The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency

The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


A series of unrelated and predictably boring mysteries are solved in a predictably boring fashion by a really unboring detective.

I went back and forth on this a lot. It has a certain light-handed charm; this is a very simple narration with unexpected flashes of emotion beneath, and the protagonist has that unbending quality of people who don't break under grief because it simply wouldn't occur to them. But then again, I think I learned maybe three things about Botswana that I didn't already know, and let's be real here, I don't know that much. Fiction doesn't have to teach me something to be good, but if it is set in an unfamiliar cultural milieu and I don't learn much, something has gone awry. And the real problem – this book is written in that particular distanced third omniscient which renders people less transparent, rather than more. You know, that thing where you spend a book watching people do things and catching edges of their thoughts, but it all has that quality of watching ants in an ant farm under glass. One of my least favorite stylistic choices, basically.




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