Somone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

I'm going to stop announcing that I'm running late, because I always am.

Sometimes, particularly when I'm trying to figure out what to say on these things, I like to look at the negative Amazon reviews on things I sort-of liked. There's a big theme in the neg reviews about how Cory Doctorow apparently thinks he's the James Joyce of Canada. I have to wonder where that came from--was there a pro review that made that comparison? It isn't in any of the blurbs on my copy. Regardless, anyone who would make such a comparison must have never read any Joyce, and perhaps has heard of him only by rough description. Because while SCtT, SLT is a bit confusing, it's in a completely un-Joycean way.

The narrative style is very straightforward. There's a main narrative, and flashbacks--a style that anyone who has ever watched television should be able to handle just fine. Part of the difficulty comes in the story's use of magical realism. The main character, who seems to be a fairly ordinary guy who's busy renovating a house he just bought, reveals early on that his father is a mountain and his mother is a washing machine. Literally. He and two of his brothers are ordinary humans (except that one brother can see the future, and the other is a walking corpse). Another brother is an island (I guess he takes after their father) and three others are a set of living nesting dolls (they can walk around separate from each other, but only the center one has internal organs; the others are hollow). The narrator reveals this information and then moves on to discuss how he got to know his neighbors (who seem basically normal, but one also has a magical-realism related secret).

Not much later, it develops that the dead brother was killed by the other brothers, and the flashbacks tell the story of the narrator's coming-of-age, and explain why the other brothers killed the dead one (hint: he's a sociopath).

Meanwhile, in the main plot, the narrator goes about settling into his new neighborhood. He teams up with a local small business owner who is working on a project to blanket their neighborhood in free wireless. At the same time, the reanimated corpse of the dead brother has returned from the dead and is causing problems for the narrator, the other brothers, and his neighbors and associates. And there is the second cause of the novel's difficulty. While both the walking-corpse-brother plot and the free wireless plot are written in a perfectly clear and readable style (again, completely un-Joycean, there is no stream-of-consciousness narration here, and very little obscure symbolism), how--or indeed if--these two plots are related remains obscure. There's something going on with themes of isolation versus connectedness (the brothers, naturally, had an isolated and unusual upbringing, and the narrator is the only one who has had much success joining normal society), but it's not drawn out particularly well, and the ending seems to undercut that theme pretty spectacularly.

I also remain baffled by the free wireless project. Even though the shop-owner character gets several author-on-board speeches *to explain why it's so great and revolutionary (trying to talk the phone company and the neighborhood anarchist bookstore, respectively, into supporting the project), I still don't get it. The general idea seems to be that people will be able to communicate without using The Man's Telephone Wires. Instead, he makes transmitters to do wireless internet over radio waves, out of pieces he gets out of the dumpster and has assembled by gutter punks. It seems roughly equivalent to if someone in the pre-computer age had decided to promote free communication by hand-making paper in their garage and handing it out to everyone in the neighborhood--while at the same time, better paper was available for a low cost from a variety of sources that don't particularly care what gets written on it.

From what I know, it's the companies that provide hosting that occasionally like to exercise some small measure of control over what's posted (see, for instance, Strikethrough 07), not the ones that provide the actual connection from your personal computer to the internet. But maybe there's something I'm missing--perhaps, and this is just occuring to me as I write this, if one obtained one's own servers from which to host one's, dunno, Naked Anarchist Archive, one might have trouble locating an ISP that wanted one's business. Maybe. But even given that possibility, it still seems like handing out paper that you made in your garage.

Anyway, three plots, one of which is mildly annoying in places but still very readable, not particularly well integrated. The novel, like all of Cory Doctorow's work, can be read for free at his website. (Which is cool, except that it sort of seems like he thinks any author who doesn't do the same is kind of a tool. Personally, I'm not at all opposed to the expectation that people should be paid for creative work, and it seems like if his model catches on, both publishers and the general public will be increasingly unwilling to do so. But I don't know--could be he's studied this and I'm wrong.)

* I could swear Cory Doctorow used to be on TV Tropes** as an example of either writer-on-board or Author Fillibuster, or both, but he seems to be gone now. It's a wiki; go figure. Hamlet's still on there, though.
**If you're not familiar with the site, I suggest blocking out several hours to spend there before you click the links. It sucks you in.

