skygiants

I hit one of those protagonists recently; she's clearly meant to be eccentric, and the author's choice seem wholly purposeful...but the result is a protagonist who makes me wonder why the other characters put up with her on a daily basis, because she is Just That Difficult.

The book in question is Elementary, She Read by Vicki Delany, first in a cozy mystery series about Gemma Doyle (only distantly related to Sir Arthur), English-born operator of a Sherlock Holmes themed bookshop on Cape Cod.

Although Gemma never describes it as such, her protagonist's superpower is that she has precisely the same knack for hyper-precise observation and deduction as does Holmes in the Conan Doyle stories. She can micro-read body language, identify accents at the drop of a syllable, extrapolate accurately from miniscule details of a target's wardrobe, and -- if forced into culinary duty by her best friend, who runs the tea shop next door -- will ask for a ruler to make sure the sandwiches are exactly two inches long by 3/4 inch wide.

The trouble is that Gemma's first-person narration (obligatory, since this is a modern cozy and that's become a Rule) makes her come across as alarmingly and unattractively self-centered. She can't resist correcting other people's imprecisions ("What high tea? Oh, you mean afternoon tea. You really shouldn't get those mixed up."), and imposes shamelessly on friends (finagling a last-second dinner reservation at the most crowded seafood place in town). So when she gets herself involved in a murder connected to the rarest possible Holmesian artifact -- an 1887 Beeton's Christmas Annual -- rather than admiring her deductive instincts, I kept wondering when she was actually going to get arrested for interfering with the police investigation.

One further complicating factor: certain aspects of the writing make me wonder if the author intends Gemma to be perceived as some flavor of high-functioning autistic, which would explain what sometimes comes across as a lack of personal filters where her dialogue is concerned. But the text gives absolutely no overt cues in that direction to the reader, so one can't really use that theory to mitigate Gemma's general lack of likeability.

Which is frustrating in the extreme, because as far as the mystery itself is concerned, Delany supplies a sharp, clever plot, a comfortable and convincingly drawn setting, and a likeable cast of supporting characters. It's just that I spent most of the book shouting metaphorically for Gemma's friends to stage an intervention on her behalf, and I'm not much interested in sticking around for more books (there are four or five at this point) in which they don't call her on her BS.