiction centering friendships is popular.-Jennifer Rummel, Cragin Library, Colchester, CT © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Guardian Review
A superhero snail, bibliophile bunnies, a story about grief filled with folkloric menace and more Picture books this month range from the anarchic to the meditative. Elys Dolan, award-winning author-illustrator of Mr Bunny's Chocolate Factory , returns with Super Snail (Hodder), the tale of an ordinary slug with extraordinary ambitions. When Kevin dons his shell, he becomes Super Snail - but hampered by his slowness and slime, how can he prove himself to the League of Heroes? Dry asides from Kevin's owl butler lend additional humour to this superbly silly story. From Flying Eye, Joe Todd-Stanton's A Mouse Called Julian offers Brambly Hedge-style charm spiced with a pinch of peril. Julian, a solitary mouse, regrets his aloofness when a fox breaks into his home, determined to eat him - but fox and mouse become unlikely friends. Cross section illustrations of glowing, cosy rooms, slyly funny dialogue and a nuanced happy ending add up to a picture book as warm as a candle-lit burrow. The Lost Book (Andersen) by Margarita Surnaite is a mysterious, entrancing debut. Henry lives in Rabbit Town, surrounded by bibliophile bunnies - but Henry much prefers real-world adventures, until he finds the lost book of the title. His search for its home takes him through a hedgerow into a flat, muted world, where people are too busy with their devices to notice Henry or the book - except for one little girl, who befriends him. This is another lovely picture book for children who like to immerse themselves in other worlds. For five-plus, Planet Omar: Accidental Trouble Magnet (Hachette) features Zanib Mian's zany text, enhanced by Nasaya Mafaridik's comics-style illustrations. Omar's wild imagination sometimes gets the better of him, especially when he has to move house and school at the same time, and bully Daniel seems determined to annoy him - but Omar has a knack for landing on his feet, even when he and Daniel get lost on a school trip to the Science Museum. This is the first in a series that should appeal to fans of Tom Gates. Britta Teckentrup's My Little Book of Big Questions (Prestel) is ideal for children concerned with philosophical conundrums, especially at bedtime. Featuring her characteristic textured, softly coloured images, it poses a series of questions: what will my life be like? Will I be happy? Do animals think? No answers are forthcoming, but the dreamy spaces of the illustrations give the reader permission to wonder. Mythical beasts get a down-to-earth treatment in The Secret Lives of Unicorns (Flying Eye), by the similarly fictional Dr Temisa Seraphini, illustrated with panache by Sophie Robin. Unicorn evolution, life cycles and habitats are meticulously detailed in a guide that reads more like wildlife non-fiction than saccharine fairytale. For readers of eight and up, fantasy and reality intertwine in a gorgeous debut, Bloom (HarperCollins) by Nicola Skinner. Anxious not to worry her mother, Sorrel has always been a good girl - in fact, she has shoeboxes filled with awards for rule-following. When headteacher Mr Grittysnit announces the chance to win a family holiday for the most obedient pupil, Sorrel knows the prize is hers for the taking. But things go horribly awry when she finds an ancient packet of seeds. Flavia Sorrentino's vine-like illustrations spiralling out from the centre of the book combine to great effect with Skinner's assured, funny voice in this compelling story of conformity, rebellion. Padraig Kenny's magnificent second novel Pog (Chicken House) also combines fantasy and reality, exploring the dark landscape of childhood grief. When David and Penny, who are mourning the loss of their mother, move to a new home, they don't expect to find a small furry creature living in their attic. Pog is one of the First Folk, a benevolent being sworn to defend the boundary between worlds - but less well-intentioned entities are also on the rise, insisting to David that his loss can be reversed. Poignant, strange, full of folkloric menace and delight, Pog fulfils the promise of Kenny's extraordinary debut, Tin . Sharna Jackson's first novel, High Rise Mystery (Knights Of), is set on a contemporary London estate where would-be detectives Nik and Norva are facing their first murder. Everyone likes Hugo, antiques dealer and art teacher. But after a furious row at a community meeting, his body is discovered in a skip - and all the evidence points to the girls' father. Jackson's voice falters occasionally, but is distinct and original, while her deft characterisation and evocation of place make for a funny, engaging modern mystery. Teenagers roundup Home Girl by Alex Wheatle, Atom, £7.99 Naomi is 14 going on 45, with a vocabulary that makes adults flinch. She has been in the care system since tragedy stole her mother and her father stopped coping, shuttled from family to family, postcode to postcode. She doesn't trust anyone, especially foster parents. What do they want from her in return for their care? But her mates on the secure unit have her best interests at heart - don't they? Studded with Wheatle's characteristic invented slang, Naomi's story is both heartbreaking and hilarious, offering no easy happy endings, but a flickering sense of hope. The Hand, the Eye and the Heart by Zoë Marriott, Walker, £7.99 Zhilan was brought up as female, the daughter of a renowned general badly injured in his last battle. When he is called to war again, Zhilan uses magical qi and martial arts training to take his place, posing as his son, Zhi. Being Zhi, rather than Zhilan, soon feels more like reality than a disguise; but Zhi must navigate attraction to a fellow soldier, battlefield brutality, murderous intrigue and the attentions of a powerful general to survive. Inspired by the story of Mulan, Marriott explores ideas of gender and belonging in this fast-paced novel set in a fairytale China. Rayne and Delilah's Midnite Matinee by Jeff Zentner, Andersen, £7.99 Every Friday night, Rayne Ravenscroft and Delilah Darkwood - AKA teen best friends Delia and Josie - present their public-access TV show dedicated to schlocky low-budget horror movies. Delia's dad, who left years ago and hasn't been heard from since, loved horror B-movies too, and the hope that he'll see it keeps her loyal to the show. Now Josie has been offered the chance to pursue a dream career - but that means leaving Delia behind again. Outrageously funny, with whip-smart, surreal dialogue, this tender portrait of friendship under the strain of inevitable change is an absolute must-read.
