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Apr. 6th, 2024 08:23 pmI picked The Appeal up after reading
littlerhymes post about it -- it's a modern epistolary murder mystery told as a collection of emails, text messages, letters, etc. passing between the various members of a dysfunctional community theater group.
The book is set up as a puzzlebox mystery, very explicitly so. The two major plot threads include:
- the troupe founder's ongoing fundraiser to raise massive amounts of money to treat his grandchild's rare brain cancer by shipping a rare experimental drug that may or may not exist in from America and the theater group's variously chaotic attempts to support it
and
- one troupe member's increasingly clingy obsession with the her new best work-and-theater friend, a former Doctors Without Borders volunteer who left her post Under Mysterious And Dramatic Circumstances
Tension on these two plot threads ratchets up to the middle of the book when Someone Dies ....
... at which point the two lawyers who have been sent all this massive pile of correspondence by their boss get sent a set of questions to answer: "who in this correspondence is lying? who is wrongfully imprisoned? who doesn't actually exist?" etc. etc., send a flurry of text messages, send their best guess back, get some things wrong, get a bit more correspondence, and are encouraged to try again. This is all a bit contrived but also very fun; between the structure and the fact that Janice Hallett is extremely good at satirizing a variety of very recognizable Styles of Bad Email, I'm not surprised it's a massive bestseller. The contortions of the plot are pretty absurd and
( spoilers ) but it's nonetheless a an extremely addictive read -- very much like devouring a very long and juicy r/hobbydrama post.
& then I saw that Hallett had also written a sequel, The Christmas Appeal, and laughed so hard at the chutzpah of writing a Christmas-themed tie-in sequel novella to a deeply cynical hobby drama murder mystery novel about fundraising fraud that I immediately got it out of the library as well. It is indeed a lighthearted and silly romp (murder is still involved) and I also had a good time with it while continuing to find the whole premise absurd. Hallett is definitely going to be on my list of airplane reads going forward.
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The book is set up as a puzzlebox mystery, very explicitly so. The two major plot threads include:
- the troupe founder's ongoing fundraiser to raise massive amounts of money to treat his grandchild's rare brain cancer by shipping a rare experimental drug that may or may not exist in from America and the theater group's variously chaotic attempts to support it
and
- one troupe member's increasingly clingy obsession with the her new best work-and-theater friend, a former Doctors Without Borders volunteer who left her post Under Mysterious And Dramatic Circumstances
Tension on these two plot threads ratchets up to the middle of the book when Someone Dies ....
... at which point the two lawyers who have been sent all this massive pile of correspondence by their boss get sent a set of questions to answer: "who in this correspondence is lying? who is wrongfully imprisoned? who doesn't actually exist?" etc. etc., send a flurry of text messages, send their best guess back, get some things wrong, get a bit more correspondence, and are encouraged to try again. This is all a bit contrived but also very fun; between the structure and the fact that Janice Hallett is extremely good at satirizing a variety of very recognizable Styles of Bad Email, I'm not surprised it's a massive bestseller. The contortions of the plot are pretty absurd and
& then I saw that Hallett had also written a sequel, The Christmas Appeal, and laughed so hard at the chutzpah of writing a Christmas-themed tie-in sequel novella to a deeply cynical hobby drama murder mystery novel about fundraising fraud that I immediately got it out of the library as well. It is indeed a lighthearted and silly romp (murder is still involved) and I also had a good time with it while continuing to find the whole premise absurd. Hallett is definitely going to be on my list of airplane reads going forward.