Official Review: Priscilla's Perfume by Livingston Oden

Amheiser · Post by **Amheiser** » 10 Feb 2014, 18:33

[Following is the official OnlineBookClub.org review of "Priscilla's Perfume" by Livingston Oden.]

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“Pricilla’s Perfume”, by Livingston Oden, is a story about a mysterious lady whose perfume shop magically appears overnight in a small town called Holbrooke. The story begins when Priscilla is leaving Holbrooke and is on her way to the airport. She tells her cab driver a story about how she tried to help the people of the town with her magic perfume. The story Priscilla tells involves several different residents of Holbrooke and how their lives were changed by her magic perfume. As the story unfolds, we find that there have been a number of young girls disappearing from the town Priscilla is leaving. Jeremy, a teenage boy in the town, follows clues to try to solve the mystery of the disappearances when he finds out that Sandy, the girl he has been hoping to ask to prom, is the latest victim in this string of disappearances.

The author uses the chapters to tell the stories of different townspeople that Priscilla is talking about and what they are doing at various times throughout the story. Oden does a good job of combining a number of different stories into the main plot by using the chapters in this way. Each chapter gives the reader a little more information about the characters in the book and a little more information to use in trying to solve the mystery of the missing girls.

The book is geared toward the adolescent reader and is an interesting story, but I found it to be a difficult read for a number of reasons. There are numerous errors in punctuation, and there are missing words, added words, wrong words (like “scope” instead of “scoop”) and words that are homophones of the words that should be used such as “to” instead of “too”, and “presents” instead of “presence”, as well as misused possessives. In addition, there are errors in the way adjectives and adverbs are used. There are sentences where the descriptive words are in the wrong order in the sentence so it’s confusing as to what is being described, even though the descriptive words that are used are good ones. For example, “…the boy with the curly hair at the end of the hall” should maybe be, “ . . .the curly haired boy who is at the end of the hall” so we don’t have to stop and wonder if the boy’s curly hair is at the end of the hall.

There are also several errors in sentence and paragraph structure. The use of dialogue to tell the story is good, but there are structural errors in how the dialogue is written so sometimes it’s hard to tell who is speaking. In some instances, the reaction of the person who is being spoken to is in the same paragraph as the dialogue to which they are reacting.

While I was reading the book I had to back track many times because the errors were so numerous that they disrupted the flow of the story. I had to stop and think about what the author really meant to say. The errors were distracting enough that it took me until I was about two thirds of the way into the book before I was hooked. That being said, the author did a good job of creating suspense and told the story in such a way that the ending was hard to guess.

If I were to recommend this book to anyone it would be to an adolescent reader because of the subject matter. I don’t think I would recommend it unless it was edited so the errors could be fixed. If the errors were fixed, I would recommend the book because I think it is a good story. I like mysteries and the characteristics of a good mystery were there, there were just too many errors to recommend the book to anyone the way it is.

If this book were edited so the story would flow, then I would give it 3 stars, but because of the numerous structural and grammatical errors I have to give this book only 2 out of 4 stars.

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