Dani-Ellie

Hair/Makeup, maybe?

IMDb will give you where to watch options when you look something up.

Man, the little girl playing Karen steals absolutely every scene she is in.

I'm late to the party in discovering this show, but I gotta tell ya, that ridiculous Feliz Navidad toy gave me the biggest jump scare I've had in a good long while.

In the parish I grew up in (Roman Catholic), you can take communion if you haven't been confirmed. However, you cannot take communion until you have been baptized and had First Penance. I was in second grade when I made my First Communion. (I was never confirmed and consider myself agnostic now.) It's possible Father Paul baptized Ali and had him go through First Penance, as he was a teenager and had reached the age of reason. He also might have been confirmed, which sometimes happens right before First Communion when you enter the Church as an adult. I'm not sure if he would have been considered an adult yet. That being said, I was surprised when Ali reawakened because I was under the assumption that he hadn't taken it, either.

Thank you for mentioning this one. I borrowed it from my library after reading your description and just finished it tonight. I enjoyed the heck out of it!

I finished Riley Sager's latest, Survive the Night, yesterday and loved it to pieces. I really enjoy all of his books. Each story has been different so it doesn't seem like he has a formula yet and I like the care he takes to make sure the conclusions make sense. (Which you would think would be a normal thing but I read a lot of thrillers and sometimes I feel like authors feel like they have to come up with big twists in order to get people talking, whether or not said twists actually make sense for the story.) Every one of his books has been an immediate "oh hell yes" for me.

I don’t read the last chapter of a whodunnit first but I will flip to the last page or two of a missing-kid book. Not to find out the whos and the whys, just to make sure they, y’know, find the kid. Because a missing kid is one story and a missing-and-dead kid is a vastly different story and I want to know ahead of time which one I’m getting.

I didn’t think this was nearly as scary as the first two but man, I could watch Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga read the phone book together.

I enjoy CJ Tudor's books a lot. The newest one, The Burning Girls, I think is my favorite.

Also not a huge fan of The Silent Patient. It was a quick read for me but I was pretty meh about it. The twist was what turned me off; it didn't feel earned to me. I never read The Guest List but I did read Lucy Foley's The Hunting Party and didn't care for it. It wanted to be Ruth Ware's In a Dark, Dark Wood so very badly, to the point that the plot progression was eerily similar, but frankly, if I wanted In a Dark, Dark Wood, I would have just reread that, as I found it infinitely more engaging.

I would categorize neglect as abuse, though. I believe abuse is a spectrum. On one end of the spectrum is beatings and bruises and on the other is the emotional. Emotional abuse can also leave a child questioning their own self-worth, wondering what it is about them that is so unlovable that even the people who are supposed to love them the most in the world don't. As far as this scenario, there is a difference between "not hovering" and apathy. These parents were portrayed as so drowning in their grief for one child that they completely disregarded the emotional needs of the two living children that they did have. I would categorize that as abuse. I would categorize conceiving a child for the sole purpose of being a bone marrow donor for an older sibling and viewing the older sibling's death as a failure on the younger child's part as abuse. Even Mrs. Buckley's acceptance of Buck at the end framed his sole purpose for existence as saving other people. That's a lot to lay on a person, never mind a child. I don't see Buck as a woobie but his parent did fail him. As far as growing up, by seeking out therapy, he is doing the responsible thing. He is learning how to separate his own issues from the ones his parents foisted on him. He is learning how to see his own self-worth for himself and not just for how he is seen by other people.

This. When I was a kid, I was daddy's little girl but my dad began emotionally checking out when his father died. (I was 10.) It hit critical mass when I was a teenager and I spent a good long time afterward wondering what I did wrong to make him ... not like me anymore. I'm 39 now and I'm still working on coming to terms with/remembering that I did nothing wrong and it was always his issue, not mine. It still hurts. Yes, Mr. and Mrs. Buckley clothed and fed their children and kept a roof over their heads but it is hard growing up feeling like your parent(s) don't care about you or love you. It is hard growing up feeling like no matter what you do, you can't please your parent(s). Buck grew up getting injury after injury (and not just skinned knees and palms like all children but injuries) and not once did his parents say, wait a second, what's going on here? They never kept a baby box (or book or anything) for Buck because their grief over Daniel overshadowed Buck's existence for them. Mrs. Buckley even says straight out that Buck is her reminder every day of Daniel's loss. I don't know how Mrs. Buckley could ever have parented Buck effectively if every time she looked at him, she was reminded of Daniel. Because to her, Buck was never just Buck. He was Daniel's failed savior, which is so unbelievably unfair to Buck.

