[.ca] The Girl with the Golden Bouffant: An Original Jane Bond ... (ISBN 0380803119)

Maney is smart, sexy, and shakes a good martini:
If God is in the details, Mabel Maney is surely going to heaven in a diamond-studded dog collar! The research it must have taken her to get this parody oh-so-right boggles the mind. I no longer wish I were around in the sixties to see Vegas in its heyday because Maney has recreated the scene(s) to such hilarious perfection and detail that I don't need to taste the fondue to know it was disgusting. As for Maney, all her books are a fun romp filled with joy, silliness, and chutzpah, and Girl With The Golden Bouffant is another notch in her lipstick case.

Spytacular!:
Mabel Maney, yeah, YOU! Keep writing PLEASE! And do a tv show or a cartoon or something! Or how about a video game, breakfast cereal, or a school snack? This is just another marvelous Mabel Maney masterpiece! Mabel Maney wrote the book on inside jokes in queer fiction. Please bring Midge and Velma back in another Nancy book and lots more Jane! Thanks for the fun!

Not up to par:
I am a huge Mabel Maney fan, but I was disappointed in this book. There's no light hearted romance in this book--just endless inventories of horrible 1950s pop culture items, and tiresome characters beating each other up. Jane spends the entire book in drag with a glued-on unibrow. Way too much of the book is about Cedric and his unappealing love interest. I kept waiting to be entertained and charmed, as I inevitably am by Maney, and instead I felt just slightly ill. Read the Nancy Clue books or the original Jane Bond parody, but borrow this one from someone who will take it back.

Hugely intelligent, achingly funny:
Mabel Maney is in cahoots with her reader and trusts them to get the jokes, and this James Bond parody abounds with them. She's a hugely intelligent writer, but don't let that stop you. There's a gem lurking in every sentence--her writing bears close inspection. Maney's sly social commentary sneaks up on you, and her own sense of laughter is infectious. Wonderful foolishness combined with a keenly observed sense of the world we live in.

How do you parody Las Vegas?:
This is a wonderful, wonderful book. I read all of Mabel Maney's Nancy Drew parodies, and the James Bond parody before this one. This one is also James (Jane) Bond, but it brings us back to American sixties kitsch, which is Maney's strong suit. There's just so much to make fun of, from the hokey FBI schtick to the "Dorothy Duncan Defrost-Off" competition. The funniest bit is the scene where the spy girls are doing a make-over of the spoiled wife of Sammy Martini (read "famous dissolute lounge act whose name had to be changed in order to avoid legal, or mob, action") and you're not sure whether they are going to fix her hair or carry out a hit. But there's a ton of classic Americana in here. I never want to eat frozen food again. But I do want to visit "old" Las Vegas.