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funny
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
Secondhand Souls is not my favorite Christopher Moore book. It’s really slow going and the most interesting part of the plot only takes up 5-10% of the overall story. Basically, there’s a lot of running around and irrelevant storytelling that delays progress rather than pushing the story forward.
In all fairness, A Dirty Job was somewhat like this as well, and Lamb got a bit draggy at the end. My enjoyment of Moore’s books seems to rely on having some other element to offset the pace. In Lamb that was the humor and in A Dirty Job, it was the story. Unfortunately a lot of the elements I found interesting in A Dirty Job didn’t seem to flow over to the sequel. We’re running around with too many characters and POVs. Nobody is getting much of anything done. Moore sacrificed the plot in order to go on random asides, some with the squirrel people and some with ghosts telling extended histories of their life stories. A lot of these asides would have made interesting novellas related to the duology and would have been better left behind.
Some of the narrative flow bothered me as well. I understand from a perspective of linguistic variety it’s nice not to always say the character’s name when referring to them, but tags like “the nun” and “the mint one” simply got exhausting after a while. Sometimes Moore casually drops a joke in with his text, particularly in dialogue tags, and those are amusing. The way Secondhand Souls drones on and on is less amusing.
For most of this book, the characters don’t quite know what’s going on. They spend a lot of time trying to guess and getting stuck in corners. After a while I got frustrated because I felt like it was going around in circles then finally an interesting plot point came up involving our antagonist and Minty Fresh it was good and I was there for it. Except… nothing really came of it. The story wound up too quickly and the ending was too easy, like Moore just got lazy and the end and decided to tie a ribbon on it and be done.
There is also the caricatures to note. I believe Moore is doing this on purpose – he likes to toe that line. At one point, another character yells at Minty and Lemon for being caricatures. Besides them, there’s the side story about the Friends of Dorothy that includes a homophobic character, Mrs. Ling, and Mrs. Korchev. All of these bits are cringy, and I think Moore overstepped the line between funny and racist in particular with the neighbors.
In general? Meh, I wouldn’t recommend this one. I like Moore’s book overall still but Secondhand Souls really underdelivers. At best, it’s boring.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Cursing, Death, Suicidal thoughts, Suicide, Kidnapping, Suicide attempt, Death of parent
Moderate: Animal death, Blood
Minor: Racism