The plague doctor pops up a lot as a hidden ghost. Much like in Hill House, this series is filled with ghosts hiding in plain sight in the background of scenes, only this time the ghosts aren’t random extras, they’re the ghosts mentioned throughout the show. The easiest sighting of the plague doctor is in the first episode, watching Dani as she makes her (terrible) tea in the middle of the night the first night she’s at the house. The camera actually lingers on him a bit when she leaves the kitchen. You can Google “Bly Manor hidden ghosts” to find articles/videos pointing out the hidden ghosts throughout the series.

My first exposure to "The Turn of the Screw" was a TV movie adaptation called The Haunting of Helen Walker with Valerie Bertinelli in the nanny role. I was maybe 14 or 15 when I saw it and that movie is the reason that ghost possession freaks me out. It amused me in the episode threads when posters mentioned the ickiness of Quint and Jessel possessing siblings because there were more than a couple of scenes in Helen Walker with Flora and Miles fully possessed and yeah, they were made of squick. It was nothing outwardly inappropriate for the young actors but seeing a 10-year-old boy brushing his 8-year-old sister's hair behind her ear or the sister caressing the brother's cheek is shudder-inducing. I finally ended up reading the novella in college. (Not for class or anything, just because my school's library had it.) I think some of the plot points in Bly Manor would have hit a little differently for me if I hadn't known the kids were possessed as least some of the time. I will say, though, that I do like that this didn't end nearly as dark as the original story.

I bought this one yesterday and finished it today. I loved it! Very glad I purchased it instead of waiting on the wait list for my library because I can totally see myself rereading it, probably more than once.

In terms of the fight, both brothers said things they shouldn't have, hurtful things that are going to be hard to come back from. In terms of the catalyst for said fight, I firmly believe that Randall was in the wrong. He should not have guilted Rebecca into doing the trial. Yes, Randall seems to think this is the best option, but there are all kinds of variables that it doesn't seem like he considered. 1) They call it a trial for a reason. The drug may not be as effective as the trial runners think. 2) She may get the placebo. 3) The stress and uncertainty of uprooting her life (for the second time in a year) may exacerbate Rebecca's memory loss. Sometimes people with dementia decline more quickly when they are removed from their familiar surroundings. 4) Much of Rebecca's support system will now be halfway across the country in either direction. How is that fair to her? Plus, Rebecca flat-out said she didn't want to do it. She still has the capacity to make her own decisions, medical or otherwise. Randall is stomping all over what Rebecca wants with his own wants. And what's more, he can't seem to recognize that the things she's doing with Kevin are things she wants to do. Randall accused Kevin of dragging her to the movie premiere without seeming to consider that maybe, just maybe, Rebecca wanted to go. And look, I get it. I have anxiety, too, (though not as deep as Randall's) so I understand the need to try to take control when things are spiraling. But Randall does not have the right to guilt his mother into doing something she specifically said she does not want to do just because he feels like he knows better. Randall does not have the right to let his mother make the announcement that she changed her mind about the trial and try to hide/deny that he talked her into it. And I say all this as someone who likes Randall.

I love me some Cold Case, and the music is exactly what hooked me. I didn't watch a lot of it first run (mostly because I had conflated it with Without a Trace, which I didn't like) but I happened to catch a syndicated ep of a case set in the 60s. My oldies-loving self adored the soundtrack and I never looked back. I love that StartTV airs it now, music intact. I try to catch it anytime I'm home in the afternoons.

I thought it was rude that neither one of the parents met Jo at the door the day they invited her back. Also, YES. If the kids had some more activities to do or a couple more toys to play with, they might not be running around like little hellions. Give them something to occupy their time and their minds, for crying out loud.

Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A. It's an NES video game cheat code that ended up taking on a life of its own, so much so that it's an Easter egg on more than a few modern websites. It even shows up in Wreck-It Ralph; it's what King Candy enters on the controller to enter Sugar Rush's programming code. Wikipedia has a good list of various places the code shows up.

Ottermommy, if you can still find Kathryn Reiss' standalone books, those were a favorite of mine at your daughter's age. I liked ghost stories and mysteries and Reiss was right up my alley; she plays a lot with time in her stories, the past touching the present and such. My favorite book of all time is actually her Time Windows (about a girl who moves into an old house and finds she can watch the lives of the people who lived there before her through the windows of an old dollhouse left in the attic by the previous occupants).

In the Woods is the only book I've legitimately wanted to throw across the room when I was finished with it. I was so disappointed in it that I never read any of her other books. ITA on the unfinished ending.

A little bit, yeah! I was also marveling at how absolutely perfect the "hey, how ah ya?" "Hey, good, how ah you?" in the beginning was.

Also a Bostonian cracking the heck up at this commercial. I’ve watched it an embarrassing number of times in the last 24 hours alone.

I still, to this day, sing along with "I Will Walk With You" if I happen to catch a Touched By An Angel repeat.