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Melissahttp://www.missmeliss.comWriter, voice actor, dog-lover, and bathtub mermaid, Melissa is the Associate Editor-in-Chief at All Things Girl. To learn more about her, visit her website, or follow her on Twitter (@Melysse) or Facebook. You can also listen to her podcast, "Bathtub Mermaid: Tales from the Tub" at Bathtub Mermaid or on iTunes.

Review: The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove by Christopher Moore

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The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove
The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove
by Christopher Moore
Harper Paperbacks, 320 pages
Get it from Amazon

When I’m reading a Christopher Moore novel, my tv stands, my computer sits unused, and I end up with a stomach ache from too much laughter. I “heart” Moore’s books, and my most recent read of his, The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove, is no exception.

I could explain the plot, but the thing about Moore is that his plots are so preposterous, and yet work out so neatly, that even a concise synopsis gives too much away. Let’s just leave it at this: this is a horror comedy that includes small-town life, drug busts, aging action heriones, raunchy sex, the blues, and a sea monster, and, like my other recent read, Commander Pants’ Whom God Would Destroy pokes a lot of provocative fun at the mental health industry, specifically where anti-depressants are concerned.

It’s an enjoyable read if you like to laugh, but it also makes you think, and really, isn’t that what good comedy should do?

Review: The Ghost and the Haunted Mansion by Alice Kimberly

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Ghost and the Haunted Mansion, theThe Ghost and the Haunted Mansion
Alice Kimberly
Berkley, 304 pages
Get it from Amazon.com >>

I don’t know what the prices of homes for sale in Alice Kimberly’s fictional Quindicott, RI are like, but considering the number of murders in that town, I bet they’re falling. The most recent death occurs in the most recent – to date – novel in the Haunted Bookshop series, and involves an old woman who lives as a recluse being literally scared to death. Local mailmain Seymour Tarnish inherits the woman’s mansion – in the toniest part of town, of course – and that’s when the real hijinks begin.

Pen and her ghostly partner, private investigator Jack Shepard are back on the case of course, though their relationship is a bit cooler than it was in the previous novel. Maybe the author figured out she’d painted herself into a corner with these two, or maybe she merely wanted to focus on plot, but I like them better as a mismatched pair who fight crime, than lovers separated by death…mostly. Of course, some of that coolness may be due to the fact that one of the other characters can SEE and HEAR Jack.

Speaking of Jack, can you believe it’s taken me this long to figure out he’s got the same name as the ersatz leader of the LOSTaways? I wonder if that’s intentional, or mere coincidence – of course there is a spelling difference.

In any case, this was, as always, an enjoyable, entertaining read, if not exactly great literature.

My only complaint? There’s no more of this series…yet.

Review: Whom God Would Destroy by Commander Pants

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Whom God Would Destroy
Whom God Would Destroy
by Commander Pands
Pantsateria, 300 pages
Get it from Amazon.com >>

When an author called “Commander Pants” contacted me asking if I’d read his book, Whom God Would Destroy, comparing it to the often-absurd work of Christopher Moore, whose writing I love, I was a bit skeptical. In truth, I was a bit worried that this book would be fodder for fueling an outdoor fireplace, rather than an entertaining read.

Two chapters into the book, I was happily proved wrong, and even though I began reading it in late October, and finally finished it in January (due to it getting lost in the house, my reading mood changing, etc.), I have to say it was one of the most provocative and funny novels I’ve read in a long time, and you should not assume that the fact that it took me seventeen years – well, seventeen weeks – to finish is at all a commentary on the book itself.

The basic premise is simple: God, calling himself “Jeremy” comes back to earth to check up on us. Of course, life has changed a lot since the robe and sandals days of Jesus, and he has to assimilate everything from fast food to digital information and public access cable. That alone would make any novel entertaining, but then Commander Pants ups the ante, introducing us to patients and caregivers in a mental health facility, and using his absurd tale to confront the very brutal realities of sanity vs. insanity, socially acceptable behavior, and mind altering prescription drugs ranging from “mild” anti-depressants to anti-psychotics.

And that’s all before we find out that the aliens just might be real, after all.

If you want a rollicking good read that really examines the social conventions of mental health, you need to read Whom God Would Destroy.

Tuesday Teaser: The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove.

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On Teaser Tuesdays readers are asked to:

  • Grab your current read.
  • Let the book fall open to a random page.
  • Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page, somewhere between 7 and 12 lines.
  • You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given.

