Book Review
The Mma Precious Ramotswe Series
Book Review by Joyce Ruiz
The Mma Precious Ramotswe Series by Alexander McCall Smith (approximately 200 pages each):
- The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency
- Tears of the Giraffe
- Morality for Beautiful Girls
- The Kalahari Typing School for Men
- The Full Cupboard of Life
- In the Company of Cheerful Ladies
I am currently reading ?In the Company of Cheerful Ladies?, but wanted to do a review of the series as a whole. I love these books! Some critics cite them as simplistic, too much time spent on character development, and childish. I find them wonderful as I am allowed to enter the world of Botswana and to learn a little of the history of that country through the protagonist?s eyes who has a great love of her country and Africa.
Mma (aka Precious) Ramotswe, is Botswana's one and only lady private detective. Each story usually contains one really big case which takes the entire book to resolve and a series of other cases which are solved quickly. As the books progress, additional characters are added to her life and her life progresses to marriage and children.
Cases include: women who suspect their husbands are cheating on them; a father worried that his daughter is sneaking off to see a boy; a missing child who may have been killed by witchdoctors to make medicine.
I love that she is described in the book as ?a woman of traditional build? and does not strive to attain the Western view of how a woman should look. We are also exposed to the everyday images of her life in Botswana ? how the houses look; drinking a cup of bush tea with a friend or client; preparing the various foods for a meal; how life in Botswana is changing, particularly with the ?sickness? (AIDS).
Alexander McCall Smith is also a new series, set in Edinburgh, Scotland, of which there are now two books: ?The Sunday Philosophy Club? and ?Matters of the Heart?. I have only read the first book so far and I cannot highly recommend this series as much as I recommend Precious Ramotswe. The protagonist is Isabel Dalhousie, a Scottish philosopher, the editor of the Edinburgh-based Review of Applied Ethics. The plot of the first book is that when Isabel sees a man fall from the balcony of a concert hall, she feels obliged to investigate because she was the last person the young man saw. I?m not sure why this book did not catch my interest in the same way; maybe because I felt mislead in that this series seemed to highlight her interest in philosophy and ethics and yet the book did not really touch upon those subjects too much.
