Curses! Spoiled Again!
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Author: Lisa Lutz
Title: Curse of the Spellmans Genre: mystery At a guess, the Spellman family is never going to be confused with the Cleavers (or, if you're of another television generation, the Huxtables). It's not that they're dysfunctional: that'd be too easy. It's more that they're simply disturbing. There are five of them, though only three and a half still live at home. Eldest child David's a fairly successful lawyer, and youngest child Rae is a high-school sophomore. That leaves middle child Isabel, a.k.a. "Izzy," to form the fulcrum of the family - which readily explains why the Spellman family is demonstrably unstable. The family business is detecting. It's really mostly skip tracing and background work on would-be employees, but hey: it's a living. Problem being that, for Izzy, it's also an obsession - so much so that she investigates everyone in sight, including her family and would-be boyfriends. Cases in point? Her Dad's suddenly started disappearing in the middle of the day and returning a couple of hours later with wet hair. Or the Spellman's new neighbor is clearly suspicious because his name is John Brown - nobody's real name is John Brown... Izzy being Izzy, we can be sure that she'll investigate both her father and "John Brown" - not to mention her brother, her sister-in-law, and her sister. Izzy is nothing if not... compulsive. The Curse of the Spellmans is the second Spellman novel from the keyboard of Lisa Lutz (as she reminds us several times, pointedly informing her readers that The Spellman Files is now available in paperback). I'm quite certain I'm not the intended audience of either book, for the main character and her antics seem to comprise a cross between Bridget Jones and Kinsey Millhone. It's a cross that, unfortunately, seems to retain the worse characteristics of each trope... Izzy Spellman, to put it simply, is "Patricia Pan": the little girl who never grew up. Fortunately, The Curse of the Spellmans seems not to involve anything deadly, or Izzy would have long ago been toast. This girl detective is Stephanie Plum without the brains and V. I. Warshawski without the charm. She's sort of a female version of Bart Simpson. Lutz's writing style lies somewhere between a daily journal and a "report of investigation" that might be submitted by Millhone. There are frequent flashbacks and the occasional flash forward. Much like Marisha Pessl's 2007 Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Lutz copiously footnotes her work. Though she doesn't include a reading list like Pessl, she does provide appendices such as synopses of her relationships with all boyfriends to date (a rather paltry list for a woman who's single at thirty...) The footnotes start off being amusing, but their chirpiness becomes tiresome after a few chapters and finally becomes irritating the second or third time Lutz mentions her newly-released paperback. In the area of character development, Lutz improves on her style: the Spellmans (Spellmen?) are a charming bunch, especially the women (Izzy notwithstanding). World-weary already at 15, Rae is oddly adult for a junk-food junkie hooked on Dr. Who. The family matriarch, mom Olivia, is clearly the iron fist in the velvet glove (Izzy's more the iron brain in the velvet hat). Nonetheless, the family's antics do prove amusing. But when it comes to plotting a mystery, well, Lutz falls completely flat: even as Izzy tracks "John Brown" (in person, or merely as "the Dot" on her GPS screen), the reason for his "suspicious activities" is crystal clear. Too bad Izzy lacks the smarts to figure it out... Unrelentingly lightweight and curiously irritating, The Curse of the Spellmans is in no sense a "must-read" for mystery fans: it's much more a "really-shouldn't-bother." all content copyright © 2001 to present by scmrak
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