After only a couple of pages I knew I was going to love this book. The first person voice is stunningly individual and I just want to curl up and let Blue McCarron tell me all about her story.

The rest of my comments are taken from a mailing list discussion and as such contain spoilers]

[About Blue and Other Characters]

I’ve only read the first few chapters of the book so far so I don’t want to read anybody else’s replys for fear of spoilers as this is a whole book discussion.

So far I’m really impressed by the individual voice that Blue has. I don’t think a great deal of the plot so far (too many threads going on to draw any conclusions from really, though I like the general rambling effect) but Blue has drawn me in and made me really want to read her story to find out about her.

I can really identify with Blue’s curiosity driven search for knowledge and her requirement for a degree of solitude. I like her though I have a feeling that this might diminish in the course of the book. I certainly think that she’s an interesting enough character for a series (but I guess that depends on how this book ends). I haven’t got any huge ideas about the secondary characters, I think her twin brother is going to define her reactions to things to a degree and I like what I’ve seen of Rox so far, I think she’s the strongest character that we’ve actually seen.

[About the Resolution] I’m aware that other people are tearing holes in the plot and I agree with them for the most part but my answer is still, yes, the resolution worked pretty well for me.

It became obvious that there was either going to be a huge coincidence happening or that the Muffin Crandall affair was going to be linked to the Misha Deland affair. I liked the way it all tied together.

There were several things that weren’t fully explained that didn’t bother me at all. For example, Dan Crandall came to Blue for help - I can live with the idea that there would be a decent non coincidental explanation for this that just didn’t make it into the book.

There were some things I couldn’t find or think of a good explanation for that didn’t involve coincidence. For example, Blue found out about Frankie Lopez from the girls at the detention centre and this didn’t just give her ideas about the case she was involved with but turned out to be directly related to the actual case! If Blue had have got that job via Misha somehow that part of the plot would have worked for me, as it was it was too neat.

There were some things that I thought were a reasonable use of conincidence. For example, that Wrenner had built Blue’s motel didn’t seem too far fetched as we were told he was one of the major players in the property market over a large area.

Also the whole thing involving Misha leaving seemed badly explained. But again I felt that I was missing details from the past that would have made Misha’s actions seem reasonable. Perhaps I’m just forgiving of the author of a book that I really liked despite its faults ;-)

I thought the ins and outs of Blue’s personal life were interesting and I liked the way her own personal crises distracted her from the detection. That she missed the blindingly obvious connection with Carty didn’t bother me. She wasn’t a real detective despite the fact that she’d been employed as one by Dan Crandall so I didn’t feel that she needed to be working on the case all the time or even that she needed to work the mystery out. Although the women did come and explain things to her at the end I thought that most of the mystery was sussed out by then and that we were just getting a summary rather than an undetected explanation.

I liked the way the story with Blue’s family worked. I was pleased that she made up with her twin. I didn’t like her ending up with Roxie though, I wanted Blue to go home by herself and not do the sickly saccharine true love thing a la Jake and Trudy. Yuck. That was the most disappointing thing in the book for me.

[About Blue’s book, sexism etc]

Generally I think there are always potential problems when a fictional character has to be an expert on something. There are two ways that I think this can be made to work. One is that the author is actually an expert on that subject and then the writing tends to feel rather autobiographical. The other is that the information the reader is given is kept sketchy and the reader has to assume that the character knows far more than they say.

I thought Padgett missed the boat on making Blue a believable expert. I found some of the stuff really interesting, like how she revamped the shopping centre to make it more attractive to women, I thought that gave insight into her profession without trying to explain everything she knew to us. But most of the stuff about apes I found vaguely insulting and I wished that Blue had kept the finer details from us. If we hadn’t been told about her thesis/book at length then I think things like Dan Crandall coming to Blue for help would have been more credible.

The idea of a network of women protecting young women was a good one and I think it worked well in the context of the story. I would have liked the book to have been clearer about why they chose an illegal rather than a legal route though. I thought that if there had been an attempt at working something legal first which had gone wrong that the plotline would have been stronger. And maybe that could have been used to explain why Misha had to vanish and why Misha and Carty didn’t just tell Blue all about it to start with.

There were many stereotypes in the book and many of the female ones were as unflattering as the male ones. The book certainly had a female bias but I’m not sure that I’d say the book was sexist. I think Blue had taken her own theories (which are not the same as facts) to heart and we were seeing everything through her eyes. I agree that the male characters weren’t fully fleshed out but I think they were more balanced than many of the female ones. Dan Crandall was shown to have a willingness to change, as was her reformed twin. Her mostly too perfect father had conceived his children in an extra-marital relationship. BB was another reformed criminal. On the female side we saw a nastier aspect to most of the characters, or they seemed to have no bad points at all (e.g. Roxie). I didn’t think that the behaviour of the characters in the book particularly backed up Blue’s theories.