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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Apr 2006, 240 pages
Paperback:
Mar 2007, 240 pages
Book Reviewed by:
BookBrowse Review Team
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There is considerable excitement at The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. A cobra has been found in Precious Ramotswe's office. Then a nurse from a local medical clinic reveals that faulty blood–pressure readings are being recorded there. And Botswana has a new advice columnist, Aunty Emang, whose advice is rather curt for Mma Ramotswe’s taste.
In this latest
installment in the internationally best-selling, universally beloved series,
there is considerable excitement at The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. A cobra
has been found in Precious Ramotswe’s office. Then a nurse from a local medical
clinic reveals that faulty blood–pressure readings are being recorded there. And
Botswana has a new advice columnist, Aunty Emang, whose advice is rather curt
for Mma Ramotswe’s taste.
All this means a lot of work for our heroine and her inestimable assistant,
Grace Makutsi, and they are, of course, up to the challenge. But there’s trouble
brewing in Mma Makutsi’s own life. When Phuti Radiphuti misses their customary
dinner date, she begins to wonder if he is having second thoughts about their
engagement. And while Mma Makutsi may be able to buy that fashionably narrow
(and uncomfortable) pair of blue shoes, it may not buy her the happiness that
Mma Ramotswe promises her she’ll find in the simpler things—in contentment with
the world and enough tea to smooth over the occasional bumps in the road.
Aunty Emang, Solver of Problems
When you are just the right age, as Mma Ramotswe was, and when you have seen a bit of life, as Mma Ramotswe certainly had, then there are some things that you just know. And one of the things that was well known to Mma Ramotswe, only begetter of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (Botswana's only ladies' detective agency), was that there were two sorts of problem in this life. Firstly, there were those problems-and they were major ones-about which one could do very little, other than to hope, of course. These were the problems of the land, of fields that were too rocky, of soil that blew away in the wind, or of places where crops would just not thrive for some sickness that lurked in the very earth. But looming greater than anything else there was the problem of drought. It was a familiar feeling in Botswana, this waiting for rain, which often simply ...
What can be said about the glorious Mma Ramotswe that hasn't been said before? Not a lot really. However, having been one of the first (possibly the first) USA-based websites to recommend this series (before it was even available in the USA) it just doesn't seem right to allow a volume in the series to go unnoted - because a day or two in the company of McCall Smith's 'traditionally built' protagonist makes the world look just that little bit sunnier, by reminding us that pleasure can be found in the smallest of things!..continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
McCall Smith describes the Botswanans as
'genuinely courteous people' He knows
Botswana well as he grew up there and
also spent several years on the law
faculty of the University of Botswana;
his volume on the legal system of
Botswana (The Criminal Law of
Botswana) remains the definitive and
in fact, only book on the subject.
In 2004 he published the first in a new
series, The Sunday Philosophy Club featuring Isabel Dalhousie, a
Scottish-American professor of moral
philosophy. The second in the series,
Friends, Lovers, Chocolate, was
published in 2005 The Right ...
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