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Title: Embarrassingly bad
Review: WHITE TEETH's problem is less its story than Ms Smith's style, which reminded me immediately of Douglas Adams. But while the late Adams's constant authorial presence, leaning over the reader's shoulder to shoot acute observations at his characters, their plight or just plain LIFE, was perfect for his offbeat genre fiction, it is immediately grating in WHITE TEETH. The author lacks the wit (and, perhaps, life experience?) to make that style work, and it sits poorly with the suburban banality she seeks to ground the characters in. Frantically page-turning to see when Marvin the Paranoid Android showed up, I bailed at ~p.100, with no interest in the characters whatsoever.
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