I read bad novels so you don't have to (unless you want to)

[lizbee]

Best thing about working in a bookstore: publishers supply reading copies of some novels.  Which is to say, happiness is not having to pay to read the new Kerry Greenwood novel.

Oh yes.  She has a new one out.  Her first new release of 2007, actually, and since she normally churns out two a year, I did wonder if this might not be a cut above the rest.  But no, she never changes, not even to improve.  Either that, or my immunity has been weakened by lack of exposure to her idiosyncratic prose.

Trick or Treat is one of the Corinna Chapman series, the adventures of a crime-solving baker and her posse of cutesy middle-class bleeding-heart-liberal busy-bodies.  Fans of the series will be pleased to know that nothing has changed -- the skinny girls are still interchangable, the Classical scholars are still kindly and eccentric, the dominatrixes are still, um, dominant, the gay couples are creepily co-dependent and the pagans still don't use contractions.  Nothing changes in Greenwood's Melbourne.

I'm only up to page fifty yet, though, and you can be sure that I'll keep the internet apprised of any significant developments and sniggerworthy prose.  Oh Kerry, how I've missed you.

Comments

[lizbee.livejournal.com]

Er, yes?

[drakyndra.livejournal.com]

I am staggered into wordlessness.

(Context: You do recall what fa11ing_away's name is, right?)

[lizbee.livejournal.com]

OH RIGHT.

I hadn't actually made the connection!

[drakyndra.livejournal.com]

I sort of want to read those books now, just so I can spend the entire time laughing my arse off at the mental images.

[lizbee.livejournal.com]

It's like ... imagine a series of crime novels written by a nice, not too bright LJ user who thinks she's smarter and more rebellious-against-society than she is. But you keep her on your flist because she posts great recipes, even though she was really annoying during Strikethroughgate and thinks she's avant garde because she says the Malfoys are just misunderstood.

[drakyndra.livejournal.com]

That sounds like what Mina de Malfois would have been like pre-BNFdom.

[lizbee.livejournal.com]

*stare*

Actually, it's uncanny. I mean ... wow.

Gosh.

[neadods.livejournal.com]

Y'know... that's not a bad description of her prose style. She's not as edgy as she likes to think she is, she's got no grasp of balancing narrative tone, and the Phryne Fisher stuff is classic, classic marysue all the way.

[fa11ing-away.livejournal.com]

I object!

[drakyndra.livejournal.com]

We need to go to a bookstore together, and start reading bits to one another.

[fa11ing-away.livejournal.com]

But what if I'm scared of what the books may say about my secret double life? *wibbles*