WORDHUNTER

3.5 stars out of 5

You know the old marketing rule - sell the sizzle, not the steak? Well, this book has plenty of steak. Sizzle? Not so much. 

In theory, the unique subject matter alone should, IMHO, make it a shoe-in as the start of a highly successful series - I mean, forensic linguistics? A lead character whose passion is diagramming sentences? Never in my word-loving, wildest dreams! In practice, though, the story screams for more character development, cohesiveness and, for want of a better word, pizzazz. 

Here's the scoop: College grad student Maggie Moore loves words, and she's studying forensic linquistics. One afternoon she's called into her professor's office, where he says the local police need help with a cyberstalker who's been sending threatening texts and he recommended Maggie. He follows that up by asking her to be his research assistant. When Maggie agrees - reluctantly - she calls police detective Silas Jackson, who just as reluctantly agrees to let her help. That successful effort comes just as the local mayor's young daughter goes missing - a suspected abduction - so Jackson and the police chief ask her to keep helping.

Once again, she's reluctant - mostly because her closest childhood friend, Lucy, pulled a similar disappearing act a decade or so ago and was never found. To Maggie, that was due in large part to a lack of police follow-up, so she's carrying a grudge. But she caves, and begins studying all the written communications from a variety of suspects to gather clues, compose a profile and, hopefully, narrow the list down to one. As she researches, ruminates and rambles through her knowledge base (extensive, but a little convoluted for readers to comprehend easily), her sentence diagrams appear. Those, I suppose, are relevant, but I'll never know because they were too small to read on my Kindle (yes, I could have pulled out a magnifying glass, but that would have taken away much of the enjoyment of reading). 

Maggie's been carrying around a fair amount of baggage from her past, and as it turns out, so has Jackson; so of course, they're at loggerheads almost from the git-go. But they manage to hold hands to keep from fighting, and in the process, Jackson agrees to re-look into Lucy's disappearing act. That sets other things in motion, including fodder for the next book (assuming there will be one).

If for no other reason than the intriguing subject matter, I really wanted to like both Maggie and Jackson; but both come off more like cariacatures than real people. Maggie smokes Camels like a chimney, drinks beer for breakfast, has more tattoos than any biker gang and a vocabulary far more colorful than any truck driver I've ever known (I don't have an issue with smutty language, but this is way over the top). Hints of their background stories should have made me sympathize, but the descriptions are so sketchy and disjointed that the only thing I felt was "Okay, so what - you're both grown-ups now, so get over it."

The bottom line for me is this: what's here is a more than respectable start that elicits hope of better efforts to come. I love the premise - and like that spaghetti sauce commercial, it's in there; give the next one some serious polishing, and it's gonna shine. Till then, I thank the publisher, via NetGalley, for the opportunity to get in on the action early on by way of a pre-release copy.

Wordhunter by Stella Sands (Harper Paperbacks, August 2024); 253 pp.

YOU'RE SAYING IT WRONG

5 stars out of 5

When I first heard about this book, I knew right away it was perfect for me. As a long-time writer, news reporter and copy editor (and now that I've pretty much settled into retirement, an avid reader), I figured getting a mere 150 words correct would be a no-brainer.

Was I right? Well, not exactly. 

These words range from "acai" to "zydeco" and are, the brother-and-sister authors say, words that will, if you pronounce them incorrectly, make you sound like an ignoramus. That's something, of course, we all want to avoid at all costs. By the end of the book, I learned that my vocabulary words fall into three major categories, beginning with those I absolutely nailed (like "gnocci" and "Louisville"). Those two I attribute to spending nearly 50 years of my life in the middle of what I fondly call the Little Italy of northeast Ohio and the fact that when I was growing up, the great state of Kentucky was but a little over an hour's drive away (even at 1950s speeds). 

On the other hand, I was humbled by words I've apparently been screwing up for most of my life, among them "detritus," "kibosh," "liqueur" and (gasp!) the name of a favorite author of children's books - Dr. Seuss. And third, I learned how to pronounce words I never even knew even existed and am quite certain I'll never use in a sentence for the rest of my natural life: "Antipodes?" "Chiaroscuro?" The ever-popular "foevvre?"

Joking aside, the book makes for quite an interesting and informative experience. Not only do we learn proper pronunciation (shown phonetically), we learn their definitions, etymology and, in many instances, related tidbits that often are amusing. The authors also make distinctions among words that are correctly uttered only one way, those that have two or more acceptable pronunciations and those that are territorial (meaning they're okay said one way in Seattle but not when you're in Tallahassee).

Scattered in between are "sidebars" of pronunciations of terms on a related subject, like travel, fashion and wine (I'll have you know I aced that latter category), adding even more enlightenment. Reading it for me provided not only positive mental exercise but a bit of the physical; by the time I'd passed "C," I started to really get into it - nodding my head enthusiastically when I got a word right and slapping myself upside the head when I didn't.

The extensive amount of research it took to compile all this makes it well worth 5 stars in my book, and the fact that it's done in an entertaining fashion makes it a shoe-in. If you're a bit of a wordsmith like me or just want to expand your knowledge base, this one is well worth consideration. Many thanks to the authors and publisher (via NetGalley) for the opportunity to read an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

You're Saying It Wrong: A Pronunciation Guide to the 150 Most Commonly Mispronounced Words - and Their Tangled Histories of Misuse by Ross Petras and Kathryn Petras (Ten Speed Press, September 2016); 192 pp.