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FAREWELL TO LEGS, A
by Jeffrey Cohen
Bancroft Press, November 2003
288 pages
$19.95
ISBN: 1890862290


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Aaron Tucker does something I've never had the desire to do: he goes to his 25th high-school class reunion. In Bloomfield, NJ - which is right next to Glen Ridge, where I went to high school. I know these guys, or reasonable facsimiles thereof. Having read A Farewell to Legs, I now have yet another reason to avoid reunions.

At the reunion, Aaron is accosted by Stephanie Jacobs, a woman who "looked just as good as she had at 18, which was entirely unfair of her." He spends most of his time with the cohorts of his youth, retelling old jokes, reminiscing, and catching up on the last few decades. Towards the end of the evening, Stephanie gets a call on her cell phone, informing her that her husband Louis (Crazy Legs) Gibson is dead . . . stabbed to death while his mistress is taking a long, hot shower. (One more reason, in my book, to never own a cell phone.)

Stephanie insists that Aaron investigate, even though he reminds her more than once that he is a free-lance journalist, not a P.I.; she uses her influence to have Snapdragon (local competition for Rolling Stone) talk to him and offer him $10,000 for a story on the crime. This is serious money, and Aaron says he'll write the story, and try to solve the crime.

Which he does. I'm not sure that the solution is the most believable ending to this story, but it's theoretically possible and isn't any crazier than the rest of the book. The solution to the "stink bomb in the school bathrooms" mystery takes Aaron much too long to solve, and the most obvious method of solving this crime eludes Aaron far longer than it should have.

I enjoyed this, more than I expected to after having read For Whom the Minivan Rolls, which I thought didn't live up to the hype. A Farewell to Legs is just as good in the good parts, and the bad parts aren't nearly as bad. A very pleasant surprise.

I think the best parts of both books are the pieces dealing with Aaron's home life, dealing with his kids on a daily basis, what middle-class life is really like these days. The shlub-married-to-a-goddess wears thin after a while, but Abby calls him on it in this book, and does a good job of it. There is less detail in Farewell about life with a child who has Asperger's Syndrome than there was in Minivan, but still enough so that the reader knows that Ethan is even more of a challenge than a "normal" early adolescent male child might be. Here is Aaron talking about his daughter:

Leah and her friend Melissa are actually the same person,

but you need two bodies to harness their combined energy.

They're constantly in motion, constantly talking, and con-

stantly together, so whatever one does, the other must

certainly do. There's no arguing with Melissa. Ever.

I remember my "Melissa", and how "joined at the hip" didn't come close to describing us. Cohen has these kinds of relationships down pat, and can write the hell out of them.

The "mystery" is better. Not just a better mystery, but the writing of it is better. If the next book improves as much as this one did, Jeff Cohen is going to be very impressive in the next few books. I look forward to that.

Reviewed by P.J. Coldren, July 2003

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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