Sometimes even I can be funny. It's a stretch, but it does happen. Here is an excerpt in which I make the same complaints in the rant (thankfully deleted) and then go on to actually attempt to be funny. Ms. Phillips is a very nice lady; she sent me back a copy of a newsletter, with a note written on it, which, considering how obnoxious I am, I figured amounted to quite a complement. Here ’tis, a beadstringer's take on Nobody's Baby:

...These are quibbles, however, and I'm neither a statistician nor an author, so you could probably make a good case for dismissing them. Now, I knew I was going to enjoy the book when Jodie marveled at all Georgia O'Keefe's flower pussies. And after the “equations all over the house like mouse droppings” which I thought the most vivid image in the book, my favorite scene was the one with lucky charms. However, there's a problem with it.

Harriet Vane, no doubt expressing her author's sentiments, explained to Peter Whimsey that whenever one of her readers caught an error in her mysteries (and nine of ten didn't notice, she pointed out) she'd write a polite letter explaining that she'd fix it in the next edition (and then never did). Romances ought to be exempt, but I just couldn't resist: though I string beads for a living, I get my jollies, among other ways, by sorting things. Nothing makes me happier than a big jar of garage sale beads and junk all mixed together, bought for a song, in which I hope to find a few treasures. I thought it would take me about fifteen minutes to sort the marshmallows out of a box of lucky charms. Fifteen minutes times five boxes would yield a little over an hour's work, not four.

So I asked my husband to buy the biggest box he could find (20 oz), which he did, though he had trouble finding it, since he remembered the cereal being a Kelloggs product. I also remember those ads from my childhood, and I know there were four charms—hearts, moons, clovers, and diamonds? From the time I started hunting around for an exacto knife, opened the box, till I finished the sort took about 18 minutes. (I figure I actually spent about 16 minutes actually pushing cereal around, so my estimate was pretty close.) I couldn't find tape, so I decided to use a hot glue gun. While I was waiting for that to heat up, I sorted the charms into their individual colors, shaking my head: these just weren't the cereal I remembered. Total time, to sort the cereal, fix the box back up, sort each kind of marshmallow into its color: half an hour. If I'd been Darlington I couldn't’ve resisted the temptation to drift given colors: say the yellow and orange whatchamalcallems into the orange stars across the front seats; the blue, rainbow and purple across the back, say, and pink and red over the dashboard, blending one color into the next.

Granted, I didn't do a perfect job: though I sorted out marshmallow bits down to about 5mm, 3 pieces of cereal (since it's neutral colored) got blended in with the more brightly colored stuff. Fortunately, it's much easier to spot the reverse, so I didn't worry about it: even at my level of effort, I still figure no marshmallows got back into the cereal. Formica strikes me as the ideal surface (you sort slick beads on a fuzzy surface, but the cereal is plenty rough, so you'd want something smooth so you could move it faster) but I had to use fabric. I was also too lazy to come up with a really efficient way to get the cereal back into the box, since I've gotten pretty good, over the years, at using my hands to put beads away.

I don't get the impression that Darlington is into a lot of tasks demanding fine motor control (except typing, maybe), but those charms are big—probably 15mm across. Like her, I did the job late (after several sleep deprived evenings, in fact, though I was wound up over guests, not errant spouses), and I'm about her age, and I figure her brains compensate for my experience: we're not talking rocket science, here. (We–that is, my husband, to whom I read the cereal scene, and I–wondered if maybe she should've distributed the contents of the fifth box amongst the other four, because there is a noticeable shortfall, but maybe Jane was counting on Conner not being awake enough to notice. Connor doesn't strike me as the type to count his boxes of cereal each morning, just notice when they start to get down to some minimum for ordering more.)

However, keeping Dorothy Sayer's comments in mind, I don't expect you to revise the book. I wish I had a sense of humor, which is why I enjoyed this novel so much, and I'm certainly looking forward to the next, which your publisher kindly promoted at the end. What humor I can claim to possess is warped (though after reading this you'd hardly need to be told) and it leads me to wonder what sorts of delicious situations will arise from the televangelist's indiscretions. Poor clergymen, they've been the butt of novels since Jane Austen...

But what the dickens do I do with this box of cereal, now?

Very truly yours,

Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.