Sunday, March 31, 2013

The Apothecary

This time around Bookshoppers read The Apothecary by Malie Meloy (Putnam, 2011). The Apothecary takes place in the late 1940's, and follows the adventures of an American girl who has been uprooted to London. She befriends the son of a local apothecary, and they discover the potions he's been cooking up have some pretty spectacular uses -- and might just save the world.

The Bookshoppers were given the task of composing and recording an old-timey radio ad for one of the products, concepts or locations in the book. We watched a bunch of newsreels, clips from old movies, and era-appropriate radio spots to get in the zone, and had a lot of fun practicing our Transatlanic accents.

One thing that was neat (if not chilling) to see was a newsreel about the House of Un-American Activities Committee hearings. Janie, the main character in The Apothecary, moved to London because her Hollywood screenwriter parents had been fingered as communist sympathizers, and wanted to avoid being called in to testify against their friends.



SO, without further ado, let's see what the Bookshoppers came up with! They all chose to make an ad for one of the concoctions that came out of the apothecary's special book...



Jonah:Invisibility Potion
Sam:Nuclear Bomb Prevention

Naima: Smell of Truth