Another Thing to Fall, Beedle the Bard, Black Ships

I'm a little behind again, so I'm going to blitz through a few books and get caught up.

Laura Lippman's Another Thing To Fall is the latest featuring her series character, PI Tess Monaghan. Tess Monaghan doesn't have a gimmick, unless living in Baltimore counts as a gimmick, which maybe it does. She straddles the line between cozy-mystery and thriller-mystery. If you like mysteries and haven't read Lippman, give her a try--but start anywhere else. This one wasn't awful, I guess, but partway in--shortly after the murder, if I remember correctly--I put it down, and I read four other books before I picked it back up and finished it.

I think the main problem is that the characters--apart from Tess and the rest of the series' recurring characters--were just so damn unlikeable. The basic setup is that Tess blunders into the set of a TV show that's being shot in Baltimore, and somehow ends up being hired as a bodyguard/minder for the show's leading lady, a stupid spoiled whore after the fashion of Paris Hilton. (Spoiler: It's revealed late in the book that she's consciously acting the part of a stupid spoiled whore for the publicity, but her actual personality isn't any more likeable.) She doesn't want the job, but takes it anyway, for reasons that aren't developed to my satisfaction, and spends most of the book reflecting on how unpleasant the TV people are to be around. Lippman's point seems to be that TV shows are like laws and sausages--if you want to enjoy them, avoid seeing them made. But if the whole point is that the movie/TV business is sordid and unpleasant, why write a whole novel revolving around that point? I'm glad I got this one from the library, because I can't imagine wanting to re-read it. But it did kind of put me in the mood to re-read one of hers that doesn't suck--probably In a Strange City, which was the first of hers I read.

Next up, The Tales of Beedle the Bard. If you follow Harry Potter, you know that this is JKR's little book of wizarding fairy tales; if you don't, you don't care. It's a quick read, with five short stories of conventional children's-story length, and short commentaries by Albus Dumbledore. I wondered before reading this if it might be wizarding re-takes of traditional fairy tales, but as far as I can tell, these are original stories. What's surprising about them is how much they feel like real fairy tales--the un-Disneyfied versions. The Amazon reviews seem to reflect that--readers aren't sure who is supposed to be the indended audience for these stories. They're short, with simple storylines and minimally-developed characters, which suggests they're for small children, but they're kind of grim and weird. But if you know your literary history, you know that fairy tales weren't intended for children to begin with.

Finally, The Black Ship is the latest of Carola Dunn's Daisy Dalrymple books. The books are set in a reasonably historically accurate version of the period immediately after the Great War, where Daisy is a magazine writer and the wife of a Scotland Yard detective (who she met in the first book of the series and married, oh, eight or ten books in). In the previous book, Daisy had twins, but she has a nurse and a nursery-maid and a housekeeper, so her children aren't afflicted with such a terrible case of satchel-baby-itis as some others I can name. She just pops up to the nursery to visit them when she feels like it, and when she has some detecting to do, they remain safely offscreen. (The family can afford all this on a policeman's salary because Daisy not only makes some money with her writing, but is the daughter of a Viscount, and her husband recently came into an inheritance of his own.) Anyway, the book was interesting enough. For some reason, Dunn chose to pretty much give away the solution to the mystery at the very beginning, but there you go.

Next time, I'll be writing about Larklight and its sequels by Phillip Reeve, which I'm enjoying greatly so far.

D-D-Dexter

When I was a teenager, I took this creative writing class. To make the point that a well-written book or story wouldn't necessarily be a commercially successful one, the teacher used the example of a book where the narrator was a serial killer, with whom the reader would be expected to sympathize. Few people would want to read that book, she said, and as a result, no matter how well-written it was, a publisher would be unlikely to pay for it.

This week, I read Darkly Dreaming Dexter, Dearly Devoted Dexter, and Dexter in the Dark, by Jeff Lindsay. These are the original novels that the Showtime series was based on (as opposed to tie-ins written after the series started, like the Monk books from last week). In case you don't know, in both the book and the show, Dexter is a serial killer whose type is...other killers. He also works for the police department as a blood spatter analyst, alongside his foul-mouthed cop sister. Dexter is the viewpoint character and--yes--we the readers are expected to sympathize with him. The show has gone into three seasons, so it seems to be working. One element that definitely helps is that the reader/viewer is shown that Dexter's victims are guilty as sin--but, perhaps even more importantly, the killings themselves are not dwelt on. The approach is similar to that used for sex in mainstream media--there's enough detail that an adult reader or viewer will know what's going on, but not a lot of detail. (The opening credits sequence of Dexter-the-show does, cleverly, make use of the kind of fetishistic detail in which mainstream film often depicts extreme violence--but in the opening sequence, Dexter is getting dressed, shaving, and eating breakfast.)

