A Sheetcake Named Desire by Jacklyn Brady
My housemate decided to read this book, the first in the Piece of Cake series, as part of a 24-hour Save Our Cozies Read-a-Thon. The series is one that has been discontinued after a merger of two publishing houses. I am still not sure why the publishing house has decided to discontinue series, when there are fans of the series. I believe that more choice is always better than less when it comes to books. My housemate had been considering this series for some time and the Read-a-Thon was the spur it took for her to finally get a copy and start the series.
Both my housemate and I are native New Orleanians, and as that was the setting for this series, we thought it was a good series to try out. I often have to remind my housemate that most things set in New Orleans are not written by natives, and many things are written by people who have only visited the city as a tourist for short periods of time. Quick trip and vacation highlight details are enough for people who were not born and raised in New Orleans, but they fail to pass muster with readers who were. So while my housemate always starts out reading books set in New Orleans with what she considers an open mind, the first mention of something not quite right or New Orleans proper does tend to ruin her enjoyment of the book.
This first installment of the series had most of the details correct, though I do still wonder about some of the geography, notably exactly where the Zydeco Cake shop is located. It’s obviously in a remodeled, big house Uptown, but exactly how far Uptown and where is still a bit confusing to me. If I didn’t know better, based on the description, I would say the bakery is located in what was at one time Bultman’s Funeral Home, but I know that’s not possible. The description of the lot fits that location, but the description of the location puts it more likely on one of the side streets among the residential areas between Prytania and Magazine Streets, on the Uptown side of Washington Avenue. The murky location of the cake shop was not the only local detail that stood out to me. At one point in the book, the author describes one of the characters as living in Lakeview, in an area untouched by Hurricane Katrina. The problem with that statement is, having lived in New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina, and knowing people who lived in various areas of Lakeview, we do not know one neighborhood that was completely untouched in the wake of the storm. There were individual houses that were untouched, and some of them were on the same block, but there were not any areas of Lakeview left completely untouched. We know this not only from personal experience, but also because my housemate worked in a law firm that served as corporate counsel for insurance companies, and was one of the lead firms in the defense liaison group in the litigation resulting from the storm. I’m sorry, author, but your facts are flat out wrong on that point.
It may have been a nitpicky thing to notice, but it was something that a true local would notice and an out-of-towner, either a visitor or a transplant, might not have realized. The factual inaccuracies did not seriously diminish the enjoyment of the book, but they did remind us that what we were reading was fiction, and fiction can be manipulated to the author’s or character’s will, with little regard for things like geography and physics.
The story itself was interesting. The amateur investigator chased down red herrings, all the while ignoring the real killer. It was a fun read, and the characters are engaging enough to read the next book in the series. And my housemate is pretty keen to read the next book in the series, just to see if the fictional geography and descriptions get any more accurate, or maybe just to pretend she’s back in our hometown for a while. Overall Rita and the gang at Zydeco Cakes are fun to hang with, but we’re not sure we can call them close, good friends just yet.
One Bear’s Opinion: Four Large Frozen Mint Plum Street Snowballs, eaten in the car parked in the shade on Burdette Street
Happy Reading Everyone,
Oliver
No comments:
Post a Comment