As much as I’d rather be looking at different options for redecorating my kitchen, weighing the virtues of Kohler vs. Grohe, and such, I can’t afford to do more than fantasize right now, which is why I’m in another reading mood. (Note to COMMANDER PANTS: Look for the review of your book later this week. Really.) One of my favorite authors is Christopher Moore, and I’m about to start a novel of his that I bought last summer – or the summer before – and never got around to reading.

So here’s my teaser, from The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove, by Christopher Moore, page 102:

To distract herself from the dragon next door, Molly had put on her sweats and started to clean her trailer. She got as far as filling three black trash bags with junk food jetsam and was getting ready to vacuum up the collection of sow bug corpses that dotted her carpet when she made the mistake of Windexing the television. Outland Steel: Kendra’s Revenge was playing on the VCR and when the droplets of Windex hit the screen, they magnified the phospphorescent dots, making the picture look like an impressionist painting: Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Le Grande Warrior Babe, perhaps.

Booking Through Thursday: Twisty

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On Thursday, January 28th, Booking through Thursday asked:

Jackie says, “I love books with complicated plots and unexpected endings. What is your favourite book with a fantastic twist at the end?”

  1. Do YOU like books with complicated plots and unexpected endings?
  2. What book with a surprise ending is your favorite? Or your least favorite?

Just as auto insurance quote don’t always give you the result you expect, nor do good novels, but it should be noted that a complicated plot means nothing if the characters aren’t well-drawn, and the story well-told. There are great writers who tell fairly simple stories, and great plotters who pretty much suck at storytelling. Given that, however, I do like it when a book surprises me – it doesn’t happen often. I vaguely recall being surprised by Anne Bishop’s Black Jewels trilogy, but I don’t remember if the twists came within the meat of the stories or at the end.

There’s a novel called The Stake that was completely twisty (it’s a vampire novel that opens with someone finding a body with a stake in its heart and moves forward and backward in time until the story is made clear. Richard Laymon wrote it, but it’s nothing like any of his other work…sort of melding classic horror conventions with a true crime sensibility.

And then there’s Possession by A. S. Byatt. Byatt is always difficult for me to read, and I’m not sure why…but that novel’s ending really surprised me, and not particularly pleasantly.

Review: The Ghost and the Femme Fatale

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The Ghost and the Femme Fatale
The Ghost and the Femme Fatale
by Alice Kimberly
Berkley, 235 pages
Get it from Amazon >>

In the fourth installment of the Haunted Bookshop mysteries, The Ghost and the Femme Fatale, Pen McClure and the ghost of Jack Shepherd are once again teamed up to solve a mystery, this time, a multiple murder centered around old Hollywood, a film festival, and (of course) a tell all book about the sordid history of two actors. I don’t like rehashing plots, especially with mysteries, because even the smallest detail can be a spoiler, but I will say that the Jack/Pen relationship in this one moves into new territory – and I don’t mean HAVC filter maintenance – I’m a bit worried, actually, about where this relationship can go, and how Ms. Kimberly plans to address it, or if she does. Fantasy is nice, after all, but eventually Pen’s going to have to live entirely in the world of the, well, living.

Still, the detective duo works. In the dreamscape representation of Jack’s past, he begins to accept her help, and in the modern waking world, Pen is becoming more and more self-reliant, with Jack’s involvement reduced to cheering her on in more than once scene.

It’s refreshing to see Pen, the woman who still uses her dead husband’s name, standing more on her own feet, and even if the mysteries are sort of predictable, the ghost and Mrs. McClure remain compelling.

A word of advice, though: Never fall for a ghost.

Teaser Tuesdays: Cleaving: a Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession

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On Teaser Tuesdays readers are asked to:

  • Grab your current read.
  • Let the book fall open to a random page.
  • Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page, somewhere between 7 and 12 lines.
  • You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given.

Sometimes the most effective diet pill isn’t a pill at all, but a bloody scene involving dead meat and sharp knives. I received Julie Powell’s second book on Tuesday (and why, pray tell, is Amazon suddenly using Velocity Express and requiring signatures?) afternoon, and couldn’t resist peeking at it, even though I have other books in progress, because I loved Julia and Julia, when I originally read it just after it came out in hardcover.

