{"id":741,"date":"2012-09-27T22:25:30","date_gmt":"2012-09-28T04:25:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=741"},"modified":"2012-09-27T22:25:30","modified_gmt":"2012-09-28T04:25:30","slug":"sharon-fiffer-lucky-stuff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/sharon-fiffer-lucky-stuff\/","title":{"rendered":"Sharon Fiffer: Lucky Stuff"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This is really one of the loveliest cozy series around.\u00a0 Fiffer\u2019s prose sparkles, and she knows how to tell a story.\u00a0 All her characters are wonderfully real people, very much like people you might actually know yourself.\u00a0 Fiffer\u2019s main character, Jane Wheel, is uncharacteristically zen in this outing, which I found refreshing.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Jane is antiques picker and<\/em> a fledgling private eye, and it\u2019s her love of \u201cstuff\u201d that has propelled the series.\u00a0 Much like Fiffer herself who collects Bakelite, buttons, pottery and vintage potholders among other items, Wheel\u2019s home and garage are packed to the rafters with her stuff.<\/p>\n

Except.\u00a0 In the last outing, Backstage Stuff, <\/em>Jane was reeling from her separation from her husband of many years, Charley.\u00a0 In this book she\u2019s moved on to selling her house and sending her only child, Nick, off to boarding school.\u00a0 As the story opens the always gently humorous Fiffer is recounting Jane\u2019s struggles with winnowing her stuff down before she puts it into storage.\u00a0 She\u2019s only managed to part with a potholder, which she thinks better of and packs anyway.<\/p>\n

Moving guys rounded up by her pal and partner Tim Lowry pick up her stuff.\u00a0 Her now almost empty house feels sleeker, not her own.\u00a0 As Jane heads out to her hometown of Kankakee, Illinois and a stint of working with Tim and hanging out with her parents for a bit while she rethinks her life, she feels almost free and strangely content.<\/p>\n

A couple of plot turns ensure that Jane is now juggling several part time jobs, one of them helping out behind the bar of her parents’ place, the EZ Way Inn.\u00a0 In almost every book I hope that Jane will spend quality time with her parents Don and Nellie, who are two of the strongest characters in the series.\u00a0 Nellie spoils not Jane, but Jane\u2019s dog, Rita.\u00a0 She\u2019s not sure Jane can handle being behind the bar, but a crisis puts Jane there anyway.<\/p>\n

Jane also agrees to act as an assistant to a B-list celebrity, Lucky Miller, a Vegas comedian who has taken over his former hometown to film a celebrity roast of \u2013 himself.\u00a0 He hires Jane to keep an eye on some mischief that\u2019s going on around his office and to take the place of his temporarily absent assistant.<\/p>\n

The whole town of Kankakee is functioning like Lucky\u2019s reality show, and Jane is drawn into the real reason for Lucky\u2019s return to town.\u00a0 While there\u2019s a dead body the true mystery lies in the past, but what Fiffer really seems concerned with here is memory and attachment, whatever forms those things may take, be it a button or a person.<\/p>\n

At the end it feels as though Jane has found a new spiritual plane to operate from, if that\u2019s not too much meaning to assign to a cozy mystery.\u00a0 In my opinion, it is not, and the last scene in the book had me in tears.\u00a0\u00a0 What a lovely book this is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is really one of the loveliest cozy series around.\u00a0 Fiffer\u2019s prose sparkles, and she knows how to tell a story.\u00a0 All her characters are wonderfully real people, very much like people you might actually know yourself.\u00a0 Fiffer\u2019s main character, Jane Wheel, is uncharacteristically zen in this outing, which I found refreshing. Jane is antiques … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[5],"class_list":["post-741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-americancozy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=741"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/741\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":744,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/741\/revisions\/744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}