Dear Book Maven: Here here! We are all just chicks flitting after the Mama Hen & the Mama is the NYT. We all get too many review copies and galleys & are forever overwhelmed by all the books "in play" on & around our night tables. Then too many reviews/features surface about a particular so-called breakthrough book (i.e. "beautiful children") It is rare indeed for me to go out & buy a book at full price. But i did just that when the plethora of "b.c." coverage hit - - most of that, yes, in NYT. And now I am among the disappointed. Kicking myself for merely following the hype once again. The novel is pretty decent, but absolutely not worth so much ink. The over-coverage led me astray once again! At the same bookstore, I was distraught to see new copies of Sophie Gee's "Scandal of the Season," an August publication (Scribner) already priced to GO at $3.98. "Scandal" is the beautifully written and brilliantly researched novel by young Princeton professor. I've recommended it to all my nearest and dearest & they have all thanked me. I bought up all those $3.98 copies. Please, please give "Scandal of the Season" a read if you havent already. It is a novel based on the "back story" of Alexander Pope's famous poem "The Rape of the Lock." Where was the coverage for THIS book? Where was the HYPE? I could also groan on about the misfire release of "Rhett Butler's People," which is 100 times better than the 1991 "sequel" to "Gone With the Wind." But apparently i only get 7,000 characters in this box. So i will shut up for now. Book Maven, we spent a fun time in line together in the UPS line at BookExpo. yours truly, julie bookman, director of The Literary Center at the Margaret Mitchell House in Atlanta

Thanks for the sanity; this column made me feel a bit less curmudgeonly. I was so perplexed by the sloppiness of the one paragraph of Bock's book that I've read (as excerpted in the Times feature) that I used it on my blog as the "before" victim in a lesson on how to revise. I fear that a portion of the eleven years the book allegedly took to write might have been better spent reading Strunk and White repeatedly, until it sank in. I am going to skip "Beautiful Children," but I look forward to reading Mr. Bock's second novel, which I hope will combine a "whiff of greatness" with the intoxicating perfume of disciplined writing. Maryrose Wood www.maryrosewood.com

Julie, I remember our BEA line chat very well, and I think your MM House book programs ROCK. Thanks for your comment and I'll definitely give Scandal of the Season a look on yoru recommendation. Maryrose Wood, you win my admiration for your sentence "I fear that a portion of the eleven years the book allegedly took to write might have been better spent reading Strunk and White repeatedly, until it sank in." I think I may re-read that peerless book soon, too.