Here, then, even though it’s now Thursday morning, is my “Tuesday Teaser,” from Cleaving: a Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession, by Julie Powell (page 43):

So I’ve told you a little bit about seams, those networks of filament that both connect muscles and define the boundary between them. Now, the difficulty is that seams can be thick, or they can be thin. The seam of a tenderloin, for instance, is very thin indeed, and therefore hard to follow. It’s easy to lose your way, which is apt to make you nervous, seeing as how the tenderloin is the single most expensive cut of meat on the steer, thirty-nine bucks a pound at Fleisher’s. If you lose the seam in one direction you waste tenderloin, and there’s only something like eight pounds of it per animal. If you lose it in the other direction, especially right at the head of the muscle, what’s called the “chateaubriand,” you cut into the eye of the sirloin, another expensive cut, and one that short-tempered chefs won’t buy mangled. Beginning butchers, needless to say, don’t get assigned to pull out many tenderloins.

Booking Through Thursday: Favorite Unknown

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On Thursday, October 29th, Booking through Thursday asked:

Who’s your favorite author that other people are NOT reading? The one you want to evangelize for, the one you would run popularity campaigns for? The author that, so far as you’re concerned, everyone should be reading–but that nobody seems to have heard of. You know, not JK Rowling, not Jane Austen, not Hemingway–everybody’s heard of them. The author that you think should be that famous and can’t understand why they’re not…

I don’t know that any of the authors I read are particularly obscure, but I do think both Kathleen Norris and Lauren Willig are underrated. Kathleen Norris’s most famous work is The Cloister Walk which had quite a lot of media coverage when it originally came out, but her other works, most notably Dakota: a Spiritual Geography tend to be underplayed, and her poetry is just amazing. She’s one of the authors I would most like to meet. If you like poetry, consider a copy of Little Girls in Church.

Lauren Willig, on the other hand, is prolific and amazing. I don’t know what kind of anti aging product she keeps hidden in her bathroom, nor do I understand where she finds the energy to be an attorney and write historical novels, about a book a year, in hardcover, but as a long-time fan of The Scarlet Pimpernel, I was instantly hooked on Willig’s work when I picked up, The Secret History of the Pink Carnation several years ago. The newest book in the series, The Betrayal of the Blood Lily is new this month.

Mini-Review: Decaffeinated Corpse

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Decaffeinated Corpse
Decaffeinated Corpse
by Cleo Coyle
Berkley, 288 pages
Get it from Amazon >>

Let’s face it, the recipes in the backs of Cleo Coyle’s coffeehouse mysteries are not exactly keys to quick trim weight loss, but the reality is, as much fun as the recipes are (and I’ve actually tried some of them) it’s the cozy Village Blend coffeehouse and the adventures of cafe manager Clare Cosi that keep us reading.

In Book 5 of the Coffeehouse Mysteries, Clare is investigating her husband’s friend, a coffee grower and playboy from Costa Gravas, who just happens to be the breeder of a decaffeinated coffee plant – as in, no need to water process the beans. There are, of course, corpses in the story, and the mystery this time seemed a bit trickier than the first four novels, but I also read this one out of sequence, since I reviewed another of Ms. Coyle’s books, Holiday Grind in All Things Girl over the holidays.

In that book, the relationship between Clare in NYPD Detective Mike Quinn had become pretty solid; in this one, they shared their first kiss.

As always, Ms. Coyle’s blend of romance, mystery, intrigue, and coffee suits me perfectly when I want light reading.

Mini-Review: The Ghost and the Dead Deb

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Ghost and Dead Deb
The Ghost and the Dead Deb
by Alice Kimberly
Berkley, 272 Pages
Get it from Amazon >>

Reading about dead debutante’s is not exactly the way to lose weight fast. I mean, skinny rich girls, even when they’re corpses, are hardly good role models. Fortunately, I don’t read Alice Kimberly’s haunted bookshop novels for fitness inspiration, but to be entertained, and this book succeeded wildly in its humble mission.

In this, the third outing for Penelope McClure and the ghost of Jack Shepherd, we have drug abuse, fickle lovers, fashionistas, and, of course, a mystery of how one pretty rich girl became the latest in a pair of connected murders.

As always, while the mystery is enjoyable, the developing Jack/Pen relationship is why I read, and in this installment the friendship between ghost and bookseller continues to deepen.

Am I the only person wishing a haunted bookshop was in my neighborhood?