I came to these books pretty thoroughly spoiled, having both seen (most of) the series, and read some articles about differences between the books and the show. The first season of the show very closely follows the plot of the first novel (Darkly Dreaming). Usually, when you read a book that's been made into a movie, the book is more substantial--to put even a short novel into a film of less than two hours takes quite a bit of trimming, naturally. But to turn a novel of moderate length into an entire season of a TV show (about sixteen hours, I think) requires quite a lot of adding. In the case of Dexter, the TV version uses a lot of its increased scope to flesh out the supporting characters. In the novel, all of the non-Dexter characters are a bit flat--which I suppose is justified, since the narrator (Dexter) is a sociopath. The other two novels have different plots from the second and third seasons of the TV show--although season 2 adapts some elements from the second book. The first two books are pretty good--although the show is, I think, a bit better--but the third absolutely stinks.

I knew that coming in, too--all of the reviews say so--but the library had all three, so what choice did I have, really? In the show, and in the other two books, the Dark Passenger can be read as a metaphor for Dexter's homicidal impulses--Dexter does refer to it as if its a separate entity a few times, but it comes across as a fairly ordinary psychological defense mechanism. In Dexter in the Dark, however, Lindsay decides to make absolutely clear that the Dark Passenger really is a separate entity--in fact, it's the Big Bad, the First Evil, a thingamajig as old as time. In the plot, Dexter and his Dark Passenger go toe-to-toe with another guy who has his own Dark Passenger. All well and good so far, and having the second killer be convinced that he's the vessel of a Dark God is an interesting idea. Even having Dexter consider the possibility that he's right could certainly work. Lindsay's fundamental errors, IMHO, was putting in non-Dexter-Narrated sections, making it 100% clear that the Authorial Voice's unequivocal position was that the Dark Passenger really is a separate thing that's existed since the beginning of time. Because, honestly.

The interesting thing about Dexter as a character is that he's a sympathetic figure who kills people and enjoys it. Taking him out of our real world and putting him in a contemporary fantasy setting undercuts the entire premise.

Dexter in the Dark was written in 2007, so it'll be interesting to see if Lindsay writes another Dexter novel--and if he does, whether he continues with the whole first-evil thing, or pretends it never happens.

I'm a little behind--look for writeups of The Tales of Beedle Bard and Laura Lippman's newest novel shortly.

Mr. Monk in Outer Space, and Germany.

Another twofer today, folks. I read two of the Monk media tie-in novels by Lee Goldberg: Mr. Monk in Outer Space, and Mr. Monk Goes to Germany. These are original stories--that is, not the same plots as an episode of the show--but read very much like watching the show. (They don't take much longer to read than it takes to watch an episode of the show, either.)

I've heard that Lee Goldberg is kind of an asshole, but I've been avoiding learning more because I do like reading the Monk books (he's the only one that does them--unlike, say, the Star Trek novels, which are farmed out to a team of writers). My vaugue memory of the scandal that I tried not to learn about is that he has some kind of a chip on his shoulder regarding fanfic writers--which, considering he makes his living writing stories based on a TV show, is either ironic or completely understandable. Dunno, maybe he's afraid of someone else getting on the Monk-novel-writing gravy train.

Anyway, in Monk in Outer Space, Monk does not actually go to outer space. Instead, he investigates a murder that happens at a convention for fans of a thinly-veiled Star Trek standin called Beyond Earth. Now, viewers of the Monk show (hi, Sandy!) may remember that they did a fandom shoutout episode, called something like, "Monk and the Biggest Fan" or something like that. (Yes, I'm too lazy to google up the actual episode title.) The episode is a cruel but accurate look at fangirls and their habits. For instance, the biggest fan--played by Sarah Silverman--makes dioramas of Monk episodes, where he is played by a Ken doll, and Natalie by a troll doll, in a cruel but clever gloss on how female characters are always hated in female-dominated fandoms. There are lots of other clever little details that show that whoever wrote the episode has actually observed how online fandoms work--not just the obviously geeky stuff, but also the interpersonal dynamics. This is not a flattering portrait of fandom--there's no "fair and balanced" opposing view; the Silverman character has no redeeming qualities and exists only as an object of mockery. But it goes beyond the cliches of how fandom is portrayed in mainstream culture, to make jokes that would only make sense to someone with inside experience of a fandom (not necesarily Monk fandom--I'm not in that one, so I don't know if there were in-jokes. I really hope the Silverman character isn't based on an actual BNF, though, because wouldn't that be awful?).

