Customer Reviews

Lady with a Laptop

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A second-rate novelist facilitates a beginners' creative writing workshop over the summer at a New Age center on an island off the coast of Greece. The center offers courses ranging from orgasmic consciousness, gastric dancing, colonic massages, and shamanism. It is quite farcical with a continuous undercurrent of murder mystery. While the content is often interesting, one is put off by the subplots which are injected frequently throughout the book and then left completely open ended. The author's sense of humor carried much of the first half of the book but the further one read the more flat it fell. The characters you want to hear more about are often under developed and the most boring ones have whole chapters dedicated to them. My biggest issue with the book was the main character. Unfortunately there is hardly a redeeming quality about him. The man has a pretentious air about him to all of his students, then spends the rest of his time lamenting his lack of recognition in the literary world or reducing every woman in the program to nothing more than sexual objects whose worth is based on the likelihood of his shagging them. He comes off as shallow and spoiled, which is not all that attractive on a middle-aged balding Englishman. If the idea is to make a dirty old man the centerpiece of the novel, he would need to be much more likable to generate any sympathy for his fate.

"Lady with a Laptop" is a howlingly funny sendup of the Greek island setting in which Don Thomas leads workshops and, when this manuscript was in progress, treated attendees to excerpts. There we found ourselves practicing the literary craft in sometimes tense proximity to drum-beating, vegetarian wannabe-shamans. The New Wave personalities and spirit of the place are vividly captured and, for extra spice, the author's alter-ego is faced with an entirely fictive problem: the mysterious death of the title character.