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MUMBO GUMBO
by Jerrilyn Farmer
William Morrow, February 2003
256 pages
$19.95
ISBN: 038097889X


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

What an excellent book for Jerrilyn Farmer to make the transition from paperback original to hardcover! All her faithful readers will find the elements they have grown to love, while readers new to the series will have no problems picking it up at this point. (They will, of course, then want to go back and read the earlier ones.) Ms. Farmer holds a magnifying glass up to Hollywood and show business and depicts their eccentric foibles and curious idiosyncrasies. Add characters empathetic enough that readers will care what happens to them and you have a recipe for a superb time of reading.

Madeline Bean, caterer to the stars, is preparing for the wrap of a very popular television game show, Food Freak, when the network decides to air one more episode. Everything is thrown into chaos including Mad who has no jobs waiting for her after this one. However the head writer seems to have vanished and the producer offers her the short-term job of filling in for him. Of course, Mad cannot just ignore a missing person, especially when so many people seem concerned. A vandalized office and another disappearing writer simply press Mad to continue her investigation while writing frantically for the final episode.

Game shows are apparently in a class all their own and Ms. Farmer is ideally positioned to demonstrate their peculiarities for she has been a writer for several of them. Therefore the reader acquires a great deal of extremely fascinating information about how game shows function back stage and how cutthroat the business actually can be. As an aficionado of Jeopardy, I was captivated by the idea of game show as metaphor for life as we would like it to be much as crime novels present the world as we wish it were. There are also some extremely interesting snippets of Hollywood history woven into to the plot of this story, for the collection of buildings where the show is conceived and taped has a long history in the making of motion pictures. All of these things added to an intriguing story create a very fine book.

While the characters, for the most part, are quite pleasant and enjoyable, life is not always what it seems and there is a decided edge to events. Those mean streets still exist in Los Angeles and sometimes even a caterer must walk up them in search of the truth.

However this is still a very amusing book. It is my kind of humor, that which grows out of a character or a situation and not the sort the demands other people as butts for jokes. Mad can laugh at herself and we can join her as she gently points out how ridiculous much of this world she has fallen into can be.

An intriguing plot, sympathetic characters, humor that includes rather than excludes the reader combine with secret rooms and missing writers, lions roaming the back alleys, show business people desperate to succeed, and sadly death all combine to create a very readable most enjoyable and extremely intriguing novel. Learn while you laugh (or at least giggle) and enjoy while you ponder the strangeness of the world of entertainment.

Reviewed by Sally A. Fellows, January 2003

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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