Death by Darjeeling by Laura Childs
Grade: C+
I love tea. I love cozy mysteries. So I thought this would be an ideal book. But what I got was a primer on how not to write a book. For example, I would not want to…
- Switch back and forth between points of view.
- Describe characters’ clothing in extreme detail.
- Relate factual information as if it came from (or were going into) a textbook.
- Spend so much time on the background that the foreground gets lost.
- Use slang in sentences where it is completely inappropriate.
- End chapters with anticlimactic sentences.
This story about a Charleston teashop owner who investigates a murder isn’t horrible, but I believe you’d be more satisfied buying a nice Darjeeling to sip while reading some other book.
The Puzzle Lady vs. the Sudoku Lady by Parnell Hall
Grade: B-
I bought this book because I am a puzzle lady and I wanted to read about myself. I was disappointed to find that I was a smart but cranky old lady who wasn’t very kind. Geez. Maybe the author really was writing about me. The cranky part is certainly accurate! 😉
The story is complicated and not particularly interesting, but I will try to give you some idea of what it’s about. The basic premise is that Minami, a sudoku constructor from Japan, comes to America to challenge Cora, the Puzzle Lady, to a crime-solving contest. Cora isn’t interested but ends up in a competition with Minami anyway. People die. Puzzles give clues. Yada yada.
There are four puzzles in the book: two crosswords and two sudoku puzzles. The crosswords are actually pretty good. The beauty of crossword puzzles is that each one is unique, so there is something to be gained by solving those that you come across. Sudoku puzzles, on the other hand, are all pretty much the same. Some are easy, some hard, but they all solve the same way and so I did not feel the need to do these particular puzzles.
One thing that particularly bothered me about the author’s style, and that I have seen elsewhere but never in such abundance, is dialogue with no cues to indicate who is speaking. You have to assume that the text in the first set of quotes is the first speaker, the second is the second speaker, the third is the first speaker again, and so forth. That’s fine for a while, but it is possible to lose track of who’s who if the dialogue goes on for a long time. And with nothing but incessant talking, you can’t visualize the story anymore, the characters sort of fade away, and the words are just echoes in the dark.
So I guess you could say that both books taught me about what to avoid as an author. Well, thanks for the lessons, y’all, but I’d really enjoy reading a good, modern cozy mystery for a change. Where, oh where, can I find one?