I’m hoping she does better on the next one. The use of the irritating dialogue might have been cute in “Clueless”, but it just trivialized French’s considerable talent. I didn’t have any trouble finishing the book, but by the end I was ready to pull out my hair. The mystical touches, (the lights, the spinning bottle caps) which seemed to me most likely meant to reflect psychedelic drug experiences, were neither integrated well, nor explained at all, so who really knows what they were about and should have been left out altogether. Also bogging down the story were a few irrelevant sidetracks. But in my opinion, it was an unfortunate distraction from what should have been and could have been (if severely edited) an important part of this story-the interaction between the students. For all I know, aping Valley Girl behavior is what Irish school girls are into right now.

Fifty percent of the chapters show off Ms French’s well known talent for interpersonal interaction and dialogue, as prickly and unpopular (i.e., won’t play along with the sexual hazing game) female Detective Antoinette Conway with chip on her shoulder, and murder squad aspirant, Detective Stephen Moran are thrown together for one intense day of frustrating interrogation at an exclusive private girls’ school. Having all the players trapped in a confined area while the detective weeds through the witnesses and suspects in an unsolved murder case, playing them against each other even as the detective is being played, is a tried and true device and was worth the effort. The structure of this book is a beautiful thing. What in the world caused Ms French to think that anyone would enjoy having every other chapter in a 20 hour book comprised of the simpering, sniping of a group of adolescent Irish Valley Girl wannabes? Even the hard-to-understand breathy, little-girl voice of Lara Hutchinson couldn’t damage the grating dialogue further.

The secret place by tana french