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Top of the pile
79
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
78/100Critics
81/100Scholars
Author:
Mary Rodgers, Jesse Green
Publisher:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Date:
August 9, 2022
The story of how Mary grew from an angry child, constrained by privilege and a parentâs overwhelming gift, to become not just a theater figure in her own right but also a renowned author of books for young readers (including the classic Freaky Friday) and, in a final grand turn, a doyenne of philanthropy and the chairman of the Juilliard School.
What The Reviewers Say
I’ve never read one more entertaining (and more revealing) than Mary Rodgers’s Shy. Her voice careens between intimate, sardonic, confessional, comic. The book is pure pleasure — except when it’s jaw-droppingly shocking.
... delectable.
Rodgers was known for her sharp wit, and Green seems to have pulled very few of her verbal punches. The account of her relationship with Sondheim is so wincingly intimate in some details that you have to wonder if Green (or the publisher) thought it would be better to wait until Sondheim was no longer around to read it, a suspicion reinforced by the fact that “Shy” is being published eight years after Rodgers’s death and less than nine months after Sondheim’s.
The final text, in which Mary’s bold, brash voice contrasts with Mr. Green’s more measured comments, reads like a conversation between the two of them, albeit one in which Mary dominates, and rightly so.