Kirkus Review
By day, they're just high school seniors from Jackson, Tennessee.Come 11:00 on Saturday nights, Josie (aka Rayne Ravenscroft) and Delia (aka Delilah Darkwood) are hosts of Midnite Matinee, a public access cable show that bookends cult horror films with eccentric entertainmenta skeleton costume dance party, a Frankenstein puppet reading fan mail. Middle-class Josie doesn't love horror movies, but she's a natural in front of the camera and wants to pursue a career in television. Her parents urge her to attend school in Knoxville, where she can intern with the Food Network, but that would mean leaving the showand Delia. Meanwhile, Delia, living in a trailer with a struggling, depressed single mother (the portrayal of mental illness, including a positive attitude toward antidepressants, is very welcome), considers herself firmly mediocre. Being on camera frightens herbut the old movies are her last link with her father, who took off when she was 7. Delia's desperate to reconnect. When a PI discovers that her father might be in Florida, near the ShiverCon convention where famed host Jack Devine might help them garner a wider audience, they take a road trip. Zentner (GoodbyeDays, 2017, etc.) nails his teen characters, their longings, and their motivations, and the first chapters are downright hilarious. Over-the-top Devine lessens the overall impact of a story that still closes well. Despite the diversity of the actual setting, all characters follow a white default. Short of brilliant, but only just. (Fiction. 14-18) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Josie Here's the thing with dreams--and I'm talking about the kind you have when you sleep, not the kind where you're finally learning to surf when you're fifty: they're carefully tailored to the only audience who will ever see them, which is you. So I'm not big on telling people about my dreams for that reason. That said, there's this recurring dream I have. It comes around every couple of months or so, but I wish it were more often because it's awesome, and when I wake up from it, I lie there for a few moments, wishing I could reenter it. In this dream, I'm at a familiar place. Often it's my grandma's house. Her house was tiny. It always smelled like quilts and oatmeal cookies and that musty odor when you first turn on a window-unit air conditioner after winter. It had a cellar that smelled like cold dirt even during the summer, where she kept store-brand cans of creamed corn, jars of home-pickled dilly beans, and two-liter bottles of Diet Coke. In my dream, I descend into the cellar. I find a door leading to a passageway. I go in. I follow it for a long way; it's cool and dark, and I'm not afraid. Eventually it opens into this grand, palatial, brightly lit marble room. There are columns and fountains, and the air smells like flowers. I push forward and find room after room. It's all grand and glorious, beautiful and perfect. It's not what you would expect to find. But there it is, and for those few minutes (I've heard that dreams are never more than five minutes long, which I totally don't believe, but whatever), you get to experience the most unexpected grandeur, running like a rabbit warren under my grandma's little house in Jackson, Tennessee. And then I wake up, the thrill of possibility and discovery drifting upward off me like steam. It's such a delicious feeling. Just stay a little longer, I say. But it doesn't. Yet another reason it sucks to tell people about your dreams is that then they suddenly become amateur dream interpretation experts: [Nondescript German psychiatrist voice] Well, you see, when you were riding that bicycle made out of fish sticks while wearing an adult diaper, it symbolizes . . . That you're afraid of failure. That you're filled with seething rage. That you're afraid to become such a grown-up that you no longer call fish sticks "fish dicks." Who knows? But dreams are their own universe. They exist in you, and you're the God of that universe, so no one can tell you what they mean. You have to figure it out, assuming dreams have any meaning at all, which I think they only sometimes do. This dream, though--the one about finding all the hidden rooms--I think it does mean something. I think it means there's something great inside me, something extraordinary and mysterious and undiscovered. That's a thing I tell myself. It's a thing I believe. Excerpted from Rayne and Delilah's Midnite Matinee by Jeff Zentner All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.