Tuesday, November 07, 2006

That obnoxious girl from that other book


So I read The Year of Secret Assignments earlier this year, and, like everyone else, loved it. Needless to say, I was looking forward to Jaclyn Moriarty next installment. Enter The Murder of Bindy Mackenzie.


Back from her triumphant cameo with her own novel, we find Bindy Mackenzie struggling with a new required course called "Friendship and Development." It doesn't fit into her curriculum expectations, but despite her several letters to the Board of Ed, she decides to try her best and actually get her classmates to like her. It's no small feat as she's given her peers lists enumerating their similarities with rather unflattering animals.

There's something about Jaclyn Moriarty. I hesitate to make a broad statement, having read only two of her novels, but she has a remarkable ability to mask her novels true direction. My friend Cory and I discussed this, and here's how she summarized our thoughts:

...because she seems to be going on one direction and you're down with that, when it suddenly becomes something else. And not in a disappointing "Why did you ruin this good book" sort of way, but in an "I totally wasn't expecting that and I'm even more intrigued and this makes everything up until this point way better" kind of way.


Yep, that's about it. One of these days I'm going to get around to her other books. I really do enjoy this author tremendously.

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