Watcha Readin' Wednesday

This week's review: What the Lady Wants by Jennifer Crusie.

Yes, another Crusie selection. It’s been a Jennifer Crusie month, what can I say? This book was one of her earlier works (copyright in my edition said 1995) and while I’d say her newer stuff is a little more riveting, it was still a fun read.

Mitch is posing as a private detective after making a bet with his stockbroker peers that he could run a PI Agency into the black in less than a year. His last week on the bet, it’s not looking good for him. Until Mae walks in dressed to the nines and hires him to find the missing diary of an uncle who died of a heart attack, but she insists was murdered (mostly to garner enough attention so he’ll take her case). The story is a whodunnit with a hot attraction mixed in. Mae’s surviving relatives are mob-wannabes and it seems pretty much everybody wanted this particular scheming, swindling uncle dead. The plot is cute, with excellent dialogue. I’d love to come across a Mitch, a man willing to face down multiple cut-throat male relatives for the woman he loves.

It took me some time to read this book on my Sony Reader (6 weeks!). Not because of the writing, but because of the formatting. It seems to be a print book the publisher decided to send out in ebook form as an afterthought. I’m glad it was available, I just wish all publishers would “get” that certain things need to be done to a file in order to make it into an ebook. Once a reader changes their font size, if the file isn’t properly formatted, paragraphs virtually fall apart. The dialogue tag from one character gets moved to the next paragraph, which is the next character’s dialogue. A page gets cut off with only 1 ½ lines of text on it. Or in the middle of a sentence, a paragraph breaks. This makes for very difficult reading. And while the file looks fine in the smallest typeface, publishers really need to plan for the adjusted sizes (just let them try to read a page in the smallest font!). For example, when going from print to ebook, page breaks need to be removed except for at the end of chapters (whereas in a to-print file, the page breaks are all specified).

The book itself, I give a Nice Bang for Your Entertainment Buck - Well worth your time and money. Pass it on to someone who’ll enjoy it and keep the author on your radar. Crusie just keeps getting better, and she was something to write home about from the start. I’m a fan.

Watcha Readin' Wednesday

This week, I’ll review Pigtopia, by Kitty Fitzgerald, published 2005 by Hyperion.

This was another “bargain” book I got on a clearance sale from B&N last January. I liked that it sounded different – fresh.

I was not disappointed. Jack Plum is about as different as they come. Most of the book is written from his perspective. He’s a thirty-something, uneducated man-boy who has a very large head, an abusive mother (who blames his malformation for her being bound to a wheelchair), and a deep kinship and understanding of pigs. Yes, hogs. In fact, between caring for his mother, Jack has created a special place below their house, a walk-out cellar leading to the woods out back, where his pig “tribe” dwells. His pigs are his friends and his family. The only human love Jack has ever known was from his father, who has been gone for years. His mother tells him it’s his fault his father abandoned them. When Jack decides to befriend Holly Lock, a teenaged neighbor girl, things change in ways he’d never expected.

I really enjoyed this book. It took a couple of chapters for me to sink into his jargon and understand him, but once I did, it was amazing. Something like one of those emails designed to show you how your brain can still read with all the letters in words jumbled. This is NOT a romance, in any way. I can’t really call it literary fiction, because, well, I liked it and I don’t generally care for literary pompousness. It’s just general fiction with very deep point of view. Nicely done. A nice change from “the usual” for me.

This book is a Nice Bang for Your Entertainment Buck. Well worth your time and money, but not one you'll have to keep around. Pass it on to someone who’ll enjoy it and keep the author on your radar.

On the nightstand now? Baby, Oh Baby, by Robin Wells.

On the Sony Reader? What the Lady Wants, by Jennifer Crusie

Yes, now that I've got the Reader too, I'll have to do the schizo/balance act thing and read more than one book at a time!

Piper Denna

Romance is sexy!