Agnes and the Hitman by Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer

Agnes and the Hitman by Jennifer Crusie

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Cranky food columnist collides with hitman while trying to plan a wedding; sparks and flamingos fly.

Fun, zaney. There's no serious internal relationship conflict here, just a shrieking heap of mob enforcers and difficult relatives and frying pans to the head. And flamingos. This book is one half domestic hilarity and one half cartoonishly violent splatterfest, which was a bit odd, I will admit. But having read only two Crusie books, I already know that she is a no-brakes funny lady who has the skill and restraint to spin a ridiculous, so far over the top it's in orbit story like this, and then bring it when it comes to personal insight so subtly that I almost miss it. This time it was Agnes with her anger management and her court-appointed psychiatrist to prove it. And Agnes and her best friend talking to each other like only best friends can, in the middle of all this nonsense and splatterfest, and calmly saying to each other that it's not that they need to kill a man. They just need to know that if they had to, they could. Because they both know that this is the sort of world where it can absolutely happen that they'd have to.

The Bob Mayer sections are not nearly so good, but whatever. Flamingos, cupcakes, making room for angry women, cool.




View all my reviews

A Stir of Bones by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

A Stir of Bones by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Thirteen-year-old Susan slips out from under the thumb of her abusive father through friends and communing with a haunted house. Slight, strange, more horror than fantasy. By which I mean that the supernatural elements feel as though they are . . . extensions? Reflections? Of-a-piece? . . . nearly inextricable from the story of internal psychological strife – the fear and depression and self-destruction. Rather than being moving elements for their own sake. Quibble with my definition, whatever, I'll just change it again in a few months anyway.

Put it this way -- a central character is the ghost of a boy who suicided many years ago, and they find his skeleton in a closet. It's that kind of book.

Two anti-climactic to really get me. I'm confused about why this, out of all of her catalog, is the only title I can find in audio. I'm not intrigued enough to put myself to the extra brain effort of text-to-speeching a novel of hers. (When you must absorb tens of thousands of words in artificial voices every day in professional settings, the desire to do it for leisure basically vanishes. Which is a shame given only a tiny fraction of a percent of the books in the world are in audio, but part of the problem is I'm usually too tired to care.)




View all my reviews