cover image The Three-Week Trance Diet

The Three-Week Trance Diet

Jane Piirto. Carpenter Press, $8.95 (232pp) ISBN 978-0-914140-14-6

Letitia Siwel has a way of crossing her slender, swarthy legs that attracts men and earns envious glares from her best friend, Marvella Mason. Marvella, an executive, has a son aptly named Dyslexia, and a 200-pound daughter called Bwana. Soon she adds My Dear Boy, a 21-year-old lover, to the menage, and the two decide to marry, forcing jealous daughter Bwana on a three-week trance diet. Seventy-five pounds lighter and quite beautiful, Bwana appears at Marvella's wedding in a tight, white leather jumpsuit, with a besotted biker in tow and a plan to steal her mother's fiance. Her new charms result in fights, a kidnapping and an absurd chase. Although this cultural farcea first novelinitially crackles with good-natured energy, the joke wears thin quickly, and the portentous, wide-eyed narrative is more annoying than droll. November