Review: Lose the accent!
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 02 24, 2012
Armando's Daughter written by R.J. Blute is a humorous spoof novel set in 1968 about a fifteen year old girl named Cassandra who enlists the help of her enforcer father to murder her mom's boyfriend who is trying to molest her. Sounds a bit heavy doesn't it? Don't worry because it's not. In fact it tries too hard to be "camp", sometimes losing the thread of the storyline. When I started the book I thought I was settling in for a fun and easy read. Instead, the characters annoyed me and the dialogue, often written in the form of a bad Sicilian accent, gave me a headache. It would have been enough had the author given an example of the accent and left the rest up to the reader's imagination.The main character, Cassandra, is a smart-mouthed, tough talking teenager who comes across like a seasoned street walker. I think I was supposed to admire her moxy but instead I just wanted to see someone wipe the snootiness out of her mouth. It is essential, if I'm to enjoy reading a book, that I like the characters, even if I like to hate them. I wanted to like Cassandra but I just could never find anything in her, good or bad, that I cared about. Armando, her father and supposedly terrifying tough guy, is the stereo typical wise guy: flashy, crude, and a momma's boy. Every time I read his dialogue I imagined the mob boss from The Simpsons. The grandmother, Nonna, is not only demented but suffering from dementia, so she is actually more vicious than either Cassandra or Armando.This book is like a bad B-movie. I know that it could be good, even really funny, if some things were tweaked starting with losing the accented dialogue. I didn't dislike the novel so much that I won't read another book by this author. In fact I want to read more because I think I may like them. I just couldn't get my head into this one.