2015 Book #6: Still Life with Woodpecker

I should have stopped reading Still Life with Woodpecker at the first mention of the “half-shellfish half-peach that occupied the warm, watery bowl of [Princess Leigh-Cheri’s] lower regions.” This is a (mostly) family-friendly blog, so I’ll let you come to your own conclusions about exactly what that means. My conclusion? YUCK.

Anyway. Still Life with Woodpecker has been on my TBR list for at least a couple of years now. It was toward the top of my failed TBR Pile Challenge last year, but I didn’t get around to it then. I’m not sure how I first discovered it, though it might have been Goodreads’s recommendation engine, which is usually pretty reliable. This time, it made it to the top of my list because of a recommendation from Book Riot: they seem to think that if you’re a Twin Peaks fan, you’ll like Still Life with Woodpecker.

Nope.

That peach business shows up around the 10% mark in a very short book, and that’s when I figured out that it’s Not My Kind of Book. I’m not a prude, but I don’t like a bunch of sex in my books. One or two tasteful scenes is tolerable, but Still Life with Woodpecker goes way overboard. Even her dad calls her a sexpot. Meh. That, and I just don’t like Tom Robbins‘s version of humor. It wasn’t funny to me: it was stupid. If it wasn’t so short and hadn’t been on my list for so long, I would have stopped.

So what’s this book about, anyway? you ask. Well, there’s a family that had been royalty of a nonexistent country, and they’ve been deposed by rebels. They’ve been given political asylum in the US and live near Seattle. Princess Leigh-Cheri is the daughter of the deposed king and queen, and she’s always in trouble, mostly for hijinks involving sex. She ends up going to Hawaii for a hippie-type conference and falling in love with a man who tries to blow it up. Things continue to happen.

Sounds exciting, right? I guess it is. Still Life with Woodpecker has good reviews on Goodreads. My issues with this book are personal, and in this case, I don’t claim any sort of objectivity: I just didn’t like it, and I’ll probably avoid Tom Robbins in the future just because I don’t like his style.

Featured photo credit: frankieleon