X NO X
This book croaked!
The narrative and characters were dead, dead, dead.
Should I just check the thesaurus for synonyms for "tedious" because I might overuse the word in my review? (Actually I am afraid that if I looked up "tedious" I would probably see "Frog Music"!!)
If only I had checked and seen the rather long appendix. It made far more interesting reading that the drivel presented as fictionalised history ... but sadly by then I had more than lost interested in it all.
If only women dressing as men, or burlesque dancers engaging in raunchy sex made up for a boring storyline. And making that storyline chronologically fractured did nothing to add to the mess. Either did the insipid snippets of song lyrics. Or the blathering conversations.
I love San Francisco and I love a a book with a strong sense of place. Possibly the problem here was that it was so try-hard ... it tried hard to get in so much history that it seemed like a cut-and-paste from research notes, just point-form trivia. The feeling was missing : the feeling of being there, feelings for the welfare of the characters.
