My friend, Bonnie, loves getting books for Christmas, but only if somebody gets murdered in them. In other words, mysteries and mysteries only. She reads dozens of them a year. So, she was particularly incensed when a friend gave her "Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures," a book about a woman who becomes an actress in Hollywood. The gift was from someone with a doctorate in philosophy and seems to have been picked up off a new book table without the slightest thought about the recipient.
Anyway, her reaction made us want to pick up the book and see what it was really like. Well, it came under a great deal of fire as the prose was decidedly underpar. We all took turns opening to random pages and within three or four sentences, we discovered that the author had penned something laughable. The first was on page one and went something like: Cherry County, so named because of the cherries that grew in the county.
Then the title character's son, Junior, was found "scampering" up to his mother and wrapping his legs "against" her waist.
Perhaps the best was an entire paragraph of how our heroine had been forced to sleep in a closet without a door. There was a curtain to provide a little privacy, but it picked up all the smells of the awful mystery meat being cooked in the nearby kitchen. Such hardship made her long for the day when she could have a door of her own, one "made of real wood."
Of course, as I look on the Internet, the book is getting fairly decent reviews.
