Locus Amoenus: All By My Shelf

This is a hard book to review, because its very nature means that it will have certain unavoidable imperfections. By passing the manuscript around to have chapters added instead of collaborating on a complete piece, it's impossible to predict where the plot will go.

Of course, that also makes it incredibly fun, and I could feel that gleeful joy when I read certain chapters where an author had thrown themselves all in with the game, and often tried to trip up whoever was to follow!

The only issues I had were that the clues piled up too heavily at some points (which the author of the "39 Articles" chapter did his best to summarize), which made the story drag; and that I never got a good sense of the geography of the story. Each author had their own vision of what the town and properties looked like, and this made things confusing for me. So I had to devise my own.

The author of the final chapter did the best job he could (the introduction pointed out that this was, of course, the hardest job), and although there were aspects that didn't quite work for me, it was fairly elegant and had some great twists at the end.

I did appreciate seeing everyone's solutions at the end. My favorite was Christie's, which was exactly where I thought the story was going at that point (with Elma being Walter), and would have been a lot of fun. Since Christie is the only author of the group that I've read before, I guess it makes sense that my mind went in that direction! I also really liked Sayers'. And I enjoyed Knox's (I think it was him) summary of how he thought the authors previous to his chapter had been thinking; for example, the fact that he didn't think Canon Whitechurch would have wanted to implicate the Vicar, as a fellow man of the cloth; and that he felt completely baffled by his immediate predecessor's chapter (Sayers') and had a hard time following up.

So all in all, a great read. If there are similar collaborative works, I'd be interested in checking them out!