House of Blues

Rating:
Summary: The Best Yet!
Review: I have read many of Julie Smith's books and this has got to be her best work! The story is engaging, the characters are rich, the whole book is a treat! If you're not sure whether to try Julie Smith, start with this one. Some of her later Skip Langdon novels get a little far out there, but this one is a gem.

Rating:
Summary: author's trends are disturbing
Review: I have read most of Julie Smith's Skip Langdon novels, and enjoyed some of them. Her later ones are starting to bother me. There are way too many subplots going on, at the middle of this book I had forgotten all about the main thread of the story until the author suddenly brought it up again. She also uses multiple points of view, which works in some books, usually long epic stories, but in a short mystery it is jarring and distracting. I see some reviewers of 82 Desire questioned whether she was also doing racial stereotyping or at least not portraying black characters realistically. To be honest, I wondered about that also, both in that book and House of Blues. I am white and have only had two brief visits to New Orleans, one in 1969 and one in 1995, so I don't have personal experience to draw on. However, it seems to me that if anyone is going to write about something they dont know, or that they themselves are not, they should at least run it by people who do know to make sure the story has some credibility. Based solely on my reading, I also felt many of her black characters appeared stereotyped and two-dimensional. She seems to be trying to draw an all-inclusive portrait of the city and its population, but it would be good to know that readers were getting an accurate picture.

Rating:
Summary: New Orleans
Review: I love Julie Smith books because of the great New Orleans feeling they give. The Skip Langdon books are my favorite.

Rating:
Summary: Big disappointment after New Orleans Mourning...
Review: I loved New Orleans Mourning, so I wanted to read more.
Sorry I did...not that I won't read another Skip Langdon
novel...I only gave this three stars for the main character,
because she's so real and so loveable.

But the editing of this book was a slap-dash job; I got very impatient with the inappropriate character responses: things slowed up when they should have been fast; and vice versa. I found myself doing something I hate to do with a book...skipping ahead just to get it over with.

I'll try Axeman's Jazz next, and if that doesn't work, I'll chalk
it up to someone who wrote one great novel and then, because it was popular, was forced to keep producing work that was a shadow of its original self.