Revenge? What Did I do to Deserve Revenge?
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Author: Lisa Lutz
Title: Revenge of the Spellmans Genre: mystery Once upon a time there was a family of loonies. This family lived in San Francisco, where it's possible that their looniness might not have been noticed by a populace quite accustomed to eccentricity, except that they were demonstrably loony by even San Francisco's heightened standards. This is their story, the story of the Spellman family. Meet Isabel Spellman, middle child of three, a Patricia Pan type who has yet to reach adulthood, even though she is well into her thirties. Izzy, as she prefers to be called, is in court-ordered therapy - treatment that, if you ask me, should have been parent-ordered decades ago, but wasn't (her parents need therapy of their own, in fact). Izzy likes to think of herself as a private detective, following in the footsteps of her parents (Al and Olivia). In point of fact, she's less a detective than she is a snoop and obsessively nosy, but that's supposedly part of her charm. As our story opens, however, Izzy is on sabbatical from the family detecting business; instead she's moved out of her parents' attic and is currently plying the trade of mixologist in her favorite local pub. This being a "detective" novel, Izzy - of course - takes on a case anyway, sort of easing back into business. A friend of a friend asks her to investigate his wife, who's been behaving strangely of late: the usual unexplained absences, expensive clothing and jewelry that don't appear on the family credit cards; all the things that scream "affair!" to a worried spouse. Izzy will eventually spend more time trying to figure out why a second detective agency is already on this case than she does in figuring out what's going on... Her freelance investigation isn't much of a case at all, to tell the truth, but then this novel isn't really about detectives: instead, it's about family dynamics and relationships and learning how to grow up. I'll save you some trouble here, however: the dynamic of the Spellman family, never stable in the first place, changes not one bit in Revenge of the Spellmans; neither does Izzy's relationship-challenged life get sorted out in the least. And, most important at all, no one - not Izzy, not her goofy 16-year-old ("sixteen and a half!") sister Rae, nor her parents - grows up even a teensy bit. So much for growth. Pbbbbbbbt. Lisa Lutz's third Spellman novel (after The Spellman Files and Curse of the Spellmans) breaks no new ground in Isabel Spellman's maturity-challenged saga. It breaks little new ground at all, in fact - Isabel continues her obsession with everyone else's business; teenaged Rae continues her obsession with junk food, bad television, and a forty-five year-old cop; and (perhaps worst) Lutz continues her arch "footnotes," bottom-of-the-page asides to the reader that mainly exhort one to read the previous two "documents," as she calls her novels. The "mysterious" portion of the novel (mainly surveillance of the wife's odd behavior) could have been compressed into a short story, and a subplot about a rival detective agency's involvement in Izzy's "case" adds nothing other than a bit of intra-Spellman family tension. I can sort of understand why the Spellman series is popular: it's squeaky clean (no sex, no profanity, no gore), and it's not intellectually taxing; features that make for books that can be read for pure entertainment - your call. I, on the other hand, prefer that my entertainment reading give my brain a little exercise. I've always thought I was reading lightweight, escapist stuff; but this sort of book has me rethinking my assessment. Or perhaps it's just that I find Lutz's relentless chirpiness and those incessant footnotes referring her readers either to "the appendices" or to the previous novel ("now available in paperback") a little too much to take on an empty stomach. Whatever the case, sorry, Ms Lutz, Revenge of the Spellmans does nothing to make me "eagerly await" the next installment in the series. This one doesn't even rise to the level of "cozy." all content copyright © 2014 by scmrak
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