Raskin, Ellen - The Tattooed Potato and Other Clues

[oyceter]

Everyone who told me to read this was right on the money. I think this may be my favorite Raskin book. It's a little hard to describe, but it feels more human than her other books, with the possible exception of The Westing Game.

Tattooed Potato is structured as a series of mysteries, sort of like an Encyclopedia Brown book (without the upside-down solutions). Dickory Dock, who silently suffers numerous jokes because of her name, manages to get a job as an assistant to Garson, a slick portrait painter who also occasionally helps the police paint portraits of crime suspects. Garson actually reminds me of Lymond a little (then again, pretty much everything does nowadays) -- he's extremely facile and Dickory senses that he only presents certain facets of himself to the world to protect himself, but it also must be said that Lymond would probably never take on the alias of Inspector Noserag.

The first few crimes that they have to solve are very fun and zany and felt like Raskin's other books (esp. Leon/Noel), but as Dickory's powers of observation and deduction get better and better, and as everything starts coming together, the mystery of Garson starts to unravel. And while I guessed most of what was going on with Garson (a rarity in a Raskin book), I wasn't prepared for the final ending. And it was good, and everything fit in that wonderfully satisfying way when all the clues and hints in a world come together. Kind of like a well-built sci-fi book actually...

Links:
- rilina's review

Comments

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

That one is my favorite Raskin, too, and I could never understand why it wasn't as famous as The Westing Game. At least, not until I grew up, reread it, and realized how very strange a book it is, an aspect that had slipped by me at the time, since I simply accepted everything beyond my experience as equally odd. Still, I wish it were more widely known, because it is *such* a good book.

[oyceter]

I do the same thing -- almost every time I reread something I loved as a kid, I sort of realize how incredibly strange some of the things are. Of course, it probably didn't help that as a kid, I just sort of automatically assumed anything not too obviously historical was set in the present day.