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I hate saying that this book was a disappointment but I'm stuck. If it had only had one annoying problem, I would try to be more positive, but it didn't work for me -- and as I liked the first two books and thought them both well-written, this was really a bummer. A dairy farm isn't a setting that interests me, nor does rural Pennsylvania, but Judy Clemens has made the place come alive with Stella Crown. Stella's an interesting character and her life and her friends have come alive in the earlier books. Here, however, it felt like the author ran out of ideas and was rushing to meet a deadline, or this was an earlier book that didn't have all the problems ironed out. Stella is adjusting to a lot of changes in her life, including living without her long-time friend, Howie, who helped her run the farm she grew up on. She has new help with Lucy and her daughter Tess who's currently crowding into the house with Stella, while they hope to rebuild the apartment the two will later live in. She's broken off with Abe, who as it turns out is not the love of her life but remains a good friend. (It helps a lot to read the earlier books to get a sense of everything that's gone before.) It's nearing Christmas, the weather is getting pretty awful. Stella's at a tattoo parlor run by Wolf and his wife Mandy, getting a remembrance of Howie put on her arm. In the middle of the session, Mandy goes to the back of the business and then calls for her husband who goes to see what's wrong. Stella, comfy and tired, falls asleep for several minutes. When she awakens, everyone's gone. Then she learns that Mandy's been killed and no one knows what happened or where Wolf disappeared to. The story's OK but it's thin. And the book has one of those annoying tendencies to offer lots of repetition. Stella goes to talk to someone, then she calls the police officer looking into the crime and reports who she talked to. It's filler; we already witnessed the conversation and I would have liked not to have to hear it again. The rehashes continue as she meets up with friends and fills them in. Every conversation seems to be about the same few topics -- who else could have killed Mandy, why, where is Wolf, and what's the story with the new law that's being proposed about tattooing. Tattooing . . . not my favorite subject either. I think Stella's cool and if she wants to tattoo Howie on her wrist in an ID bracelet, OK, sure, but it's not like she'd forget the guy. I am not someone who thinks sleaze when she sees tattoos -- I've seen ones that are just beautiful. But it's not my thing. And that was disappointment number two -- the heavy-handed lecture-y tone where Clemens seems determined to make sure every reader understands that there are good tattoo people and bad. I didn't need the unsubtle iterations. I still won't consider getting a tattoo -- it sounds painful and not for me. Can I go now? Stella's defensiveness over Nick, a man she cares for, combined with her unnecessary guilt over Mandy's death (apparently Mandy was killed in those few moments she fell asleep -- which again, is brought up at least a half dozen times) is flat-out annoying. OK, she feels bad, who wouldn't? But blaming yourself for something that clearly was not your fault can get tiresome. There's often discussion of how the second book in a series can suffer from 'sophomore slump' and how the promise of a first book doesn't hold. I was surprised that I liked the earlier books in this series and pleased; it's a new world to me. I don't get why anyone would want to run a dairy farm, the endless, exhausting, never-ending backbreaking work, in all sorts of weather doesn't appeal in the slightest to this city kid. But Stella's got a right to her life and she's made clear, good choices to continue in the family tradition. She's torn between being lonely and being independent -- something most of us can relate to. But she was annoying in this tale. In the other two books, the pacing worked. Stella's prickly but prickly is not always a bad thing; here, her passive-aggressiveness about Nick is rude. OK, we get her dislike of his job as a developer -- so all right, then, say your piece, stop dancing around and kick him out. If any one of the annoying bits had been absent from the book, I would have enjoyed it. And I hate saying this, but between the redundancy resulting, I think, from the relative thinness of the plot, along with Stella's all-too-evident guilt and her push/pull behavior toward Nick, I just wanted the book to be over.
Reviewed by Andi Shechter, May 2006
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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