Customer Reviews

Side Effects: A New Orleans Love Story

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

 

 

If Secondhand Smoke proved Patty Friedmann reigning Queen of Black Humor, her new novel, Side Effects, A New Orleans Love Story, presents her as the South's Queen of Compassion. I just met three vibrant new characters whose divisive racial, class and educational backgrounds should have them at each other's throats. Instead, these drugstore pharmacy employees, Ciana, Vendetta, and Lennon, bond together to solve a family murder. Each voice is an original; each character speaks in dialogue grounded in New Orleans. Their talk is street poetry, as unique to this city of soul as Mardi Grai or Jazz Fest. Like reading good poetry, I found myself backing up to savor the spoken syllables a second time. This is splendid reading, a driving narrative, not five stars so much as a small galaxy.

Deborah Reed

My favorite beach read this summer!!!! I fell in love with the characters and the pharmacy stories interwoven into the story were so funny I'm sure they were based on real life patients. Not sure if Patty ever worked in a pharmacy, but she got all of the nuances of the work enviorment, the family atmosphere and the co-dependency of the pharmacy staff with each other (and their patients).

The evolution of integrating all ethnicities into a work enviorment in today's day and time were also very true to life and interesting in this story as the main character (a white pharmacist) has her eye on her pharmacy student (a black man). The pharmacist is also best friends with her black technician and doesn't think twice about pitching in to become part of her family drama in repayment of all of the wisdom her employee/friend has given her with her own family drama usually initated by her upper crust sister-in-law upon the mysterious death of her mother.

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Shortly after reading " Secondhand Smoke " by the same author, I tried this one out. I did not like it as much. There was not enough of a story for me. It just kind of kept repeating things. I would have preferred a better ending than it had. I did enjoy the New Orleans references tremendously. I am a native of New Orleans, but I always wonder about what others would think about a book like this!