The protrayal of fandom in Monk in Outer Space, on the other hand, is at the same time more symapthetic and more shallow. Goldberg points fingers at how Beyond Earth fans wear funny costumes, pay outrageous amounts of money for thrity-year-old boxes of Beyond Earth cereal, learn a fictional language used in the show, live in their parents' basements....you know, the usual. If you've ever watched an episode of any mainstream TV show that used a science fiction convention as a plot point, you know what aspects of fandom are lampooned in this book. Monk, oddly enough, views the Beyond Earth fans as freaks (in other words, just like everyone else), while Natalie provides (also fairly standard) opposing view: fandom gives dysfunctional people a sense of belonging! Something that's further emphasized when we find out that Monk's brother Ambrose (the one who never leaves his house) is a Beyond Earth fan, and has written several books on the subject. There's a murder, of course, and Ambrose's encylopedic knowledge of the show provides a vital clue. Yawn. While the novel, unlike the episode, makes an effort to understand fandom, and to show it in a positive light, it's clear that the novel's audience is mainstream readers, who know little about fandom beyond the same cliches that the book deploys. (Which is a little weird, when you think about it--a non-fannish, mainstream media consumer is more likely to see the episode than to read the book. But it probably comes down to Lee Goldberg being kind of a douche, and contemptuous of fandom to boot.)

Monk Goes to Germany involves Monk's therapist going on vacation to Germany, and Monk stalking him there. (Natalie goes along with it out of revenge for the therapist failing to discourage Monk from trailing her on her vacation to Hawaii, which Goldberg wrote about in--you could probably guess this--Mr. Monk Goes to Hawaii.) Naturally, he discovers a murder there. There's also some stuff thrown in there about Trudy's murder, which we know isn't going to go anywhere because it's a tie in. If Monk was actually going to solve his late wife's murder, it would be on the show.

In closing, I wish I knew how people get tie-in-writing gigs, because it seems like it would be very easy. Just like writing fanfic, except you can't put in any sex. And it can be a little more trite, because anyone who criticizes you must be OMG jealous! (Which I am.)

Kitchen Confidential, Deja Demon, Extras

I have three books to blog about today--not because I fell behind, but because I was reading two books at once, and then read Extras at the bookstore today.

Kitchen Confidential is that guy who wrote about why you shouldn't eat fish on a Monday and how restaurant workers say "fuck" a lot. Remember him? He made a big splash back when the book first came out. It was fairly OK--I think the author (Anthony Bourdain) is a little too in love with his own bad-boy, "Oh yeah, I cuss a lot, like knives, and did I mention I used to do heroin?" self-image. He professes in the introduction (new to the trade paperback edition, written after the hc was a smash success) that he was tewtally, tewtally shocked to have become famous for the book, but you can kind of tell he was sort of hoping for it. But I have such a knee-jerk hatred of pretentious assholes, that I think the fact that I read him as one says more about me than it does about the book. The guy really does care about food, which counts for a lot in my estimation. Many of the chapters read like magazine articles--the front matter doesn't say they were previously published, but they might be anyway. That would explain why he repeats himself so much (not just the heroin thing, although I swear he mentions that in every chapter). I did enjoy the chapter about eating in Tokyo, so I might give his next book, which seems to be about eating in various countries, a try. Although if he mentions how he used to do heroin more than once in the first 50 pages, I'm throwing it across the room. (Special note: if you click on the link above and act fast, you could buy my very own copy of this book! Exciting, huh? I will be happy to sign it for you.)

