Customer Reviews

Fell Down

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

"Is this seat taken?" Those four words started it all. That's when Lenny and Nels met. Lenny Last and Nels Plummer, "It takes two to tango...to tangle too."
Fell last saw Dib in the car with Jack. Now the accident killed Dib but not Jack. Fell was angry, with himself and Jack. Everyone said that the other driver, Lenny Last, was down right crazy, but Fell knew Jack was drunk. The weirdest part of the accident was that before Lenny died he asked Jack to take care of his "dummy". Plumsie was it's name.
"I'm selling the dummy," Jack said. "The damn thing
gives me nightmares. It's cursed anyway. It might have caused
the accident."
The person who Jack sells the dummy to has some relations to the Plummers, and Fell doesn't know how to mind his own business. What will happen, and was the accident really and accident.
I'm gonna be honest. I did not really like this mystery. It was slow. I had to get to the ending to actually like the book. M.E. Kerr's choice of writing was very descriptive. You would have to real a page to get to the point. The book is split into two stories. "the mouth" is the chapters for the story of Lenny and Nels, and the other one is Fell's story and his connection to the "mishap" of Lenny and Nels. Although I did not like it, it doesn't mean you won't like it. I would recommend this book for those people that like reading stuff about possessed dolls.

Too bad this one is out of print, because I really thought it was very interesting. Fell is in a funk, contemplating leaving the school (sorry, blanked on its name) that had previously brought him so much happiness, including membership in its exclusive club, Sevens. He returns to Seaside with Keats, his ex-girlfriend, and becomes immersed in learning about the mysterious disappearance of a former Sevens member from the forties. The chapters alternate between Fell's point of view and that of a ventriloquist's dummy, which is used to provide a first-person account of the lives of the two Sevens members in the past. (Not nearly as dumb as it sounds.) Anyway, the story really was very interesting, and Fell's melancholy is realistic and makes sense in light of what's happened to him in the two previous "Fell" novels. The reason it only gets 4 stars, however, is that I still don't understand how we made the leap from wondering how the Sevens guy disappeared to knowing how it happened--suddenly, Fell was telling us, with no sense of drama to revealing something that had driven us through the book! I like subtlety, but not so much that I have to re-read the book to find out if I was paying enough attention! (I was, it was just vague.)

Fell Down is an ok book, though I personally wouldn't recommend it. The book takes an extremely long time to get to anything interesting. It is very hard to tell who's talking and the point of view. Plus, it has two whole different stories going on at the same time in different time periods, with different people. One has a boyfriend and a girlfriend trying to figure out who the ventriloquists are in the other part of the story. The other has the two ventriloquists trying to steal an extremely famous doll owned by one of the boys' rich sister. Then they chicken out half way through the robbery, and the people from the more modern time find out the doll they were trying to steal had changed its name and look into a famous doll in their time! This book was heavy on description and light on action.

Written By Reid Miles