Review: A study in frustration
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 05 8, 2012
The title caught me and dragged me in...  unfortunately the story itself didn't live up to its promise.  There was incredible potential in the premise for a rip-roaringly funny story, and while the plot tried, it just couldn't quite make it.  Plot devices that were supposed to be clever or snarky were amusing the first time they appeared, after that they fell flat.  The premise of a well-known personality having a meltdown in public and being forced to spend some time 'resting' can be found in just about any newspaper at any time, in one form or another.  If the time spent 'resting' was at Aunty Ida's, the possibilities would, theoretically, be endless.Ida starts out as a pleasantly oddball character, and goes downhill from there - her conversations make less and less sense, and her behavior becomes more and more self-centered.  The same can be said for just about all of the staff at her 'institution'.  Margaret, the 'patient', starts out as a relatively unsympathetic figure, and by comparison becomes more and more sympathetic.  The only truly likeable character is Stevie Sr., and he doesn't appear until about 2/3 of the way through, and then in a relatively minor role.  The author seems to be trying to make this story 'about' something, whether it be corruption in politics/government or perversion of justice or a character study, but none of those subplots seems really able to get off the ground.  They're in the background, and you can sense that there are things that should be said, but they aren't able to stand on their own and give some body and substance to the story.I personally found the writing style to be very difficult.  Between Ida's dottiness and Margaret never being sure what was 'her' idea, and what was a result of Ida's experiments on her, their dialogue became a study in frustration - they seemed to know what they were talking about, but I was totally lost in the gray area between fantasy and reality.  That was a recurring issue with this story - the line between fantasy and reality was blurred almost to nonexistence, and the reader never knew for sure if what was happening was 'real' or not.Note on Kindle formatting:  Very poor.  It started out well enough, but about 1/2 way through began to deteriorate sharply.  There were no paragraph breaks between speakers in a dialogue at times.  There were also many, many instances where there were no paragraph breaks (outside of a dialogue) and paragraph symbols were visible in the text instead.  This was distracting, and in the case of dialogue, made an (frequently) already difficult conversation even harder to follow.