Next up, Deja Demon. This is the book I picked up to read some of whenever Mr. Bourdain got on my nerves too much. It's fourth in the series about Kate Conner, Demon Hunter. Kate lives in San Diablo, California, and--as her titles suggests--she fights demons. It sounds awfully derivative--and it is--but the author makes one relatively minor change that makes these novels read like something more than Buffy fanfiction with the serial numbers partially filed off. Kate is over thirty, so instead of fitting in fighting evil alongside high school, dates, and homework, Kate juggles fighting evil with running errands, keeping house, and throwing dinner parties to help her husband's political career. Instead of hiding her secret identity from her parents, she hides it from her husband and children. She did start demon-hunting as a teen, but gave it up to start a family. That worked out for her for longer than you'd think (if you're at all genre-savvy), but when demons coincidentally (or not...) show up in the very town she chose to raise her family in, she has to pick up her old job. She resists the call, hoping to have a normal life with her husband and kids, but (here the genre-savvy will not be disappointed), eventually realizes that the world isn't going to save itself, and her husband and kids live in the world, so she doesn't have much of a choice.

By book four, she's assembled a multi-generational Scooby gang, including her best friend-slash-neighbor, an older demon-hunter who poses as her late husband's grandfather, the reincarnation of her late husband, and her own teenage daughter. (Her husband and toddler son are still in the dark about her activities.) In this installment, a demon she encountered in her past comes back to haunt her--this time, with zombies! In this series's mythology, zombies can be stopped only by dismembering them--but once dismembered, the individual parts remain mobile. This special feature is used both for drama (when a zombie hand tries to strangle Kate's daughter) and comedy (when a different zombie hand runs across the floor during a dinner party). Lots of zombies in this book.

Finally, Extras. YA novel. Extras is a--well, an extra, 4th book added on to Scott Westerfield's Uglies trilogy. Uglies is set in a near-future world where at age 16, everyone recieves cosmetic surgery to make them beautiful, and moves into a city where all the beautiful people have nothing to do but hang out, go to parties, and wear nice clothes. Oddly enough, the beautiful people also seem much more vapid and shallow than they were before their cosmetic surgery. What I thought was interesting about it was just how effective the setup is as an extended metaphor for smart pre-teens' hopes and fears about young adulthood. (Smart pre-teens, of course, are the audience for YA novels. Actual teenagers don't read them.) The Pretties have a glamourous lifestyle, unfettered by the rules that constrain the under-16 Uglies, but newly-minted Pretties become so wrapped up in this lifestyle that they lose all interest in friends who haven't turned 16 yet, and in the activities they once loved. Similarly, smart pre-teens in the real world may long for the freedom of slightly older siblings, but fear becoming boy-crazy and obsessed with appearance.

Of course, in the series, it's all a massive conspiracy. (Spoiler: the Prettifying operation also includes brain surgery to reduce imagination, motivation, and intelligence.) The main character (not-coincidentally, a 15 year old whose best friend has just turned 16) uncovers the conspiracy and reverses it.

Extras takes place a few years later, and has a new main character. She, too, is 15, and is stuck on the outskirts of the new system, where luxury goods and other perks are distributed based on popularity index (called "face rank" in the novel). She learns about an exciting and mysterious clique of girls who don't care about their popularity index, and--in keeping with the rest of the series--uncovers a massive conspiracy.

It's better than I'm making it sound. The setting is imaginative, and throughout the series, the characters' personalities and motivations are realistic.

The Wordy Shipmates

So far, I'm doing a great job on this "blog about every book I read" thing--I finished The Wordy Shipmates two days ago, and here I am blogging about it! I think as long as I blog each book before I finished the next one, I'll be OK. (The next book, Deja Demon, is a pretty quick read, so I had to get moving.)

I've read most of Sarah Vowell's books--I skipped the one about listening to the radio. This one is about the Puritans. Early in the book--or maybe later in the book that I think; I can't seem to find it to quote properly--Vowell tells an anecdote about how when she's at parties, someone inevitably asks what her new book is about. When she says "The Puritans," her interlocutor inevitable rattles the ice in his bourbon glass and says, "Fun."

Oddly enough, however, The Wordy Shipmates is fun (well, except the parts that are about women and children being burned alive). At times, Vowell writes about the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony as if she's gossiping about people she and the reader know personally. In between those bits, however, she also traces how the Puritans are still with us today--particularly in the idea that Americans are God's chosen people, with a moral responsibility to go over to other people's countries and show them how it's done. (The colonists' logo shows an Indian man--holding a bow in one hand and an arrow in the other, and wearing what looks like a shrub around his waist--with a speech bubble saying, "Come over and help us." The Puritan colonists helped the natives in part by burning down a village while the men, women, and children who lived there were asleep in their homes. But a not-compeltely-unrelated group of Indians had killed a white guy--a drunken sea captain that the Puritans were going to execute if he showed up in their colony again--so that's OK.)

