Review: least satisfying Sunday Philosophy Club book
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 10 27, 2012
Was it the slight length? Or just the slight subject matter? I can't really say with precision why I found "The Perils of Morning Coffee" so very unsatisfying. Available only as an eBook, at 45 pages, the work is closer to a long short story than to a novella. What can happen in less than 50 pages? Well, not much. Isabel Dalhousie responds to an email sent by accident, and she ends up having lunch with the email's sender. A distraught wife accuses Isabel of engaging in an affair with her husband, and Isabel becomes exercised over this false accusation. The potential was there; after all, the seventh novel in the Sunday Philosophy Club series,The Charming Quirks of Others: An Isabel Dalhousie Novel (7), successfully mined this very territory. Yet, somehow, Smith never pulls it off here, although I'm hard pressed to identify exactly why.One doesn't read Isabel Dalhousie books for nonstop action, at-the-edge-of-your-seat suspense, or pyrotechnics; however, in author Alexander McCall Smith's deft hands, a novel in which not that much happens can be a sheer delight. Just being privy to the clever and kind Isabel Dalhousie's internal ruminations about our obligations to others can make a novel enjoyable. Yet, in "The Perils of Morning Coffee," there just isn't that much there there -- to paraphrase Gertrude Stein -- even in the philosophical considerations.I'm a diehard Isabel Dalhousie fan, but, unless you've got nothing else to read, I'd skip this one.