If you're going to write a book, do some research

I managed to depress myself recently by reading This Is The Way the World Ends, a thoroughly researched and remarkably frightening book about the rapid pace of climate change and just how thoroughly screwed we are. I decided I needed some mind candy, a piece of fiction that wouldn't require much thinking at all. You know, a break from reality. I'd check out a mystery, but nothing too dark, something from the Janet Evanovich school of writing instead of James Lee Burke or John Sandford.

For the uninitiated, Evanovich mixes romance and/or sex with the crime and corpses. Her lead characters are young women who manage to stay alluring while eating whatever they want (usually donuts and cupcakes), bumble their way through crime solving, and end up being saved by some dude who is the requisite tall, dark, and handsome (white horse to ride in on is optional). You know, classic female fantasy material. Evanovich also manages to be funny -- if Bob the Dog is involved, odds are there's going to some laugh out loud shenanigans happening -- so definitely mind candy. The mental equivalent of dining on gum drops and Snickers.

My expectations when reading fluff are not especially high. As long as the writing is reasonably smooth and the author doesn't commit too many howlers, I don't feel like it's been a total waste of my time. I'll flinch when I stumble across something that's a blooper, like referencing a cultural icon like a killer car and then saying that Christine was a Ford Pinto when she was actually a Plymouth Fury, but it doesn't matter what you're reading; with most fiction there's going to be blemish or two.

When that blemish turns into a severe case of creeping green crud, a fungus that permeates the entire work, however, I tend to get a tad annoyed. The latest annoyance? Holly Quinn's A Crafter Knits a Clue. I should have known, given the excessive cuteness of the title, but I really didn't expect it to turn into an incoherent hot mess. The first few pages weren't bad.

Then Quinn decided to turn high school basketball into a major plot point. First, she gets the season wrong. She has the sport being played much too late in the school year. Winter is over, daffodils are blooming, people are running around without winter jackets, but it's not even tournament season yet.. In Wisconsin. Let that sink in for a moment. The daffodils are a possibility, especially in the southern part of the state, but it's definitely not the end of Winter yet when basketball wraps up for the year. The Wisconsin state tournament is in mid-March. Maybe she'd never heard the term "March madness"? I can remember March Madness in Madison; there were still snowbanks. Disgusting, melting slushy snowbanks, to be sure, but still definitely not let's run around in just a tee-shirt weather.

Then she makes her teenage character a senior. It's getting towards the end of the school year, he's supposedly hoping to go to U-W on a basketball scholarship, but he hasn't been recruited yet. I used to be a college basketball coach's secretary. I know how this shit works. If a player is worth offering a scholarship to, the college coaches want to see them in action a lot earlier than the end of the season their senior year. They scout kids when they're juniors, sometimes earlier if their names keep popping up in sports reporting, check them out at summer basketball camps, and by the time it gets to be Christmas, they're angling for verbal commitments -- and when it gets to be National Signing Day (February 6 this year) they want the prospective players' signatures on paper. If there are college coaches or their minions at late season basketball games, they're not looking at the seniors. They're eyeballing the younger players and making notes on who to track as a possibility for a year or two down the road. 

There are multiple additional inconsistencies and bloopers in the book. Quinn really could have used a good editor. In one chapter her heroine is described as having a hard time juggling her purse, a bratwurst, and a soft drink but in the next paragraph she does a both thumbs up salutation to a friend -- and then is immediately back to dealing with both the brat and the drink simultaneously. Does she have four arms? The heroine gives out a slew of $50 gift cards for her shop but then thinks that it's a good thing sales were brisk that day because maybe she'll finally be out of the red. The handing out the gift cards made no sense in terms of plot development anyway. It seemed to be tossed in just to emphasize a little more what an extremely nice person Our Heroine is. End result? It feels sloppy. 

I suppose it could have been worse. One thing that grated a bit even if it didn't qualify as a blooper is the heroine refers to her full-grown golden retriever as her "puppy." Over and over. He's a puppy, not a dog, and although I think it's fine to baby talk to your dog regardless of his or her age in the real world it just reads as childish on the page. Not sure why that was irritating, especially when it could have been worse. Our Heroine could have been thinking of the beast as her fur baby.

Quinn apparently has fantasies of this being the first novel in a series. She may succeed in that ambition. Most readers won't pick up on the stuff that bothered me. Her attempts at humor fall pretty flat (she does definitely channel Evanovich, right down to having a good looking police detective as a romantic foil for the heroine), but they aren't offensive, just ineffective. The writing may be sloppy, but it's not hard to read. Readers who less fussy than I am might actually like the book. Stranger things have happened.