There are a couple of good chapters about Anne Hutchinson--if you're like me, the name rings a bell, but you're not totally sure who she it. You might also have her mixed up with Anne Bradstreet, but they're totally different people who happened to share a first name, a gender, and a town. Vowell wrote Shipmates largely from primary sources--diaries, letters, sermons, and so on. Here's what Winthrop--governor of the colony--wrote about the Hutchinson family when they got off the boat: "'a man of a very mild temper and weak parts, wholly guided by his wife'" (206). There's not much more about Mr. Hutchinson. Mrs. Hutchinson, however, is a mother of 15, a midwife, and a minister (although without the title). She has women over to talk about the Bible--which is all fine and good, until the groups get to be fairly large (60 plus) and to include men as well as women. At that point, the colony's two paid clergymen start feeling threatened--especially since she starts hinting around that they're preaching a "doctrine of works"--you don't really need to know what a doctrine of works is, except that saying a Puritan minister is preaching one is like calling a Republican Senator a flaming liberal. Fightin' words.

So eventually they put her on trial, and she keeps asking what she's done that's against the law, and Winthrop keeps giving vague and unsatisfying answers--because, duh, what she's done is have people over to talk about the Bible in her house, which happens to be one of the few things you're actually allowed to do with your spare time in a Puritan colony. So Anne totally pwns Winthrop, and she's about to be acquitted, until she decides to bring up, "something God said to her one day when they were hanging out" (229). Yes, Hutchinson thinks that God has addressed her personally, on more than one occasion. He gives her encouraging hints about the future, because they are BFF.

And here's where Vowell is cool. She points out this exquisite tension between Anne Hutchinson, you know, totally rocking as an outspoken career woman who took on the religious establishment and, when they threw her out of their bitchy little club, organizes her weak husband and some other dudes to found a better colony; one where they won't throw you out for talking. (Sorry, that sentence got away from me.) Anyway, the tension between that, and the fact that she's sort of a nutball who believes God directs her decisions, and hasn't it worked out great for us, in recent history, when our leaders have made crucial decisions based on what God puts in their hearts?

Fun fact: George W. Bush is a direct descendant of Anne Hutchinson. Seriously, guys. Unfortunately, he didn't inherit her intelligence or her mad debate skillz. (Hutchinson also, in her role of midwife, delivered a stillborn child with serious birth defects, which Puritans would have interpreted as being God's punishment against the parents. In order to spare the mother having everyone else in town speculate about what sins led to her bearing what Winthrop's diaries describe as "a monster," Hutchinson helped the mother secretly bury the fetus. In other words, she put into practice the belief that a woman's reproductive health is her private business and not the church's or the government's. So it's hard to imagine her giving whole-hearted approval to all of her many-times-great grandson's decisions as president.)

Anyway, it's a good book, and I haven't put in all of the A material by any means. You can check out the intro here.

Book The First

I'm kicking off the YOB with an intellectual treat: Doggie Day Care Murder: A Melanie Travis Mystery. This book is the latest in Poor-man's-Susan-Conant Laurien Berenson's series starring a (originally) single mom who shows Standard Poodles.

Berenson's books aren't quite as substantial as Conant's early offerings, but while Conant clearly jumped the shark a few books back (one of her recent efforts involves her sleuth, Holly Winter, becoming Dog Trainer to the Mob), Bereneson's books haven't suffered a noticeable decline. They're fairly fluffy, light on the actual dog info (unlike Conant, whose character tends to lecture both other characters and the reader about training, feeding, and other issues as they arise in the narrative, with well-rounded characters (at least when it comes to the adult humans) and clever mysteries. They're OK--the kind of thing you might read in the bathtub.

