Review: Naked Came the Manatee

A new story entry has been added:

Review: Naked Came the Manatee

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http://www.mellophant.com/files/manatee.jpg
TITLE: Naked Came the Manatee
AUTHOR: Brian Antoni, Dave Barry, Edna Buchanan, Tananarive Due, John Dufresne, James W. Hall, Vicki Hendricks, Carl Hiaasen, Carolina Hospital, Elmore Leonard, Paul Levine, Evelyn Mayorson, Les Standiford
PUBLISHER: Ballantine Books
LENGTH: Novel
GENRE: Humorous mystery
COST: $12.95
Off the coast of Miami, a manatee named Booger collides with a pair of would-be criminals and fouls up their delivery of a severed head that looks alarmingly like Fidel Castro. From there, however, things only get weirder, as twelve other Florida writers construct this mystery round-robin style...

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Too bad it didn't work as a cohesive novel...it was a cool idea. I would love to see Chicago writers do this with a Windy City setting! Sounds like it would need someone to give it a stronger framework for the writers to work in, and who knows if they would be willing to do that.

Is it worth reading as individual pieces? Or are they too dependent on each other, plot-wise?

Yeah, it sounds like a cool concept, but it also sounds like the writers may have gotten a little too competitive with one another to see how "wacky" they could get.

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Originally posted by Zuul

Yeah, it sounds like a cool concept, but it also sounds like the writers may have gotten a little too competitive with one another to see how "wacky" they could get.

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Yeah, that's the thing. If the writers are dedicated to making it work as a cohesive story, then it could really work. Maybe egos got in the way. :(

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Originally posted by Sarahfeena

Is it worth reading as individual pieces? Or are they too dependent on each other, plot-wise?

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It would depend on your purpose for reading them individually, I think. To get a taste of an author's style, absolutely. It provides the same sort of introduction that most anthologies do. To be able to appreciate each individually? Maybe not so much. There were a lot of characters in this, some who'd show up for a chapter, then disappear for a few, only to be brought back later by another author but since so many might have been introduced in between, it invariably meant flipping back through to figure out who it was again.

That being said, a couple authors actually managed to make their chapters a little more self-contained than the others. Excluding Dave Barry's chapter (since he was first and didn't have to worry about trying to fit in with anybody else), James W. Hall's chapter, "The Old Woman and the Sea," is the best example of that, by focusing mostly on Marion - the 102 y/o environmentalist - with a cutaway in the middle that actually fit in with the Marion stuff. Only trouble is, his chapter is 5th, and isn't worth the price of the book. Though, you could always check it out of the library, lol.

Yeah, it definitely sounds like a library read vs. a purchase read! Thanks for the extra feedback on it! :)