Helpful Score: 1
While I found parts of this book amusing, especially David's interactions with the clones and the frogs, I felt that the storyline was repetitive at times and was sometimes hard to follow.
I don't know if it was the British humor or just a sagging plot, but I couldn't get into this. It's a more watered-down version of Bill Fitzhugh or Carl Hiaasen. It's also a far less interesting story than anything Jonathan Carroll writes. Try him instead.
David Perkins is in an art gallery, talking to a seventeenth-century painting. He loves the woman portrayed in it, who was burned as a witch almost 400 years before, and has since he was young. A lock of hair reputed to be hers will be auctioned off later that day, and David must obtain it. For he recently came across an obscure establishment, Honest John's House of Clones, that, upon inquiry, turned out to be exactly what its name implied, and he plans to take advantage of its services. And then he discovers that the place is run by raniform beings--frogs, that is--and everything he has done so far is in accordance with a scheme the frogs hatched back in the seventeenth century. Thereafter, between being wanted for murder and dealing with almost supernatural frogs as well as a baker's dozen clones of Honest John, David has very little time to wonder exactly how his innocent attempt to clone the girl of his dreams got him in so much trouble.
An imaginative read, but I didn't find it especially easy to get through. The humor was worth the effort though.