By this particular book, 15th in the series, Melanie has--naturally--remarried. (Because most cozy readers are women, all cozy series have a romance angle--typically a book-spanning arc, where the sleuth meets her romantic interest in book one--he's often a suspect, although he could also be a police officer--and marries him around 10 or 12.) Melanie's romantic interest, Sam, was probably a suspect in Book One--I forget--because he's not a police officer. Just like her, he shows black Standard Poodles. He has no kids, but is a great stepdad to her son, Davy. Davy was, I think, about six at the start of the series, and has actually aged--he's now nine. His age is a plot point, because he's just taken up Junior Showmanship, a development that was foreshadowed in the last book, and nine is the minimum age. He's showing his aunt's 1-year-old puppy, instead of any of the 5 finished champions that live in his house, because none of the older dogs are in coat....except it was established early on that the young dog isn't in coat either, since he just graduated from the puppy classes, so who knows.

I almost forgot--and I have a feeling the author did at times, too--that Melanie and Sam have a new baby, too. A quick check of the book reveals that the baby's name is Kevin. Kevin suffers from a serious case of Suitcase Baby Syndrome--a condition in which children ranging from newborns to toddlers are able to be carried around like so many props, without requiring the parents to change their activities in any way. This condition is very common in fictional children and unheard of in real ones. Kevin is three months old, coincidentally exactly the age of my youngest niece at the time I read it. Now, I don't have any children of my own, but I help my sister out enough to know how the wind blows. When I got to the scene where Melanie is gardening (an activity she narrates that she doesn't even enjoy), while Kevin slept peacefully in his carseat, I laughed and laughed. Every chapter or three throughout the book, Melanie narrates about how tired she is from all the sleepless nights with her newborn--but when he takes a nap, she decides to haul him outside and plant tomatoes? Any real new mother knows that the baby's naps are to be used for sleeping, showering, or any necessary activity that requires two hands--like doing dishes, or--in Melanie's case--grooming her damned Poodles. (A few chapters after the gardening incident, she mentions she hasn't had time to groom them since the baby was born. Holly Winter would rip her a new one.) But I guess Melanie doesn't have to worry about that, because her baby sleeps all the time, whether he's in his carseat, his stroller, his sling, or at home with Sam, waking up only occasionally to coo.

Anyway, as you may have guessed, I found the unrealistic treatment of Melanie's baby to be a bit of a distraction from the actual mystery, which involves one of the brother-and-sister co-owners of a banana stand. No, wait, a doggie day care. (The other thing that bugged me was a scene where Melanie and her Aunt Peg snark about how silly it is for people to put their dogs in doggy day care--"Why have a dog when you don't spend time with it?" they wonder. Obvy, everyone should just stay home with them all day like Aunt Peg and post-baby Melanie do, or take them to work with them, like pre-baby Melanie did! What makes snarkage even worse is that Melanie gets involved with the doggy day care in the first place because her BFF, Alice, wants to send her own dog there while she goes back to work. So, yes, Melanie apparently thinks that Alice is a bad dog owner for sending her dog to this chi-chi daycare so she can go back to work. Faugh.) Anyway, daycare owner gets murdered, his sister is upset, Melanie's friend volunteers her to investigate, pointing out that she has investigated 14 others. Melanie points out that, as a new mother, she doesn't have time to investigate murders anymore, but Alice brings up the gardening incident (seriously) to demonstrate that she can easily fit in some crimefighting around the baby's naps. Which is basically what happens. During the Peril Scene (all cozies have a scene near the end where the sleuth, having just figured out who the murderer is, runs into that very person, who realizes that she knows and then talks about killing her until either help arrives or she manages to escape), the Arrival of Help is delayed until the most dramatic possible moment because Sam had to find a babysitter before he could rush to her aid. After justice is served, Davy participates in his first Junior Showmanship competition, while his baby brother sleeps in the sling at ringside.

I'm a little embarrassed that I didn't plan ahead and kick off the year with something more intellectual, but on deck is Sarah Vowel's Wordy Shipmates, so that'll be a change of pace.

Welcome!

I've been envious of the "I'm going to do something for a year and write about it" trend, so I decided to do one of my own. Since I'm not really interested in anything that might involve discomfort or inconvenience, my Blog Year Project is that I'm going to blog about every book I read all year.

I read mostly mysteries, science fiction, and nonfiction--history, current events, animals, science, crime, etc. I don't read a lot of high-literary stuff, although I do have a few non-genre novels on my TBR pile. Don't expect a straight review of every book--all I'm committing to is to write something that responds in some way to each book I read--so that could be a review, a plot summary, a meandering mess of nothing vaguely inspired by some tangential detail from the book, an interpretive dance, etc.

Exciting, huh? Stay tuned!